Thorne would come for her. He was a hero. She was a damsel. That’s how the stories went—that’s how they always went.

With a groan, she settled into her corner and started to cry again, cried until no more tears would come.

Suddenly, she jolted awake.

There was salt dried on her cheeks and her back ached from being hunched over. Her butt and sides were bruised from the bumping of the van, which, she realized, had come to a stop.

She was instantly alert, the grogginess shaken off by a new wave of fear. There was a hint of light coming through the cracks around the doors, which meant they’d driven through the night. A door slammed and she could make out Jina’s chatter, no longer friendly and comforting. The van shook as the driver got out.

“Making good time,” Cress heard a man say. “Someone want to help me back here?”

Another man laughed. “Can’t take the little waif yourself?”

Jina’s voice cut through their boasting. “Try not to bruise her. I want top payment this time, and you know how he negotiates. Nitpicking every little thing.”

Cress gulped as the boots came closer. She steeled herself. She would lunge. She would fight. She would be ferocious. Bite and scratch and kick if she had to. She would take him by surprise.

And then she would run. Fast as a cheetah, graceful as a gazelle.

It was still early. The sand would be cool on her bare feet. Her blisters were almost healed, and while her legs still ached horribly, she could ignore them. Hopefully they would deem her not worth coming after.

Or maybe they would shoot her.

She gulped down the thought. She had to take the risk.

The lock clanked. She took in a deep breath, waited for the door to open—and pounced. A guttural scream was ripped out of her, all her anger and vulnerability swelling up and unleashing in that one vicious moment as her clawed fingers scrabbled for his eyes.

The man caught her. Two hands snapped around her pale wrists. Her momentum kept her careening outside the truck and she would have tumbled to the sand if he hadn’t held her half suspended. Her war cry was abruptly cut off.

The man started to laugh—laughing at her, at her pathetic attempts to overpower him.

“She is a tiger, I’ll give you that,” he said to the man who had teased him. He twisted Cress around so he could hold both of her wrists in one firm grip. Her body still dangled from his hold as he began marching her away from the van and into the dunes.

“Let me go!” she shrieked, kicking back at him, but he was undeterred by her flailing. “Where are you taking me? Let me go!”

“Calm down, little girl, I’m not going to hurt you. Wouldn’t be worth it.” He snorted and dropped her down the other side of the dune.

She stumbled and rolled a couple times in the sand before bolting into a crouch. She swiped hair and sand from her face. By the time she looked up at the man, he had a gun pinned on her.

Her heart sputtered.

“Try to run, I shoot. And I don’t mean to kill. But you’re smarter than that, aren’t you? You’ve got nowhere to go anyway, right?”

Cress gulped. She could still hear the voices on the other side of the dune. She hadn’t been able to tell how many caravaners were still along in the group.

“Wh-what do you want from me?”

“I suspect you have business to tend to?”

Standing, she stumbled a bit down the hill, the sand unstable beneath her. The man didn’t flinch. He jerked the barrel of the gun toward her feet. “Go on. It’ll be another few hours before we stop, so better get it out of the way now. Don’t want you losing your water in the back of that nice van. We wouldn’t get our security deposit back, and Jina hates that.”

Her lower lip trembled and she cast another glance around the desert, the wide openness of this barren landscape. She shook her head. “No, I can’t. Not with…”

“Ah, I won’t watch.” To prove his point, he spun around and scratched behind his ear with the gun. “Just make it quick.”

She spotted another man over the dune, faced away from her, and suspected he was relieving himself. Cress turned away, ashamed and embarrassed. She wanted to cry, wanted to beg the man to let her be, to just leave her here. But she knew it wouldn’t work. And she didn’t want to beg this man for anything.

Thorne would come for her, she thought as she stumbled to the base of the dune in search of what privacy she could find.

Thorne had to come for her.

Thirty-Four

“Fateen-jiĕ?”

The girl spun around, her long black braid swinging against her lab coat. “Your Majesty!”

A ghost smile flickered over Kai’s face. “Do you have a moment to assist us with something?”

“Of course.” Fateen tucked a portscreen into her coat pocket.

Kai moved toward the wall of the white corridor, allowing room for researchers and technicians to pass by. “We need access to some patient records. I realize they’re probably confidential, but…” Kai trailed off. There was no “but,” only a vague hope and a fair amount of confidence that his title was the only credential he needed.

But Fateen’s gaze darkened as they flickered between him and Torin. “Patient records?”

“A few weeks ago,” said Kai, “I came to check on Dr. Erland’s progress and Linh Cinder was here. The Lunar cyborg from—”

“I know who Linh Cinder is,” she said, her hardness fading as quickly as it had come.

“Right, of course.” He cleared his throat. “Well, at the time, the doctor told me she was there fixing a med-droid, but I was thinking about it, and I thought maybe she had actually been a…”

“A draft subject?”

“Yes.”

Fateen shrugged. “Actually, she was a volunteer. Come on, there should be a vacant lab you can use. I’m happy to pull up Linh Cinder’s records for you.”

He and Torin followed her, Kai wondering whether she would have been as accommodating had it been any other patient. Since the arrest, Linh Cinder had become a matter of public concern, and therefore her private records weren’t so private anymore.

“She was a volunteer? Really?”

“Yes. I was here the day she was brought in. They’d had to override her system to get her in here. I guess she put up quite a fight when they came for her.”

Kai frowned. “Why would a volunteer put up a fight?”

“I’m using volunteer in the official sense. I believe her legal guardian recommended her for the testing.” She swiped her wrist over an ID scanner, then ushered them into Lab 6D. The room smelled of bleach and peroxide and every surface glistened to a perfect shine. A counter along the far wall was set before a window overlooking a quarantine room. Kai grimaced, reminded of his father’s last days spent in a room not entirely unlike that one, although his had been equipped with blankets and pillows, his favorite music, a tranquil water fountain. The patients who came to these labs would not have received the same luxuries.

Fateen paced to the adjoining wall. “Screen, on,” she said, tapping something into her portscreen. “I do believe these records were a part of the investigation following her jailbreak, Your Majesty. Do you think the detectives may have missed something?”

He threaded his fingers through his hair. “No. I’m just trying to answer some of my own questions.”

The lab’s log-in screen faded, replaced with a patient profile. Her profile.

LINH CINDER, LICENSED MECHANIC

ID

#0097917305

BORN 29 NOV 109 T.E.

RESIDENT OF NEW BEIJING, EASTERN COMMONWEALTH. WARD OF LINH ADRI.

CYBORG RATIO: 36.28%

“Is there something specific you’re looking for?” Fateen asked, sliding her fingers along the screen so that the profile trekked down into blood type (A), allergies (none), and medications (unknown).