Thirty-Eight

Cress held her breath and listened—listened so hard it was giving her a headache—but all she heard was silence. Her left leg was beginning to cramp from being curled into such an awkward position, but she dared not move for fear she would bump something and alert the old man to her location.

She hadn’t run from the hotel. Though she’d been tempted, she’d known that Jina and the others could still be out there, and running into them would put her right back where she’d started. Instead, she’d ducked into the third room down the long, slender corridor, surprised to find the door unlocked and the room abandoned. It had the same setup as the doctor’s room: bed, closet, desk, but to her chagrin it was missing a netscreen. If she hadn’t been so desperate to find a hiding spot, she would have wept.

She’d ended up in the closet. It was empty, with a bar for hanging clothes situated below a single shelf. Cress had used all her strength to clamber up onto that shelf, propelling up the closet’s side walls with both feet, before squeezing her way into the tiny alcove. She’d used her toes to pull the door shut. For once, she was glad of her small size, and she figured that if he found her she’d at least have the leverage from being so high up. She wished she would have thought to grab some sort of weapon.

But her hope was that there would be no need for it. She suspected that when he woke up, he would think she’d run out into the town and he would go searching for her, which should give her ample time to get back to that netscreen and contact Thorne at their last hotel.

She had lain there for hours, waiting and listening. Though it was uncomfortable, it kind of reminded her of sleeping beneath the bed in the satellite during those long hours when Luna could be seen through her windows. She’d always felt safe then, and the memory brought a strange sense of protection, even now.

After a while, she began to wonder whether she’d killed the man. The guilt that sparked in her chest made her angry. She had nothing to feel guilty about. She’d been defending herself, and he was a Lunar-trafficking monster.

Not long after she’d had this thought, she heard shuffling, so quiet it could have been a mouse in the walls. It was followed by a couple of thumps and a groan. Her body seized up again, her right shoulder aching from the way she was lying on it.

This had been a mistake. She should have run when she’d had the chance. Or she should have used the time that he was unconscious to tap into his netscreen. In hindsight, she’d had plenty of time, but now it was too late and he was awake and he would find her and—

She squeezed her eyes shut until white specks flickered in the darkness.

Her plan had not failed yet. He could still go outside in search of her. He could still leave the building.

She waited.

And waited.

Breathing in and breathing out. Filling herself with hot, stifling air. Her pulse skipped at every sound, every muffled scrape, every wooden thump, trying to create a picture in her mind of what was happening in the room at the end of the hall.

He never left his room. He didn’t come to look for her at all.

She scowled into the darkness. A bead of sweat lobbed its way off her nose.

When solid darkness had crept into her closet and, despite the discomfort and stiff muscles, Cress found herself dozing off, she snapped herself awake and determined that she had hidden long enough. The old man wasn’t searching for her, which seemed absurd, knowing how much he’d paid for her. Shouldn’t he have been a little more concerned?

Or maybe all he’d really wanted was her blood. It was a peculiar coincidence, given how Mistress Sybil had saved so many non-gifted infants from death because she’d seen some value in their blood too.

She tried not to let her suspicions and paranoia dig any deeper. Whatever the old man wanted, she couldn’t stay in this closet forever.

Tilting one foot off the shelf, she nudged open the closet door. It squeaked, a sound that was drum-shatteringly loud, and she froze with one leg extended.

Waiting. Listening.

When nothing happened, she prodded the door open a bit more and shimmied to the edge of the shelf. She lowered herself as gently as she could down to the floor.

The floorboards groaned. She halted again, heartbeat thundering.

Waited. Listened.

Dizzy and parched, Cress made her way to the corridor. It was empty. She crept to the next door. Again, it was unlocked, but the room looked exactly like the one she’d just left. Abandoned and empty.

Her skin was crawling, every sense heightened as she shut the door and moved on to the next.

In the third room, the blinds were closed, but the light from the corridor fell on a netscreen hanging in the darkness. She barely stifled a gasp. Trembling with anticipation, she shut the door behind her.

Then her attention landed on the bed and she pressed a hand over her mouth.

A man was lying there. Sleeping, she realized, as she waited for her heartbeat to stop thudding so painfully against her ribs. She dared not move until she could be certain that the rise-and-fall pattern of his chest was steady and deep. She hadn’t woken him.

She glanced at the netscreen again, weighing the risks.

She could slip into the corridor again and keep searching. There were two doors on this floor she hadn’t yet opened … but they were both back toward the old man’s room. Or she could go downstairs and try her luck there.

But every step she took on the old floorboards could alert someone to her presence, and she had no guarantee that any of the other doors would be unlocked, or that they would have netscreens.

The minutes ticked by as she stood with one hand on the doorknob, the other over her mouth, trapped by indecision. The man never stirred, never so much as twitched.

Finally she forced herself to take a step toward the netscreen. Her gaze darted to the sleeping form again and again, making sure that his breathing didn’t change.

“Netscreen,” she whispered. “On.”

The screen flickered and she began repeating, “Netscreen, mute, netscreen, mute, netscre—” But her command was unnecessary. As the netscreen brightened, she found herself staring at a map of Earth, not a net drama or newsfeed. Four locations had been marked. New Beijing. Paris. Rieux, France. A tiny oasis town in the northwest corner of Nile Province in the African Union.

A sense of coincidence stirred in her, but her brain was already skimming too far ahead to dwell on it. Within moments, she had sent the map away and called up a comm link. She hesitated. The only time she’d ever sent a comm was when she talked to Cinder, using a link that couldn’t be traced or monitored. She knew intimately how much access Queen Levana had to Earth’s net and all those comms that Earthens mistakenly believed were private.

But she couldn’t dwell on that. What interest would Queen Levana have in a single comm link established between two small towns in north Africa? She was, no doubt, far too preoccupied with her plans for intergalactic dominance.

“Netscreen,” she whispered, “show hotels in Kufra.”

Her awkward pronunciation brought up a list of seven possible Kufras. She selected the one with the least distance from her current location and was then faced with the names of a dozen lodging options, their ads and contact information flashing on the sidebar. She scowled, reading each carefully. None of their names sounded familiar. “Show in map.” The city of Kufra spilled out across the screen, a satellite-taken photograph that, after a moment of squinting at the brown-tinted roads, began to breach the gaps in her memory. Then she spotted a courtyard outside one of the hotels and, after zooming into the photo, recognized a lemon tree standing against one wall. She dared to smile and tapped on the hotel’s contact information.