Thorne brought the blanket and parachute square out of the pack and laid it out for them to sit on, to keep them off the hot sand, then pulled the corners over their heads like a canopy that blocked out the sun’s brightness.
He put an arm around Cress’s shoulders and tugged her against him. She felt so dumb, so betrayed—by the desert, by the sun, by her own eyes. And now the truth was settling upon her.
There was no water.
There were no trees.
Nothing but endless sand, endless sun, endless walking.
And they may never make it out. They couldn’t go on forever. She doubted she could go on for another day like this, and who knew how long it would take to reach the end of the desert. Not when every sand dune multiplied into three more, when every step toward the mountains seemed to send them even farther into the distance, and they didn’t even know that the mountains would offer any protection when they got there.
“We are not going to die here,” Thorne said, his voice soft and reassuring, like he’d known exactly where her thoughts had been taking her. “I’ve been through much worse than this and I’ve survived just fine.”
“You have?”
He opened his mouth, but paused. “Well … I was in jail for a long time, which wasn’t exactly a picnic.”
She adjusted the towels on her feet. The hair-ropes had begun to cut into her skin.
“The military wasn’t much fun either, come to think of it.”
“You were only in it for five months,” she murmured, “and most of that was spent in flight training.”
Thorne tilted his head. “How’d you know that?”
“Research.” She didn’t tell him just how much she’d researched into his past, and he didn’t ask.
“Well—so maybe this is the worst I’ve been through. But it doesn’t change the fact that we’re going to survive. We’ll find civilization, we’ll comm the Rampion, and they’ll come get us. Then we’ll overthrow Levana and I’ll get loads of reward money and the Commonwealth will pardon my crimes or whatever and we’ll all live happily ever after.”
Cress nestled against Thorne’s side, trying to believe him.
“But first, we have to get out of this desert.” He rubbed her shoulder. It was the kind of touch that would have filled her with giddiness and yearning if she hadn’t been too tired to feel anything. “You have to trust me, Cress. I’m going to get us out of this.”
Twenty-One
“There,” said Dr. Erland, snipping off the ends of the surgery thread. “That’s all I can do for him.”
Cinder wet her lips and found that they had begun to split from dryness. “And? Will he … is he going to…?”
“We have to wait and see. He’s lucky the bullets didn’t puncture a lung, or he wouldn’t have made it this far, but he did lose a lot of blood. I’ll monitor the anesthetics closely for the next day or two. We want to keep him sedated. Levana’s soldiers are designed as disposable weapons—they are very effective when they’re in good health, but their genetic alterations make it difficult for them to rest, even when their bodies need time to recover from injury.”
She stared down at Wolf’s wounds, now sewed together with dark blue thread that formed ugly bumps and ridges where open flesh had been before. Numerous other scars littered his bare chest, long since healed. It was obvious that he had been through a lot. Surely this wouldn’t be the end of him, after everything?
A table beside her held a tray with the two small bullets the doctor had removed—they seemed too small to have done so much damage.
“I can’t let anyone else die,” she whispered.
The doctor looked up from cleaning the surgical tools. “They may be treated as disposable assets to the queen, but they are also resilient.” He dropped the scalpel and tweezers into a blue liquid. “With proper rest, it’s possible that he’ll make a full recovery.”
“Possible,” she repeated dumbly. It wasn’t enough.
She slumped down onto the wooden chair beside Wolf’s bed and slipped a hand into his, hoping he would appreciate the touch, even though she wasn’t Scarlet.
She crushed her eyes shut, the wave of remorse flooding over her. Scarlet. Wolf would be furious when he woke up. Furious and devastated.
“Now perhaps you might deign to tell me how you managed to be in the company of both a Lunar soldier and a Lunar royal guard, of all the possible allies in this galaxy.”
She sighed. It took a while to gather her thoughts and find the beginning of such a story. Ultimately she decided to tell him about tracking down Michelle Benoit, and how she’d been hoping to find out more about the woman who had protected her secret to the death. How she’d been searching for clues about her past, who had brought her to Earth, and why anyone would put so much faith into a child who, at the time, was a mere three years old and on the brink of death after the queen’s attempted murder.
She explained how they’d followed the path of clues to Paris, where she learned that Michelle Benoit was dead, but she found her granddaughter instead. Scarlet … and Wolf. How they became allies. How Wolf was training her to use her mental abilities and to fight.
She told him about the attack aboard the Rampion and how Sybil Mira had taken Scarlet, and now it was only her and Wolf … and this guard, who she wanted to trust, felt she needed to trust, and yet she didn’t even know his name.
“He said that he serves his princess,” Cinder said, the words wispy and thin. “Somehow, he knew about me.”
Erland rubbed at his frizzy hair. “Perhaps he overheard Thaumaturge Mira, or the queen herself talking about you. We’re lucky that his fealty is to the true crown. Many of Levana’s minions would just as soon kill you and claim a reward than see you recognized as queen.”
“I figured as much.”
He sneered, like he wasn’t happy to have to acknowledge the guard could be an ally after all. “And speaking of recognizing you as the true queen…”
She shriveled into her seat, squeezing Wolf’s hand.
“Miss Linh, I have spent years planning for the time when I would find you again. You should have come to me straightaway.”
Cinder wrinkled her nose. “That’s precisely why I didn’t.”
“And what does that mean?”
“When you came to my jail cell and dropped this whole princess thing on me … how was I supposed to react? All of a sudden I went from being nobody to being long-lost royalty, and you expected me to jump up and accept this destiny that you’d worked out in your head, but did you ever consider that maybe that’s not the destiny I want? I wasn’t raised to be a princess or a leader. I just needed some time to figure out who I was … am. Where I came from. I thought maybe those answers were in France.”
“And were they?”
She shrugged, remembering the underground lab they’d found on the Benoit farm, with the suspended-animation tank where she had slept, half alive, for eight years. Where some nameless, faceless person had given her a new name, a new history, and new robotic limbs.
“Some of them were.”
“And how about now? Are you ready to accept your destiny, or are you still searching?”
She frowned. “I know that I am who you say I am. And someone has to stop Levana. If that someone has to be me, well … yes. I accept that. I’m ready.” She glanced down at Wolf and bit back her next words. At least, I thought I was ready, before I ruined everything.
“Good,” said the doctor. “Because it’s time we developed a plan. Queen Levana cannot be allowed to rule any longer, and she certainly cannot be allowed to rule Earth.”