Cress (Lunar Chronicles 3)

“I have a camel for sale. I heard you might be interested.” His voice trembled on the last word.

Dr. Erland dropped his spectacles to the end of his nose. The boy was scrawny, sure, but he didn’t appear malnourished. His dark skin looked healthy, his eyes bright and alert. Another year or so, and Erland suspected he’d be the taller of the two of them.

“One hump or two?” he asked.

“Two.” The boy took in a deep breath. “And it never spits.”

Erland tilted his head. He had had to be careful about who he told this code language to, but news seemed to be spreading quickly, even into neighboring oasis towns. It was becoming common knowledge that the crazy old doctor was looking for Lunars who would be willing to help him with some experimentation, and that he could pay them for their assistance.

Of course, the spreading knowledge of his semi-celebrity status, complete with Commonwealth want ads, hadn’t hurt either. He thought many people who came to knock on his door were merely curious about the Lunar who had infiltrated the staff of a real Earthen palace … and who had helped the true celebrity, Linh Cinder, escape from prison.

He would have preferred anonymity, but this did seem to be an effective method for gathering new test subjects, which he needed if he was ever going to copy the letumosis antidote the Lunar scientists had discovered.

“Come in,” he said, stepping back into the room. Without waiting to see if the boy followed, he opened the closet that he had transformed into his own mini laboratory. Vials, test tubes, petri dishes, syringes, scanners, an assortment of chemicals, all neatly labeled.

“I can’t pay you in univs,” he said, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. “Barter only. What do you need? Food, water, clothing, or if you’re willing to wait on payment for six consecutive samples, I can arrange one-way transportation into Europe, no documentation required.” He opened a drawer and removed a needle from the sterilizing fluid.

“What about medication?”

He glanced back. The boy had barely taken two steps into the room.

“Shut the door, before you let in all the flies,” he said. The boy did as he was told, but his focus was now caught on the needle. “Why do you want medicine? Are you sick?”

“For my brother.”

“Also Lunar?”

The boy’s eyes widened. They always did when Dr. Erland threw out the word so casually, but he never understood why. He only asked for Lunars. Only Lunars ever knocked on his door.

“Stop looking so skittish,” Dr. Erland grumbled. “You must know that I’m Lunar too.” He did a quick glamour to prove himself, an easy manipulation so that the boy perceived him as a younger version of himself, but only for an instant.

Though he’d been tampering with bioelectricity more freely since he’d arrived in Africa, he found that it drained him more and more. His mind simply wasn’t as strong as it used to be, and it had been years since he’d had any consistent practice.

Nevertheless, the glamour did its job. The boy’s stance relaxed, now that he was somewhat sure that Dr. Erland wouldn’t have him and his family sent to the moon for execution.

He still didn’t come any closer, though.

“Yes,” he said. “My brother is Lunar too. But he’s a shell.”

This time, it was Erland’s eyes that widened.

A shell.

Now that had true value. Though many Lunars came to Earth in order to protect their non-gifted children, tracking those children down had proven more difficult than Erland had expected. They blended in too well with Earthens, and they had no desire to give up their disguise. He wondered if half of them were even aware of their own ancestry.

“How old?” he said, setting the syringe down on the counter. “I would pay double for a sample from him.”

At Erland’s sudden eagerness, the boy took a step back. “Seven,” he said. “But he’s sick.”

“With what? I have pain killers, blood thinners, antibiotics—”

“He has the plague, sir. Do you have medicine for that?”

Dr. Erland frowned. “Letumosis? No, no. That isn’t possible. Tell me his symptoms. We’ll figure out what he really has.”

The boy looked annoyed at being told he was wrong, but not without a tinge of hope. “Yesterday afternoon he started getting a bad rash, with bruises all over his arms, like he’d been in a brawl. Except he hadn’t. When he woke up this morning he was hot to the touch, but he kept saying he was freezing, even in this heat. When our mother checked, the skin under his fingernails had gone bluish, just like the plague.”

Erland held up a hand. “You say he got the spots yesterday, and his fingers were already turning blue this morning?”

The boy nodded. “Also, right before I came here, all those spots were blistering up, like blood blisters.” He cringed.

Alarm stirred inside the doctor as his mind searched for an explanation. The first symptoms did sound like letumosis, but he’d never heard of it moving through its four stages so quickly. And the rash becoming blood blisters … he’d never seen that before.

He didn’t want to think of the possibility, and yet it was also something he’d been waiting for years to happen. Something he’d been expecting. Something he’d been dreading.

If what this boy said was true, if his brother did have letumosis, then it could mean that the disease was mutating.

And if even a Lunar was showing symptoms …

Erland grabbed his hat off the desk and pulled it on over his balding head. “Take me to him.”

Eight

Cress hardly felt the hot water beating on her head. Outside her washroom, a second-era opera blared from every screen. With the woman’s powerful voice in her ears, swooning over the incessant shower, Cress was the star, the damsel, the center of that universe. She sang along at full volume, pausing only to prepare herself for the crescendo.

She didn’t have the full translation memorized, but the emotions behind the words were clear.

Heartbreak. Tragedy. Love.

Chills covered her skin, sharply contrasted against the steam. She pressed a hand to her chest, drowning.

Pain. Loneliness. Love.

It always came back to love. More than freedom, more than acceptance—love. True love, like they sang about in the second era. The kind that filled up a person’s soul. The kind that lent itself to dramatic gestures and sacrifices. The kind that was irresistible and all-encompassing.

The woman’s voice rose in intensity with the violins and cellos, a cl**ax sung up into the shower’s downpour. Cress held the note as long as she could, enjoying the way the song rolled over her, filling her with its power.

She ran out of breath first, suddenly dizzy. Panting, she fell against the shower wall.

The crescendo died down into a simple, longing finale, just as the water sputtered out. All of Cress’s showers were timed, to ensure her water reserves wouldn’t run out before Mistress Sybil’s next supply visit.

Cress sank down and wrapped her arms around her knees. Realizing there were tears on her cheeks, she covered her face and laughed.

She was being ridiculously melodramatic, but it was well deserved.

Because today was the day. She’d been following the Rampion’s path closely since they’d agreed to rescue her nearly fourteen hours before, and they had not deviated from their course. The Rampion would be crossing through her satellite’s trajectory in approximately one Earthen hour and fifteen minutes.

She would have freedom, and friendships, and purpose. And she would be with him.

In the next room, the operatic solo began again, quiet and slow and tinged with longing.

“Thank you,” Cress whispered to the imaginary audience that was going mad with applause. She imagined lifting a bouquet of red roses and smelling them, even though she had no idea what roses smelled like.

With that thought, the fantasy disintegrated.

Sighing, she picked herself off the shower floor before the tips of her hair could get sucked down the drain.

Her hair weighed heavy on her scalp. It was easy to ignore when she was caught up in such a powerful solo, but now the weight of it threatened to make her topple over, and a dull headache was already creeping up from the base of her skull.

This was not the day for headaches.

She held up the ends of her hair with one hand, taking some pressure off her head, and spent a few minutes ringing it out, handful by soaking handful. Emerging from the shower, she grabbed her towel, a ratty gray thing she’d had for years, worn to holes in the corners.

“Volume, down!” she yelled out to the main room. The opera faded into the background. A few last droplets from the showerhead dribbled onto the floor.

Cress heard a chime.

She pulled her hair through her fists again, gathering another handful of water and shaking it out in the shower before wrapping herself in the towel. The weight of her hair still tugged at her, but was feeling manageable again.

In the main room, all but the single D-COMM screen were showing the theater footage. The shot was a close-up of the woman’s face, thick with makeup and penciled eyebrows, a lion’s mane of fire-red hair topped with a gold crown.

The D-COMM screen held a new message.

FROM USER: MECHANIC. ETA 68 MINUTES.

Cress was buoyed by giddiness. It was happening. They were really coming to rescue her.

She dropped the towel to the floor and grabbed the wrinkled dress she’d been wearing before—the dress that was a little too small and a little too short because Sybil had brought it for Cress when she was only thirteen, but that was worn to the perfect softness. It was Cress’s favorite dress, not that it had a lot of competition.

She pulled it over her head, then rushed back into the bathroom to begin the long process of combing out her wet tangles. She wanted to look presentable, after all.

No, she wanted to look irresistible, but there was no use dwelling on that. She had no makeup, no jewelry, no perfume, no properly fitting clothes, and only the most basic essentials for daily hygiene. She was as pale as the moon and her hair would dry frizzy no matter how she coddled it. After a moment of staring at herself in the mirror, she decided to braid it, her best hope for keeping it tamed.

She had just divided it into three sections at the nape of her neck when Little Cress’s voice squeaked. “Big Sister?”

Cress froze. She met her own wide-eyed gaze in the mirror. “Yes?”

“Mistress’s ship detected. Expected arrival in twenty-two seconds.”

“No, no, no, not today,” she hissed.

Releasing her wet strands of hair, she rushed out into the main room. For once, her few belongings weren’t strewn across the floor and tabletops, because they were all packed neatly inside a pulled-out drawer that sat on top of her bed. Dresses, socks, and undergarments neatly folded alongside hair combs and barrettes and what food packs she still had from Sybil’s last visit. She’d even nestled her favorite pillow and blanket on top.

All evidence that she was running away.

“Oh stars.” She swept forward and grabbed the drawer with both hands, pulling it off the bed. She tore out the blanket and pillow and tossed them onto the mattress, before dragging the heavy drawer over to the desk she’d taken it from.

00:14, 00:13, 00:12, sang Little Cress as she wrestled the drawer back into place. It wouldn’t shut.

Cress squatted beside it, eyeing the rails to either side of the drawer. It took seven more seconds of harried finagling before she managed to slam the drawer shut. Sweat, or water from her still-wet hair, dripped down the back of her neck.

Tugging out a lock of hair that had gotten caught in the drawer, she hastily straightened the bed as well as she could.

“Mistress has arrived. She is requesting an extension of the docking clamp.”

“I’m getting there,” Cress responded, darting toward the boarding ramp screen and entering the code. She turned back to the room as the clamp extended outside her walls, as Sybil’s ship attached, as oxygen filled the space.

The opera singer was still there, and Mistress would be annoyed at Cress’s waste of time, but at least it wasn’t—

She gasped, her eyes landing on the one screen that stood out from the rest, and the single bright green message on a field of black.

FROM USER: MECHANIC. ETA 68 MINUTES.

She heard Sybil’s steps approaching as she launched herself across the room. She shut down the screen just as the satellite door whistled open.

Heart in her throat, Cress spun around and smiled.

Sybil met her gaze from the doorway. She was already glaring, but Cress thought her eyes narrowed even more in that moment between seeing Cress and noting her brilliant grin.

“Mistress! What a surprise. I just got out of the shower. Was just … listening to some … opera.” She gulped, her mouth suddenly dry.

Sybil’s eyes darkened and she cast them around the room, at the screens still quietly transmitting the opera singer engrossed in her song. Sybil sneered. “Earthen music.”

Cress chewed on her lower lip. She knew there were musicians and plays and all sorts of entertainments for the Lunar court, but they were rarely recorded, and Cress didn’t have access to them. Lunars generally disliked having their true appearances transmitted for all the galaxy to see. They much preferred live performances where they could alter the audience’s perception of their skills.

“All screens, mute,” she murmured, trying to stop shaking.

In the wake of silence, Sybil stepped inside, allowing the door to shut behind her.

Cress gestured to the familiar metal box Sybil carried. “I don’t believe I’m in need of any supplies, Mistress. Is it time for another blood sample already?” she asked, knowing it wasn’t.