She paced across the concrete, crunching through the debris. She moved slowly, lest the ghost of familiarity vanish.
“Uh, Cinder,” said Thorne, glancing back toward the farm. “What are we doing in here?”
“Looking for something.”
“In this mess? Good luck with that.”
She found a small plot of empty concrete and stalled, thinking. Examining. Knowing she’d been there before. In a dream, in a daze.
She noticed a thin metal cabinet painted a putrid brown, where three jackets hung on a rod. They all had insignias from the EF military embroidered on their sleeves. Squaring her shoulders, Cinder picked her way toward it and pushed the jackets to the side.
“Really, Cinder?” said Thorne, coming up beside her. “This is not the time to be worried about a change of clothes.”
Cinder barely heard him over the ticking in her head. The mess was no coincidence. Someone had been there, and they’d been looking for something.
They’d been looking for her.
She wished the realization hadn’t struck, but there was no dismissing it.
Crouching in front of the cabinet, she slid her hand against the back corner until it brushed against the handle she’d known would be there. Painted the same brown color, it was invisible in the shadows. It would never be noticed unless a person knew to look. And she knew—because she’d been here. Five years ago, in a state of drugged-up delirium that she’d always mistaken for a dream, she’d emerged in this spot. Every joint and muscle aching from the recent surgeries. Crawling slowly out of endless darkness and blinking, as if for the first time, into a dizzily bright world.
Cinder braced herself against the cabinet and pulled.
The secret door was heavier than she’d expected, made of something much sturdier than tin. She heaved it up on hidden hinges and let it slam down on the concrete floor. A cloud of dust billowed up on all sides.
A square hole gaped up at them. A ladder of plastic rungs was drilled into the foundation, leading to a secret sublevel.
Thorne bent over, planting his hands on his knees. “How did you know that was there?”
Cinder couldn’t tear her gaze away from the hidden passageway.
Unable to voice the truth, she said simply, “Cyborg vision.”
She descended first, releasing her flashlight as she was hit with thick, stale air. The beam bounced around a room as big as the hangar above, with no doors and no windows. Almost afraid to know what she’d just stumbled into, she tentatively ventured, “Lights. On.”
She heard the sound of an independent generator click on first, before three long overhead fluorescents gradually brightened, one after another. Thorne’s shoes thumped on the hard floor as he skipped the last four rungs of the ladder. He spun around and froze.
“What—what is this?”
Cinder couldn’t answer. She could barely breathe.
A tank sat in the center of the room, about two meters long with a domed glass lid. A collection of complex machines stood around it—life monitors, temperature gauges, bioelectricity scanners. Machines with dials and tubes, needles and screens, plugs and controls.
A long operating table against the far wall held an array of moveable lights sprouting from each end like a metal octopus, and beside it a small rolling table with a near-empty jug of sterilizer and an assortment of surgical tools—scalpels, syringes, bandages, face masks, towels. On the wall were two blank netscreens.
As much as that side of the secret chamber imitated an operating room, the opposite side more closely resembled Cinder’s workshop in the basement of Adri’s apartment building, complete with screwdrivers, fuse pullers, and a soldering iron. Discarded android parts and computer chips. An unfinished, three-fingered cyborg hand.
Cinder shuddered, chilled from the air that smelled like both a sterile hospital room and a damp underground cave.
Thorne crept toward the tank. It was empty, but the vague imprint of a child could be seen in the goo-like lining beneath the glass dome. “What’s this?”
Cinder went to fidget with her glove before remembering that it wasn’t there.
“A suspended animation tank,” she said, whispering as if the ghosts of unknown surgeons could be listening. “Designed to keep someone alive, but unconscious, for long periods of time.”
“Aren’t those illegal? Overpopulation laws or something?”
Cinder nodded. Nearing the tank, she pressed her fingers to the glass and tried to remember waking up here, but she couldn’t. Only addled memories of the hangar and the farm came back to her—nothing about this dungeon. She hadn’t been fully conscious until she’d been en route to New Beijing, ready to start her new life as a scared, confused orphan, and a cyborg.
The girl’s outline in the goo seemed too small to have ever been hers, but she knew it was. The left leg appeared to have been significantly heavier than the right. She wondered how long she had lain there without any leg at all.
“What do you suppose it’s doing down here?”
Cinder licked her lips. “I think it was hiding a princess.”
Thirty-Two
Cinder’s feet were cemented to the ground as she took in the underground room. She couldn’t shake the vision of her eleven-year-old self lying on that operating table as unknown surgeons cut and sewed and pieced her body together with foreign steel limbs. Wires in her brain. Optobionics behind her retinas. Synthetic tissue in her heart, new vertebrae, grafted skin to cover the scar tissue.
How long had it taken? How long had she been unconscious, sleeping in this dark cellar?
Levana had tried to kill her when she was only three years old.
Her operation had been completed when she was eleven.
Eight years. In a tank, sleeping and dreaming and growing.
Not dead, but not alive either.
She peered down into the imprint of her own head beneath the tank’s glass. Hundreds of tiny wires with neural transmitters were attached to the walls and a small netscreen was implanted on the side. No, not a netscreen, Cinder realized. No net access could infiltrate this room. Nothing that could ever get back to Queen Levana.
“I don’t get it,” said Thorne, examining the surgical tools on the other side of the room. “What do you think they did to her down here?”
She peered up at the captain, but there was no suspicion on his face, only curiosity.
“Well,” she started, “programmed and implanted her ID chip, for starters.”
Thorne shook the scalpel at her. “Good thinking. Of course she wouldn’t have had her own when she came to Earth.” He gestured at the tank. “What about all that?”
Cinder gripped the tank’s edges to steady her hands. “Her burns would have been severe, even life threatening. Their priority would have been keeping her alive, and also keeping her hidden. Suspended animation would solve both problems.” She tapped a finger on the glass. “These transmitters would have been used to stimulate her brain while she was sleeping. She couldn’t receive life experience or learn like a normal child, so they had to make up for it with fake learning. Fake experiences.”
She bit her lip, silencing herself before she mentioned the netlink they’d planted in the princess’s brain that made for an efficient way to learn when she was finally awake, without being any the wiser that she should have known these things anyway.