Scarlet

far too extravagant to be a place for work. Three ornate tasseled lanterns were lined up on a red-and-gold ceiling, hand-painted with elegant dragons. A holographic fireplace was set into the wall to his left. A sitting area with carved cypress furniture surrounded a miniature bar in the far corner. Silent videos of Kai’s mother shimmered from picture frames by the door, sometimes paired with flashes of Kai growing up, and sometimes all three of them together.
    Nothing had changed since his father’s death, except the room’s owner.
    And perhaps the smell. Kai seemed to recall the aroma of his father’s aftershave, but now there was the distinct stench of bleach and chemicals—remnants of the cleaning crew scrubbing the room raw after his father first had contracted letumosis, the plague that had killed hundreds of thousands of people all over Earth in the past decade.
    Kai’s attention fell from the pictures and snagged on the small metal foot that sat on the corner of his desk, its joints caked with grease. Like a revolving wheel, his thoughts came full circle yet again.
    Linh Cinder.
    Stomach tightening, he set down the stylus that he’d been gripping and reached for the foot, but his fingers stalled before they could get to it.
    It belonged to her, the pretty young mechanic at the market. The girl who was so easy to talk to. The girl who was so authentic, who didn’t pretend to be something she wasn’t.
    Or so he’d thought.
    His fingers tightened into a fist and he drew back, wishing he had someone he could talk to.
    But his father was gone. And now Dr. Erland was gone too, having resigned from his position, and left without even saying good-bye.
    There was Konn Torin, his father’s, and now his, adviser. But Torin, with his ever-present diplomacy and logic, would never understand. Kai wasn’t sure he even understood what it was he felt when he thought of Cinder. Linh Cinder, who had lied to him about everything.
    She was cyborg.
    He couldn’t dismiss the memory of her lying at the base of the garden steps, a foot disconnected from her leg, a white-hot metal hand having melted away the remnants of a silk glove—gloves that had been his gift to her.
    He should have been repulsed by her. Reliving the memory again and again, he tried to be repulsed by the sparking wires and her grime-packed knuckles and the knowledge that she had fake neural receptors taking messages to and from her brain. She was not natural. She was probably a charity case, and he couldn’t help but wonder if her family had paid for the operation or if it had been government funded. He wondered who had taken such pity on her that they’d determined to give her a second life when her human body had been so damaged. He wondered what had caused her body to be that damaged in the first place, or if perhaps she was born disfigured.
    He wondered and wondered and knew he should have been more disturbed by each unanswered question.
    But he wasn’t. It was not her being cyborg that had curdled his stomach.
    Rather, his repugnance had started the moment his vision of her flickered as if she were a broken netscreen. He’d blinked, and she was no longer a helpless, rain-soaked cyborg, but the most intensely beautiful girl he’d ever laid eyes on. She was blindingly, breathtakingly stunning, with flawless tanned skin and shining eyes and an expression so ravishing it threatened to buckle his knees.
    Her Lunar glamour had been even more striking than Queen Levana’s, and her beauty was painful.
    Kai knew that’s what it had been: Cinder’s glamour, fading in and out even as he stood above her, trying to make sense of what he was seeing.
    What he didn’t know was how many times she’d glamoured him before that. How many times she’d tricked him. How many times she’d made him out to be a complete fool.
    Or had the girl at the market, muddied and disheveled, been the real girl after all? The girl who had risked her life to come to the ball to give Kai a warning, unsteady cyborg foot and all …
    “It doesn’t matter,” he said to his empty office, the disconnected foot.
    Whoever Linh Cinder was, she was no longer his concern. Soon Queen Levana would be returning to Luna, and she would take Cinder back as her prisoner. It was the arrangement Kai had agreed to.
    At the ball, he had been forced to make a choice, and had refused Levana’s offer of a marriage alliance once and for all. He was determined to never subject his people to