Scarlet

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.
    It was easy to talk about the princess as if she were someone else. Cinder couldn’t stop thinking that she was someone else. The girl who had slept in this tank was someone different from the cyborg that had woken up in it.
    It occurred to Cinder with a jolt that this was why she had no memories. Not because the surgeons had damaged her brain while inserting her control panel, but because she had never been awake to make memories in the first place.
    If she thought back, could she grasp something from before the coma? Something from her childhood? And then she recalled her recurring dream. The bed of coals, the fire burning off her skin, and realized it may have been more memory than nightmare.
    “Screen, on.”
    Both screens over the operating table brightened at Thorne’s command—the one on the left output a holograph of a torso from the shoulders up, spinning and flickering in the air. Cinder’s heart jolted, thinking it was her, until she took in the second screen.
    PATIENT: MICHELLE BENOIT
    OPERATION: SPINAL AND NERVOUS SYSTEM BIOELECTRICITY SECURITY BLOCK, PROTOTYPE 4.6
    STATUS: COMPLETE
    Cinder approached the holograph. The shoulders were slender and feminine, but nothing could be seen above the line of her jaw.
    “What’s a bioelectricity security block?”
    Cinder pointed at the holograph as it spun away from her and a dark square spot appeared on the spine, just beneath her skull. “This. I had one implanted too, so I wouldn’t accidentally use my Lunar gift when I was growing up. In an Earthen, it makes it so you can’t be brainwashed by Lunars. If Michelle Benoit did have information about Princess Selene, she would have had to protect herself, in case she ever fell into Lunar hands.”
    “If we have the technology to nullify the Lunar’s craziness, why doesn’t everyone have one of these?”
    A wave of sadness washed over her. Her stepfather, Linh Garan, had invented the bioelectricity block, but he’d died of the plague before seeing it past the prototype stage. Though she’d barely known him, she couldn’t help feeling that his life had been cut far too short. How different things could have been if he’d survived—not only for Pearl and Peony, but for Cinder too.
    She sighed, tired of thinking, and said simply, “I