Hello! Sorry I haven't posted sooner. But here it is, and with underlying romantic text! Yay!
As always, I don't own the Lunar Chronicles. My story will never be as good as Marissa Meyer's is. They don't even compare.
Lots of thankyous to my SIX followers! Thank you times a million to my FOUR favorites! And thank you plus a million to my THREE reviewers! Thank you thank you thank you!
As of this very moment, this story has 494 views. Don't really know what consists of a "view", since I am new to this world of fanfiction, but the traffic-graph thingy says that I have some views as far away as Australia, Canada, Palestinian Territory, New Zealand, Germany, the UK, the Philippines, Venezuela, Spain, Portugal, Iceland, and Poland! WOW! I don't think I could pinpoint all those places on a map. Just wow!
Okay. I'm done. Enjoy!
Chapter Four (Chapter 18)
The movement of the sand underneath his feet confused him. One step, it would be soft and his foot would sink into the ground but the next would bring him into contact with a rock or tough clump of sand. His cane was probably leaving a trail where he was dragging it – a light, embarrassingly zigzagged trail across the barren land.
Cress could see all of this. She saw him trip on his own feet, which actually happened more often than falling over a rock or something. She saw him wobble when he lost his balance. With every new addition to his list of pathetic moments, he wondered how long it would be until she commented on it. He probably looked hilarious. But the remark never came.
He shifted his cane to his other hand and readjusted their supply bundle from time to time. It wasn't pleasant – none of this was pleasant. He wasn't going to stop trying, though. He figured he had an obligation to finish Cress's rescue, however skewed it already was.
If it weren't for the sound of her breathing or her footsteps, Thorne would've felt utterly alone. Lost. Helpless. Everything was scary and unfamiliar, but she kept him grounded, and he held it together for her. It was an unspoken exchange. He wondered if Cress had recognized it yet.
She would make little whimpers occasionally. He tried to imagine what this would be like for her. As small as she was, and considering how she grew up, he doubted she'd ever been much of an athlete. Now she was expected to get up and march across the desert with inadequate shoes and clothes, just like that.
She must've been exhausted.
Try as he might, he couldn't imagine the detailed picture he was used to of what she looked like in that moment. He'd read somewhere, a long time ago, that a person couldn't imagine a face they had never seen. But he had seen her – albeit briefly. Her hair was tangled and frizzy and blonde, short where it used to be long. He'd only seen it long. Now he imagined it cropped, fanning her face in golden strands.
Her face. Her eyes were blue, weren't they? He supposed they could be green and still match her complexion. Or maybe her eyes were a mix of blue and green. They could've been brown for all he knew, though he doubted it. When he saw her before, he'd only noticed her crazy-long hair.
Thorne knew she was short. Shorter than Cinder and Scarlet, definitely, at least by a few inches. She barely came up to his collarbone, and he knew what her voice sounded like.
He hadn't paid attention to her facial appearance as much as he did her hair. He didn't expect to be relying merely on memory. But he was, and his memory was flawed.
He decided to imagine her with blue eyes. Bright blue like the afternoon sky. It seemed fitting.
Thorne began to notice that their pace was slower. He cocked his head and listened, but just as he did, Cress sped back up to normal.
She was tiring. They would have to rest soon.
A while later, though with no complaints, it happened again. Their speed slowed dramatically and he almost reached out to ask her if she needed a break, but she quickened her feet just as he lifted his hand.
It happened twice after that.
"Why do we keep slowing down?" he asked finally. His voice was rough.
He heard her stumble. "Oh," she said, flustered. "Um. I was looking at the stars."
Then they walked in silence, and their walking remained perfectly constant. His thoughts drifted in circles, going from wondering what was happening with Cinder, Wolf, Scarlet, and Iko on his ship. He knew they probably got away from the thaumaturge. Cinder and Wolf could handle her easily.
The real question was what they thought of him.
Did they think he was dead?
Though the concept made him shudder, it was perfectly reasonable for them to think it. The satellite fell from the sky and crashed to Earth. If Cress hadn't done her parachute-code-override-thing, they both would've been pancakes hours ago.
Morbid, but true.
Hours later, his mind was grasping for something new to think about – anything. Anything to keep him from succumbing to the turmoil lurking behind the carefully bricked wall he'd constructed in his brain.
He exhaled. "Do you need to take a break?" he asked. They couldn't keep walking forever. Probably.
"N-no," she huffed. "We're almost to the top of this dune."
He raised his eyebrows. Her voice was laced with fatigue. "Sure? No point passing out from exhaustion." He wished she'd take the hint.
But she kept walking.
"Really," he pressed. "Let's take a break." He stabbed his cane into the grainy sand and set the supply bundle beside it. After a spine-popping stretch that felt wonderful, he sat down. Cress sat next to him.
He swept his hand across the ground and grabbed the bag, loosening the ties and groping around for the two water bottles. For such clunky things, they were very evasive. He finally found them and handed one to Cress.
"Shouldn't we ration it?" she asked.
He shook his head and swallowed a sweet mouthful. "It's best to drink when we're thirsty, and just try to keep sweating to a minimum – as much as possible. Our bodies will be better able to maintain hydration that way, even if we do run out of water." He took another drink. "And we should avoid eating until we find another water source. Digestion uses up a lot of water too."
He never would have guessed that the torture known as school would be so helpful.
"That's fine," Cress said. "I'm not hungry."
They both took one last drink and set off down the dune, off on yet another endless walk through a deadly landscape.
"What do you think is happening on your ship?" Cress asked. "Do you think Mistress Sybil..."
"They're fine," he interrupted. He was surprised at how firm and confident he sounded. "I pity the person who goes up against Wolf, and Cinder's made of tougher stuff than people realize." He chuckled at his own accidental joke, remembering her heavy metallic leg clanking down the hall. "Literally, in fact."
"Wolf. That must be the other man on the ship?"
"Yes, and Scarlet is his... well, I don't really know what they call themselves, but he's lunatic-crazy for her. Scarlet's not a bad shot, herself. That thaumaturge had no idea what she was walking into."
There was a brief silence, punctured only by the gentle swipes of his cane over the sand and their footsteps.
"So how did a girl born on Luna get stuck in a satellite and become an Earthen sympathizer anyway?" The question had been tickling his thoughts for a while now. He didn't understand why they would want her to remain a prisoner instead of staying home on the moon.
"Well. When my parents found out I was a shell, they gave me up to be killed, because of the infanticide laws. But Mistress saved me and raised me instead, along with some other shells she'd rescued. She mostly just wanted us for some sort of experiments they're always running, but Mistress never really explained it to me. We used to live in some of the lava tubes that had been converted into dormitories, and we were always being monitored by these cameras that were connected to Luna's communication system. It was sort of cramped, but not too bad, and we had ports and netscreens, so we weren't entirely cut off from the outside world. After a while I got really good at hacking into the communication system, which I mostly just used for silly stuff. We were all curious about school, so I used to hack into the Lunar school system and download the study guides, things like that."
Cress had never gone to school. He thought that may have played a part in forming her naivety.
"Then one day, one of the older boys – Julian – asked me if I thought I could find out who his parents were. It took a couple of days, but I did, and we learned that his parents lived in one of the lumber domes, and that they were both alive, and that he had two younger siblings. And then we figured out how to send them a message and tell them that he was alive."
Thorne frowned at the change in her tone. It was very subtle, but it gave him a queer feeling.
"He thought that if they knew he hadn't been killed after all, they would come find him. We got so excited, thinking we could all contact our families. That we would all be rescued." She paused and took a deep breath. "It was really naive, of course. The next day, Mistress came and took Julian away, and then some technicians removed all of the monitoring equipment so we couldn't access the net anymore. I never saw Julian again. I think... I think his parents must have contacted the authorities when they got his comm, and I think he may have been killed, to prove that the infanticide laws were being taken seriously.
"After that, Mistress Sybil started to pay more attention to me. She sometimes took me out of the caverns and up into the domes and gave me different tasks. Altering the coding of the broadcast system. Tapping into netlinks. Programming intelligence software to pick up on specific verbal cues and divert information into separate comm accounts. At first I loved it. Mistress was nice to me then, and it meant I got to leave the city. I felt like I was becoming her favorite, and that if I did what she asked me to do, eventually it wouldn't matter that I was a shell anymore, and I would be allowed to go to school and be just like any normal Lunar."
Before Thorne had gone to the satellite, when they were first contacting Cress, she'd said that she had been on the satellite for seven years. She couldn't be much older than sixteen, if his guess was correct, so he could only dream of what she was capable of now, hacker-wise.
"Well, one day Sybil asked me to hack a communication between a couple of European diplomats and I told her that the signal was too weak. I needed to be closer to Earth, and I required better net connectivity, and advanced software..."
That sounded exactly like a satellite orbiting Earth. He twisted the cane in his hand.
"A few months later, Mistress came to get me, and told me we were going on a trip. We boarded a podship, and I was so, so excited. I thought she was taking me to Artemisia, to be presented to the queen herself, to be forgiven for being born a shell. It feels so stupid now. Even when we started flying away from Luna, and I saw that we were heading toward Earth, I thought that's where we were going. I figured, all right, maybe Lunars really can't accept me this way, but Mistress knows that Earthens will. So she's letting me go to Earth, instead. The trip took hours and hours and by the end of it I was shaking with excitement, and I'd worked up this whole story in my head, how Mistress was going to give me to some nice Earthen couple, and they would raise me as their own, and they lived in an enormous tree house – I don't know why I thought they would live in a tree house, but for some reason that's what I was hoping for. I mean, I'd never seen real trees." Something in her voice tightened. "Still haven't, actually."
Thorne exhaled slowly. "And that's when she took you to the satellite, and you became the queen's programmer."
"Programmer, hacker, spy... somehow, I never stopped believing that if I did everything she asked, someday they would let me go."
It was such a depressing story. It made Thorne feel immensely grateful to his mother and father, though he'd done everything in his youthful power to make them analyze the effectiveness of their parenting skills. "And how long before you decided that you'd rather be trying to save Earthen royalty than spy on them?"
"I don't know. I was always fascinated by Earth. I spent a lot of time reading Earthen news and watching their dramas. I started to feel connected to the people down there... down here. More than I ever did to Lunars. After a while, I started to pretend that I was a secret guardian, and it was my job to protect Earth and its people from Levana."
Thorne really had been horrible to his parents. He remembered wishing that they would go away and let him do his own thing instead of doing what they told him to. But he was rethinking all of that after hearing this tiny, innocent Lunar girl who never had parents and went on to try and save the Earth from her tyrannical queen. All Thorne had done was cause Earth more trouble.
He sighed. "If I'd been in your position, and I had only one D-COMM chip that I could use to communicate with Earth, I would have found some dirt on a hotshot spaceship pilot and blackmailed him into coming to get me out of that satellite, rather than trying to rescue the emperor."
"No, you wouldn't have. You would have done the same thing I did, because you know that the threat Levana poses to Earth is much bigger than you or me... much bigger than any of us."
He shook his head. "That's very good of you to say, Cress. But trust me. I would have blackmailed someone." When she didn't say anything else, Thorne realized that he'd gotten what he wanted – a distraction.
He knew just what kind of person Cress was.
He knew just what kind of person he was.
One was a hero. One was not.
Thorne sighed and pushed the thoughts away, very hesitantly allowing himself to think about the blindness.
He needed a new distraction.