Excerpt: Cress: Book Three of the Lunar Heir Chronicles

Book One: Satellite
“The enchantress shut her into a tower that had neither stairs nor door.”

Chapter One

Outside Cress’s small windows, Earth could be seen glowing blue and white—a mirage of serenity amidst the stars. The peaceful picture it presented did not meld with the word splattered across her multiple computer screens.

Full Moon Correlates with Werewolf Attacks in Sixty Major Cities

Mysterious Wolf Army Signifies Impending War

Largest Massacre in Earthen History, Over 300,000 Dead in Ten Hours

Emperor Kai Agrees to Marriage to Stop War

It was the last headline that had Cress’s stomach churning more than any of the others. Though the web was littered with horrors this morning—victims tattered to bloody pieces, live footage of average-looking men transforming into werewolf murderers—it was the thought of the horrors still to come that terrified Cress beyond reason.
Emperor Kai to marry Queen Levana.
Queen Levana to be Empress.
Queen Levana to rule Earth. Many would try to argue that she wanted only a peace alliance. That her desires stretched to the rich and beautiful Eastern Commonwealth, not beyond. But they would be fools to believe it. Cress knew better, and suspected that Emperor Kai did too.
She settled her elbows on either side of her keyboard and buried her hands into her hive of blonde hair. The familiar keys blurred in her vision. One of the computers behind her was reading aloud in her own voice—programmed with she was nine years old out of four months of near-total boredom. The high, childish voice was too chipper for the material it quoted: a medical blog from the EU announcing the results of an autopsy performed less than an hour before on one of the wolf creatures.

The bones were found to be peculiarly weak for such strong creatures, evidence of the energy it must of cost to undergo the transformation from human to wolflike structure. Bone scans showed precisely where the bones were stretched and curved to unnatural proportions. However, doctors are still no closer to finding the cause for such transformations or what prompted all of the creatures were able to transform at the same time worldwide. Though it is an accepted theory that the transformations were through a combination of tissue grafting and Lunar mag—

“Mute feed.”
The sweet nine-year-old voice silenced, leaving the satellite humming with the sounds that had long ago been relegated to the back of Cress’s consciousness. The whirring of computer fans. The thrumming of the life support systems. The gurgling of the water filter.
Cress yanked her hands harshly through her hair, gathering the thick locks at the nape of her neck and pulling the long tail over her shoulder. She lifted her head to stare at the screen before her, still plastered with half a dozen different news feeds, all from Earth. Luna did not have journalists, and any “news” was crown-sanctioned lies and drivel, so Cress had stopped reading it when she was eleven.
She mindlessly wrapped her ponytail around her left arm, tying it up from elbow to wrist without realizing what she was doing, then exhaling slowly and unwinding it all the way and starting again, ignoring the knots that clumped up the frayed ends in her lap.
“Oh Cress,” she murmured, “what are we going to do about this?”
Her nine-year-old self piped back, “I don’t understand. Please clarify your instructions, Big Sister.”
She shut her eyes against the blue glare again and tried to think of some instruction she could give. The voice in the computer had been her companion for seven long years—her only true companion—and she sometimes worried that if she didn’t keep her busy and allow her to feel useful, Little Cress might get upset. Might feel unloved.
She knew it was stupid. Computers did not have emotions. Her nine-year-old self was no more. But she could not help personifying the tinny voice, always cheerful, always hopeful.
“I know he’s only trying to stop a war,” she said, louder now, “but he must know it won’t end. He must know she won’t stop with . . .” She bit down on her lip and felt a headache creeping up behind her eyes. “If only I knew what that girl told him, if she had a chance to tell him anything.”
Her gaze fell to the bottom of the screen, to a window she never closed. It was linked to a spider alert service that was constantly patrolling the net for any new information related to the cyborg Lunar fugitive who had been taken into custody mere weeks earlier. The girl who had escaped, with one other prisoner, from New Beijing prison. The girl who had been Cress’s only chance for telling Emperor Kai the truth about Levana.
The feed hadn’t been updated in over twelve hours. In the hysteria of the werewolf invasion, Earth seemed to have forgotten the cyborg fugitive.
A screen beside her dinged. Cress spun toward it, taking it out of sleep mode, and saw that the program it had been running for 29 hours and 12 minutes had finally finished. The screen read: Russian Dictionary Word Search Complete. No Matches Found.
“Of course there aren’t,” she muttered to herself and cleared the screen without missing a beat. She’d developed the program just under a year ago, after spending days of manually typing every word from the Earthen English Dictionary into the password decoder and coming up empty handed, she’d decided to simply connect the password decoder to a series of varying language dictionaries and let it scan on its own time.
The idea was that somehow, somewhere, there must be a administrator password for overriding the satellite’s programming. She’d run into blocks before that required password identification and had realized that the only way she’d ever be able to change the satellite’s default orbit and change its course to take her down to Earth, she would need that password.
Her program, which took just over two weeks to write, could scan 220 words a minute. But so far she’d been through 64 dictionaries, with no luck.
According to some stats she’d found on the net, there had once been over 7,000 languages on Earth, and she of course had no way of knowing which language the satellite’s original programmer had chosen to use, or if it was a real word or a random assortment of letters and numbers and characters…
With a sigh, she selected the next language at random—romanized Mandarin—downloaded a dictionary from the second era, and set the password decoder to chugging away again.
“Big Sister?”
She spun in her chair, facing the screen that the voice had been reading from before, as if her soul suddenly inherited that machine. “Yes Cress?” she asked with some suspicion, already poised with both hands on the arms of her chair.
“Mistress is arriving. Expected to dock in 0:20 seconds.”
Cress had catapulted from her chair the moment the voice had uttered the word “mistress,” spoken even seven years ago with a tinge of fear.
She did not hesitate on where to go. For over a year, she’d been choosing a new hiding spot within two hours of Mistress Sybil’s last visit. She always found a new place immediately, so she would be prepared.
Of course Sybil always found her eventually—and her hiding places on the satellite were dwindling quickly, but that only forced her to be more creative. She wasn’t sure what she hoped to accomplish. Perhaps that one day Sybil would not be able to find her and would believe that Cress had finally discovered her Lunar power and used it to evaporate into the life support system.
Or perhaps that one day Sybil would simply get tired of looking for her and go away and never come back. Which would ultimately lead to Cress’s death as Sybil was responsible for bringing her food and water supplies.
But death seemed less and less awful with every day that passed of her solitary confinement—every day in which there was no sign of her ever being truly Lunar, no sign of her ever being able to escape.
She snatched an ever-ready screwdriver from the counter—really a thin piece of paneling removed from one of the keyboards when she was eight—and dropped to the floor beside her pull out bed.
Little Cress was counting down the seconds as Sybil’s ship approached the satellite’s dock. 18. 17. 16.
She lodged the paneling into a screw’s hatch marks, leaned into it with her shoulder as she twisted it out. The screw was one of four that had originally held this aluminum panel in place, but she hadn’t put the other three back upon choosing this hiding place three weeks ago, and this fourth screw slid out easily from being so recently removed.
12. 11. 10.
She pulled the panel out and slid it against the wall, revealing the jumble of cables tucked into this panel, never meant to be seen by anyone other than its initial engineer. She squirmed feet-first into the alcove, careful not to disconnect any wires or accidentally dislodge anything that could shut off, say, her oxygen pump or anti-gravity device.
8. 7. 6.
With one hand, she reached up and found the latch against the wall that released her bed. The mattress came tumbling out of the wall, stopped by 3 metal brackets mere inches above Cress’s shoulders. Sybil would be angry that Cress hadn’t made the bed that day—she always expected cleanliness—but never knowing when Sybil would arrive it seemed useless to have to make the bed every day. And it wasn’t like anyone else would ever see it.
3. 2. 1.
There was a clunk outside the satellite’s entrance. The walls jolted and vibrated as the small ship docked.
She scurried to sweep her trailing her back into the alcove with her, bunching it up in a mess of tangles and curls, shoving the mess down by her waist, before sliding the little metal panel shut.
Darkness engulfed her. The alcove was hot and already the heat was clinging to the back of her neck. Already the air felt like it was stifling her, finding it hard to be sucked into her lungs. She had little tolerance for heat—the satellite was always kept at an even 69 degrees.
Cress shut her eyes to listen, forcing herself to ignore the onset of claustrophobia that always found her in these tight places. The other option was to face Sybil, which she would have to eventually anyhow, but perhaps if she just stayed still enough, just stayed silent, her mistress would tire of looking for her and leave her alone.
The familiar sounds were repeated. She could have counted the beats between them. The power of the small spacecraft’s engines powering down. The clang of the walkway attaching. The vacuum as oxygen was pushed into the space. The beep that confirmed there were no air leaks, that travel between the two modules was safe. The opening of the spacecraft door. Slow, practiced steps echoing on the hard walkway. The door to Cress’s single room opening.
The steps paused. Cress imagined Sybil standing on the threshold, her gray eyes glowering at the small room—clearly devoid of life.
The pause lasted longer than usual. Cress was just beginning to wonder if perhaps she’d succeeded this time, that maybe Sybil was at her rope’s end and was about to march back to her ship and fly back to the moon.
She was just beginning to question if this would really make her happy when Sybil’s voice cut through the quiet—sharp even when muffled by the metal paneling.
“Crescent.”
A chill traced her spine, even as she felt the heavy hair on the back of her neck begin to dampen from her sweat.
“Come out here this instant. I am not in the mood for your games today.”
Cress had often heard Sybil angry. Often seen her angry. Often felt the result of that anger. But the tone on her voice now made her voice dry from worry. Her heart was suddenly throbbing against the warm floor of the alcove. Her fingers itched toward the panel.
A crash screeched on the other side of the wall.
Cress’s hand snatched back, covering her mouth but too late to catch an escaped cry. She shrank against the cables, hot against her back, then quickly pushed out against the paneling. The metal clanged to the floor. A whoosh of cool air filled her lungs. From her viewpoint beneath the bed she could see Sybil’s dark pointed boots, toes turned toward her. Even the position of her feet seemed cranky.
Sybil lashed out with one foot, kicking the bed back up into the wall with a loud bang.
Cress gasped, ducking back in the panel, but she was frozen by Sybil’s frosty glare. She gulped, hesitated only a moment, before squirming out and standing on wobbly knees.
“Mistress.” She lowered her eyes and dipped into a curtsy. “I was only—”
It seemed that the sharp cracking sound followed full seconds after the scorch of pain in Cress’s cheek. She reeled back, collapsing against the bed wall and sinking into a crouch. Her own warm hands found the stinging, but could offer no comfort.
Cress had only ever been hit by Sybil’s hand and could compare it to no other, yet she had long expected that wounds inflicted at Sybil’s hands were far worse than normal wounds. She suspected that Sybil laced her lashes with bits of magic to enforce the blow, make it sting longer than it should have.
“I will not tolerate such disrespect again, Crescent. I expect you to greet me upon my arrivals and be ready to proceed with your lessons immediately. Do you understand me?”
Cress dropped her hand to her side and forced herself to stand, pushing away from the wall. But she dared not meet Sybil’s gaze. The pain in her cheek would burn for some minutes, she knew, but the shock of the hit was trivial compared her surprise at Sybil’s anger. She had seemed irritated before, annoyed at finding Cress always hiding, but never had it been the cause of a punishment—not a physical one, at least. Added lessons, perhaps, but that was all.
“Crescent?”
“Yes, Mistress. I’m sorry, Mistress.”
Sybil sucked in a breath through her nostrils—loud like she did when she was trying to keep her hand from striking Cress again.
She released the breath all at once and paced to the board of computer screens at the other end of the room.
“Repeat your lessons from last week.”
It took a moment for Cress’s brain to switch gears so completely. Her brain dredged up the memorized nonsense words from a bucket of molasses. “Akatu indeci agranon—”
“Agranin!”
“Agranin on . . . on . . .”
“Oncantu.” Sybil slammed her fists down on the desk, on either side of the keyboard Cress had been sitting at before her arrival.
“Oncantu,” Cress repeated, but the words were lost in her mouth. There was no energy behind them—they were nothing but sounds in her ears. Syllables and vowels and sounds, all mushed together into some nonsensical chanting. When Sybil said these words, they could make sparks in the air, could make rain clouds form in the atmosphere-controlled satellite. When Cress said them—nothing.
She saw now what had crashed when she’d been hidden in the alcove. Sybil had thrown one of the external hard drives against the wall. It was the hard drive that had been the home of Little Cress’s recorded dictionary.
Four months, seven years ago, vanished into a splinter of silicon and plastic.
“Again.”
She gulped, hard. Her eyes remained glued to the hard drive. She immediately wished that Sybil would leave, soon, now, so she could fish through the bits and pieces and see what was salvageable. So she could see if Little Cress was all right.
“Akatu indeci agranin oncantu.”
“Again.”
“Akatu indeci agranin oncantu?”
Sybil lifted her face up to the satellite’s ceiling. Her black hair tumbled down her black in thick, straight strands, but her knuckles were white as she pushed herself away from the desk and turned back to Cress.
Tears were forming in Cress’s eyes. She blinked them back and tried to straighten her shoulders beneath Sybil’s empty stare.
“Are you even trying?” Sybil said. “Are you even thinking about what you are saying? Are you even pretending to be Lunar, or have you merely accepted your body to be the disgusting imposter it is?”
“I’m sorry, Mistress. I will try harder.”
Sybil turned her head away, waving her hand through the air as if she was too disgusted to look at Cress for another moment. The lights in the satellite dimmed briefly. This seemed to happen a lot when Sybil was around—her magic somehow affected the power center.
“Shall I say them again?”
“No. The words are nothing but a mockery coming from you.”
“I am sorry . . .” Cress spotted the screen behind Sybil and realized why Sybil’s anger was so surprising to her today. A picture of Emperor Kai standing at a podium draped with the Eastern Commonwealth flag lingered in the bottom right corner of the screen. “Are we not . . . happy?” she started, uncertainly. “At the engagement between Her Majesty and . . . isn’t that what we wanted?” Her eyes snagged on a headline on another screen—300,000 Dead—and she swallowed back her disgust.
Sybil snorted, muttering beneath her breath, “Is Her Majesty ever happy?”
Cress bunched her hair into both fists, winding it around her wrists one after the other.
“Have you made any progress on the search for the cyborg shell?”
Cress slowly shook her head. She knew immediately that Sybil was referring to the mechanic, even though the whole world knew that the Lunar fugitive was not a shell. Unlike Cress, she had magic. It may have been buried or hidden somehow, but it had certainly made itself known at the Commonwealth’s annual ball. The sight of her white glowing skin had been caught on four different cameras—the footage had not taken long to travel the span of the world, the galaxy.
Just like it had not taken long for Sybil to direct a new set of orders to Cress, the morning it was discovered that the Lunar fugitive, a girl of sixteen by the name of Lin Cinder, had escaped from her high-tech prison. Cress was to stop making spy equipment at once—drop everything and apply all her resources to finding the girl. The order had come from Queen Levana herself.
“No,” she said. “Nothing since the sighting in Paris.”
“She can’t have just vanished. A whole ship.”
The SS Rampion. A military cargo ship now turned rogue. Owned and captained by Alexander Woods, the other escaped convict. After hours of research, sifting through top secret military documents and trial reports, Cress knew everything there was to know about the ship—and its captain.
Everything except where they had gone.
“I’m sure they’re being careful to avoid radar traps,” Cress said, wringing her hair. “So unless they initiate a direct netlink it may not be possible to—”
“Enough.”
She sank back. “I’m sorry, Mistress. I will keep looking.”
“Levana will have us both killed if we fail in this.” She was speaking to herself again, staring at one of the screens as if it were very far away. Shaking herself, she turned back to Cress. She seemed to analyze her a moment, her gray eyes sharp beneath the satellite’s fluorescents. “I apologize for striking you.”
Cress raised a hand, fingers brushing her cheeks. “It was deserved, Mistress. I am sorry to have displeased you.”
All at once, the stinging stopped, as if Sybil had never touched her.
“You are a good child, Crescent, but you must try harder if we are ever to succeed with your lessons. If you are ever to be readmitted into Lunar society.”
Cress lowered her eyes. There was no response she could give to this common monologue. She was a shell and would always be a shell. She was born without magic and despite Sybil’s attempts and years of tutelage, she would never achieve even a spark of magic. She would never be Lunar.
Her only hope of a normal life was to escape to Earth and try to fit in on the blue planet she stared at each morning. But Sybil would surely beat her if she admitted such dreams.
“Begin the seven steps of meditation,” Sybil said with a resigned sigh. “And I will fix us lunch.”