Winter

Thirty-Four

Linh Pearl stepped off the elevator, clutching the strings of her purse against her shoulder. She was shaking—livid with rage. Since Cinder had made that spectacle at the ball and been revealed to be not only an insane cyborg but an even more insane Lunar, Pearl’s world had crumbled around her.

At first it had been minor inconveniences—annoying, but tolerable. With no servant cyborg and no money to hire new help, Pearl was now expected to help around the apartment. Suddenly she had “chores.” Suddenly her mother wanted her to help with the shopping and to cook her own meals and even do the dishes when she’d finished, even though it had been her stupid decision to sell off their only functioning android.

But that she could have lived with, if her social life hadn’t simultaneously splintered along with her dignity. Overnight, she had become a pariah.

Her friends had dealt with it well enough at first. Filled with shock and sympathy, they flocked around Pearl like she was a celebrity, wanting to know everything. Wanting to offer their condolences, knowing that her adopted stepsister had been such a terror. Wanting to hear every horrific story of their childhood. Like a girl who’d barely escaped death, she had been the center of all their conversations, all their curiosity.

That had dwindled, though, when Cinder escaped from prison and remained at large for too long. Her name became synonymous with traitors and it was dragging Pearl down with it.

Then her mother—her ignorant fool of a mother—had unknowingly aided Cinder in the kidnapping of Emperor Kai by giving her their wedding invitations.

She’d traded them for napkins. Napkins.

And it had baffled her. Hours before they were to attend the royal wedding, already dressed in their finest, her mother had torn the apartment apart, frantically digging through every drawer, crawling on her hands and knees to peer beneath the furniture, searching every pocket in her wardrobe. Cursing and swearing over and over that she’d had them, she’d seen them just that morning, when that awkward woman from the palace had brought them and explained the mishap and where could they have gone?

They missed the wedding, naturally.

Pearl had screamed and cried and hidden in her room to watch the newsfeeds—the live footage that had gone from talk of wedding traditions and palace décor to a devastating account of an assault on the palace and the disappearance of Emperor Kai.

Linh Cinder was behind it all. Her monstrous stepsister, once again, had ruined everything.

It had taken two days for the palace’s security team to trace the invitations of a Bristol-dàren (who had been at home in Canada, enjoying a bottle of fine wine) back to the actual invitations that had been given to Linh Adri and her daughter, Linh Pearl. Only then did her mother understand. Cinder had made her out to be an idiot.

That had been the last straw for Pearl’s friends.

“Traitors,” Mei-Xing had called them, accusing Pearl and her mother of helping the cyborg and putting Kai in danger.

Furious, Pearl had stormed out, screaming that they could believe whatever they wanted for all she cared. She was the victim in all of this, and she didn’t need so-called friends to throw these accusations at her. She had enough to deal with as it was.

She’d expected them to chase after her, apologies in tow.

They didn’t.

She walked all the way home with her fists clenched at her sides.

Cinder. This was all Cinder’s fault. Ever since Peony—no, ever since their dad had caught the plague and been taken away from her. Everything was Cinder’s fault.

Karim-jiĕ, their neighbor in 1816, didn’t move aside as Pearl barreled past. Her shoulder smacked the woman against the wall and Pearl paused long enough to glare at her—was the old hog turning blind now, as well as lazy?—but she was met with a haughty snort.

This reaction, too, was one Pearl had seen too often since the ball. Who was this woman to look down on Pearl and her mother? She was nothing but an old widow whose husband had died from a love of drink, and who now sat in her garbage-smelling apartment with a sad collection of ceramic monkeys.

And she thought she was better than Pearl?

The whole world had turned against her.

“So sorry,” Pearl said through her teeth, stomping ahead to her own apartment.

The door was opened slightly, but Pearl didn’t give it any thought until she shoved it open and it banged against the wall.

She froze.

The living room had been torn apart. Even worse than when her mother had been searching for those stupid invitations.

The pictures and plaques had all been shoved off the fireplace mantel, the brand-new netscreen was lying facedown on the floor, and the urn containing Peony’s ashes …

Pearl’s stomach plummeted. The door came back to hit her shoulder.

“Mom?” she said, darting across the hall.

She froze. A scream crawled up her throat but died in a petrified squeak.

He was leaning against the living room’s far wall. Though he had the form of a man, he stood with hunched shoulders and enormous clawed hands. His face had been disfigured into a snout with teeth that jutted between his lips and dark, glassy eyes sunk back in his face.

Pearl whimpered. Instinct prompted her to take a step back, though instinct also told her it was useless.

A hundred horrific stories, from newsfeeds to whispered gossip, filled her head.

The killings were random, people said.

The Lunar monsters could be anywhere at any time. No one could discern any pattern or logic to their strikes. They might swarm a crowded office building one day and kill every soul on the ninth floor, but leave the rest alone. They might kill one child asleep in their bed, but not their brother across the room. They might dismember a man as he dashed from a hover to his front door, then ring the doorbell so a loved one would find him still bleeding on the step.

The terror of it was in the randomness. The brutality and the senseless way they chose their victims, while leaving so many witnesses to spread the fear.

No one was safe.

No one was ever safe.

But Pearl never thought they would come here, to their inconsequential apartment, in such a crowded city …

And—and the war was in cease-fire. There hadn’t been any attacks in days. Why now? Why her?

A whine squeezed through her throat. The creature smirked and she realized his jaw had been working when she’d come in. Like he’d been helping himself to a snack.

Mom.

Sobbing, she turned to run.

The door slammed shut. A second creature blocked her way.

Pearl collapsed to her knees, sobbing and shaking. “Please. Please.”

“You sure we can’t eat her?” said the one by the door, his words barely discernible beneath a gruff, raspy tone. He grabbed Pearl’s arm and hauled her back to her feet. She screamed and tried to cower away, but his grip was merciless. He peeled the arm away from her body, extending it so he could get a good view of her forearm. “Just a taste? She looks so sweet.”

“Yet smells so sour,” said the other.

Pearl, through her hysteria, smelled it too. There was warm dampness between her legs. She wailed and her legs gave out again, leaving her to dangle from the monster’s hold.

“Mistress said to bring them unharmed. You want to take a nibble, go ahead. Her wrath, your head.”

The one holding Pearl pressed his wet nose against her elbow and sniffed longingly. Then he let the arm fall and scooped Pearl over one shoulder. “Not worth it,” he said with a growl.

“I agree.” The second beast came closer and pinched Pearl’s face in his massive, hairy hand. “But maybe we’ll get to sample her when they’re done.”