This man was Lunar.
She flinched away, wanting to curl up until she was no larger than a grain of sand, until she blew away into the desert and disappeared.
But she could not disappear. Instead, as Jina stepped aside, she found herself face-to-face with a man well into his years.
She started. They were face-to-face—he was barely taller than her.
Behind a pair of thin wired spectacles, his blue eyes widened, looking remarkably lively despite the wrinkles that folded and creased around them. He was balding, with tufts of untamed gray hair that stuck out above his ears. A bizarre déjà vu struck her, as if she’d seen him before, but that was impossible.
He whipped off his spectacles and rubbed at his eyes. When he replaced them, his lips were puckered and he was examining Cress like a bug for dissection. She pressed back against the wall, until Niels grabbed her elbow and yanked her forward.
“Definitely a shell,” the old man murmured, “and a phantom, it seems.”
Cress’s heart pounded a rough, erratic rhythm against her rib cage.
“I’m asking 32,000 univs for her.”
The man blinked at Jina like he’d forgotten she was there. He stood a bit straighter and made a great fuss about removing his spectacles again, to clean them this time.
Cress dug her fingernails into her palm to distract herself from her panic. She stared past the man. A single window was covered in blinds, and there was dust swirling in and out of a beam of sunlight that knifed through them. There was a closed door, presumably a closet, a desk, a bed, and a pile of rumpled blankets in the corner. The blankets were clotted with blood.
A chill raced across her skin.
Then she spotted the netscreen.
A netscreen. She could comm for help. She could contact the last hotel, in Kufra. She could tell Thorne—
“I will give you 25,000.” The man’s tone had solidified while he cleaned his glasses, and was now all business.
Jina snorted. “I will not hesitate to take this girl to the police and have her deported. I’ll collect my citizen’s reward from them.”
“A mere 1,500 univs? You would sacrifice so much on your pride, Jina?”
“My pride, and to know that one less Lunar is walking around on my planet.” She said this with a sneer, and for the first time it occurred to Cress that Jina might truly hate her—for no other reason than her ancestry. “I’ll let her go for 30,000, Doctor. I know you’re paying as much for shells these days.”
Doctor? Cress gulped. This man in no way resembled the finely polished men and women in the net dramas, with their crisp white coats and advanced technology. Somehow, the title served to make her more wary, as visions of scalpels and syringes flashed through her mind.
He sighed. “Ah, 27,000.”
Jina tilted her head back, peering down her nose. “Deal.”
The doctor took her hand, but he seemed to have drawn back into himself. He couldn’t look at Cress full-on, as if he were ashamed that she had witnessed the transaction.
Defiance jolted down Cress’s spine.
He should be ashamed. They should all be ashamed.
And she would not let herself become mere baggage to be bartered for. Mistress Sybil had taken advantage of her for too long. She wouldn’t let it happen again.
Before these thoughts could become anything more than rebellious anger, she was shoved into the room. Jina shut the door, enclosing them all in the hot, dusty space that smelled of stale chemicals. “Make the transfer quick,” she said, folding her arms. “I have other business to tend to in Kufra.”
The doctor grunted and opened the closet. There were no clothes inside, but rather a miniature science lab, with mystery machines and scanners and a stand of metal drawers that clanked when he opened them. He pulled out a needle and syringe and made quick work of removing its packaging.
Cress backed away, arms pulling against her bindings, but Niels stopped her.
“Yes, yes, let me get a blood sample from her, then I’ll make the transfer.”
“Why?” Jina said, stepping between them. “So you can determine something’s wrong with her and compromise our deal?”
The doctor harrumphed. “I have no intention of compromising anything, Jina. I merely thought she would be more complicit while you’re here, allowing me to more safely extract a sample.”
Cress’s gaze darted around the room. A weapon. An escape. A hint of mercy in the eyes of her captor.
Nothing. There was nothing.
“Fine,” Jina said. “Niels, hold her so the doctor can do what he needs to do.”
“No!” The word was ripped out of Cress as she stumbled away. Her shoulder collided with Niels and she started to fall backward, but then he was gripping her by the elbow and hauling her against him. Her legs had become soggy and useless beneath her. “No—please. Leave me alone!” She pleaded at the doctor and saw such a mixture of emotion on his lined face that she fell silent.
His eyebrows were bunched together, and his mouth tightly pursed. He kept rapidly blinking behind his glasses, like trying to clear away an eyelash, until his gaze fell away from her altogether. There was pity in him. She knew it—she knew this was sympathy he was trying to disguise.
“Please,” she sobbed. “Please let me go. I’m just a shell, and I’m stranded here on Earth, and I haven’t done anything to anyone, and I’m nobody. I’m nobody. Please, just let me go.”
He did not meet her eyes again, even as he stepped forward. She tensed, trying to back away, but Niels held her firm. The doctor’s touch felt papery, but his grip was strong as he took her wrist in one hand.
“Try to relax,” he murmured.
She flinched as the needle dug into her flesh, the same spot where Sybil had taken blood a hundred times. She bit hard on the inside of her cheek, refusing to so much as whimper.
“That was all. Not so awful, was it?” His tone was eerily soft, like he was trying to comfort her.
She felt like a bird who’d had her wings clipped and been thrown into a cage—another filthy, rotting cage.
She’d been in a cage all her life. Somehow, she’d never expected to find one just as awful on Earth.
Earth, she reminded herself as the doctor plodded back across the groaning floorboards. She was on Earth. Not trapped in a satellite in space. There was a way out of this. Freedom was just out that window, or just down those stairs. She would not be a prisoner again.
The doctor fit the syringe full of her blood into a machine and flipped on a portscreen.
“There now, I will transfer over the funds, and you can be on your way.”
“You’re using a secure connection?” Jina asked, taking a step forward as the doctor tapped in some sort of code word. Cress squinted, watching where his fingers landed, in case she would later need it. It could save time not having to hack it.
“Trust me, Jina, I have more reason than you to keep my transactions hidden from prying eyes.” He studied something on the screen, before saying, more solemnly, “Thank you for bringing her.”
Jina scowled at his balding head. “I hope you’re killing all these Lunars when you’re done with them. We have enough problems with the plague. We don’t need them too.”
His blue eyes flashed and Cress detected a hint of disdain for Jina, but he covered it over with another benign look. “The payment has been transferred. If you would untie the girl before you go.”
Cress kept still as the bindings were taken off her wrists. She whipped her hands away as soon as they were gone and scurried against the nearest wall.
“Lovely doing business with you again,” Jina said. The doctor merely grunted. He was watching Cress from the corner of his eye, trying to stare at her without being obvious.
And then the door closed and Jina and Niels were gone. Cress listened to their feet clopping down the hallway, the only noise in the building.
The doctor rubbed his palms down the front of his shirt, like cleansing them of Jina’s presence. Cress didn’t think he could feel half as filthy as she did, but she stayed as still as the wall, glaring.
“Yes, well,” he said. “It is more awkward with shells, you know. Not so easy to explain.”
She snarled. “You mean, not so easy to brainwash.”
He tilted his head, and the odd look had returned. The one that made her feel like a science experiment under a microscope. “You know that I’m Lunar.”