She was free. She was in control. She didn’t belong to Adri anymore.
For perhaps the first time, she stepped out of the elevator with her head high.
The hallway was empty except for a mangy gray cat cleaning himself.
Cinder came to apartment 1820, squared her shoulders, and knocked.
Footsteps padded on the other side of the door, and she focused on her glamour. Cinder had chosen to take on the appearance of one of the officials she’d seen standing behind Kai at the last press conference. Middle-aged, slightly pudgy, with gray-flecked black hair and a too-small-for-her-face nose. She mimicked her exactly, down to the blue-gray business suit and sensible tan shoes.
The door opened and a cloud of stale hot air swept into the hallway.
Adri stood before her, tying the belt around her silk bathrobe. She almost always wore her bathrobe when she was at home, but this was not the same one Cinder was familiar with. Her hair was pulled back, and she wasn’t yet wearing any makeup. There was a fine sheen of sweat on her face.
Cinder expected her body to recoil under her stepmother’s inspection, but it didn’t. Rather, as she looked at Adri, she felt only a detached coldness.
This was just a woman with an invitation to the royal wedding. This was just another task to cross off the list.
“Yes?” said Adri, skeptical gaze swooping over her.
Cinder-the-Palace-Official bowed. “Good morning. Is Linh Adri-jiĕ at home?”
“I am Linh Adri.”
“A pleasure. I apologize for disturbing you at such an early hour,” said Cinder, launching into her practiced speech. “I am a member of the royal wedding planning committee, and I understand you were promised two invitations to the nuptials between His Imperial Majesty, Emperor Kaito, and Her Lunar Majesty, Queen Levana. As you are one of our distinguished civilian guests, I am honored to personally deliver your invitations for tonight’s ceremony.”
She held out two pieces of paper—in reality, disposable napkin scraps, but to Adri’s eye, two finely crafted, hand-pressed paper envelopes.
At least, she hoped that’s what Adri was seeing. The closest Cinder had yet to come to changing the perception of an inanimate object was her own prosthetic hand, and she wasn’t sure if that counted.
Adri frowned at the napkins, but it quickly turned into a patient smile. No doubt because she now believed she was talking to someone from the palace. “There must be some mistake,” she said. “We received our invitations last week.”
Cinder feigned surprise and withdrew the napkins. “How peculiar. Would you mind if I took a look at those invitations? So I can make sure some mishap hasn’t occurred?”
Adri’s grin tightened, but she stepped aside and ushered Cinder into the apartment. “Of course, please come in. Can I offer you some tea?”
“Thank you, no. We’ll just clear up this confusion and I won’t intrude anymore on your time.” She followed Adri into the living room.
“I must apologize for the heat,” said Adri, grabbing a fan off a small side table and flicking it before her face. “The air has been broken for a week now and the maintenance here is completely incompetent. I used to have a servant to assist with these things, a cyborg ward my husband took in, but—well. It doesn’t matter now. Good riddance.”
Cinder bristled. Servant? But she ignored the comment as her gaze traveled over the room. It hadn’t changed much, with the exception of the items displayed on the mantel of the holographic fireplace. Belongings that had held such prominent position before—Linh Garan’s award plaques and alternating digital photos of Pearl and Peony—had been crammed together at the mantel’s far edge. Now, at its center, stood a beautiful porcelain jar, painted with pink and white peonies and set atop a carved mahogany base.
Cinder sucked in a breath.
Not a jar. An urn. A cremation urn.
Her mouth went dry. She heard Adri padding across the living room, but her focus was pinned to that urn, and what—who—would be inside it.
Of their own accord, her feet began to move toward the mantel and Peony’s remains. Her funeral had come and gone and Cinder had not been there. Adri and Pearl had wept. Had no doubt invited every person from Peony’s classes, every person from this apartment building, every distant relative who had barely known her, who had probably griped about having to send the expected sympathy card and flowers.
But Cinder hadn’t been there.
“My daughter,” said Adri.
Cinder gasped and pulled away. She hadn’t realized that her fingers were brushing against a painted flower until Adri had spoken.
“Gone only recently, of letumosis,” Adri continued, as if Cinder had asked. “She was only fourteen.” There was sadness in her voice, true sadness. It was perhaps the one thing they had ever had in common.
“I’m sorry,” Cinder whispered, grateful that in her distraction, some instinct had maintained her glamour. She forced herself to focus before her eyes started trying to make tears. They would fail—she was incapable of crying—but the effort sometimes gave her a headache that wouldn’t go away for hours, and now was not the time for mourning. She had a wedding to stop.
“Do you have children?” Adri asked.
“Er … no. I don’t,” said Cinder, having no idea if the palace official she was impersonating did or not.
“I have one other daughter—seventeen years old. It was not very long ago that all I could think of was finding her a nice, wealthy husband. Daughters are expensive, you know, and a mother wants to give them everything. But now, I can’t stand the thought of her leaving me too.” She sighed and tore her gaze away from the urn. “But listen to me, carrying on, when you must have so many other places to be today. Here are the invitations we received.”
Cinder took them carefully, glad to change the subject. Now that she was seeing a real invitation up close, she changed the glamour she’d made up for the napkins. The paper was a little stiffer, slightly more ivory, with gold, embossed letters in a flourishing script on one side and traditional second-era kanji on the other.
“Interesting,” said Cinder, opening the top invitation. She faked a laugh, hoping it didn’t sound as painful as it was. “Ah, these are the invitations for Linh Jung and his wife. Your addresses must have gotten switched in our database. How silly.”
Adri cocked her head. “Are you sure? When they arrived, I was certain—”
“See for yourself.” Cinder angled the paper so Adri could see what wasn’t there. What Cinder told her to see. What Cinder told her to believe.
“Goodness, so it is,” said Adri.
Cinder handed Adri the napkins and watched as her stepmother handled them as though they were the most precious items in the world.
“Well then,” she said, her voice barely warbling. “I’ll see myself out. I hope you’ll enjoy the ceremony.”
Adri dropped the napkins into her robe’s pocket. “Thank you for taking the time to deliver these yourself. His Imperial Majesty certainly is a gracious host.”
“We are lucky to have him.” Cinder meandered into the hallway. As her hand landed on the door, she realized with a jolt that this could be the last time she ever saw her stepmother.
The very last time, if she could dare to hope.
She attempted to smother the temptation that roiled inside her at the thought, but she still found herself turning back to face Adri.
“I—”
… have nothing to say. I have nothing to say to you.
But all the common sense in the world could not convince her of those words.
“I don’t mean to pry,” she started again, clearing her throat, “but you mentioned a cyborg before. You wouldn’t happen to be the guardian of Linh Cinder?”
Adri’s kindness fell away. “I was, unfortunately. Thank the stars that’s all behind us now.”
Against all her reasoning, Cinder stepped back into the apartment, blocking the doorway. “But she grew up here. Didn’t you ever feel that she could have been a part of your family? Didn’t you ever think of her as a daughter?”
Adri huffed, fanning herself again. “You didn’t know the girl. Always ungrateful, always thinking she was so much better than us because of her … additions. Cyborgs are like that, you know. So self-important. It was awful for us, living with her. A cyborg and a Lunar, although we didn’t know it until her mortifying spectacle at the ball.” She tightened her belt. “And now she’s soiled our family name. I have to ask that you not judge us by her. I did all I could to help the girl, but she was unredeemable from the start.”