“It was my idea,” said Calista, who stood near the front of the line. Sybil’s piercing eyes shifted to her. “Don’t be mad at Cress. I put her up to it. I just thought … we just thought…”
Sybil waited, expressionless, but Calista seemed to have lost her gumption. A silence filled the dormitory, and though the temperature was static, Cress began to shiver.
Finally, Arol spoke. “We thought it could teach us how to read.” He cleared his throat. “I mean, those of us who don’t know how…”
Which was most of them. Cress had managed to download a Beginning Readers app to their shared holograph node a few years ago, and she and a couple others had made it through the entire course before Sybil had found out and blocked it from them. They had tried to teach the others—those who wanted to learn—but without paper or portscreens it was a slow, tedious process.
Most of them wanted to know, though. There was something liberating about it. Something powerful.
She thought Sybil knew that too; otherwise she wouldn’t have been opposed to it.
Sybil began to pace down their line, eyeing each of them in turn, though most of the kids dropped their stares as she passed. She moved like a cat. A proud, spoiled one, who hunted for sport, not survival. The guard who had accompanied her waited by the door, attention pinned on the distant wall, ignoring them all.
“If it was important for you to have the skill of reading,” said Sybil, “do you not think I would have ensured that you were taught? But you are not here to be educated. You are here because we have hopes of curing you. You are here to supply us with shell blood so that we might study your deficiencies and, perhaps, someday we will know how to fix you. When that day comes, you will be reintroduced as full citizens of Luna.” Her words turned sharp. “But until that day, you have no place in civilized society, and no purpose beyond the blood that runs through your veins. Reading is a privilege that you have not earned.”
She stopped in front of Cress and turned to face her. Cress cowered, though she wished that she hadn’t. There would be no medal of bravery today.
Reading was a privilege she had not earned. Except … she felt that she had. She had learned the language of computers and networks and she had learned the language of letters and sounds and she had done it all on her own. Wasn’t that earning it?
It didn’t matter now. Knowledge was something that Sybil could never take away from her.
“Crescent.”
She shuddered and forced herself to look up. She braced herself for a reprimand—Sybil certainly looked angry enough.
But instead, Sybil said, “You will have your blood taken first today, and then you will prepare for a departure. I have a new assignment for you.”
* * *
Cress held the bandage against her elbow as she followed Mistress through the underground tunnels that connected the shell dormitories to the rest of Luna’s capital city. The shells were kept separated from the rest of society because supposedly they were dangerous. They couldn’t be manipulated by the Lunar gift, which meant they posed a threat to the queen and the rest of the aristocracy, those Lunars who were able to manipulate the minds of people around them. It had, in fact, been an enraged shell who had assassinated the previous king and queen, leading to the banishment of shells in the first place.
Cress had heard the story a hundred times—this proof that people like her weren’t fit to be around other Lunars. That they needed to be fixed before they could be trusted. But still she couldn’t understand it.
She knew that she wasn’t dangerous, and most of the other shells were children like her. Almost all of them had been taken from their families when they were newborns.
How could someone as powerful as Queen Levana be afraid of someone like her?
But no matter how many times she tried to get a better explanation from Sybil, she was rebuked. Don’t argue. Don’t ask questions. Give me your arm.
At least, since Sybil had learned of Cress’s affinity for computers, she had started to pay a bit more attention to her. Some of the other kids were starting to get frustrated. They said that Cress was becoming a favorite. They were jealous that Sybil kept taking her out of the dorms—no one else ever left the dorms, and Cress had even gotten to go to the palace a few times, a story that the younger kids never tired of hearing about, even though Cress had only gone in through the servants’ passages and been taken straight to the security control center. She hadn’t seen the throne room or anything interesting like that, and she certainly hadn’t seen the queen herself. Still, it was more than most anyone else in the dormitories had seen, and they loved to hear her tell the tale, over and over again.
She suspected that Sybil was taking her to the palace again this time, until Mistress took a turn that she had never taken before. Cress almost tripped over her own feet in surprise. The guard, pacing an arm’s reach from her (because, again, she was dangerous), cast her a cool glare.
“Where are we going, Mistress?”
“The docks,” Sybil answered without pretense.
The docks.
The spaceship docks?
Cress furrowed her brow. She hadn’t been to the docks before. Did Sybil need her to program special surveillance equipment into one of the royal ships? Or update the parameters for the ships that could enter and exit Artemisia?
Or …
Her heart started to thump, although she did her best to temper it. She should not hope. She should not let herself be excited. Because the thought that Sybil might be taking her on a ship … that she might be going into space …
Her eagerness was almost too much to bear. She knew that she shouldn’t let herself wish for it, but she wished anyway. Oh, the stories she would tell. The little kids would crowd around her to hear all about her space adventure. She started looking around the corridor with new eyes, trying to mentally record every last detail that she could take back to them later.
But these corridors were so bland, with their polished-smooth stone walls, that there wasn’t much to tell. Not yet.
“Mistress,” she ventured to ask, “what will you have me do at the docks?”
Sybil was silent for so long that Cress began to regret asking. Maybe she’d angered her. Sybil didn’t like being asked rudimentary questions. She didn’t like it much when Cress talked at all, other than Yes, Mistress and Of course, Mistress and I would be happy to complete this task for you, Mistress.
And though Cress had never been fond of Sybil—had, in fact, been terrified of her since before she could remember—she still wanted Sybil to be fond of her. She wanted Mistress to be proud. She imagined Sybil bragging about her to the queen, telling Her Majesty of the young prodigy in her care, who could be so much more useful to the crown if she weren’t trapped in those awful dormitories all the time. Cress hoped that if she could impress Sybil enough, someday the queen would have to take notice of her. Maybe she would be offered a job and she could prove that shells weren’t dangerous after all. That they want to belong and be good, loyal Lunars just like anyone. Maybe, just maybe, the queen would listen to her.
“Do you remember,” said Sybil, jolting Cress from a daydream in which Queen Levana herself was praising Cress for her brilliance and essential service to the crown, “when I asked you about conducting more extensive surveillance on the leaders of the Earthen Union?”
“Yes, Mistress.”