She was only a child, and there were already so many hopes and expectations heaped on her shoulders. Michelle suddenly pitied her.
More than that, she realized she was going to miss her, this child who had caused her so much worry. Who had been a constant fixture in her life for so long, and who would leave now and never even know Michelle’s name. Never know who had cared for her for so long.
“All right,” Logan murmured. He had attached a portscreen to the side of the tank and was staring at it. “I’m going to initiate the procedure. It will be a few moments, but we should soon begin to see signs of life independent of the machinery.”
There was a hum from the base of the suspension tank.
The girl didn’t move. Not a breath, not a flinch.
Michelle glanced up at Garan, who was watching the child with eager curiosity. “What are you going to call her?” she asked.
Garan turned to her. “Call her?”
“You can’t very well call her Selene. I was wondering if you’d chosen another name.”
He stood up straighter. His expression took on a look of bewilderment. “I honestly hadn’t given it any consideration.”
“Michelle is right,” said Logan, still inspecting the portscreen. “We will need to give her an ID chip, too, if we expect her to fit in here on Earth. It will require some history for her—a family, and a believable story for how she became a cyborg. Enough to keep away any suspicion. I have some ideas already, but you are welcome to assign her a name, as her guardian.”
Garan’s gaze dropped to the child again. His brow was furrowed. “I’m not good with naming things. My wife chose the names for our daughters. I don’t think it even occurred to me that I might have a say in it.”
Michelle licked her lips behind the face mask. “I have a thought.”
Both men glanced at her.
“What about … Cinder?”
There was a hesitation, and she could tell they were doubtful about the name. She lifted her chin and explained, “It’s an unassuming name, but also … powerful. Because of where she came from. She survived that fire. She was reborn from the cinders.”
They turned as one to look at the girl again.
“Cinder,” said Logan, rolling the name over on his tongue. “Cinder. I like it, actually.”
“Me too,” said Garan. “Linh Cinder.”
Michelle smiled, glad they had been easily swayed. A child’s name was not a decision to be made lightly, but she felt it was the perfect name for her. And now the princess would have a token to take with her. A name that Michelle had given to her, like a parting gift, even if she never knew it.
Cinders. Embers. Ashes. Michelle hoped that whatever strength had allowed this child to survive the fire all those years ago was a strength that still burned inside her. That it would go on burning, hotter and hotter, until she was as bright as the rising sun.
She would need that strength for what lay ahead.
Michelle pressed her palm to the top of the tank, near where the girl’s heart was, just as a screen pulsed.
A heartbeat.
Then, seconds later, another. And another.
Nerves tingling, Michelle leaned closer and let her breath fog the glass. “Hello, Cinder,” she whispered. “I’m so pleased to finally meet you.”
As if she’d heard her name being spoken, the child opened her eyes.
Glitches
“Are you ready to meet your new family?”
She tore her gaze away from the window, where snow was heaped up on bamboo fences and a squat android was clearing a path through the slush, and looked at the man seated opposite her. Though he’d been kind to her throughout their trip, two full days of being passed between a hover, a maglev train, two passenger ships, and yet another hover, he still had a nervous smile that made her fidget.
Plus, she kept forgetting his name.
“I don’t remember the old family,” she said, adjusting her heavy left leg so that it didn’t stick out quite so far between their seats.
His lips twisted awkwardly into an expression that was probably meant to be reassuring, and this ended their conversation. His attention fell down to a device he never stopped looking at, with a screen that cast a greenish glow over his face. He wasn’t a very old man, but his eyes always seemed tired and his clothes didn’t fit him right. Though he’d been clean-cut when he first came to claim her, he was now in need of a razor.
She returned her gaze to the snow-covered street. The suburb struck her as crowded and confused. A series of short one-story shacks would be followed by a mansion with a frozen water fountain in its courtyard and a red-tiled roof. After that, a series of clustered town houses and maybe a run-down apartment complex before more tiny shacks took over. It all looked like someone had taken every kind of residence they could think of and spilled them across a grid of roads, not caring where anything landed.
She suspected that her new home wasn’t anything like the rolling farmland they’d left behind in Europe, but she’d been in such a foggy-brained daze at the time that she couldn’t remember much of anything before the train ride. Except that it had been snowing there, too. She was already sick of the snow and the cold. They made her bones ache where her fleshy parts were connected to her steel prosthetics.
She swiveled her gaze back toward the man seated across from her. “Are we almost there?”
He nodded without looking up. “Almost, Cinder.”
Enfolding her fingers around the scar tissue on her wrist, she waited, hoping he would say something else to ease her nerves, but he didn’t seem the type to notice anyone’s anxiety above his own. She imagined calling him Dad, but the word was laughably unfamiliar, even inside her head. She couldn’t even compare him with her real father, as her memory had been reduced to a blank slate during the intrusive surgeries, and all she had left of her parents were their sterile identity profiles, with plain photos that held no recognition and a tag at the top labeling them as DECEASED. They’d been killed in the hover crash that had also claimed her leg and hand.