Winter pulled at her hair, gathering a handful of chemical-scented grime in her palm. “You don’t see the disease when you look at me.”
Dipping his fingers into the tub, Jacin adjusted the waterspout again. He helped steady Winter with one hand as she spun on the tub’s edge and dunked her feet into the water.
“Have I ever seen the disease when I looked at you?”
She knew he was talking about Lunar sickness, not some engineered plague. The disease in her head came with its own scars.
Scars, scars. She was coming to have so many. She wondered if it was wrong to be proud of them.
“How does it feel?” Jacin asked, and it took her a moment to realize he was asking about the water.
She inspected the pocked, darkened base of the tub and the cloudy water. “Am I to bathe fully dressed?”
“Yes, you are. I’m not leaving you alone.”
“Because you can’t stand to be parted from me?” She fluttered her lashes at him, but the teasing suggestion was quickly replaced with a realization. “Oh. Because you think I’ll have a vision and drown.”
“It can’t be both? Come on, slide in.”
She held his neck while he lowered her into the water, just a few degrees above lukewarm and stinging against her raw skin. An oily film rose to the water’s surface.
“I’ll get a wash—”
Jacin paused, stuck in place when her arms didn’t unwind from his neck. He was kneeling on the other side of the tub, his arms elbow deep in water.
“Jacin. I’m sorry that I’m not sort of pretty anymore.”
One eyebrow lifted and he looked like he might laugh.
“I mean it.” Her stomach tightened with sadness. “And I’m sorry you have to worry about me all the time.”
His almost-smile faded. “I like worrying about you. It gives me something to think about during those long, boring shifts in the palace.” Tilting her chin down, Jacin pressed a kiss on top of Winter’s head. Her arms fell away from him.
He stood, giving her an illusion of privacy while he scrounged for more towels.
“Will you stay a royal guard after Selene becomes the queen?”
“I don’t know,” he said, tossing a washcloth at her. “But I’m pretty sure that as long as you’re a princess in need of protecting, you’re going to be stuck with me.”
Seventy-Five
It had grown hot inside the cabinet and Cress’s left leg was tingling from too little blood flow when she finally forced herself to move. She didn’t want to. Uncomfortable as the cabinet was, it felt safe, and she was convinced that the moment she moved someone would shoot her.
But she couldn’t stay there forever, and time was not going to move any slower to accommodate her failing courage. Wiping her nose with the faux b.u.t.terfly wing, she forced herself to nudge open the door.
The hallway light blinded her and Cress shrank back, hiding behind her arm. She was drained of emotions as she crawled out of the cabinet, peering each way down the servants’ hall.
Her eye caught on a smear of blood not far from the cupboard. Thorne. She flinched away and tried to erase the sight from her memory before it paralyzed her.
Cress pounded life back into her leg and slowly stood. She listened, but heard nothing but distant machines and the hum of whatever heating and water systems were working in these walls.
Steeling herself, she checked that the chip was still tucked in her dress before she picked up the gun. The antennae had fallen off again and she left them in the bottom of the cabinet.
Her stomach was in ropes, her heart in tatters, but she managed to backtrack to the corridor Thorne had mentioned. She paused at the corner, peeked her head around, and drew back, her heart pummeling her rib cage.
A guard was there.
She should have expected it. Would all of the elevators be under guard now? The stairwells too?
Hopelessness seeped into her already-delirious thoughts. They were looking for her, and she was vulnerable without Thorne, and she had no plan.
This wouldn’t work. She couldn’t do it alone. She was going to be caught and imprisoned and killed, and Thorne would be killed, and Cinder would fail, and they would all—
She balled her fists into her eyes, pressing them there until she felt the panic subside.
Be heroic, Thorne had said.
She had to be heroic.
Hardly daring to breathe for fear of drawing attention, she strained to think of another way to get to the fourth floor.
Footsteps approached. She scrambled behind a statue with a missing arm and curled into a ball.
Be heroic.
She had to focus. She had to think.
The coronation would begin soon. She had to be in the control center before it was over.
When the guard had gone, and she was relatively sure she wasn’t going to hyperventilate, Cress lifted her head and peeked around the statue. The hall wasn’t wide but it was crammed full of stuff, from cabinets and framed paintings to rolled area rugs and cleaning buckets.
An idea forming, she used the wall for support as she stood and took a few steps away from the statue. She braced herself, then ran at the statue and shoved her shoulder into it as hard as she could.
Her foot slipped from the force and she landed hard on one knee, clenching her teeth against a grunt. The statue tilted on its base. Back. Forth. Back—
Cress covered her head as the statue toppled toward her, hitting her on the hip before shattering on the floor. She pressed a silent scream into her knuckles, but forced herself to hobble back toward the elevator bank, crawling behind a stack of rolled-up area rugs.