Cress crouched before the security panel and retrieved Kai’s portscreen. She unwound the universal connector cable.
It took her twenty-eight seconds to break into the room, which was an eternity, but she was distracted, jumping at every distant noise. Sweat was snaking down her spine by the time she heard the door unlatch.
Her breath was shaky but relieved. No one was inside. The door shut behind her.
Cress’s adrenaline was pumping like jet fuel through her veins as she scanned the room. She was surrounded by invisi-screens and holographs and programming, and the familiarity of it all made the knot in her stomach loosen. Instinct and habit. She formed a checklist in her mind.
The room was big, but crowded with desks and chairs and equipment, panels that switched from video footage of the outer sectors to the underground shuttle map to surveillance feeds of different sections of the palace. A separate recording suite was accessed through a soundproof door. Lights and recording equipment surrounded a replica of the queen’s throne. A sheer veil was draped over a mannequin head and the sight gave Cress a chill down her spine. It felt like it was watching her.
She turned away from the mannequin and settled herself into one of the controller’s chairs. She removed the gun from the jacket pocket and set it and the portscreen on the desk, both within easy reach. She felt the press of time as keenly as Kai had. She’d already wasted too much of it. Kissing Thorne in the atrium. Hiding in that cabinet. Dodging in and out of corridors like a lost rabbit.
But she was here. She’d made it. She’d been heroic—almost.
Her objectives spooled through her thoughts.
Placing her fingertips across the nearest invisi-screen, she began to count them off, one by one.
First, she reconfigured the security codes for the queen’s broadcasting transmitter. She put the palace’s armory under lockdown. She scheduled a retraction for the tunnel barricades surrounding Artemisia.
Breaking through the codes, navigating the protocols—it felt like a ch.o.r.eographed dance, and though her muscles were weary, they still remembered the steps.
Finally, she pulled the chip from her bodice. She envisioned the transmitter on top of the palace, sending the crown’s official feed to receivers throughout the dome. A closed feed, protected by a complex labyrinth of internal firewalls and security codes.
Five minutes could have pa.s.sed. Eight. Nine, at the most.
Check. Check. Check—
She heard footsteps in the hallway as she was inserting the chip with Cinder’s video into the port. She felt the satisfying click.
Download, data transfer, translate the encryption.
Her fingers danced over the screens, daring the coding to keep up.
Boots outside, pounding faster now.
Her hair clung to the back of her neck.
Check. Check.
Done.
Cress cleared the screens, disguising her motives with a few hasty commands.
The door crashed open. Guards filed in.
Confused silence.
Squeezed into the alcove between the bank of screens and the transmitter’s mainframe, Cress held her breath.
“Spread out—and get tech up here to find out what she did!”
“She left a portscreen,” said someone else, and she heard a subtle clacking on the desk as they picked it up. Trembling, Cress looked down at the gun cradled in her hands. Her stomach was knotted again. She couldn’t help feeling like she’d grabbed the wrong thing. They would know the portscreen was Kai’s easy enough. They would know he’d helped her. “Maybe she was planning on coming back.”
“You, stay here and wait for tech. And I want a guard posted at every door in this wing until she’s found. Go!”
The door slammed shut and Cress released a shaky breath, wilting from the surge of adrenaline.
She was trapped. Thorne was captured.
But they had been heroic.
Seventy-Seven
Jacin had gone back outside by the time Winter finished cleaning the slippery gel-like substance out of her hair. She changed into the dry clothes someone had brought for her.
She could not stop smiling. Jacin was back and he was alive.
And yet, at the same time, her heart ached. People were going to die today.
She checked her arms. The rash was already receding. At least, some of the bruises looked not quite as dark, and the blue had disappeared from beneath her fingernails.
When she left the security of the washroom, she found the clinic crammed full of people—the one doctor and a dozen civilians checking on the patients who had been too ill to line up for the antidote outside. Seven deaths, she’d been told. In the short time since Levana had infected Winter, seven people in this sector had died from letumosis.
It would have been many more if Jacin and Cinder hadn’t arrived, but Winter was hardly comforted. Seven deaths. Seven people who could have been in the suspension tank if they hadn’t given it to her.
Winter pa.s.sed the patients slowly, taking the time to smile and offer a comforting squeeze of a shoulder as she made her way to the exit. She emerged on the little wooden step.
A whooping cheer swelled up in the dome, hundreds of voices buffeting her.
Winter froze, then backed into the building’s overhang again. The crowd continued to cheer, shaking their makeshift weapons over their heads. The wolf soldiers started to howl. Winter wondered if she, too, should cheer. Or howl. Or if they expected her to speak—though her throat still felt chapped and her brain was still muddled.
Scarlet appeared beside her, waving her arms in an attempt to quiet the crowd. She looked both pleased and annoyed as she faced Winter. The evidence of the plague still lingered on Scarlet’s pale skin—freckles mixed with bruises and irritated flesh. Though there were still a few dark blisters, the disease had not escalated as quickly on Scarlet as it had on Winter and those seven poor residents. They all knew she’d gotten lucky.