Scarlet

The netscreens in the tavern are replaying the footage from the Eastern Commonwealth’s ball, where a cyborg girl “infiltrated the party” and “tried to assassinate the visiting queen” (12) from Luna, Queen Levana. Scarlet brings the food to the street fighter, who is covered in bruises and surprisingly soft-spoken and shy. When she notices that he hasn’t touched his tomatoes, she tells him that “they’re the best part, and they were grown in [her] own garden” (14). The people at the bar start cheering as the netscreens show the cyborg girl falling down the stairs of the palace. Scarlet loses her temper, climbs up on the bar, and “pluck[s] out the netlink cable” (17). She scolds the crowd for mocking a teenage girl who is going to be executed, but they shout back that the cyborg is a Lunar and deserves to be killed. When a man mocks Scarlet and her grandmother and says that “crazy runs in [their] family” (18), the street fighter attacks the man and orders him to apologize. Before the tavern’s owner yells at him to get out, Scarlet notices a tattoo on his arm that reads “LSOP962” (19) As he leaves, Scarlet thinks that he “look[s] no more menacing [...] than a scolded dog” (21).

Scarlet leaves the tavern, knowing that people will spread the story of how she was “defending the cyborg” (24). She remembers how the man in the tavern accused her grandmother of being crazy, and as Scarlet thinks about her grandmother’s disappearance, she sees the street fighter watching her in the alley near her ship. Scarlet’s nerves “[can’t] decide if she should be afraid of him” (25). He admits that he saw Scarlet’s gun when she climbed up onto the bar, and Scarlet remembers the day her grandmother gave her the pistol and taught her how to shoot it.

The fighter asks if he can buy more tomatoes from Scarlet, and she gives him tomatoes and carrots. He then asks if “[Scarlet] could use a farmhand” because although street fighting earns him decent money, “it doesn’t make for much of a career” (27). Scarlet declines, but she asks for his name, and he tells her he is called Wolf. Scarlet is momentarily smitten with “this soft-spoken street fighter” (28) but snaps back to the more pressing matter of finding her grandmother. Wolf tells her that if she changes her mind about needing a farmhand, “[he] can be found at the abandoned Morel house most nights” (29).

In a cell in New Beijing Prison, Carswell Thorne is minding his own business on the “228th day of his captivity” (31) when a cyborg girl suddenly drops into his cell from the ceiling. The girl is trying to escape from the prison, and as Thorne tries to flirt with her, she shoots down his advances and ignores him, focusing on drilling a hole in the wall behind Thorne’s urinal. Thorne is fascinated by the cyborg girl and learns her name is Cinder. He offers to help her escape and tells her he has a spaceship “just outside the city limits” (37). Cinder begs him to stop talking so she can concentrate on getting them out of the cell, and suddenly, Thorne sees “her image [waver], like heat rising off maglev tracks” (37-38). He is suddenly overwhelmed by a desire to please Cinder and give her whatever she wants, and he falls silent under these “thoughts of compliance” (38).

Scarlet returns to her grandmother’s farm. She is angry with herself for being distracted by “a handsome face and a veneer of danger” (39) when she still has to find her grandmother. Her grandmother was “a military spaceship pilot for twenty-eight years” (40), but the townspeople have reduced her reputation to that of a “crazy” woman. As Scarlet feeds the chickens, she notices a light on “in her grandmother’s bedroom” (41). Scarlet races upstairs to find her father, disoriented and hysterical, digging through her grandmother’s possessions. He says that “she’s hiding something” (45), and he is desperate to find it. Scarlet sees that the skin of his arm is “covered in burn marks” (43).

He tells Scarlet that her grandmother’s captors interrogated her, but she wouldn’t give up the information they wanted, and they forced Scarlet’s dad to burn himself with a hot poker. Her father remembers seeing a tattoo on his tormentor’s arm, made up of “letters and numbers” (47). Scarlet remembers Wolf’s tattoo, and she is disgusted to think that she “almost trusted” (48) the street fighter who kidnapped her grandmother and tortured her father. She leaves the house and tells her father to call the police if she isn’t back in three hours.