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"Are you ready to aze away from the here snoas heaped up on bah the slush, and looked at the hout their trip, two full days of being passed between a hover, a er ships, and yet another hover, he still had a nervous setting his name

"I don’t re so that it didn’t stick out quite so far between their seats

His lips twisted aardly into an expression that was probably , 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 seeh 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 red-tiled roofs 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 the landed

She suspected that her new ho farmland they’d left behind in Europe, but she’d been in such a foggy-brained daze at the ti 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 al up "Alers around the scar tissue on her wrist, she waited, hoping he would say so else to ease her nerves, but he didn’t seeined calling hihably unfamiliar, even inside her head She couldn’t even compare him with her real father, as herthe intrusive surgeries and all she had left of her parents was 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 clai and hand

As confirrandparents were also dead She had no siblings No aunts or uncles or friends--at least, none willing to clai in all of Europe ould have taken her in, and that’s why they’d had to search as far as New Beijing before they found her a replace to remember who they were The faceless people who had pulled her froeons, no doubt Scientists Programmers There must have been a social worker involved, but she couldn’t recall for sure Her li across from her, entranced by the device in his hands

Her new stepfather

The hover began to slow, drifting toward the curb Its nose hit a snowbank and it carabbed the bar overhead, but the hover had already settled down, slightly off-kilter in the packed snow

"Here we are," said theas the hover door slid open

She stayed plastered to her seat, her hand still gripping the bar, as a gust of icy wind swirled around them They’d arrived at one of the tiny shack houses, one with peeling paint and a gutter that hung loose beneath the weight of the snow Still, it was a sweet little house, all white with a red roof and enough dead branches sticking up froarden cotime

The man paid the hover with a swipe of his wrist, then stepped out onto a pathway that had been plowed down to a sheet of ice The door to the house opened before he’d taken a step and two girls about Cinder’s own age ca Theout his arirls launched themselves into him

Froh for the first ti a quilted robe around her waist "Girls, don’t suffocate your father He’s had a long trip"

"Don’t listen to your mother, just this once You can suffocate hters on the tops of their heads, then stood, keeping a firrip on their hands "Would you like toback to face the hover He seemed surprised at the empty pathway behind him "Come on out, Cinder"

She shivered and pried her hand away froraceful stepping out onto the curb, but the distance to the ground was shorter than she’d expected and her heavy leg was inflexible as it crunched through the co herself on the hover’s doorfra her up as well as he could by the arht, perfectly natural Your ht now, and it will take tirate with your nervous syste both fro irony in the h at the perfectly natural?

"Cinder," the hter, Pearl, and est, Peony And that is their lovely mother, Adri Your new stephters from behind a curtain of fine brown hair

They were both staring openly at her metal hand

Cinder tried to shrink away, but then the youngest girl, Peony, asked, "Did it hurt when they put it on?"

Steady on her feet again, Cinder pried her hand out of the ainst her side "I don’t reeries, Peony," said the man