*
Michelle had been caring for the princess for almost two years, and the regular ministrations had become second nature. Just another chore to check off her daily list. Feed the animals. Gather the eggs. Milk the cow. Check the princess’s diagnostics and adjust the tank’s fluid levels as needed.
The child was growing. She would have been five years old now—was five years old, Michelle reminded herself. Even after all these months it was hard not to think of the girl as a corpse she kept locked up beneath her hangar.
She wasn’t a corpse, but she wasn’t exactly alive, either. The machines did everything for her. Breathed. Pumped blood. Sent electrical signals to her brain. Logan had told her it was important to keep her brain stimulated so that when she awoke she wouldn’t still have the mind of a three-year-old. Supposedly she was being fed knowledge and even life experiences as she lay there, unmoving. Michelle didn’t understand how it worked. She couldn’t imagine how this child could sleep for her entire life and then be expected to become a queen upon her return to society.
But that would be Logan’s job, whenever he returned. There were years still before anyone would know who this child was going to become.
Michelle finished recording Selene’s vital statistics and flipped off the generator-powered lights. The bomb shelter, which had been converted into a makeshift hospital room and scientific laboratory, remained lit by the pale blue light from the suspension tank. Michelle clipped her portscreen to her belt and climbed the ladder to the hangar above. She grabbed one of the storage crates that she shuffled between the hangar and the barn—a useful excuse in case anyone ever saw her coming and going. The bomb shelter and its occupant were a secret, a dangerous one, and she could never allow herself to lose caution.
This was the direction of her thoughts when she stepped onto the gravel drive and saw the taxi hover waiting there. She wasn’t expecting visitors. She never had visitors to expect.
She squared her shoulders and settled the crate on one hip. The pebbles crunched beneath her feet. She glanced into the hover’s windows as she passed, but it was empty, and no one was waiting on the porch, either.
Setting down the crate, Michelle grabbed the only weapon she passed—a pair of rusted gardening shears—and shoved open her front door.
She froze.
Scarlet was sitting on the bottom step of the foyer’s staircase, a backpack tucked under her legs. She was bundled up in the same wool coat that Michelle remembered from the Louvre photos, but now it was fraying at the shoulder seams and looked two sizes too small for a growing girl.
“Scarlet?” she breathed, setting the shears on the entry table. “What are you doing here?”
Scarlet’s cheeks reddened, making her freckles even more pronounced. She looked like she was on the verge of crying, but the tears didn’t come. “I came to live with you.”
*
“This is just another one of her cries for attention!” Luc spat. His nose and cheeks were tinged red, his words slurred. He was outside and on the screen Michelle could see the puffs of his breaths in the night air. “Just put her back on the train and let her figure it out.”
“She is seven years old,” Michelle said, aware of how thin the walls around her were. No doubt Scarlet could hear her father’s raised voice, even from downstairs. “It’s a wonder she made it here safely at all, being all by herself like that.”
“And what do you expect me to do? Fly down there to pick her up? I have work in the morning. I just got this new job and—”
“She is your daughter,” Michelle said. “I expect you to be a father, to show that you care about her.”
Luc snorted. “You’re lecturing me on how to be a good parent? That’s rich, Maman.”
The comment struck her straight between the ribs. Michelle stiffened. The knot of tension in her stomach wound so tight it threatened to cripple her.
It was her biggest regret, not being there for her son when he was little. She’d been a single mother trying to balance a newborn son with a military career—a career that had been full of potential. She had long ago realized how badly she’d failed in balancing anything. If she could do it all over again …
But she couldn’t. And while Luc’s flaws were partially her doing, she wasn’t about to see the same neglect happen to her darling Scarlet.
She looked away from the portscreen. “She can stay the night, of course. I’m not sending her back on a train by herself.”
Luc grunted. “Fine. I’ll figure out what to do with her tomorrow.”
Michelle shut her eyes and squeezed them tight. She pictured the secret door to the bomb shelter. The half-alive girl in that glowing blue tank. She pictured a faceless woman—Dr. Eliot—being tortured for information on what had happened to Princess Selene.