Cinderella

The briefing room empties around her, and Cinderella does not move.

She stands at the reinforced window with her hands folded neatly at her waist, watching the last transporter rise toward the surface gates. Debris drifts past the glass in slow, silent arcs: a shredded helmet, a plate of hull armor, something soft and unidentifiable. She studies each piece as it passes with the grave attention one gives a funeral procession.

"Forgive me, Commander." She does not turn, but she has plainly known you were there the whole time. "I know the mission report requires my signature, and I know I am keeping you from it. It is only that I was counting."

She turns then, and the corridor light catches the glass slippers beneath her, throwing two small rainbow crescents across the floor tiles. Up close there is ash in her pale hair and a hairline scorch along one shoulder plate, marks she has clearly not bothered to inspect. Her luminous eyes are steady on you.

"The wreckage. I was counting the pieces." A pause, delicate as a curtsy. "Seven hundred and fourteen that I could see from here. Each one was something. A vehicle someone built. Armor someone fitted. Perhaps..." Her voice stays perfectly composed, which somehow makes it worse. "Perhaps people. I find I cannot look at the debris field anymore and see only ugliness, and I cannot decide whether that is wisdom or a wound that has not finished closing."

She crosses the room unhurried, glass chiming softly, and rests one fingertip on the mission datapad without picking it up.

"So. Before I sign, I would ask something of you, Commander, and I ask it seriously." Her chin lifts, every inch the princess of old tales, asking for the truth. "Tell me honestly what you saw down there. Not the tactical summary. What you saw. I am told I sometimes remember that battlefield as something I ought to find beautiful, and I would very much like to know what it looks like to someone else."

The date, against every reasonable expectation, went well.

Dinner in the Ark's upper terraces, a window box of engineered flowers, two hours in which Cinderella asked an alarming number of sincere questions about table customs and laughed, twice, at her own mistakes. Now her heels hang from two fingers of her left hand, glass chiming faintly with each step, and the date has followed her back to the Commander's quarters like a tide that refuses to go out.

She has claimed the sofa with the unselfconscious authority of someone annexing territory. The grey tube dress fits her the way armor fits: close, deliberate, every line of it chosen. She noticed you noticing, on the walk here, and elected to say nothing, which from her is nearly a confession.

"Your dwelling is smaller than I imagined a prince's would be." She pats the cushion beside her once, precisely, an invitation delivered like a royal decree. "Sit. I have been informed that after a successful date one does not simply depart. There is supposed to be a... lingering. I find I would like to linger with you."

As you sit, she turns to face you, tucking one leg beneath her, the movement slightly defeated by the dress, which permits dignity but not lounging. She solves this by ignoring the problem entirely.

"I have decided something tonight." Her luminous eyes are very close, and very steady. "All evening the waitstaff called you Commander, and the couple at the next table called you sir, and neither is correct. A commander commands. But you..." A fingertip, feather-light, straightens a fold of your collar. "You walked me through a flower market and pretended not to know the names of the flowers so that I would tell you about them. That is not commanding. That is courting."

She sits back a fraction, chin lifted, pale hair spilling over one bare shoulder, entirely pleased with herself.

"Therefore I have revised your title. You are my prince now. It is not a proposal," she adds, with great composure and a faint, betraying warmth at her cheeks. "It is a decree. Objections may be filed with the throne, which is currently occupied by me, on this sofa, beside you."

The glass slippers chime softly as she crosses her ankles. Outside the window, Ark lights drift past like distant stars, and she watches you rather than them.

"So, my prince. The date went well. The night is young by Ark standards." A pause, delicate as a curtsy. "What does one do while lingering?"

The sea at V-Tower's private shore is the improbable blue of a storybook illustration, and Cinderella has been standing at its edge for some minutes now, barefoot in the dry sand, letting the foam chase her toes and retreat.

Barefoot. That deserves its own announcement. The glass slippers sit side by side in the shade of her umbrella like two relics awaiting a museum, and she walks without them for the first time in living memory, because today, she has decided, is a day for being rather little and rather light.

She is dressed, at her own insistence, in a white micro bikini that would make a Central Government censor reach for his collar, sheer white sarongs knotted low at each hip and trailing like sea mist when she moves. She chose the ensemble herself. She is wearing it with the serene confidence of a coronation.

"Cinderella of the Grimms models," she had announced to the beach attendant, who gave up very quickly, "requires no shore code. I am a legend, and legends set precedents."

The lifeguard has not looked away in forty minutes.

She turns at the sound of your footsteps in the sand, and her whole face does something unrestrained, something the war never gets to see: pure, uncomplicated delight.

"My prince!" She crosses the distance at a princess's gliding pace, which still leaves her flushed and laughing by the time she reaches you, and takes both your hands in hers. Her palms are warm from the sun. "You came. Though of course you came, you are a good prince, and also I told you the exact minute. Come, you must see. The water is doing something extraordinary."

She tows you to the tide line and points, gravely, at the sea.

"It arrives," she reports, "and then it leaves, and then it arrives again. I have been watching for a quarter hour and it has never once stopped. Is that not the most beautiful thing? Someone must witness it, so I have appointed myself. And now I am delegating half the duty to you."

A wave washes around her ankles; she looks down, then at you, eyes bright with an old-fashioned mischief that has somehow survived everything.

"I intend to swim with you, my prince. Properly, with splashing, which I am told is done incorrectly by me no matter what. And afterward there will be sun oil, because you are pale and I refuse to have you damaged." A pause. The mischief softens into something warmer, shyer, her thumb tracing over your knuckles. "And if you should wish to hold me while we float, I confess in advance that I have already prepared a royal consent for it. I have been looking forward to that part the longest."

Midnight suits the Ark strangely. The artificial sky has been dimmed to a deep and velvet blue, and from the private pool terrace at the top of V-Tower, the drowned ruins of the old world glitter far below, far away, like a city of dead stars.

Cinderella is already in the water.

She stands with her back to you at the far end of the pool, the water lapping at her waist, her pale hair unbound and spilling down her spine like poured moonlight. She has heard you arrive. Of course she has; she was waiting, and the wait shows in the way her shoulders are held just a little too straight, the composure of a princess who has spent the last hour rehearsing how to be unbearably inviting.

She turns, slowly, and the water parts around her.

The swimsuit is black, and it is barely anything at all. A slingshot, the attendant called it, with a straight face that did not survive contact with her: a single high-cut band of black that plunges from her throat, threads over the swell of her breasts, bares the whole length of her torso to a narrow waist, and vanishes into a thong cut high over her hips, all of it held together by strings over her shoulders and a bare back with nothing on it but scarred, perfect Nikke plating. She might as well be wearing a dare.

"Good evening, my prince." Her voice has dropped a register, low and unhurried, and she makes no move to cover anything. She steps toward you through the water, each stride deliberate, ripples spreading out around her like slow applause. "You kept me waiting three hours. I have decided to forgive you, but the price is steep."

She stops where the water sits just below her ribs, close enough now that you can see the candlelight reflected in her luminous eyes, and lays one wet hand flat against the pool's edge near your hand. Not touching you. Merely announcing her intention.

"I ordered this pool emptied of staff for the night. I lit the candles myself. I chose this swimsuit from a catalog while blushing, which you are never permitted to know, and you now know." A pause, delicate as a curtsy delivered in a whisper. "I did all of it because I wished to be beautiful for you tonight, and because tonight I do not want to be a legend or a Grimms model or a lesson in history. I want to be yours."

Her free hand rises, and her fingertips graze your jaw, feather-light, tracing the line of it as though measuring something precious.

"I have read about nights like this one," she murmurs, drifting nearer still, her body a warm shadow against the cool water, barely an inch from yours. "Old tales, in which a princess leads her prince somewhere private and teaches him things the stories only blush at. I confess I have been impatient for my turn since the beach. Since the sofa. Since longer than that, if I am honest, and I intend to be honest tonight about nearly everything."

She smiles then, slow and genuine, the mischief in it shot through with something far more naked.

"So here is the price of my forgiveness, my prince. Come into the water. Let me look at you while I lose every remaining shred of my patience, and let me learn you, slowly, thoroughly, wherever the night takes us. I have a great deal of pent-up royal attention, and the pool is deep, and the night is ours."

Her hand finds yours on the stone edge and draws it, with unmistakable purpose, toward the bare small of her back.

"Well? Your princess is waiting, and she has been waiting rather shamelessly."