Happily Ever After (The Lunar Chronicles story continuation)

Chapter 5: The master plan

Cress had returned to her favourite place in the world, the Rampion. After they had finished their work and distributed the Letemosis cure to anyone who needed it, Thorne had taken her around to see the world, just like he had promised her. It was around the same time that Wolf and Scarlet decided to move to the farm in France, which had left her alone with Thorne, being his only crew member, but she knew he preferred it that way. Thorne could easily have arranged for new members to be brought in, but he hadn't.
Cress loved it that way. They'd seen wonderful places, but never settled anywhere. Cress adored being able to travel anywhere she wanted to go, she loved the freedom it gave. It made her feel on top of the world and free like a bird. The Rampion had become her favourite place in the world, it was the opposite of everything she had hated on her satellite. Here, she just needed to name a place and Thorne would take her there. They'd visited every country in the world, but never settled anywhere, which had turned the Rampion into their home. This was before they had been recruited by the ICA, which had given them a new series of adventures.
Now they had a new mission, to figure out what Levana's last sympathisers were up to and stop it. Cress sat at her portscreen and observed a video feed of their camp on Luna. She or Thorne kept close watch day after day, only one of them slept at a time. Commander Kobe had given Cress access to it, despite the fact that she could just as easily have hacked her way into it. Thorne was looking at maps, trying to create a master plan. Meanwhile, Cress observed the video feed from the Lunar camp. It wasn't her favourite job. There hadn't been executions like the last in which a woman had been under the influence of a thaumaturge and been forced to stab herself, watching them clean up the body and blood had been just as painful and sickening to watch for Cress. Her stomach dropped just at the thought.
There was still no sound to the video feed, the hardware of the recording system had been partly broken and it was too dangerous to go there and fix it. They couldn't exactly send a repairman, not that it would have turned out like that. Cress had imagined hiring a ninja with some wrenches, who could infiltrate the area and repair the camera, but she knew the idea was silly.
The video of the feed worked perfectly, and they would rather have a video without audio than risking having nothing at all. Still, they could only see the common area, that was used for executions and gatherings. There had been so many people that Cress hadn't been able to count them, and there was no telling whether that had been all of them.
The mission was safe as the camera wasn't discovered. These kind of tasks made Cress wonder if they were ever being watched by others.
Cress looked at the screen. Not a fly moved. There was absolutely nothing happening, no one went in, no one came out, they hadn't for hours and probably wouldn't have for hours. She yawned. Bored, she looked over to what Thorne was doing.
Thorne ran a hand through his now messy blonde hair and looked at the map with tired eyes. He was using a highlighter, which was attached to his cyborg finger. After Thorne had lost two fingers, he had gotten to choose what kind of replacement he wanted. In a heartbeat he had gone for changeable cyborg parts. He had been inspired by Cinder's mechanical parts and hadn't been able to choose between the hundred different tools he wanted at hand, so he had gone for two easy-to-change fingers, so that he could choose the tools he wished to use from day to day. Thorne probably wouldn't even have minded had he lost all his fingers.
"Did you see something?" Thorne asked.
Having completely wandered off in her own thoughts, this startled Cress. She shook her head. "Do you have a plan yet?"
He took in a deep breath. "No, but I will have one soon. We can't hear anything on that stupid video feed and we can only see what happens outdoors, not inside, and all the good stuff happens inside. So we will have to infiltrate their base in some way, but it seems so impossible." Thorne put his arms crossed on the table and positioned his forehead on top of them. "If I could just think of something."
Cress looked back at the portscreen, which still showed the same video, it it hadn't been for the occasional wind gust, blowing dust around, Cress would've thought someone had simply placed a picture in front of the camera.
"What if we pretend we're fugitives, that we were part of Levana's army, but that we were captured and have been imprisoned unfairly ever since by the prior queen of Luna?"
Thorne frowned. "Cinder would never do that to anyone."
"We know that, but they might not."
Thorne cocked his head as he thought it over. "It could actually work, we would need some pretty good disguises, but it could work. I will still need to figure out how we contact the thaumaturges' camp. Cress, would you be able to hack into the Lunar database to find two names of deceased soldiers, with a high rank or something, but not too famous, whom we could impersonate?"
"How could you ever doubt me?" She said. She would have mentioned something about how easy it would be for them to access the files via the ICA, who probably had all of them stored on world's biggest memory stick or they could simply ask the government officials Cinder or Winter for the password, but that didn't seem nearly as fun as hacking her way into the system. It made her feel like a spy, all sneaky and clever, and she wasn't going to let simplicity crush her fantasies.