Free Read: Glitches by Marissa Meyer

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Remember when I had told you guys about that great scifi Cinderella story I had read, in which Cinderella (or Cinder) is a cyborg? Well if this sounded like the kind of book you would enjoy, or if you have already read it, then you should head over to Tor.com where Marissa Meyer, the author of Cinder, has posted a prequel to the story.

In Meyer's short story, Glitches, Cinder is brought to her new home by the man that found her, after having undergone extensive surgery. There she is introduced to her new stepmother and stepsisters, who are less then pleased at this new addition to the family. Except for Peony, who is delighted by having a new playmate with whom she could pretend to dress up for the ball, and dance with the handsome prince Kai.

“Are you ready to meet your new family?” 

She tore her gaze away from the window, where snow was heaped up on bamboo fences and a squat android was clearing a path through the slush, and looked at the man seated opposite her. Though he’d been kind to her throughout their trip, two full days of being passed between a hover, a maglev train, two passenger ships, and yet another hover, he still had a nervous smile that made her fidget. 

Plus, she kept forgetting his name. 

“I don’t remember the old family,” she said, adjusting her heavy left leg so that it didn’t stick out quite so far between their seats. 

His lips twisted awkwardly into an expression that was probably meant to be reassuring, 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 seemed tired and his clothes didn’t fit him right. Though 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 them across a grid of roads, not caring where anything landed. 

She suspected that her new home wasn’t anything like the rolling farmland they’d left behind in Europe, but she’d been in such a foggy-brained daze at the time that she couldn’t remember much of anything 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.

Read the rest here