Glitches recap

A prequel short story, told from Cinder's point of view. At eleven, freshly rebuilt as a cyborg with no memory of anything before the surgery, she is brought to New Beijing by Linh Garan and installed in his household. Garan is kind and interested in her; his wife Adri is neither, his elder daughter Pearl follows her mother's lead, and only the younger girl, Peony, treats her as a sister. Cinder struggles with a body she does not recognise, a retinal display she cannot read, and a legal status that makes her closer to property than to a daughter. Garan builds her an android companion, Iko, whose personality chip is faulty in ways that make her far better company than her model should be. Then Garan catches letumosis and dies, and the household that tolerated Cinder because he wanted her there stops tolerating her at all.

A note before starting: Glitches is a short prequel to the Lunar Chronicles, set five years before the novel Cinder, and it is also collected in Stars Above. It gives away nothing about the series' later reveals, but it means considerably more once you know who this girl turns out to be, so it is usually read after Cinder rather than before it. The setting is the Eastern Commonwealth, a hundred-odd years after a world war, in a New Beijing where cyborgs have no legal standing and are the property of their guardians, and where an incurable plague called letumosis is spreading through the poorer parts of the city.

Garan contracts letumosis, the plague that has no cure, and dies. With him goes the only person in the house who wanted Cinder there. Adri, left a widow with two daughters, a failing income and a cyborg stepdaughter she never agreed to, settles into treating Cinder as an unpaid mechanic and legal property rather than family, and blames her for Garan's death. Peony remains fond of her, Pearl follows her mother, and Iko - the android with the faulty personality chip - is the one companion Cinder has left. The story ends with the household arrangement that the novel Cinder opens on already in place: an unwanted girl, an unpaid job, no memories, and one friend who is not human.