Stars Above recap

Nine short stories set around the Lunar Chronicles. Michelle Benoit takes in a burned Lunar toddler and hides her on her farm; an eleven-year-old Cinder arrives in New Beijing as a new cyborg and gets an android friend; a twelve-year-old Ze'ev Kesley is taken for Levana's army and made into a wolf soldier; a thirteen-year-old Carswell Thorne runs a school scheme to impress a girl; a small Lunar shell called Crescent Moon is installed alone in an orbiting satellite; the princess Winter decides as a girl never to use her Lunar gift and scars her own face rather than be valued for it; a self-aware android in New Beijing loves a mechanic and gives up everything to become human, in a retelling of The Little Mermaid; and Prince Kai takes a broken android to a market mechanic, retelling the series' first meeting from his side. The collection closes two years after the end of the series with Scarlet and Wolf's wedding on the French farm, which reunites the entire cast.

A note before starting: Stars Above is a collection of nine short stories tied to the Lunar Chronicles, and it is not a book to read early. Most of the stories are prequels that only make sense once you know who the characters turn out to be, several of them turn on reveals the novels build to, and the final story is an epilogue set roughly two years after the end of Winter. Read it after the whole series. What the stories assume you already know: Luna is a settled colony on the moon whose people can control what others see and feel; its queen Levana took the throne after her niece, Princess Selene, was believed to have died as a small child; Selene in fact survived, was hidden on Earth and rebuilt as a cyborg, and grew up as Linh Cinder; and Cinder, with Scarlet, Wolf, Cress, Thorne, Iko, Winter and Jacin, brought Levana's reign to an end. The recaps that follow track the stories in the order the collection presents them.

The Keeper. A Lunar doctor arrives at a farm in southern France in the middle of the night, carrying a badly burned three-year-old in a life-support tank, and asks Michelle Benoit to hide her. The child is Princess Selene, and hiding her means giving up any ordinary future: no visitors, no records, no explanations, and a granddaughter who grows up on a farm with a locked barn. Michelle agrees, and the story is the account of that decision and the years it commits her to. Glitches. Linh Garan brings home an eleven-year-old girl newly rebuilt as a cyborg, to a wife who did not agree to it and a household that treats her as an intrusion. Cinder has no memories before the operating table and no idea how to use the hand and leg she has been given. Garan builds her an android companion with a chip that does not behave to specification, and Iko becomes the one thing in the house that likes her. Then Garan contracts letumosis, and the household's tolerance for Cinder dies with him.

The Queen's Army. Ze'ev Kesley is twelve when Levana's recruiters come to his outer sector and take him. The story follows him through the training that turns Lunar children into special operatives - the pack hierarchy, the deliberate brutality, and the surgery that fuses a boy with wolf DNA - and through the choices he makes to survive it, including the ones that cost other people. He goes in as somebody's son and comes out as Wolf. Carswell's Guide to Being Lucky. Thorne at thirteen, at school in America, working an elaborate scheme to impress a girl he likes. It goes wrong in the particular way his schemes go wrong, and shows both the charm he has always relied on and the early conviction that rules are for people with less imagination.

After Sunshine Passes By. A small Lunar shell called Crescent Moon is taken from the other shell children and told she has been chosen for something. Sybil Mira installs her alone in a satellite in Earth's orbit with a net feed, a job and nobody to talk to, presenting the arrangement as a rescue. The story covers her first days in orbit and the beginning of seven years of it. The Princess and the Guard. Winter grows up in Levana's palace with Jacin, a guard's son, as her closest friend. She watches what the Lunar gift does to the people it is used on, and at thirteen resolves never to use hers again - a choice she keeps, at the price of the sickness that comes with it. When her beauty starts to be treated as the only thing about her that matters, she takes a knife to her own face.

The Little Android. A retelling of The Little Mermaid, set in New Beijing and only loosely tied to the main series. An android called Mech6.0, damaged in a way that has left her self-aware, is attached to Dataran, the young mechanic who services her. She goes to an illegal surgeon to be given a human body, and finds that being human costs her everything she was good at and does not make Dataran see her. The story ends with her sacrificing herself for him without his ever knowing what she was. The Mechanic. Kai's account of the scene the series opened with: the crown prince takes a broken royal android to a market booth himself, meets the young mechanic behind the counter, and leaves considerably more interested than he intended to be.

Something Old, Something New. Roughly two years after the fall of Levana, Scarlet and Wolf marry at the Benoit farm in France, and the wedding brings everyone together: Cress and Thorne fly in with the Rampion, Winter and Jacin come down from Luna, Iko is there in a body of her own, and Cinder and Kai attend as the heads of two governments still learning to work with one another. Luna is under an elected government, the plague is treatable everywhere, and the shell children who were kept for their blood are being given lives back. The story resolves the last of the couples, closes Cinder and Kai's relationship, and finishes the series on a farmhouse rather than a throne room.

The collection closes with Something Old, Something New, set roughly two years after the events of Winter. Scarlet and Wolf marry at the Benoit farm in France, and the wedding brings the whole cast together for the first time since the revolution: Cress and Thorne arrive in the Rampion, Winter and Jacin come down from Luna, Iko is present in a body of her own, and Cinder and Kai attend as the leaders of two worlds still working out how to be neighbours. Luna is being rebuilt under an elected government rather than a crown, the plague is treatable, and the freed shells are being returned to lives of their own. The story is an epilogue rather than a plot: it settles where each couple has landed, gives Cinder and Kai's relationship its resolution, and lets the series end on the ordinary business of a farmhouse wedding rather than on a throne room.