
Suddenly, Peony’s skin begins to break out in splotches-she’s caught letumosis. There, Cinder finds a magbelt as well as an old gasoline car. Cinder decides to go with Peony and Iko, her android, to a junkyard to scavenge for a magbelt. When Cinder gets home from the market, her stepmother Adri is getting dresses fitted for Cinder’s stepsisters Pearl and Peony for the upcoming ball, but Adri says that she can’t afford both a dress for Cinder and new a magbelt for their hover. After he leaves, an outbreak of the deadly plague letumosis spreads through the market, and the baker, Chang Sacha, is taken to the quarantines. As a cyborg, Cinder faces discrimination from people who believe she is less than human, so she keeps her identity hidden from Kai. Just after this, the prince of the Eastern Commonwealth, Prince Kai, visits her booth and asks her to fix his android Nainsi, explaining that Cinder has a reputation as the best mechanic in New Beijing.


One day, at her mechanic’s booth, Cinder struggles to remove her old, rusty mechanical foot and then fits herself with the new prosthetic she just purchased. Sixteen-year-old Cinder is a cyborg mechanic living in the futuristic city of New Beijing in the country of the Eastern Commonwealth.
