Cinder & Scarlet

Lore & Background

In the world of The Lunar Chronicles, Earth has fractured into a patchwork of colonies and city-states, each with its own politics, and the Moon is a sovereign realm with its own royal line. Cinder was raised in New Beijing as a servant, her cyborg body a secret she guarded with her life. Scarlet grew up on the Texas colony, her mother a spy for a resistance movement, and learned to read people the way she reads a locked door: for the seam where it gives. Neither girl had a name that meant anything to the powerful, and that shared anonymity is the first thread that binds them.

Their friendship is never simple. Cinder's lunar heritage makes her a political symbol; Scarlet's colonial roots make her a pawn in someone else's war. They are drawn to the same man, Kai, and the unspoken rivalry over his affection becomes a low-grade poison they both swallow in silence. Yet every time the world tries to sort them into opposing camps—cyborg versus human, servant versus spy, Moon versus Earth—they find a way to stand on the same side of the line. The relationship is less a romance than a negotiation: what do I owe you, what do I owe myself, and can both answers be yes?

By the later books, the bond has weathered enough betrayal and secrecy to become something almost unbreakable. They fight, they doubt, they protect each other's worst secrets, and they become the emotional gravity around which the wider resistance orbits. In a universe full of royal decrees and political machinations, the Cinder–Scarlet friendship is the one thing no one can legislate away.

In Their Own Story

The training yard behind the resistance safehouse smelled of ozone and wet concrete. Cinder ran a diagnostic along her forearm, watching the blue light trace the seam where metal met skin, while Scarlet paced three paces away, boots scuffing the slick ground, muttering a half-remembered sequence of lock-picks. Neither spoke. They didn't need to. After everything—the ball, the lies, the nights Scarlet had pressed a blade to Cinder's throat and the nights Cinder had pressed a hand to Scarlet's back and said *I'm still here*—silence had become its own language. A nod. A shift in weight. The small, deliberate way Cinder angled her shoulder to block the draft from Scarlet's side. Outside, the colony's floodlights painted the sky a bruised orange. Inside, two girls who were supposed to be enemies sat on a crate, sharing a cold ration bar, and called it enough. For tonight, it was.

Reader's Guide

Cinder and Scarlet are the emotional spine of The Lunar Chronicles, bound by a friendship that begins in suspicion and rivalry and hardens into something fierce and mutual.

They first cross paths at a masquerade ball in New Beijing, where Cinder is the cyborg servant and Scarlet is the human spy. Their initial bond is transactional—mutual utility, shared danger, and an unspoken awareness that they are the only two people who see each other clearly. The shared attraction to Prince Kai becomes a quiet, corrosive thread that neither fully names.

By the second book, told from Scarlet's perspective, the friendship is tested by jealousy, secrecy, and the weight of each girl's separate loyalties. Cinder's lunar heritage and Scarlet's colonial roots place them in different political worlds, and their bond survives only because both refuse to let the other go.

In Cress and Winter, the rivalry softens into genuine solidarity. They fight alongside one another, cover each other's weaknesses, and become the emotional anchor for the wider resistance. What the relationship costs them is the comfortable, singular identity they once had—Cinder can no longer hide behind servitude, and Scarlet can no longer define herself solely by her mother's mission.

The bond reveals Cinder's capacity for loyalty beyond duty and Scarlet's depth beneath her bravado. It is, ultimately, the relationship that makes both of them whole.

Did You Know?

• The second book in the series is told entirely from Scarlet's point of view, giving readers direct access to her perspective on the friendship and the events of the first book.
• Cinder and Scarlet's shared attraction to Prince Kai is a recurring source of tension, yet the series never resolves it with a simple love triangle; the rivalry coexists with their deepening friendship.
• The two girls come from fundamentally different political worlds—Cinder from the lunar court and New Beijing, Scarlet from a terrestrial colony—making their alliance a quiet act of defiance against the era's rigid social
• Their friendship is the connective tissue that links all four books: even in Cress and Winter, where the central protagonists shift, Cinder and Scarlet's bond remains the emotional through-line fans return to.