Glitches

Glitches is a short prequel story to Marissa Meyer's Cinder, first published free on Tor.com. It is set about five years before the novel, when eleven-year-old Cinder comes to live with her new guardian, Linh Garan, and his family in New Beijing. Her stepmother Adri and stepsister Pearl resent her from the start, while Garan tries to make her welcome.

The story shows how the plague that is sweeping Earth reaches the household and the toll it takes on Cinder, and it fills in the early life of the cyborg mechanic readers meet in The Lunar Chronicles. It runs only a few dozen pages, works as a quick introduction to the series, and is also collected in Stars Above.