The Cage (10 page)
Authors: Megan Shepherd
“I worry about her.” His voice was quieter. “Ellie. If she’s okay.”
Cora’s heart clenched. She liked this side of him, the one that cared about his little sister. She almost told him she’d been locked up too, but stopped. Her father’s voice was too fresh. “We’ll never speak of what happened,” he had said. “Not to the media, not even to each other. You’re not an ex-con, you’re our daughter.”
But she
was
an ex-con. That’s what they never understood.
She stood and tugged on Leon’s massive arm. “Come on.”
When they returned to the others, Nok was twisting the pink strand of her hair nervously. “You really think we can go back?” she asked.
“Of course we can’t!” Rolf sputtered, pushing at the place where his glasses should reside. “That could be the reason they killed the other girl—for all we know, she was trying to escape. They gave us three rules. That’s all. We should at least
try
to obey. There might not even be any walls or exits, anyway.”
“There is an exit,” Cora said. “The Caretaker called it a fail-safe.”
Rolf shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. They’d just see us through those panels and stop us.”
“Why do you want to stay here so badly?” Cora snapped.
He blinked like she had slapped him. “It isn’t about staying here,” he said. “It’s about staying
alive
.”
Staying alive. Cora had experience with staying alive. At Bay Pines, girls made makeshift knives out of toothbrushes. Pummeled each other with pillowcases full of loose change. She’d tried to banish such memories, like her father had said, but some things were harder to forget.
Maybe she shouldn’t try so hard to forget.
“I might have an idea,” she said hesitantly. “The Kindred are stronger than us, but not invincible. The Caretaker breathes oxygen, which means he could choke. He had a bump on his nose like it had been broken. He’s not flawless.”
“What are we going to hurt them with?” Rolf asked. “Meat loaf? Every inch of this place has been designed like a padded cell.”
“There
are
weapons.” She leaned in and dropped her voice. “Remember those toys we saw in the shops? The Caretaker said they were authentic artifacts from Earth. That means they’re real, not soft like everything else. Those croquet mallets could inflict serious damage. We could use the guitar strings as a garrote.”
“What’s a garrote, eh?” Leon asked.
“A weapon you can use to strangle a person silently,” she explained calmly.
“Bloody hell,” he muttered. “How’s a girl like you know a thing like that?”
Cora bit the inside of her cheek. “I watch a lot of TV,” she lied.
Thankfully, Lucky saved her from having to explain further. “It’s a good plan—and the only one we’ve got. We have twenty-one days before they remove us. Until then, we’ll solve their puzzles—it will look like we’re cooperating. But really, we’ll map the different habitats to find the fail-safe exit and win prizes we can secretly turn into weapons we can defend ourselves with.”
Rolf shook his head. “We can’t even solve the jukebox puzzle, and you expect to escape from super-intelligent extraterrestrials? Impossible.”
Cora glanced at the black window. Was the Caretaker watching? Her skin still tingled at the memory of the spark of electricity. Did all humans feel it, or was it only her?
Lucky shot Leon a sharp look. “And don’t even think about acting on Rule Three.”
Leon held up his hands. “Why are you telling me? My girl’s dead.”
Nok let out a quiet sound of disgust.
Cora rubbed the constellation marks on her neck. It wasn’t just her eyes that felt tired. It was her whole body; her face, her limbs, her mind. They had more to worry about than the Kindred. Captivity did strange things to people. In Bay Pines, pretty girls had lusted after balding old male guards because that’s all there was, and human nature was too strong—even stronger when family and routine were taken away.
“Tomorrow,” Lucky said. “We’ll divide into teams, and start our escape.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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NOK HAD BEEN STANDING
ankle-deep in slime for the last two hours.
The day before, when Lucky had suggested they search the habitats, this wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Lucky and Cora had gone to the forest. Leon had set out on his own for the mountains. Why she and Rolf had been given the swamp environment to explore, she’d never know. Next time she’d request someplace dry and warm, like the farm.
She looked at the sky between the breaks in the trees. Perfect and blue, but no birds. Around them, set into mossy banks, black panels watched. She shivered, thinking of the beast with the gleaming skin who had called himself the Caretaker. He looked like a man, but his shimmering bronze face reminded her of the iridescence of lizard scales. When she’d been a little girl, the monk in her village would read stories from a leather-bound copy of the
Ramakien
. There was an illustration of the god Phra Phai, with blue skin and a celestial beauty that masked his treacherous nature. That painting had always both terrified and enchanted Nok. That’s how she thought of the Caretaker, as Phra Phai. God of wind, giver of life—and of death.
Ahead, Rolf was nearly invisible among the trees.
“Hey, wait!” she called.
Rolf came tromping back through the slime. “Sorry.” He held out a twitchy hand to help her across a knot of roots, and her mood softened. How easy it was to manipulate boys like him. Shed a few tears, and they’d do anything.
Nok rubbed her arm, looking at the slime swallowing her feet. She’d gone along with Delphine’s lessons because she’d had no choice: Delphine controlled every aspect of their lives. The flophouse was supposed to keep them “safe” and the pathetically sparse food was supposed to keep them “thin.” Instead it kept them starved and enslaved as they were driven around to shoots in an ancient black van with sticky seats.
And Nok had been
good
. She could look into the camera and give the man on the other side exactly what he wanted. A smile full of promise, an alluring tilt of her chin. But each time, resentment had grown in her, bit by bit, like a cancer.
She blinked.
Delphine isn’t here
. For once, she didn’t need coy smiles. She could just be herself.
“No . . . I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s this headache.”
“We’ll turn back soon.” Rolf helped her trod though the sticky mud. “Wouldn’t want to stay out here after dark.”
“Seriously,” Nok muttered. “We’d probably wake up in the morning to find the Kindred had dressed us in Halloween costumes.”
Rolf snickered, and Nok gave him a surprised look. She hadn’t been joking.
They continued through the swamp, as Rolf pointed out each clump of green muck and gave her its scientific name—alder twig, cattail, loosestrife. She’d never met a boy more in love with slime; it made her smile as much as it made her roll her eyes.
“Look!” He slushed toward a cluster of fungus. “
Pleurotus ostreatus.
I didn’t know they grew in wetlands.”
“Swamp mushrooms.” Nok feigned rubbing a hungry stomach. “Mmm.”
He grinned.
They kept walking. She’d warmed up to him, she realized, as she watched him take careful steps ahead of her to avoid crushing any plants. Neuroses and fungus and all. She didn’t mind that he was four inches shorter than her and looked like he hadn’t seen daylight in weeks. Handsome boys were insufferable, always checking themselves out in mirrors. Judging by the cowlick in his red hair, Rolf hadn’t glanced in a single mirror since they’d arrived.
“What will you get with the token?” he asked over his shoulder.
She patted her dress pocket, where a heavy bronze token rested. Rolf had solved the swamp puzzle after only ten minutes. It involved listening for a bullfrog croak (it had a metallic ring to it—definite not real), then searching for water bubbles and reaching into the silty bottom to get a token before the bubbles stopped. “It isn’t really my choice, yeah? We have to save up to buy something Cora can make into a weapon.”
He glanced at her. “Well, if you could choose anything, what would it be?”
She took another slushy step through the slime. “More nail polish?”
No, stupid,
she cursed herself. She didn’t care a quid for nail polish—but Delphine was still hiding in some deep pocket of her brain, telling her to say what he wanted to hear.
“Ah, scrap that. I’d take the radio,” Nok answered, more confidently. “The red one in the arcade. I liked the way the knobs formed a little face.”
Her first few months in the London flophouse, she’d both loathed her parents and missed them painfully. The only comfort she had found was a little shortwave radio she’d discovered crammed on a bookshelf, which she could tune to a Thai station. Now she had a feeling she would never see home again.
Her foot sank deeper in the slime, which splashed the hem of her dress. She cringed. Rolf rubbed the back of his neck, blinking a little fast.
“I could try to carry you,” he offered.
She snorted. She’d squish the poor boy. “It’s fine, really.”
As they kept walking, Nok wondered what kind of a baby they would have, if they did go through with the Kindred’s insane plan. Maybe with her looks and his brains, it would be some super child. Or else with his twitches and her height, it would be the most awkward thing ever. She pressed a hand to her stomach, feeling sick. Were they really going to have to go through with it? Sixteen years old and trapped in an alien zoo didn’t exactly make her feel ready to be a mother.
“Some of my friends back home got pregnant,” she said. “Only one kept the baby, though.” The girl had married a photographer—a real classy guy—and had brought the baby back to the apartment to show the other girls. Nok had held it uneasily. It wasn’t entirely awful; it had smelled nice, at least.
Rolf stopped, blinking steadily, and faced her. “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Nok. But I can promise you one thing. Whether we end up having a child or not, whether they take it away from us or not, I’ll always be there. For you, I mean.”
She swallowed back a surge of tenderness. No one had ever been as sweet to her before.
She cleared her throat, suddenly nervous. “Hey, look. More
Pluris ostrus
or whatever.”
He smiled. “
Pleurotus ostreatus.
”
“Well, we can’t all be geniuses.”
The grin fell off his face as his cheeks reddened. He pushed at the bridge of his nose. “I’m not a genius.”
“You think Leon can identify swamp mushrooms? Why do you downplay it so much?”
His fingers twitched by his side, performing some calculations, as though that might help him think better. “Girls don’t like smart guys,” he said at last.
She looked at him in surprise. Suddenly she regretted all her crocodile tears, all her acts of helplessness. She knew when a boy liked her, and Rolf had it bad—but he didn’t even know who she really was.
“Let me be the judge of what I like,” she said softly.
They reached the end of the swamp at last. As they climbed out, the moss lining the bank soaked up the slime on her feet, so that she looked utterly clean. She glanced at her reflection in the nearest black window and adjusted her hem.
The light overhead changed. Late afternoon.
“Nok, look.” Rolf pointed ahead. “What’s that?”
Through the swamp trees, distant lights came on. Nok’s heart beat a little faster as she recognized them. Her headache returned tenfold, and she doubled over in pain.
“Impossible,” she gasped.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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THE FOREST WAS EERILY
quiet as Cora and Lucky passed among the trees. It had been almost three days since they’d found each other on the beach, but in a place without clocks or lengthening shadows, did time even exist the same way?
Cora hadn’t slept more than a few groggy hours, and it made her headache worse. At home, there’d been one sleepless night, driving the Virginia back roads, that she’d heard a radio program on a psychological experiment where they put test subjects in a room without natural light. Strange things started to happen: people would sleep for days on end, then wake for a week at a time. Was she changing, like the people in the experiment?
Her temper had gotten snappier—everyone’s had.
She hugged her arms around her dress. She’d found a dozen of them the night before, in the dead girl’s armoire. Rolf had said it was wrong to wear the dead girl’s dresses because the Kindred might punish her, but it was worth the risk to feel like herself.
They followed the trail passed a chalet with murky black windows. “They find a way to watch us everywhere, don’t they?” she said.
Lucky glanced at the window. “I’ll give them something to watch.” He raised his middle finger.
Cora grinned, but then she glanced behind them at the trail that had somehow telescoped in distance, and pain shot through her skull. “Ah—my head. Feels like someone’s stabbing screwdrivers behind my eyes.” She leaned her head against a tree, fighting the pain. “It has to be like Rolf said. Our minds can’t handle the unnatural angles and distances.”
“It can’t help that you’ve barely slept,” he said. She looked up at the worry in his eyes, as he crouched next to her. “Didn’t you think I’d notice? You look like you’re practically sleepwalking. I . . .” His voice faded as he caught sight of something behind her. “Are those . . . platforms?”
Cora shaded her eyes as she looked in the direction he pointed. Dark shadows in the trees formed into rough shapes that looked a bit like platforms and tree houses and ladders. “You think it’s one of the puzzles?”
