The Cage (19 page)

She headed for the doorway.

The light had shifted to dusk. Music came from the diner, something with a hint of jazz, but it just made her head pound harder. Mali stood by the open door with her hands across her chest, watching Cora like she could see straight into her soul. A cry came from inside the diner and Nok rushed out, followed by Rolf, who clutched a guitar in one hand.

“You!” Rolf jabbed a finger at Cora. “What, breakfast and lunch wasn’t enough? You had to steal dinner too?”

“I didn’t steal anything!” Cora yelled.

“Stop shouting!” Nok wailed. “My head hurts!”

Rolf stomped toward Cora, his eye twitching. “Is this revenge for seeing us together? If you’re jealous that you and Lucky don’t have a relationship like we do, maybe that’s your own fault!” He let the guitar fall to the porch with a clatter of errant notes.

Cora jumped back. What had gotten into him? She tightened her grip on the mallet. First the radio. Now the guitar. If anyone had a right to be angry, it was her.

“You’ve been secretly buying things from the shops, haven’t you? We could have used those things, Rolf! If I’d had a garrote or a makeshift knife when the Warden had tried to strangle me, maybe I could have killed him!”

He rolled his eyes. “Wow. How brilliant of you to figure out my plan. Yes, I bought them and didn’t tell you. Just like you took our food and didn’t tell us.”

“I didn’t!”

Splinters of pain shot off from her head. It felt like her brain was splitting in two, and anger boiled from the fissure. She gripped the mallet tighter.

Rolf narrowed his eyes.

“Stop it.” Nok tugged on Rolf’s arm. “It doesn’t matter why she did it—there’s still enough food, if we divide up what’s on her plate and forage in the orchard. Cora, just don’t do it again. Please. Headaches are bad enough, we don’t need hunger pangs too.”

“I
didn’t
take your food. Don’t you see? The Kindred are doing this. They want us to turn against each other.”

The others stared at her like she’d gone mad.

Mali yawned.

Cora spun and strode through the grass, bumping into Rolf so hard that he knocked into the guitar with another burst of errant chords, and then she stopped in front of the movie theater’s black window.

Her father had taken her to a zoo when she was a little girl. They had gone to see the tiger. She remembered squeezing her father’s hand as it paced back and forth, back and forth, watching them with unblinking eyes through the glass.

She felt like that tiger. She
was
that tiger.

She laid her palm flat on the humming window. Only a thick piece of glass had stopped that tiger from killing her. She
hoped
the Kindred could read her mind, and know she was biding her time until no surfaces separated her from them, and she could do to them what that tiger wanted to do to her.

“All right, Caretaker,” she muttered, stepping back. “Take care of
this
.”

She swung the mallet with all her strength against the glass. Nok shrieked. Cora cringed, expecting a satisfying
crack
and shatter of glass. The mallet was real wood, not whatever fake substance everything else was made of, and yet the moment it connected with the window, nothing happened. Not a crack. Not even a thud.

“Dammit!” She hurled the mallet to the ground.

Her vision started to fracture into little dots, as if the lights of town were a spinning kaleidoscope. Pain ripped through her head as lack of sleep caught up with her all at once. She sank to the ground.

Lucky crouched next to her. The sweat had dried on his shirt in the cool evening air. He nodded toward the croquet mallet. “Did you really think that was going to work?”

She pushed her mess of hair out of her face and sat up. “I don’t know. I had to try.” She watched the others tearing into her plate of food on the diner porch. “Look at them. They’re like wolves. Don’t they understand what’s happening? These are creatures who took us from our beds. Who are forcing us to breed for their own twisted purposes. Who keep kids in cages and cut off their fingers.”

Lucky crackled the knuckles in his left hand. “The Mosca cut off fingers, not the Kindred.”

“They’re all part of the same system! The Kindred protect us only as long as we obey them.”

She moved closer, brushing his leather jacket, catching a trace of his fresh soap smell that reminded her of home.
Home.
Maybe at this moment Charlie was pulling his Jeep into the driveway, and Sadie was running out to meet him.

“I can’t take it, Lucky. I’m going crazy.” At Bay Pines she’d checked off the days on a calendar, but she had no boxes to check now. No end date. Just the seashells, but there was an endless ocean of them. Would she keep collecting them until they filled the house, spilling out the windows into the marigolds? For months?
Years?
She curled up tight, wishing she could disappear into herself. She needed help. She needed a way home.

She needed a sign that there was hope.

A soft, familiar
plink
sounded on the black window behind them. Cora lifted her head. When dusk had rolled in, clouds had come too.

A drop of rain fell on her bare toes.

She stared at the patch of water, dumbfounded. Every day in the cage had been identical. Sunny skies without a trace of clouds. It rained in the jungle, and it snowed in the forest, but always on a predictable schedule, and never in the town. Now the rain started softly, a few errant drops at a time. The clouds grew heavier, making the day darker. It had been so long since Cora had felt a drenching rain that she’d forgotten the way it smelled. So earthy.

Nok shrieked with delight, jumping up and down and clapping, her mood flipping on a dime, as though the fight had never happened. She took Mali’s hands, swinging her around, trying to make her dance, but Mali just pitched her head toward the sky in distrust. The rain grew. Big fat drops formed rivulets and streams and rivers on the black windows. Rolf was trying to trace them with his finger, but there were too many.

“Why?” Cora turned to Lucky, rubbing her throbbing temples that were soaked with rain. “Why are they doing this? What do they hope to gain by changing things?”

“You’re tired, Cora. You haven’t slept.”

“You know I didn’t take everyone’s food, right?”

A slight pause. “Sure.”

Water flowed down his handsome face like tears, finding the valleys of his eyes, dripping off his jaw. Even if she hadn’t known him at home, and even though the Kindred had dressed him in a stranger’s clothes, she recognized sincerity in his face.

“They want to see what we’ll do.” She twisted her head toward all the watching windows. “They’re standing there now, watching us. You see them, right? The shadows?”

“Sure. I see them.” But his eyes stayed locked to hers. He tucked a wet strand of her hair gently behind her ear. “Do you trust me?” There was a strange hitch to his voice.

Her headache reverberated in her skull, louder and louder, but she nodded.

“Then come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

28

Cora

LUCKY LED HER ACROSS
the grass toward the weeping cherry tree that burst with thousands of blooms. “I found this place the first day, when you vanished.”

Cora could barely hear him over the falling rain. He parted the weeping branches and she ducked inside, flinching as a skeletal branch grazed her arm. But the tree gave them shelter, and the smell was soft and perfumed, and it slowly untangled the tension from her muscles, knot by knot, until she could breathe. The ground was carpeted in velvety pink petals. With the dome of flowers around them, it looked otherworldly.

She hugged her arms tighter over her wet sundress. “It’s beautiful, Lucky. But it doesn’t help us.”

“It isn’t about that.” He wiped the rain from the planes of his face. “It’s the black windows. They can’t see us here.”

She blinked as it slowly sank in. The branches formed a perfect dome that hid them from prying Kindred eyes. For the first time in fifteen days, she wasn’t being watched. Her throbbing headache lessened. She turned in a circle as mist caught in her hair like fairy-tale dust. She felt a million miles away from the half-mad dancing in the rain, and the broken croquet mallet, and the fact that their lives had been stolen. There was only the beating of her heart beneath her dress, and Lucky’s warm hand taking hold of hers, and a thousand feelings of relief.

For once, it felt like home.

A petal landed on his shoulder. She brushed it off. He was so solid beneath her fingers. Real. On impulse, she threw her arms around his neck and breathed in the smell of rain in his tangled dark hair.

“You have no idea how badly I needed this.” She could feel his pounding heart between two layers of ribs and skin and cotton. Her heart responded. She coiled her fingers in his jacket, wanting him even closer. She didn’t want to think about the Kindred. Or the missing food. Or the others.

She tilted her chin toward his. In the desert, they’d almost kissed. It would have been a mistake there, with the Kindred watching. They would have been doing exactly what the Warden wanted.

But there was no one watching now.

She pressed her lips to his. A hundred sensations overtook her. Her heart fluttered and spun like the petals falling around them. He pulled back in surprise. For a few breaths his eyes searched hers, water dripping from his dark hair, and she almost thought she’d made a mistake.

He let out a ragged breath.

Then he kissed her back, harder, his hands threading through her wet hair, pulling in a way that drove her mad. She matched his fervor. No thinking. Letting her heart overpower her head. Shedding all those days her father had told her to smile through pain. There were no black windows watching them. No Cassian was watching them. No other captives were shooting her sharp words and dangerous looks. An urgency swelled in her chest.

He turned his head away. “Wait. There’s something I have to tell you.”

She shook her head. “Whatever it is, I don’t care.” She pulled his shirt tighter, drawing him closer. All she could think about were his eyes in the rose-colored light and his arms around her. She’d had so little practice with this sort of thing, and her hand drifted to rub against her bottom lip. His face darkened like he wanted nothing more than to kiss her again.

“I’ve wanted to kiss you ever since you fell out of that tree,” he said. “But there’s something you don’t know.”

She rested her head on his shoulder, breathing in his scent, tugging at his leather jacket like she was afraid he would dissolve in the rain.

“Cora. It’s about your father.”

She let him go abruptly. It was strange to hear someone else speak about her life at home. It made it all suddenly real again. Her father. Charlie. Her mother watching
Planet of the Apes
on the sofa. Sadie barking at squirrels. “My father?” She shook her head in confusion. “What does he have to do with anything?”

Rain still dripped from Lucky’s hair.

“He has to do with everything between you and me.” Alarm started to beat in time with Cora’s heart, and she steadied herself against the tree trunk as he continued. “I told you I lived in Virginia for a while. I didn’t tell you when. I moved away two years ago. April third.”

“April third?” She pressed a hand to her aching head, trying to think past the fog. That date was stamped on her parole papers. The day she was admitted to Bay Pines.

He kept his eyes on the ground. “I should have told you that first day, but I just . . . didn’t. I had seen you in the newspapers, and on TV. I knew that your father was a senator and your mother used to be an actress.”

He
knew
?

She pressed her hand harder against her head, trying to ease the throbbing that cut like a knife. “No—don’t apologize,” she stammered. “I worried that someone would remember the news, but the others all live overseas, so it seemed unlikely. I should have told you about the conviction, but I thought you’d think of me differently. I promise you, I didn’t do it.”

He didn’t even blink at her words. “I know you didn’t kill that woman, Cora. I know who your father is because I met with his men three times after the accident. I collected checks from them. They were paying me to keep quiet about what I saw that night.”

The aching in her head vanished. The sound of the rain faded, and the smell of the cherry blossoms. Slowly, her hand dropped. “What do you mean?”

“The night of the accident. Your father’s political fund-raiser. He’d had too much to drink. The car was swerving all over the bridge. All I could make out was your dress—green silk—as you were yelling for him to stop. The headlights were so bright. And then the car went over.”

Dimly she realized that the rain had stopped outside, but it didn’t matter. “How could you have seen that?”

A second passed, a second she knew would change everything. “I was in the other car,” he said. “The one your father crashed into before he swerved off the bridge. I was in the passenger seat.” His voice broke. “The woman who died was my mother.”

Dread filled Cora the same way water had filled her father’s car that night: rushing in too fast to stop. She had been accused of a woman’s murder. Involuntary manslaughter. The woman’s name had been Maria Flores, and her teenage son had been with her, though Cora had been so occupied trying to help her father get control of the car she hadn’t seen either of their faces through the windshield.

Luciano—that had been the son’s name. Luciano Flores.

“Call me Lucky,” he had said.

She doubled over, struggling to breathe. “Your
mother
? My dad killed your
mom
? You said she died when you were a little boy!”

“I . . . lied. I didn’t want you to know.”