The Cage (34 page)

A strange tickle spread down her back, painful but not like a headache, and she pinched herself hard. That was only seven. That meant there had to be an eighth, and the ocean was the only habitat left. Maybe it was a puzzle they couldn’t solve—because it was hidden by perceptive technology.

Because it was the fail-safe exit.

She pinched herself harder. She might not be psychic, but she was smart enough to pierce through their lies. She bit the inside of her cheek, tasting blood, and leaned forward. If she was right, they could all escape. “Give me another chance. Take me back to the cage, just for one more day. You might not have been the one manipulating us, but you went along with it. You owe me.”

Even as she said the words, she knew they weren’t quite true. How many times had he bent the rules for her?

He turned his head. “That is against protocol.”

“So was taking me to the menagerie. So is having me in your bedroom, I’m guessing. Admit it—you know what they’re doing is wrong. You know I’m more than a gender and a number. I’m a person. Like you.”

Her heart hammered. It was excruciating, being so close to this beautiful bronzed creature who wasn’t human but who was so similar. A crazy thought entered her head:
Maybe Lucky was right to be jealous.

His hand flexed on the table, close enough that their fingers brushed, and the spark ran through her, straight to her heart.

“Why do you wish to go back,” he asked, “when we both you know will never obey?”

She bit the inside of her cheek harder, masking her thoughts with pain. “Don’t ask me that. Please. I can’t tell you.”

That’s why the ocean had pulsed so strangely that day—because her eyes knew they were being tricked. Her body knew there was something wrong with the ocean, more than just her fear of deep water.

“I would be risking much for you, Cora. If the Warden found out, we would both be severely punished.”

She didn’t let herself think. “That’s what I want.”

He paused. “Then I will help you. And I will not ask why.”

Silence shrouded the room, but Cora didn’t mind. It was a reprieve from the cage. From her thoughts. From her loneliness. Cassian refilled the glass, and they took turns sipping. For the rest of the night they sat in his spartan quarters and talked, and then they didn’t talk, and they listened to the silence around them.

Cora’s head jerked. She had fallen asleep sitting up. She tried to stand but stumbled, shaky. Cassian stood too, to keep her from falling.

“You should rest,” he said. “When you wake, I will return you to your enclosure.”

He was asking her if she could walk, but she couldn’t find the words to answer. She just wanted to sleep. Her thoughts kept drifting back to her bed at home, the quilt that Sadie liked to curl up on. Even with all the pain, and hurt, and loneliness, she wanted that life back.

The ground fell away from her; he was carrying her to the other room as though she weighed nothing. Her head lolled, her hair dangling. Then came a temperature change and a softness as her body relaxed into the familiar comfort of a bed, though it was harder than she’d like. Her muscles unwound in a way they hadn’t in weeks.

“I will wait in the other room,” he said.

She shook her head. She reached out a hand to touch him, though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to push him away or pull his warmth closer.

“I still have to try,” she whispered.

He didn’t ask her to elaborate, because if he could see in her head, he had to know what she meant: she couldn’t live in a cage. And she couldn’t let the others continue to slide away from humanity.

“Not now,” he said. “Now, just rest.”

She started to drift even deeper into sleep. The mattress dipped where he was sitting; she was tempted to roll toward that groove. He said words she barely heard, about how she was wrong when she thought she was just an animal to him. That he didn’t think of her that way. But it might have just been her dreams taking over.

Her mind drifted deeper, and an hour might have passed, or maybe only an instant, but his weight was still on the bed beside her.

“Cora,” he said softly, more to himself. She felt the faintest touch of his hand on her cheek, his fingers light as if they didn’t know how hard to touch not to bruise her. The metallic skin of his thumb rubbed along her bottom lip.

You don’t know what I’m like in private, when I’m uncloaked.

As she slipped from the waking world to sleep, she wondered if he wanted to kiss her. He had been so curious, that day in the menagerie. His desire to understand humanity had been palpable. Her heart was racing, despite the alcohol. She could still show him. She could press her lips to his—she was aching to. It was so clear now. She wasn’t sure when it had begun, certainly not that first day, nor in the medical rooms. The night he gave her the stars, maybe. She wanted to show him what it meant to be human.

She moved her lips, trying to form his name.

But as soon as his thumb had brushed her lips, it was gone, and the weight beside her on the bed was gone, and then she fell asleep to the sound of his footsteps by the window, pacing back and forth, back and forth. Just like a tiger.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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48

Lucky

LUCKY CROUCHED BY THE
side of the candy shop, working fast in the moonlight. His palms stung from swinging through the treetop ropes course all night. Without Cora to hold the ladders, it had been difficult, but he’d managed. Now he ran his hand over the plastic water gun he’d bought from the toy shop with all the tokens he’d earned. Back on his granddad’s farm, he’d learned a trick to keep the flies off horses: liquefied cayenne pepper. But if you got it in your eyes, it would blind you.

He stomped on a handful of peppers from the farm, juicing them under his heel, and squeezed them into the water gun. His head throbbed from where Cora had hit him, but he ignored it, just like he ignored the awful hollow space in his chest. He’d only felt this way twice before—once, on a bridge outside of Richmond, after his car had wrapped around a streetlight, and he’d looked over to see his mother slumped against the wheel. The second time had been when he’d met Cora’s father’s men in a drugstore parking lot and taken their check.

He finished filling the water gun and shoved the stopper back into it, then grabbed a jump rope he had modified into nunchakus. He glanced back at the house, where he could make out Rolf reading a book by the window. For a brief moment, he considered staying.

But the cherry blossoms wafted toward him, and he turned sharply and started for the jungle. He
knew
Cora. She wasn’t that devious. Someone must have put her up to hitting him, pouring lies into her ear for weeks. He knew it wasn’t Nok or Rolf, because he’d constantly been around them. He didn’t think it was Mali—she had no reason to. There was only one person in the enclosure who had violent tendencies too, who could have convinced her to do such a thing.

Leon.

His chest felt even more hollow at the memory of her betrayal, and he had to lean against the railing of the jungle walkway. He pictured her face, the blue eyes with the dark rings around them from not sleeping, and her lips that had tasted so real, and he gripped the jump-rope nunchakus harder.

He ran down the walkway, dizzy from his injury and the distortions. He’d known Leon would be trouble from the start. His father had warned him about Leon’s type—guys who hated authority. Guys who wanted to be soldiers not to protect the country, but because they liked blood on their hands.

He skidded to a stop as soon as he saw a collection of huts scattered around a huge stone temple. His heart pounded harder as he walked as silently as he could through the jungle. A sheet flapped in the wind, covered with odd symbols he couldn’t make out in the moonlight. They almost looked like eyes. Then he heard rustling, and took out the water gun. His plan was to blind Leon first, then use the nunchakus. Four years of martial arts had to be worth something.

He pressed his back against the hut, moving slowly toward the entrance. The jungle was so quiet he could hear his own heart beating. Another shuffle came from within the hut, and he leaped inside, gun raised.

Nok screamed.

Lucky started. What was
she
doing there? She was alone, wrapped in only a sheet, her pink streak of hair hiding the left side of her face.

“Lucky?” she sputtered. “Is that a
gun
?”

He lowered the water gun, leaning on the doorway to steady his throbbing head. Her lips fell open, but she seemed lost for words. Lucky’s thoughts caught up with him all at once: Nok wrapped in the sheet . . . how she’d come to him that day on the porch and run her finger down his cheek, and offered to spare him from the third rule.

Had she made the same offer to
Leon
?

“Jesus, Nok. What are you . . . Is the baby even Rolf’s?”

His words jolted her out of her stupor. She dragged the sheet around her tighter, stumbling to her feet, a fire in her eyes. “I had to, Lucky. You heard what that substitute caretaker said. They’re taking away my baby because of what Cora did to you. She’s gone crazy. Leon’s the only person who can stop her. I need him, and don’t you dare judge me for getting his help this way.”

She tossed the pink streak of hair out of her face. She had a wild look in her eye that had never been there before. This wasn’t the same skittish, pretty girl he’d found cowering in the toy store. He’d only seen glimmers of her darkness before, like the time she’d kicked Leon in the groin.

“How’s Leon going to stop her?” Lucky said. “Hurt her?
Kill
her?”

A shadow filled the doorway behind him.

“What the hell is this?” Leon bellowed.

Lucky’s hand tightened on the gun.
Blind him, then use the nunchakus.
But he hadn’t expected Nok. He hadn’t guessed that they’d been sleeping together. His stomach twisted at that feverish-wild look in her eye.

He was so tired of it all. The betrayals. The hurt.

He looked at his makeshift weapons. What had he been planning to do,
kill
Leon? He’d felt such hatred in his veins, such certainty that Leon had been the one to twist Cora, but the truth was,
all
of them were twisted.

He let the water gun fall and shoved past Leon, back out into the jungle.

He ran along the walkway until it bled into the forest. He followed the paths to the clearing with the treetop ropes course. He would isolate himself, like Leon had, for his own safety.

He reached for a branch, but his hand froze.

What if
he
was twisted too, just like they were, and he didn’t know it? Had
he
done anything that might have made Cora run? He’d just been trying to show her that he loved her. He’d been trying to keep them both safe from removal.

The hair on his arms started to rise. He stared at it in the moonlight, and then whirled in the clearing. That pressure usually meant the Caretaker was coming. He wound the jump rope around his knuckles, ready to use it to strangle him as soon as he appeared.

As soon as the Caretaker flickered into the clearing, Lucky jumped him. He managed to get the rope around his neck, pull it taut so it dug into the creature’s metallic skin, but then the air rushed out of Lucky’s lungs, and he felt himself flying across the clearing. His back collided with the mulched chips.

Before he could sit, the Caretaker was standing over him, one booted foot resting on his chest.

“I have an offer for you,” the Caretaker said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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49

Cora

IN THE MORNING, CORA
blinked awake on an unfamiliarly hard bed. Her vision focused on a black panel with a starry sky. The smell of ozone lingered on the air. She stretched out, reveling in having slept soundly through the entire night for the first time in weeks, and then gasped. She jerked upright. The light from the wall seams, the empty shelves . . . she’d fallen asleep in Cassian’s bedroom. The events of the previous day came rushing back: how, in that murky time between awake and asleep, she’d wanted his lips on hers. It was a mortifying thought—all the worse because he must have been able to read her mind.

His door opened, and he entered. She stood in a rush, smoothing out her dress and her hair, looking everywhere but at his eyes.

“It is time to return to your enclosure.”

His demeanor was perfectly even. Emotionless. Cora envied him that ability.

He led her to the control room, every move perfectly mechanical and by the book, just as it had been on the day of the medical examinations, after he’d slipped and said her name by accident. It wasn’t until he had stabbed the apparatus through his chest and dematerialized them both into the peach orchard that she observed any emotion at all.

His hand flexed a little too hard by his side. “One final day. Continue to disobey, and I will have no choice but to take you to the Harem.”

With that, he was gone.

Cora watched the grass blow around the place where his two heavy boots had stood. He—her jailer, her captor—was risking so much for her. She made her way toward town, winding through the maze of peach trees, trying to find the right words to convince the others to escape with her. They were furious at her, thinking she was trying to sabotage them. Not to mention, she’d knocked Lucky out and run.

She reached the edge of the town and shrank behind a tree. Nok and Rolf were playing croquet on the lawn between the house and the movie theater. Those two were frighteningly unstable, especially after all the accusations they’d thrown at her in the diner. She skirted behind the row of shops until she was close enough to overhear their conversation.