The Cage (25 page)

Her candy-blue lips pulled him from his thoughts. The same shade of blue as the cubes in the Kindred’s medical room. He’d studied them at first to distract himself from the idea of stripping nude, and then because curiosity set in. There had been one above each doorway. Several more built into the cabinets. Both the doors and cabinets had opened automatically according to the Kindred’s thoughts—and then it had hit him.

The physical equipment was different, but the theory was similar to the research his colleagues at Oxford’s robotics lab had done on brain waves controlling prosthetic limbs. The blue cubes had to be thought amplifiers. Which meant the Kindred weren’t as powerfully psychic and telekinetic as the others believed. It also meant, if the cubes could be modified, it would hamper the Kindred’s abilities.

A fact Cora would die to know. A fact he would never tell her.

“If I’m going,” he said to Nok, pulling her into his lap on impulse, “then you’re coming too!” She shrieked in surprise as he pushed them down the mountain together. It was a challenge with her added weight and his restricted view. The wind flew by them, making Nok squeal with delighted fear and clutch him harder. They passed trees in a blur:
Abies recurvata
and
Ducampopinus
. Her hair brushed his cheek. The snow kissed their faces. He adjusted their angle, and they moved faster, faster, until Lucky and Mali had to jump out of the way as they shot straight into a snowbank.

They flew off the sled, tangled around each other, and landed in the soft snow. Rolf was half buried in it, numb except for the fire raging in his heart.

Earth? Good riddance.

Lucky picked up the token that had slid out of a trough at the bottom of the sledding course. “Here. You earned it.” Heavy worry lines framed his face. He had to be as aware as the rest of them that it was the twenty-first day, and Cora showed no signs of returning. But he tried for a tired half grin. “I’ve never seen anyone navigate the course that fast.”

Lucky tossed the coin to Rolf, who caught it triumphantly. He’d always wanted a friend as cool as Lucky. Soon, once Lucky got over his grief, he’d have a girlfriend
and
a best friend.

They tromped home through the snow, and he and Nok paused to make a snowman that looked like the Caretaker. Then they returned to town and goaded Lucky into pulling out the guitar. The town square was summery warm. Nok stripped off her snow-soaked dress and jumped in the stream in her underwear, while Lucky played an old country song he said his granddad had taught him. Rolf mentally laid out a new plan for the farm.
Asparagus officinalis
by the barn and
Phaseolus vulgaris
beans along the fence. Under his leadership, they wouldn’t even need the diner. Maybe next year the Kindred would let him design all the gardens.

Nok didn’t bother to get dressed after her swim and laid out on the grass to dry in her underwear. Christ, but she was beautiful. Her long limbs gleamed in the sunlight. She tapped her toes in time with Lucky’s music.

“I love a guy who can play guitar,” she said dreamily, rolling over in the grass.

Lucky grinned back, and Rolf sucked in a sharp breath. His fingers started tapping, and he forgot about the
Asparagus officinalis
and
Phaseolus vulgaris
. Why was she looking at Lucky so adoringly? Rolf had been the one who won the guitar.
He
was the one keeping them alive. Nok let out another peal of laughter from some joke Lucky had made, and red flared into Rolf’s cheeks. His eye started twitching.

He stood abruptly and headed for the house.

“Where are you going?” Nok called.

He got his pillowcase of tokens from their bedroom, then pushed through the saloon-style toy store doors, slamming tokens into the counter. He got the painting kit so Nok could draw the birds she missed. The Curious George book set so he could read to her every night. He stuffed all the toys, along with handfuls of candy, into the pillowcase. He carried everything back to the town square and emptied it on the grass.

“What’s all this?” Nok dug through the toys with wide eyes. “It looks like Christmas!”

“Yes, Norwegian style. The gnomes have decided you’ve been very good boys and girls,” Rolf said, emptying the rest of the pillowcase. “It’s time for a celebration.”

Nok tore through the presents, showing Mali the best ones and explaining what they were for. Rolf smiled until Lucky silenced the guitar with a hand on the strings.

“A celebration of
what
?” Lucky’s voice had an edge.

Rolf glanced at Nok, letting his gaze slide to her bare back, her bare legs. A celebration of her. A celebration of the Kindred. A celebration of having everything he had ever wanted. “A celebration of making it to the twenty-one day mark and still being here.”

A shadow passed over Lucky’s face. “We aren’t all still here.”

Rolf paused. He should have picked his words more carefully. Lucky still thought the Caretaker had taken Cora, but Rolf knew that logically, she had to still be there.

“We’ve all lost people we love.” Rolf tried to keep his voice diplomatic.

Nok found the painting set and started setting out the pots of rainbow colors in the grass. She selected a fat brush and dipped it into the green.

“The way you two are acting,” Lucky said testily, watching her, “playing around while Earth is gone, makes it seem like you don’t even care.” When they didn’t answer, he went back to plucking on the guitar, sunk into a dark mood.

Oblivious to their argument, Nok drew a flower on the back of her hand, a purple lollipop sticking out of her mouth.

Why should she grieve?
Rolf wondered. All she’d lost on Earth were parents who’d sold her into indentured servitude, and an apartment full of sickly thin girls, and a talent manager who might as well have been a whorehouse madam. He didn’t have much to grieve, either: his parents had never been affectionate; always pushing him to work harder, isolating him from kids his age. The only people in his life he’d interacted with had been a steady stream of bullies: Karl Crenshaw and the cricket bat. The schoolmates who made fun of his glasses. A professor who had forced him into public speaking.

They’re all gone now,
Rolf consoled himself. He picked up a lollipop from the pile and spun it lazily in his mouth.

“Hey, Mali,” Nok said. “Take off your jacket. I want to paint on you, yeah?”

A branch snapped near the side of the movie theater, and Rolf spun on his heels. Was it Cora and Leon, spying on them? He’d never trusted that lumbering Neanderthal. Nothing had delighted Rolf more than when he’d banished himself to the jungle.

Rolf took a step closer to Nok, protectively. Mali had shrugged out of the military jacket, and Nok was using her body as a canvas, drawing bright blue swirls all over her arms. Empty chocolate wrappers surrounded them. Nok’s lips were stained bright purple from lollipops.

“You too, Rolf,” Nok said. “Take off your shirt. I’ll paint you next.”

He cast one look back toward the jungle behind the movie theater, searching for the moving shape of a tattooed Maori or a small blond girl, but the leaves were quiet now.

He sat in the grass and pulled his shirt over his head, and closed his eyes. Rolf would be a canvas if she wanted him to be. He’d be anything for her. He’d be
everything
for her.

Nok dotted his nose with paint, and he fell just a little bit more in love with her.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

36

Cora

CORA COULDN’T STOP SHAKING
as Cassian led her down the dank burrows back to the austere upper levels. The shock of seeing the menageries had lulled her into silence. Caged kids. Missing fingers. Drugged eyes. Cora’s chest knotted with longing for this whole nightmare to be over. She wanted to play in the backyard with Sadie. She wanted to pick up where she left off, be back in Charlie’s Jeep, scrawling lyrics.

Home is the place you never know . . .

Until there is no more home . . .

Cassian’s head cocked toward hers; it was usually difficult to gauge where exactly he was looking, but this time she felt the heat of his gaze. “I thought showing you this alternative would make you content in your environment. Yet in your head, you are only more determined to return to Earth.”

Cora nodded.

“Cora, your home . . .” He stopped. “Never mind.”

They walked in more silence, Cassian’s hand balling into a fist and releasing. There was something he wasn’t telling her, but no matter how she searched his dark eyes, she couldn’t see into his head.

A door slid open, revealing the star-lit medical room. Cassian held out a hand to stop her. “
This
is your home now. You must accept that.” He removed her shackles mechanically. While he readied the rematerialization apparatus, she leaned against the examination table, running a fingernail over her lips. The pull of home was too strong to give up on. She glanced at the doorway that had closed behind them.

Planning escapes had practically been an extracurricular activity at Bay Pines; Cora and her roommate used to lie awake at night swapping far-fetched ideas, most of them stolen from bad action movies. She’d never taken their planning seriously, but four months after she’d been there, a girl two rooms down had succeeded. She’d bribed a guard to unlock her room at night, then sneaked to the kitchen, which was run by outside contractors she’d paid off to smuggle her out in a vat of food scraps so the guard dogs wouldn’t smell her.

Cora bit on a jagged fingernail. The space station was hardly a juvenile detention facility outside Cincinnati, but maybe she could use some of the same tactics. Trading information. Bribery. Cassian had said that the Mosca only cared about payment. . . .

Cassian’s head jerked to hers, and Cora pinched her thigh, hoping Mali was right that pain could block the Kindred’s ability to read minds.

His black eyes scanned her face. “You are trying to hide something from me.”

She pinched herself harder. “No.”

“You should not inflict pain upon yourself.” His chest was rising and falling a little quickly. It made her remember his face so close in the fountain room, his lips just an inch from hers. . . .

He shoved the apparatus into his chest and darted out a hand to pull her close. He whispered in her ear.

“Obey the rules. Please.”

It was no longer an order. It was a request, and one of the few times Cora had heard his voice sound anything other than mechanical. “I’m not the only one watching you,” he said. “I cannot protect you forever.”

HE RETURNED HER TO
the empty drugstore. Beyond the doorway, sunshine spilled over the green grass. Cora stumbled toward the light.

She blinked a few times, clearing her foggy head, reminding herself that the crickets chirping weren’t real. The sunlight was fake. It was as much a fabricated prison as the menagerie. At the heart of it, they weren’t any different from those drugged kids.

Nok and Rolf were stretched out on the grass, dressed only in their underwear, playing with the painting kit. Not far away, Mali was toying with the radio, twisting the volume to make the voices rise and fall, rise and fall. Blue paint coated her arms. Rolf had blue streaks over one arm too, and was in the midst of painting a yellow swirl on Nok’s stomach. He dotted her cheek with paint and she laughed, trying to take the brush from him, getting gooey blobs of paint all over them. Their candy-stained lips met, and the brush fell from his hand. They started making out, right in front of Mali and the dozens of black windows.

And the Kindred thought humankind was evolving? If anything, it was
de
volving.

A hand clamped over her shoulder, and she jumped.

Lucky stood behind her, guitar half forgotten in one hand. His dark eyes raked over her. The last time they’d been together, everything had changed. She had thought she’d found a friend in him. More than that. Someone who made her feel less alone, a boy with a broken hand and a dimple in one cheek, and yet it had all been a lie.
We need to grow up,
his voice echoed in her head. He had betrayed her the night of the accident, and he had betrayed her here too, when he said he didn’t believe in escape. Cora’s heart didn’t know how fast to beat.

Should she shove him away? Or forgive him?

He answered the questions in her head when he let the guitar fall into the grass, forgotten. He pulled her into his arms.

She clenched her eyes shut. She couldn’t bring herself to hug him back. She couldn’t quite pull away either.

“What happened?” His voice sounded older.

She shook her head against his shoulder. “Where’s Leon? I want everyone to hear this.”

“No one’s seen him in days.”

“Days?”
Cora pulled away, confused. She glanced toward Nok and Rolf, who hadn’t yet noticed that she was back. “I’ve only been gone a couple of hours.”

Lucky was very quiet, searching her eyes with his own. “You’ve been gone three days.”

Her heart pounded harder. The Kindred controlled the sunlight, so they could set a day to be however long they wanted. So did this mean instead of four more days until she faced removal, she only had one? It was already the
twenty-first day
?

Mind racing, she hurried over to where the others were sprawled. Nok glanced at her briefly, then went back to mixing paint. “Hey. You’re back.”

She spoke casually, like Cora had gone on a stroll to the beach, not been taken by the Kindred for three days. And yet Cora detected a flicker of annoyance in her voice—at interrupting her painting, or at being back at all, she wasn’t sure.

Rolf didn’t even pretend to be pleased to see her. “Come back to apologize, I hope?”

“Apologize for what?”