The Cage (5 page)

Tokens rained out of the slot.

Rolf hurried over. “Ten tokens?” He blinked too fast. “That doesn’t make any sense. If anything, the game I solved was harder, but I only got one.” His blue-green eyes blinked in confusion.

Cora rubbed her eyes. “I don’t want them—you guys take them.”

“I’ve got all the nail polish I need, sweetheart,” Leon said.

Rolf ran his fingers over the tokens, comparing them to the one he had won. “It just doesn’t make any sense. It counters the philosophy behind conditioned responses. The most effective way to reinforce a lab rat’s behavior is through random rewards. For example, if a rat runs a maze ten times, you only reward it six out of the ten times. The uncertainty makes the rat focus harder.” Rolf frowned at Cora’s pile of tokens, versus his meager one. “But with a system of random rewards, you still have to be consistent from rat to rat. Even rats sense unfairness. It causes them to get extremely frustrated.”

“Maybe the people put us here aren’t scientists,” Lucky said. “They could just be twisted. This could be some sick kind of torture.”

Everyone was quiet. Cora eyed Lucky carefully, from the way he habitually popped his knuckles like they ached him, to the small scar on his chin. What had happened to him, to make his mind go to such a dark place?

“Don’t think like that,” she said. “At least not yet. Come on.”

The group filed back outside.

Cora shaded her eyes, looking down the row of buildings. “All the rest of the shops—”

“Hang on.” Nok cocked her head, pink streak of hair falling in her face. “Do you hear that?”

At first Cora heard nothing, but then faint notes reached her ears. A song. It sounded like recorded music, old-fashioned, that made her think of crooners dressed in tuxedos. Then the lyrics began.

A stranger in my own life . . .

It was coming from one of the shops. The diner. Lucky started toward it, but Cora clamped her hand onto his.

“Wait,” she whispered.

A ghost behind my smile . . .

A coldness started somewhere at the base of her skull and spread. The memory returned of riding in Charlie’s car, wanting so badly to reach that resort where their parents waited for them, her crumpled notebook in her lap, making up lyrics.
Those
lyrics. The same ones playing now. She whirled toward the source of the music with a feeling like the world was spinning just a little too fast.

Not at home in paradise . . .

Not at home in hell . . .

A sign flashed above the diner:
THE GREASY FORK
. It flashed again and again, beckoning them.

“Hey, you okay?” Lucky asked.

“This song.” Her voice came out hoarse. “These lyrics. They’re . . . mine.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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8

Cora

VERTIGO HIT CORA AS
if the past and present were intertwining.

“You mean . . . you know this song?” Lucky asked.

She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I
wrote
these lyrics. It was the last thing I was doing before I woke up here. Someone must have stolen my notebook, hired a singer, and recorded the song. That’s so elaborate. Why would anyone do that?”

Everyone was silent.

She reached for her necklace, and felt only emptiness.

Leon tugged off his tie and let it fall to the grass. “They’re twisted shits, that’s why.” He climbed the diner stairs with a look like he’d kill whoever was in there. After a minute, he stuck his head back out.

“There’s no one here.” He sounded disappointed.

Cora started up the steps. Inside, old-fashioned lamps cast a smoky glow over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths. There was a long counter, and three tables with two chairs each. A black window hummed from the wall, murky shadows floating behind it like ghosts.

“There’s the source of your music.” Lucky pointed to a jukebox against the back wall. “It must be programmed to play automatically at certain times.”

A stranger in my own life . . .

A ghost behind my smile . . .

Cora closed her eyes. This song was supposed to be private, meant to live only in the pages of a notebook. It was about the night of the accident, when her mother had first threatened to file for divorce. No one wanted a scandal, so Cora had attended her father’s political fund-raiser at the last minute in her mother’s place.
A Mason smiles, even if her heart is breaking.
She’d worn a green silk dress with lace down the back. On the car ride home, while her father drove, she’d rested her head against the cool glass and listened to the smooth voices on NPR, watched the stars overhead, and made a wish that a smile really could solve everything.

When she opened her eyes, Lucky was looking at her strangely, like he had when they’d first met on the beach. She touched her cheek self-consciously, wondering if her face looked as sunken and heavy as she felt.

“Hey.” Leon slammed his fist on the jukebox. “Are they just going to play this song on repeat? What gives?” His head dipped as he searched for buttons. The controls slid around, but nothing happened, almost as if they weren’t controls at all.

“Perhaps it is another puzzle,” Rolf said quietly.

Cora leaned against the counter, still feeling dazed. The army. The helicopters. The police. They should have been there by now.

Leon stabbed a finger in Rolf’s direction. “If it’s a puzzle, solve it, genius.”

Rolf trudged over to the jukebox. His fingers flew over the blocks, but nothing he tried worked. Lucky took a try too, but he didn’t make any more progress.

The song continued.

Outside, the sunlight faded to the golden color of late afternoon, not suddenly but all at once, like someone had flipped a switch. Cora whirled toward the doorway.

“Did you guys see the light change?” Nok pointed outside. “That’s impossible, yeah?”

A clicking noise came from the countertop, and a trapdoor opened, revealing six trays of food. Curry over rice, looking so normal and innocent that it was terrifying. No one made a move.

Rolf’s eyes were wide. “I think it’s safe to assume we’re in a heavily controlled environment. It appears our food arrives not according to solving a puzzle but in correspondence to the light changing. Perhaps because food is a resource we require, whether we can solve puzzles or not. I would imagine this is supposed to be dinner.”

Leon grabbed one of the trays. “Dinner. Breakfast. Whatever, as long as it goes down and stays down.”

“Don’t eat it.” Lucky pointed to the sixth tray, which was empty. “One of us is already gone, remember? The girl Cora and I found. It could be poisoned.”

Leon ignored him and dug into the curry. Cora and the others watched in horrified fascination. He only paused midbite, cheeks full. “In case you were wondering, it’s bloody delicious.”

Halfway through Leon’s meal, the light outside changed again, dropping from dusk to night abruptly. The trays sank back into the counter, as if the food had never existed.

Cora went to the doorway, where Lucky stood with his arms folded across his chest. Across the square, the lights of the Victorian house had come on, blazing in the darkness. The front door was wide open.

“The army isn’t coming, is it?” she asked quietly.

Lucky popped the knuckles of his left hand. “I don’t think so.”

She shivered, though the night was mild. “Whoever put us here turned on the lights in the house. They want us to go there, I think. Pretend this place is real, like dolls in a play world. It feels wrong—like they’re setting us up for something.”

“Something like what happened to the girl on the beach?”

Cora hugged her arms. “Maybe.”

“It’s useless to resist.” Rolf’s shock of red hair popped up between them. “We’re like the lab rats. The scientists control the experiment; the rats have no choice but to obey.”

“And if they don’t?”

“The scientists will throw them out and get new rats.”

“Throw them out . . . like
kill
them?” Nok asked from inside the diner. At Rolf’s nod, she turned even paler.

“What’s the worst that can happen?” Leon grunted, pointing at the house. “There are flowers. And a porch swing. It’s hardly a torture den.”

He started for it, and the others had no choice but to follow.

THE HOUSE WAS JUST
as Rolf had described it: a living room downstairs and a bathroom and three bedrooms upstairs, perfectly normal except for a few odd details, like carpeting inside the fireplace, that made Cora question the sanity of their captors.

Leon poked at a framed portrait of a toaster. “This from IKEA?” he said to Rolf.

“I wouldn’t know. IKEA furniture comes from Sweden, not Norway.”

“Eh, it’s all the same up there. Cold days. Long nights. Pretty girls.”

Cora rolled her eyes and grabbed his shoulder, pushing him toward the stairs. “Keep going.”

“It’ll be safer if we all sleep in the same bedroom,” Lucky said as they climbed the stairs. “Girls on the bed, guys on the floor. I’ll take the first watch.”

“Let me,” Cora said, rubbing her dry eyes. “I’m an insomniac. I’ll be up half the night anyway.”

He shook his head. “You look like you’re about to fall over from exhaustion at any moment. All the more reason you should try to sleep. We need all the rest we can get.”

Leon gave him a wry salute and went to another room to get more pillows. He came back and threw one to Rolf. “Nighty-night, darling.” He flipped off the light.

The boys lay down on the floor while Lucky settled into the doorframe and Cora and Nok curled up beneath a blanket. Cora’s weary muscles unwound slowly, but the familiar cloudiness of insomnia settled behind her eyes—it didn’t matter how tired she was, she knew sleep wouldn’t find her. But she must have slept at some point over the last few days, because she’d had the dream about that beautiful man with the bronze-colored skin. She wished he’d opened his eyes, in the dream. She wanted to look into the face of an angel.

At home, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak downstairs and borrow her mother’s keys and cruise the Virginia back roads, listening to NPR. There had been a story once about the ways the human mind devised to cope with trauma: denial, bargaining, lethargy. The broadcaster talked about teenage girls in refugee camps who were starving and yet, when questioned, listed their biggest problem as trying to find a nice boy to take home to their parents. He said that the human mind is able to adapt to anything.

Cora wasn’t too sure about that. When she’d gone to Bay Pines, she had been the outsider: a wealthy girl from a politician’s family, charged with murder. When she’d left Bay Pines and returned home, she was an ex-con who knew how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush. That didn’t fit well with lacrosse team and cotillion classes.

She rolled over, and let lyrics form in the back of her head.

How much can we change . . .

When change is all there is . . .

The black window seemed to hum louder, or maybe it was just in her head. She didn’t know which was scarier—seeing their captors, or knowing they were there but not seeing them at all.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

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9

Nok

NOK SHIVERED IN THE
darkness. From where she lay, huddled under the thin blanket that smelled like chemicals, all that was visible through the window was the smear of night. In London, she’d never known true blackness. There’d always been headlights and fluorescent bulbs, street lights and billboards. And it was so deathly quiet. No city noises to drown her memories. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat, expecting the familiar clot of asthma—but her breath came easily.

She rolled over. “Cora, are you still awake?”

“Yeah.”

“I know this sounds crazy,” she whispered, “but I think whoever put us here cured my asthma. And when we first met, Rolf said he used to wear glasses, but his vision is perfect now. They must be super-advanced scientists to do all that, yeah? What if they aren’t . . . human?” Nok drew the blanket higher around her neck.

The other side of the bed was quiet. “You’ll never fall asleep if you start worrying about that,” Cora said at last. “Think about something better. Home. Tell me about London. The life of a model sounds so glamorous.”

Glamorous?
Nok rolled over onto her pillow.

Not exactly.

The story she’d told the others had been a detour from the truth. Her childhood had been banana leaves and
khee mao
noodles and dirt roads the color of rust. Her adolescence had been a rare trip to Bangkok with her three sisters, peppermint ice cream from blue glass bowls, a model 7scout who’d seen her from the street outside and scribbled an address on a napkin he slid to her mother.

Like winning the lottery, her family had said.

Then there’d been a plane ride, twenty other bony girls bound for Europe, giggling and striking silly model poses. The plane landed in London. She couldn’t speak a word of English. They’d taken her to a neighborhood filled with sirens and trash, up seven flights of cramped stairs to a flat packed with five girls to a room, sleeping on floor mattresses, cheap clothes and cheaper makeup strewn everywhere. Home, the model scout had said.

She hadn’t needed to speak English to understand that it was not like winning the lottery.

Nok blinked back to the present. “Home? Right—London. Oh, I’ve a gorgeous flat there. In Notting Hill, by the river. Penthouse suite with a balcony, a massive bathroom with a chandelier.”