The Cage (11 page)

“I doubt it’s an Ewok village.” He stood. “We should check it out. I’ll give you a boost, if you feel up to it.”

Cora hesitated. In seventh grade she’d climbed a high ropes course at day camp. She’d been fearless, the first one to the top, and that night her mother had invited her friends over for cake to celebrate. But that was before that horrible weightless fall when her car had plunged three stories off a bridge.

You were fearless once,
she reminded herself.

“No. I can do it.” He formed a stirrup with his hands. She stepped up and clambered up a branch, blinking through bleary eyes. Lucky hoisted himself up beside her, as effortlessly as if he’d spent his life climbing trees, and she gaped. “Maybe that’s why the Kindred took you,” she said. “Supernatural climbing ability.”

He grinned and then pointed down. “It helps to know we don’t need to worry about falling. The ground cover’s spongy pine needles. I bet we’d only bounce.”

“Yeah, they wouldn’t want to bruise any of their precious specimens.”

Slowly she climbed higher, until they reached a platform circled by a thick rope. She gripped the safety of the rope, trying to catch her breath. Ten feet away, a metal object gleamed on another platform.

“Do you see that?”

Lucky shaded his eyes. “Looks like a token chute, like in the shops.” He crouched at the platform’s edge, judging the distance, and then looked back at the rope. “The only way over is to swing across.”

“
Swing across?
Go ahead, Tarzan. I’ll wait here.”

“I’ll go first. Just watch how I do it.”

He swung out. Alone in the tree, Cora grabbed the trunk harder, eyes squeezed shut. She waited for the terrible crash as he fell, but none came. When she opened her eyes, he was standing on the next platform, dusting pine needles off his shirt.

“See?” he called. “Easy.”

“Easy for you,” she muttered. He threw the rope back. She searched her brain for words of advice from her father, but none came. She couldn’t smile her way through this one. She gripped the rope, blood pulsing in her ears.
Don’t look down.
She jumped off, shrieking as she hurtled through the air. The world was a blur. Branches and leaves and Lucky, and then his gentle laughter was in her ear, and his body was pressed against hers.

“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

She pulled away to hide the burn in her cheeks. “Okay. I’ve met my vine-swinging quota for the day. I’m ready to head to solid ground.” She punched the chute’s red button. A flood of tokens slid out. Lucky pushed it too—just one.

“I guess I’m better at this than you,” she teased.

He wrapped his fingers around his single token. The smile fell off his face. “That’s the second time you’ve gotten more for solving the exact same puzzle. Listen, maybe we should keep this just between you and me. You know what Rolf said about how lab rats get angry when they sense unfairness. Not that we’re rats, but . . . When you got more tokens before, Rolf seemed frustrated.”

She shoved the tokens in her pocket nonchalantly, but Lucky’s words stuck in her mind like a thorn. What could the Kindred hope to achieve by spreading unfairness?

“Well. At least we’re done.”

“Uh . . . not yet.” He pointed toward the clearing. “We have to climb down.”

Any sense of accomplishment she’d had collapsed.

Lucky went first, moving fast, and was on the ground in no time. Cora took a deep breath. Not letting go of the trunk, she crawled to the closest branch, her muscles shaking. Left hand, then the right. Not so bad as long as she didn’t look down.

“You’re almost there,” Lucky called. “Two more branches.”

His voice gave her enough courage to glance down. That was a mistake. The ground was dizzyingly far, telescoping toward her, and her mind was already so sleep deprived.

Her tired hands slipped.

She grabbed for the branch, but her hand glided off it, and she tumbled toward the clearing.

Lucky caught her. It was awkward and painful and she must have landed half against his head, because when she found her feet, his ear was red and his hair was ruffled.

“Whoa. That was close.” His breathing was only slightly taxed, his eyes glinting with the thrill of having finished the puzzle.

She tried to comb her hair into some semblance of neat. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were enjoying yourself.”

“Rescuing a pretty girl? I don’t mind too much.” He still held her tight. He was warm—she had missed that. The only other boy who had ever hugged her so close was Charlie. Her brother had always smelled of cologne, but Lucky was pinesap and cut grass.
Home.
The burn spread to her cheeks.

He let go of her almost reluctantly, and she almost wished he hadn’t.

Overhead, the light grew brighter.

“Noon.” Lucky slipped his token into his pocket. “We should keep going before it’s time to turn back.”

“I hope Rolf and Nok are getting along,” Cora said, as they ducked through a perfectly engineered tunnel of vines. “They’re sort of a mismatched pair.”

“Maybe the Kindred’s research found that opposites attract. Look at us—I mean, back home, guys like me don’t end up with girls like you.”

“Girls like me?”

“Rich girls. Important girls.” He paused. “Beautiful girls.”

Beautiful? Not with her eyes sunken from lack of sleep. Not with her hair tangled and wild. At least she was walking in front, where he couldn’t see her burning cheeks. The last thing she needed was to start blushing whenever he threw his dimple around. The Kindred would love that. The researchers were probably checking off boxes left and right. Attraction?
Check.
Witty banter?
Check.
Rescuing a girl in distress?
Check.

“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with opposites,” she said. “Maybe there’s some connection between the couples we don’t know about. We both lived in Virginia for a while.”

“Right. That’s true.” Lucky kept walking in silence. Cora tossed a glance over her shoulder. What wasn’t he telling her?

They crested a ridge and stopped. Ahead, colored lights twinkled between the trees. One flashed blue, another orange. Neon signs.

“Is that . . . another town?” She squinted at the lights. “Maybe there are more kids like us. Or maybe it’s where the Kindred live.”

Music slowly trickled through the trees, finding its way to her ears.

Don’t belong in paradise,

Don’t belong in hell . . .

She shot Lucky a worried look. “That’s my song.”

They pushed through the last of the forest, toward an enormous cherry tree that rose in the center of a town square exactly like theirs. Pooled in the grass was one of Leon’s ties. The same tie he had ripped off their first day.

“Oh, no,” she whispered.

“It’s our town,” Lucky said quietly. “We’ve come back.”

Across the town square, Nok and Rolf emerged from the jungle, looking stricken.

Cora ran toward them. “Did the paths loop you back too?”

Nok had gone pale. “Yeah . . . we didn’t turn once, I swear.”

A curse came from the boardwalk, where Leon came stalking up the beach. “Am I going mad? I must have tramped up that mountain for six hours, and in five minutes I was back. After a couple hundred feet, it started snowing. Looked like goddamn Siberia. Then I find sleds, a whole stack of them just sitting there, and a racecourse marked with colored flags. Rode a sled down the mountain and ended up right here on the beach.”

“I told you all trails lead back,” Rolf said. “It doesn’t matter what directions we took, or what time of day we left, or how quickly we walked.”

As though someone had flipped a switch, all the lights of the shops turned off, plunging the town into a darkness lit only by twilight.

“Um, was that supposed to happen?” Nok asked.

A single light flickered back on—the drugstore’s. It was on the end of the row of buildings, next to the boardwalk. The front door had always been sealed.

Now it was wide open.

“Finally,” Leon muttered. “Valium. Percocet. They’ve taken pity on us.”

Lucky shot him a look. “I doubt our captors want you to get high.”

Hesitantly, Cora approached the open doorway. There was no countertop. No toys or candy. No black windows. If there was a puzzle, it was well hidden.

“I’ll go in first,” Lucky said. “If anything happens, let me do the talking.”

The five of them crammed into the drugstore, which looked the same size as the other shops from the outside but was considerably smaller inside. The odd angles made her head twist with pain. She spun, looking for numbers or buttons that might indicate a puzzle.

The front door slid closed.

They were packed together like cattle, pressed against the walls, and Cora’s lungs started to seize up. She’d been claustrophobic ever since the accident, when her father’s car had crashed into the river. The doors’ automatic locks had shorted out, locking them in. Water had first swallowed her ankles. Then her knees, then her waist, until her father had broken the windshield with a flashlight.

“Hey!” Leon pounded on the door. Cora’s heart was racing. Breathing was getting hard. Nok clenched her arms tightly over her chest. Rolf’s nervous fingers were tap-tap-tapping away. Every once in a while he would rub the top of his nose, adjusting glasses that weren’t there.

The bare walls made sense now. It
wasn’t
a puzzle.

It was a trap.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

18

Cora

“CORA. STAY WITH ME.”
Lucky gripped her arm. She must look pale. Her shoulder found the wall, which was sturdy.
I won’t fall. I won’t . . .

Just as her legs went slack, Lucky caught her. The pressure in the room began to change. Leon bellowed. The hair on Cora’s arms rose, and she clutched onto Lucky as the pressure ripped her apart, piece by piece by piece. For a terrifying moment everything was a blur, like the dizzying sensation of passing out, and she thought she might have found the release of sleep of last. But then it let up, and her vision returned.

They weren’t in the drugstore anymore.

They were in a large chamber with an arched ceiling made of molded metal blocks that fit together in interlocking seams. It wasn’t the same room she had materialized in before, though the same starry light came from the seams, filling the chamber with a muted glow. A jumble of equipment was hooked to the walls like a gun armory, only there were giant needles and sensors instead of knives and triggers. Blue cubes the size of her fist pulsed above the doorway and the wall cabinets. A cold examination table sat in the middle.

Cora’s nails dug into Lucky’s leather jacket. “Look.”

In the corner was a small cage. A human girl sat locked inside, with dusky dark skin and stringy black hair hanging in her eyes. She wore a dark scrap of clothing that left her legs and arms bare, and was crouched like a feral animal, glaring at them through her braids.

“What the . . . ,” Leon started. “Who the hell are you?”

The girl didn’t answer. Either she didn’t speak English, or she didn’t care. Her hands slowly curled around the bars.

“You deaf, girl? I asked—”

The door beneath the blue cube opened, silencing him, and a Kindred woman entered. It was one of the researchers, the one with high cheekbones and a thin nose, who had spared a glance back at Cora. She ignored the poor cramped girl in the cage.

Her black hair was pulled back in a tight knot, not a hair out of place. She now wore a stiff white uniform with cerulean trim and a row of intricate knots down the side. Seven knots, Cora counted. The other researchers all had had six. Did that mean she was a higher rank? She’d been too distracted to count the Warden’s knots—seeing as he’d been choking her to death—but it had been far more.

“I am Serassi.” The woman spoke flatly. “I am your medical inspector. It is time for your physical assessments. You may disregard the human subject behind those bars. She is here for observation purposes only.”

Another door opened, and the Caretaker entered.

Cora’s breath caught. She would never get used to seeing him. His imposing size, his dreamlike beauty. Her body hummed with the memory of his touch, how foreign and frightening it had been, and how he had spared her from the Warden. Then she remembered the girl in the cage, and her fury returned.

They’re monsters. Even him.

While the Kindred exchanged words, Cora balled her fists. If she’d had the guitar string garrote right then, she could easily have wrapped it around either of their necks and
pulled
. But she had nothing. She felt helpless.

Their conversation paused. The Caretaker’s head jerked toward her an inch, as though he heard her thoughts. The back of her neck went cold, and that creeping worry returned, that maybe the Kindred
could
read their minds. But that didn’t make any sense. If the Kindred could read minds, wouldn’t they know about her plan to find the fail-safe exit and escape?

“We will call you in numerical order to approach the table,” the Caretaker said. “The medical inspector will record your body mass and perform a series of tests to evaluate your health. This process will not be painful or unpleasant unless you chose to make it so. Boy One, you are first.” He looked at Rolf. “Remove your clothing.”

Cora’s eyes went wide. Rolf’s went wider.

They wanted them
naked
?

The first day in the cage, Cora hadn’t showered or changed clothes because of the black windows in the bathroom. Eventually she’d had to. But there was a big difference between stripping in front of a black window and here, with the Kindred, not to mention the other captives and the girl in the cage.

Leon cursed. “Is he serious?”

Cora kept her eyes fixed on the Caretaker. Did he understand why they were so reluctant? Did nudity mean the same thing to his people? In the cage, the human girl watched impassively, rocking slowly back and forth. Cora started to wonder if she
was
even human.