The Cage (15 page)
Authors: Megan Shepherd
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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MALI TWIRLED CORA’S HAIR
tighter around her finger. “Your hair is quite pretty, do you know that. The Kindred have very dark hair and most humans do too. It is rare to find one with hair so light.” She paused. “If you give me some perhaps I will tell you.”
Cora jerked backward. “You want my
hair
?”
“Only a small piece.”
Lucky cleared his throat. “Yeah, that’s not happening—”
“Wait.” Cora took a deep breath. “I’ll give you some—one lock. But you have to tell us first how to block our thoughts.”
Lucky shot her a look like she’d lost her mind, but Cora ignored him. She shook a strand of hair tantalizingly. “Do we have a deal?”
Mali wobbled her head—her version of a nod. “There are three ways to shield your thoughts,” she explained. “The first takes many years to learn. It is similar to a form of meditation. You must divide your mind into two streams of thought.” She pointed outside, where the ocean was crashing against the beach. “Observe the ocean. The water is warm above and cold below. The mind is the same. Let the Kindred read what is above but not in the deep. Think hard about something—the song on the jukebox—but let your true thoughts sink below. The Kindred can tell that you are hiding something, but they cannot break through.”
“That’s it?” Lucky said.
Mali wobbled her head again. “It takes me seven years to learn this.”
Cora and Lucky exchanged a look. She shrugged and practiced concentrating on the records flipping in the jukebox. Then she tried to split her thoughts to also focus on Lucky’s leather jacket. But within seconds, she’d lost all thoughts of the record, and her headache only worsened. She tried again, but her thoughts jumped from one to the other, never both simultaneously, and the effort made her restless mind throb.
She rubbed her eyes. “What are the other ways?”
“The Kindred cannot perceive your mind unless they also have a calm mind. If they are uncloaked, they cannot read anything. But it is very difficult to make them uncloak. They practice cloaking since they are very young.”
“Then what’s the third way?”
Mali pinched Cora’s arm. She yelped and jerked her arm back.
“Pain,” Mali said. “It is so strong that it hides other thoughts.”
Cora clutched the angry red spot forming on her arm. “You’ve been pinching yourself this whole time. I thought you were just crazy.”
Mali’s head wobbled in her equivalent of a shrug. She held out her hand flat. “Now. Our agreement.”
Cora forced herself not to flinch away from Mali’s scarred fingers. It went against her every instinct to hand over a piece of herself, with her DNA, to a girl who was so cozy with their captors. “What are you going to do with it?”
Mali’s face was very serious, and then her lips dipped into a smile—just for a second—and she looked young and friendly for once.
“I see why you are his favorite,” Mali said, ignoring her question. “I think at first it is just the color of your hair but it is more. You are determined. You have a sharp mind. That cannot help but intrigue him.”
“Intrigue . . . who?” Lucky asked.
A shiver ran down Cora’s back. She knew exactly who Mali was talking about. In her dream, he’d been an angel. The most beautiful face she’d ever seen, a body more powerful even than Leon’s. So powerful it was terrifying.
Cora’s hand unconsciously drifted to the tangled blond strands around her shoulders. The jukebox song kept playing, over and over. Lucky looked between Cora and the black window like he was missing something.
“Wait,” he said. “You mean the Caretaker? Is that why you get more tokens than the rest of us—you’re his
favorite
?”
“It doesn’t matter.” Cora yanked on her hair, ripping a dozen strands. She hissed at the sting of pain but passed the hair to Mali, who examined it, then carefully deposited it in the upper pocket of Rolf’s military jacket.
“You can just . . . go ahead and keep that jacket,” Rolf said from across the room.
Mali sauntered to the doorway like nothing had happened. Cora repeated Mali’s words to herself: three ways to block their thoughts. Through meditation, through pain, and when the Kindred were uncloaked. In the black window, a single shadow moved slowly to the left. Cora pressed a hand against her throbbing scalp. It hurt so badly that whoever was watching now wouldn’t hear a thing inside her head.
She stood on tiptoes to whisper in Lucky’s ear.
“I don’t care how much Mali knows about them. I don’t trust her. And I want out of here before we figure out why they’ve really taken us. So we need to find the exit. Starting in the grasslands, right now.”
WHEN CORA HAD BEEN
fourteen, her parents had taken her and Charlie to the Serengeti on a safari to see rhinos lazing in the sun and giraffes bending to drink from a watering hole. Now, as she and Lucky gazed out over the grasslands rippling with waist-high grass, goose bumps rose on her arms. It was beautiful, and desolate, and monotonous, just as the Serengeti had been. A near-perfect reproduction in miniature. The only difference was, now she and Lucky were the animals being watched.
“Sometimes I forget it’s all fake,” Lucky said.
There was a slight catch to his voice. Cora felt it too—that there was something so wrong, but also beautiful, about each habitat. As much as she might have hated the Kindred, she couldn’t deny that they were masters at what they did.
“Over there.” She pointed toward a hill. A few scattered trees dotted the landscape, along with a long, low building that looked like a rural Kenyan school.
They started through the tall grass. The wind was strong, coming in waves like the seas. As it bent the grass, it made a hollow sound, like whistling. It made Cora think of a song she’d once written, about how the fences at Fox Run, their gated community, hadn’t been that different from the ones at Bay Pines. Even the names weren’t that different: both were named after the wildlife that had been destroyed for the buildings to be built.
The school door didn’t open when Lucky tugged on it. While he circled the building, Cora examined a few uneven bricks, the first imperfections she’d seen.
“Nothing.” Lucky came around the corner and leaned against the building, frustrated.
A low chime came from the school’s bell tower.
He jerked up, head craned toward the tower. “Did you hear that bell? All I did was lean against a brick. If that’s all there is to the puzzle, they must think we’re idiots.” He pressed the same brick.
The low chime rang again. Cora’s body felt weary and her head foggy, but she forced herself to concentrate. She pressed two different bricks, and two higher-pitched chimes rang. Behind her, the wind whistled harder through the grass.
Lucky started pushing every brick in sight, but no tokens came. Finally he kicked the schoolhouse in frustration.
“Wait.” Cora grabbed his arm. “Listen.”
She closed her eyes, letting the wind wash over her. The notes began to take form, hollow and windy. It was three notes, repeated again and again. She pressed different bricks until she was able to match the exact pitch of the notes.
Tokens rained out of a slot in the school’s door, too many to catch at once.
Lucky frowned. “There must be, I don’t know, thirty tokens here. They just keep giving you more.” There was hesitation in his voice. “I guess you really are the Caretaker’s favorite.”
Before, in the ropes course, he had joked about being jealous of her extra attention. He wasn’t joking now.
“I don’t know what Mali meant by that. She’s crazy.”
But Lucky kept studying the tokens.
“You’ve been alone with him twice now.” There was a strange pitch to his voice. “On the first day when you beamed away with him, and then when he kept you behind during the medical test. Is there anything you haven’t told me? Something he said or . . . did?”
For a flash, she was back in the med room with the Caretaker’s body pressed against her, starlight radiating from the walls. She swallowed. “I told you everything. I don’t know why I get more tokens, Lucky. I swear.”
The wind picked up again, ruffling his hair. He was so handsome that it made her heart unsteady—but the look in his eyes was dangerous. Rolf had said that lab rats sense when things were unfair. Rolf had already snapped at her a few times. Even Nok had kept her distance. Why would the Kindred want them to turn on each other? Or rather, turn on
her
?
“Lucky . . .”
“No. Forget it.”
His knuckles popped, and just like that, the tension broke. He slid the tokens into his pocket like he couldn’t get rid of them fast enough, and cleared his throat. “How about that three-note melody? Pretty awful. The Kindred must not be musically gifted.”
She clung to the lighter tone in his voice and tried to work it into her own. “Don’t say that too loud. We should at least
act
like it’s good.”
He snorted. “Something tells me you’re a better actress than me. Probably inherited it from your mom.”
She gave a tired smile. At least the tension was—
wait a minute
. Her head whipped around. “How do you know my mom was an actress?”
The grin fell off his face. The wind grew colder, pushing between them. She’d trusted Lucky because he wanted to get home as badly as she did, and because he was missing a watch just like she was missing a necklace, and because if a super-intelligent race matched them together, maybe they knew what they were doing.
But Rolf had said there might be a mole.
Lucky gave a half shrug. “You know. That first night, when we were talking. I told you about my granddad, you told me about your family.” He swallowed like his throat had gone dry.
Cora’s suspicion started to slip away. She
had
told him that her dad was a politician—but she didn’t remember saying anything about her mom. Her mind started to concoct all kinds of conspiracy theories, but she shook her head. No. Paranoia was too rampant here, and it was a short leap to full-on madness.
“Right.” She rubbed her temples. “It’s because I haven’t slept much, and with these headaches on top of everything . . . it makes me forgetful.”
Lucky hesitated, then reached into his pocket and tossed her a token. “No worries. Here. Buy yourself something nice, like a Slinky you can strangle that Caretaker with. He’d never expect that from his
favorite
.”
She caught the token, and the uneasiness was gone. Any boy who could joke about murdering their alien overlords was someone she could trust.
She gave him a sly smile. “Just wait until you see what I can do with a toothbrush.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
..................................................................
AFTER THAT CRAZY GIRL
with the stringy black hair so casually told them about kids kept as pets and black market traders who sold knuckle bones, Nok had nightmares for three days straight.
She refused to take a step outside of the town.
If she ignored the lack of traffic and unmoving sun and weird mash-up of cultures, she could almost delude herself into believing she lived in a quaint town, somewhere beachy and flashy, like Florida. She told herself the headaches were just allergies.
Cora and Lucky were braver than her—or more foolish. They went out every day to the far reaches of the enclosure, still trying to find the walls, while Leon did god knows what in the jungle, and Mali wandered through the habitats like she’d never seen trees or pumpkins or beach umbrellas before—which maybe she hadn’t.
Nok stayed behind, with Rolf, and earned tokens from the puzzles in town. The candy store was her favorite. She could have done without the pastel paint and the bins of every type of candy imaginable—licorice, mints, butterscotches—but the puzzle might as well have been designed just for her.
She approached the big metal cash register on the counter, an enormous silver thing that looked a hundred years old, with round buttons and a lever to open the cash drawer. The buttons had letters on them instead of numbers, and where the price should have been displayed was a card behind glass with nonsense words printed on it:
LIP LO POL
.
Nok smirked. This one was the easiest yet.
She tapped a few keys, and the new word she’d spelled out appeared in the window box:
LOLLIPOP
.
A token rolled out of the register. She snatched it and started for the door, but paused at the glistening bin of butterscotches. She wiped her mouth. Was that
drool
?
Rolf appeared in the doorway. “You solved another anagram? Nice.” He’d been in the arcade again, she could tell. He only rumpled his hair like that when he was playing video games.
He peeked at the card. “Lollipop? You never said they were so easy. Let me try one.” He punched a button on the cash register, and another anagram card popped up.
AT ECO LOCH
. He frowned, trying to figure it out, until Nok took pity on him. She punched in a few keys.
CHOCOLATE
appeared on the card, along with another token.
“Aren’t you supposed to be some kind of genius?” she teased.
“With math and physics, maybe.” She couldn’t help but notice his hands were resting calmly at his sides. He rarely twitched his fingers anymore when it was just the two of them. “You’re the one with a gift for languages. No wonder the Kindred wanted you. Smart
and
the most beautiful creature on Earth.”
She blushed, letting the pink strand of hair fall over her eyes. It was true that she’d picked up English within weeks of arriving in London and had gone on to learn seven more languages from the other models. Delphine had only sneered when she’d asked if she could start taking translator classes.
Speaking foreign languages doesn’t make you smart,
Delphine had said, chewing on a black licorice rope,
if you have nothing of merit to say. And you, girl, look prettiest when you keep your mouth shut.