The Cage (16 page)

Rolf took her hand in his. “I have a present for you.”

Nok’s eyebrows shot up as he pulled her next door into the arcade. The video games blinked and beeped on their own like ghosts were working the controls.

Rolf covered her eyes with his hands. “I don’t want you to see yet.”

She laughed as he led her blind between the beeping games. After sharing a room with four other girls for so many years, she’d missed the warmth of another person.

“Okay. Look.” He removed his hands, and she blinked. Sitting on top of the arcade’s counter was the shiny red radio.

She drew in a breath. No one had ever given her a present before, except some of Delphine’s photographers, who’d been hoping to take a little more of her than just a photograph. “You got this for me?”

Rolf ruffled his hair nervously. “You said you liked listening to the radio back in London. I don’t know if this plays any Thai music.” He was leaning very close to her, twisting a dial, and his cheek brushed hers. He jerked up, blinking fast. “Sorry . . . I’m sure it’s plainer than what you’re used to. You probably had a huge entertainment system at home.”

She wrinkled her face, confused—she’d never even owned a TV—but then remembered that he thought she was a famous model.

“No, I love it!” She threw her arms around him. “Oh, but you must have used your tokens to get this, yeah?” She pulled back, looking at the radio reluctantly. “We were supposed to save those for Cora.”

Rolf was quiet. He rubbed his temples, eyes squeezed shut, like pain was throbbing in his skull.

“What’s wrong?” Nok asked. “This isn’t about her getting more tokens again, is it?” It was a topic that had come up more than a few times, as each evening when the others returned, Cora’s pockets were loaded with tokens. Last night, when they’d compared their haul, Cora had sixty. Rolf, who’d spent ten straight hours in the arcade, had earned six. “Just forget about it. You look like your head’s killing you. You should lie down.”

“That’s just it, Nok. I thought the strange angles and optical illusions were giving me a headache, but it’s actually making everything clear. I can think better now . . .” He shook his head, blinking fast. “I understand those rats now, the ones that revolt when they receive unfair rewards. It isn’t that the rats are just stupid, jealous animals. Any solid society is built on the foundation of fairness. That’s why monarchies topple. That’s why governments experimented with communism. When you lose fairness, you lose what makes us human.”

“Or what makes us rats,” Nok offered, hoping for lightness.

But Rolf didn’t seem to hear her. “You were right when you said I shouldn’t be ashamed to be smart. That’s why I like you. You see me for who I am, and you
like
me. So I have been. Letting myself think, I mean. And my mind is telling me something doesn’t add up with Cora. All the times she’s disappeared off with the Kindred. The favoritism. I’m not saying she’s the mole, but . . .” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “All I’m saying is, she isn’t the only one who can come up with a plan.”

He picked up the radio.

“This is
my
plan: to make us happy. If a few tokens go missing here or there, Cora doesn’t have to know. Besides, I already examined it. There’s no transmitter, so there’s no way we could radio anyone for help. It’s just a toy. For you.”

For a moment, the sounds of the arcade surrounded them, the flashing lights spilling out on Rolf’s face, turning it blue, then orange, then red. Nok’s heart twisted a little bit with each one. She hated that the others didn’t see how valuable his genius was. She hated that Leon bullied him. Maybe he was right—they deserved a little happiness.

Rolf put his hands over hers, holding the radio tightly.

“I know this place was scary at first.” The lights of the games reflected in his eyes. “But it really is engineered to keep us safe and happy.”

She swallowed. “But Cora says—”

He was always looking away, at his toes or at the floor, but this time, he looked her square in the eyes. “I don’t care what Cora says. I know I’m supposed to hate it here and want to go home, but the truth is, life was bad for me there.”

She rubbed his hand, petting him like a wounded bird.

His eyebrows knit together. “I was testing eight years ahead of my age level. My parents had my entire life planned out: graduate from Oxford at seventeen, PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT in America, a MacArthur fellowship by the time I was twenty. It was suffocating. I felt like I’d be trapped for the rest of my life. I don’t care about engineering, or Greek literature either. I want to work with plants. Have my hands in the soil. But that wasn’t academic enough. And then here . . . and you . . .” His fingers were starting to shake. “I know I’m not supposed to, but I like it here. And I really, really like you.”

The arcade games kept beeping and flashing, throwing colored pools of light over both their faces. Nok clutched the radio. Rolf’s hands clutched hers. In that moment, she felt like the arcade was the only place in the universe.

“I lied before,” she admitted. “Life was bad for me at home too. I’m not some top model. My parents sold me to a seedy modeling agency that’s only a step above an escort service. I’d have been stuck with them forever, or until I was too old and they threw me onto the street.”

She hung her head, worried he wouldn’t like her anymore.

But his hands didn’t let go of hers.

“I’d have done anything to save you from that life,” he said. “I still would.”

She looked up in surprise. She wasn’t sure what impulse made her do it, but she kissed him.

Rolf went rigid; despite what he claimed about having had sex before, he went as stiff as though it was his first kiss. But then he kissed her back, a little too soft and a little unsure of himself, but to Nok it was perfect. She had kissed boys before, but always to get something. Delphine had taught her well. And yet when she kissed Rolf, all she wanted was to be kissed back.

The next day, when Cora and Lucky went to the alpine biome to explore, Nok and Rolf kissed again while sitting in the movie theater’s red plush seats, and then the next day in the French salon, and it only got better and better.

In another week, they were obeying all the rules—even the third one.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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24

Cora

SAND CLUMPED IN CORA’S
toes as she searched the beach for a seashell. Since she rarely slept, she’d started rising before first light to collect seashells, which she left in a stack on her windowsill, one for each day. Today’s would be the fifteenth. And yet the pink streak in Nok’s hair hadn’t grown out, and neither had anyone’s fingernails or the boys’ facial hair.

What was happening to time?

The dull ache of exhaustion throbbed in her head. She lost her focus and her toe snagged on something hard. She crouched down to find a snow-white shell. Like all the rest, it had no sharp edges, as though it had been worn smooth by years of sand and sea. Or, rather, engineered to appear that way.

The hair on her arms rose. Her headache increased, like pressure was building. She shoved the shell in her dress pocket and spun toward the town. Was the Caretaker coming? Or had that tingle on her arms only been the sea breeze?

She climbed the stairs to the nearest shop, the bookstore. Inside was a different world. England at the turn of the century. Two leather club chairs and a brocade-covered settee in the middle of the room, with a tea set on the coffee table. The shelves were made of elegant wood packed with beautiful cloth-bound volumes that smelled like must and rain. They weren’t real books—she had already checked. They made up the puzzle, which involved categorizing the volumes by title and color. The real books were enclosed behind the glass countertop.
The Hobbit
.
Charlotte’s Web
. The complete boxed set of Dating the Duke romance novels. All available for a few tokens each.

But it wasn’t the books she was interested in. The hair on her arms was still tingling, and she faced the black window behind the counter, keeping her distance. She ran her thumb over the seashell’s hard edge, reminding herself that nothing here was real. Not the shell. Not the bookstore. Not even time itself.

But the Caretaker—he was real.

Cora leaned against the counter. “Are you there?”

She had meant to sound accusatory, and yet the words came out as a whisper. She’d sounded almost curious. Guilt cut into her, and she whipped her gaze out the bookstore door. What if Lucky caught her trying to talk to Cassian?

She turned back to the window. Yes, she was curious about him. And yes, she knew that was sick, but she couldn’t help it. It didn’t mean she wasn’t also desperate to wrap the metal guitar strings around his neck and
squeeze
.

She rested the pads of her fingers on the humming window. The vibrations entered her. The ache grew in her head. She pushed through the pain to peer into the murky blackness, longing to see a shadowy figure—
his
shadowy figure—and to know she wasn’t alone.

“Cassian? Are you there?”

She wanted answers. Why he had saved her from the Warden. Why she got more tokens than everyone else. If all humans felt a spark of electricity when he touched them, or if it was just her. Her shaking fingertips coiled into her palm, making a tight fist against the panel. In her dreams, she thought he was an angel. A beautiful face to chase away the nightmares. He
was
beautiful. But instead of taking her away from nightmares, he had brought her into one.

The throb in the back of her head grew. Or rather, it changed. It spread at the base of her head like soft needles, not entirely unpleasant but strange. The colors of the toy store seemed to grow brighter, and her balance tipped like she was drunk, and a sharp
tug
came from the other side of the window.

She shoved away from it. Her vision returned to normal, her skin calmed, but her heart still raced. Had he reached into her head? The sensation was different from the normal headaches that came whenever she looked at an angle that wasn’t right. This one felt almost . . . pleasurable.

“There you are.”

With a start, she turned. Lucky stood in bookstore’s doorway, hair still sleep tangled, but his eyes were bright. They darkened at her expression.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The word came out too fast. She stepped away from the black window and set the seashell on the glass countertop. “I was just getting this. For our calendar.” She smiled, hoping he couldn’t tell how fast her pulse was racing. She tapped on the glass counter top and cleared her throat. “I noticed that the copy of
Robinson Crusoe
is gone. The radio’s gone from the toy store too, and the teddy bear.”

“You think the Kindred took them?”

“They must have, but it doesn’t make sense.” The black window hummed, and Cora pinched her arm, hard, so they wouldn’t be able to read her mind. She pulled Lucky away from the window and lowered her voice. “If they knew we were planning to use the prizes as weapons, they would have taken the guitar strings and the boomerangs. Those are a lot more dangerous than a teddy bear.”

Lucky gave a shrug, looking tired. “There’s no understanding them.”

The black window hummed louder. She tried very, very hard to ignore it.

They started down the long path toward the desert. They’d spent nearly every day in the biomes together, winning tokens and mapping the area. They hadn’t found the fail-safe exit, or anything to indicate how large the enclosure was, but Cora hadn’t lost hope.

Her legs burned as they climbed the tallest dune. Aside from the vast empty valley she’d woken in, the desert was filled with Egyptian-like ruins. There weren’t any pyramids or temples, only dusty sandstone walls that stretched into infinity, winding around each other in impossible twists and turns that made her wonder if it was more Kindred technology messing with her perception. At the very top of the dune, a copse of palm trees surrounded a pool of crystal-clear water. A black window, set into a crumbling sandstone wall, overlooked it. Even though the wall was only two feet wide, she knew there was somehow a viewing chamber behind it.

She shivered and looked away.

“I think it’s a maze,” Lucky said.

“It can’t be a maze.” Cora knelt by the pool to splash water over her limbs. Her skin still throbbed from whatever had happened in the bookstore, when her vision and balance had faltered, but she ignored it. “A maze has openings and dead ends, and this has none.”

They started down the dune, sliding more than walking, heading for the closest of the sandstone walls. It ran forever in either direction; if they were going to go deeper into the ruins, they’d have to climb it. They followed it until they reached a place where the wall had crumbled enough that they could scramble to the top.

They balanced on the wall and dusted off their hands. Cora counted at least a dozen places where the circular stone walls were so collapsed they might be able to scale them. Others were deteriorating from the bottom, forming tunnels they might be able to crawl through.

A tingle spread through her nerves. “Wait—it
is
a maze. But not a regular one. See those places where the stone is crumbling at the top or at the bottom, making a tunnel? We have to climb up or under. It’s a vertical maze, not a horizontal one. The tokens must be in the center.”

Lucky raised an eyebrow. “Race you?”

Her limbs were heavy with exhaustion from lack of sleep, but his grin energized her. She took a deep breath. “You’re on.”

She took off, fighting the burn in her muscles, looking for a place to climb under the next wall, while Lucky tried his luck scaling the top. The sand warmed her bare feet; she found a tunnel and crawled through into a tighter ring, and followed it until she could scramble over. An oasis waited on the other side. She paused for a drink of water. When she looked up, her own face looked back at her from a black window. Her reflection showed deep circles and sunken eyes, but a grin.