The Cage (21 page)
Authors: Megan Shepherd
Had she even been there?
Shaken, head throbbing, he pushed farther into the jungle. He’d slept in the huts before. With the sheets, he could make himself comfortable. He could scavenge food from the farm. He didn’t need the others at all. If the Kindred wanted to punish him for it, let them try.
He paused and tilted his throbbing head toward the sky.
Sometimes he thought he could hear the moon moving.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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NO MATTER HOW FAST
Cora ran, Lucky’s words clung to her heels. All this time, he’d been lying to her. About the accident. About believing they could go home. About believing she wasn’t stealing food. She plunged into the shadows of the forest. There was no moon or stars, but her eyes adjusted. She followed the steep path toward the mountain biome, the farthest one from town.
Sweat slicked on her face. The path curved, trying to steer her back to town, but that was the last place she wanted to go. She leaped off the path onto the wild forest floor, where roots and twigs twisted at her feet. Snow began, softly at first. She ignored the blinding flakes and kept running until Lucky was far behind her and the town was a distant memory, until her foot caught and she slammed to her knees.
The shock of impact left her numb. Her frozen lungs fought to pull in air. She squeezed her throbbing toes and searched for what had made her trip.
There—a sled.
It was old-fashioned, with wooden slats and metal runners, though the edges were harmlessly spongy. Next to it were five more sleds. Leon had told them about this puzzle—some kind of racecourse.
Her body started shaking so hard it threatened to shatter. She had been running off-trail for hours, and she ended up exactly where the Kindred wanted her to be. Running in circles. Her brother, Charlie, had owned a pet rat before he’d left for college. Sometimes he would take it out and let it ride around on his shoulder, but most of the time it ran on a wheel in a corner of its cage. Running, running, running.
She felt like that rat. Running endlessly, going nowhere.
She shoved the sled down the mountain. “I’m not playing your games!”
The hair on her arms started to tingle. The pressure in the air crackled. She balled herself tight, pressing her back against a tree, not daring to look up. She knew, if she did, Cassian would be there. She clenched her jaw in anger. Well, if he really could read her mind,
good
. She focused on how much she hated him.
But when she did look up, and saw his two boots, and then him standing so stoic in the snowfall, the anger vanished. This was the person who had rescued Mali. Who had saved Cora’s own life from the Warden. Could she truly hate someone who would do that? Did he deserve her fear—or her admiration?
Cassian’s boots crunched softly as he approached. He crouched so they were eye to eye. He wasn’t wearing a coat, but he didn’t shiver. His head tilted to study the goose bumps on her bare arms.
“You should return to the house, where there is warmth, and try to sleep.”
A snowflake landed on his cheek and melted quickly. The metallic sheen to his skin had a way of absorbing the low light so that he almost glowed in the darkness—a man made of starlight. A man from her dreams. She leaned her head against the tree and squeezed her eyes shut. She had never noticed before, but snow made a sound when it fell, like rustling leaves.
“I have brought you something,” he said.
Cora opened one eye, begrudgingly curious.
He removed a small object from his uniform pocket and held it an inch from her palm. It took Cora a moment to recognize the delicate gold chain tarnished around the clasp, the golf club charm and the theater mask and the airplane. Her necklace. She had thought it destroyed forever, like Lucky’s watch and their clothes and every trace of their previous lives.
There was a new charm attached to the chain.
A dog.
“Dogs are rare here.” His expression was perfectly flat, and yet his voice fluctuated with the barest hint of emotion. “I searched hard for one, but they are considered low value, so they are not kept in this sector. I submitted a travel request to get you one, but the Warden denied it.”
The charm was old, with a dent on one of the dog’s legs. She couldn’t imagine where he had found such a thing. It did a strange thing to her to see all she truly cared about in sixteen years of life reduced to such trinkets. Her family and her dog.
It wasn’t much to hold on to.
A cold breeze blew, and she shivered. He noticed and moved to the left, blocking the wind, but it didn’t help. It was hard to imagine this otherworldly creature having a life. Did he live in a city? Did he go shopping and cook supper and spend his evenings listening to songs on the radio? And what happened in private with all that pent-up emotion he kept so tightly stored away?
He reached the necklace around her neck, but he wore no gloves. His bare fingers brushed the delicate skin of her neck, along with the sizzle of electricity. She jerked away.
“Don’t touch me.”
He regarded her like a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “I wish only to give you this present.”
When she didn’t recoil again, he reached gently to brush the hair off her neck, so he could fasten the necklace. She closed her eyes, anticipating his touch. His finger barely brushed her skin.
There.
That spark. It was such a foreign feeling, just short of painful. She wanted to feel it again and again. She felt the weight of the charms around her neck, so familiar and missed. When he let her go, she almost grabbed his hands back to feel that spark again. It was an addiction she didn’t want to have.
She pressed her hand against the charm. “What does it feel like, when you touch me?”
“Very soft,” he said. “You are very soft. Cora.”
Her fingers started throbbing over the charm, along with her heart. Unfreezing, piece by piece, but she fought against it. She curled a fist around the charms. “You think a necklace will help me sleep? I don’t want a piece of home. I want all of it.”
“Be careful, Cora. Defiance is not a desirable human value. The Warden believes that your attempt to kill me, naive though you were, betrayed a defiant spirit. He was not pleased.”
“You think?” Cora rubbed her throat. “He nearly strangled me.”
“He
was
attempting to strangle you. It would have rid him of an unpredictable human subject. I was able to convince him your actions came from fear, not defiance, and that your other traits—resilience to captivity, extensive knowledge of Earth, even the rare coloring of your hair—made up for the difference. I told him it would not happen again.” Cassian leaned closer. “It
cannot
happen again.”
She squeezed the necklace harder. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“I want you to trust me, Cora.”
The way he looked at her, with a flicker of concern behind those black eyes, made her think he might really be on her side. That there were forces even bigger than him, and he was bending the rules for her. But how could she ever trust the man who had taken her?
His head tilted slightly.
“In time, your hatred of me will diminish. You will come to understand that I brought you here for your own good. If a necklace is not enough, I can give you more.” Cassian closed his eyes.
The snow stopped falling. The last flakes settled a little too slow, like in a dream, and then, between the breaks in the clouds, faint lights appeared. Just a few at first. Tiny dots. She could almost have mistaken them for fireflies, if this had been any other place. They multiplied until the sky was a shimmering dome.
Stars. He’d given her the stars.
Her hand pressed against her mouth, holding in a silent exclamation. She didn’t know how he’d made stars appear with his mind alone, but she didn’t care. Nor did she mind the ache that spread through her head, the same familiar ache that came whenever they manipulated the environment. She had missed the stars too much to care. It was like seeing old friends after too long apart. She had painted stars on her bedroom walls when she was twelve. She used to climb onto the roof and watch stars appear on the horizon. Making wishes. Picking out the constellations.
Her fingers drifted from the necklace to the black marks on her neck. Orion. She thought about Lucky, and that brought a stab of pain. She tried to think instead about how she never wished upon a star for
this
. Maybe back home she would have spent her life as an outsider, torn between two worlds. But nothing, especially not fake stars in a fake sky, was going to change the fact that he was her captor and she his prisoner.
She was done being caged.
This couldn’t be her life. Four walls made of endless trees and mountains and a ceiling made of limitless sky, and a man with black eyes who thought giving her the stars could make this world real.
“Mali might have taught you some tricks,” he said, “but you cannot hide your thoughts from us forever. The Warden knows you are attempting to find the fail-safe exit. He knows you refused Boy Two’s sexual advances. His researchers are collecting observations, Cora. If you continue down this path, he will soon have enough data to build a case to remove you, whether the twenty-one day mark comes or not.”
She ran a nail over her lips, taking in his words, and then dropped her hand when she remembered Lucky saying that habit had made him want to kiss her. “Is that why I get more tokens for solving the same puzzles? Why he only plays my song on the jukebox, and why the others don’t get food anymore, but my plate is full?” She swallowed. “Why is he trying to drive a wedge between me and the others?”
He stood abruptly. “You do not know what you are talking about.”
She stood too, moving to face him. “You’re trying to break us, aren’t you? That’s why you’re messing with us. That’s what the headaches are about. It’s the rumors that Mali told us about. Human evolving. You’re trying to push our minds to the limit. You want to see if we can be perceptive, like you can.”
“The researchers do not need to test that. We
know
you cannot be perceptive.”
“I know that too!” She grabbed his arm. “But you’re just the Caretaker. The hired help. You don’t know what the Warden might be planning—but you could find out. You owe us that. If you believe in your mission to take care of us, and I think you do, then you have to defend us even from your own kind.”
He pushed her hand off his shoulder. It was rough, a gesture of anger. He was leaving her on her own, just like Lucky had.
With an angry cry, she lurched for the rematerialization apparatus. If he wouldn’t find out, she would. But just as her fingers closed over the smooth metal, a hand gripped her shoulder, hard enough to sear her with pain, and then she was flying through the air. The air exploded from her lungs as she connected with the ground. She pushed back to her feet, head swimming, and lunged for him again.
“Stop.”
His command was sharp, not at all regimented. Cora ignored him and scrambled against his chest to grab the apparatus, as he tried to stop her without inflicting damage. His knee pressed against her chest, pinning her to the snow that seeped through her white dress, just hard enough that she couldn’t breathe.
Her throat burned. Was this it? Was he going to turn her over to the Warden for this final act of defiance?
Suddenly, his knee was gone. Air rushed into her lungs just as he grabbed her wrists, pulling her close.
“Let me go,” she managed to choke.
“No.” His grip tightened. He reached for the apparatus on his chest, the very thing she had wanted. “You still do not comprehend the magnitude of the danger you would face outside of the life we have given you. You are only safe here, under my care. It is not a kind world, Cora, beyond the walls.”
From somewhere even deeper than her fear, deeper than her gasping lungs, curiosity whispered. What was out there, beyond the walls? She didn’t want to be curious, but how could she not be? This was the stuff of legends, and gas-station tabloids, and dreams. This was the truth about the universe.
He clenched his jaw in a gesture that looked startlingly human, as if this was actually hard for him. Sweat broke out on Cora’s skin.
“Are you turning me in to the Warden?”
“No.” He pulled her closer, so they were only inches apart. “I am going to give you what you want. Answers. And when you see what is beyond the walls, you will not be so anxious to disobey us anymore. You will find that life here—life with me—is far superior to anything out there.”
Her heartbeat throbbed in her veins. “Life with you?” she echoed.
The muscles in his throat constricted. “Life in the environment, watched over by me.” His hand tightened over hers.
Pressure consumed her.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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WHEN THE STATIC-LIKE PRESSURE
ebbed away, Cora opened her eyes.
A row of cabinets. A metal table. They were back in the medical room.
Before she could speak, Cassian dragged her toward one of the wall cabinets. He took out a metal bar the length and thickness of a pencil. When he snapped his wrist, it opened to reveal a set of shackles.
“My colleagues would question my motivations if I were to transport an unrestrained human subject. Hold out your hands.”
Cora pulled back. Her head felt deep in a fog; was it really only hours ago she’d twirled beneath a fairy-tale tree with Lucky while the others danced in the rain? The sting of his betrayal felt as fresh as the snow melting down her legs. “Tell me where we’re going first.”
He gripped the restraints impatiently. “If you insist on asking questions, I can summon the Warden. He would be happy to give you answers—perhaps while he was dismembering you.”