The Cage (28 page)

“I need you, Leon. Brother. You’re the only other one who isn’t complacent here. Nok and Rolf like it here. Mali does too. She might as well
be
a Kindred. And Lucky is . . .” She swallowed, thinking of his dark eyes turning away from her. “Lucky is as blind as the rest of them. You and me, we’re the only ones who understand that we have to get out of here. This place is dangerous.”

“Yeah. I’ll help them.” Leon slowly slunk back to the shadows at the rear of the hut.

“Oh. Great—”

“I’m already helping them. That’s why I’m out here, Cora.”

At the sound of her name, not Ellie’s, she grabbed the guitar strings. His mind was returning to reality, and she wanted to be ready if he did anything unpredictable.

He crouched in the corner of the hut. “For a while, everything Rolf said made sense. He and Nok were happy. Yasmine was gone, and none of you knew what happened to her. I thought maybe they were on to something about this place not being so bad. Life was crap at home.” He paused. “But then I saw that girl with the scarred hands, and I knew, even without a mark, that she was the new one for me.” His eyes dropped to the guitar string stretched between her hands. “I couldn’t stand to be near her, knowing what they expected. Knowing what happened to the last girl they tried to pair me with. What if I snapped? What if I killed Mali too?
That’s
why I’m here. To protect them from me.”

Cora thought, in that moment, that Leon would continue to surprise her. He hadn’t abandoned the group because he didn’t care about the others, or because he was crazy. It was because of Mali.

“You can help her—all of us—more by being a part of our group than by banishing yourself. Come back, Leon. Help me figure out how to escape.”

He shook his head. “They were right, you know—the people back home. I’ll never be the good person Ellie thought I could be. I’ve done things I’m not proud of.”

His eyes shifted to a pile of sheets and clothes in the corner of his hut. Curiosity flickered in Cora’s mind. Bedding streaked with paint was kicked in the corner. Something red glinted: Nok’s radio. That was strange—Nok took it with her everywhere. Next to it was a crumpled pair of panties.

“Has Nok been here?” Cora asked uneasily.

Leon ran a hand over his face. “Ah, hell. What an idiot.”

“Nok?”

“
Me.
I’m a bloody idiot. Few weeks ago, if a girl like that came to me, offering what she did, I’d have thought I’d hit the bloody lottery. But now—” He gazed off, eyes a little unsteady. “Now I know better. Or I should. But you don’t understand what it’s like out here. So quiet. It makes my thoughts scream in my ears. And the headaches . . .” He cursed. “She found me at a weak moment. Rolf’s not a bad kid. He didn’t deserve it. Not from me. Definitely not from her.”

The small crumple of underwear stood out like a stain among the sheets. Had Nok come, one of those days when she claimed she was in the salon, and slept with
Leon
? Nok had always acted so in love with Rolf. It didn’t make any sense; the first day, while they whispered together in bed, Nok had said that she didn’t like hulking guys like Leon. So why would she do something so drastically out of character?

Cora remembered something else about that conversation. Nok had slipped up on basic London geography. She’d been lying, but Cora had thought it was harmless.

What else was Nok lying about?

Leon glanced at the pair of painted green eyes. “Get out of here, sweetheart. Don’t come back.”

He stomped off into the leaves. She stood alone in the clearing, heart pounding. The sun shifted a degree to signal late afternoon, as an eeriness settled between the trees. It was too quiet. The sounds were all wrong, like the wind was moving backward.

A crash came from the woods. Maybe Leon. Maybe the dead girl’s ghost—could the Kindred also bring back the dead?

Cora bolted. She tore back toward the walkway, back to the safety of town, but her legs were so fatigued that her foot caught and she slammed to the mud.

She sat up, wincing, looking for the root she had tripped on. But it wasn’t a root. It was a hard object bleached white, a shape she’d studied in school but had never seen in real life. Her stinging palms throbbed harder.

A bone.

A human one.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

40

Cora

WITH SHAKING HANDS, CORA
dug the bone free of the mud. She tried to convince herself it was from a dog or a horse, only there were no animals in the cage.

Just people.

If Cassian had taken Yasmine’s body, whose bone was this?

Her stomach clenched with a swell of vomit. The bone was old and sun-bleached; it must have been there for months, maybe even years, though it was hard to tell in a place where time moved differently. She pushed herself to her feet, struggling with the mud threatening to swallow her back down.

The bone had to mean that they weren’t the first kids in the cage. There had been others.

But what had killed them?

To her left, palm branches hid one of the humming black windows. She shoved the leaves aside and pounded on the glass.

“I know you’re watching, Cassian! Show yourself!”

Her hair began to rise even before she’d finished the sentence. She hadn’t quite believed it would work, but then she saw his reflection behind her in the panel, and went still. Did she really want to know what had happened to the last group? It wasn’t too late to drop the bone, stop questioning, and accept their prison.

But then she looked at the jungle mud splashed on the hem of her dress. A dead girl’s dress. Any of them could be next, unless she did something about it.

She turned slowly on the Caretaker.

He cut such a striking figure against the jungle backdrop that it was hard not to be anything but awestruck. In person, he was always larger than she remembered. She couldn’t help but take in all the little details that made him real: the dent in his nose. The slight scar on his chin. The way his hand flexed at his side when he was struggling to control his emotions. For a moment she forgot about the bone, and Yasmine, and she was back in the menagerie, on the soft cushions around the babbling fountain. His lips had been just an inch from hers. “I’m not interested in learning about kisses from them,” he had said, and her anger had melted away, just as it did now. Had he read her thoughts about showing him what a kiss was?

Had he wanted her to show him?

She gasped, shocked by her own line of thought, unable to calm her rapid heartbeat as easily as he was able to. She squeezed the bone, refocusing herself.

“What the hell is this?”

Cassian didn’t blink. “That belonged to a previous inhabitant of this environment.”

“A
dead
inhabitant.”

The accusation seemed to slip off his smooth skin, and he cocked his head calmly. “Yes. We are able to synthetically replicate your world within these boundaries, but it requires a large supply of carbon. If a human dies, it is perfectly logical to recycle their carbon. Most is absorbed quickly; sometimes there are pieces that take longer.”

“This whole place is made of
dead bodies
?”

“We use a variety of carbon sources, not only human carcasses. I would place the number of bodies that have been absorbed into this environment at eighteen. This enclosure is relatively new. Your cohort is only the third one to occupy it.”

She squeezed the bone harder. “What happened to the other two groups?”

“The cohorts both failed. Each ward was terminated as a result of their own actions.”

Cora frowned, uncertain of what he meant.

“They murdered each other,” he clarified calmly, as though this information didn’t trouble him in the least. But it rocked Cora; her heart seized into a fist.

“Murdered?”

“We discovered that none of the previous inhabitants of this environment were adaptable to captivity,” he continued. “They grew irate. The males fought over the females. They started wandering alone instead of residing within the settlement areas. Eventually they killed each other.”

“You mean they went crazy.” It was a struggle to control her voice. “They couldn’t handle your mind games. The headaches. The optical illusions. You pushed them too far, messing around with time and space, matching random strangers together . . . what did you expect would happen?”

She was shouting now.

He folded his hands. “It will not happen again.”

“Why not?” She threw her arm in the direction of the jungle huts. “Leon’s halfway there already!”

For a second his mask slipped, and she saw indecision in his eyes. “The previous cohorts were selected solely for their desirable traits and their fertility. Unfortunately, their advanced age made them unable to adapt. That is why the six of you are all of an adolescent age. Old enough for procreation, but young enough to adapt. We spent considerable time reconfiguring the habitats to reflect the needs of your age bracket.”

If it wasn’t for the heavy fatigue in her limbs, Cora would want to slap him. The adults all turned violent, so they took teenagers instead. This explained the childlike nature of life in the cage: the candy store, the arcade, the prizes. As if they were six years old, not sixteen.

“Is that really what you think matters to us? Toys? Candy?” She sucked in a breath. “Is that really what you think matters to
me
?”

She clamped her mouth shut before her voice broke. She knew how desperate she sounded. The other Kindred viewed them as dolls they could toy with, but she had thought Cassian was different. She thought he saw her as a person, not a plaything.

Maybe she’d been wrong.

Cora closed her eyes, but the image of the bleached bone didn’t go away. Was she truly just a chore for him—something to keep alive and healthy? What about the times he’d bent the rules for her? What about the necklace with the charm of a dog? What about the stars?

She clutched her necklace so hard that the sharp charms bit into her palm. With her eyes closed, she could almost believe she was back home. She’d wake in the morning in her own bed, with the smell of brunch downstairs, and the soft hum of the morning news on the downstairs TV.

“Cora.”

Her eyes snapped open. He’d moved close enough that she tasted metal.

“I know that more matters to you. I know that you long for home. I know that you wish you had told your family more often that you loved them.” He reached for her neck. The Warden’s hand flashed in her head, his fingers against her windpipe. But Cassian’s hand didn’t tighten around her throat; it stopped on the charm necklace. His bare fingers touched it gently, almost reverently, and that nameless electricity sparked around the edges of her throat.

“How long were you watching me on Earth?” she whispered.

“Long enough.”

“Long enough for what?”

“To know you, and what you are capable of. There is more to you than the other wards know. Boy Two cares for you, but he doesn’t know you. Not as well as I do.” His fingers curled around the charms. Their bodies were very nearly touching. Her eyes sank closed as his breath whispered against her ear.

“A smile can hide so much. A smile can be a lie.” His voice rose and fell oddly. With a start, she realized he was trying to sing—but his voice was rusty and unpracticed; he must never have sung before. It was one of the songs she had written after the bomb threat at her dad’s political rally.

Heat radiated from Cassian’s hand, holding on to the necklace, holding on to
her
.

“A smile can make me want to scream, and leave all this behind.”

He was singing her words, which she’d never shared with anyone—not even Charlie. Words she’d used to make sense of a life she didn’t fit into anymore. About a little girl who was supposed to spend her whole life smiling, even when she was sad, or scared, or went to prison for a crime she didn’t commit.

Her throat burned. She’d been holding her breath. It caught up with her all at once, and she sucked in air. Her chest grazed against his; electricity pulsed and the bone knocked against her leg. The
bone
. She’d forgotten the femur clutched in her hand.

She stepped back, and he released her necklace, and the spell was broken.

“Cora—”

“Get away from me.” Her voice was a knife. “You’re a liar. We aren’t safe here at all. If you don’t kill us first, then we’ll end up killing each other.”

He looked at her like she’d slapped him. His hand flexed at his side, once, twice, and he opened his mouth as though to plead with her. But then he straightened, and the mask returned.

“Your safety is of utmost importance to us. The stock algorithm accurately predicts—”

“Did the stock algorithm predict what happened with the last groups?”

He paused. “There is always a margin of error.”

Margin of error
, she thought.
Such a tidy way to explain eighteen dead bodies.

The sun was merciless. The mud tried to swallow her feet. Fear and anger and exhaustion seized her body in a tight fist, and yet the worst of all of it was the way his black eyes shifted to her, always back to her, as though she was different. His pet.

I
am
different,
she realized.
I’m the only one sane enough to know we’re in danger.

“I will personally ensure the safety of everyone in this environment,” Cassian repeated more insistently. “We simply require you to follow a set of basic rules.” He leaned close, and all that emotion came rushing back. He could be tender; he could be cruel too. “It has been twenty-one days, Cora. You have until sunset.”

With another swell in pressure, he was gone.

Cora sprinted away from the jungle. The ocean taunted her with each crashing wave that moved too slowly, reminding her that nothing was real, not this place, not Cassian’s promise that they were all safe.