The Cage (32 page)

Lucky pressed a hand to his bleeding face. “I don’t think she was trying to kill me.”

Nok bit her lip, looking between them anxiously.

“Of course she was!” Rolf said. “She knows all about how to kill a person. You’ve heard her talk about making weapons out of teddy bears and things . . . I mean, who
does
that? She must have been some kind of social deviant back on Earth, some sociopath, and now her true tendencies are coming out.”

Nok chewed on her lip. “If that was true, wouldn’t the Kindred have stopped her?”

Rolf tossed her a look like she was a traitor for even daring to speak such a thing. “Why do you think they’ve kept her behind so many times? Why do you think the Caretaker keeps paying her the most attention? It’s because the Kindred know that they made a mistake putting her here, and that she’s dangerous. Didn’t you all see in the diner—she had a bone in her hand! No explanation. Just a bone. It was probably from that first girl who died. Who’s to say Cora didn’t kill her and hide the body?”

“Could a body really decompose that fast?” Nok asked.

“Time doesn’t work the same way here,” Rolf answered curtly.

Nok flinched. Rolf had found his confidence and then some. She told herself he was just worried about the baby, and the threat Cora’s instability might pose. But the truth was, Rolf had always had a jealous streak. He was jealous when she smiled at Lucky. He was jealous when Cora got more tokens.

Nok raked her nails over her scalp. Her head throbbed so hard she could barely think. “I just can’t imagine Cora would do such a thing. If we could reason with her . . .”

Lucky’s eyes were dazed from the head wound, and he kept clutching at his chest like Cora had ripped the very heart from his chest.

“Maybe she isn’t malicious,” Rolf said quietly. “But we all know that she’s going crazy. For her own good, she can’t be allowed to just run free. None of us are safe with her on the loose. We have a baby to think of now. We need to find her and turn her over to the Kindred. They’ll give her the help she needs and put her in a place that’s right for her.”

Nok chewed on her lip. She glanced at Lucky, who looked like he wasn’t even listening. He kept pressing his fist against his heart, rubbing his chest, swallowing hard.

Maybe Rolf was right.

Pressure started to build in the air, and alarm shot to Nok’s throat as she remembered it was the twenty-first day. Had they come for Lucky now? Surely they would give him another chance. She didn’t want him replaced with some half-feral boy with cold eyes who might pose yet another threat to her child.

A figure materialized in the corner, dressed in black, but it wasn’t the Caretaker. It was a Kindred woman with dark hair, pulled back tight in a different style knot from Serassi’s. The same apparatus jutted out of her chest. The woman tugged off her thick black gloves.

“Who are you?” Rolf asked in a bewildered voice, looking just as shocked as Nok felt. “Where’s the Caretaker?”

“I am the substitute Caretaker. My name is Tessela. It is my responsibility to heal any minor injuries that do not require the medical officer’s attention.” She pressed her ungloved hand against Lucky’s bleeding temple. When she pulled back her hand, the wound was healed, the blood dried and crusted. “Due to this recent incident, the Warden has determined that the artifacts from Earth, such as the ceramic dog, are too dangerous; you cannot be trusted with them if you insist on hurting one another. The Warden has given the order to phase them out over the next week. They will be replaced with imitations.”

Nok gaped. The radio with the knobs that looked like a smiling face. The painting set. The books in the bookstore. They were replacing them with toys that would feel wrong and smell wrong.

As if sensing her thoughts, Tessela turned to her. “That goes for your child as well. The Warden has determined, given this violent incident, that your cohort is too unstable for a child to be raised among you. Once you deliver your child, we will transport it to the standard facility, where it will be cared for.” Tessela gripped the apparatus in her chest and, with a wave of pressure, flickered away.

Nok’s breath caught. Pain ripped through her head, but it was nothing compared to the panic flooding her chest. Her heart fluttered like a trapped bird. Her hands pressed against her abdomen protectively. They were going to take her baby away? All because of one fight? Her thoughts churned faster, panic rising. She had to fix this. She had to convince the Kindred—but she couldn’t win
them
over with a flirtatious smile, that was for sure.

It hadn’t even been Nok’s fault. She had done nothing but obey the rules.

Cora
had been the one who’d broken them.

Rage started boiling inside of her, heating her up faster and faster until she feared she’d melt. She had thought Cora was a friend. She had defended her against Rolf’s claims. And this is what she got for her friendship—her baby ripped away?

Pain fractured behind her left eye, and she doubled over. A memory overcame her. Standing on the tarmac in Chiang Mai, in her older sister’s finest dress that her mother had patched, a backpack with fifteen hundred baht and a bag of peanuts in case she got hungry. Her parents pulling her into a stiff hug, her mother trying not to cry. “Like winning the lottery,” her mother had said, and then, less than twenty-four hours later, arriving at a London apartment and realizing she’d practically been sold into slavery.

She’d grown up with strangers, forced to be photographed, observed.

Her
daughter would not have that life.

Her
daughter would have a mother.

Nok crouched next to Lucky, forcing herself to keep her rage tamped down. She had seen how Delphine had handled this kind of situation—not with raised voices, but with soft ones. Not with fists, but with whispered words.

She smoothed Lucky’s hair. “You see?” She petted the healed place on his forehead. “Rolf was right. This is what Cora has done to us. They’re taking away everything we have because of her violent tendencies. Even my baby. It doesn’t matter if she was a good person. She’s crazy now, and she has to be stopped before she ruins
everything
.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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

46

Cora

WHEN THE REMATERIALIZATION WAS
over, Cora found herself in a small room nearly bare of furniture. Open doorways led to two more small rooms. It didn’t have the medical chamber’s austerity, nor the market’s bustling chaos, nor the menagerie’s faux Greek columns. But starry light came from the seams in the wall, marking it as a Kindred space.

Cassian held her tightly. As soon as he released her, she took a quick step away.

She crossed to the single window and shoved open the curtain, afraid to see a black window and know she was still being watched. But on the other side was the night sky filled with endless stars. Some so faint they were nearly invisible, some close enough to burn her eyes. In the center was a distant planet, ringed like Saturn, the blue color of water. She had to grab the curtain to keep from falling.

“This is what’s outside? Outer space?”

“That is a projected image. I selected it for you.” He paused. “I know you like the stars.” He traced a pattern on the wall in the central room, where a cabinet slid out, revealing a square container and a single square drinking glass.

She peeked into one of the other rooms. A bed with no sheets or blankets, and a shelf holding a few blue cubes and nothing else. Had he brought her to a prison cell?

“Where are we?” she asked.

“My quarters.” He spoke so casually that Cora barely had time to register before he pointed to the sitting room. “Sit in there.”

“Your
quarters
? I thought you’d take me to one of the menageries.”

He raised an eyebrow. “The Warden did instruct me to take you to a menagerie. And as you recall, I
did
take you to one. The Temple. I fulfilled his orders—I just didn’t leave you there, drugged and caged.” She thought she saw a flicker of dark amusement cross his face. “Never let it be said that my kind does not excel at finding loopholes.”

He picked up the square glass and the bottle, but hesitated. “The Warden recommended that I take you to a menagerie called the Harem. It is located on the seventh sector—an area frequented by disgraced Kindred and Mosca traders. They go through human girls quickly there. It is a place I do not think you would like to go. I would certainly not enjoy having to leave you there.”

He was implying using girls for sex, or worse—things she couldn’t even imagine. It made the childish tricks in the Temple seem positively innocent. What had she done to make the Warden hate her this much?

Cassian pointed toward the sitting room. “Sit. Please. I would not like to spend the little time we have arguing.”

Cora made her way into the sitting room. It was barren, save for some metal crates pushed against the wall and a book tossed on top of the crates, dog-eared and worn.
Peter Pan and Wendy
. An artifact from Earth. It was the only thing at all in the entire room that had any glimmer of personality. Cassian picked up the book quickly and dropped it into one of the metal crates.

The bare room reeked of desolation. “Do you all live like this, so spartanly?”

“Yes, though not by choice. There is not an abundance of resources in space. Dust and rock and light can only power so much. We live a frugal life out of necessity. The technology used to create your environment works only within certain confines and requires a high amount of carbon. We could not create such luxury for ourselves.” He traced another pattern on the wall. A small tray emerged, which served as a table for the glass and square container. He poured a sharp-smelling liquid into the glass and took a deep drink.

“What’s that?”

“Alcohol, made from fermented lichens.”

“You have alcohol?”

He glanced at her with a flicker of amusement. “Every society in the universe has invented alcohol—even some lesser species, such as your own. Intoxicants are prohibited, in general, outside of the menageries. But we are allowed to keep one container in our quarters, in case of difficulty controlling emotions.”

She grabbed the glass out of his hand, downing the contents, wincing as it burned her throat in a way her mother’s expensive wine never had. She held out the glass for more. “I’m
definitely
having difficulty controlling my emotions.”

Cassian hesitated—clearly he meant the drink for himself, not her—but then refilled her glass. She took a slower sip, letting her heavy eyelids sink slightly. The room was quiet, too quiet, and she cleared her throat. “What did you mean when you said that the algorithm didn’t make a mistake, but you did?”

He dragged a crate over as a makeshift chair. “It is protocol to monitor the stock algorithm’s selections before the transfer from the native environment to the artificial one. I performed the required period of observation on the other Girl Two. She would have been suitable.” He looked down at his hands. “I continued to monitor Boy Two simultaneously. He was performing a research operation on one of your networked computers. He found an article from the previous year about your father’s employment. You were standing in the picture. Boy Two’s emotions were very strong. Impossible to ignore.”

Lucky had said he looked her up on the internet every few months at his library, hoping for news that would make him feel better about playing a part in her time in juvenile detention.

That whole time, Cassian had been watching?

“He felt intense guilt,” Cassian continued, “which was perplexing, since he had not directly wronged you. He felt curiosity too, and very strong attraction, though that only made his guilt increase. I began to observe you as well. Call it . . . curiosity. Your experience with captivity was somewhat unusual in a female of your age and your intelligence. Such resilience is highly desirable to us, after what happened to the previous cohorts.”

She swallowed. Her hand still felt dry from the femur bone.

“You had other traits—physical attractiveness, a quiet demeanor, an emotional strength—that would make for an interesting pairing with any of the three males selected. I already knew Boy Two would be more than interested in you. So I went against the stock algorithm. I selected you myself. The Warden strongly disapproved, but I argued that your resilience would make you highly adaptable to an environment such as this.”

“That’s what this is all about, resilience?” She clutched the glass harder. “You thought that because I was in prison before, and didn’t cause disruptions, that I’d roll over and accept this prison too? You’ve got it all wrong. The accident and my time at Bay Pines didn’t make me resilient. It left me a shell of a person. I can’t face enclosed spaces. I can’t face water. It didn’t matter where I went or who I was around after that; I didn’t belong anywhere. Not at home. Not in prison either. It changed me, Cassian.”

Her fingers were trembling on the glass. He folded his own across from her, a gesture that felt startlingly human. “Perhaps we define resiliency differently. My understanding was that resilience isn’t about weakness, but strength.”

“Exactly. I’m
not
strong. I can’t sleep and when I do, it’s just nightmares. I can’t even—”

Her voice failed her. She was about to say she couldn’t even love Lucky like he deserved, but Cassian didn’t need her to list her failures. He could see them in her head.

For a long time, he didn’t answer. He must be thinking about how he made a mistake. He thought she was more than she was. He saw something that wasn’t there. She didn’t think she would ever care if the monster who brought her here regretted it, but in some ripped-bare part of her, she found that she did care. Yes, she did.

She wanted to know why he thought she was resilient.