The Cage

by Megan Shepherd

  Leon stood abruptly, chair scraping backward, and paced to the jukebox. His head felt like it was splitting in two. That same song, over and over. He pounded a fist against the jukebox.

  “You must cooperate,” Mali added. “The Kindred keep you safe as long as you obey the rules.” From nowhere, her face cracked in a flat line that somewhat resembled a smile.

  They stared at her, mouths agape.

  Nok broke the silence with a ragged cry. “The rules? That’s really all this is all about? We eat their food and play their games and have sex and they won’t cut us up for some alien’s tea? Screw it, sign me up. Come on, Rolf. The bedroom. Five minutes.” Her voice was growing hysterical as she paced by the countertop. Rolf’s eyes went wide. The only way to tell he was alive was that he was rapidly turning the same bright shade of red as his flowers.

  Lucky came around the counter and grabbed her, forcing her to stop pacing. “No one’s doing Rule Three. They can’t make us do that.”

  “Yes,” Mali answered. “They can.” She went back to picking at her toenails.

  “She should know, shouldn’t she?” Rolf stuttered, finally coughing some air back into his lungs. “She’s lived with them. Look at the scars on her hands. She was in a cage when we first saw her! What’s worse, ending up like her, or obeying a few rules? I mean . . . it’s hardly torture. We’ve all had sex before, right?”

  “It would be more convincing if you weren’t blushing like a girl when you said that,” Leon muttered.

  Mali slid her unblinking gaze to him, and he shuddered as if a ghost had passed through him. Those scarred hands. The hollow eyes. That girl had been through god knows what. An instinct in him flared up, fighting against his sympathy. This girl was weak, he tried to tell himself. A victim. And he didn’t associate with the weak. No one in his family did. He used his size to intimidate people. He’d gotten tattoos to show his family’s powerful story. He’d taken a job with his brother smuggling electronics from Bangladesh—he wasn’t a hero. He sure as hell wasn’t interested in being this girl’s hero.

  “Don’t feel sorry for her,” he snapped. “She’s probably lying.”

  The girl didn’t flinch. Even with her thin arms and thin legs, she didn’t seem intimidated by him in the slightest. In fact, he sensed something else far scarier.

  A connection.

  She didn’t have a constellation mark on the side of her neck that matched his, but she didn’t have to. The moment she looked into his eyes, something shifted. Some wall fell down, and an instinct to protect her rose. This girl who’d been through so much. This girl who didn’t know how to be gentle, just like him. He didn’t need the stars to tell him she was meant for him, and he for her.

  His head throbbed harder, and he stomped out of the diner. Away from the girl with the light brown eyes. Away from what the Kindred wanted him to do. He’d always run away from his problems before, so why not now?

  “Leon, wait!” Cora ran out behind him, her blond hair flowing like the trail of a comet. “Where are you going?”

  “I can’t sleep in the house with that girl there. I’m going to the jungle—there are huts there. I’ll be back in the morning for breakfast and another spin through the rat maze.”

  He didn’t look back.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  21

  Cora

  WHEN CORA RETURNED TO the diner, the ideas Mali had alluded to—private owners and abducted children—churned in her stomach. She’d thought, after Bay Pines, that she could face anything. That was when the only monsters in her life were bad-tempered guards and other juvie girls who stole her stuff while she was in the shower.

  The others formed a huddle by the countertop, whispering, while Mali sat alone at a table and poked at Lucky’s folded aviator sunglasses.

  “Cora.” Lucky beckoned to her and, when she neared, dropped his voice so Mali wouldn’t overhear. “Rolf thinks we should listen to Mali—that it’s too dangerous to try to escape.”

  Cora shook her head. “No. We stick to the plan.”

  Over Lucky’s shoulder, Cora watched as Mali slowly opened the aviator glasses, one temple at a time, examined them, and then placed them on her face.

  “You wish to find the fail-safe exit,” Mali said cryptically. “You cannot. The Kindred hide it with perceptive technology. It could be in this room and you could not see.” She stood, squinting through the dark sunglasses, and wandered to the jukebox.

  Rolf leaned in, moving aside the potted geraniums. “You see? Escape is impossible. These are creatures who trade human body parts. We don’t want to go up against them. I’ll solve their puzzles, but you know what I’m going to do with the tokens I win? Buy the painting kit. Take up art. Enjoy myself. Maybe I’ll even buy the radio and listen to some music that isn’t this same aggravating song on repeat.”

  Cora had never heard a cutting tone in Rolf’s voice before. The headaches must be making him as irritable as she was.

  “So that’s it? You’re giving up?” When she was little, she’d always been the good girl, top of her class, the smiling face standing to the left of her father. Even in Bay Pines, when the gap-toothed girl punched her in the stomach, she hadn’t objected. But now . . .

  She was done doing what everyone wanted.

  “And you.” Cora spun on Mali. “They kidnapped you. You should hate them. Has the Caretaker brainwashed you or something?” Cora could barely keep the anger out of her voice, thinking of how a powerful creature like Cassian could do anything to a tiny girl like Mali. Four years old, and stolen away from her family.

  At this, Mali’s startlingly clear eyes cut to Cora’s sunken ones.

  “Cassian is my friend.”

  “Your friend?”

  Mali’s mouth twitched. “He saves my life three years ago.”

  Cora looked down at her torn fingernails, piecing through Mali’s strange way of speaking, wondering how the man who imprisoned them could be the same person who would save a girl’s life. In the medical room, just for a flash, she’d thought that he was different from the other Kindred. Was he?

  Mali approached slowly, lifting and lowering her sunglasses. She looked like a deranged ballerina in Rolf’s oversized military jacket. “Cassian is the Caretaker only recently. Three years ago, he is malakai—soldier paid to find and save humans kept by private owners. He finds me. He saves me.”

  “You were in an enclosure like this one?”

  “No—three years ago I am kept by a private owner. A bad owner. He sells me many times.” Mali brushed a finger slowly down the seam of Rolf’s military jacket, paying more attention to the woven threads than her story. “After Cassian saves me he takes me to a good menagerie. I am there one year and then I am in an enclosure like this but smaller for one year and then I am in another menagerie.” She paused. “This enclosure is not like the others. The Kindred set the days to different lengths here. They change the distances. The clothes here are strange.”

  Cora leaned forward. “You mean they don’t mess with the other kids’ heads like they do ours? Why us?”

  Mali was silent. Her face was a mask behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses, just like the Kindred, and then she pinched herself slowly on the shoulder. “There are rumors that humans can evolve to have perceptive abilities. That this is even happening now. The Kindred fear the day when humans are as capable as them.”

  Cora straightened, glancing nervously at the others. “Evolving? Is there any truth to it?”

  Mali paused. “I see nothing with my eyes but friends I trust tell me yes this happens. Perhaps the Kindred treat you different because they fear you are different. Here. In the mind.” She tapped her head. Her words lingered in the air like whispers of prophets. Then she sneezed and drifted back over to the jukebox.

  Cora ran a finger along her lips, sorting through Mali’s words.
A hand sank onto her shoulder, and she jumped out of her fog. Lucky jerked his head toward the doorway, and she followed him to where they could talk in private.

  “Go easy on Nok and Rolf,” he said as soon as they were out of earshot. “They’re terrified, and everyone’s tempers are short. Leon too—why do you think he stormed out like that? He’s scared. At least here we’re safe. Beyond the walls . . . who knows.”

  “Lucky, they’re talking about giving up on escape. That’s insane. We can’t spend our lives here.”

  “We won’t. I have plans, remember? Retire at thirty-eight. Military pension. A beach somewhere with a beer and a girl who doesn’t mind me picking at a guitar with my bad hand.” He flexed his scarred knuckles. “Just give them a few days to calm down.”

  “They only gave us twenty-one days and we’ve already wasted some of that time. We can’t let some headaches stop us.”

  He took her hand in his reassuringly. “We won’t.”

  Her face felt heavy, but she smiled. At least there was one other sane person around. Even if she’d only known Lucky a few days, she felt drawn to him in a way that had nothing to do with the constellation marks on their necks, and everything to do with his determination not to spend their lives as a sideshow.

  “Um, guys?” Nok said.

  The smile fell from Cora’s face. Nok and Rolf had backed away from the jukebox, which Mali was circling, bobbing her head up and down, a predator ready to strike.

  “She must not know what it is,” Lucky said. “Maybe she’s afraid of it.”

  Mali approached the jukebox hesitantly. Cora was about to tell her it was a puzzle they couldn’t solve when her long fingers started to fly over the controls. Rearranging shapes. Stacking them. She worked out the first combination of shapes in seconds and moved on to the second.

  Cora was speechless.

  They’d been wrong about Mali. The jukebox wasn’t foreign to her, or at least its puzzle wasn’t. From the corner of her eye, Cora glimpsed Rolf’s hand twitching—making the same shapes as Mali’s, she realized. He had had the same intensely focused look in the medical room, studying the blue cube above the doorway.

  “Hey,” she whispered to him. “In the medical room, you were looking at their equipment like you’d figured something out.”

  His fingers went still. There was an edge to his blue-green eyes that hadn’t been there before. He shook his head. “Looking around, that’s all.”

  They were interrupted when Mali clicked the last shapes together, and a token slid from a trough on the side of the jukebox. Mali caught it with sticky fingers and inserted it into a slot, then pressed a red button.

  The song ended.

  Another one began. It was terrible, something poppy and vaguely Japanese, but it was wonderfully, marvelously new. Mali leaned against the jukebox and licked the rest of the sauce off her fingers. “That is a very basic puzzle. The Kindred give it to children.” The Japanese song rose in volume, filling the space with high-pitched voices. “Some puzzles are more difficult,” she continued. “Have you found the one in the bookstore yet? That one is very challenging.” She drifted closer to Nok, who took a jerky step back.

  “If she can solve that puzzle,” Lucky whispered in Cora’s ear, “maybe she can help us solve the others.”

  Mali suddenly spun, drifting over with that strange bobbing motion, and reached out to touch the curling ends of Cora’s hair. “It is useless to speak in low voices. They know what you say.” She tapped Cora’s head. “They hear you here.”

  Lucky tensed. “They can even read our minds through the panels? Then any kind of planning we do is useless. We might as well scream it out loud.”

  “There are ways to block the Kindred.” Mali twirled a strand of Cora’s hair slowly around her finger. “It is not thoughts they read, but intentions like escape and restlessness. To read one single word requires much concentration and a strong mind.”

  “The Caretaker can read specific words,” Cora said.

  “He has a very strong mind,” Mali answered, almost proudly. “And he watches you for so long that he can read even your softest thoughts. Not mine. I spend years learning to block him.”

  “So tell us how,” Lucky said.

  “I will.” A slow smile stretched across Mali’s face. “For a price.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  22

  Cora

  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.