The Cage

by Megan Shepherd

  What if he was lying to them? What if he was the mole?

  Cora stood so fast her chair skidded backward. She picked up the bone like a cleaver, and the others all stopped eating in surprise.

  “It’s you,” she said to Rolf, her voice barely a whisper, as she felt her thoughts cutting through the fog. “It’s been you, this entire time. Manipulating Nok. Manipulating all of us. You’re the Kindred’s mole!”

  Rolf’s lips fell open in true surprise but just as quickly pressed shut. “What are you talking about now? Is this some new plot of yours?”

  His innocent act enraged her, and she flew across the table and grabbed the shoulder of his shirt, dragging him toward her, the bone raised to threaten him. Nok jumped up, and Lucky pushed to his feet too.

  Mali kept eating her pancakes.

  “I’m talking about how you’re working with them,” Cora accused, “like the rat you are, trying to bend us to their will. You twisted Nok first. Convinced her to give up on escape—”

  “You’re crazy!”

  “Cora, just calm down,” Lucky whispered.

  “This is just more of her games!” Rolf snapped. “You take away our food and then have the Caretaker bring it back. You insist on maintaining the seashell calendar so you can make us think time is passing strangely. You’re mad that we won the guitar, so you steal it.” When she started to object, his face turned red. “Are you seriously going to say you didn’t steal the guitar? Just like you didn’t steal the food? Or mess with our heads?”

  She started to deny it, but they’d found the guitar. They knew. She hadn’t taken any food, but they’d never believe her now.

  Cora let go of Rolf’s shirt abruptly and paced, sweat rolling down her face. “Rolf’s been manipulating you all this entire time, in conjunction with the Kindred. I suspected it from the first time he tried to convince us we shouldn’t fight back. He always had such a convenient explanation for everything strange that was happening, so we wouldn’t question the bigger motivation of what the Kindred wanted with us. He even has a convenient story about his life back home. How he was bullied, so we’d feel sympathy for him. How he was so caught up in his studies that he never had time for the books and TV shows we all might have watched. He even has twitches and strange mannerisms like Mali does. Probably because he’s never even been to Earth and doesn’t know how real people act!”

  Rolf looked like he had been slapped. Red splotched his pale face. His fingers, which hadn’t twitched in days, slowly started their neurotic tapping against the table.

  “Let him go!” Nok said. “It isn’t true, any of it!”

  Cora whirled on her. “Why do you keep defending him?”

  “Because you haven’t heard him talk about home like I have. We both lived in London. We went to some of the same restaurants. He’s seen Star Trek and he’s ridden the London Eye and there’s nothing wrong with the way he acts. Anyway, I wouldn’t care if he had grown up among the Kindred, because he’s a good person, and he loves me, and because we’re going to have a baby together!”

  She pressed a hand against her mouth. Silence echoed in the diner. Cora stared at her, stunned. Nok was still thin, but she had certainly put on a few pounds over the last few weeks. Cora had assumed it was all the candy. Was this why she’d been acting so strangely? Why she’d needed Lucky and the other boys wrapped around her finger?

  Nok tossed Rolf a look that wavered between nervous and excited. Slowly she removed her hand from her mouth. “So, um, now would probably be a good time to tell you that I’m pregnant.”

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  42

  Cora

  CORA LET ROLF SLIP out of her hands as fatigue caught up with her all at once, and she slumped into a chair. He pulled away like a frightened animal, then turned to Nok, blinking hard, fingers twisting in his wild red hair.

  “Is it true?” he asked.

  For a moment, no one dared to move. Lucky massaged his temple, wincing, like another headache had struck. Nok was breathing hard, cheeks flushed, as the light kept swinging back and forth.

  Mali reached for another dinner roll.

  “Yes,” Nok said. “By almost two weeks. They can detect these things early. I wasn’t supposed to say anything until I was further along. That medical officer, Serassi, has been testing me in private ever since you and I started sleeping together, with a needle so big it would give you nightmares. She teleported into the salon yesterday and told me I was pregnant.” Nok pressed her hand against her stomach. A slight smile came to her lips. “She said she oversees centers where human children are raised communally, like nurseries, but I asked if we could raise it here, on our own, and she asked the Warden; she said it would be good for her research to observe human child raising in their natural habitat. He agreed.”

  Cora glanced at Rolf out of the corner of her eye. Did he know about Nok visiting Leon in the jungle? Seducing Lucky? Did he know there was a chance the baby wasn’t his?

  She pushed out of the chair and took a shaky step backward, like Rolf was a powder keg and this information was a lit match.

  But he blinked, and his fingers twitched, and then threw his arms around Nok. “That’s wonderful!”

  He didn’t know.

  He swung Nok in his arms, kissing her cheeks, making her giggle. Cora stumbled backward against the black window. Oblivious to her shock, Lucky pushed past her to congratulate Nok. The tension from earlier had shifted to laughter—Cora was forgotten, and the mole was forgotten, and so was the bone.

  Pain throbbed between her temples.

  Maybe Rolf wasn’t the mole. Maybe Mali wasn’t either. Maybe there never had been a mole. Maybe the Kindred had been setting her up to be ostracized all along: giving her unfair amounts of tokens, making it seem like she’d stolen the food, letting her out of the cage, as though they were intentionally trying to make the others jealous.

  And now she’d dug her own grave by stealing the guitar and accusing Rolf.

  The black window at her back hummed against her skin. She’d thought the cage was driving the others crazy, but what if it wasn’t? What if it was just twisting her, like the others kept insisting?

  They always said crazy people never knew they were crazy.

  Frustrated tears tangled with pain and pushed behind her eyes. Mali was the only one not congratulating Nok. Instead, she calmly offered Cora the rest of her roll across the table. For once, her light brown eyes weren’t cold.

  Cora stared at her, then knocked the roll away. “It’s a hell of a time to start being friendly!”

  Lucky glanced over his shoulder. The smile on his face faded once he saw the tears that dripped onto her untouched plate. He pushed aside the diner chairs and pulled her into a hug, murmuring in her ear. “What’s wrong? Don’t you like your pancakes?”

  This only made Cora cry more, because he was still so kind, despite the fact that he was totally delusional.

  “I’m not crazy,” Cora whispered. “This place is a prison. We’re slaves here, Lucky. They’re trying to turn you all against me.”

  “Shh,” he said. “I’d never turn against you.”

  Over his shoulder, Nok had her hands pressed to her stomach, Rolf still kissing her cheek, but Nok’s smile shifted to uneasiness when she caught Cora’s words.

  “At home, we were living half a life,” Lucky said. “I held on to so much anger, Cora. At your dad. At myself. But after our talk, I finally let all that guilt and pain go, and you should too.” He softly pointed his chin toward the others. “Look at how happy Nok and Rolf are. That could be us.”

  Nok’s dress ruffled as she came toward them. She smiled at Cora, but the sweetness of the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “Lucky’s right,” Nok said. “We were so worried, we even thought we might have to kick you out of the house if you kept making life so difficult for everyone.
But you’re over that, now, yeah? You want to be one of us. Don’t you?”

  Her threat was as clear as the challenge in her eyes. This was Cora’s ultimatum: embrace their insane paradise, or be ostracized to the biomes like Leon, starved for human contact. And meanwhile, they’d just keep sliding further into insanity.

  The bone was still in her hand.

  The song ended, and there was a second of silence before it reset itself. Someone had overturned a glass of water that rolled off the table and dripped onto the floor like the ticking of a clock. Drip. Drip. Drip. Lucky was looking at Cora with eyes so full of hope—delusional hope—and if she said yes, they would be a couple, they would run obstacle courses and eat gumdrops and pretend they weren’t rats running on a wheel for the benefit of their alien captors.

  He would be happy.

  She would be numb.

  She had done it before—shut out the screaming voice in the back of her head. At Bay Pines, she’d given in. Back at home, too. The saddest part was how easy giving in was: a tug of the lips into a smile, voice silenced, lyrics kept to herself. Now, she’d resisted the Kindred for weeks—for what? Sunken eyes and weary limbs? Cold looks from the only people in the world who could laugh and smile and comfort her?

  She rubbed her eyes with limbs that felt impossibly heavy.

  “Okay,” she whispered.

  As soon as she spoke the words, relief wound into her tired muscles. She’d had sixteen years of practicing how to give in. It came so naturally, so effortlessly, like greeting an old friend. A small voice tried to claw its way back up, but she forced a smile.

  She ignored the tears in her eyes.

  “And Rule Three?” Nok said tightly. “You’ll even obey Rule Three?”

  Lucky stopped his pacing. Cora’s heart stopped its beating, as the voice tried once more to claw up her throat. Then, with a single lurch, she swallowed it back down again.

  “Yes.”

  Her voice sounded as broken as she felt.

  Genuine smiles stretched across Lucky’s and Nok’s faces. Mali looked as expressionless as always, until her eyes shifted to the black window, where a murky shadow flickered.

  Lucky kissed Cora’s temple. “I knew you’d come around. The night of the accident bound us. It was fate. Now we’ll always be together.”

  Cora forced a wider smile. Smile, even when you feel like crying.

  Lucky brushed away her tears. “I know you’re worried. But the Kindred are so much more advanced than us. They have to know what they’re doing. If they want us to be together and have kids, they must have a good reason. It’s like . . . our duty, Cora. To continue the species.”

  He kissed her tear-stained cheek.

  “Our duty,” she repeated.

  He gave a serious nod. “Exactly.”

  This was what they had done to him, skewed his ethics, made him think they were like children who didn’t know what was best for themselves.

  He took her hand. “We’re going to be so happy.”

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  HarperCollins Publishers

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  43

  Leon

  LEON HAD LEARNED TO move through the habitats silently. It was difficult at first; the words quiet and subtle had never once been used to describe him, but now, as he crept through the marigolds by the side of the diner, he felt like a jungle beast.

  A figure dropped over the side of the railing, landing on all fours in front of him. He let out a curse and stumbled back.

  Mali stared into his eyes like she could see the very stains on his soul. Her eyes went from the mud on his hems to the sharpened stake he had made out of a rocking horse. “What are you doing.”

  “Hunting. Now scram.”

  She stood slowly. “Hunting what.”

  “Ghosts.” He braced himself. He knew that sounded crazy, but it wasn’t. Yasmine’s ghost was here. He could feel her eyes. They had it all wrong, when they thought the Kindred were the ones watching.

  A bird trilled and he crouched lower. The bird sounds weren’t real, either. They were Yasmine, trying to drive him mad for running her into the ocean.

  Mali gave his shoulder a sharp pinch.

  “Ow! What was that for?”

  “Focus. I must ask you a question.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the diner in the distance, where they others had been talking. “When you spy on the others, do you hear them say that Earth is gone.”

  He rubbed his shoulder where she pinched him. “Yeah. But they’re idiots. Cora’s the only one with any sense. She’s right. Earth isn’t gone.”

  “How do you know.”

  “Because if Earth was gone, they’d have a finite supply of humans. Us six and the rest scattered around in cages. A few thousand, at most. Barely enough to rebuild an entire species. They’re supposed to be all logical, right? So they wouldn’t be mucking about, letting private individuals chop off our fingers or whatever, eh? They’d have every single one of us in breeding facilities, churning out kids left and right. They wouldn’t bother with this twenty-one day shit.”

  “That is just a theory. You do not know that for sure.”

  “I know human nature, kid.”

  “They are not human.”

  “They’re close enough.”

  Mali sat abruptly, cross-legged, resting her chin on her hands. Ever since stars had appeared, the night had taken on a different color. More silver, like a riverbed. The starlight played over her dark hair, showing blacks and browns and even a hint of burnished red that Leon had never noticed before.

  She stared at him hard. “Would you go home if you could.”

  Leon didn’t answer. Home? When he’d been taken, he’d been in the middle of helping his older brother unload a truck of ripped-off gaming systems into the back of a dirty warehouse. His sister, Ellie, had called to invite him over for dinner, and Leon had said he couldn’t be bothered. Now all he wanted in the world was to sit at Ellie’s table, her baby gurgling beside him, their nieces and nephews tugging on his clothes, asking him to pick them up and play Godzilla.

  “Would you go back,” Mali pressed. “I need to know.”

  In the shadows, with her long dark hair, Mali almost looked like Yasmine. Only Yasmine’s eyes had been so frightened as she’d run away, and Mali looked like she’d never been frightened in her life.

  “Doesn’t matter, kid. There’s no way out.”

  He shoved past her, knocking her to the ground. He hadn’t stormed away more than a foot before something launched itself at his back; he cursed and ducked, but the thing was moving fast. Thin arms and stringy black hair and cold, cold eyes.

  “Bloody hell!” he yelled.

  He spun, trying to grab Mali, but she evaded him easily. He felt a tug on his arm, pressure on his left calf, a pinch between his shoulder blades, and suddenly he was flat on his back, staring at the stars, and every one of his muscles screamed in pain.

  Mali leaned over him with that flat smile of hers.

  “How the hell did you do that?” he bellowed.

  “You do not scare me,” she said.

  He tried to stand, flustered and cursing, but she seemed able to hold him down with a single finger against his forehead. Was this some sort of alien ninja shit?

  “I don’t scare you?” he roared. “What do you think happened to the girl you replaced? You look like her, you know that? Same dark skin. Same long hair. Be careful or you’ll end up like her too. She’s dead because of me.”

  Mali leaned in, her finger digging into the center of his forehead. “I see my predecessor’s body. I see her wounds. She drowns on her own.”

  “She was running away from me.”

  “She runs from the Kindred. Serassi stands behind you, your first day here. The previous Girl Three sees her. It frightens her enough to flee into the ocean, where she thinks she can swim away. She does not yet understand that she is no longer o
n Earth.”

  Leon’s muscles, cramped with pain, suddenly released. The pain melted away but was replaced by a rush of shock, then denial, and then rage.

  “They’re the reason she’s dead?”

  “They have her body. They perform tests on it.”

  Rage choked him. He forgot about the stringy-haired girl sitting on his chest. He forgot about how she’d immobilized him with a single finger. All he could picture was Yasmine’s green eyes, so round and full of fear, and how he’d hated himself every day for driving her into that ocean.

  But she hadn’t been running from him.

  He felt like he could breathe for the first time in days. Maybe her ghost wasn’t haunting him for revenge; maybe it wanted revenge on their black-eyed kidnappers, and he was the only one who could get it for her.

  Mali leaned close. “You can make a choice. You can choose to do what is right.”

  She removed her finger from his forehead, freeing him. He sat up, pushing her aside, leaning into his throbbing hands.

  He hadn’t killed Yasmine—they had.

  He stood in a daze and stumbled to his camp, and stared at the paintings of Yasmine’s haunting eyes. Mali’s words lodged in his head like a splinter. He ripped down the bedsheet, and all the paintings, and then stormed deeper into the jungle.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  44

  Cora

  AFTER THE ARGUMENT AT the diner, the rest of Cora’s night was as surreal as a nightmare.

  Lucky took her to see a film in the movie theater, ten minutes of a goat standing in a field while the phantom smell of popcorn choked her. He spent every hard-earned token he had on chocolates and gummies from the candy shop, which Cora forced down with a smile, never mind that they made her stomach burn. At suppertime he played a song on the jukebox about finding true love.