The Cage (The Cage 1)

“Maybe you should take a deep breath, Cora. Meditate . . . or something. I know that fight turned quickly. We’ve all been bottling up emotions. Not thinking straight. This morning I woke up and forgot my mom died. I kept waiting to hear her making breakfast downstairs.”

Cora paused before continuing to feed tokens into the slot. She’d forgotten that Lucky’s mother had died when he was little. He’d told her so quickly, like it pained him deep to even think about. She’d forgotten he had a life before this, and plans.

The Kindred had taken that future from him.

From all of them.

“It isn’t about the fight.” Cora fed the slot more tokens. “Not entirely. It’s about the two of you arguing with each other, when it should be them we’re fighting. It’s about Rolf and Nok hooking up even though the Kindred are watching. We’re forgetting what matters, Lucky.”

She slammed the last token through the slot and pounded on a copper button beneath the croquet set. The glass door opened. She grabbed the blue mallet.

It felt powerful in her hand. Real.

She headed for the doorway.

The light had shifted to dusk. Music came from the diner, something with a hint of jazz, but it just made her head pound harder. Mali stood by the open door with her hands across her chest, watching Cora like she could see straight into her soul. A cry came from inside the diner and Nok rushed out, followed by Rolf, who clutched a guitar in one hand.

“You!” Rolf jabbed a finger at Cora. “What, breakfast and lunch wasn’t enough? You had to steal dinner too?”

“I didn’t steal anything!” Cora yelled.

“Stop shouting!” Nok wailed. “My head hurts!”

Rolf stomped toward Cora, his eye twitching. “Is this revenge for seeing us together? If you’re jealous that you and Lucky don’t have a relationship like we do, maybe that’s your own fault!” He let the guitar fall to the porch with a clatter of errant notes.

Cora jumped back. What had gotten into him? She tightened her grip on the mallet. First the radio. Now the guitar. If anyone had a right to be angry, it was her.

“You’ve been secretly buying things from the shops, haven’t you? We could have used those things, Rolf! If I’d had a garrote or a makeshift knife when the Warden had tried to strangle me, maybe I could have killed him!”

He rolled his eyes. “Wow. How brilliant of you to figure out my plan. Yes, I bought them and didn’t tell you. Just like you took our food and didn’t tell us.”

“I didn’t!”

Splinters of pain shot off from her head. It felt like her brain was splitting in two, and anger boiled from the fissure. She gripped the mallet tighter.

Rolf narrowed his eyes.

“Stop it.” Nok tugged on Rolf’s arm. “It doesn’t matter why she did it—there’s still enough food, if we divide up what’s on her plate and forage in the orchard. Cora, just don’t do it again. Please. Headaches are bad enough, we don’t need hunger pangs too.”

“I didn’t take your food. Don’t you see? The Kindred are doing this. They want us to turn against each other.”

The others stared at her like she’d gone mad.

Mali yawned.

Cora spun and strode through the grass, bumping into Rolf so hard that he knocked into the guitar with another burst of errant chords, and then she stopped in front of the movie theater’s black window.

Her father had taken her to a zoo when she was a little girl. They had gone to see the tiger. She remembered squeezing her father’s hand as it paced back and forth, back and forth, watching them with unblinking eyes through the glass.

She felt like that tiger. She was that tiger.

She laid her palm flat on the humming window. Only a thick piece of glass had stopped that tiger from killing her. She hoped the Kindred could read her mind, and know she was biding her time until no surfaces separated her from them, and she could do to them what that tiger wanted to do to her.

“All right, Caretaker,” she muttered, stepping back. “Take care of this.”

She swung the mallet with all her strength against the glass. Nok shrieked. Cora cringed, expecting a satisfying crack and shatter of glass. The mallet was real wood, not whatever fake substance everything else was made of, and yet the moment it connected with the window, nothing happened. Not a crack. Not even a thud.

“Dammit!” She hurled the mallet to the ground.

Her vision started to fracture into little dots, as if the lights of town were a spinning kaleidoscope. Pain ripped through her head as lack of sleep caught up with her all at once. She sank to the ground.

Lucky crouched next to her. The sweat had dried on his shirt in the cool evening air. He nodded toward the croquet mallet. “Did you really think that was going to work?”

She pushed her mess of hair out of her face and sat up. “I don’t know. I had to try.” She watched the others tearing into her plate of food on the diner porch. “Look at them. They’re like wolves. Don’t they understand what’s happening? These are creatures who took us from our beds. Who are forcing us to breed for their own twisted purposes. Who keep kids in cages and cut off their fingers.”

Lucky crackled the knuckles in his left hand. “The Mosca cut off fingers, not the Kindred.”

“They’re all part of the same system! The Kindred protect us only as long as we obey them.”

She moved closer, brushing his leather jacket, catching a trace of his fresh soap smell that reminded her of home. Home. Maybe at this moment Charlie was pulling his Jeep into the driveway, and Sadie was running out to meet him.

“I can’t take it, Lucky. I’m going crazy.” At Bay Pines she’d checked off the days on a calendar, but she had no boxes to check now. No end date. Just the seashells, but there was an endless ocean of them. Would she keep collecting them until they filled the house, spilling out the windows into the marigolds? For months? Years? She curled up tight, wishing she could disappear into herself. She needed help. She needed a way home.

She needed a sign that there was hope.

A soft, familiar plink sounded on the black window behind them. Cora lifted her head. When dusk had rolled in, clouds had come too.

A drop of rain fell on her bare toes.

She stared at the patch of water, dumbfounded. Every day in the cage had been identical. Sunny skies without a trace of clouds. It rained in the jungle, and it snowed in the forest, but always on a predictable schedule, and never in the town. Now the rain started softly, a few errant drops at a time. The clouds grew heavier, making the day darker. It had been so long since Cora had felt a drenching rain that she’d forgotten the way it smelled. So earthy.