The Cage (The Cage 1)

But he couldn’t stop her, not when she was this close.

He pushed her back to the shallow surf. “Don’t, Cora. You can’t do it. Your mind isn’t strong enough.”

She started. His voice was different. Less rigid. Startlingly human. Was he uncloaked? A rush of curiosity swelled. You do not know what I am like, when I am uncloaked. But she ignored her curiosity. He wouldn’t be stopping her unless she was right. She had solved the last of the puzzles—the only one that really mattered.

The exit.

50

Cora

THE OCEAN WAVES WENT on crashing, even when everything else in Cora’s world had ground to a halt. The salt air beckoning her toward the exit she knew was just beneath those waves—if only Cassian weren’t holding her back.

More than just his voice had changed. It was his eyes. They had always been fathomlessly black, but they were cloudy now, like a broken storm, clearing into something that looked drastically more human.

Her lips parted. “Your eyes—”

“Don’t,” he said again, his voice so warm and rich and varied as his fingers knitted against her. “Don’t go in the water. Your mind can’t handle it.”

Cora’s head spun, still thrown off by seeing raw emotions in a man she had thought practically mechanical. “That’s the way out, isn’t it? I figured it out in your quarters, when you were telling me the real reason the Warden took us.”

“Yes.” His heart was beating wildly through his shirt. “Yes, that’s the way out, but it’s impossible for humans to pass through. Your physical body can do it—it’s just a matter of swimming down far enough—but your mind won’t let you do what it believes is impossible. You’d have to go beyond the point where you could swim back to the surface.” His hand wove through her hair, and she closed her eyes, overcome by this new side of him. “You shouldn’t have been able to perceive it. It’s true that they’ve been monitoring you for signs of perceptive ability, but none of you have yet exhibited any, despite the extents to which they’ve pushed your minds.”

“I don’t have to be psychic to be smart.” Her voice sounded certain, and yet her thoughts wavered. Was deduction really all there was to it? There’d been that time the ocean had shimmered so strangely. The time in the bookstore when her vision and balance had pulsed.

She stared at the waves that weren’t waves at all, but just more illusions, wondering what it all meant. One of Cassian’s hands still tangled in her hair and the other pulled at her waist, refusing to let her go, flooding her with that spark.

His storm-cloud eyes searched hers. “What are you thinking? Tell me.”

His frantic request threw her off—she was so used to him reading her mind—until she remembered that he couldn’t read minds when his own was flooded with emotions.

I’m thinking about you, she thought, knowing he couldn’t read her. Seeing you like this, uncloaked and real, as desperate as I am.

“I can’t stay here,” she said. “None of us can. Through the ocean is the only way.” A breeze sent a spray around them. A drop landed on the shoulder of his uniform. She touched it with the pad of her finger. “Don’t you understand? None of this is real. We can’t live like that.”

“Not everything is an illusion.” His hands pawed at her waist. “There are real oceans out there, on other planets. I’ll get permission to take you there. I’ll show you an ocean, or dogs, or the stars—I’ll show you whatever you want, as long as you stay here.”

His breath was straining against the machinery strapped to his chest. He wanted her to be like Charlie’s pet rat, taken out to ride on his shoulder, but at the end of the day, always locked back in his cage.

She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at his. Those dark eyes, the scar on the side of his neck, the nights he spent sleepless. They were more alike than she wanted to admit. She thought of that single chair in his quarters. Why hadn’t she seen until then how alone they both were?

Cora had wanted so badly to feel normal for once. She hadn’t belonged in Bay Pines, and she hadn’t belonged back home either. Maybe she would never belong: maybe there were certain people, like her, meant to live between worlds. Cassian too. The only Kindred who felt sympathy for humans and a desire to understand them, not use them.

“I can do it,” Cora whispered. “I figured out the puzzle was there without perceptive abilities, so I know I can make it through.”

His hands pulled her close enough to whisper, with a voice so human she could close her eyes and almost pretend he was. “Stay here. With me. The things I have done . . .” He stopped, and swallowed. “I’ve made so many mistakes, Cora.”

She didn’t know which mistakes he was talking about, but it didn’t matter. They had both made so many. In that moment, more had changed than just his eyes. In her, or in him, she wasn’t sure. When she had first seen him, she had thought him such a terrifyingly beautiful creature. Their captor. Their jailer. He was still those things to her, but he was something more. She didn’t want to put a word on it, and she didn’t know how she even would, but she knew it had to do with the times he had asked her what it meant to be human.

This was what had changed, and it was so devastatingly simple: she had become a person to him; he had become a person to her. Human, Kindred—it didn’t matter. It was just her, and him, standing in the sea.

His hand grazed the constellation markings on her neck. She couldn’t help but think about Lucky, who drew her to him as if they’d been made for each other—exactly as the Kindred engineered it. She and Lucky had everything needed to fall in love: attraction, respect, a shared past she hadn’t even known about. But in the same way the trees here were not quite trees, and the fruit was not quite fruit, the Kindred had misjudged something about humanity, and people, and the connections between humans. Love wasn’t just a combination of matching physical and personal criteria. It was something you couldn’t put into words, just a certainty, a twist of fate, a spark.

As much as Lucky drew her to him, she had never felt that spark. Not like she did with Cassian.

She pulled away, covering her face with her hands.

“Cora,” he murmured, and then said her name again and again. She was shaking so hard that she leaned her head against his chest and thought about how before him, before this place, everyone thought of her as a victim—her family, her classmates, the media, even Lucky. But Cassian had never looked at her that way. He had always known that beneath the smile she’d been told to wear, she was strong.