The Hunt (The Cage 2)

Dane smirked, undeterred. “I thought you didn’t trust a word out of our kidnappers’ mouths.”

Cora narrowed her eyes, and Dane matched it with a thin smile. “Like I said, with that attitude, neither of you will ever see Armstrong. Do you know what they do with the ones who turn nineteen and haven’t behaved?”

Lucky, next to her, went still. An eerie quiet spread from the other cast members, who shifted uneasily in their cells.

“What?” Cora asked warily.

“I don’t know,” Dane said, and pointed toward the corridor. “But each one of those rooms in there connects to a drecktube. It’s where we dump the animals if they die, and all our trash. The bad kids go in there and they never come back. You saw it yourself, today. The boy those two guards dragged off, Chicago. Until this morning, he occupied this same cell that you’re in now. That’s his blanket you’re hugging, as a matter of fact. He’s always been a problem—never wanted to clap when the guests told him to clap, never polished the rifles on time.” His voice lingered in a way that made Cora wonder if he was telling the truth. Shoving kids down a trash chute didn’t sound like a very Kindred thing to do.

“So behave yourself, songbird,” Dane continued, “and sing for that Warden of yours, and one day maybe you’ll go to Armstrong instead of the alternative.”

He stowed the yo-yo in his shirt pocket and climbed up the stairs to his cell. Pika tried to snatch the yo-yo from his pocket, but he slapped her hand away. She curled in her corner, sucking her braid, whining softly.

From two cells down, Lucky was still strangely quiet. It was as though all his anger had suddenly emptied, and Cora didn’t know why, or what had changed. She wished she could see into his mind.

She slid her hands around the bars.

Well, maybe she could.

She’d read Cassian’s mind once, though unintentionally. She hadn’t tried to read minds while trapped in the six-by-six cell, simply because there’d been nobody to practice on. But now she had a roomful of test subjects, and a boy whose thoughts she desperately wanted to read.

She closed her eyes, concentrating. Before, when she had read Cassian’s thoughts, her mind had been completely blank. Broken. That wasn’t the case now, but maybe she could quiet her mind enough.

Her thoughts reached out for Lucky, hoping to connect. And for a second, she thought she got a glimmer of something. It was shrouded in an overwhelming feeling of uneasiness. A number, maybe.

The number 19? Was that right? He must have been worried about Chicago and what Dane said, but there was something more. . . .

She got the sudden, eerie sensation she was looking into a hazy mirror. Or maybe more like watching herself on an old video recording, her hair extra bright, the dark circles under her eyes gone. Cherry petals were fluttering around her.

Her cheeks blazed. He was thinking of her. She quickly severed the connection into his mind. It had been wrong anyway—she shouldn’t have done it without his knowledge. Her heart pounded as she wondered if he could somehow tell what she’d done.

But then he sighed, and rolled over, and there was nothing.

She stretched out a hand instead and tried again to reach him through the bars, but they never would be close enough.

9

Nok

“THIS IS YOUR NEW home.”

Serassi rested a hand on the knob of the red front door of a two-story house.

Nok placed her palm flat on her belly. With the other, she squeezed Rolf’s hand. They stood in a cavernous warehouse so large that the walls were hidden in shadow. It was nearly empty except for two structures: the house with the red front door, and tiered rows of theater benches facing it.

Serassi twisted the knob.

The house was filled with heavy wooden furniture, a blocky television set, cabinets that looked painted on. Nok got the sense that she and Rolf had been brought to an enormous dollhouse, or maybe that they’d been shrunk down to doll size. She pushed back the paisley living room curtains, expecting to see opaque observation panels instead of windows. But here, the windows were real transparent glass, though beyond was only the empty warehouse.

The house is perfect in every way, she thought, except one.

There were only three walls.

She turned to where the fourth wall, the front of the house, should be. Open space gaped, facing the tiered spectator seating in the same way that a theater was open to the audience. Carefully, Nok walked to the edge of the living room, where the floor ended abruptly. It was about a four-foot drop to the warehouse floor below. From the house’s upstairs level, the drop must be closer to fifteen feet. She let her bare toes curl over the edge. She could jump off, but where would she go? Wherever the warehouse doors were, they would be locked.

Bright lights suddenly turned on from the direction of the seating area, and she shaded her face. Who exactly was going to watch them?

“Nok.” She turned at Rolf’s call. He stood at the top of the living room stairs. His fingers were holding the handrail tightly, but they weren’t tapping. He’d shaken that bad habit during their time in the cage, and for a second, he looked like an entirely different person than the twitchy genius she’d first met. “You should come see this.”

She followed him up the stairs, so nervous that her own fingers nearly started twitching. The entire house consisted of only four rooms, stacked two on two like a perfect cube, with a small cutout for a bathroom. Downstairs was a living room and a kitchen large enough to fit a dining room table. Upstairs there was a bedroom and a spare room, mostly empty now except for a rocking chair and a few boxes.

She paused in the open doorway.

Unassembled parts of a crib were leaning against one of the boxes. A tangled mobile of stars already hung from the ceiling, perfectly still in the windless room. She took a shaky step inside, touching the mobile to make it spin.

A nursery—or at least the start of one.

The mobile spun faster, or maybe the spinning was in her head. She suddenly felt like she was back home in London, trapped in front of flashing camera lights, a too-small dress riding up her hips. She felt sick and turned, but jumped to find Serassi blocking the door.

“I don’t understand,” Nok said, breathing hard. “You said we weren’t capable of raising our own young. You said you were going to take away the baby.”

Serassi eyed her calmly. “That was my original assessment, yes. We reproduce by collecting Kindred DNA and matching it for optimum genetics. The offspring are not born, but raised in communal grow houses from infancy through first-decade aging. As chief genetics officer, I have been working to engineer a similar system with humans. Soon, natural reproduction will be as obsolete for your kind as it is for ours. Your child mig

ht very well be the last born of natural means.”

She almost looked pleased with herself, but then she blinked, as though she had forgotten something important, and cocked her head. “Though after observing you in your previous enclosure, I realized I might be missing a valuable opportunity to study authentic prenatal care in its natural habitat. Our knowledge of your child-rearing culture has heretofore been collected by studying artifacts: instructional books, videos, and recordings. I’ve learned that your kind has traditions that are never written down. It is my intention to observe these informal practices here.”

Nok stumbled through her words. “So . . . we can keep the baby?”

Serassi’s dark eyes swiveled to Nok’s belly. “As long as you prove yourselves useful to our research purposes.”

“And if we don’t?” Rolf asked tensely. “You cut the baby out of her belly and kill us?”

“The moral code prevents us from killing you,” Serassi answered, though from the way her voice lingered, whatever the alternative would be didn’t seem much better.

A pain shot through Nok’s belly. Was it true? Would they really take Sparrow away before she was even born and raise her in some alien incubator somewhere, watched and documented just like Nok had been for all those photographers back home? “You’re monsters!” She lunged toward Serassi, but Rolf held her back. His muscles had grown from all the sledding and gardening in the cage, and he stopped her from clawing at Serassi.

“Don’t,” he whispered. “She’s stronger than us. Think of Sparrow.”

Nok let out a frustrated cry and spun away, breath coming fast. She pressed a hand to the base of her neck. The Kindred had fixed her asthma when they’d abducted her, but she still felt the ghost of tightness in her lungs.