The Hunt (The Cage 2)

She stormed into the nursery. Rolf followed her, glancing back at the open door.

“At least we’re safe for the time being,” Rolf said.

“Until when?” she asked. “Until we can’t teach them anything they haven’t already learned from books? Rolf, I don’t know anything about raising a baby. It won’t take them long to figure that out. A month, maybe two, and they’ll take her away as soon as she’s developed enough.”

She glanced over at the crib and felt sick all over again.

“I won’t let it come to that.” Rolf rested his hands on her shoulders.

They went back into the hallway, but Serassi had vanished. They found her downstairs, inspecting a microwave oven that kept dinging despite the fact that nothing was cooking. If she was upset that Nok had nearly tried to claw her face off, she didn’t show it.

“Do this for Sparrow,” Rolf whispered.

It gave Nok something to hold on to, and she took a deep breath and turned to Serassi. “What about the others?”

Serassi straightened. “None of the others are expecting a child, so there is no reason for them to be here.” She nodded toward the staircase. “You will find suitable clothing in the bedroom upstairs. Try to ignore the observers and act as naturally as you would if you were in your former lives. This habitat has been left open so the observers can ask you any questions they might have about what you are doing and why. Answer their questions promptly. Otherwise, you are free to live as you choose.”

The tight walls of the living room pressed in toward Nok.

“Where is Cassian? Can we talk to him?”

Serassi returned to inspecting the microwave. “If you believe that Cassian will take you away from this place, you are mistaken. He needed to hide Cora’s escape attempt and his own role in it from the Council. Tessela and Fian are two of his supporters, and thus they agreed to lie. But I care nothing for his mission. And so he offered to give me the two of you and your baby for my own research purposes, in exchange for my silence.” Serassi closed the microwave door. “I am the one you answer to now.”

Nok closed her eyes, pressing a hand to her throat.

“We have simulated day and night for you,” Serassi continued. “I will return tomorrow to perform the first round of tests, along with my fellow reproductive scientists. We expect you to comply with the mission of this facility and act in a way befitting parents-to-be. Cook meals and dine together. Prepare the house for your coming child. Follow whatever customs you would on Earth. And, most importantly, focus on your health. For the baby.”

Her eyes, once more, went to Nok’s belly.

Nok pressed her hands tighter to fight against the sense that Serassi was already communicating with her child; that Sparrow somehow already belonged more to this creature than to Nok.

Serassi left through the red front door, which seemed a bit farcical; she could have stepped down through the missing wall. Once she was gone, Nok threw her arms around Rolf. She wanted to burst into tears, but they didn’t come. “How much time do we have until Sparrow is developed enough that they could take her away?”

“I can’t be certain,” Rolf said. “Their time works differently. In the cage, I had started to work through the calculations—it’s an algorithm based on the speed of the rotations of this station and the gravitational pull of nearby planets. But then . . . Well.” His face went dark. “It didn’t seem to matter anymore.”

Nok didn’t need to ask him what he meant. She and Rolf had both gone a little crazy in the cage, convinced that the unlimited candy and video games were paradise.

“Can you try to figure it out again?” she asked, squeezing his arms. “We need to know how much time we have to . . .” Pressure built behind her eyes but she still didn’t cry. This time, she wasn’t going to go along blindly, letting people order her to pose this way and that. She was done being a living doll. “. . . to escape. Sparrow is not going to grow up in this dollhouse with an alien for a mother. She’s going to grow up with you and me—far away from here.”

10

Cora

IT WAS A NOISY night. The brother and sister from Australia whispered to each other from their neighboring cells, and once Dane fell asleep, Pika started grumbling aloud to the bobcat’s tail about the yo-yo. The only quiet corner was Mali’s and the hyena’s, and Cora wondered what Mali must think of all this. Like Dane, Mali had once sided with their Kindred kidnappers. But that had changed when she’d learned Anya was alive—and the Kindred had lied about it.

“Cora,” Lucky whispered. “You still awake?”

“As if I could sleep.” She tapped on the bars above her. “What about you, Mali?”

Two arms and a head appeared, upside down. Thin as she was, Mali had to be the only one who could squeeze her head between the bars. “I do not sleep either.”

“Where have they been keeping you?” Lucky asked.

Cora told him about the six-by-six cell, and the grimaces on both his face and Mali’s said they were all too familiar with it.

“I do not think they have caught Leon,” Mali said. “He might come back for us.”

Lucky snorted. “He won’t.”

The disappointment on Mali’s face was plain to see, even upside down. In the cage, she and Leon had been matched. An arrangement that Leon had resisted, to say the least, and yet Cora knew that the Kindred had matched them because they were more alike than he wanted to admit.

Cora reached up and squeezed Mali’s dangling hand.

Lucky’s voice dropped an octave, as though he knew he was treading dangerous ground. “They said the Warden brought you here. He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

Cora felt her heart beat just once, painfully, as if someone had reached into her chest and squeezed out all the blood. Had he hurt her? He’d decimated her.

She clenched her jaw.

“I’m fine.” She squinted into the darkness. “Are there black windows here? Are they watching us?”

“Not as far as I can tell. It isn’t like the cage, where they watched us all the time. They don’t seem to care what we do, as long as we don’t cause trouble. Wait until you get a good look at this place during the daytime. It’s a dump.”

Mali grunted her agreement. “We are not prime specimens anymore.”

Cora glanced toward the other cells, listening to the faint sounds of shifting bodies as the others slept. She pulled her blanket tighter. Chicago’s blanket. What had he done to merit being dragged off on his nineteenth birthday, instead of being sent to Armstrong? And what were the Kindred’s lies he’d been yelling about?

“I don’t know if I believe a word Dane says,” Cora said, “but we can’t stay here.”

Lucky let out a harsh laugh. “We tried to escape. You know as well as I do how that played out.”

“I’m not talking about escape,” Cora whispered. “Cassian has a different plan. There’s a series of tests that’s happening in a few weeks. If I run them and pass, humans will be granted intelligent species status. They won’t be able to cage us anymore. That’s why he put us here, to train me in psychic abilities secretly so I can pass the tests.”

Mali, her long braids dangling toward the floor, let out another soft grunt. “You speak of the Gauntlet.”

Cora nodded.

Lucky stared at her with an unreadable expression in the blue glow. “Psychic abilities?” There was a strange undertone in his voice. She couldn’t shake the feeling that words like freak were circling around in the back of his head.

“Will you do it,” Mali asked.

“I didn’t say yes,” Cora said. “I can’t bring myself to trust him. He had me completely fooled before. You have no idea how awful it is to even be around him, the constant reminders that he was lying the entire time.”

Lucky didn’t respond right away, and she realized her connection with Cassian was probably the last thing he wanted to talk about.

“The Gauntlet is dangerous,” Mali said. “Eleven humans

attempt to run it before. None still live.”

“They died in the puzzles?”

“A few. The physical challenges are difficult, but the moral and perceptive ones are most dangerous. They can break your mind. Some humans go insane and die after.”

“What kind of puzzles were they?” Cora asked.