The Hunt (The Cage 2)

They were in Serassi’s genetics laboratory, where she had taken Nok for testing. Serassi’s head swiveled toward her as though she had forgotten Nok was lying flat on the examination table with tubes snaking into her veins. Something had changed over the past few days. Serassi had been spending more time in the house, not just observing it. She rarely input research findings into her hip computer, even when Nok made up a really juicy lie about baby-raising practices. And last night, Serassi had hung photographs of Sparrow on all the dollhouse walls. Simulations of what she would look like as a baby, and as a toddler, and as a little girl in a lavender dress. Serassi had superimposed herself in all the photos, like a doting mother. Nok and Rolf weren’t in any of them.

Now, in the lab, Serassi dismissed Nok’s correction. “Yes. Babies are sugary. Not sweet. Of course.” She turned back to the three-dimensional model of the baby on the glowing surface. The image glowed a little itself, but otherwise it looked alarmingly realistic. The projected baby was crawling, which meant she had to be around six months old, if Nok had learned anything from reading all those parenting books.

She ran a hand over her belly and accidentally brushed one of the sensors. The image of the baby flickered like static on a television set and then righted itself again. Serassi punched a few more commands into her hip pad, and the baby fast-forwarded until she was twenty pounds bigger and was walking now, unsteadily, waving her little arms.

There was something in Serassi’s face that hadn’t been there before, as she watched the projection. Even though she was cloaked, there was a glisten of pride and desire all mixed up together that made Nok’s heart race with fear.

Serassi punched a few more keys, and the toddler fast-forwarded again. Now the baby fat was gone, and the child’s black hair, slightly curly at the ends like Rolf’s, hung down to her shoulders. The little girl skipped in a circle.

Nok pressed her hand again against her small belly bump. The fetus was just a little over twenty weeks old, yet here she was as a four-year-old. She had Nok’s eyes.

Serassi punched in another few commands and the girl’s face shifted slightly. Her hair was shorter; her limbs were too.

“Hey!” Nok sat up in alarm, jostling the equipment, making the image flicker. “What did you do to her?”

Serassi gave her a slow, annoyed-looking blink. “I am running a variety of programs to see what effects various diets and outside factors will have on the child’s development.”

“Well, don’t. It’s creepy to see her change like that.”

“They are all possibilities for how the baby will grow depending on what external factors I expose her to.”

“We,” Nok said tensely. “What we expose her to.”

Serassi leveled her a black-eyed stare, then turned back to the screen. “This is if she receives a protein-rich diet, and if I mimic her environment to be that of a high altitude.” A few more buttons, and the girl shifted again, her hair slightly lighter. “This is if she receives a primarily vegetarian diet, at a low altitude, in an area with strenuous terrain.”

“And if she grows up on an alien space station, eating replicated food that all tastes like chalk?”

“As far as the child is concerned, she will not even know what Earth is.” Serassi’s face was perfectly emotionless. “Or rather, was.”

Before Serassi had taken Nok away for this round of examinations in the laboratory, Rolf had whispered in her ear: Cooperate with her. Don’t give her any reason to be unhappy with us. But Nok had never been good at controlling her temper. “Yeah,” she muttered, “because it’ll be totally normal to have a dozen Kindred observers watching through a missing wall of our house.”

Serassi’s eyes narrowed slightly. “It is not up to you to decide how the child will be raised.” The image of the girl sat cross-legged, playing a game on her hand that Nok used to play, too.

“Sparrow,” Nok said.

Serassi cocked her head. “What did you say?”

“Her name is Sparrow.”

She was pushing it, she knew. And yet she detested that possessive look on Serassi’s face. It was the same look Miss Delphine, her talent manager, had worn when she sent Nok to fashion shoots in dirty warehouses. As if her life wasn’t her own.

The blue sensor above the door suddenly flickered, and Cassian entered.

Nok sat straighter—it was the first time she’d seen him since the cage. He was cloaked, and just as robotic as always, except his eyes shifted to the black panel anxiously. If Cassian noticed the projected four-year-old girl playing hand games on the glowing surface, he didn’t say anything. He exchanged a few words with Serassi and then turned to the door.

“There are no observers,” he said in English. “It is safe for you to enter.”

Cora hobbled in, favoring one leg. Nok leaned forward so abruptly that it screwed with all the sensors and the image of Sparrow flickered wildly. Cora’s hair was dirty and streaked with sweat; she was wearing a torn gold ball gown; dried blood was crusted on her left shin.

“Cora?” Nok asked incredulously.

Cora’s eyes went wide. “Nok!”

Nok kicked her legs off the examination table and threw her arms around Cora. “What happened?”

Cora shook her head. “It’s a lot to explain, but I’m okay. And you? You’re okay?” She looked around at the lab’s medical equipment.

“It’s just . . . baby stuff,” Nok said, glancing at Serassi. “There’s this projection and . . .” But Serassi was watching her keenly, and she stopped. She wanted to tell Cora about the dollhouse, about the lies she and Rolf had made up, about Serassi’s increasingly possessive behavior.

But Cassian interrupted their reunion. “Cora, sit on the table. Serassi will repair your wound.”

Serassi gave him a look that said she had no intention of doing anything of the sort, and they spoke in flat Kindred words for a moment. Serassi’s voice went extra tight—the closest thing to an argument two cloaked Kindred could reach.

Nok pinched herself so that they wouldn’t be able to read her mind and stepped out of their earshot. “Please tell me you’re getting us to that safe room soon,” she whispered to Cora. “Serassi’s got this weird obsession with Sparrow, like Rolf and I don’t even exist. She’s going to cut Sparrow out of me and lock us away in cages any minute, I swear.”

“I did have a plan, but . . .” Cora looked down at her bloodstained hands, and Nok wasn’t sure she wanted to know what had happened. “But Cassian might suspect too much now. If anything happens to me, Leon will get you to the safe room.” She glanced at Cassian. “Listen, don’t get your hopes up, but we found a clue that someone might have tampered with the algorithm that claimed Earth was gone. We’re trying to get real proof.”

Nok’s heart thundered. “We could go home?”

But Cassian and Serassi had stopped speaking, and Nok squeezed Cora’s hand hard, a signal not to answer in case they were listening. Serassi turned to one of the cabinets, where she traced a pattern and took out the repair tool. She worked efficiently, healing Cora’s wound slowly and methodically until the skin was entirely patched. If it hadn’t been for the dried blood crusting Cora’s foot, Nok would never have known she’d been wounded.

Cassian turned to Cora. “We must go.”

Nok threw her arms around Cora again, breathing in the scent of mud on her clothes, with only a trace of ozone. “Don’t leave.”

“Just hold on a few more days.” Cora squeezed her hand.

It was the same quick, tight squeeze Cora had given to her the first day they had woken in the cage, with no idea where they were. At the time, Nok had been so crippled by fear that she’d barely been able to string words together. Now, she could feel how much she had changed. Instead of balling up and rocking back and forth, she could fold the fear into herself, tuck it away carefully behind a mask of indifference, just like the Kindred. There, it could grow, and fester, and give her a steady stream of anger that she could twist into

strength.

Serassi ripped Cora out of Nok’s arms before she could say good-bye, and shoved her toward the open doorway. The door slid closed.

Nok was again alone with Serassi.

On the glowing surface, the projected image had changed again, this time to Sparrow as she truly was, a barely developed fetus, tiny arms visible when the image wasn’t flickering.

Nok’s fear folded itself into a knot again, tighter and tighter.

Serassi reached out toward the projection, fingers brushing against the formless shape tenderly. “Sugary,” she cooed. “Such a sugary little thing.”

28

Cora

THE LAST TIME CORA had been in Cassian’s quarters, everything she’d known about him had been a lie. He wasn’t the low-level Caretaker he claimed to be, powerless in the face of the Warden—he was the Warden. So when the door to his room slid open, she expected to find chambers befitting his rank.

But there was only the same lonely chair, the same hard bed, the lone square drinking glass.

She turned to him in confusion. “I thought this room was just part of the act.”