The Gauntlet (The Cage 3)

AS SOON AS CORA crossed into the second puzzle, a familiar smell hit her. Sweet, minty, strong. Candy. She had expected to find another bare ten-by-ten-by-ten cube, but an illusion was projected throughout the room.

A candy shop.

She touched the shop’s glass counter with unsteady fingers. The candy jars, the giant cash register, the bins along the back wall—everything was identical to the candy shop they’d found in the cage. She almost expected Lucky to walk through the door behind her, joking about sugar highs. She moved behind the counter hesitantly. In the cage, the candy store had been an intellectual puzzle: the keys on the cash register weren’t numbers but letters, and each receipt card was an anagram. Nok had solved them almost instantly by unscrambling the letters to form words like CHOCOLATE and LICORICE and MINTS.

There was a card in the cash register’s receipt box here too.

MY ANISE.

Cora’s fingers rested on the cash register keys. Anise was a sweet herb that licorice was made out of. But anagrams were supposed to be scrambled nonsense words, and this one seemed already solved. So was she supposed to scramble it herself? That didn’t sound like much of a puzzle.

Her pulse beat in her fingertips, urging her to hurry to unscramble the word. MA . . . MAN . . . But her thoughts kept twisting back to the central vestibule. The scars on Cassian’s arms. The way he’d hesitated before calling to her. The fear in his eyes, almost as though he’d feared her, as though getting close to her again meant risking his life even more.

She snapped back to the letters. Solve it.

MANY . . .

ANY . . .

NAME . . .

Nothing she could come up with worked, and she huffed in frustration. The first puzzle was a trap, she reminded herself. This could be a trap too.

She forced herself to calm down.

She studied the card more carefully, staring at the letters, continuing to mentally move them around. SAY . . . YES . . . SAM . . .

No combinations made sense.

SIN . . .

SEINE, the river in Paris? But no, there was only one E. What else could it want her to spell? A habitat, like DESERT or JUNGLE?

A name?

AMY . . .

YAS . . .

She sucked in a breath as a sickening chill uncurled in her stomach. There was a name that started with Y. Then an A. Then S. Bile rose in her throat as she arranged one letter after another, half hoping she wasn’t right.

But the letters kept matching up.

Y . . . A . . . S . . . M . . . I . . . N . . . E.

She swallowed back the sour taste of bile. Yasmine had been the Middle Eastern girl she and Lucky had found in the cage on their first day. The original Girl Three. Yasmine had been dead when they found her, drowned. Cora had seen the Kindred experimenting on her body. She bent down, dizzy with the memory, then forced herself to take a breath and slowly tap out Yasmine’s name on the cash register keys.

The register dinged cheerfully. A token rolled down into the change trough.

She picked up the token, feeling sick, waiting for the next door to appear. She’d won, hadn’t she? But the walls remained the same. Then her fingers brushed four slots in the counter—the same size as tokens. Great. She had to solve four anagrams to win.

She shoved the token into the first slot and a new card popped up.

A RHINOS.

Okay. Think. Rhinoceros made her think of the Hunt, where all the animals had been so horribly mistreated. She tried to piece apart the letters.

NOIS . . .

RINA . . .

She sighed. Nothing seemed to click.

HARI . . .

Her uneasiness grew as she continued to rearrange the letters, coming up with nothing, until at last she found a combination that worked.

ROSHIAN.

Sweat beaded on her forehead. Roshian was the only person Cora had ever killed, impaling him through the eye. Her stomach twisted as she typed his name and got her second token. She was starting to realize the trick of this puzzle. What a messed-up game. Technically an intellectual one, yes, but it wasn’t about challenging her intellect. The stock algorithm was trying to shake her confidence by showing her the names of the dead.

People die when they get close to you, songbird, Dane had said. I’m not taking any chances.

She swallowed down the guilty taste of bile.

The third card popped up with a ding, and she closed her eyes, wincing. She knew what it would say. She just knew. There was only one other person who had died as a result of getting too close to her.

She opened her eyes with heavy dread.

CORA LIES ON FLU.

It was a nonsense sentence, but the first two words made her flinch as though each one were a slap. Cora lies. Which was exactly what she had done to Lucky. It was part of the reason he was dead.

Her fingers were shaking now, but she typed Lucky’s real name, LUCIANO FLORES, the ding of each key making her want to retch. A third token rolled out. She snatched it up, clenching her jaw. She wasn’t going to let this puzzle shake her. If the stock algorithm was trying to make her doubt herself, it would have to work harder.

She slammed the token into the third slot, determined, and the final card popped up.

MACAROONS.

She focused on the letters with renewed resolve. Who else was dead because of her? No names came to mind, and for a second, her confidence faltered. A cold chill spread through her legs. Maybe she hadn’t figured out the hidden trick of this puzzle after all.

SCAR . . . CARO . . .

And then her lips parted—there was a name in the letters.

CORA.

Her own

name. The chill grew as she unscrambled the rest of the letters.

CORA MASON.

She jumped back from the cash register as if the keys had turned molten. She stared at her name. Yasmine, Roshian, and Lucky were all dead because of her, and now her own name was on a card.

Am I going to die too?

Fear shot to her throat. She pushed back, shaking her head. No, the stock algorithm had no way of knowing that. It was just trying to make her second-guess herself, that was all. A trick. She paced, wondering how much time she’d already wasted.

I can’t let it get in my head.

She set her fingers on the keys, ready to type her own name, but paused. What if, by entering in her name, she was somehow signing her own death warrant? What if typing her name would make it come true?

She lifted her fingers off the keys, letting out a tight breath. This could be another moral test in disguise. Add her name to the list of the dead, and the Gauntlet would make certain it happened. But what choice did she have? If she didn’t solve the puzzle, she wouldn’t move on.

She started typing slowly.

C-O-R-A-M-A-S-O-

She hesitated, the premonition that she was ensuring her own death almost too overwhelming to fight against.

She swallowed.

She hoped she wasn’t making the biggest mistake of her life.

She typed the N.

26

Cora

C-O-R-A-M-A-S-O-N.

Cora stepped back, tense, braced for something terrible to happen.

The cash register dinged. A door appeared to her left.

She’d won.

She let out quick breaths, not daring to trust it. Had she just sealed her own fate? Her legs shook as she walked around the counter, toward the open door. She peeked into the next cube: plain walls. Empty. She stepped in quickly, glad to be away from the cloyingly sweet smell of the candy shop, from the names of the dead, from her own name.

The door closed behind her.