Safe—she was safe.
Or was she?
Her body ached, but what frightened her even more was that her head didn’t. Something had happened when she’d felt that tear. The pain in her head had vanished. She tried to tentatively push out her psychic abilities, but there was nothing there. It was just as though she’d suddenly lost her hearing or her sense of smell.
She had broken her mind permanently this time.
Fear made her breath go still.
She swallowed and frantically tried to remember something to see if her memories were still intact. Cassian—yes, she could picture him. She knew his name and how they’d met. Lucky—she remembered him too. She sighed in relief. It was okay; she remembered. She knew who Anya was, and Mali, and Nok and Rolf. She remembered waking up in the desert habitat of the cage. Before that, she remembered . . .
And her relief disappeared.
She remembered her first day in the cage clearly. The red sand dunes. Finding Lucky, and Yasmine’s body. But before that was only a blank. She knew some facts: she’d been abducted from Earth, her name was Cora—but there were simply no memories. She must have had a family, but she couldn’t remember them. Couldn’t remember going to school, or what she did for fun, or who her friends were. Couldn’t picture her house. Couldn’t even remember what state she was from.
She drew in a sharp breath. It had happened—exactly what Willa had warned her about. She had torn her brain and lost half her memories: every moment of her life from before the cage. She pressed her back against the platform, fighting a rising sense of panic. Was the damage permanent? What would happen if she never remembered? Would Cassian take her back to a planet she had no memory of? Would she have to rely on Mali and Leon and Nok and Rolf for the rest of her life? She couldn’t even remember her mother or her father.
Tears started pooling in her eyes, and she pitched forward, burying her face in her knees. Around her, lava hissed and sizzled. Her breath came in uneven sobs.
Slowly, very faintly, voices came to her head.
Stand up, Rolf’s voice said.
She didn’t stop crying. At least tearing her brain hadn’t affected the paragon burst, but what good was it now? Those voices couldn’t bring her memories back. They couldn’t tell her what she’d forgotten about Earth.
The voices began to whisper louder, voices of her friends and strangers alike:
Keep going.
Keep fighting.
She swallowed back another sob. Whispers of encouragement continued floating between her ears. And then:
Don’t give up!
It was the echo of Mali’s voice, practically shouting. Cora opened her eyes at last. Swallowed back the rising panic. At least she remembered Mali. And Cassian, and Leon, and Serassi, and Nok and Rolf and Lucky. She might not remember her old life, but she remembered her new one.
Keep going, Mali’s voice urged again.
The door opened, and it took the last of her energy to crawl through into puzzle eight. Bright lights blinded her. She blinked through them. She was on a . . . a stage. Stage lights shone from the ceiling, and she shaded her eyes to peer into row after row of empty theater seating. It was a concert hall. Beautiful and grand. Chairs of red velvet. Gilded theater boxes overlooking the stage. The only other thing onstage beside Cora was a grand piano.
From somewhere in the rafters, an intercom crackled to life. Cora tensed, apprehensive, mustering courage to fight if she had to. But then a slow song started playing.
All these years I thought I’d know
All the places I would go
An unfamiliar song—or had she known it once and was now missing that memory? She stood shakily and circled the piano. By the process of elimination, this had to be an intellectual puzzle.
And yet a thousand steps and still, I’m—
The song on the intercom stopped abruptly as she reached the piano bench. She waited for the song to resume, but it didn’t. She searched the piano, but there were no letters or numbers to rearrange.
Then an idea struck her. She sat on the bench and rested her fingers just above the keys. In the cage, there had been a music puzzle in the grasslands habitat. Three notes would play on the wind, and she and Lucky had matched them with identical musical notes. Maybe this puzzle was similar, only instead of matching the notes, she had to take it further and finish the song.
She touched a key hesitantly. A low C note reverberated through the room. Something about the familiar vibration washed over her skin, instantly calming her, as though she’d taken a deep breath of fresh air. She closed her eyes. It felt natural, deep down. She felt certain that back home—though she didn’t remember—she must have known how to play. She tried to shut off that blankness where her memories should have been and play on instinct.
Somewhere deep, she missed music. She missed her memories. She missed home, whatever it had been.
Serassi’s paragon burst flared to life too at the sound of the note. Music was one of the reasons Cassian had been fascinated by humans—an art form that the Kindred, in their sterile world, didn’t practice. She could feel humanity’s love of music humming inside her. All those voices, all those minds and hearts blossoming in unison.
She pressed another key, trying to remember the melody of the song on the intercom, and hummed a note to match it. She would need to get the rhyming just right, as well as the rhythm. The lyrics would have to make sense too with the rest of the song, not to mention the notes would need to perfectly match the ones that came before them. If she hit one wrong note or got one imperfect rhyme, she might lose the puzzle. And she couldn’t lose now, not when she was so close to seeing her friends again. To stopping the Axion.
“I’m not just any girl . . .”
She hummed the words slowly, her voice raspy with lack of warm-up. She hit each key on the piano slowly, careful to match the melody that had played moments ago as her mind worked to finish the rest of the line. Even now, she could feel the paragon burst working within her. Her thoughts came faster than they ever had before. She was aware of so much more than she’d ever been. It was as though Serassi had downloaded an encyclopedia into her mind, not just of facts but of emotions, ideas, sensations.
“I’m not just any girl. . . . I have an iron will, and I will show you who I am.”
She hit the last key.
The intercom crackled back to life—the puzzle wasn’t over yet. Another song started playing.
Dreams are like stars, stronger at night
This second song was more complicated. There were more sharps and flats to the notes, the speed was more staccato, the words harder to rhyme. But she didn’t care. The challenge felt thrilling. She kept playing, faster now and more confidently, not worried about stumbling over the notes.
Her voice rang out as she found just the right pitch: “Shining with promise, promising bright.” The room took on another energy, almost as if the empty seats were all filled. Cora pictured ghosts of people in all the seats, not just attentive spectators but active participants in her song. She pictured Mali and Lucky in the front row, Leon and Nok and Rolf behind them. Because she wasn’t the only one singing. It was their voices too, echoing in her head.
The voices of humanity.
Yo soy tan solo sin ti
Her fingers slowed to a stop. Was that Spanish? For a moment that beautiful flood of hope faltered. The voices in her head died down, as hesitant as she was. Her pulse started to pound faster. Her fingers were frozen over the keys.
She didn’t speak any foreign languages.
She let out a ragged breath. Dammit. Just once, couldn’t the stock algorithm take pity on her? Throw her an easy puzzle? But no, it had woven tricks and traps into every single one, making it impossible. She’d only managed to beat the others with the help of the paragon burst, or else with clues that Willa and Ironmage and Cassian had given her ahead of time.
The speaker crackled again, waiting for her to finish the song. Taunting her w
ith its silence.
I don’t speak Spanish, she wanted to yell. I can’t do it! Suddenly anger filled her—she’d come so far. She wanted to kick the bench over, slam her fists over the keys, rip out the piano wires with her hands.
But then one of the echoing voices reached her:
But I do.