Cora’s pulse throbbed in her head, too loud to think. In Bay Pines, the guards had always offered the inmates two choices. It was supposed to teach them to make good decisions. Once, Queenie got into a fight in the cafeteria, and the guards said she could either spend free period cleaning the spilled food or be dragged straight off to solitary. Queenie had just smiled and stabbed a fork into her hand, and spent the next two weeks in a cushy bed in the psych hospital watching Friends reruns.
Cora had learned a lesson from Queenie that day, but not the one the guards wanted: just because someone told you there were only two choices didn’t mean they were right.
Sometimes you had to make your own third option.
29
Cora
“ANSWER ME, CORA,” CASSIAN said. “Agree to run the Gauntlet according to my rules. There is still time. It is for your own good.”
“Is it?” Her voice was dangerously soft. “We both know this is about more than the Gauntlet. You can’t stand the thought of your precious pet not obeying you.” She met his eyes with a challenging stare. “You can’t stop thinking about that day in the ocean surf when you kissed me. I bet you even want to do it again, don’t you? Feel desire, and love, and all those emotions that are denied to you. You never wanted me to be free. You want me to be yours.” She turned her hand palm up to show the markings on her skin. “Did you think I wouldn’t notice my ring finger? You modified the markings to look like a diamond ring.”
He went quiet. His eyes went from her hand to her face and back again.
“You’ve studied humanity more than any other Kindred,” she continued. “You know what a diamond ring means to us. To have and to hold.”
The muscles of his neck were tensing. He picked up the gloves again, tugging one on stiffly. “You understand nothing.”
“Don’t I?” She stood. “You might be wearing a mask, but I can still see beneath it.”
He turned on her fast enough to make her breath go still. He would never hurt her, she knew, but it was impossible not to be intimidated by him.
He leaned in until he could whisper against her ear.
“Can you? Well then, let’s both drop our masks.” He closed his eyes. The muscles of his face shifted beneath his skin. Tension drained away. Jaw softened. When he opened his eyes, they had cleared into the gray storm clouds that hovered just over his irises.
He blinked.
“This is bigger than what I want, and what you want.” His voice was rounder, more insistent, and it made her blood pool in her heart. “I suspected all along that you were not being honest with me, but I did not want to believe it. And I don’t blame you for wanting to cheat us, after we have mistreated you. But now, you must agree to do this the correct way. Then, once this is over, I’ll take you back to your solar system myself, so we can both learn the truth. And if the algorithm is right, and there is only a hole in the sky where your home used to be, you will truly know that there is no other place for you than with me.”
A shiver ran down her back. “Don’t talk like that.”
But he leaned in closer. “You accuse me of wanting to feel lesser emotions. You’re right. Is it such a crime to want to feel? I do not understand why we must always be at odds. Why we cannot be partners in proving humanity’s intelligence. Why that partnership cannot cross into what I feel in my heart whenever I think of you. Why you cannot love me, and why you feel such contempt for the fact that I love you.”
His lips grazed her ear on his last words. She drew in a tight breath, electricity from his touch shooting through her nerves. He turned his head just slightly, until the side of his face pressed hers. “You do not give up,” he said. “And so I will not give up either. Even when it goes against logic.”
He wanted to kiss her. She could feel it in every move he made.
And she wanted him to. She wanted to put aside the anger, the betrayal, the questions over the future. She wanted to forget about the murder on her hands.
But she looked away.
“No,” she said. “There’s a third way. You say you respect us, so prove it. Help me do this my way.”
His hands flexed against the wall indecisively, as though part of him still wanted to kiss her right there. His face was warm against hers.
“I cannot condone cheating.”
“You can. Because if you truly love me, then the only way that I could come to love you back is if we’re complete equals.”
She let her lips graze his ear and felt his jaw tighten in response. He let out a breath and then pulled away, hands falling to his sides. He paced quickly, one hand scrubbing over his face in indecision. For a minute, she almost regretted using him like this. But then he snatched up the other glove from the table and tugged it on, his movements tight and angry.
“Does this mean you’ll help?” She couldn’t keep the hope from her voice.
He gave a reluctant nod. “Yes, though you have no idea what you’re asking. There are complications . . .” His voice was tense, and he dropped whatever he was going to say. “Just rest. Your mind needs it. I’ll return shortly.”
The door slid closed behind him.
The panel hummed, and the weight of solitude pressed in from all sides. She pressed a hand to her lips, where she could still feel a lingering spark. Her body started shaking at the thought that after everything—the murder and the argument and months of anger—they were on the same side. There would be no more secrets or lies.
She staggered into the bedroom and paced, trying to calm her heart. He had left a drawer open, and she riffled through it. Black shirts made of a liquid-metal material that was like impenetrable silk; they were formfitting on him, but when she changed into one, it fell below her hips like a loose tunic. She pressed the fabric to her face. It smelled like ozone and salt, and for a moment the lingering image of Roshian’s bloody face disappeared, and she remembered standing in the ocean with Cassian, her face pressed against this same shirt.
Had he really meant his promise? Had she?
I could come to love you. . . .
The idea made her shiver with either nerves or excitement, and she balled up her dirty dress and shoved it into the back of the drawer, then slammed it closed. There was another drawer next to it. Curious, she tapped on it, trying to mimic whatever gesture he made to open them. She swirled her finger over the drawer’s surface, trying circles, stars, crosses, and then paused. Slowly, she traced the symbol that he had drawn for her once on the alcove table. The symbol of the effort to prove humanity’s worth, the Fifth of Five: a double helix with five marks for the five intelligent species.
The drawer opened, but inside she found only more clothes, a deck of cards, a few spare temporary removal passes. Then her fingers brushed something hard.
A small spiral-bound notebook.
It was cheap; the kind of thing you’d pick up at the dollar store to jot down grocery lists in. But the worn pages suggested it had been handled carefully for some time. She flipped open the cover, but there were only strange marks in pencil that varied in pressure, like the writer wasn’t sure how hard to press.
She flipped another page. It was just shapes. A small circle, a large oval, something like an elongated triangle. She flipped again. Similar shapes, only more confidently drawn. One line was marked through, and another carefully drawn next to it. As she kept flipping, the shapes continued to evolve until her eye could stitch them together into something recognizable. That triangle was meant to be a tail. That small circle, an eye. By the last pages, the shapes formed a roughly drawn picture of a dog, its ears perked up.
She stared at the drawings. Had Cassian taken this from one of the abducted children? No, there was something so odd about the drawing. The lines wavered as if the artist didn’t know how to properly hold a pencil.
She flipped the page again, and started. In the final drawing, there was a loop on the dog’s back strung with a chain. It wasn’t just any dog—it was the charm Cassian had once given her to re
mind her of Sadie.
He had made these drawings. Painstakingly, secretly, teaching himself how to make human marks on human paper to depict an animal from a lost world. Why? She ran through every explanation, but there was really only one that made sense.
He wanted to draw. He wanted to make art.
She closed the notebook and stowed it back in the drawer.
She lay down. The pounding in her ears abated, and she began to hear the sounds of the station. Electricity pulsing. Machinery whirring softly. Right now, he would be destroying Roshian’s body to erase evidence of the murder she had committed.
Her thoughts started to unjumble as she rested. She believed everything he had said. That he loved her and wanted to prove humanity’s intelligence badly enough that he would even help her cheat—a practice that went against his core nature. It made her think of her parents’ marriage being held together with lies. Her mother’s denial about drinking and about all those late-night sessions with her personal trainer—though she didn’t seem to lose a single pound. Her father’s string of affairs too, the campaign aides and the widow two houses down, and all the false promises about a stable life, about retiring from politics, when he never had the slightest intention. A relationship twisted by betrayal was no relationship at all.
But then she thought of the drawing. If Cassian was going to stand by his promise, then maybe she would stand by hers. Maybe he didn’t deserve giving up on. And maybe not all relationships that started with lies also had to end with them.
30
Leon
LEON GRUMBLED TO HIMSELF as he stood over the broken-down parts of a baby crib. Bonebreak had agreed to the safe room idea, but only if Leon forfeited his cut of each smuggling run, which was extortion if he’d ever heard of it. But he’d begrudgingly agreed, and Bonebreak’s underlings had taken him to this dusty storeroom that, as best he could tell from the smell, used to house rancid cheese.
“Why don’t these bloody things come with instructions?” he muttered to himself, picking up a piece that might have been a railing. It was the same crib he’d busted out of when he’d first met the Mosca, pink penguin bedding and all. Beside it sat a stack of baby supplies he’d managed to scrounge. Some tiny cowboy pajamas. A bottle with dancing giraffes on it. A stack of old shirts advertising a dentist in San Diego that he figured they could use for diapers.
“Let’s see, this part matches this part. . . .” He fumbled with a screw, and cursed as the entire crib fell apart again. “Well, shit.”