The Gauntlet (The Cage 3)

Cassian was leaning over Cora’s body. She lay in a puddle of dark liquid that was slowly draining from the cracks in the chamber’s floor. Her blond hair, soaked, clung to her pale skin. Her Gauntleteer uniform was tangled around her lifeless limbs. She wasn’t breathing.

Mali looked away with a quick inhale.

“It’s okay,” Leon said, rubbing her shoulder. “She knew what she was doing. It was her choice.”

Hesitantly, Mali glanced back at Cora’s body. Cassian was lifting each of her eyelids, then feeling along her skull as though to check for broken bones. His movements were quick, anxious.

Mali frowned. “She’s dead, Cassian. She isn’t breathing.”

Cassian parted Cora’s teeth to look inside her mouth, then quickly picked her up in his arms, carrying her back to the broken wall seam. “You are correct,” he said. “She is not breathing.” He squeezed through the wall seam with Cora’s body and then hurried back through the course they had taken through the Gauntlet wreckage. “But it doesn’t mean she’s dead.”

Mali drew in a sharp breath as she ducked under a fallen beam. “She’s alive? How?”

But the storm had made another beam fall, blocking their path. Cassian changed course and plunged into another chamber, then stepped carefully over a shattered wall panel and bent down to open a trapdoor in the floor.

It revealed a dark pit.

This was not part of the official module.

He grabbed a few sets of goggles hanging from a hook. “Put these on so you can see.” He pulled one pair over his own eyes and then climbed into the pit. Mali and Leon hurried to do the same. The temperature was cool. Storm water made the stone walls slick, but the floor was well trodden.

A cave.

When she came around the corner, unused to the red tint that the Mosca goggles gave everything, she stopped.

A small cavern had been converted into a makeshift medical room, with a bed and beeping equipment. Cassian laid out Cora’s body on the bed and began hooking up the equipment, affixing sensors to Cora’s arms, pressing a tube into her throat. Thick blue liquid started to flow out of the tube.

Slowly—impossibly—Cora’s chest rose and fell.

Mali ran to the bed.

“What is this? How is this possible?”

The anxious set to Cassian’s expression eased. He leaned over the bed, blood still trickling down his arm, and rested a gentle hand on Cora’s forehead. Her chest rose in another breath.

He looked at Mali and gave a weary smile.

“Cora taught me how to cheat,” he explained. “And I paid very close attention.”

45

Cora

HER LUNGS WERE THICK with water. An icy blackness coated her skin. Her memories were hazy, but she remembered sinking deep into the swollen river. A sense of peace had surrounded her as she’d melted into the dark muck of the riverbed. But now she didn’t feel peaceful at all. Now her lungs burned as though someone had clawed them with jagged fingernails. Her head throbbed, and her entire body felt violently, painfully alert.

Was this dying? This awful, terrifying, electrifying pain?

She awoke with a gasp. Air flooded into her nose, rushed down her irritated throat, and coated her screaming lungs. She sucked in another breath, and another, greedily, as though she weren’t sure she’d ever have enough air. The pain was so acute she nearly blacked out. She tried to sit up, only to have a wave of dizziness knock her back against the pillow.

She cracked her eyes open, but a golden sort of light stung them, and she recoiled. She tried again gradually, blinking hard. There was a soft humming in the room, maybe a radio or a jukebox, she couldn’t be sure. Her vision was swimming as she tried to take in the blurry shapes in the room. She blinked harder. The walls were brown. Wood. A dirty window let in mottled sunlight.

A baby suddenly wailed.

She jerked her head around as the humming stopped. The movement drew the attention of someone sitting in a rocking chair by the window, cradling a baby.

“You’re awake!” Nok pushed out of the rocking chair, clutching the baby to her chest as she came to the side of the bed.

Cora stared at Nok as though she were a ghost: there were dark circles under her eyes and a listlessness to her skin, as though she’d been ill too.

“Nok?” Cora’s voice was creaky with disuse. “What . . . what happened?”

“We’re on Armstrong. You’re safe.” Nok clutched the baby tighter. “You’ve been unconscious for almost two weeks. Cassian says that’s a normal recovery period when it comes to ingested stasis fluid.”

Ingested stasis fluid? Recovery period?

Cora tried to sit up. “Where’s Cassian? Where’s Mali?” Her eyes fell on the baby as she realized with relief that Nok must have given birth safely. “And Rolf?”

Nok’s eyes, heavy and dark, started to rim in red. She blinked a few times, struggling against tears. Cora leaned forward, worried. “Nok?”

“Rolf . . . he . . .” Nok swallowed, stumbling over her words. “Rolf protected all of us. He left plans to rebuild this whole town. We owe him so much. . . .”

Cora’s breath stalled. “Why are you talking about him like that?”

“He’s gone,” Nok choked out. “He crawled into the transport hub’s reactor core to shut off power so the Axion couldn’t blow up the town. He . . . he died. Once the power was off long enough and the radiation levels lowered, Keena sent some guards in there to get his body—she’s been sick too, but she’s getting better. We buried him yesterday. In the valley by the river.”

Cora drew in a sharp breath. Oh, no. Now the dark circles under Nok’s eyes made sense. Nok had been ill. Her heart had broken irreparably.

Cora swallowed back her own grief. “Oh, Nok. I’m so . . . I’m so sorry.” She reached out, catching Nok’s wrist, pulling both Nok and her baby into a hug. Nok didn’t try to hold back tears. She shook with sobs as Cora squeezed her shoulders, fighting an urge to sob herself.

The baby started wailing.

Nok pulled back, patting the baby’s back gently, wiping away her tears. “I gave birth to Sparrow a few days ago. She came early, but she’s a

fighter. Like her father. Anyway, I’d better get Cassian. He asked me to tell him the minute you woke.” She paused at the door. “I’m glad you’re okay, Cora. Rolf would have been, too.”

Cora nodded her thanks.

Alone, Cora stared at the ceiling, groggy, trying to process it all. Rolf was gone. The pain in her head was gradually dulling, but it still throbbed hard enough that she felt she might pass out again. Her lips were dry, and she looked around for water, dimly taking in a wooden table next to the bed; but when she felt for water or a bottle, her hand only grazed paper. A journal. Lucky’s journal. Someone must have found it and saved it for her.

She forced herself to sit up, rearranging the pillows to form a backrest. She touched her sleeve. She was wearing a soft cotton shirt that went down to her knees and was draped in a cozy felt blanket. The wooden walls looked like they belonged in a cabin or hut, but everything was clean, and there was a fresh smell of new paint.

She heard faint voices outside. The sunlight was too bright to look directly through the window, but she thought she saw dusty red ground, maybe the hazy shapes of other cabins or huts, and some people moving.

The door opened again.

Cassian took one look at Cora and sank onto the edge of her bed, reaching out to run a hand through her hair.

“You’re awake.”

“Cassian.” She squeezed her eyes closed again but reached out to hold on to him, needing to feel him. “I heard about Rolf.”

“Yes. He died a hero.”

She took a deep breath. “And . . . and I don’t understand. I died, too. I remember.”

He shook his head. “You only thought you did. You had to believe you were truly sacrificing yourself in order for the Gauntlet to register it. But you’re crazy if you thought I would let you die.”

She squinted at him in incomprehension.

“The river,” he said. “It wasn’t water. It was a stasis fluid that is breathable to humans, like amniotic fluid. Though it usually results in a partial shutdown of secondary biological systems, which is why you lost consciousness for so long. Your body had to purge all the stasis fluid and learn to breathe air again.”