The Cage (The Cage #1)(43)
Author: Megan Shepherd

There was a new charm attached to the chain.

A dog.

“Dogs are rare here.” His expression was perfectly flat, and yet his voice fluctuated with the barest hint of emotion. “I searched hard for one, but they are considered low value, so they are not kept in this sector. I submitted a travel request to get you one, but the Warden denied it.”

The charm was old, with a dent on one of the dog’s legs. She couldn’t imagine where he had found such a thing. It did a strange thing to her to see all she truly cared about in sixteen years of life reduced to such trinkets. Her family and her dog.

It wasn’t much to hold on to.

A cold breeze blew, and she shivered. He noticed and moved to the left, blocking the wind, but it didn’t help. It was hard to imagine this otherworldly creature having a life. Did he live in a city? Did he go shopping and cook supper and spend his evenings listening to songs on the radio? And what happened in private with all that pent-up emotion he kept so tightly stored away?

He reached the necklace around her neck, but he wore no gloves. His bare fingers brushed the delicate skin of her neck, along with the sizzle of electricity. She jerked away.

“Don’t touch me.”

He regarded her like a puzzle he couldn’t solve. “I wish only to give you this present.”

When she didn’t recoil again, he reached gently to brush the hair off her neck, so he could fasten the necklace. She closed her eyes, anticipating his touch. His finger barely brushed her skin. There. That spark. It was such a foreign feeling, just short of painful. She wanted to feel it again and again. She felt the weight of the charms around her neck, so familiar and missed. When he let her go, she almost grabbed his hands back to feel that spark again. It was an addiction she didn’t want to have.

She pressed her hand against the charm. “What does it feel like, when you touch me?”

“Very soft,” he said. “You are very soft. Cora.”

Her fingers started throbbing over the charm, along with her heart. Unfreezing, piece by piece, but she fought against it. She curled a fist around the charms. “You think a necklace will help me sleep? I don’t want a piece of home. I want all of it.”

“Be careful, Cora. Defiance is not a desirable human value. The Warden believes that your attempt to kill me, naive though you were, betrayed a defiant spirit. He was not pleased.”

“You think?” Cora rubbed her throat. “He nearly strangled me.”

“He was attempting to strangle you. It would have rid him of an unpredictable human subject. I was able to convince him your actions came from fear, not defiance, and that your other traits—resilience to captivity, extensive knowledge of Earth, even the rare coloring of your hair—made up for the difference. I told him it would not happen again.” Cassian leaned closer. “It cannot happen again.”

She squeezed the necklace harder. “Why are you telling me all this?”

“I want you to trust me, Cora.”

The way he looked at her, with a flicker of concern behind those black eyes, made her think he might really be on her side. That there were forces even bigger than him, and he was bending the rules for her. But how could she ever trust the man who had taken her?

His head tilted slightly.

“In time, your hatred of me will diminish. You will come to understand that I brought you here for your own good. If a necklace is not enough, I can give you more.” Cassian closed his eyes.

The snow stopped falling. The last flakes settled a little too slow, like in a dream, and then, between the breaks in the clouds, faint lights appeared. Just a few at first. Tiny dots. She could almost have mistaken them for fireflies, if this had been any other place. They multiplied until the sky was a shimmering dome.

Stars. He’d given her the stars.

Her hand pressed against her mouth, holding in a silent exclamation. She didn’t know how he’d made stars appear with his mind alone, but she didn’t care. Nor did she mind the ache that spread through her head, the same familiar ache that came whenever they manipulated the environment. She had missed the stars too much to care. It was like seeing old friends after too long apart. She had painted stars on her bedroom walls when she was twelve. She used to climb onto the roof and watch stars appear on the horizon. Making wishes. Picking out the constellations.

Her fingers drifted from the necklace to the black marks on her neck. Orion. She thought about Lucky, and that brought a stab of pain. She tried to think instead about how she never wished upon a star for this. Maybe back home she would have spent her life as an outsider, torn between two worlds. But nothing, especially not fake stars in a fake sky, was going to change the fact that he was her captor and she his prisoner.

She was done being caged.

This couldn’t be her life. Four walls made of endless trees and mountains and a ceiling made of limitless sky, and a man with black eyes who thought giving her the stars could make this world real.

“Mali might have taught you some tricks,” he said, “but you cannot hide your thoughts from us forever. The Warden knows you are attempting to find the fail-safe exit. He knows you refused Boy Two’s sexual advances. His researchers are collecting observations, Cora. If you continue down this path, he will soon have enough data to build a case to remove you, whether the twenty-one day mark comes or not.”

She ran a nail over her lips, taking in his words, and then dropped her hand when she remembered Lucky saying that habit had made him want to kiss her. “Is that why I get more tokens for solving the same puzzles? Why he only plays my song on the jukebox, and why the others don’t get food anymore, but my plate is full?” She swallowed. “Why is he trying to drive a wedge between me and the others?”

He stood abruptly. “You do not know what you are talking about.”

She stood too, moving to face him. “You’re trying to break us, aren’t you? That’s why you’re messing with us. That’s what the headaches are about. It’s the rumors that Mali told us about. Human evolving. You’re trying to push our minds to the limit. You want to see if we can be perceptive, like you can.”

“The researchers do not need to test that. We know you cannot be perceptive.”

“I know that too!” She grabbed his arm. “But you’re just the Caretaker. The hired help. You don’t know what the Warden might be planning—but you could find out. You owe us that. If you believe in your mission to take care of us, and I think you do, then you have to defend us even from your own kind.”