The Cage (The Cage #1)(45)
Author: Megan Shepherd

No other colors flashed among the crowd, except a shocking blur of red: two figures who might have been normal height if standing upright, but whose backs were so hunched that they couldn’t be more than five feet tall. They wore dirty rust-red jumpsuits and masks that fractured their eyes like insects’, and they had an odd way of walking, a little fast and jerky. No patch of skin or face or hair was showing; there could be anything under those jumpsuits, but the way their backs twisted so unnaturally screamed that they weren’t human.

She nearly collided with someone while trying to study the insect-masked creatures. She started to apologize but froze. A man’s leather belt was directly in front of her, at eye level. Her head pitched up, and up, until she was looking into the face of a creature—a man, as far as she could tell—with startlingly green eyes and skin a watery shade of gray. He had to be eight feet tall. He ruffled fingers at her that were long and willowy as water reeds, and she gasped.

Cassian dragged her away by her wrist cuffs.

“That was an alien!”

She supposed her words sounded ridiculous—Cassian was an alien too, but she had never really thought of him that way. Her eyes ran over his features; they had looked so foreign to her at first, but compared to the other creatures, he seemed strikingly close to being human. As his dark eyes cut to hers, she felt a kinship she knew she’d never feel with the other species. At least he had eyes . . . who knew what was underneath those masks.

“That was a Gatherer.” His tone was flat. “And they, in particular, do not like to be observed. They especially do not like to be bumped into by lesser species. If you must stare, the Mosca could not care less.” He jerked his chin toward the two hunchbacked figures in insect-like masks. “All they care for is unloading their wares, consuming alcohol, and falling asleep in some hallway.”

Cora gave the two Mosca a wide berth as they passed. The sea of cerulean-clad Kindred moved so stiffly around them, their heads held high, as though to show that they were superior. Most of the booths were run by Kindred, but a few were manned by more of the Mosca in masks and rust-red jumpsuits. They tended to huddle on the floor, their voices droning in fits and starts behind their masks.

Cassian led her past a stall stacked high with comic books: some in French, some Japanese, a few English. A short Kindred man—only six feet tall—stood stiffly behind the table, dressed in a uniform with only two knots on the side, with a jean jacket slung over his shoulders and sunglasses perched on his nose, looking so strikingly out of place that she had to stare.

She ducked to read the title of his comic book as they passed. Aquaman. A date was stamped on the bottom left corner. She did the math quickly—the comic book wouldn’t come out for another two years.

Her head started to throb. How was that possible? Had they been gone from Earth for two years? Or did the Kindred have the ability to manipulate time even more than she thought?

Cassian kept walking so fast that she barely had time to think. She tried to turn to see the comic book again, to confirm she hadn’t imagined it, but they were too far past the stall. “That comic book. The date—”

But Cassian shot her a cold look, to be quiet.

Cassian stopped abruptly as two Kindred soldiers in identical black uniforms approached. They exchanged words with Cassian that sounded harmless, though Cassian’s fingers dug into Cora’s arm like a warning. She looked over her shoulder amid the crowd, half expecting to see Fian’s creased face bearing down on her.

“Hey, give that back.”

She whipped her head in the other direction, following voices in English. In the booth across from them, three human children dressed in costume—one a cowboy, one in a princess crown, another in a baseball uniform—were chained to a post, arguing over a dirty stuffed dog. Fears over the Warden finding her folded themselves into a pocket of her mind, present but tucked away. These children couldn’t have been more than eight years old.

The boy in the princess crown grabbed the dog. He was missing his two front teeth and half of one of his fingers. The other boy let out a racking cough, and the creature manning the booth, one of the masked Mosca, tore the dog away.

“Worthless. All you childrens.” His voice, behind the mask, came in fits and starts like a static-filled radio program. “When I go back to Earth next, I will get little childrens who know how to behave. I will to bring them back here, and then will throw the lot of you childrens out.”

Cora instinctively moved closer to Cassian. He glanced at her dilated pupils and sweating brows, and said a few final words to the guards, then led her through the rest of the market quickly.

They plunged into another hallway, this one blessedly empty. It was all she could do to put one heavy foot in front of the other through the murky light that made her feel as though she were moving underwater.

“Why were those kids chained up back there, and missing teeth and fingers?” she whispered insistently, rubbing her knuckles against her tired eyes. “Were they for sale?”

“They were, yes, but do not fear. That was one of the more reputable trading halls. Those children were protected by basic laws. If they were selling the children for individual body parts, they would not have done so out in the open.”

Cora stopped in the center of the empty hallway. “So it was a pet store?” She looked at him hard. “It’s nice to know that’s how you think of us.”

“I told you that you would not like what you saw. You should feel fortunate. The Kindred only take humans of the highest-quality stock. The Mosca take whatever they can get; those humans often suffer a poor fate.” He paused. “It is a deplorable practice. In my previous position, it was my responsibility to save and protect humans mistreated by private owners.”

“How heroic of you.”

“Keep walking.” His fingers curled around the bar imprisoning her wrists as he pulled her farther along down the hall. “We did not come here to see a trading hall. We are going to see the menageries. Be warned that until now, you have only ever seen one aspect of our world: the public one, where we cloak our emotions to demonstrate the highest standards of intelligence, obedience, and above all, emotional control. But as much as we would like to, we cannot suppress emotions forever. They have a way of coming out, and that is why we live very different private lives.” He reached a door that didn’t open automatically like the others, but he stopped. The light from the seam in the door danced over his features, casting his eyes in shadows.