The Cage (The Cage #1)(57)
Author: Megan Shepherd

“Yeah. I’ll help them.” Leon slowly slunk back to the shadows at the rear of the hut.

“Oh. Great—”

“I’m already helping them. That’s why I’m out here, Cora.”

At the sound of her name, not Ellie’s, she grabbed the guitar strings. His mind was returning to reality, and she wanted to be ready if he did anything unpredictable.

He crouched in the corner of the hut. “For a while, everything Rolf said made sense. He and Nok were happy. Yasmine was gone, and none of you knew what happened to her. I thought maybe they were on to something about this place not being so bad. Life was crap at home.” He paused. “But then I saw that girl with the scarred hands, and I knew, even without a mark, that she was the new one for me.” His eyes dropped to the guitar string stretched between her hands. “I couldn’t stand to be near her, knowing what they expected. Knowing what happened to the last girl they tried to pair me with. What if I snapped? What if I killed Mali too? That’s why I’m here. To protect them from me.”

Cora thought, in that moment, that Leon would continue to surprise her. He hadn’t abandoned the group because he didn’t care about the others, or because he was crazy. It was because of Mali.

“You can help her—all of us—more by being a part of our group than by banishing yourself. Come back, Leon. Help me figure out how to escape.”

He shook his head. “They were right, you know—the people back home. I’ll never be the good person Ellie thought I could be. I’ve done things I’m not proud of.”

His eyes shifted to a pile of sheets and clothes in the corner of his hut. Curiosity flickered in Cora’s mind. Bedding streaked with paint was kicked in the corner. Something red glinted: Nok’s radio. That was strange—Nok took it with her everywhere. Next to it was a crumpled pair of panties.

“Has Nok been here?” Cora asked uneasily.

Leon ran a hand over his face. “Ah, hell. What an idiot.”

“Nok?”

“Me. I’m a bloody idiot. Few weeks ago, if a girl like that came to me, offering what she did, I’d have thought I’d hit the bloody lottery. But now—” He gazed off, eyes a little unsteady. “Now I know better. Or I should. But you don’t understand what it’s like out here. So quiet. It makes my thoughts scream in my ears. And the headaches . . .” He cursed. “She found me at a weak moment. Rolf’s not a bad kid. He didn’t deserve it. Not from me. Definitely not from her.”

The small crumple of underwear stood out like a stain among the sheets. Had Nok come, one of those days when she claimed she was in the salon, and slept with Leon? Nok had always acted so in love with Rolf. It didn’t make any sense; the first day, while they whispered together in bed, Nok had said that she didn’t like hulking guys like Leon. So why would she do something so drastically out of character?

Cora remembered something else about that conversation. Nok had slipped up on basic London geography. She’d been lying, but Cora had thought it was harmless.

What else was Nok lying about?

Leon glanced at the pair of painted green eyes. “Get out of here, sweetheart. Don’t come back.”

He stomped off into the leaves. She stood alone in the clearing, heart pounding. The sun shifted a degree to signal late afternoon, as an eeriness settled between the trees. It was too quiet. The sounds were all wrong, like the wind was moving backward.

A crash came from the woods. Maybe Leon. Maybe the dead girl’s ghost—could the Kindred also bring back the dead?

Cora bolted. She tore back toward the walkway, back to the safety of town, but her legs were so fatigued that her foot caught and she slammed to the mud.

She sat up, wincing, looking for the root she had tripped on. But it wasn’t a root. It was a hard object bleached white, a shape she’d studied in school but had never seen in real life. Her stinging palms throbbed harder.

A bone.

A human one.

40

Cora

WITH SHAKING HANDS, CORA dug the bone free of the mud. She tried to convince herself it was from a dog or a horse, only there were no animals in the cage.

Just people.

If Cassian had taken Yasmine’s body, whose bone was this?

Her stomach clenched with a swell of vomit. The bone was old and sun-bleached; it must have been there for months, maybe even years, though it was hard to tell in a place where time moved differently. She pushed herself to her feet, struggling with the mud threatening to swallow her back down.

The bone had to mean that they weren’t the first kids in the cage. There had been others.

But what had killed them?

To her left, palm branches hid one of the humming black windows. She shoved the leaves aside and pounded on the glass.

“I know you’re watching, Cassian! Show yourself!”

Her hair began to rise even before she’d finished the sentence. She hadn’t quite believed it would work, but then she saw his reflection behind her in the panel, and went still. Did she really want to know what had happened to the last group? It wasn’t too late to drop the bone, stop questioning, and accept their prison.

But then she looked at the jungle mud splashed on the hem of her dress. A dead girl’s dress. Any of them could be next, unless she did something about it.

She turned slowly on the Caretaker.

He cut such a striking figure against the jungle backdrop that it was hard not to be anything but awestruck. In person, he was always larger than she remembered. She couldn’t help but take in all the little details that made him real: the dent in his nose. The slight scar on his chin. The way his hand flexed at his side when he was struggling to control his emotions. For a moment she forgot about the bone, and Yasmine, and she was back in the menagerie, on the soft cushions around the babbling fountain. His lips had been just an inch from hers. “I’m not interested in learning about kisses from them,” he had said, and her anger had melted away, just as it did now. Had he read her thoughts about showing him what a kiss was?

Had he wanted her to show him?

She gasped, shocked by her own line of thought, unable to calm her rapid heartbeat as easily as he was able to. She squeezed the bone, refocusing herself.

“What the hell is this?”

Cassian didn’t blink. “That belonged to a previous inhabitant of this environment.”

“A dead inhabitant.”

The accusation seemed to slip off his smooth skin, and he cocked his head calmly. “Yes. We are able to synthetically replicate your world within these boundaries, but it requires a large supply of carbon. If a human dies, it is perfectly logical to recycle their carbon. Most is absorbed quickly; sometimes there are pieces that take longer.”