The Cage (The Cage #1)(62)
Author: Megan Shepherd

He kissed her tear-stained cheek.

“Our duty,” she repeated.

He gave a serious nod. “Exactly.”

This was what they had done to him, skewed his ethics, made him think they were like children who didn’t know what was best for themselves.

He took her hand. “We’re going to be so happy.”

43

Leon

LEON HAD LEARNED TO move through the habitats silently. It was difficult at first; the words quiet and subtle had never once been used to describe him, but now, as he crept through the marigolds by the side of the diner, he felt like a jungle beast.

A figure dropped over the side of the railing, landing on all fours in front of him. He let out a curse and stumbled back.

Mali stared into his eyes like she could see the very stains on his soul. Her eyes went from the mud on his hems to the sharpened stake he had made out of a rocking horse. “What are you doing.”

“Hunting. Now scram.”

She stood slowly. “Hunting what.”

“Ghosts.” He braced himself. He knew that sounded crazy, but it wasn’t. Yasmine’s ghost was here. He could feel her eyes. They had it all wrong, when they thought the Kindred were the ones watching.

A bird trilled and he crouched lower. The bird sounds weren’t real, either. They were Yasmine, trying to drive him mad for running her into the ocean.

Mali gave his shoulder a sharp pinch.

“Ow! What was that for?”

“Focus. I must ask you a question.” She glanced over her shoulder toward the diner in the distance, where they others had been talking. “When you spy on the others, do you hear them say that Earth is gone.”

He rubbed his shoulder where she pinched him. “Yeah. But they’re idiots. Cora’s the only one with any sense. She’s right. Earth isn’t gone.”

“How do you know.”

“Because if Earth was gone, they’d have a finite supply of humans. Us six and the rest scattered around in cages. A few thousand, at most. Barely enough to rebuild an entire species. They’re supposed to be all logical, right? So they wouldn’t be mucking about, letting private individuals chop off our fingers or whatever, eh? They’d have every single one of us in breeding facilities, churning out kids left and right. They wouldn’t bother with this twenty-one day shit.”

“That is just a theory. You do not know that for sure.”

“I know human nature, kid.”

“They are not human.”

“They’re close enough.”

Mali sat abruptly, cross-legged, resting her chin on her hands. Ever since stars had appeared, the night had taken on a different color. More silver, like a riverbed. The starlight played over her dark hair, showing blacks and browns and even a hint of burnished red that Leon had never noticed before.

She stared at him hard. “Would you go home if you could.”

Leon didn’t answer. Home? When he’d been taken, he’d been in the middle of helping his older brother unload a truck of ripped-off gaming systems into the back of a dirty warehouse. His sister, Ellie, had called to invite him over for dinner, and Leon had said he couldn’t be bothered. Now all he wanted in the world was to sit at Ellie’s table, her baby gurgling beside him, their nieces and nephews tugging on his clothes, asking him to pick them up and play Godzilla.

“Would you go back,” Mali pressed. “I need to know.”

In the shadows, with her long dark hair, Mali almost looked like Yasmine. Only Yasmine’s eyes had been so frightened as she’d run away, and Mali looked like she’d never been frightened in her life.

“Doesn’t matter, kid. There’s no way out.”

He shoved past her, knocking her to the ground. He hadn’t stormed away more than a foot before something launched itself at his back; he cursed and ducked, but the thing was moving fast. Thin arms and stringy black hair and cold, cold eyes.

“Bloody hell!” he yelled.

He spun, trying to grab Mali, but she evaded him easily. He felt a tug on his arm, pressure on his left calf, a pinch between his shoulder blades, and suddenly he was flat on his back, staring at the stars, and every one of his muscles screamed in pain.

Mali leaned over him with that flat smile of hers.

“How the hell did you do that?” he bellowed.

“You do not scare me,” she said.

He tried to stand, flustered and cursing, but she seemed able to hold him down with a single finger against his forehead. Was this some sort of alien ninja shit?

“I don’t scare you?” he roared. “What do you think happened to the girl you replaced? You look like her, you know that? Same dark skin. Same long hair. Be careful or you’ll end up like her too. She’s dead because of me.”

Mali leaned in, her finger digging into the center of his forehead. “I see my predecessor’s body. I see her wounds. She drowns on her own.”

“She was running away from me.”

“She runs from the Kindred. Serassi stands behind you, your first day here. The previous Girl Three sees her. It frightens her enough to flee into the ocean, where she thinks she can swim away. She does not yet understand that she is no longer on Earth.”

Leon’s muscles, cramped with pain, suddenly released. The pain melted away but was replaced by a rush of shock, then denial, and then rage.

“They’re the reason she’s dead?”

“They have her body. They perform tests on it.”

Rage choked him. He forgot about the stringy-haired girl sitting on his chest. He forgot about how she’d immobilized him with a single finger. All he could picture was Yasmine’s green eyes, so round and full of fear, and how he’d hated himself every day for driving her into that ocean.

But she hadn’t been running from him.

He felt like he could breathe for the first time in days. Maybe her ghost wasn’t haunting him for revenge; maybe it wanted revenge on their black-eyed kidnappers, and he was the only one who could get it for her.

Mali leaned close. “You can make a choice. You can choose to do what is right.”

She removed her finger from his forehead, freeing him. He sat up, pushing her aside, leaning into his throbbing hands.

He hadn’t killed Yasmine—they had.

He stood in a daze and stumbled to his camp, and stared at the paintings of Yasmine’s haunting eyes. Mali’s words lodged in his head like a splinter. He ripped down the bedsheet, and all the paintings, and then stormed deeper into the jungle.

44