The Cage (The Cage #1)(71)
Author: Megan Shepherd

“How’s Leon going to stop her?” Lucky said. “Hurt her? Kill her?”

A shadow filled the doorway behind him.

“What the hell is this?” Leon bellowed.

Lucky’s hand tightened on the gun. Blind him, then use the nunchakus. But he hadn’t expected Nok. He hadn’t guessed that they’d been sleeping together. His stomach twisted at that feverish-wild look in her eye.

He was so tired of it all. The betrayals. The hurt.

He looked at his makeshift weapons. What had he been planning to do, kill Leon? He’d felt such hatred in his veins, such certainty that Leon had been the one to twist Cora, but the truth was, all of them were twisted.

He let the water gun fall and shoved past Leon, back out into the jungle.

He ran along the walkway until it bled into the forest. He followed the paths to the clearing with the treetop ropes course. He would isolate himself, like Leon had, for his own safety.

He reached for a branch, but his hand froze.

What if he was twisted too, just like they were, and he didn’t know it? Had he done anything that might have made Cora run? He’d just been trying to show her that he loved her. He’d been trying to keep them both safe from removal.

The hair on his arms started to rise. He stared at it in the moonlight, and then whirled in the clearing. That pressure usually meant the Caretaker was coming. He wound the jump rope around his knuckles, ready to use it to strangle him as soon as he appeared.

As soon as the Caretaker flickered into the clearing, Lucky jumped him. He managed to get the rope around his neck, pull it taut so it dug into the creature’s metallic skin, but then the air rushed out of Lucky’s lungs, and he felt himself flying across the clearing. His back collided with the mulched chips.

Before he could sit, the Caretaker was standing over him, one booted foot resting on his chest.

“I have an offer for you,” the Caretaker said.

49

Cora

IN THE MORNING, CORA blinked awake on an unfamiliarly hard bed. Her vision focused on a black panel with a starry sky. The smell of ozone lingered on the air. She stretched out, reveling in having slept soundly through the entire night for the first time in weeks, and then gasped. She jerked upright. The light from the wall seams, the empty shelves . . . she’d fallen asleep in Cassian’s bedroom. The events of the previous day came rushing back: how, in that murky time between awake and asleep, she’d wanted his lips on hers. It was a mortifying thought—all the worse because he must have been able to read her mind.

His door opened, and he entered. She stood in a rush, smoothing out her dress and her hair, looking everywhere but at his eyes.

“It is time to return to your enclosure.”

His demeanor was perfectly even. Emotionless. Cora envied him that ability.

He led her to the control room, every move perfectly mechanical and by the book, just as it had been on the day of the medical examinations, after he’d slipped and said her name by accident. It wasn’t until he had stabbed the apparatus through his chest and dematerialized them both into the peach orchard that she observed any emotion at all.

His hand flexed a little too hard by his side. “One final day. Continue to disobey, and I will have no choice but to take you to the Harem.”

With that, he was gone.

Cora watched the grass blow around the place where his two heavy boots had stood. He—her jailer, her captor—was risking so much for her. She made her way toward town, winding through the maze of peach trees, trying to find the right words to convince the others to escape with her. They were furious at her, thinking she was trying to sabotage them. Not to mention, she’d knocked Lucky out and run.

She reached the edge of the town and shrank behind a tree. Nok and Rolf were playing croquet on the lawn between the house and the movie theater. Those two were frighteningly unstable, especially after all the accusations they’d thrown at her in the diner. She skirted behind the row of shops until she was close enough to overhear their conversation.

Crack.

Rolf swung his croquet mallet, his force extra hard as he smacked the ball.

Crack.

The sound was strange; not like wood against wood. “Try it again,” Nok ordered, a hard edge to her voice. Rolf paused to wipe the sweat from his forehead, then slammed the croquet mallet down again. Nok stooped to examine the ball. She gave him a grim nod.

“That’s the right amount of force. Remember, she can make a weapon out of anything. If she comes back, she’ll probably be armed, yeah? We can’t take any chances after she tried to kill Lucky. Now hit it again.”

Rolf hefted the croquet mallet.

Fear trickled down Cora’s back. They weren’t playing croquet. So what were they hitting so hard with the mallets? She dared to peek over the bushes.

Pumpkins. Big, round ones. They’d painted blue-eyed faces on them that looked an awful lot like hers.

Rolf brought down the mallet. Crack.

Nok nodded. “Perfect.”

Cora slunk along the ground, afraid to even breathe, until fear got the best of her and she took off at a run toward the habitats. Her legs burned. Her vision went glassy. Did they really think she had tried to kill Lucky? What had this place done to them, to twist them into such angry versions of themselves?

She stopped running when she reached the swamp, and collapsed against a tree to catch her breath. This was going to be harder than she thought. She needed to test her theory that they could escape through the fail-safe exit beneath the waves, but that wouldn’t help her much if the others had it out for her. She couldn’t go to Lucky for help; she was sure the Kindred had fixed his head injury, but they couldn’t fix a broken heart. That left Mali, who might as well be a Kindred, and Leon, who had gone completely insane—but at least he didn’t hate her, so he was her best chance.

The sun shifted a degree. Noon already. She ran for the jungle, her bare feet slapping across the raised walkway through the thick underbrush. She reached Leon’s makeshift camp just as a drenching rain began.

Oh, no.

The camp was destroyed. The sheets with Leon’s artwork had been torn down and trampled in the mud. Rotten fruit spilled out of overturned orchard crates. No one lived there anymore, that was certain. And judging by how violently Leon had destroyed his camp, he might be even more dangerous than he had been before.

Cora flinched as rain came harder, and thunder struck high up in the sky. It made the same sound as a hideous crack, like a croquet mallet slamming into a pumpkin. She leaned against a tree, hands pressed to her throbbing head. The previous six inhabitants were dead now, murdered by each other. How long before history repeated itself?