JUST WHEN CORA COULDN’T bear another moment of bone-splitting pressure, grass materialized beneath her feet. Distant waves crashed. The sun shone directly overhead.
They were back in the cage.
The breeze tangled in her hair, along with the metallic smell of the Caretaker’s skin. She let him go as if he was a spark and she a dry piece of wood.
“Get away from her!” Lucky’s voice cut like a knife. She turned in a daze as he and the others sprinted across the grass.
The Caretaker ignored them, eyes only on Cora. “Remember: three rules. That is all we require.” His outline flickered like an old-fashioned television set and then vanished, just as the others rushed up.
Cora wiped her mouth, swallowing hard despite the memory of the Warden’s hand clamped around her neck. “I’m okay. He took me to a room I wasn’t supposed to see. It’s where they observe us.” She pointed toward the candy shop, head foggy. “It was behind one of these black windows.”
Rolf frowned. “The candy shop wall that supports the black window can’t be more than six inches thick—not nearly enough room for a viewing chamber.” His lips moved silently as he seemed to be performing calculations. “The black windows must work on forced perspective technology that’s more advanced than anything I’ve heard of. The walls appear straight, but they must bend to accommodate viewing chambers.”
Cora dug her knuckles into her aching forehead. “I don’t know, but there are more of the Kindred, behind the windows. Researchers. And the one who’s in charge—they called him the Warden. His real name is Fian. He was huge like the Caretaker, with a knot of angry wrinkles between his eyebrows. He tried to strangle me, but the Caretaker stopped him. And I saw . . .” She paused. How would they react when she told them about the dead girl?
“So this is it?” Nok cried. “We’re here for the rest of our lives? No more walks through Hyde Park, or old Star Trek reruns, or any of that?”
She was pacing wildly, near the breaking point, and Cora swallowed back the words she’d been poised to say. One horror at a time.
Lucky pulled Nok into a hug. Nok collapsed against his shoulder, though she was a good three inches taller than him, and let out a burst of runny-nose tears.
“We’ll get out of here,” he said softly, meeting Cora’s eyes over Nok’s shoulder. “I promise. We’ll go home.”
Home. What had Charlie done, when she’d disappeared from the passenger side of his Jeep? She pictured her father holed up in a hotel room with his security staff, the head of the FBI on the phone. Maybe her disappearance had finally brought them all together; a family again, only without her. Or, for all she knew, the Kindred had wiped every memory they had of her.
She let out a choked breath.
She leaned in to them, her face pressed between Nok’s cheek and Lucky’s shoulder. To Cora’s surprise, Leon crashed into her, wrapping his big arms around all of them. Rolf was the only one left alone, his fingers twitching against the stiff pockets of his military jacket. Cora grabbed his wrist and pulled him into the group embrace. It was the five of them, no longer strangers, any differences they once might have had now meaningless. Nok slipped her bony hand into Cora’s and squeezed.
Girl Two, the Caretaker had called her. No longer a person. Now a specimen. Given a second chance only because the Caretaker had intervened.
“I know we’re all strung out,” Lucky said. “We can get through this, as long as we stick together.” The group broke apart shakily. The morning light turned to noon in a single click, and Cora’s song started on the jukebox.
“Great,” Leon muttered. “Lunchtime. I feel better already.”
“Food’s not a bad idea, actually.” Lucky cracked the knuckles in his left hand. “None of us have eaten anything in days, except for Leon, and he’s alive, so it must be safe. Rolf, you and I will bring the trays out here so we all have some fresh air to help us think. Nok . . .” He paused, avoiding Cora’s eyes. “Tell Cora what we figured out . . . about the marks on our necks.”
He disappeared with Rolf into the diner. Nok stumbled through an explanation about the matching constellations, and by the time Lucky came back with the trays of noodles, Cora understood why Lucky hadn’t told her himself. They were matched? She could barely look at him without feeling mortified—although a small voice in her head whispered that he was the kind of guy she’d always liked. Not arrogant, like the boys she’d gone to school with. Not flamboyantly dramatic, like most of the guys in Charlie’s theater classes.
The kind of guy with grease on his hands.
She looked down at her noodles. They smelled wrong—sticky sweet. The song ended and flipped over, starting again. Was it supposed to make them complacent—or torture them?
“So,” Lucky said. “We should figure out what the hell is going on.”
“We’ve been abducted by little green men,” Leon said. “Or in this case, big bronze men. What more do you need?”
“I need to know why.” Lucky turned to Rolf. “No offense, Rolf, but I don’t believe they’re telling the truth about why they brought us here. So what do we know? They took the five of us specifically. They want us to reproduce, which is . . . messed up. They’re watching us from behind those panels. They want to study us in our natural habitat”—he motioned to the row of fake shops—“or whatever this is supposed to be. Why? For entertainment?”
“Maybe they want to see how we interact?” Nok offered. “Like, not just our daily lives, but under pressure. When situations change. Maybe that’s why they’ve dressed us in clothes that aren’t ours and thrown us together in random pairs and given us food that tastes wrong. I mean, this looks like khee mao noodles, but it tastes like a cinnamon bun.”
“To what end?” Lucky asked.
Nok tapped her chin, thinking, and then a look of horror crept over her face. “What if they’re going to attack Earth? Maybe this is all a war scenario. They might want to see how people will react under pressure so they can make it an easy fight.”
Everyone was quiet. Cora’s song played steadily from the jukebox, taunting them.
“Maybe.” Lucky rubbed his forehead like his head ached. “It’s one possible theory, and it explains some things, but not others. If that were the case, why would they care if we reproduce? I was thinking, maybe we really are like lab rats. The Kindred seem pretty similar to us, physically. They can speak our language, so our vocal cords must be similar, and they breathe the same air we do, so we must just be a few chromosomes away or something. Wouldn’t that make us perfect test subjects?”
Rolf frowned. “Theoretically.”
“They could be developing some new kind of drug but don’t want to test it out on themselves first. We’re the lab chimps now. And the drugs . . .” Lucky looked at the noodles.
Nok and Rolf both shoved their trays away.
“There’s something else.” Cora knew she couldn’t withhold what she’d seen forever. “While I was in their control rooms, I saw the dead girl’s body. They were examining it. Maybe experimenting—I don’t know. They said it was protocol to monitor dead bodies for signs that humans were evolving, but she looked perfectly normal to me. It felt like they were covering for something.”
Even Leon dropped his fistful of noodles. He always looked so tough, but for once he seemed almost stricken. Cora recalled that the girl with the heart-shaped scar was supposed to have been his match.
“This is seriously shitty. All of it.” He pushed off from the grass and sauntered toward the row of shops.
Lucky shook his head. “That guy is going to be trouble.”
Cora watched Leon disappear in the town. “I’ll talk to him.”