SAND CLUMPED BETWEEN CORA’S toes as she searched the beach for a seashell. Since she rarely slept, she’d started rising before first light to collect seashells, which she left in a stack on her windowsill, one for each day. Today’s would be the fifteenth. And yet the pink streak in Nok’s hair hadn’t grown out, and neither had anyone’s fingernails or the boys’ facial hair.
What was happening to time?
The dull ache of exhaustion throbbed in her head. She lost her focus and her toe snagged on something hard. She crouched down to find a snow-white shell. Like all the rest, it had no sharp edges, as though it had been worn smooth by years of sand and sea. Or, rather, engineered to appear that way.
The hair on her arms rose. Her headache increased, like pressure was building. She shoved the shell into her dress pocket and spun toward the town. Was the Caretaker coming? Or had that tingle on her arms only been the sea breeze?
She climbed the stairs to the nearest shop, the bookstore. Inside was a different world. England at the turn of the twentieth century. Two leather club chairs and a brocade-covered settee in the middle of the room, with a tea set on the coffee table. The shelves were made of elegant wood packed with beautiful clothbound volumes that smelled like must and rain. They weren’t real books—she had already checked. They made up the puzzle, which involved categorizing the volumes by title and color. The real books were enclosed behind the glass countertop. The Hobbit. Charlotte’s Web. The complete boxed set of Dating the Duke romance novels. All available for a few tokens each.
But it wasn’t the books she was interested in. The hair on her arms was still tingling, and she faced the black window behind the counter, keeping her distance. She ran her thumb over the seashell’s hard edge, reminding herself that nothing here was real. Not the shell. Not the bookstore. Not even time itself.
But the Caretaker—he was real.
Cora leaned against the counter. “Are you there?”
She had meant to sound accusatory, and yet the words came out as a whisper. She’d sounded almost curious. Guilt cut into her, and she whipped her gaze out the bookstore door. What if Lucky caught her trying to talk to Cassian?
She turned back to the window. Yes, she was curious about him. And yes, she knew that was sick, but she couldn’t help it. It didn’t mean she wasn’t also desperate to wrap the metal guitar strings around his neck and pull.
She rested the pads of her fingers on the humming window. The vibrations entered her. The ache grew in her head. She pushed through the pain to peer into the murky blackness, longing to see a shadowy figure—his shadowy figure—and to know she wasn’t alone.
“Cassian? Are you there?”
She wanted answers. Why he had saved her from the Warden. Why she got more tokens than everyone else. If all humans felt a spark of electricity when he touched them, or if it was just her. Her shaking fingertips coiled into her palm, making a tight fist against the panel. In her dreams, she thought he was an angel. A beautiful face to chase away the nightmares. He was beautiful. But instead of taking her away from nightmares, he had brought her into one.
The throb in the back of her head grew. Or rather, it changed. It spread at the base of her head like soft needles, not entirely unpleasant but strange. The colors of the bookstore seemed to grow brighter, and her balance tipped like she was drunk, and a sharp tug came from the other side of the window.
She shoved away from it. Her vision returned to normal, her skin calmed, but her heart still raced. Had he reached into her head? The sensation was different from the normal headaches that came whenever she looked at an angle that wasn’t right. This one felt almost . . . pleasurable.
“There you are.”
With a start, she turned. Lucky stood in the bookstore’s doorway, hair still sleep tangled, but his eyes were bright. They darkened at her expression.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The word came out too fast. She stepped away from the black window and set the seashell on the glass countertop. “I was just getting this. For our calendar.” She smiled, hoping he couldn’t tell how fast her pulse was racing. She tapped on the glass countertop and cleared her throat. “I noticed that the copy of Robinson Crusoe is gone. The radio’s gone from the toy store too, and the teddy bear.”
“You think the Kindred took them?”
“They must have, but it doesn’t make sense.” The black window hummed, and Cora pinched her arm, hard, so they wouldn’t be able to read her mind. She pulled Lucky away from the window and lowered her voice. “If they knew we were planning to use the prizes as weapons, they would have taken the guitar strings and the boomerangs. Those are a lot more dangerous than a teddy bear.”
Lucky gave a shrug, looking tired. “There’s no understanding them.”
The black window hummed louder. She tried very, very hard to ignore it.
They started down the long path toward the desert. They’d spent nearly every day in the biomes together, winning tokens and mapping the area. They hadn’t found the fail-safe exit, or anything to indicate how large the enclosure was, but Cora hadn’t lost hope.
Her legs burned as they climbed the tallest dune. Besides the vast empty valley she’d woken in, the desert was filled with Egyptian-like ruins. There weren’t any pyramids or temples, only dusty sandstone walls that stretched into infinity, winding around each other in impossible twists and turns that made her wonder if it was more Kindred technology messing with her perception. At the very top of the dune, a copse of palm trees surrounded a pool of crystal-clear water. A black window, set into a crumbling sandstone wall, overlooked it. Even though the wall was only two feet wide, she knew there was somehow a viewing chamber behind it.
She shivered and looked away.
“I think it’s a maze,” Lucky said.
“It can’t be a maze.” Cora knelt by the pool to splash water over her limbs. Her skin still throbbed from whatever had happened in the bookstore, when her vision and balance had faltered, but she ignored it. “A maze has openings and dead ends, and this has none.”
They started down the dune, sliding more than walking, heading for the closest of the sandstone walls. It ran forever in either direction; if they were going to go deeper into the ruins, they’d have to climb it. They followed it until they reached a place where the wall had crumbled enough that they could scramble to the top.
They balanced on the wall and dusted off their hands. Cora counted at least a dozen places where the circular stone walls were so collapsed they might be able to scale them. Others were deteriorating from the bottom, forming tunnels they might be able to crawl through.
A tingle spread through her nerves. “Wait—it is a maze. But not a regular one. See those places where the stone is crumbling at the top or at the bottom, making a tunnel? We have to climb up or under. It’s a vertical maze, not a horizontal one. The tokens must be in the center.”
Lucky raised an eyebrow. “Race you?”
Her limbs were heavy with exhaustion from lack of sleep, but his grin energized her. She took a deep breath. “You’re on.”
She took off, fighting the burn in her muscles, looking for a place to climb under the next wall, while Lucky tried his luck scaling the top. The sand warmed her bare feet; she found a tunnel and crawled through into a tighter ring, and followed it until she could scramble over. An oasis waited on the other side. She paused for a drink of water. When she looked up, her own face looked back at her from a black window. Her reflection showed deep circles and sunken eyes, but a grin.
The smile dropped from her face.
Smiling? She shouldn’t be enjoying herself. This was a prison. It might not have Bay Pines’s chain-link fences, but they were captive, just the same. The Kindred could be there now, studying them for some nefarious purpose. What if the Warden changed his mind and cut her up for the black market—blond hair going to the highest bidder, gall bladder up next?
Footsteps reverberated in the sand as Lucky rounded the corner, stopping when he saw her. He pulled off his leather jacket. He was breathing hard, but the dimple winked in his left cheek.
“Break time already?” He knelt by the oasis pool and soaked his face, tossing his hair back.
Cora ignored the lines of water running down his neck. “Your dad learned hand-to-hand combat in the army, didn’t he? Did he ever teach you?”
Lucky’s grin faded. He wiped the water out of his eyes. “Yeah, the basics, and I took a few years of martial arts. Why?”
“Will you teach me?”
His face creased in confusion, until he followed her line of sight to the black window. “Look, I get why you’d want to know how to defend yourself, but the Kindred are too strong. The Caretaker threw Leon like he weighed nothing.”
“I need to know how,” she said. “I can’t stand feeling like this. Powerless.”
He squinted at the sun reluctantly but then splashed another handful of water over his face. He stood and paced beside the oasis, drawing a wide circle with his toe.
“Come on, then.”
She jumped up, wiping the sand from her hands.
“First of all, it’s called combatives, not hand-to-hand. It can be any style of martial art or close-quarter combat system, but the one the army teaches is drill based. You practice certain techniques until they’re second nature. The most important thing is to recognize the situation you’re in and know what technique to use.”
“And if I just want to inflict serious pain on someone?”
He smiled. “No offense, but you’re not big enough to do damage to a flock of chickens. You need to focus on dodging blows and holds. Then we can talk about body-weight techniques where you might actually be able to hurt someone.”
Cora nodded. “Show me.”
They spent the next hour practicing stances and kicks, and how to throw her weight to knock her opponent off-balance, and which parts of the body were most vulnerable to attack—they could only assume the Kindred’s bodies were similar to theirs. Cora’s muscles blazed with exhaustion.
“This is called escaping the mount.” Lucky drew an X in the sand. “If you’re pinned in a choke hold or a joint lock.”
She came forward ready to fight, but he hooked a foot behind her ankle and off-balanced her onto the sand. Surprise shoved the breath from her lungs. She started to push herself up, but Lucky straddled her chest.
“Not so fast. I’m going to show you a standard pin.”
He gripped her left wrist, and her pulse pounded with exhilaration from using her muscles this way for the first time—and from something else: she’d never been this close to a boy before. Certainly not like this, with his groin resting on her stomach. She’d gone to an all-girls school before Bay Pines, and afterward the only boys who approached her were more interested in being on the news for dating a convicted murderer, like she was some kind of rite of passage for jerks.
Her heart thudded so painfully, she was sure he could feel it through the layers of their clothes.
“Ready?” His voice caressed her ear.
The sand felt warm against her back. She had never noticed before all the different colors in his eyes, flecks of copper and green and ocean blue.
“Your goal is to escape the mount,” he explained. “For someone your size, it’s less about strength and more about positioning. You want to do what’s called a bridge, thrust your hips up and to the side to throw me off balance, and then slip out. If you’re dying to punch someone, now would be the time, while he’s down. You’ll get the most force if you use an elbow to the temple.”
The idea of thrusting her hips against him made her face burn even harder. Her lips parted. She didn’t move.
“Any time now, Cora.”
His throat constricted as he swallowed. Maybe he felt it too, this attraction. This place did strange things to all of them, and she was so starved for human contact, her skin longing to brush against the fabric of his shirt.
Lucky leaned closer, his face an inch from hers.
“Cora?”
“Yeah.”
“Any time now.”
Her head nodded on its own. She only vaguely remembered she was supposed to be doing an escape of some sort. Right now there was only one thing on her mind, and judging from the way Lucky shifted on top of her, she didn’t think she was the only one.
“Hang on. There’s . . .” His breath was ragged. “There’s something I should tell you.”
“Mm-hm,” she muttered, letting her jaw lightly brush his shoulder. He let out a tight breath and lowered his head, so the side of his face grazed hers.
“Really,” he breathed. “I have to tell you. Before . . . this happens.”
“Just stop talking,” she whispered. She tilted her head enough for her lips to graze his jaw, which tasted like the dryness of the sand, but saltier. She was aware of every grain of sand, every pulse of sunlight, every inch that separated them.
Lucky tilted his head too, until their lips were a breath away from touching. This was going to be it. Her first kiss. With a Montana farm boy who smelled like motor grease and fresh-cut grass, and was going to help her get out of this twisted playground.
She parted her lips.
“You call that fighting?” a deep voice called.