CORA STOOD IN THE bedroom doorway, one hand still on the knob. Nok and Rolf were tangled in the bedsheets, more naked than not. They’d been giggling when she first entered, but that had ended abruptly.
“What are you doing?” Cora yelled.
“What does it look like we’re doing?” Rolf sputtered. “Give us some privacy! Wasn’t it enough to steal our breakfast?”
“I didn’t touch your food! Just—Hold on. I’ve got to get something.” Cora wavered a second, then darted into the room, holding her breath like she was under water, snatched up the clinking pillowcase—it felt heavier—and dashed out. She slammed the door behind her, and only then gasped for breath.
If that wasn’t sex, it was pretty close.
She sank onto the bottom stair, the pillowcase of tokens sagging on the floor, and took the seashell out of her dress pocket. How long had it been? Two weeks? And everything was already going to hell. Nok and Rolf had clung to each other right from the start, so maybe she shouldn’t be so surprised, but seeing them tangled in the early-morning sunlight with a black window looming next to them stirred something ugly within her.
It wasn’t the sex—they were old enough to make their own decisions. It wasn’t even that they were obeying the Kindred’s rules, because she knew they were terrified of disobeying. It was because they had looked truly, blissfully, blindly happy.
They like it here.
The pillowcase slipped from her hands. Tokens avalanched to the floor, far more than she had collected. She must have grabbed the wrong pillowcase. Had Nok and Rolf been earning tokens on their own, or worse, siphoning off the ones she’d earned?
Now that she looked around the living room, at the candy wrappers on the side table, and a fort they must have made from sofa cushions, and even a radio—the red one she thought the Kindred had stolen—she realized she’d been blind.
Rolf and Nok never had any intention of escaping.
Footsteps sounded on the porch, and Lucky stuck his head in, still sweat soaked from the desert. “I’ve been looking for you everywhere.” He leaned in the doorway, catching his breath. “I know that fight was stupid. Guys can be like that sometimes—I didn’t mean what I said. It’s this place. It makes my head ache so bad I can’t even think.” He squeezed a fist against his forehead and released it with an angry sigh. “It’s my fault. I let everyone drift apart.”
Cora knelt to pick up the scattered tokens. “Well, they all hate me now, thinking I stole their food. And good luck talking to Rolf and Nok. I doubt you can get them to stop making out long enough to listen.” She stuffed the tokens into the pillowcase and then started past him onto the porch.
“Wait. I can fix this—” he began to say.
“I’m fixing it myself. I’m tired of these black windows. Nothing they give us here will break them, but I know something that will.”
He followed her at a fast clip, trying to talk her out of it. She strode up the toy shop steps, shoving open the saloon doors. The croquet set sat between two dolls. She started shoving tokens through the copper slot.
“Maybe you should take a deep breath, Cora. Meditate . . . or something. I know that fight turned quickly. We’ve all been bottling up emotions. Not thinking straight. This morning I woke up and forgot my mom died. I kept waiting to hear her making breakfast downstairs.”
Cora paused before continuing to feed tokens into the slot. She’d forgotten that Lucky’s mother had died when he was little. He’d told her so quickly, like it pained him deeply to even think about.
The Kindred were taking those memories from him.
From all of them.
“It isn’t about the fight.” Cora fed the slot more tokens. “Not entirely. It’s about the two of you arguing with each other, when it should be them we’re fighting. It’s about Rolf and Nok hooking up even though the Kindred are watching. We’re forgetting what matters, Lucky.”
She slammed the last token through the slot and pounded on a copper button beneath the croquet set. The glass door opened. She grabbed the blue mallet.
It felt powerful in her hand. Real.
She headed for the doorway.
The light had shifted to dusk. Music came from the diner, something with a hint of jazz, but it just made her head pound harder. Mali stood by the open door with her hands across her chest, watching Cora like she could see straight into her soul. A cry came from inside the diner and Nok rushed out, followed by Rolf, who clutched a guitar in one hand.
“You!” Rolf jabbed a finger at Cora. “What, breakfast and lunch wasn’t enough? You had to steal dinner too?”
“I didn’t steal anything!” Cora yelled.
“Stop shouting!” Nok wailed. “My head hurts!”
Rolf stomped toward Cora, his eye twitching. “Is this revenge for seeing us together? If you’re jealous that you and Lucky don’t have a relationship like we do, maybe that’s your own fault!” He let the guitar fall to the porch with a clatter of errant notes.
Cora jumped back. What had gotten into him? She tightened her grip on the mallet. First the radio. Now the guitar. If anyone had a right to be angry, it was her.
“You’ve been secretly buying things from the shops, haven’t you? We could have used those things, Rolf! If I’d had a garrote or a makeshift knife when the Warden had tried to strangle me, maybe I could have killed him!”
He rolled his eyes. “Wow. How brilliant of you to figure out my plan. Yes, I bought them and didn’t tell you. Just like you took our food and didn’t tell us.”
“I didn’t!”
Splinters of pain shot off from her head. It felt like her brain was splitting in two, and anger boiled from the fissure. She gripped the mallet tighter.
Rolf narrowed his eyes.
“Stop it.” Nok tugged on Rolf’s arm. “It doesn’t matter why she did it—there’s still enough food, if we divide up what’s on her plate and forage in the orchard. Cora, just don’t do it again. Please. Headaches are bad enough—we don’t need hunger pangs too.”
“I didn’t take your food. Don’t you see? The Kindred are doing this. They want us to turn against each other.”
The others stared at her like she’d gone mad.
Mali yawned.
Cora spun and strode through the grass, bumping into Rolf so hard that he knocked into the guitar with another burst of errant chords, and then she stopped in front of the movie theater’s black window.
Her father had taken her to a zoo when she was a little girl. They had gone to see the tiger. She remembered squeezing her father’s hand as it paced back and forth, back and forth, watching them with unblinking eyes through the glass.
She felt like that tiger. She was that tiger.
She laid her palm flat on the humming window. Only a thick piece of glass had stopped that tiger from killing her. She hoped the Kindred could read her mind, and know she was biding her time until no surfaces separated her from them, and she could do to them what that tiger wanted to do to her.
“All right, Caretaker,” she muttered, stepping back. “Take care of this.”
She swung the mallet with all her strength against the glass. Nok shrieked. Cora cringed, expecting a satisfying crack and shatter of glass. The mallet was real wood, not whatever fake substance everything else was made of, and yet the moment it connected with the window, nothing happened. Not a crack. Not even a thud.
“Dammit!” She hurled the mallet to the ground.
Her vision started to fracture into little dots, as if the lights of town were a spinning kaleidoscope. Pain ripped through her head as lack of sleep caught up with her all at once. She sank to the ground.
Lucky crouched next to her. The sweat had dried on his shirt in the cool evening air. He nodded toward the croquet mallet. “Did you really think that was going to work?”
She pushed her mess of hair out of her face and sat up. “I don’t know. I had to try.” She watched the others tearing into her plate of food on the diner porch. “Look at them. They’re like wolves. Don’t they understand what’s happening? These are creatures who took us from our beds. Who are forcing us to breed for their own twisted purposes. Who keep kids in cages and cut off their fingers.”
Lucky crackled the knuckles in his left hand. “The Mosca cut off fingers, not the Kindred.”
“They’re all part of the same system! The Kindred protect us only as long as we obey them.”
She moved closer, brushing his leather jacket, catching a trace of his fresh soap smell that reminded her of home. Home. Maybe at this moment Charlie was pulling his Jeep into the driveway, and Sadie was running out to meet him.
“I can’t take it, Lucky. I’m going crazy.” At Bay Pines she’d checked off the days on a calendar, but she had no boxes to check now. No end date. Just the seashells, but there was an endless ocean of them. Would she keep collecting them until they filled the house, spilling out the windows into the marigolds? For months? Years? She curled up tight, wishing she could disappear into herself. She needed help. She needed a way home.
She needed a sign that there was hope.
A soft, familiar plink sounded on the black window behind them. Cora lifted her head. When dusk had rolled in, clouds had come too.
A drop of rain fell on her bare toes.
She stared at the patch of water, dumbfounded. Every day in the cage had been identical. Sunny skies without a trace of clouds. It rained in the jungle, and it snowed in the forest, but always on a predictable schedule, and never in the town. Now the rain started softly, a few errant drops at a time. The clouds grew heavier, making the day darker. It had been so long since Cora had felt a drenching rain that she’d forgotten the way it smelled. So earthy.
Nok shrieked with delight, jumping up and down and clapping, her mood flipping on a dime, as though the fight had never happened. She took Mali’s hands, swinging her around, trying to make her dance, but Mali just pitched her head toward the sky in distrust. The rain grew. Big fat drops formed rivulets and streams and rivers on the black windows. Rolf was trying to trace them with his finger, but there were too many.
“Why?” Cora turned to Lucky, rubbing her throbbing temples that were soaked with rain. “Why are they doing this? What do they hope to gain by changing things?”
“You’re tired, Cora. You haven’t slept.”
“You know I didn’t take everyone’s food, right?”
A slight pause. “Sure.”
Water flowed down his handsome face like tears, finding the valleys of his eyes, dripping off his jaw. Even if she hadn’t known him at home, and even though the Kindred had dressed him in a stranger’s clothes, she recognized sincerity in his face.
“They want to see what we’ll do.” She twisted her head toward all the watching windows. “They’re standing there now, watching us. You see them, right? The shadows?”
“Sure. I see them.” But his eyes stayed locked to hers. He tucked a wet strand of her hair gently behind her ear. “Do you trust me?” There was a strange hitch to his voice.
Her headache reverberated in her skull, louder and louder, but she nodded.
“Then come with me. There’s something I want to show you.”