WHEN THE REMATERIALIZATION WAS over, Cora found herself in a small room nearly bare of furniture. Open doorways led to two more small rooms. The space didn’t have the medical chamber’s austerity, nor the market’s bustling chaos, nor the menagerie’s faux Greek columns. But starry light came from the seams in the wall, marking it as a Kindred space.
Cassian held her tightly. As soon as he released her, she took a quick step away.
She crossed to the single window and shoved open the curtain, afraid to see a black window and know she was still being watched. But on the other side was the night sky filled with endless stars. Some so faint they were nearly invisible, some close enough to burn her eyes. In the center was a distant planet, ringed like Saturn, the blue color of water. She had to grab the curtain to keep from falling.
“This is what’s outside? Outer space?”
“That is a projected image. I selected it for you.” He paused. “I know you like the stars.” He traced a pattern on the wall in the central room, where a cabinet slid out, revealing a square container and a single square drinking glass.
She peeked into one of the other rooms. A bed with no sheets or blankets, and a shelf holding a few blue cubes and nothing else. Had he brought her to a prison cell?
“Where are we?” she asked.
“My quarters.” He spoke so casually that Cora barely had time to register before he pointed to the sitting room. “Sit in there.”
“Your quarters? I thought you were taking me to one of the menageries.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The Warden did instruct me to take you to a menagerie. And as you recall, I did take you to one. The Temple. I fulfilled his orders—I just didn’t leave you there, drugged and caged.” She thought she saw a flicker of dark amusement cross his face. “Never let it be said that my kind does not excel at finding loopholes.”
He picked up the square glass and the bottle but hesitated. “The Warden recommended that I take you to a menagerie called the Harem. It is located on the seventh sector—an area frequented by disgraced Kindred and Mosca traders. They go through human girls quickly there. It is a place I do not think you would like to go. I would certainly not enjoy having to leave you there.”
He was implying using girls for sex, or worse—things she couldn’t even imagine. It made the childish tricks in the Temple seem positively innocent. What had she done to make the Warden hate her this much?
Cassian pointed toward the sitting room. “Sit. Please. I would not like to spend the little time we have arguing.”
Cora made her way into the sitting room. It was barren, save for some metal crates pushed against the wall and a book tossed on top of the crates, dog-eared and worn. Peter Pan and Wendy. An artifact from Earth. It was the only thing at all in the entire room that had any glimmer of personality. Cassian picked up the book quickly and dropped it into one of the metal crates.
The bare room reeked of desolation. “Do you all live like this, so spartanly?” she asked.
“Yes, though not by choice. There is not an abundance of resources in space. Dust and rock and light can only power so much. We live a frugal life out of necessity. The technology used to create your environment works only within certain confines and requires a high amount of carbon. We could not create such luxury for ourselves.” He traced another pattern on the wall. A small tray emerged, which served as a table for the glass and square container. He poured a sharp-smelling liquid into the glass and took a deep drink.
“What’s that?”
“Alcohol, made from fermented lichens.”
“You have alcohol?”
He glanced at her with a flicker of amusement. “Every society in the universe has invented alcohol—even some lesser species, such as your own. Intoxicants are prohibited, in general, outside of the menageries. But we are allowed to keep one container in our quarters, in case of difficulty controlling emotions.”
She grabbed the glass out of his hand, downing the contents, wincing as it burned her throat in a way her mother’s expensive wine never had. She held out the glass for more. “I’m definitely having difficulty controlling my emotions.”
Cassian hesitated—clearly he meant the drink for himself, not her—but then refilled the glass. She took a slower sip, letting her heavy eyelids sink slightly. The room was quiet, too quiet, and she cleared her throat. “What did you mean when you said that the algorithm didn’t make a mistake, but you did?”
He dragged a crate over as a makeshift chair. “It is protocol to monitor the stock algorithm’s selections before the transfer from the native environment to the artificial one. I performed the required period of observation on the other Girl Two. She would have been suitable.” He looked down at his hands. “I continued to monitor Boy Two simultaneously. He was performing a research operation on one of your networked computers. He found an article from the previous year about your father’s employment. You were standing in the picture. Boy Two’s emotions were very strong. Impossible to ignore.”
Lucky had said he looked her up on the internet every few months at his library, hoping for news that would make him feel better about playing a part in her time in juvenile detention.
That whole time, Cassian had been watching?
“He felt intense guilt,” Cassian continued, “which was perplexing, since he had not directly wronged you. He felt curiosity too, and very strong attraction, though that only made his guilt increase. I began to observe you as well. Call it . . . curiosity. Your experience with captivity was somewhat unusual in a female of your age and your intelligence. Such resilience is highly desirable to us, after what happened to the previous cohorts.”
She swallowed. Her hand still felt dry from the femur bone.
“You had other traits—physical attractiveness, a quiet demeanor, an emotional strength—that would make for an interesting pairing with any of the three males selected. I already knew Boy Two would be more than interested in you. So I went against the stock algorithm. I selected you myself. The Warden strongly disapproved, but I argued that your resilience would make you highly adaptable to an environment such as this.”
“That’s what this is all about, resilience?” She clutched the glass harder. “You thought that because I was in prison before, and didn’t cause disruptions, that I’d roll over and accept this prison too? You’ve got it all wrong. The accident and my time at Bay Pines didn’t make me resilient. It left me a shell of a person. I can’t face enclosed spaces. I can’t face water. It didn’t matter where I went or who I was around after that; I didn’t belong anywhere. Not at home. Not in prison either. It changed me, Cassian.”
Her fingers were trembling on the glass. He folded his own across from her, a gesture that felt startlingly human. “Perhaps we define resiliency differently. My understanding was that resilience isn’t about weakness, but strength.”
“Exactly. I’m not strong. I can’t sleep and when I do, it’s just nightmares. I can’t even—”
Her voice failed her. She was about to say she couldn’t even love Lucky like he deserved, but Cassian didn’t need her to list her failures. He could see them in her head.
For a long time, he didn’t answer. He must be thinking about how he’d made a mistake. He thought she was more than she was. He saw something that wasn’t there. She didn’t think she would ever care if the monster who brought her here regretted it, but in some ripped-bare part of her, she found that she did care. Yes, she did.
She wanted to know why he thought she was resilient.
“Because of what happened with your father,” he said. “Because of the truth.”
CORA’S EYES CLOSED TO the room and the starry window, as she remembered a different night long ago. It was two days after she had been released from Bay Pines.
Her welcome-home party.
The divorce had been finalized halfway through her incarceration, but her mother had flown back from Miami and drunk enough pinot grigio to be able to be under the same roof as her father, though never in the same room. They’d invited all her old school friends and her father’s colleagues. Her mom had attached a silk bow to Sadie’s collar. There had been a three-tiered cake and presents, as though she’d been away at a European boarding school for the last eighteen months, and not an upstate detention facility.
No one talked about Bay Pines. No one asked her how bad the cafeteria food was or if any of the girls had attacked her. Her father made a long toast to her return. Then the guests left, and her parents got into one of their marathon fights and her mother stormed out, and the maids cleaned the spilled champagne, and Cora went outside to look at the night sky.
Whether she was looking up from Bay Pines or Fox Run, whether her family was together or broken, at least the stars had always looked the same.
Her father joined her, and for the first time since the night of the accident, they were alone. They exchanged a few words about the upcoming election, and the fight he’d had with her mother over the guest list, and then he leaned over the railing, with no warning, and let his gin glass slip into the bushes below, and covered his face with his hands.
It was the first time Cora had ever seen him cry.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said, between sobs that made the loose skin on his neck tremble. He was already bald by then, and his manicured fingers clutched his head as though it needed to be held together. “I’d had too much to drink. I was so angry with your mother, threatening divorce.”
It had taken Cora a moment to even realize he was talking about the night of the accident, because he only ever spoke about it in vague terms, and only if he had to. As a senator, he’d always been coached in what to say, so it was rare to see him open up like this. She watched his fingers fumbling over his bald scalp, searching for something, anything. He looked older than she’d ever seen him, and it was the first time she realized that one day he would die.
“It eats at me. It should have been me. My little girl spent eighteen months in that place, and all it would have taken was a single phone call, a single confession, and you would have walked free.”
He had collapsed into a sobbing collection of tired eyes and world-worn fingers and wrinkles that hadn’t been there before that night.
Cora leaned against the railing next to him. She had tried hard not to think often about the night of the accident. That terrifying plunge off the bridge, the car filling with water, shivering together on the shore, her father reeking of alcohol. Sitting on the wet grass, she’d thought through what would happen next. The police would arrest him. He would lose his senatorship and his reputation. Her family would lose their livelihood. Her mother would divorce him for real. She and Charlie would lose a father.
Below, in the garden, the shattered pieces of his gin glass reflected the moonlight. She remembered each day of those eighteen months. The fights in the shower. The leering eyes of the guards. The lights that stayed on all night. At the time, it had seemed an eternity.
“It was my choice, Dad.” She had glanced back through the windows at her house, where her mother slept on the sofa and Charlie played video games. She felt like she was looking into another person’s life. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I hadn’t known the consequences. I knew exactly what I was doing when I told the police that I had been behind the wheel. I was saving our family.”
“I never should have gone along with it.” Her dad sobbed. “I should have confessed. I should have served the time.”
Cora had reached over and covered his large old-man hand with her small one. “It’s okay, Dad. I knew what I was doing.”
She had lied to him plenty back then, but not that night on the porch. It was okay. Her father worked too hard, and was away from home too often, but he loved her. She knew him—she loved him—and she never once blamed him for going along with a decision that she had made on her own. Lucky had it all wrong, when he thought that her father had forced her to take the fall for him. She had never been a victim. Not once in her life. It had been her idea to take the fall. There on the banks of the river, waiting for the police to come, she had practically forced her father to agree. And even after the conviction, and after the divorce happened anyway, and after juvie, and after coming home and knowing that she would never belong again, she had never once regretted it.