“HE’S MY FATHER,” SHE whispered. “I had the ability to help him. It’s what anyone would have done.”
Cassian didn’t answer. In his eyes she saw herself reflected: tangled hair, delicate features, dark under-eye circles. Taking the fall for her father didn’t mean she was brave. It certainly didn’t make her a paragon of humanity.
But she sensed that Cassian disagreed, and it was a strange feeling. He didn’t see her as a victim, like Lucky did. He knew that the lie had been her idea. He didn’t care about the accident or her false imprisonment or the skills she’d learned in juvie or even her high-profile family.
He cared about the sacrifice she had made.
“Humans have been cruel to you,” he said. “Your father, for allowing you to accept blame for his crimes. Your fellow inmates in detention. Those in the media who unfairly judged you. And yet you bear no resentment toward them. I took you from your world because I wished to give you something better.”
Her heart pounded. She never expected this. Not from him.
“I don’t want better.” Her voice was faint. “I want home, flaws and all. And don’t try to tell me it isn’t there. I saw the comic book. I know time works differently for you. Just tell me straight that it was all a lie. Earth is still there, isn’t it?”
Her words reverberated around the small corners of his room. Echoed back at her, they sounded desperate, but she refused to back down. Not when everything she had ever loved was at stake.
She could tell by his flat expression that he was going to lie again. She could almost feel the lie forming on his lips, could almost taste its bitterness. But then he closed his mouth. “There is no short answer to that question.” The flatness in his face was gone now; he was telling the truth. “Because we ourselves do not know.”
She gripped the edge of the table. “How can you not know? It’s a huge planet. It’s either there or it isn’t.”
“Two hundred rotations ago, the stock algorithm ran a projection that predicted humans would destroy their own planet with a ninety-eight point six degree of certainty. We began taking the last groups of humans before the destruction was predicted to occur. So by all projections, the answer to your question is yes, Earth is gone.”
“But I overheard the Mosca in the market talking about going back to Earth for another supply run. And that comic book was stamped with a date in the future.”
He took the glass from her and swallowed her concerns with another pour of alcohol. “Many artifacts are counterfeit—you cannot trust the comic books are authentic. And we do not concern ourselves with the Mosca. If they believe Earth exists, perhaps they have not been back yet to verify its destruction.”
“But have you verified it? Have any Kindred seen it with their own eyes?”
“A ninety-eight point six percent chance does not require verification.”
She didn’t listen to his talk about percentages and statistics. All Cora heard was that there was a chance; the stock algorithm had made mistakes before. Margins of error.
Maybe this was a mistake, too.
“You forget that I can read what you are thinking,” he said. “You still hope to return to Earth, even knowing the high likelihood it is gone. Perhaps the Mosca would be able to help you, but they are an unscrupulous species. They would just as likely betray you. The wisest course of action would be to forget your dreams; if you will only agree to obey, I can request an extension from the Warden. He won’t like it, but I have some sway. I could make the enclosure more comfortable for you.”
On the wall, the fake stars shimmered. He had already risked so much for her—and now he was willing to sacrifice more. She picked up the glass and twirled it in her fingers.
“It isn’t about the comforts of Earth. It’s about what’s real. My life at home was as fake as my life here. I was never allowed to be myself—I always had to be a senator’s daughter. My mother couldn’t be an actress, like she wanted, and it made her bitter and resentful. I could never be a songwriter, because my dad’s handlers thought that if any of my songs got online, it would hurt my dad’s chances at reelection. We had to be these artificial versions of ourselves, always smiling when we were sad, cloaking our real emotions, just like you do.
“If I can go home, I can change that. I can truly live, even if it’s painful. I want a real relationship with my father and my mother. We can be a real family again, even with the divorce—we were making progress. I want to write songs about the things I’ve been through, and I want to fall in love with someone I choose, not who was chosen for me.” She tore her hand away from her necklace. “You probably don’t understand that.”
He was quiet for some time and then very slowly rubbed the scar on his neck. “I understand more than you think. I could not have observed humanity for this long without being affected by it. The others of my kind are fascinated by the brightly colored parts of humanity: your clothing, your architecture, the tricks you can perform. I’m not as interested in those. I like the quieter part, like how humans wish on stars knowing they won’t be answered. And what you told me once, about how some mistakes are worth making. I have made mistakes myself.” He took the glass and downed another sip, as though he could swallow whatever memories pained him. “That is why your capacity for emotional depth intrigues me. The Kindred do not have those notions. Forgiveness. Sacrifice. They are remarkable traits.”
His face had looked so otherworldly at first, like that of a god, or someone from her dreams. But now she knew he was just a person, and he was young too, and felt things like guilt and shame and the need for forgiveness.
“You should not be ashamed to be one of the unintelligent species,” he said, looking into the glass. “The intelligent species are not perfect, though we may pretend to be. We can lie. We can manipulate. We can betray. Your kind are not capable of the same level of evil as mine is.” He set the glass back down, and the liquid settled. It was cold in his room, but he didn’t seem to feel it.
“Yes, we are.” She thought of the girls at Bay Pines who bullied each other just for fun, and of her friends who had vanished after her arrest, and even of herself, who had been so careless with Lucky’s heart. She took the glass and downed the rest of it. “You admit that the Kindred lie. Were you lying when you said your people had taken us for our own benefit? All your talk about swearing altruistic oaths . . .” She looked down into the glass. “It isn’t true, is it?”
He didn’t answer. This close, his eyes weren’t just black; there was depth to them, like the cut crystal of the glass.
“Tell me why the Warden really had you take us,” she demanded.
The angles of his room felt extra sharp. The tension was heavy in the air, nearly at the point of bursting. No more lies. Please.
He leaned in slowly. “Our oath is not a lie. We do see ourselves as stewards, and not just because of our fondness for humans. It is our duty to ensure your survival—and all the lesser species’ survival—because the universe would lose its richness without humanity, and diversity of thought leads to the ultimate intelligence.” He paused. “But you in particular. You six. There is more to it than what we have told you, and more to your enclosure.”
“So you admit that those researchers have been manipulating us.” Her vindication was immediately swallowed by anger. “But why would they mess with the puzzles? Why put us in such strange pairs? Why turn the others against me?”
“Mali has mentioned rumors to you that certain humans are beginning to demonstrate signs of perceptive ability. Some have claimed to be mildly psychic, even telekinetic. None of the claims have been verified. The six of you were chosen, in part, because of your potential to display perceptive ability, if your minds were pushed in the correct manner. Challenging your concepts of time and space, for example. Altering the weather. Putting pressure on you in terms of presenting puzzles with variable rewards.”
She stared at him like he was speaking another language. All of it, everything, had been an attempt to see if they were evolving. The headaches. The irritability. The fighting among themselves. The scrape of anger clawed her once more. “It was under the Warden’s orders, wasn’t it? And those researchers were more than happy to screw with our heads. But we could have killed each other, like the last groups. We still could! When Rolf finds out Nok’s sleeping with Leon, it could all go to hell!”
She sank forward, resting her tired head in her hands, trying to quiet the millions of thoughts warring for her attention. Her neck throbbed as though the Warden’s icy grip was still there. No wonder he’d been willing to remove her—she wasn’t being a good little specimen. She wished she had never awakened in that desert, and seen that ocean, with its strange shimmer and its dead body. Why had they even given them an ocean, anyway? Was it just more manipulation? There was no puzzle there. Eight puzzles in the habitats, eight in the shops—that’s what Cassian had said. And each of the environments they’d found had a puzzle: the treetop ropes course in the forest, the maze in the desert, the scavenger hunt in the swamp, the musical puzzle in the grasslands, the harvest game in the farm, the temple maze in the jungle, and the sledding race in the arctic habitat.
A strange tickle spread down her back, painful but not like a headache, and she pinched herself hard. That was only seven. That meant there had to be an eighth, and the ocean was the only habitat left. Maybe it was a puzzle they couldn’t solve—because it was hidden by perceptive technology.
Because it was the fail-safe exit.
She pinched herself harder. She might not be psychic, but she was smart enough to see through their lies. She bit the inside of her cheek, tasting blood, and leaned forward. If she was right, they could all escape. “Give me another chance. Take me back to the cage, just for one more day. You might not have been the one manipulating us, but you went along with it. You owe me.”
Even as she said the words, she knew they weren’t quite true. How many times had he bent the rules for her?
He turned his head. “That is against protocol.”
“So was taking me to the menagerie. So is having me in your bedroom, I’m guessing. Admit it—you know what they’re doing is wrong. You know I’m more than a gender and a number. I’m a person. Like you.”
Her heart hammered. It was excruciating, being so close to this beautiful bronzed creature who wasn’t human but who was so similar. A crazy thought entered her head: Maybe Lucky was right to be jealous.
His hand flexed on the table, close enough that their fingers brushed, and the spark ran through her, straight to her heart.
“Why do you wish to go back,” he asked, “when we both know you will never obey?”
She bit the inside of her cheek harder, masking her thoughts with pain. “Don’t ask me that. Please. I can’t tell you.”
That’s why the ocean had pulsed so strangely that day—because her eyes knew they were being tricked. Her body knew there was something wrong with the ocean, more than just her fear of deep water.
“I would be risking much for you, Cora. If the Warden found out, we would both be severely punished.”
She didn’t let herself think. “That’s what I want.”
He paused. “Then I will help you. And I will not ask why.”
Silence shrouded the room, but Cora didn’t mind. It was a reprieve from the cage. From her thoughts. From her loneliness. Cassian refilled the glass, and they took turns sipping. For the rest of the night they sat in his spartan quarters and talked, and then they didn’t talk, and they listened to the silence around them.
Cora’s head jerked. She had fallen asleep sitting up. She tried to stand but stumbled, shaky. Cassian stood too, to keep her from falling.
“You should rest,” he said. “When you wake, I will return you to your enclosure.”
He was asking her if she could walk, but she couldn’t find the words to answer. She just wanted to sleep. Her thoughts kept drifting back to her bed at home, the quilt that Sadie liked to curl up on. Even with all the pain, and hurt, and loneliness, she wanted that life back.
The ground fell away from her; he was carrying her to the other room as though she weighed nothing. Her head lolled, her hair dangling. Then came a temperature change and a softness as her body relaxed into the familiar comfort of a bed, though it was harder than she’d like. Her muscles unwound in a way they hadn’t in weeks.
“I will wait in the other room,” he said.
She shook her head. She reached out a hand to touch him, though she wasn’t sure if she wanted to push him away or pull his warmth closer.
“I still have to try,” she whispered.
He didn’t ask her to elaborate, because if he could see in her head, he had to know what she meant: she couldn’t live in a cage. And she couldn’t let the others continue to slide away from humanity.
“Not now,” he said. “Now, just rest.”
She started to drift even deeper into sleep. The mattress dipped where he was sitting; she was tempted to roll toward that groove. He said words she barely heard, about how she was wrong when she thought she was just an animal to him. That he didn’t think of her that way. But it might have just been her dreams taking over.
Her mind drifted deeper, and an hour might have passed, or maybe only an instant, but his weight was still on the bed beside her.
“Cora,” he said softly, more to himself. She felt the faintest touch of his hand on her cheek, his fingers light as if they didn’t know how hard to touch not to bruise her. The metallic skin of his thumb rubbed along her bottom lip.
You don’t know what I’m like in private, when I’m uncloaked.
As she slipped from the waking world to sleep, she wondered if he wanted to kiss her. He had been so curious, that day in the menagerie. His desire to understand humanity had been palpable. Her heart was racing, despite the alcohol. She could still show him. She could press her lips to his—she was aching to. It was so clear now. She wasn’t sure when it had begun, certainly not that first day, nor in the medical rooms. The night he gave her the stars, maybe. She wanted to show him what it meant to be human.
She moved her lips, trying to form his name.
But as soon as his thumb had brushed her lips, it was gone, and the weight beside her on the bed was gone, and then she fell asleep to the sound of his footsteps by the window, pacing back and forth, back and forth. Just like a tiger.