THE OCEAN WAVES WENT on crashing, even when everything else in Cora’s world had ground to a halt. The salt air beckoning her toward the exit she knew was just beneath those waves—if only Cassian weren’t holding her back.
More than just his voice had changed. It was his eyes. They had always been fathomlessly black, but they were cloudy now, like a broken storm, clearing into something that looked drastically more human.
Her lips parted. “Your eyes—”
“Don’t,” he said again, his voice so warm and rich and varied as his fingers knitted against her. “Don’t go in the water. Your mind can’t handle it.”
Cora’s head spun, still thrown off by seeing raw emotions in a man she had thought practically mechanical. “That’s the way out, isn’t it? I figured it out in your quarters, when you were telling me the real reason the Warden took us.”
“Yes.” His heart was beating wildly through his shirt. “Yes, that’s the way out, but it’s impossible for humans to pass through. Your physical body can do it—it’s just a matter of swimming down far enough—but your mind won’t let you do what it believes is impossible. You’d have to go beyond the point where you could swim back to the surface.” His hand wove through her hair, and she closed her eyes, overcome by this new side of him. “You shouldn’t have been able to perceive it. It’s true that they’ve been monitoring you for signs of perceptive ability, but none of you have yet exhibited any, despite the extents to which they’ve pushed your minds.”
“I don’t have to be psychic to be smart.” Her voice sounded certain, and yet her thoughts wavered. Was deduction really all there was to it? There’d been that time the ocean had shimmered so strangely. The time in the bookstore when her vision and balance had pulsed.
She stared at the waves that weren’t waves at all, but just more illusions, wondering what it all meant. One of Cassian’s hands still tangled in her hair and the other pulled at her waist, refusing to let her go, flooding her with that spark.
His storm-cloud eyes searched hers. “What are you thinking? Tell me.”
His frantic request threw her off—she was so used to him reading her mind—until she remembered that he couldn’t read minds when his own was flooded with emotions.
I’m thinking about you, she thought, knowing he couldn’t read her. Seeing you like this, uncloaked and real, as desperate as I am.
“I can’t stay here,” she said. “None of us can. Through the ocean is the only way.” A breeze sent a spray around them. A drop landed on the shoulder of his uniform. She touched it with the pad of her finger. “Don’t you understand? None of this is real. We can’t live like that.”
“Not everything is an illusion.” His hands pawed at her waist. “There are real oceans out there, on other planets. I’ll get permission to take you there. I’ll show you an ocean, or dogs, or the stars—I’ll show you whatever you want, as long as you stay here.”
His breath was straining against the machinery strapped to his chest. He wanted her to be like Charlie’s pet rat, taken out to ride on his shoulder, but at the end of the day, always locked back in his cage.
She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at his. Those dark eyes, the scar on the side of his neck, the nights he spent sleepless. They were more alike than she wanted to admit. She thought of that single chair in his quarters. Why hadn’t she seen until then how alone they both were?
Cora had wanted so badly to feel normal for once. She hadn’t belonged in Bay Pines, and she hadn’t belonged back home either. Maybe she would never belong: maybe there were certain people, like her, meant to live between worlds. Cassian too. The only Kindred who felt sympathy for humans and a desire to understand them, not use them.
“I can do it,” Cora whispered. “I figured out the puzzle was there without perceptive abilities, so I know I can make it through.”
His hands pulled her close enough to whisper, with a voice so human she could close her eyes and almost pretend he was. “Stay here. With me. The things I have done . . .” He stopped, and swallowed. “I’ve made so many mistakes, Cora.”
She didn’t know which mistakes he was talking about, but it didn’t matter. They had both made so many. In that moment, more had changed than just his eyes. In her, or in him, she wasn’t sure. When she had first seen him, she had thought him such a terrifyingly beautiful creature. Their captor. Their jailer. He was still those things to her, but he was something more. She didn’t want to put a word on it, and she didn’t know how she even would, but she knew it had to do with the times he had asked her what it meant to be human.
This was what had changed, and it was so devastatingly simple: she had become a person to him; he had become a person to her. Human, Kindred—it didn’t matter. It was just her, and him, standing in the sea.
His hand grazed the constellation markings on her neck. She couldn’t help but think about Lucky, who drew her to him as if they’d been made for each other—exactly as the Kindred engineered it. She and Lucky had everything needed to fall in love: attraction, respect, a shared past she hadn’t even known about. But in the same way the trees here were not quite trees, and the fruit was not quite fruit, the Kindred had misjudged something about humanity, and people, and the connections between humans. Love wasn’t just a combination of matching physical and personal criteria. It was something you couldn’t put into words, just a certainty, a twist of fate, a spark.
As much as Lucky drew her to him, she had never felt that spark. Not like she did with Cassian.
She pulled away, covering her face with her hands.
“Cora,” he murmured, and then said her name again and again. She was shaking so hard that she leaned her head against his chest and thought about how before him, before this place, everyone thought of her as a victim—her family, her classmates, the media, even Lucky. But Cassian had never looked at her that way. He had always known that beneath the smile she’d been told to wear, she was strong.
Cora started crying because she didn’t want this, and it was wrong, and she didn’t know anything about him. Cassian might have been Mali’s hero, but he could never be hers. How unfair, then, that suddenly she felt closer to him than anyone.
He touched a hand to her cheek. “Tell me what you’re feeling.”
He knew, just as she knew, that what was happening between them was wrong. That he couldn’t fall in love with a human and she couldn’t fall in love with her captor, but here they were.
“Please,” he whispered. “Whatever you ask, it’s yours. Just tell me that you feel—”
“Stop.” Her hand went to his lips, silencing him. “Don’t say that.”
His muscles were tensing and untensing as he gave up the last remnants of his fight to cloak his emotions. He rubbed a hand over the bump in his nose, turned his head to the side and cursed. He was acting just like . . . a person. And that scared her most of all.
“Cloak your emotions again,” she ordered.
“I don’t want to. You asked what I was like in my private life. Let me show you.” He leaned in, touching his forehead to hers, his lips a breath away. “You captivated me. I knew you were different. Strong. So full of potential. You baffled the researchers. You baffled me too. I did everything I could to understand you, and you were still a mystery.”
His chin started to tilt toward hers. His lips parted. “I want to know what it feels like,” he whispered.
My god. He was going to kiss her, and it was so wrong, and so was how badly she wanted him to.
She turned her head at the last second. “Don’t. If you cared for me, you’d help me escape.”
He balled his fists and straightened, trying to gain control over his emotions. He was a jealous person, she hadn’t forgotten. And Mali had said they were unpredictable when their emotions were uncloaked. As much as Cora wanted to think of him as human right now, she had to remind herself that he wasn’t.
He took a step away from her, pacing in the surf. “Is that what you want? To be away from me?”
“We weren’t meant to live behind bars.”
“What you are asking me goes against logic. You want to leave this place—leave me—when I’ve so recently discovered that you remaining close is the only thing I truly want.”
She urged her foot to take a step closer. Her hand drifted to her collar, to the charm necklace that tied her to a different world. She didn’t stop until she felt the heat from his body.
“I know,” she said. “I’m still asking.”
“Here I can at least see you, and touch you, and keep you safe from those who might do you harm. Why would I help you when I would lose even that?”
“Because I’d never be happy here. And caring about someone means you would sacrifice your own happiness for theirs.”
“That is a human way of looking at things. Not Kindred.”
“Well, you said you wanted to understand humanity.” He was silent, though he paced through the surf with his storm-cloud eyes still on her, and she added, “I’m not asking you to break the rules. I don’t want you to be punished. Just look the other way.”
He regarded her steadily, trying perhaps to see around his own mental blocks and read her thoughts. He put one hand around the back of her neck and moved closer.
His lips touched hers.
The flood of electricity broke through the dam of her lips and flowed into her chest, her arms, her head. She steadied herself against him. He hadn’t kissed before. It was stiff and hungry, but he had seen her and Lucky kissing, and Nok and Rolf. He knew what it looked like. He threaded his fingers though her hair like Lucky had. Cora let everything go, then. She didn’t care if other Kindred were watching.
She kissed him back, showing him how a kiss was meant to be, though she hardly knew either. He learned fast. His people might not kiss, but she could tell by his heart thumping under her hand that he enjoyed it, that he responded to it the same way humans did. Quick breath. Radiating warmth. Hands running over every inch of her back, arms, waist, like he had imagined this all in his head a thousand times. Everywhere he touched her rippled in goose bumps. He wasn’t careful and gentle with her, not like Lucky had been. He knew she wouldn’t break.
He was so warm, so full of energy and life that Cora never wanted to never let go. But she had to.
She pulled away from the kiss. He kept his arms around her as she closed her eyes, grounding herself in the coppery smell of his uniform. Something had happened here. They had crossed a line there was no going back from. It was a mistake—but some mistakes were worth making.
“Go at night,” he said. “The ocean isn’t as deep as it appears; there’s a pressure lens separating it from an equipment chamber beneath. You have to swim down far enough to reach it. The pressure will increase to the point where continuing feels impossible, but it’s not. You’ll break through the pressure lens. After that, you’re on your own.”
“Won’t the Warden and his researchers be watching?”
His eyes had returned to black, but his emotions were not totally gone. He pressed his lips to her forehead very softly, and then whispered a few words in her ear before letting her go.
“Leave them to me.”
He dematerialized, leaving her alone in the crashing waves.