CORA SLAMMED THE DOOR of her cell closed.
She mussed her hair to make it look as if she’d slept, and kicked around her blanket, seconds before the morning lights flickered on. The clock above the doorway clicked onto Morning Prep.
She sank against the bars, chest rising and falling hard. She had made it. They had made it. It was all she could do, once the lights flickered all the way on, not to laugh out loud in joy. She pressed a hand over her mouth and whirled toward Lucky’s cell.
But the joy on her face died.
He looked awful. Dark circles around his eyes, hair tangled, like he hadn’t slept at all. As soon as the lightlocks clicked off, she pushed open the door. The other kids all tumbled out of their cells, trying to beat one another to the feed room. Cora bided her time until they cleared.
“What’s wrong?” she asked Lucky.
He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck and glanced at the fox. Their argument from the night before flooded back to her, his assertions that he’d do anything—even stay behind—to protect the animals, and that it was her responsibility to do the same for the kids.
“The others know,” he said.
She jerked back in surprise. “How much?”
“Not everything, but enough. They’ve been protecting us.” He glanced toward the medical room, tucking a few torn-out journal pages into his pocket. There was handwriting on them, but it wasn’t his. “Did you get Anya?”
“Yeah. She’s safe, but . . .” She remembered the gun floating in the air. “I’m not sure anyone around her is. She’s delirious. She isn’t going to be able to train me like that.”
“It must be the drugs,” Lucky said. “They’ll have to leave her system before she can tell you how to control minds.”
The clock clicked over to Showtime, and Cora’s stomach grumbled, but she ignored it. Lucky rubbed his shoulder uneasily as he watched the backstage kids tumble out of the feed room, Shoukry and Christopher arguing over half a breakfast cake. His fingers fumbled again with the torn-out pages.
“What are those?” she asked.
He didn’t answer. She was tempted to probe inside his mind and see what was bothering him. She went so far as to send her thoughts just to the edge of his, but flinched when she saw images of guns, darts, dead animals—all surrounded by an overwhelming feeling of sadness.
“Don’t worry about it.” When he met her eyes, he blinked and his weariness vanished. He gave her half a smile. “We’re getting close. You’re going to beat this thing, I know it.”
His words bolstered her hope.
That morning, she raced through her songs as if she’d chugged ten cups of coffee. Her limbs felt light and jittery. Arrowal and the Council members hadn’t come today. Roshian was rotting where no one would ever find him. For the first time in days, Cora let herself revel in a sense of hope, as she pulled Shoukry onstage and they belted out the refrain together.
“I haven’t thought of that song in years!” Shoukry said with a laugh. “We used to listen to it at the roller-skating rink. It played at my fifth birthday party.”
Cora squeezed his hand, beaming.
Shoukry leaned in close. “Whatever you’re planning,” he whispered, “we’re with you.”
Shocked, Cora couldn’t form words to answer until Shoukry was already stepping off the stage, and by then, the front door was opening.
Cassian entered, and any words vanished in her mind.
His eyes met hers and he stopped. Suddenly she was back in his quarters, and it made goose bumps erupt on her arms. They were in this together now. No more secrets. No more lies.
He nodded toward the alcove.
Once they were in the solitude behind the wooden screen, she thought her racing heart would slow, but it only beat faster.
“We freed Anya,” she said.
“Where is she?”
“With the Mosca.” Cora picked up one of the cards on the table, the queen of diamonds, turning it anxiously between her fingers.
“It will take a while for the drugs to clear her system,” Cassian said. “A full day, perhaps longer. The Gauntlet arrives tomorrow, and the tests begin the day after that. That does not leave us much time. How much progress have you made teaching yourself to read minds?”
A thump sounded from beyond the alcove. The music outside stopped halfway through a song. Cora glanced at the slats, but dismissed it. Makayla must be taking her break early.
“I can see images sometimes in people’s heads, sense the feelings that go with them.”
“I don’t know how Anya goes about controlling minds, but my guess is you’ll need more than that. You’ll need to extract specific words, as a starting point. It isn’t like levitating dice, because there are no amplifiers built into the mind. You must probe beneath consciousness, like reaching into a murky pond and finding a stone at the bottom.” He took her hands, and she flinched at the sudden contact. He placed her palms on either side of his head, just above his ears. “Tell me what I am thinking.”
He closed his eyes.
She scanned his face, looking for any tells or clues that might give away his thoughts. The scar Mali had given him. The bump in his nose.
She concentrated on piercing his mind’s natural shield. She had only ever intentionally read humans’ minds before, and by contrast Cassian’s felt surprisingly chaotic. Thoughts were stacked in haphazard piles that must make sense only to him.
Out of the chaos, she sensed an image of his quarters, bare. The book he liked to read, Peter Pan and Wendy. Then a memory of the cage, of watching her from behind a panel as she found the bone he had planted in the desert. That memory seemed stronger than the others.
“The bone,” she whispered, and felt his head nod in her hands.
“Good. And what am I thinking now?”
She concentrated again, and pictured a black sky. A snow-covered hill that would have made her shiver, but in his memory, he didn’t feel the cold. One by one, lights appeared in the dark.
“Stars.”
“Yes. And now?”
He had tipped his head down, so their foreheads were pressed together. She pictured an image of her own face. She was driving in her dad’s car down country roads, singing softly to the radio. Her cheeks started to warm. His memories felt different when they were about her. They crackled at the edges, more alive. The image changed to waves lapping in the ocean, the two of them standing in the surf. In the memory, they were arguing. He was confused, frustrated, desperate. She had started to speak, but then he’d kissed her.
Her lips parted in surprise. “You’re thinking . . . of that day—”
And then, he was kissing her again. Not in a memory—in real life.
They were so close already that it had taken just a tilt of his head for their lips to meet. A current spread to her toes, and her hands instinctively slipped from the sides of his head to his shoulders. He kissed her deeper and she slid her arms around his neck. It was wrong, she knew. She’d sworn not to do this again. And yet ever since that day they’d pretended to dance together, she’d been unable to forget it.
Her hip bumped the table, and the cards fluttered to the floor. She broke the kiss and twisted to pick them up, but he held her tightly.
“Cora. Please. Do not push me away again.”
But it was too much—the kiss, what it meant, everything. She crouched down, hair falling over her face, thankful for the excuse to catch her breath. Her fingers curled around the fallen cards. She’d stand up. She’d face him. She’d tell him it couldn’t happen again. . . .
And then she realized that the Hunt had gone completely silent on the other side of the screen. No clinking glasses, no announcements from the stage. She glanced at Cassian and saw the same realization reflected in his own face.
The wooden screen jerked open.
Arrowal stood on the other side. “You. Girl. Come with us.”
The blood drained from her face. Surely he hadn’t seen the kiss. Behind him, Fian stood with two Kindred guards. When his eyes met hers, they flamed with warning.
Cassian was rapidly cloaking himself. “I have reserved this girl’s entertainment for the rest of the quarter rotation.”
“That is inconsequential,” Fian said. “There has been a murder.”
Cold fear crept up her body until she was nearly blinded by it. Arrowal didn’t take his eyes off Cora. “The boy Tessela arrested, Dane, revealed it during his interrogation. We scanned the environment and found high traces of carbon. A body. Roshian’s body. And according to Dane, this girl was the only one present at the time of his death.”
Her lips parted, but she couldn’t think of a thing to say to clear her name.
“Take her to an interrogation room,” Arrowal ordered.
The two guards stepped forward. Fian’s eyes—looking for instruction—flashed toward Cassian, but Cassian seemed at a loss too, his face returned to a mask to hide whatever it was he was truly feeling.
“Wait.” Fian stepped in front of one of the guards. “I will interrogate her. This matter is too important to entrust to the guards alone.”
Relief flowed into her heart. Fian would protect her, just as he had before.
Arrowal nodded. “I agree. Which is why I will interrogate her personally. The mind cannot hide the truth for long. We will soon know everything.”
Everything.
If they probed her mind, they’d learn about more than just Roshian’s murder. They’d learn about her abilities and the training sessions with Cassian and the Fifth of Five, and god, even the kiss.
Cassian blocked the door. “No.”
His command was sharp. The guards obeyed by instinct, taking a step back as though he was their commander, not Arrowal. Cora’s heart pounded wildly.
What was he doing?
Arrowal seemed to tower even a few inches higher. “You question me, Warden?”
“You only saw a portion of the truth in Dane’s mind,” Cassian said. “You saw the events that led up to the murder, but not the crime itself. You couldn’t have, because Dane was not present when it happened.”
There was a subtle shift in the air that left Cora baffled. Why was he saying all this?
For a second, Cassian’s eyes shifted to Fian, and Fian gave a slight nod. Cora had no idea what silent message had just transpired between the two of them.
“And how do you know that?” Arrowal countered.
Cassian didn’t immediately answer.
Cora willed herself to keep breathing steadily. Fian’s hand was flexing a few inches from his apparatus belt, almost like he was preparing for something. Was that what the look between them had meant? That Cassian was going to try to fight his way out of this? Enact the Fifth of Five’s secondary plan that he’d told her about, launching a war?
They wouldn’t last ten minutes.
“You are always trying to protect the lesser species,” Arrowal said, a hint of condescension in his voice. “But this girl is no longer a ward in one of your environments. You cannot protect her against her own crimes. Now tell me how you know Dane was not present, if you were not present yourself.”
Cora tossed a look at Cassian, but his face revealed nothing. She tried to probe into his thoughts, but her own mind was too fractured, her thoughts too scattered to concentrate. All she glimpsed was a shadowy image of his quarters again. She was there, her mouth moving, a card in her hand. He was thinking of the lesson where she had taught him to cheat.
“I know,” he said calmly, “because I was present.”
A lie.
Her lips parted. Fian’s hand flexed again, and it all seemed to happen so fast. She pressed deeper into Cassian’s head, and suddenly his head turned toward her, as though he could feel her there. The sensation of his thoughts changed. That brighter, more alive feeling came. Images of her flashed through his head. Her, standing on a beach. Her, looking out her bedroom window. Her, when she had first felt the electricity of their touch. A feeling of love was wrapped around each one, but there was something darker too.
“Why exactly were you present at a murder scene?” Arrowal asked, and for a second the room was silent.
Cassian glanced down at the queen of diamonds on the floor. As though the world had suddenly turned on its side, Cora realized what he was about to do. It didn’t have anything to do with the Fifth of Five or any secondary plans. It was why he’d shown her all the images, surrounded by love.
He was going to sacrifice himself for her.
Words rose up her throat, about to tell him that he was making a terrible mistake. She hadn’t taught him to lie so he could lie about this.
At the same time, Fian took a sharp step right behind her, as though sensing what she was about to do.
“Because it was me,” Cassian said. “I killed Roshian.”