“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IT looks like we have a new girl.”
Cora turned toward the voice in the darkness. Two hands grabbed the bars of her cell and rattled hard, making her jump. A boy’s face pressed against the bars, grinning maniacally.
The blond bartender, Dane.
“Boo.” He let out a laugh.
He took a yellow yo-yo out of his pocket and started tossing it up and down, up and down, carefree as though they weren’t all prisoners. As though one of them hadn’t been dragged off by guards just hours ago for no discernible reason, yelling about lies. The blue glow reflected on the boy’s buzzed head, hair a shade darker than her own, hooded eyes that cast shadows almost like the Kindred’s.
“Welcome to the Hunt, songbird. You’re the third new cast member we’ve gotten today—we met the others this morning. What’s your name?”
“Leave her alone,” Lucky said.
Dane tossed Lucky a searing look, eyeing him up and down. “Friend of yours? Ah, the one you were asking Pika about. She must be. Not too many blondes around here. You must have someone powerful looking out for you, songbird, or they would have already sold your hair. I bet it was that Warden who brought you here.”
“He’s no friend of mine,” Cora said.
Dane raised an eyebrow. “That’s too bad. You’d do well to have powerful friends. A Warden on the outside, me on the inside.”
Cora pushed to her feet, dusting grime off her hands. “How’d you get out of your cell, anyway?”
“Within these walls, I’ve got the power.”
“The most powerful of the powerless,” Lucky muttered.
Dane shot him another look, this one darker. “Not powerless. Not at all. The Kindred have entrusted me with all kinds of power you know nothing about.” He threw the yo-yo again and snapped it back. “I’m Head Ward, which means I run this place after hours. I’ve been here the longest and the Kindred grant me privileges, like a key to my cell that can override the lightlocks, in return for keeping things nice and peaceful backstage. Let me introduce you to our ensemble cast.” He swept an arm out toward the other shadowy faces. “Directly above you, we have the other new girl, Mali.” He leaned in close and dropped his voice. “A strange one, talks funny, but it seems you already know each other. I saw you whispering together in the lodge. I let it slide because you’re new, but I’d better not catch you chatting in public again.” His hooded eyes flashed with warning, before he grinned again suddenly and turned back to the wall of cages.
“Next to Mali is the hyena, and then there’s Makayla, from Vancouver, who you’ll be sharing the stage with.” In the faint light, Cora barely made out the dancing girl with the bandage on her knee giving her a wave, and then twisting her hand around to shoot Dane the bird behind his back. Cora barely hid her smile.
“Then the two giraffes in the tall cell in the corner,” Dane continued, “and that’s Pika next to Roger, the bobcat. Pika runs the show back here during the day.” A dirty girl chewing on her braid paused in stroking the bobcat’s tail to wave vigorously. “And our three antelope in the other tall cage, and the kangaroo and lioness along the top row. Shoukry’s there on the bottom next to the zebra; he’s from Cairo. He bartends with me, as you saw today. Jenny and Christopher are on the bottom too—siblings from Australia. They work out on the savanna, leading the expeditions. And then there’s our other new addition, this pretty boy with an attitude.” His eyes lingered on Lucky’s cage, one corner of his mouth turned up in a cryptic smile. “And between you two is our arctic fox. From Canada, I believe. It likes to chew on anything it can get its teeth around. And then there’s you. And me, of course, in the cell between Makayla and the hyena. I was rescued five years ago from Cape Town.”
Cora raised an eyebrow. “Rescued? That’s what you call being abducted?”
“Precisely. I’ve been running this place ever since,” he added.
“Ever since you failed out of one of the enclosures,” Makayla muttered loud enough to be heard across the room. Dane snapped his yo-yo back sharply and tossed her a look.
“So here’s how it works.” He pointed to a clock above the doorway. It looked like the industrial clocks that had been scattered throughout Bay Pines, except there was only one hand, and instead of having twelve numbers, this clock was divided into four uneven slices. “That’s how the Kindred keep time for us. Right now it’s on Night—the longest block of time. That little sliver next to it is Morning Prep, when you change clothes and eat breakfast, but you have to hustle because it’s just a few minutes. The big block next to it is Showtime. That’s when you march out there and sing and smile and do whatever the Kindred want you to do. I run the bar and make the announcements, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Then it’s the final block of time: Free Time. About an hour, give or take, and it’s a privilege that can be revoked for bad behavior.”
Cora rolled her eyes. “You seem awfully proud for a guy who’s betraying his own kind.”
The shadows around Dane’s eyes deepened, so only the faintest glimmer of lights reflected in his irises. “Better to be working with the Kindred than against them.”
She snorted.
Dane started pacing. “What do you think, ensemble? Is she going to make it to Armstrong with an attitude like that?”
“Not a chance!” Pika yelled back.
Cora raised an eyebrow. “What’s Armstrong?”
Dane stopped his pacing abruptly. He turned toward them with an incredulous look. “No one’s told you about Armstrong yet?”
“We’ve been locked in a fake world,” Cora said. “We haven’t gotten out much.”
The smile crept back onto Dane’s face. “Allow me to enlighten you, then. Armstrong is the closest thing to home we have. It’s an uninhabited asteroid, a small moon. Well, uninhabited by Kindred or the other intelligent species, that is. It’s home to displaced humans. A nature preserve, if you will. It’s where the Kindred send all the good boys and girls when they grow up. We put in our hard time as teenagers, and if we behave, we’re taken there when we turn nineteen. We’re free to govern ourselves, do whatever we want.”
Cora eyed him warily. “The Warden told me about that place once,” she said slowly, “only he didn’t say it was paradise.”
Dane smirked, undeterred. “I thought you didn’t trust a word out of our kidnappers’ mouths.”
Cora narrowed her eyes, and Dane matched it with a thin smile. “Like I said, with that attitude, neither of you will ever see Armstrong. Do you know what they do with the ones who turn nineteen and haven’t behaved?”
Lucky, next to her, went still. An eerie quiet spread from the other cast members, who shifted uneasily in their cells.
“What?” Cora asked warily.
“I don’t know,” Dane said, and pointed toward the corridor. “But each one of those rooms in there connects to a drecktube. It’s where we dump the animals if they die, and all our trash. The bad kids go in there and they never come back. You saw it yourself, today. The boy those two guards dragged off, Chicago. Until this morning, he occupied this same cell that you’re in now. That’s his blanket you’re hugging, as a matter of fact. He’s always been a problem—never wanted to clap when the guests told him to clap, never polished the rifles on time.” His voice lingered in a way that made Cora wonder if he was telling the truth. Shoving kids down a trash chute didn’t sound like a very Kindred thing to do.
“So behave yourself, songbird,” Dane continued, “and sing for that Warden of yours, and one day maybe you’ll go to Armstrong instead of the alternative.”
He stowed the yo-yo in his shirt pocket and climbed up the stairs to his cell. Pika tried to snatch the yo-yo from his pocket, but he slapped her hand away. She curled in her corner, sucking her braid, whining softly.
From two cells down, Lucky was still strangely quiet. It was as though all his anger had suddenly emptied, and Cora didn’t know why, or what had changed. She wished she could see into his mind.
She slid her hands around the bars.
Well, maybe she could.
She’d read Cassian’s mind once, though unintentionally. She hadn’t tried to read minds while trapped in the six-by-six cell, simply because there’d been nobody to practice on. But now she had a roomful of test subjects, and a boy whose thoughts she desperately wanted to read.
She closed her eyes, concentrating. Before, when she had read Cassian’s thoughts, her mind had been completely blank. Broken. That wasn’t the case now, but maybe she could quiet her mind enough.
Her thoughts reached out for Lucky, hoping to connect. And for a second, she thought she got a glimmer of something. It was shrouded in an overwhelming feeling of uneasiness. A number, maybe.
The number 19? Was that right? He must have been worried about Chicago and what Dane said, but there was something more. . . .
She got the sudden, eerie sensation she was looking into a hazy mirror. Or maybe more like watching herself on an old video recording, her hair extra bright, the dark circles under her eyes gone. Cherry petals were fluttering around her.
Her cheeks blazed. He was thinking of her. She quickly severed the connection into his mind. It had been wrong anyway—she shouldn’t have done it without his knowledge. Her heart pounded as she wondered if he could somehow tell what she’d done.
But then he sighed, and rolled over, and there was nothing.
She stretched out a hand instead and tried again to reach him through the bars, but they never would be close enough.