The Cage (The Cage 1)

But it wasn’t the books she was interested in. The hair on her arms was still tingling, and she faced the black window behind the counter, keeping her distance. She ran her thumb over the seashell’s hard edge, reminding herself that nothing here was real. Not the shell. Not the bookstore. Not even time itself.

But the Caretaker—he was real.

Cora leaned against the counter. “Are you there?”

She had meant to sound accusatory, and yet the words came out as a whisper. She’d sounded almost curious. Guilt cut into her, and she whipped her gaze out the bookstore door. What if Lucky caught her trying to talk to Cassian?

She turned back to the window. Yes, she was curious about him. And yes, she knew that was sick, but she couldn’t help it. It didn’t mean she wasn’t also desperate to wrap the metal guitar strings around his neck and squeeze.

She rested the pads of her fingers on the humming window. The vibrations entered her. The ache grew in her head. She pushed through the pain to peer into the murky blackness, longing to see a shadowy figure—his shadowy figure—and to know she wasn’t alone.

“Cassian? Are you there?”

She wanted answers. Why he had saved her from the Warden. Why she got more tokens than everyone else. If all humans felt a spark of electricity when he touched them, or if it was just her. Her shaking fingertips coiled into her palm, making a tight fist against the panel. In her dreams, she thought he was an angel. A beautiful face to chase away the nightmares. He was beautiful. But instead of taking her away from nightmares, he had brought her into one.

The throb in the back of her head grew. Or rather, it changed. It spread at the base of her head like soft needles, not entirely unpleasant but strange. The colors of the toy store seemed to grow brighter, and her balance tipped like she was drunk, and a sharp tug came from the other side of the window.

She shoved away from it. Her vision returned to normal, her skin calmed, but her heart still raced. Had he reached into her head? The sensation was different from the normal headaches that came whenever she looked at an angle that wasn’t right. This one felt almost . . . pleasurable.

“There you are.”

With a start, she turned. Lucky stood in bookstore’s doorway, hair still sleep tangled, but his eyes were bright. They darkened at her expression.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.” The word came out too fast. She stepped away from the black window and set the seashell on the glass countertop. “I was just getting this. For our calendar.” She smiled, hoping he couldn’t tell how fast her pulse was racing. She tapped on the glass counter top and cleared her throat. “I noticed that the copy of Robinson Crusoe is gone. The radio’s gone from the toy store too, and the teddy bear.”

“You think the Kindred took them?”

“They must have, but it doesn’t make sense.” The black window hummed, and Cora pinched her arm, hard, so they wouldn’t be able to read her mind. She pulled Lucky away from the window and lowered her voice. “If they knew we were planning to use the prizes as weapons, they would have taken the guitar strings and the boomerangs. Those are a lot more dangerous than a teddy bear.”

Lucky gave a shrug, looking tired. “There’s no understanding them.”

The black window hummed louder. She tried very, very hard to ignore it.

They started down the long path toward the desert. They’d spent nearly every day in the biomes together, winning tokens and mapping the area. They hadn’t found the fail-safe exit, or anything to indicate how large the enclosure was, but Cora hadn’t lost hope.

Her legs burned as they climbed the tallest dune. Aside from the vast empty valley she’d woken in, the desert was filled with Egyptian-like ruins. There weren’t any pyramids or temples, only dusty sandstone walls that stretched into infinity, winding around each other in impossible twists and turns that made her wonder if it was more Kindred technology messing with her perception. At the very top of the dune, a copse of palm trees surrounded a pool of crystal-clear water. A black window, set into a crumbling sandstone wall, overlooked it. Even though the wall was only two feet wide, she knew there was somehow a viewing chamber behind it.

She shivered and looked away.

“I think it’s a maze,” Lucky said.

“It can’t be a maze.” Cora knelt by the pool to splash water over her limbs. Her skin still throbbed from whatever had happened in the bookstore, when her vision and balance had faltered, but she ignored it. “A maze has openings and dead ends, and this has none.”

They started down the dune, sliding more than walking, heading for the closest of the sandstone walls. It ran forever in either direction; if they were going to go deeper into the ruins, they’d have to climb it. They followed it until they reached a place where the wall had crumbled enough that they could scramble to the top.

They balanced on the wall and dusted off their hands. Cora counted at least a dozen places where the circular stone walls were so collapsed they might be able to scale them. Others were deteriorating from the bottom, forming tunnels they might be able to crawl through.

A tingle spread through her nerves. “Wait—it is a maze. But not a regular one. See those places where the stone is crumbling at the top or at the bottom, making a tunnel? We have to climb up or under. It’s a vertical maze, not a horizontal one. The tokens must be in the center.”

Lucky raised an eyebrow. “Race you?”

Her limbs were heavy with exhaustion from lack of sleep, but his grin energized her. She took a deep breath. “You’re on.”

She took off, fighting the burn in her muscles, looking for a place to climb under the next wall, while Lucky tried his luck scaling the top. The sand warmed her bare feet; she found a tunnel and crawled through into a tighter ring, and followed it until she could scramble over. An oasis waited on the other side. She paused for a drink of water. When she looked up, her own face looked back at her from a black window. Her reflection showed deep circles and sunken eyes, but a grin.

The smile dropped from her face.

Smiling? She shouldn’t be enjoying herself. This was a prison. It might not have Bay Pines’s chain-link fences, but they were captive, just the same. The Kindred could be there now, studying them for some nefarious purpose. What if the Warden changed his mind and cut her up for the black market—blond hair going to the highest bidder, gall bladder up next?

Footsteps reverberated in the sand as Lucky rounded the corner, stopping when he saw her. He pulled off his leather jacket. He was breathing hard, but the dimple winked in his left cheek.