Gilded Cage (Dark Gifts #1)(65)

Those eyes met hers. Human. Mostly.

‘I won’t hurt,’ he growled. ‘You. I won’t hurt you.’

‘Anyone,’ Abi insisted. Her hand shook. What was she thinking? She had no idea what he had done to be sentenced in this way – to be Condemned. All she knew was what the Master of Hounds had told her: that he had deserved his punishment at the hands of Lord Crovan. And given the horror of that punishment, she didn’t want to guess at the awfulness of his crimes.

‘I’m trusting you,’ she said, fitting the little key to the padlock.

‘Trust,’ the man rasped, before being racked by a ghastly, wheezing paroxysm.

It was laughter, Abi realized a moment later, feeling sick.

She could walk away now and leave him penned. The lock had clicked open, but it was still threaded through the clasp, holding the door shut. Her hand hovered over it.

Then she remembered Lady Thalia’s veiled dismissal. Jenner unpeeling her fingers from his sleeve. The fuzziness in her head as she came to in the Great Solar. The pain, afterwards, as thoughts and memories swam through her brain and tried but failed to connect.

Something had happened in that room. Something had been done to her by the Equals. What?

‘Let’s get you out,’ said Abi. She plucked off the padlock, lifted the cage door slightly on its hinge so it didn’t grate across the floor, and swung it open.

For a moment, the man simply stared. Then he crept out on all fours and lay on the damp concrete. He rolled onto his back and stretched his arms above his head, straining to point his toes. He looked like a man on the rack. Every one of his ribs was visible; his abdomen a shallow dish; the hair at his groin dense and matted. His face was twisted with what could have been pain, or equally ecstasy.

Turning back onto his stomach, he hauled himself onto hands and knees. His fingers clawed their way up the side of the cage until he was kneeling upright. He paused there a moment, diaphragm ballooning. Then with a horrible broken-boned movement he dragged each leg into a squat.

And silently – though he must surely have wanted to howl, because what it cost him was plain on his face – the man stood.

He staggered around. It was horrible to see. Like a parody of walking performed by something inhuman. And all the while, he didn’t utter a sound.

There was a scream outside, and Abi froze. Above, a window clattered open and the Master of Hounds bellowed something obscene before banging the casement shut again.

‘Owl,’ gasped the dog-man.

Abi checked her watch. It was later than she’d thought.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but you’d better get back in the pen. I need to go home. But I’ll come again soon, I promise. There must be something we can do. If they see you walking and talking, can see you recovering, they surely can’t make you carry on living like this, whatever it is you’ve done.’

The man wheezed again. That mirthless laugh. He dropped to the floor, slung back his haunches and crawled inside. Turned.

‘You’re in – the pen – too.’ He peered through the bars, fixing Abi with glittering eyes. ‘Just – I see – my cage – my leash.’

Abi’s hands shook as she snapped the padlock shut.





16



Luke



Luke had never imagined he’d be so thrilled to hear ‘Happy Panda’ again. The catchy beat was still doing its oh-wa-woah-wa-wa in his head as he loped downstairs. Just hearing Oz’s voice had put a spring in his step, and he took the stairs two or three at a time, eager to see how this day would unfold.

He pushed through the front doors. Their paint was flaking, rubbed thin by the pressure of hundreds of hands daily. Men going out to work, men coming back. Another lick of paint every few years. Another batch of men to fill the foundries and factories, to do the maintenance shifts and cart away the rubbish. Then when they were gone: more men, more paint.

Would today be a first step towards ending all that?

It was icy outside, and Luke turned up the collar of his too-thin jacket and stuffed his hands into his armpits as if trying to hold in his body heat. His boilersuit was uncomfortably hot inside the shed, but worn outside it had been uncomfortably cold for months, though January was proving the worst. They probably designed the garment carefully for maximum thermal inefficiency in all conditions.

His breath steamed in the frigid air. The only time steam looked clean in Millmoor was when it came out of your own mouth. After a few minutes, he’d adjusted to the temperature sufficiently to lift his head and straighten his back from an instinctive, heat-conserving hunch.

Usually, there wasn’t much worth looking at in Millmoor, although he still did Doc Jackson’s exercise of searching for details. But today was different.

Today was party day.

With a six-day work week, Luke had never been in the streets on a Friday before. It seemed busier than when he was out and about on club business on Sundays.

Just in front of him walked a couple holding hands. The man had draped his jacket around his girl’s shoulders. He must be freezing. The dark hair buzzed short at the back of his head bristled with cold, and his neck had a raw, red look. There was a slapping sound as they walked. Luke identified it as the heel of her boot, which had come loose. That wouldn’t keep out much on a rainy day.

The woman stopped, uncertain, and the man’s arm pulled tight around her shoulders. Somewhere up ahead was a hubbub of raised voices and angry shouts. The couple turned aside, taking a different route, but Luke thought he knew what was going on.