The Cage(14)

Leon poked at a framed portrait of a toaster. “This from IKEA?” he said to Rolf.

“I wouldn’t know. IKEA furniture comes from Sweden, not Norway.”

“Eh, it’s all the same up there. Cold days. Long nights. Pretty girls.”

Cora rolled her eyes and grabbed his shoulder, pushing him toward the stairs. “Keep going.”

“It’ll be safer if we all sleep in the same bedroom,” Lucky said as they climbed the stairs. “Girls on the bed, guys on the floor. I’ll take the first watch.”

“Let me,” Cora said, rubbing her dry eyes. “I’m an insomniac. I’ll be up half the night anyway.”

He shook his head. “You look like you’re about to fall over from exhaustion at any moment. All the more reason you should try to sleep. We need all the rest we can get.”

Leon gave him a wry salute and went to another room to get more pillows. He came back and threw one to Rolf. “Nighty-night, darling.” He flipped off the light.

The boys lay down on the floor while Lucky settled into the doorframe and Cora and Nok curled up beneath a blanket. Cora’s weary muscles unwound slowly, but the familiar cloudiness of insomnia settled behind her eyes—it didn’t matter how tired she was, she knew sleep wouldn’t find her. But she must have slept at some point over the last few days, because she’d had the dream about that beautiful man with the bronze-colored skin. She wished he’d opened his eyes, in the dream. She wanted to look into the face of an angel.

At home, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak downstairs and borrow her mother’s keys and cruise the Virginia back roads, listening to NPR. There had been a story once about the ways the human mind devised to cope with trauma: denial, bargaining, lethargy. The broadcaster talked about teenage girls in refugee camps who were starving and yet, when questioned, listed their biggest problem as trying to find a nice boy to take home to their parents. He said that the human mind is able to adapt to anything.

Cora wasn’t too sure about that. When she’d gone to Bay Pines, she had been the outsider: a wealthy girl from a politician’s family, charged with murder. When she’d left Bay Pines and returned home, she was an ex-con who knew how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush. That didn’t fit well with lacrosse team and cotillion classes.

She rolled over, and let lyrics form in the back of her head.

How much can we change . . .

When change is all there is . . .

The black window seemed to hum louder, or maybe it was just in her head. She didn’t know which was scarier—seeing their captors, or knowing they were there but not seeing them at all.





UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

9

Nok

NOK SHIVERED IN THE darkness. From where she lay, huddled under the thin blanket that smelled like chemicals, all that was visible through the window was the smear of night. In London, she’d never known true blackness. There’d always been headlights and fluorescent bulbs, street lights and billboards. And it was so deathly quiet. No city noises to drown her memories. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat, expecting the familiar clot of asthma—but her breath came easily.

She rolled over. “Cora, are you still awake?”

“Yeah.”

“I know this sounds crazy,” she whispered, “but I think whoever put us here cured my asthma. And when we first met, Rolf said he used to wear glasses, but his vision is perfect now. They must be super-advanced scientists to do all that, yeah? What if they aren’t . . . human?” Nok drew the blanket higher around her neck.

The other side of the bed was quiet. “You’ll never fall asleep if you start worrying about that,” Cora said at last. “Think about something better. Home. Tell me about London. The life of a model sounds so glamorous.”

Glamorous? Nok rolled over onto her pillow.

Not exactly.

The story she’d told the others had been a detour from the truth. Her childhood had been banana leaves and khee mao noodles and dirt roads the color of rust. Her adolescence had been a rare trip to Bangkok with her three sisters, peppermint ice cream from blue glass bowls, a model 7scout who’d seen her from the street outside and scribbled an address on a napkin he slid to her mother.

Like winning the lottery, her family had said.

Then there’d been a plane ride, twenty other bony girls bound for Europe, giggling and striking silly model poses. The plane landed in London. She couldn’t speak a word of English. They’d taken her to a neighborhood filled with sirens and trash, up seven flights of cramped stairs to a flat packed with five girls to a room, sleeping on floor mattresses, cheap clothes and cheaper makeup strewn everywhere. Home, the model scout had said.