The Cage(42)

“You were in an enclosure like this one?”

“No—three years ago I am kept by a private owner. A bad owner. He sells me many times.” Mali brushed a finger slowly down the seam of Rolf’s military jacket, paying more attention to the woven threads than her story. “After Cassian saves me he takes me to a good menagerie. I am there one year and then I am in an enclosure like this but smaller for one year and then I am in another menagerie.” She paused. “This enclosure is not like the others. The Kindred set the days to different lengths here. They change the distances. The clothes here are strange.”

Cora leaned forward. “You mean they don’t mess with the other kids’ heads like they do ours? Why us?”

Mali was silent. Her face was a mask behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses, just like the Kindred, and then she pinched herself slowly on the shoulder. “There are rumors that humans can evolve to have perceptive abilities. That this is even happening now. The Kindred fear the day when humans are as capable as them.”

Cora straightened, glancing nervously at the others. “Evolving? Is there any truth to it?”

Mali paused. “I see nothing with my eyes but friends I trust tell me yes this happens. Perhaps the Kindred treat you different because they fear you are different. Here. In the mind.” She tapped her head. Her words lingered in the air like whispers of prophets. Then she sneezed and drifted back over to the jukebox.

Cora ran a finger along her lips, sorting through Mali’s words. A hand sank onto her shoulder, and she jumped out of her fog. Lucky jerked his head toward the doorway, and she followed him to where they could talk in private.

“Go easy on Nok and Rolf,” he said as soon as they were out of earshot. “They’re terrified, and everyone’s tempers are short. Leon too—why do you think he stormed out like that? He’s scared. At least here we’re safe. Beyond the walls . . . who knows.”

“Lucky, they’re talking about giving up on escape. That’s insane. We can’t spend our lives here.”

“We won’t. I have plans, remember? Retire at thirty-eight. Military pension. A beach somewhere with a beer and a girl who doesn’t mind me picking at a guitar with my bad hand.” He flexed his scarred knuckles. “Just give them a few days to calm down.”

“They only gave us twenty-one days and we’ve already wasted some of that time. We can’t let some headaches stop us.”

He took her hand in his reassuringly. “We won’t.”

Her face felt heavy, but she smiled. At least there was one other sane person around. Even if she’d only known Lucky a few days, she felt drawn to him in a way that had nothing to do with the constellation marks on their necks, and everything to do with his determination not to spend their lives as a sideshow.

“Um, guys?” Nok said.

The smile fell from Cora’s face. Nok and Rolf had backed away from the jukebox, which Mali was circling, bobbing her head up and down, a predator ready to strike.

“She must not know what it is,” Lucky said. “Maybe she’s afraid of it.”

Mali approached the jukebox hesitantly. Cora was about to tell her it was a puzzle they couldn’t solve when her long fingers started to fly over the controls. Rearranging shapes. Stacking them. She worked out the first combination of shapes in seconds and moved on to the second.

Cora was speechless.

They’d been wrong about Mali. The jukebox wasn’t foreign to her, or at least its puzzle wasn’t. From the corner of her eye, Cora glimpsed Rolf’s hand twitching—making the same shapes as Mali’s, she realized. He had had the same intensely focused look in the medical room, studying the blue cube above the doorway.

“Hey,” she whispered to him. “In the medical room, you were looking at their equipment like you’d figured something out.”

His fingers went still. There was an edge to his blue-green eyes that hadn’t been there before. He shook his head. “Looking around, that’s all.”

They were interrupted when Mali clicked the last shapes together, and a token slid from a trough on the side of the jukebox. Mali caught it with sticky fingers and inserted it into a slot, then pressed a red button.

The song ended.

Another one began. It was terrible, something poppy and vaguely Japanese, but it was wonderfully, marvelously new. Mali leaned against the jukebox and licked the rest of the sauce off her fingers. “That is a very basic puzzle. The Kindred give it to children.” The Japanese song rose in volume, filling the space with high-pitched voices. “Some puzzles are more difficult,” she continued. “Have you found the one in the bookstore yet? That one is very challenging.” She drifted closer to Nok, who took a jerky step back.