The Cage(49)

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.

“Break time already?” He knelt and soaked his face, tossing his hair back.

Cora ignored the lines of water running down his neck. “Your dad learned hand-to-hand combat in the army, didn’t he? Did he ever teach you?”

Lucky’s grin faded. He wiped the water out of his eyes. “Yeah, the basics, and I took a few years of martial arts. Why?”

“Will you teach me?”

His face creased in confusion, until he followed her line of sight to the black window. “Look, I get why you’d want to know how to defend yourself, but the Kindred are too strong. The Caretaker threw Leon like he weighed nothing.”

“I need to know how,” she said. “I can’t stand feeling like this. Powerless.”

He squinted at the sun reluctantly, but then splashed another handful of water over his face. He stood and paced beside the oasis, drawing a wide circle with his toe.

“Come on, then.”

She jumped up, wiping the sand from her hands.

“First of all, it’s called combatives, not hand-to-hand. It can be any style of martial art or close-quarter combat system, but the one the army teaches is drill based. You practice certain techniques until they’re second nature. The most important thing is to recognize the situation you’re in and know what technique to use.”

“And if I just want to inflict serious pain on someone?”

He smiled. “No offense, but you’re not big enough to do damage to a flock of chickens. You need to focus on dodging blows and holds. Then we can talk about body-weight techniques where you might actually be able to hurt someone.”

Cora nodded. “Show me.”

They spent the next hour learning stances and kicks, and how to throw her weight to knock her opponent off balance, and which parts of the body were most vulnerable to attack—they could only assume the Kindred’s bodies were similar to theirs. Cora’s muscles blazed with exhaustion.

“This is called escaping the mount.” Lucky drew an X in the sand. “If you’re pinned in a choke hold or a joint lock.”

She came forward ready to fight, but he hooked a foot behind her ankle and off-balanced her back onto the sand. Surprise shoved the breath from her lungs. She started to push up, but Lucky straddled her chest.

“Not so fast. I’m going to show you a standard pin.”

He gripped her left wrist, and her pulse pounded with exhilaration from using her muscles this way for the first time—and from something else: she’d never been this close to a boy before. Certainly not like this, with his groin resting on her stomach. She’d gone to an all-girls school before Bay Pines, and afterward the only boys who approached her were more interested in being on the news for dating a convicted murderer, like she was some kind of rite of passage for jerks.