“Right. That’s true.” Lucky kept walking in silence. Cora tossed a glance over her shoulder. What wasn’t he telling her?
They crested a ridge and stopped. Ahead, colored lights twinkled between the trees. One flashed blue, another orange. Neon signs.
“Is that . . . another town?” She squinted at the lights. “Maybe there are more kids like us. Or maybe it’s where the Kindred live.”
Music slowly trickled through the trees, finding its way to her ears.
Don’t belong in paradise,
Don’t belong in hell . . .
She shot Lucky a worried look. “That’s my song.”
They pushed through the last of the forest, toward an enormous cherry tree that rose in the center of a town square exactly like theirs. Pooled in the grass was one of Leon’s ties. The same tie he had ripped off their first day.
“Oh, no,” she whispered.
“It’s our town,” Lucky said quietly. “We’ve come back.”
Across the town square, Nok and Rolf emerged from the jungle, looking stricken.
Cora ran toward them. “Did the paths loop you back too?”
Nok had gone pale. “Yeah . . . we didn’t turn once, I swear.”
A curse came from the boardwalk, where Leon came stalking up the beach. “Am I going mad? I must have tramped up that mountain for six hours, and in five minutes I was back. After a couple hundred feet, it started snowing. Looked like goddamn Siberia. Then I find sleds, a whole stack of them just sitting there, and a racecourse marked with colored flags. Rode a sled down the mountain and ended up right here on the beach.”
“I told you all trails lead back,” Rolf said. “It doesn’t matter what directions we took, or what time of day we left, or how quickly we walked.”
As though someone had flipped a switch, all the lights of the shops turned off, plunging the town into a darkness lit only by twilight.
“Um, was that supposed to happen?” Nok asked.
A single light flickered back on—the drugstore’s. It was on the end of the row of buildings, next to the boardwalk. The front door had always been sealed.
Now it was wide open.
“Finally,” Leon muttered. “Valium. Percocet. They’ve taken pity on us.”
Lucky shot him a look. “I doubt our captors want you to get high.”
Hesitantly, Cora approached the open doorway. There was no countertop. No toys or candy. No black windows. If there was a puzzle, it was well hidden.
“I’ll go in first,” Lucky said. “If anything happens, let me do the talking.”
The five of them crammed into the drugstore, which looked the same size as the other shops from the outside but was considerably smaller inside. The odd angles made her head twist with pain. She spun, looking for numbers or buttons that might indicate a puzzle.
The front door slid closed.
They were packed together like cattle, pressed against the walls, and Cora’s lungs started to seize up. She’d been claustrophobic ever since the accident, when her father’s car had crashed into the river. The doors’ automatic locks had shorted out, locking them in. Water had first swallowed her ankles. Then her knees, then her waist, until her father had broken the windshield with a flashlight.
“Hey!” Leon pounded on the door. Cora’s heart was racing. Breathing was getting hard. Nok clenched her arms tightly over her chest. Rolf’s nervous fingers were tap-tap-tapping away. Every once in a while he would rub the top of his nose, adjusting glasses that weren’t there.
The bare walls made sense now. It wasn’t a puzzle.
It was a trap.
18
Cora
“CORA. STAY WITH ME.” Lucky gripped her arm. She must look pale. Her shoulder found the wall, which was sturdy. I won’t fall. I won’t . . .
Just as her legs went slack, Lucky caught her. The pressure in the room began to change. Leon bellowed. The hair on Cora’s arms rose, and she clutched onto Lucky as the pressure ripped her apart, piece by piece by piece. For a terrifying moment everything was a blur, like the dizzying sensation of passing out, and she thought she might have found the release of sleep of last. But then it let up, and her vision returned.
They weren’t in the drugstore anymore.
They were in a large chamber with an arched ceiling made of molded metal blocks that fit together in interlocking seams. It wasn’t the same room she had materialized in before, though the same starry light came from the seams, filling the chamber with a muted glow. A jumble of equipment was hooked to the walls like a gun armory, only there were giant needles and sensors instead of knives and triggers. Blue cubes the size of her fist pulsed above the doorway and the wall cabinets. A cold examination table sat in the middle.
Cora’s nails dug into Lucky’s leather jacket. “Look.”
In the corner was a small cage. A human girl sat locked inside, with dusky dark skin and stringy black hair hanging in her eyes. She wore a dark scrap of clothing that left her legs and arms bare, and was crouched like a feral animal, glaring at them through her braids.
“What the . . . ,” Leon started. “Who the hell are you?”
The girl didn’t answer. Either she didn’t speak English, or she didn’t care. Her hands slowly curled around the bars.
“You deaf, girl? I asked—”
The door beneath the blue cube opened, silencing him, and a Kindred woman entered. It was one of the researchers, the one with high cheekbones and a thin nose, who had spared a glance back at Cora. She ignored the poor cramped girl in the cage.
Her black hair was pulled back in a tight knot, not a hair out of place. She now wore a stiff white uniform with cerulean trim and a row of intricate knots down the side. Seven knots, Cora counted. The other researchers all had had six. Did that mean she was a higher rank? She’d been too distracted to count the Warden’s knots—seeing as he’d been choking her to death—but it had been far more.
“I am Serassi.” The woman spoke flatly. “I am your medical inspector. It is time for your physical assessments. You may disregard the human subject behind those bars. She is here for observation purposes only.”
Another door opened, and the Caretaker entered.
Cora’s breath caught. She would never get used to seeing him. His imposing size, his dreamlike beauty. Her body hummed with the memory of his touch, how foreign and frightening it had been, and how he had spared her from the Warden. Then she remembered the girl in the cage, and her fury returned.