Her head was roaring so much that she had hardly noticed the pressure building. It wasn’t until Cassian’s arms were around her, preventing her from going underwater with a grip hard enough to bruise, with raw emotion on his face—desperation—that she knew she was right. His gloves were gone, and the clips on his shirt were only half closed. The rematerialization apparatus jutted out of his bare skin at the base of his rib cage, where a metal port had been grafted into his body. The metallic skin around it was streaked with angry black veins, as though he hadn’t had time to properly connect to the device. She flinched at the sight. He must have dropped everything to stop her.
But he couldn’t stop her, not when she was this close.
He pushed her back to the shallow surf. “Don’t, Cora. You can’t do it. Your mind isn’t strong enough.”
She started. His voice was different. Less rigid. Startlingly human. Was he uncloaked? A rush of curiosity swelled. You do not know what I am like, when I am uncloaked. But she ignored her curiosity. He wouldn’t be stopping her unless she was right. She had solved the last of the puzzles—the only one that really mattered.
The exit.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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50
Cora
THE OCEAN WAVES WENT on crashing, even when everything else in Cora’s world had ground to a halt. The salt air beckoning her toward the exit she knew was just beneath those waves—if only Cassian weren’t holding her back.
More than just his voice had changed. It was his eyes. They had always been fathomlessly black, but they were cloudy now, like a broken storm, clearing into something that looked drastically more human.
Her lips parted. “Your eyes—”
“Don’t,” he said again, his voice so warm and rich and varied as his fingers knitted against her. “Don’t go in the water. Your mind can’t handle it.”
Cora’s head spun, still thrown off by seeing raw emotions in a man she had thought practically mechanical. “That’s the way out, isn’t it? I figured it out in your quarters, when you were telling me the real reason the Warden took us.”
“Yes.” His heart was beating wildly through his shirt. “Yes, that’s the way out, but it’s impossible for humans to pass through. Your physical body can do it—it’s just a matter of swimming down far enough—but your mind won’t let you do what it believes is impossible. You’d have to go beyond the point where you could swim back to the surface.” His hand wove through her hair, and she closed her eyes, overcome by this new side of him. “You shouldn’t have been able to perceive it. It’s true that they’ve been monitoring you for signs of perceptive ability, but none of you have yet exhibited any, despite the extents to which they’ve pushed your minds.”
“I don’t have to be psychic to be smart.” Her voice sounded certain, and yet her thoughts wavered. Was deduction really all there was to it? There’d been that time the ocean had shimmered so strangely. The time in the bookstore when her vision and balance had pulsed.
She stared at the waves that weren’t waves at all, but just more illusions, wondering what it all meant. One of Cassian’s hands still tangled in her hair and the other pulled at her waist, refusing to let her go, flooding her with that spark.
His storm-cloud eyes searched hers. “What are you thinking? Tell me.”
His frantic request threw her off—she was so used to him reading her mind—until she remembered that he couldn’t read minds when his own was flooded with emotions.
I’m thinking about you, she thought, knowing he couldn’t read her. Seeing you like this, uncloaked and real, as desperate as I am.
“I can’t stay here,” she said. “None of us can. Through the ocean is the only way.” A breeze sent a spray around them. A drop landed on the shoulder of his uniform. She touched it with the pad of her finger. “Don’t you understand? None of this is real. We can’t live like that.”
“Not everything is an illusion.” His hands pawed at her waist. “There are real oceans out there, on other planets. I’ll get permission to take you there. I’ll show you an ocean, or dogs, or the stars—I’ll show you whatever you want, as long as you stay here.”
His breath was straining against the machinery strapped to his chest. He wanted her to be like Charlie’s pet rat, taken out to ride on his shoulder, but at the end of the day, always locked back in his cage.
She closed her eyes so she didn’t have to look at his. Those dark eyes, the scar on the side of his neck, the nights he spent sleepless. They were more alike than she wanted to admit. She thought of that single chair in his quarters. Why hadn’t she seen until then how alone they both were?
Cora had wanted so badly to feel normal for once. She hadn’t belonged in Bay Pines, and she hadn’t belonged back home either. Maybe she would never belong: maybe there were certain people, like her, meant to live between worlds. Cassian too. The only Kindred who felt sympathy for humans and a desire to understand them, not use them.
“I can do it,” Cora whispered. “I figured out the puzzle was there without perceptive abilities, so I know I can make it through.”