“Go the other way,” Mali whispered urgently.
They followed her down the opposite direction, but the hallways only looped back. The sensation of being turned around made Cora’s head throb, and Lucky kept rubbing his forehead too, but it didn’t seem to affect Mali. She was faster than they were, not slowed by the strange perception. She disappeared around a bend, and when they stumbled after her, she was gone. The hallway stretched as far as Cora could see. Mali simply wasn’t there.
Instead, five Kindred dressed in black turned the corner.
Cora skidded to a stop, choked by the sight.
“Run!” she yelled.
Lucky and Cora raced in the opposite direction, turning at each branching hallway, desperately looking for a door, but Cora had the awful feeling they were just running in circles.
She focused her thoughts and projected that she needed Cassian’s help, but he must have been too far away to perceive her call, because minutes passed and he still didn’t come.
Lucky slipped. Cora pulled him to his feet as they stumbled around another corner. There, at the far end, was another soldier. Black clothes, short hair, but it wasn’t Cassian.
“Hurry!” Cora said, and they raced down the corridor, but the soldier was impossibly fast. He was on them in a second. His hands dug into Lucky’s shoulder, and Cora knew—she knew—that he would never get away.
“He can’t catch both of us,” Lucky yelled. “Keep going!”
Cora was crying now, that they had Lucky, and Mali and Leon were both gone, and she was on her own. The only way she could keep going was to tell herself that she’d come back for him. She’d head to the lowest level, and find the Mosca traders, and come back to rescue him.
She turned another corner as sweat poured down the back of her neck. A door stood at the end—a chance to hide. She threw herself against it.
Her beating heart was all she could hear as she dug her fingernails into the seam, screaming at the stupid door to open. She heard footsteps behind her and worked faster. The door didn’t budge. There were no tools around, only a blue cube above the doorway. An amplifier.
Rolf had said if she could damage it, the Kindred wouldn’t be able to open the doors with their telekinesis. Maybe the opposite was also true—if she broke it, maybe she could override the door and open it by hand.
She wedged her foot in the doorway and used it as leverage to push herself up until she could grab hold of the cube. She’d been expecting something hard like plastic, but it was cold and pulsing and wet, more like ice. Shock made her let go, and she had to climb up again, her heart pounding harder.
She gripped the cube again and dropped her weight. The sudden force made the cube splinter with a jolt of electricity. She cried out as she crashed to the ground, then scrambled to the door and shoved her fingers into the seam. It opened an inch, enough to wedge her toe in. Thank you, Rolf. She pushed harder, and it glided open.
She stumbled through the doorway, then pushed it closed behind her. She was in a room the size of the medical chamber, only not nearly as sparse. It was packed with a chaos of belongings, stacked on the floor, propped on a circular desk ringing nearly the entire room. Most of the clutter was unfamiliar—blue cubes of all sizes, boxes stuffed with a variety of apparatuses—but a few things seemed vaguely recognizable. Stacks of the Kindred’s cerulean clothing. A communicator like Cassian wore on his wrist. Metal boxes with lids piled against the wall. It all looked haphazard, but Cora got the sense it was actually highly organized, in the same way the market had been.
She took a hesitant step into the room. Several of the black windows had been set into the walls, projecting a variety of different images. Cages. Dozens of them. Not a single one of them theirs. She took a step forward and unfolded one of the blue fabric uniforms. The material was fine, supple but strong. Cerulean, the color of authority. Fearfully, she counted the row of knots down the side.
Twenty knots. Far more than any of the other Kindred she’d seen.
She must have run straight into the Warden’s personal office.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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55
Cora
SHE SCRAMBLED TOWARD THE wall, but the door didn’t open. She dug in her fingernails, but it wouldn’t budge, no matter how hard she pulled. She must have broken it. She punched at the door. Screamed at it. Frantically, she waded back into the mess of belongings to try to find something to pry the door open. She grabbed one of the arm-length apparatuses, but it was hinged and merely slumped to the ground like liquid. She tossed it away and threw the lid off one of the metal boxes, but paused.