An hour passed, maybe longer. Another Kindred came, with three knots on his uniform, and took her to a room full of plain cells. A true prison this time. When he locked the cell, she expected the hinges to groan, and the lock to thunk, to echo the slamming sounds of her heart. But it closed as smoothly and silently as everything in the Kindred’s world.
Cora caught sight of Lucky and Mali, each locked in individual cells a few doors down, separated from each other by an aisle. Cora tried to yell to them, but her voice only bounced around the perimeter of her cell. Lucky shouted back, but she heard nothing. Their cells must have been soundproofed.
Cora grabbed the bars.
“Are you okay?” she mouthed.
A bandage covered half his face. His other eye had a deep circle under it, but he nodded. In the cell beside him, Mali merely pressed her lips together in an expression Cora couldn’t quite read, but it looked grim.
Cora let go of the bars and paced her cell, still feeling the crushing weight of Cassian’s betrayal. A worry struck her, and she jerked up her head. Had Mali known all along that Cassian was the Warden? But one more glance in Mali’s direction showed sunken, hollow eyes and a hardened mouth—Mali was just as disappointed as Cora was. Cassian had been Mali’s friend too.
For hours, Cora paced in the cell. Serassi had given her new clothes to wear. Plain black robes with a single knot at the shoulder, which Cora could only assume was a sign of their status now, the lowest of the low. Lucky and Mali wore the same robe. The constellation markings on their necks were gone, nothing to identify them as a gender or even a number.
It was clear the Kindred weren’t returning them to the cage. So what would happen to them? And what had happened to Nok and Rolf? There were no toilets, no food, which meant the Kindred couldn’t be planning to keep them there for long. Words that Mali and Cassian had both hinted at scrolled through her mind: Drugged girls. Dead girls. Private owners. Menageries.
The door at the end of the room opened. Cassian entered.
Cora looked away. She didn’t want to see those lips she had kissed. Those eyes that had cleared like storm clouds. His approaching footsteps were heavy and slow. From the corner of her eye, she saw his fingers curl around the bars of her cell. She could almost convince herself that he was feeling something. Regret, maybe. But she snatched back those traitorous thoughts. Any true emotion he had shown her had been a trick.
“Cora.”
His voice was so quiet that, huddled in the farthest part of the cell, she could almost pretend he hadn’t spoken.
“I brought you something.” He slid an object through the bars, and her heart clenched. The little red radio with dials like a smiling face. Nok’s radio. Did this mean that Nok didn’t need it anymore—that they’d transferred her somewhere? And what about Rolf? She glanced at Lucky and Mali, who watched them but couldn’t hear past their own cells. A part of Cora wanted to lunge for this small comfort he was offering—voices on the airwaves, a link to home—but she didn’t want anything from him. She hugged her legs closer.
Cassian’s hand curled on the bar. “I wish to explain.”
“There’s nothing to explain. You’re the Warden. Everything was a lie.”
“I told you that I feared I was making a mistake. You assumed I meant betraying my people. I meant betraying you. Lying to you gave me no joy. I almost aborted the mission when I saw the strain it was putting on your cohort, and on you. I did not want you to end up like the previous groups.”
“Dead? How kind.”
He paused. “I did not lie to you about our mission. All my actions were for your own good. Under my orders, my researchers were putting pressure on your minds to see if they could bring you to the point of mental evolution.”
“So you could justify enslaving us, when we failed?”
“So we could free you, when you succeeded.” He lowered his voice, almost as though he feared someone might overhear them. But he was the Warden—there was no one higher than him, was there? Where did he even plan to take her, if his plan had worked? She couldn’t exactly picture a parade rolling down the austere aisles of the aggregate station, celebrating humanity’s intelligence. The Kindred had made it perfectly clear they didn’t want humans as equals.
“I pushed you to prove that humans are intelligent, as I know you can be. Anya was psychic; she read my mind on two separate occasions. When the other Kindred learned of this, they drugged her and locked her in the menagerie to hide her abilities. I was a low-ranking soldier—there was nothing I could do about it. So I set my mind to working my way up our ranks, rotation after rotation, until I was chosen by our Council as Warden.”