“I hope Rolf and Nok are getting along,” Cora said, as they ducked through a perfectly engineered tunnel of vines. “They’re sort of a mismatched pair.”
“Maybe the Kindred’s research found that opposites attract. Look at us—I mean, back home, guys like me don’t end up with girls like you.”
“Girls like me?”
“Rich girls. Important girls.” He paused. “Beautiful girls.”
Beautiful? Not with her eyes sunken from lack of sleep. Not with her hair tangled and wild. At least she was walking in front, where he couldn’t see her burning cheeks. The last thing she needed was to start blushing whenever he threw his dimple around. The Kindred would love that. The researchers were probably checking off boxes left and right. Attraction? Check. Witty banter? Check. Rescuing a girl in distress? Check.
“Maybe it doesn’t have anything to do with opposites,” she said. “Maybe there’s some connection between the couples we don’t know about. We both lived in Virginia for a while.”
“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.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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18
Cora