She tested her shackles again. They held too tight.
“This menagerie, or one like it, is where I must take you if the Warden orders your removal—assuming he lets you live. These are all children who had to be removed from their enclosures or private owners for one reason or another.”
“Why are they all children?” Her voice was barely audible.
“We do not only take children. We prefer to take them, however, because of their malleable natures and heightened ability to adapt.”
“But what happens when they grow up?”
His face darkened. No longer a man of starlight, but of shadows. “If the adults are docile, they are kept in research facilities, or given light menial work. However, many grow unruly as they age. They are sent to unmanaged preserves; there they are free to be as savage as their true natures dictate.” He pointed through the window toward the last cage. “This girl is the one I wanted to show you.”
The last cell was a tableau of a Greek throne room, with a little girl of about ten years, with wheat-blond hair shorn close to her scalp. She sat on a leather stool, hands clasped in her lap, staring into a hearth that crackled with what must be simulated flames.
“That girl was relocated from Iceland four years ago,” Cassian said. “She was put in an enclosure like yours, though less advanced, with only two biomes. She refused to eat, which disobeys Rule Two. After several rotations she had to be removed, and was sold to a private owner, from whom she escaped. She escaped from her next two owners as well, but was caught each time. She will be here for the remainder of her life. We administer drugs to her to keep her docile. We must do that with the rebellious ones. For their own safety.”
Cora could only stare. The girl would be there—staring at the stone hearth, isolated, drugged—for the rest of her life?
“That could be you, Cora,” Cassian said.
It wasn’t hard to imagine—with her wheat-blond hair, the girl almost looked like a younger version of Cora. In the cell, the girl raised a sluggish hand to scratch her shorn scalp. She was missing two fingers, from the middle knuckle up. Cora’s own fingers started throbbing.
Cassian leaned in close. “Do you still intend on disobeying our rules?”
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HarperCollins Publishers
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34
Cora
CORA’S HEAD SPUN. THIS little girl. The boy in the scroll room. The other girl, asleep under the watch of statues. They were just a few of many who had been taken. A living display, a breathing museum, to satisfy the Kindred’s fascination.
Her stomach twisted.
“I am trying to keep you from this, Cora,” Cassian said quietly. “Do not make me bring you to a place like this. It would only—”
He stopped when the door below opened. They both leaned toward the window as two Kindred women entered the chamber below, wearing Grecian costume dresses, their hair loose, their faces plastered with the exaggerated emotion that meant they were uncloaked. They strode directly to the Icelandic girl’s cell.
Cassian’s cold gaze slowly slid to Cora, and she got the sense that whatever they were about to witness was going to be even worse than it already was.
Below, the taller Kindred woman reached through the bars and beckoned to the girl, who stood and approached slowly, walking like she was dizzy. The Kindred woman said a few words that Cora couldn’t hear through the viewing panel.
“She wants the girl to clap,” Cassian explained. “To perform a trick for her entertainment.”
The girl slowly brought her disfigured hands together like a wind-up toy, which made the Kindred women gasp in delight.
The Kindred woman’s lips moved again.
“Now she wishes for the girl to bow,” Cassian translated.
The girl bent at the waist, sweeping her arm with a slightly dizzy flourish, and the Kindred handed her a token. The token fell from the girl’s missing fingers, but she picked it up with her other hand and slipped it into her pocket.
“The humans in these exhibits collect the tokens and redeem them for prizes,” Cassian explained. “The more tricks they perform, the more rewards they earn.”
Disgust crept up Cora’s skin. This was what the Kindred though of humans? That, other than a handful of elite ones suitable for breeding, they were no good for anything but performing cheap tricks?
The shorter Kindred handed the girl another token, then leaned forward with her lips pursed. Cassian explained, “She has asked for a kiss, this time.”
All the tension that had been knotted in Cora’s body unraveled all at once, plunging to her feet.
A kiss?
The shackles felt too tight. Her lungs constricted. Sweat broke out on her forehead and her vision started to blur as the horror of everything descended on her all at once.
The Kindred could do anything to them, she realized.
Kiss them.