“Obey the rules. Please.”
It was no longer an order. It was a request, and one of the few times Cora had heard his voice sound anything other than mechanical. “I’m not the only one watching you,” he said. “I cannot protect you forever.”
HE RETURNED HER TO the empty drugstore. Beyond the doorway, sunshine spilled over the green grass. Cora stumbled toward the light.
She blinked a few times, clearing her foggy head, reminding herself that the crickets chirping weren’t real. The sunlight was fake. It was as much a fabricated prison as the menagerie. At the heart of it, they weren’t any different from those drugged kids.
Nok and Rolf were stretched out on the grass, dressed only in their underwear, playing with the painting kit. Not far away, Mali was toying with the radio, twisting the volume to make the voices rise and fall, rise and fall. Blue paint coated her arms. Rolf had blue streaks over one arm too, and was in the midst of painting a yellow swirl on Nok’s stomach. He dotted her cheek with paint and she laughed, trying to take the brush from him, getting gooey blobs of paint all over them. Their candy-stained lips met, and the brush fell from his hand. They started making out, right in front of Mali and the dozens of black windows.
And the Kindred thought humankind was evolving? If anything, it was devolving.
A hand clamped over her shoulder, and she jumped.
Lucky stood behind her, guitar half forgotten in one hand. His dark eyes raked over her. The last time they’d been together, everything had changed. She had thought she’d found a friend in him. More than that. Someone who made her feel less alone, a boy with a broken hand and a dimple in one cheek, and yet it had all been a lie. We need to grow up, his voice echoed in her head. He had betrayed her the night of the accident, and he had betrayed her here too, when he said he didn’t believe in escape. Cora’s heart didn’t know how fast to beat.
Should she shove him away? Or forgive him?
He answered the questions in her head when he let the guitar fall into the grass, forgotten. He pulled her into his arms.
She clenched her eyes shut. She couldn’t bring herself to hug him back. She couldn’t quite pull away either.
“What happened?” His voice sounded older.
She shook her head against his shoulder. “Where’s Leon? I want everyone to hear this.”
“No one’s seen him in days.”
“Days?” Cora pulled away, confused. She glanced toward Nok and Rolf, who hadn’t yet noticed that she was back. “I’ve only been gone a couple of hours.”
Lucky was very quiet, searching her eyes with his own. “You’ve been gone three days.”
Her heart pounded harder. The Kindred controlled the sunlight, so they could set a day to be however long they wanted. So did this mean instead of four more days until she faced removal, she only had one? It was already the twenty-first day?
Mind racing, she hurried over to where the others were sprawled. Nok glanced at her briefly, then went back to mixing paint. “Hey. You’re back.”
She spoke casually, like Cora had gone on a stroll to the beach, not been taken by the Kindred for three days. And yet Cora detected a flicker of annoyance in her voice—at interrupting her painting, or at being back at all, she wasn’t sure.
Rolf didn’t even pretend to be pleased to see her. “Come back to apologize, I hope?”
“Apologize for what?”
He let out a coarse laugh. “Right. Pretend like nothing’s happened. Where do you claim to have been for three days, if not sneaking around with Leon and stealing our food? If I didn’t know so much about gardening, we might have starved because of your games.”
She let out a frustrated cry. “You still think I’m still stealing food? How? I haven’t even been here! I’ve been with the Caretaker!”
Rolf’s face reddened. His fingers massaged his head as his eye twitched. “Well, now it makes sense. You got him on your side against us. You’re his favorite, after all. He’d do whatever you asked. Change the weather. Stop feeding us. Have you been watching us this entire time, laughing as we starved?”
“Of course not!” Her own head was throbbing. She squeezed her tired eyes shut, resisting the temptation to smack Rolf. Laughing with the Caretaker? More like the slow torture of seeing what they really did to humans. “Listen. I know you don’t like me. You don’t have to. I’ve seen more of their station and I think I know how we can get back to Earth, but we’ll have to act quickly. They’re speeding time up in here. If it’s already the twenty-first day, they might be on to us.” Cora pinched the inside of her arm hard enough to cause a steady stream of pain, glancing at the shadowy figures beyond the black windows.