“I am the substitute Caretaker. My name is Tessela. It is my responsibility to heal any minor injuries that do not require the medical officer’s attention.” She pressed her ungloved hand against Lucky’s bleeding temple. When she pulled back her hand, the wound was healed, the blood dried and crusted. “Due to this recent incident, the Warden has determined that the artifacts from Earth, such as the ceramic dog, are too dangerous; you cannot be trusted with them if you insist on hurting one another. The Warden has given the order to phase them out over the next week. They will be replaced with imitations.”
Nok gaped. The radio with the knobs that looked like a smiling face. The painting set. The books in the bookstore. They were replacing them with toys that would feel wrong and smell wrong.
As if sensing her thoughts, Tessela turned to her. “That goes for your child as well. The Warden has determined, given this violent incident, that your cohort is too unstable for a child to be raised among you. Once you deliver your child, we will transport it to the standard facility, where it will be cared for.” Tessela gripped the apparatus in her chest and, with a wave of pressure, flickered away.
Nok’s breath caught. Pain ripped through her head, but it was nothing compared to the panic flooding her chest. Her heart fluttered like a trapped bird. Her hands pressed against her abdomen protectively. They were going to take her baby away? All because of one fight? Her thoughts churned faster, panic rising. She had to fix this. She had to convince the Kindred—but she couldn’t win them over with a flirtatious smile, that was for sure.
It hadn’t even been Nok’s fault. She had done nothing but obey the rules.
Cora had been the one who’d broken them.
Rage started boiling inside of her, heating her up faster and faster until she feared she’d melt. She had thought Cora was a friend. She had defended her against Rolf’s claims. And this is what she got for her friendship—her baby ripped away?
Pain fractured behind her left eye, and she doubled over. A memory overcame her. Standing on the tarmac in Chiang Mai, in her older sister’s finest dress that her mother had patched, a backpack with fifteen hundred baht and a bag of peanuts in case she got hungry. Her parents pulling her into a stiff hug, her mother trying not to cry. “Like winning the lottery,” her mother had said, and then, less than twenty-four hours later, arriving at a London apartment and realizing she’d practically been sold into slavery.
She’d grown up with strangers, forced to be photographed, observed.
Her daughter would not have that life.
Her daughter would have a mother.
Nok crouched next to Lucky, forcing herself to keep her rage tamped down. She had seen how Delphine had handled this kind of situation—not with raised voices, but with soft ones. Not with fists, but with whispered words.
She smoothed Lucky’s hair. “You see?” She petted the healed place on his forehead. “Rolf was right. This is what Cora has done to us. They’re taking away everything we have because of her violent tendencies. Even my baby. It doesn’t matter if she was a good person. She’s crazy now, and she has to be stopped before she ruins everything.”
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46
Cora
WHEN THE REMATERIALIZATION WAS over, Cora found herself in a small room nearly bare of furniture. Open doorways led to two more small rooms. It didn’t have the medical chamber’s austerity, nor the market’s bustling chaos, nor the menagerie’s faux Greek columns. But starry light came from the seams in the wall, marking it as a Kindred space.
Cassian held her tightly. As soon as he released her, she took a quick step away.
She crossed to the single window and shoved open the curtain, afraid to see a black window and know she was still being watched. But on the other side was the night sky filled with endless stars. Some so faint they were nearly invisible, some close enough to burn her eyes. In the center was a distant planet, ringed like Saturn, the blue color of water. She had to grab the curtain to keep from falling.
“This is what’s outside? Outer space?”
“That is a projected image. I selected it for you.” He paused. “I know you like the stars.” He traced a pattern on the wall in the central room, where a cabinet slid out, revealing a square container and a single square drinking glass.
She peeked into one of the other rooms. A bed with no sheets or blankets, and a shelf holding a few blue cubes and nothing else. Had he brought her to a prison cell?
“Where are we?” she asked.
“My quarters.” He spoke so casually that Cora barely had time to register before he pointed to the sitting room. “Sit in there.”
“Your quarters? I thought you’d take me to one of the menageries.”
He raised an eyebrow. “The Warden did instruct me to take you to a menagerie. And as you recall, I did take you to one. The Temple. I fulfilled his orders—I just didn’t leave you there, drugged and caged.” She thought she saw a flicker of dark amusement cross his face. “Never let it be said that my kind does not excel at finding loopholes.”
He picked up the square glass and the bottle, but hesitated. “The Warden recommended that I take you to a menagerie called the Harem. It is located on the seventh sector—an area frequented by disgraced Kindred and Mosca traders. They go through human girls quickly there. It is a place I do not think you would like to go. I would certainly not enjoy having to leave you there.”
He was implying using girls for sex, or worse—things she couldn’t even imagine. It made the childish tricks in the Temple seem positively innocent. What had she done to make the Warden hate her this much?
Cassian pointed toward the sitting room. “Sit. Please. I would not like to spend the little time we have arguing.”
Cora made her way into the sitting room. It was barren, save for some metal crates pushed against the wall and a book tossed on top of the crates, dog-eared and worn. Peter Pan and Wendy. An artifact from Earth. It was the only thing at all in the entire room that had any glimmer of personality. Cassian picked up the book quickly and dropped it into one of the metal crates.
The bare room reeked of desolation. “Do you all live like this, so spartanly?”
“Yes, though not by choice. There is not an abundance of resources in space. Dust and rock and light can only power so much. We live a frugal life out of necessity. The technology used to create your environment works only within certain confines and requires a high amount of carbon. We could not create such luxury for ourselves.” He traced another pattern on the wall. A small tray emerged, which served as a table for the glass and square container. He poured a sharp-smelling liquid into the glass and took a deep drink.
“What’s that?”
“Alcohol, made from fermented lichens.”
“You have alcohol?”
He glanced at her with a flicker of amusement. “Every society in the universe has invented alcohol—even some lesser species, such as your own. Intoxicants are prohibited, in general, outside of the menageries. But we are allowed to keep one container in our quarters, in case of difficulty controlling emotions.”
She grabbed the glass out of his hand, downing the contents, wincing as it burned her throat in a way her mother’s expensive wine never had. She held out the glass for more. “I’m definitely having difficulty controlling my emotions.”
Cassian hesitated—clearly he meant the drink for himself, not her—but then refilled her glass. She took a slower sip, letting her heavy eyelids sink slightly. The room was quiet, too quiet, and she cleared her throat. “What did you mean when you said that the algorithm didn’t make a mistake, but you did?”
He dragged a crate over as a makeshift chair. “It is protocol to monitor the stock algorithm’s selections before the transfer from the native environment to the artificial one. I performed the required period of observation on the othe
r Girl Two. She would have been suitable.” He looked down at his hands. “I continued to monitor Boy Two simultaneously. He was performing a research operation on one of your networked computers. He found an article from the previous year about your father’s employment. You were standing in the picture. Boy Two’s emotions were very strong. Impossible to ignore.”
Lucky had said he looked her up on the internet every few months at his library, hoping for news that would make him feel better about playing a part in her time in juvenile detention.
That whole time, Cassian had been watching?
“He felt intense guilt,” Cassian continued, “which was perplexing, since he had not directly wronged you. He felt curiosity too, and very strong attraction, though that only made his guilt increase. I began to observe you as well. Call it . . . curiosity. Your experience with captivity was somewhat unusual in a female of your age and your intelligence. Such resilience is highly desirable to us, after what happened to the previous cohorts.”
She swallowed. Her hand still felt dry from the femur bone.
“You had other traits—physical attractiveness, a quiet demeanor, an emotional strength—that would make for an interesting pairing with any of the three males selected. I already knew Boy Two would be more than interested in you. So I went against the stock algorithm. I selected you myself. The Warden strongly disapproved, but I argued that your resilience would make you highly adaptable to an environment such as this.”
“That’s what this is all about, resilience?” She clutched the glass harder. “You thought that because I was in prison before, and didn’t cause disruptions, that I’d roll over and accept this prison too? You’ve got it all wrong. The accident and my time at Bay Pines didn’t make me resilient. It left me a shell of a person. I can’t face enclosed spaces. I can’t face water. It didn’t matter where I went or who I was around after that; I didn’t belong anywhere. Not at home. Not in prison either. It changed me, Cassian.”
Her fingers were trembling on the glass. He folded his own across from her, a gesture that felt startlingly human. “Perhaps we define resiliency differently. My understanding was that resilience isn’t about weakness, but strength.”
“Exactly. I’m not strong. I can’t sleep and when I do, it’s just nightmares. I can’t even—”
Her voice failed her. She was about to say she couldn’t even love Lucky like he deserved, but Cassian didn’t need her to list her failures. He could see them in her head.
For a long time, he didn’t answer. He must be thinking about how he made a mistake. He thought she was more than she was. He saw something that wasn’t there. She didn’t think she would ever care if the monster who brought her here regretted it, but in some ripped-bare part of her, she found that she did care. Yes, she did.
She wanted to know why he thought she was resilient.
“Because of the truth about what happened with your father,” he said.
CORA’S EYES CLOSED TO the room and the starry window, as she remembered a different night long ago. It was two days after she had been released from Bay Pines.
Her welcome-home party.
The divorce had been finalized halfway through her incarceration, but her mother had flown back from Miami and drank enough pinot grigio to be able to be under the same roof as her father, though never in the same room. They’d invited all her old school friends and her father’s colleagues. Her mom had attached a silk bow to Sadie’s collar. There had been a three-tiered cake and presents, as though she’d been away at a European boarding school for the last eighteen months, and not an upstate detention facility.
No one talked about Bay Pines. No one asked her how bad the cafeteria food was or if any of the girls had attacked her. Her father had made a long toast to her return. Then the guests had left, and her parents got into one of their marathon fights and her mother stormed out, and the maids cleaned the spilled champagne, and Cora went outside to look at the night sky.
Whether she was looking up from Bay Pines or Fox Run, whether her family was together or broken, at least the stars had always looked the same.
Her father joined her, and for the first time since the night of the accident, they were alone. They exchanged a few words about the upcoming election, and the fight he’d had with her mother over the guest list, and then he’d leaned over the railing, with no warning, and let his gin glass slip into the bushes below, and covered his face with his hands.
It was the first time Cora had ever seen him cry.
“I didn’t know what to do,” he said, between sobs that made the loose skin on his neck tremble. He was already bald by then, and his manicured fingers clutched his head as though it needed to be held together. “I’d had too much to drink. I was so angry with your mother, threatening divorce.”
It had taken Cora a moment to even realize he was talking about the night of the accident, because he only ever spoke about it in vague terms, and only if he had to. As a senator, he’d always been coached in what to say, so it was rare to see him open up like this. She watched his fingers fumbling over his bald scalp, searching for something, anything. He looked older than she’d ever seen him, and it was the first time she realized that one day he would die.
“It eats at me. It should have been me. My little girl spent eighteen months in that place, and all it would have taken was a single phone call, a single confession, and you would have walked free.”
He had collapsed into a sobbing collection of tired eyes and world-worn fingers and wrinkles that hadn’t been there before that night.
Cora leaned against the railing next to him. She had tried hard not to think often about the night of the accident. That terrifying plunge off the bridge, the car filling with water, shivering together on the shore, her father reeking of alcohol. Sitting among the wet grass, she’d thought through what would happen next. The police would arrest him. He would lose his senatorship and his reputation. Her family would lose their livelihood. Her mother would divorce him for real. She and Charlie would lose a father.
Below, in the garden, the shattered pieces of his gin glass reflected the moonlight. She remembered each day of those eighteen months. The fights in the shower. The leering eyes of the guards. The lights that stayed on all night. At the time, it had seemed an eternity.
“It was my choice, Dad.” She had glanced back through the windows at her house, where her mother slept on the sofa and Charlie played video games. She felt like she was looking into another person’s life. “I wouldn’t have suggested it if I hadn’t known the consequences. I knew exactly what I was doing when I told the police that I had been behind the wheel. I was saving our family.”
“I never should have gone along with it.” Her dad sobbed. “I should have confessed. I should have served the time.”
Cora had reached over and covered his large old-man hand with her small one. “It’s okay, Dad. I knew what I was doing.”
She had lied to him plenty back then, but not that night on the porch. It was okay. Her father worked too hard, and was away from home too often, but he loved her. She knew him—she loved him—and she never once blamed him for going along with a decision that she had made on her own. Lucky had it all wrong, when he thought that her father had forced her to take the fall for him. She had never been a victim. Not once in her life. It had been her idea to take the fall. There on the banks of the river, waiting for the police to come, she had practically forced her father to agree. And even after the conviction, and after the divorce happened anyway, and after juvie, and after coming home and knowing that she would never belong again, she had never once regretted it.
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47
Cora
“HE’S MY FATHER,” SHE whispered. “I had the ability to help him. It’s what anyone would have done.”
Cassian didn’t answer. In his eyes sh
e saw herself reflected: tangled hair, delicate features, dark under-eye circles. Taking the fall for her father didn’t mean she was brave. It certainly didn’t make her a paragon of humanity.
But she sensed that Cassian disagreed, and it was a strange feeling. He didn’t see her as a victim, like Lucky did. He knew that the lie had been her idea. He didn’t care about the accident or her false imprisonment or the skills she’d learned in juvie or even her high-profile family.
He cared about the sacrifice she had made.
“Humans have been cruel to you,” he said. “Your father, for allowing you to accept blame for his crimes. Your fellow inmates in detention. Those in the media who unfairly judged you. And yet you bear no resentment toward them. I took you from your world because I wished to give you something better.”
Her heart pounded. She never expected this. Not from him.
“I don’t want better.” Her voice was faint. “I want home, flaws and all. And don’t try to tell me it isn’t there. I saw the comic book. I know time works differently for you. Just tell me straight that it was all a lie. Earth is still there, isn’t it?”
Her words reverberated around the small corners of his room. Echoed back at her, they sounded desperate, but she refused to back down. Not when everything she had ever loved was at stake.
She could tell by his flat expression that he was going to lie again. She could almost feel the lie forming on his lips, could almost taste its bitterness. But then he closed his mouth. “There is no short answer to that question.” The flatness in his face was gone now; he was telling the truth. “Because we ourselves do not know.”
She gripped the edge of the table. “How can you not know? It’s a huge planet. It’s either there or it isn’t.”
“Two hundred rotations ago, the stock algorithm ran a projection that predicted humans would destroy their own planet with a ninety-eight point six degree of certainty. We began taking the last groups of humans before the destruction was predicted to occur. So by all projections, the answer to your question is yes, Earth is gone.”