“It would be more convincing if you weren’t blushing like a girl when you said that,” Leon muttered.
Mali slid her unblinking gaze to him, and he shuddered as if a ghost had passed through him. Those scarred hands. The hollow eyes. That girl had been through god knows what. An instinct in him flared up, fighting against his sympathy. This girl was weak, he tried to tell himself. A victim. And he didn’t associate with the weak. No one in his family did. He used his size to intimidate people. He’d gotten tattoos to show his family’s powerful story. He’d taken a job with his brother smuggling electronics from Bangladesh—he wasn’t a hero. He sure as hell wasn’t interested in being this girl’s hero.
“Don’t feel sorry for her,” he snapped. “She’s probably lying.”
The girl didn’t flinch. Even with her thin arms and thin legs, she didn’t seem intimidated by him in the slightest. In fact, he sensed something else far scarier.
A connection.
She didn’t have a constellation mark on the side of her neck that matched his, but she didn’t have to. The moment she looked into his eyes, something shifted. Some wall fell down, and an instinct to protect her rose. This girl who’d been through so much. This girl who didn’t know how to be gentle, just like him. He didn’t need the stars to tell him she was meant for him, and he for her.
His head throbbed harder, and he stomped out of the diner. Away from the girl with the light brown eyes. Away from what the Kindred wanted him to do. He’d always run away from his problems before, so why not now?
“Leon, wait!” Cora ran out behind him, her blond hair flowing like the trail of a comet. “Where are you going?”
“I can’t sleep in the house with that girl there. I’m going to the jungle—there are huts there. I’ll be back in the morning for breakfast and another spin through the rat maze.”
He didn’t look back.
21
Cora
WHEN CORA RETURNED TO the diner, the ideas Mali had alluded to—private owners and abducted children—churned in her stomach. She’d thought, after Bay Pines, that she could face anything. That was when the only monsters in her life were bad-tempered guards and other juvie girls who stole her stuff while she was in the shower.
The others formed a huddle by the countertop, whispering, while Mali sat alone at a table and poked at Lucky’s folded aviator sunglasses.
“Cora.” Lucky beckoned to her and, when she neared, dropped his voice so Mali wouldn’t overhear. “Rolf thinks we should listen to Mali—that it’s too dangerous to try to escape.”
Cora shook her head. “No. We stick to the plan.”
Over Lucky’s shoulder, Cora watched as Mali slowly opened the aviator glasses, one temple at a time, examined them, and then placed them on her face.
“You wish to find the fail-safe exit,” Mali said cryptically. “You cannot. The Kindred hide it with perceptive technology. It could be in this room and you could not see.” She stood, squinting through the dark sunglasses, and wandered to the jukebox.
Rolf leaned in, moving aside the potted geraniums. “You see? Escape is impossible. These are creatures who trade human body parts. We don’t want to go up against them. I’ll solve their puzzles, but you know what I’m going to do with the tokens I win? Buy the painting kit. Take up art. Enjoy myself. Maybe I’ll even buy the radio and listen to some music that isn’t this same aggravating song on repeat.”
Cora had never heard a cutting tone in Rolf’s voice before. The headaches must be making him as irritable as she was.
“So that’s it? You’re giving up?” When she was little, she’d always been the good girl, top of her class, the smiling face standing to the left of her father. Even in Bay Pines, when the gap-toothed girl punched her in the stomach, she hadn’t objected. But now . . .
She was done doing what everyone wanted.
“And you.” Cora spun on Mali. “They kidnapped you. You should hate them. Has the Caretaker brainwashed you or something?” Cora could barely keep the anger out of her voice, thinking of how a powerful creature like Cassian could do anything to a tiny girl like Mali. Four years old, and stolen away from her family.
At this, Mali’s startlingly clear eyes cut to Cora’s sunken ones.
“Cassian is my friend.”
“Your friend?”
Mali’s mouth twitched. “He saves my life three years ago.”
Cora looked down at her torn fingernails, piecing through Mali’s strange way of speaking, wondering how the man who imprisoned them could be the same person who would save a girl’s life. In the medical room, just for a flash, she’d thought that he was different from the other Kindred. Was he?
Mali approached slowly, lifting and lowering her sunglasses. She looked like a deranged ballerina in Rolf’s oversized military jacket. “Cassian is the Caretaker only recently. Three years ago, he is malakai—soldier paid to find and save humans kept by private owners. He finds me. He saves me.”
“You were in an enclosure like this one?”
“No—three years ago I am kept by a private owner. A bad owner. He sells me many times.” Mali brushed a finger slowly down the seam of Rolf’s military jacket, paying more attention to the woven threads than her story. “After Cassian saves me he takes me to a good menagerie. I am there one year and then I am in an enclosure like this but smaller for one year and then I am in another menagerie.” She paused. “This enclosure is not like the others. The Kindred set the days to different lengths here. They change the distances. The clothes here are strange.”
Cora leaned forward. “You mean they don’t mess with the other kids’ heads like they do ours? Why us?”
Mali was silent. Her face was a mask behind the dark lenses of her sunglasses, just like the Kindred, and then she pinched herself slowly on the shoulder. “There are rumors that humans can evolve to have perceptive abilities. That this is even happening now. The Kindred fear the day when humans are as capable as them.”
Cora straightened, glancing nervously at the others. “Evolving? Is there any truth to it?”
Mali paused. “I see nothing with my eyes but friends I trust tell me yes this happens. Perhaps the Kindred treat you different because they fear you are different. Here. In the mind.” She tapped her head. Her words lingered in the air like whispers of prophets. Then she sneezed and drifted back over to the jukebox.