“No, I love it!” She threw her arms around him. “Oh, but you must have used your tokens to get this, yeah?” She pulled back, looking at the radio reluctantly. “We were supposed to save those for Cora.”
Rolf was quiet. He rubbed his temples, eyes squeezed shut, like pain was throbbing in his skull.
“What’s wrong?” Nok asked. “This isn’t about her getting more tokens again, is it?” It was a topic that had come up more than a few times, as each evening when the others returned, Cora’s pockets were loaded with tokens. Last night, when they’d compared their haul, Cora had sixty. Rolf, who’d spent ten straight hours in the arcade, had earned six. “Just forget about it. You look like your head’s killing you. You should lie down.”
“That’s just it, Nok. I thought the strange angles and optical illusions were giving me a headache, but it’s actually making everything clear. I can think better now . . .” He shook his head, blinking fast. “I understand those rats now, the ones that revolt when they receive unfair rewards. It isn’t that the rats are just stupid, jealous animals. Any solid society is built on the foundation of fairness. That’s why monarchies topple. That’s why governments experimented with communism. When you lose fairness, you lose what makes us human.”
“Or what makes us rats,” Nok offered, hoping for lightness.
But Rolf didn’t seem to hear her. “You were right when you said I shouldn’t be ashamed to be smart. That’s why I like you. You see me for who I am, and you like me. So I have been. Letting myself think, I mean. And my mind is telling me something doesn’t add up with Cora. All the times she’s disappeared off with the Kindred. The favoritism. I’m not saying she’s the mole, but . . .” He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “All I’m saying is, she isn’t the only one who can come up with a plan.”
He picked up the radio.
“This is my plan: to make us happy. If a few tokens go missing here or there, Cora doesn’t have to know. Besides, I already examined it. There’s no transmitter, so there’s no way we could radio anyone for help. It’s just a toy. For you.”
For a moment, the sounds of the arcade surrounded them, the flashing lights spilling out on Rolf’s face, turning it blue, then orange, then red. Nok’s heart twisted a little bit with each one. She hated that the others didn’t see how valuable his genius was. She hated that Leon bullied him. Maybe he was right—they deserved a little happiness.
Rolf put his hands over hers, holding the radio tightly.
“I know this place was scary at first.” The lights of the games reflected in his eyes. “But it really is engineered to keep us safe and happy.”
She swallowed. “But Cora says—”
He was always looking away, at his toes or at the floor, but this time, he looked her square in the eyes. “I don’t care what Cora says. I know I’m supposed to hate it here and want to go home, but the truth is, life was bad for me there.”
She rubbed his hand, petting him like a wounded bird.
His eyebrows knit together. “I was testing eight years ahead of my age level. My parents had my entire life planned out: graduate from Oxford at seventeen, PhD in mechanical engineering at MIT in America, a MacArthur fellowship by the time I was twenty. It was suffocating. I felt like I’d be trapped for the rest of my life. I don’t care about engineering, or Greek literature either. I want to work with plants. Have my hands in the soil. But that wasn’t academic enough. And then here . . . and you . . .” His fingers were starting to shake. “I know I’m not supposed to, but I like it here. And I really, really like you.”
The arcade games kept beeping and flashing, throwing colored pools of light over both their faces. Nok clutched the radio. Rolf’s hands clutched hers. In that moment, she felt like the arcade was the only place in the universe.
“I lied before,” she admitted. “Life was bad for me at home too. I’m not some top model. My parents sold me to a seedy modeling agency that’s only a step above an escort service. I’d have been stuck with them forever, or until I was too old and they threw me onto the street.”
She hung her head, worried he wouldn’t like her anymore.
But his hands didn’t let go of hers.
“I’d have done anything to save you from that life,” he said. “I still would.”
She looked up in surprise. She wasn’t sure what impulse made her do it, but she kissed him.
Rolf went rigid; despite what he claimed about having had sex before, he went as stiff as though it was his first kiss. But then he kissed her back, a little too soft and a little unsure of himself, but to Nok it was perfect. She had kissed boys before, but always to get something. Delphine had taught her well. And yet when she kissed Rolf, all she wanted was to be kissed back.
The next day, when Cora and Lucky went to the alpine biome to explore, Nok and Rolf kissed again while sitting in the movie theater’s red plush seats, and then the next day in the French salon, and it only got better and better.
In another week, they were obeying all the rules—even the third one.
24
Cora
SAND CLUMPED IN CORA’S toes as she searched the beach for a seashell. Since she rarely slept, she’d started rising before first light to collect seashells, which she left in a stack on her windowsill, one for each day. Today’s would be the fifteenth. And yet the pink streak in Nok’s hair hadn’t grown out, and neither had anyone’s fingernails or the boys’ facial hair.
What was happening to time?
The dull ache of exhaustion throbbed in her head. She lost her focus and her toe snagged on something hard. She crouched down to find a snow-white shell. Like all the rest, it had no sharp edges, as though it had been worn smooth by years of sand and sea. Or, rather, engineered to appear that way.
The hair on her arms rose. Her headache increased, like pressure was building. She shoved the shell in her dress pocket and spun toward the town. Was the Caretaker coming? Or had that tingle on her arms only been the sea breeze?
She climbed the stairs to the nearest shop, the bookstore. Inside was a different world. England at the turn of the century. Two leather club chairs and a brocade-covered settee in the middle of the room, with a tea set on the coffee table. The shelves were made of elegant wood packed with beautiful cloth-bound volumes that smelled like must and rain. They weren’t real books—she had already checked. They made up the puzzle, which involved categorizing the volumes by title and color. The real books were enclosed behind the glass countertop. The Hobbit. Charlotte’s Web. The complete boxed set of Dating the Duke romance novels. All available for a few tokens each.