Nok peeked out from the pink stripe of hair and scooted closer to Rolf.
Cora stood. “I’m Cora; this is Lucky.” She glanced around the toys in the shop. “I think we should try to set off a flare, or make a sign that an airplane could read with some of this stuff.”
“This isn’t bloody Robinson Crusoe,” Leon said. “There’s an arcade and a movie theater, and you’re talking about spelling some S.O.S. shit out of rocks.”
“No . . . she’s right.” Lucky leaned against the countertop. “We need to find a way to make contact with someone, and we should keep searching the town. There could be dozens more of us.”
“Not dozens,” Rolf said. “Just one.”
Cora turned, rubbing her pounding temples. With its high collar and epaulettes, Rolf’s military jacket gave him an air of authority that didn’t fit with his neurotic blinking. His fingers found some sort of metal combination lock built into the edge of the glass countertop; it had a row of gears that he spun now absent-mindedly, spreading a deep, nearly ominous rumble throughout the room. “Another girl, I think. Three girls and three boys. Six altogether.”
“Three and three makes six, eh?” Leon grunted. “You must be some kind of genius.”
Rolf cleared his throat awkwardly. “Hardly. I just have a gift for observational reasoning. It’s what I’m studying at Oxford. Well, that and robotics. And Greek philosophy.”
Cora frowned. “Wow. How old are you?”
His cheeks flamed. “Fifteen.” He shook his head quickly, dismissing it. “But that doesn’t matter. Observational reasoning is really just deduction, at its core. Any of us can deduce. Nok and I explored each of the stores when we woke. There were six chairs in the diner. Six umbrellas on the boardwalk. Six dolls behind the counter.” He nodded toward the glass case beneath the countertop, which held the dolls, and a child’s painting kit, and a bright croquet set. “We explored the house, too. There’s a few bedrooms upstairs, a living room downstairs. There were six dressers with six sets of clothing in the bedrooms. Judging by the clothing, there’s still one girl missing. She’ll be wearing a white sundress.”
Cora’s head shot around to Lucky. His mouth was set grim. “Yeah. About that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “We found her. She’s dead. Drowned in the ocean, just over that rise.”
Rolf looked up in surprise, pushing at the bridge of his nose, a gesture like a person with glasses might do. Even Nok stopped cringing. Her eyes were still damp, but Cora saw something else, just for a flash. Nok’s mouth tightened. Her eyes narrowed a hair. And then, just as fast, she was wailing again, leaning into Rolf, crying harder.
Cora had seen plenty of girls at Bay Pines put on a show for the guards, to gain sympathy. She knew good acting when she saw it. But why would Nok put on an act?
“Dead?” Nok whispered in a trembling voice. “Like, murdered?”
“She had bruises on her neck,” Lucky said.
Leon gave a sudden shiver like a dog shaking off spray. He stalked to the door, rubbing the back of his neck. Trying to act like he wasn’t scared, but he was sweating hard.
Cora took a deep breath. “We just have to stay calm and wait for help. We’ll be rescued.”
They all turned at the sound of her voice. Rolf started spinning the gear again, filling the room with that ominous metallic jangle.
“Who will rescue us?” Nok said. “We don’t even know where we are, or why they took the six of us.” One bony hand snaked up to twist her hair.
Cora eyed each of them in turn. Nok was a famous model; Rolf had to be a prodigy, to be studying at Oxford at his age. Cora wasn’t exactly famous, but her father was. Was this about ransoming them for money? She eyed Lucky. Beneath that leather jacket, was he someone famous? He was cute, sure, but not movie-star cute; not pearl-white teeth and well-rehearsed smiles. As if to prove her point, he kicked the row of glass jars, forgetting he was barefoot, then doubled over and cursed.
Leon snorted. “You’re wasting time with theories. Me, I don’t give a shit. I’m getting out of here, and any of you are welcome to come with.”
Rolf spun the gear slower, so that it barely made a noise. “We can’t leave.”
“Like hell we can’t. I’ll pick a direction and walk. Those roads have to lead somewhere.”
Rolf shook his head. “They end just behind those buildings. I already tried them.” He looked down at his toes. “Well, they don’t end, exactly. I followed one that led away from the town square. In about three blocks, the road led me back to the town. I didn’t take a single turn, but it looped me back here anyway. I tried another road, and it was the same. It doesn’t matter which direction you head. You’ll just come back to where you started.”
The toy store fell quiet. Only the sound of Rolf’s spinning gear, and the humming black window, filled the silence. A shadow had appeared behind the window, moving slowly. It didn’t seem so much like a person now; it was too tall and too stiff.
“That’s impossible,” Nok blurted out.
Rolf’s fingers stopped. Without the sound of the gear, the room—the town—was even more eerily quiet. “According to the rules of physics, it isn’t.”
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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6
ROLF
ROLF FOCUSED ON THE marigolds beyond the toy store doors. Calendula officinalis. It was easier to think about plants than about the kids staring at him. When he had started classes at Oxford, four years younger than every other university student and the only red-haired kid in his dorm, they’d teased him incessantly. Now he didn’t even have his glasses to hide behind. Their abductors had taken them—and yet, as he blinked, his vision was inexplicably perfect.
“I must have hit you too hard, brother,” Leon said. “That’s insane.”
A glance at Leon’s tattooed face sent Rolf’s fingers spinning the gears on the combination lock faster. His twitchiness was a bad habit, he knew, but not an easy one to break. “It’s called an infinity paradox. It exists, but only theoretically. I’d wager that if you followed any of these paths, eventually you would end up back where you started. There’s no way of telling how far the boundaries are, or if there even are boundaries. It’s highly theoretical.”
“So we’re trapped?” Nok’s beautiful eyes were full of fear. “Even though there are no walls or bars?”
Rolf froze. Staring was all he could manage with Nok. The pink strand of hair perfectly framed the left side of her face, a geometric wonder. He had first seen her standing on the boardwalk, hair tangled in the breeze. Her face had looked defiant—but he’d been wrong. The moment she’d turned and seen him, surprise had flashed over her features, and then tears. Big, rolling ones. She’d thrown her arms around him, never mind that he was a stranger.
He shoved at glasses that were no longer there. “Ah . . . yes. Trapped. I also believe the infinity paradox is responsible for the headaches we’ve all been complaining about. Our minds can’t handle this much unpredictability.”
He thought his logical explanation would put her at ease, but Nok went pale. Stupid. He’d never been confident around girls, especially beautiful ones. He came from Viking descendants; wasn’t he supposed to be beating his enemies with sabers and ripping trees in half? All the Vikings ever gave him was an unmanly shade of strawberry hair.
Cora tugged on his military jacket, getting his attention. “What about the ocean? There’s no path in the water that can loop a person back. Maybe someone just needs to swim out far enough to get past this infinity paradox.”
Rolf paused to consider this. It most certainly wouldn’t work, but at least she was displaying creative thinking, which was more than he could say for the others. “Perhaps, but judging by the fact that a girl already drowned, I’m not sure it’s the best course of action.”
His fingers found the comfort of the combination lock gears, spinni
ng them again. He hated being put on the spot. Back in Oslo, all he’d wanted was to live in the flower garden at Tøyen, near to where his parents worked. He’d spend hours digging around the Rosa berberifolia and Bellis perennis. Dirt used to ring the beds of his fingernails, brown-black and permanent, like it had been tattooed on. You can’t play in the dirt, min skatt, his mother had said, washing off the dirt. You were made to use your brain, not your hands.
He sighed, squinting at the small etched numbers on the spinning gears of the combination lock, blinking hard, still confused by his perfect new vision. He’d seen numbers like the ones on the gears before. It was a Fibonacci pattern even the most basic math student would learn: one, one, two, three, five, eight, thirteen, and a blank for the last number.
On impulse, he spun the final gear until the next number lined up with the others—twenty-one—with a satisfying click. A copper-colored token rolled out of a trough at the base of the counter. There were strange grooves on either side of the token . . . a foreign language, or symbols. He inserted the token into a slot above the trough to see what would happen.
A glass door swung free. Hundreds of peppermint candies rained to the ground.
He cursed, jumping back as the flood of candy hit his feet. The others jumped back too. The falling candy was the only sound in the room, along with a sweet smell that made him famished. It felt like forever since he’d eaten anything. At Oxford he’d had lunch every day at an Indian takeaway place just below his dorm . . . he’d kill for a curry now, or for his mother’s egg-butter cod with flatbread, or even one of Snadderkiosken’s overcooked burgers.
Cora crouched down to inspect the candy. “How’d you do that?”
“The numbers on the combination lock form a simple sequence.”
“Simple? Maybe for you.” She inspected the gears. “Look, the numbers have already reset themselves into a different order. I don’t think it’s a lock. I think it’s a puzzle. Solve the numbers and get a token.”
Rolf cleared his throat, leaning in to see. “It’s possible. Scientists use this sort of puzzle to gauge the intelligence of lab mice and chimpanzees.” He glanced at the humming black window. “These windows could be viewing panels. Our captors might be watching us now, timing how quickly we solve these number tests, and perhaps the greatest puzzle of all—why we are here.”
As if to prove his point, one of the shadowy outlines shifted to the right.
Nok recoiled. “Is that them?” She collapsed against Rolf. “But those shadows are too big to be people, yeah?”
He tried to ignore how nice she smelled, like spring in Tøyen gardens. “We can’t be sure of anything. I imagine that whoever put us here wanted a group of teenagers who all spoke English, even though we’re from different countries. Nok is Thai, but she lives in London, I’m Norwegian, Leon is New Zealander. Lucky is . . .” He paused. He didn’t trust cool-looking American guys in leather jackets as a rule, but he liked the way Lucky spoke, calm and certain, and he definitely liked the way Lucky had punched Leon in the face. “The two of you—Lucky and Cora—are both American. That can’t be right. It doesn’t fit the pattern.”
“I was born in Colombia,” Lucky said. “My mom moved to the States when I was two and married my stepdad there.”
Rolf almost smiled—his theory had been correct. “So perhaps they want us for our different ethnicities, not nationalities. And I suppose they want us all to speak English because they speak English, which means they’re probably Americans or Brits or Australians.”
“I don’t care who they are,” Leon said, glaring at the panel challengingly. “As long as they bleed.”
“Do you think that’s why this place is so strange?” Cora asked. “With all the weird angles, and time periods stuck together? Maybe they’re trying to do some psychological test, like how much stress a mind can take?”
“If it is a psychological experiment,” Rolf said, “then they won’t tell us their purpose. It would skew whatever data they’re trying to collect. But there’s something else we need to think about. Every experiment has a control. A test subject who isn’t being manipulated, so they can ensure accurate results. Someone on the inside. A mole. Which means the more pressing question is . . . how can we trust each other?”
Everyone went silent. Both Cora and Leon rubbed their heads like their headaches were only getting worse. Rolf realized his mistake too late. He hadn’t meant to sow seeds of doubt; it had been a perfectly reasonable line of thought. But now he could practically hear the sound of their shifting eyes evaluating each other. He glanced at Nok—a girl who needed him. And Lucky—who had defended him. Had he already ruined his chances for some friends?
Stupid.
Next time he’d just study the Calendula officinalis and keep his mouth shut.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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7
Cora
“A SNITCH?” CORA’S VOICE cut through the silence.
Nok was clutching her scalp, sobbing again. Even Leon, who acted so tough, paced over the peppermints, crushing them into a sticky mess. Cora could feel their panic—it beat in time with her own. But panic wouldn’t help this situation.
She looked at her reflection the black window, forcing the tight muscles in her face to ease—her clenched jaw, her wrinkled forehead—until she looked calm on the outside. It was something she’d had plenty of practice with.
At a political rally for her father outside of Virginia Beach, long before the divorce, someone had called in a bomb threat. The security guards had whisked her away to a tent. Her father had come an hour later, unharmed, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “A Mason never lets the world see her cry,” he had said. “No matter how scared she is, she smiles.”
Cora couldn’t quite bring herself to smile now, but she at least kept her voice steady. “None of us are snitches,” she said.
“Oh, yeah?” Leon asked. “How many run-ins has a pretty girl like you had with snitches?”
Cora turned away from her reflection. “I’m just saying that we shouldn’t turn against each other five minutes after we’ve met. We don’t know what’s going on. We don’t even know what’s in the other shops.”
Lucky pushed off from the counter. “You’re right. But we should find out.”
Cora met his eyes. Stay in one place, the voice of her father’s guard whispered—but it didn’t look like help was coming.
She gave a nod.
One by one, they filed into the arcade, which was nearly identical in layout to the toy store: a glass counter to one side, a black window, and arcade games lining the opposite wall. It was dark inside, with flashing lights that Cora had to squint into, and sounds that took her back to the arcade in Richmond that she’d loved as a girl. After school, her mother would drop her off at the mall with a few girlfriends, and while they shopped for cheap earrings, she’d play the claw game with the bored mall cop.
She reached for her necklace, forgetting it wasn’t there.
“Looks like you were right, Rolf,” Lucky said, motioning to the glass counter, which had a copper slot for tokens and contained a circulating ring of brightly colored prizes: a guitar, a boomerang, a small red radio that Cora wondered if they could rewire to send a distress signal. “All the video games are puzzles. Must be testing our hand-eye coordination or something.”
They went to the beauty salon next, which was styled in gaudy French decor. Nok collapsed in one of the chairs, rubbing the velvet cushions. “Swanky.”
Cora eyed her sidelong. For a famous model, she had awful taste.
Lucky scratched his neck. “So where’s the puzzle?”
Rolf’s fingers were twitching against his legs, his gaze going from the photographs on the wall to the floor. Cora leaned in. “You know, don’t you?”
“Yes, but I was . . . going to give you all the opportunity to figure it out.
Look at the photographs on the wall. They’re pairs. It’s a matching game.” He flipped the photographs to matching pairs, and a token rolled down a metal trough built into the counter, identical to the one in all the other shops. He stuck the token into an identical slot in the countertop, and a jar of red nail polish tumbled onto the floor. Nok poked the bottle with her toe like it might bite. When it didn’t, she slipped it into her pocket, despite the odd looks from the others.
“What? It’s my favorite color.”
On the wall, the photographs reset themselves mechanically into a different set of images. Now they were famous sites of the world: the Eiffel Tower, the Taj Mahal, along with outlines of various countries. Cora’s head was still foggy, but she touched the closest painting, the Eiffel Tower, and spun the one below it until she got to France.
Tokens rained out of the slot.
Rolf hurried over. “Ten tokens?” He blinked too fast. “That doesn’t make any sense. If anything, the game I solved was harder, but I only got one.” His blue-green eyes blinked in confusion.
Cora rubbed her eyes. “I don’t want them—you guys take them.”
“I’ve got all the nail polish I need, sweetheart,” Leon said.
Rolf ran his fingers over the tokens, comparing them to the one he had won. “It just doesn’t make any sense. It counters the philosophy behind conditioned responses. The most effective way to reinforce a lab rat’s behavior is through random rewards. For example, if a rat runs a maze ten times, you only reward it six out of the ten times. The uncertainty makes the rat focus harder.” Rolf frowned at Cora’s pile of tokens, versus his meager one. “But with a system of random rewards, you still have to be consistent from rat to rat. Even rats sense unfairness. It causes them to get extremely frustrated.”
“Maybe the people put us here aren’t scientists,” Lucky said. “They could just be twisted. This could be some sick kind of torture.”
The Cage Page 3