The Cage

by Megan Shepherd

  Everyone was quiet. Cora eyed Lucky carefully, from the way he habitually popped his knuckles like they ached him, to the small scar on his chin. What had happened to him, to make his mind go to such a dark place?

  “Don’t think like that,” she said. “At least not yet. Come on.”

  The group filed back outside.

  Cora shaded her eyes, looking down the row of buildings. “All the rest of the shops—”

  “Hang on.” Nok cocked her head, pink streak of hair falling in her face. “Do you hear that?”

  At first Cora heard nothing, but then faint notes reached her ears. A song. It sounded like recorded music, old-fashioned, that made her think of crooners dressed in tuxedos. Then the lyrics began.

  A stranger in my own life . . .

  It was coming from one of the shops. The diner. Lucky started toward it, but Cora clamped her hand onto his.

  “Wait,” she whispered.

  A ghost behind my smile . . .

  A coldness started somewhere at the base of her skull and spread. The memory returned of riding in Charlie’s car, wanting so badly to reach that resort where their parents waited for them, her crumpled notebook in her lap, making up lyrics. Those lyrics. The same ones playing now. She whirled toward the source of the music with a feeling like the world was spinning just a little too fast.

  Not at home in paradise . . .

  Not at home in hell . . .

  A sign flashed above the diner: THE GREASY FORK. It flashed again and again, beckoning them.

  “Hey, you okay?” Lucky asked.

  “This song.” Her voice came out hoarse. “These lyrics. They’re . . . mine.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  8

  Cora

  VERTIGO HIT CORA AS if the past and present were intertwining.

  “You mean . . . you know this song?” Lucky asked.

  She shook her head. “You don’t understand. I wrote these lyrics. It was the last thing I was doing before I woke up here. Someone must have stolen my notebook, hired a singer, and recorded the song. That’s so elaborate. Why would anyone do that?”

  Everyone was silent.

  She reached for her necklace, and felt only emptiness.

  Leon tugged off his tie and let it fall to the grass. “They’re twisted shits, that’s why.” He climbed the diner stairs with a look like he’d kill whoever was in there. After a minute, he stuck his head back out.

  “There’s no one here.” He sounded disappointed.

  Cora started up the steps. Inside, old-fashioned lamps cast a smoky glow over the red-and-white checkered tablecloths. There was a long counter, and three tables with two chairs each. A black window hummed from the wall, murky shadows floating behind it like ghosts.

  “There’s the source of your music.” Lucky pointed to a jukebox against the back wall. “It must be programmed to play automatically at certain times.”

  A stranger in my own life . . .

  A ghost behind my smile . . .

  Cora closed her eyes. This song was supposed to be private, meant to live only in the pages of a notebook. It was about the night of the accident, when her mother had first threatened to file for divorce. No one wanted a scandal, so Cora had attended her father’s political fund-raiser at the last minute in her mother’s place. A Mason smiles, even if her heart is breaking. She’d worn a green silk dress with lace down the back. On the car ride home, while her father drove, she’d rested her head against the cool glass and listened to the smooth voices on NPR, watched the stars overhead, and made a wish that a smile really could solve everything.

  When she opened her eyes, Lucky was looking at her strangely, like he had when they’d first met on the beach. She touched her cheek self-consciously, wondering if her face looked as sunken and heavy as she felt.

  “Hey.” Leon slammed his fist on the jukebox. “Are they just going to play this song on repeat? What gives?” His head dipped as he searched for buttons. The controls slid around, but nothing happened, almost as if they weren’t controls at all.

  “Perhaps it is another puzzle,” Rolf said quietly.

  Cora leaned against the counter, still feeling dazed. The army. The helicopters. The police. They should have been there by now.

  Leon stabbed a finger in Rolf’s direction. “If it’s a puzzle, solve it, genius.”

  Rolf trudged over to the jukebox. His fingers flew over the blocks, but nothing he tried worked. Lucky took a try too, but he didn’t make any more progress.

  The song continued.

  Outside, the sunlight faded to the golden color of late afternoon, not suddenly but all at once, like someone had flipped a switch. Cora whirled toward the doorway.

  “Did you guys see the light change?” Nok pointed outside. “That’s impossible, yeah?”

  A clicking noise came from the countertop, and a trapdoor opened, revealing six trays of food. Curry over rice, looking so normal and innocent that it was terrifying. No one made a move.

  Rolf’s eyes were wide. “I think it’s safe to assume we’re in a heavily controlled environment. It appears our food arrives not according to solving a puzzle but in correspondence to the light changing. Perhaps because food is a resource we require, whether we can solve puzzles or not. I would imagine this is supposed to be dinner.”

  Leon grabbed one of the trays. “Dinner. Breakfast. Whatever, as long as it goes down and stays down.”

  “Don’t eat it.” Lucky pointed to the sixth tray, which was empty. “One of us is already gone, remember? The girl Cora and I found. It could be poisoned.”

  Leon ignored him and dug into the curry. Cora and the others watched in horrified fascination. He only paused midbite, cheeks full. “In case you were wondering, it’s bloody delicious.”

  Halfway through Leon’s meal, the light outside changed again, dropping from dusk to night abruptly. The trays sank back into the counter, as if the food had never existed.

  Cora went to the doorway, where Lucky stood with his arms folded across his chest. Across the square, the lights of the Victorian house had come on, blazing in the darkness. The front door was wide open.

  “The army isn’t coming, is it?” she asked quietly.

  Lucky popped the knuckles of his left hand. “I don’t think so.”

  She shivered, though the night was mild. “Whoever put us here turned on the lights in the house. They want us to go there, I think. Pretend this place is real, like dolls in a play world. It feels wrong—like they’re setting us up for something.”

  “Something like what happened to the girl on the beach?”

  Cora hugged her arms. “Maybe.”

  “It’s useless to resist.” Rolf’s shock of red hair popped up between them. “We’re like the lab rats. The scientists control the experiment; the rats have no choice but to obey.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  “The scientists will throw them out and get new rats.”

  “Throw them out . . . like kill them?” Nok asked from inside the diner. At Rolf’s nod, she turned even paler.

  “What’s the worst that can happen?” Leon grunted, pointing at the house. “There are flowers. And a porch swing. It’s hardly a torture den.”

  He started for it, and the others had no choice but to follow.

  THE HOUSE WAS JUST as Rolf had described it: a living room downstairs and a bathroom and three bedrooms upstairs, perfectly normal except for a few odd details, like carpeting inside the fireplace, that made Cora question the sanity of their captors.

  Leon poked at a framed portrait of a toaster. “This from IKEA?” he said to Rolf.

  “I wouldn’t know. IKEA furniture comes from Sweden, not Norway.”

  “Eh, it’s all the same up there. Cold days. Long nights. Pretty girls.”

  Cora rolled her eyes and grabbed his shoulder, pushing him toward th
e stairs. “Keep going.”

  “It’ll be safer if we all sleep in the same bedroom,” Lucky said as they climbed the stairs. “Girls on the bed, guys on the floor. I’ll take the first watch.”

  “Let me,” Cora said, rubbing her dry eyes. “I’m an insomniac. I’ll be up half the night anyway.”

  He shook his head. “You look like you’re about to fall over from exhaustion at any moment. All the more reason you should try to sleep. We need all the rest we can get.”

  Leon gave him a wry salute and went to another room to get more pillows. He came back and threw one to Rolf. “Nighty-night, darling.” He flipped off the light.

  The boys lay down on the floor while Lucky settled into the doorframe and Cora and Nok curled up beneath a blanket. Cora’s weary muscles unwound slowly, but the familiar cloudiness of insomnia settled behind her eyes—it didn’t matter how tired she was, she knew sleep wouldn’t find her. But she must have slept at some point over the last few days, because she’d had the dream about that beautiful man with the bronze-colored skin. She wished he’d opened his eyes, in the dream. She wanted to look into the face of an angel.

  At home, when she couldn’t sleep, she’d sneak downstairs and borrow her mother’s keys and cruise the Virginia back roads, listening to NPR. There had been a story once about the ways the human mind devised to cope with trauma: denial, bargaining, lethargy. The broadcaster talked about teenage girls in refugee camps who were starving and yet, when questioned, listed their biggest problem as trying to find a nice boy to take home to their parents. He said that the human mind is able to adapt to anything.

  Cora wasn’t too sure about that. When she’d gone to Bay Pines, she had been the outsider: a wealthy girl from a politician’s family, charged with murder. When she’d left Bay Pines and returned home, she was an ex-con who knew how to make a shiv out of a toothbrush. That didn’t fit well with lacrosse team and cotillion classes.

  She rolled over, and let lyrics form in the back of her head.

  How much can we change . . .

  When change is all there is . . .

  The black window seemed to hum louder, or maybe it was just in her head. She didn’t know which was scarier—seeing their captors, or knowing they were there but not seeing them at all.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  9

  Nok

  NOK SHIVERED IN THE darkness. From where she lay, huddled under the thin blanket that smelled like chemicals, all that was visible through the window was the smear of night. In London, she’d never known true blackness. There’d always been headlights and fluorescent bulbs, street lights and billboards. And it was so deathly quiet. No city noises to drown her memories. She pressed a hand to the base of her throat, expecting the familiar clot of asthma—but her breath came easily.

  She rolled over. “Cora, are you still awake?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know this sounds crazy,” she whispered, “but I think whoever put us here cured my asthma. And when we first met, Rolf said he used to wear glasses, but his vision is perfect now. They must be super-advanced scientists to do all that, yeah? What if they aren’t . . . human?” Nok drew the blanket higher around her neck.

  The other side of the bed was quiet. “You’ll never fall asleep if you start worrying about that,” Cora said at last. “Think about something better. Home. Tell me about London. The life of a model sounds so glamorous.”

  Glamorous? Nok rolled over onto her pillow.

  Not exactly.

  The story she’d told the others had been a detour from the truth. Her childhood had been banana leaves and khee mao noodles and dirt roads the color of rust. Her adolescence had been a rare trip to Bangkok with her three sisters, peppermint ice cream from blue glass bowls, a model 7scout who’d seen her from the street outside and scribbled an address on a napkin he slid to her mother.

  Like winning the lottery, her family had said.

  Then there’d been a plane ride, twenty other bony girls bound for Europe, giggling and striking silly model poses. The plane landed in London. She couldn’t speak a word of English. They’d taken her to a neighborhood filled with sirens and trash, up seven flights of cramped stairs to a flat packed with five girls to a room, sleeping on floor mattresses, cheap clothes and cheaper makeup strewn everywhere. Home, the model scout had said.

  She hadn’t needed to speak English to understand that it was not like winning the lottery.

  Nok blinked back to the present. “Home? Right—London. Oh, I’ve a gorgeous flat there. In Notting Hill, by the river. Penthouse suite with a balcony, a massive bathroom with a chandelier.”

  “I’ve been to London. . . .” Cora paused. “I didn’t think Notting Hill was near the river.”

  Nok’s heart thudded. She knew that—she’d just spoken in such a rush. “Chelsea, I mean. I moved last year. My flat in Notting Hill was a postage stamp. I couldn’t stand it.” She craned her head, trying to see on Cora’s face if she’d sensed the lie, but there was only darkness.

  “Right.” Cora’s voice was softer. “A chandelier. Wow.”

  Thank you, Nok mouthed to the heavens. If Cora did suspect anything, she was going to keep it to herself.

  The bed rumpled, as Cora must have flipped over. “We have a nice house too. My dad invested in tech companies at the right time. Now he’s in politics. He doesn’t know this, but I painted glow-in-the-dark stars on my bedroom ceiling when I was twelve. You can only see them when the lights are off.” She paused. “It seems silly now.”

  Nok’s own secret sweated from her pores as her mind raced for a safer topic. “What do you think about the guys?”

  “Leon’s kind of an ass,” Cora whispered.

  Nok laughed before she could stop herself, and clamped a hand over her mouth. “I never go for those muscle types. Or the good-looking ones, like Lucky. Too full of themselves.”

  “You think Lucky’s cute?”

  “You don’t?”

  Cora didn’t answer. Nok rolled over on her pillow, staring at the ceiling. That awful silence. One of the boys started snoring. It mingled with the hum from the black panel, and Nok’s throat started to close up. Her hand shot to her neck. Blackness swamped her from both sides: the night outside, the black window. She could feel eyes behind that dark glass studying her. She didn’t care about being watched—she’d spent her life watched by photographers from behind dark camera lenses.

  When she closed her eyes, she could still see their flashing bulbs. Delphine, her steely-haired talent manager who seemed never to age, standing by the doorway eating black licorice, while a photographer who couldn’t be more than seventeen hid behind a curtain snapping his bulb like squeezing a trigger. Bam. Bam. Bam.

  “Look beyond the camera,” Delphine had said. “Look into the heart of the photographer—not this greasy-faced boy, but every man. Because it will be always be a man, even if a woman is taking the pictures, because it’s a man’s world. They always want something. Vulnerability. Weakness. Need. When you give it to them, you control them completely.” Sugary black saliva dribbled from the corner of Delphine’s mouth as she bit into another licorice stick. “And controlling men is the only way women like you and me will survive.”

  “What did you say?” Cora asked.

  Nok didn’t realize she’d mumbled aloud until Cora’s hand squeezed hers in the darkness. “Hey. You should sleep. Lucky’s keeping watch, and I don’t sleep much either. You can close your eyes. It’s safe.”

  Nok searched the dark ceiling for flashing bulbs but found none. No photographers. No Delphine with her dribbling black licorice.

  She didn’t let go of Cora’s hand. She squeezed her eyes shut, and thought of banana leaves and khee mao noodles. Her name meant bird in Thai; she missed the birds back home.

  If she was being honest, the birds were the only thing she misse
d.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  10

  Cora

  CORA STARED AT THE ceiling, feeling the absence of the glow-in-the-dark stars as strongly as the absence of her necklace. Her eyes were bleary with exhaustion, but her mind wouldn’t quiet.

  She sat up to see if Lucky was still awake too.

  The doorway was empty. Alarms rang in her head, and she jumped out of bed and checked the other bedrooms, then jogged down the stairs, and stopped.

  He sat in the front doorway, head tilted back, eyes closed. He looked peaceful. She could almost believe she was home, a normal girl at a house party that had gone on too late, stumbling upon a cute guy passed out in the doorway.

  His head rolled toward her, and his eyes opened. He scrambled to his feet. “Is something wrong?”

  “No. I . . . I was just awake. I thought I’d keep you company.”

  His shoulders eased. He nodded toward the floor, a silent invitation to join him. Cora hesitantly sat in the doorway opposite him, hugging her tired muscles. He tossed his jacket to her as a pillow.

  The jukebox was silent now. It could be midnight, or it could be five in the morning. There was no way to tell.

  Lucky looked at the dark sky. “There aren’t any stars here. In Montana, people watch the stars like people in other places watch movies. My granddad used to wake me up when there was a new moon and drag me out to the fields. Said he had Blackfoot blood in his veins, and wanted to teach me his people’s legends written in the constellations.” He’d been smiling at the memory, but it faded. “I miss him, and his old lies. He wasn’t any more Blackfoot than I am royalty.” He rubbed the place on his wrist where a watch would normally be.

  Cora paused. “Is your granddad the one who gave you the watch you’re missing?”

  His eyebrows rose. “How’d you know?”

  “You reach for it when you talk about him.” She touched her throat. “I had a necklace that disappeared when I woke here. It had a charm for each member of my . . .” She stopped. It all sounded so silly. Her life couldn’t be summed up by a string of charms. Besides, if she talked too much, Lucky might remember the news stories from two years ago, and he’d never trust her if he knew she’d been in juvie.