"We're closing shortly," Dane said. "Perhaps you can continue your card game tomorrow. And, Cora, I wondered if you'd mind sticking around a bit longer. The zebra was sick, and I could use an extra set of hands cleaning up. I'll have you back to the cell block before Free Time ends."

He gave a bland smile.

"Um . . . sure." Cora hurried to pick up all the cards and shuffle them into a stack. "Whatever you need. Ca.s.sian, just let me know when you want to . . . play cards . . . again."

She felt her cheeks blazing. She was in such a rush to get away that she didn't stop to think about how odd it was for Dane to ask her a favor, until he led her to the Hunt's supply closet behind the bar. To her surprise, Lucky was standing among the boxes of booze. His face looked grim.

"What's going on?" she asked, blinking hard.

"Dane and I had a chat," Lucky said quietly. "Come inside, and shut the door behind you."

23.

Cora CORA STEPPED INTO THE supply closet, squeezing between dusty boxes of booze, and inched the door closed. "Tell me."

Lucky nearly b.u.mped into an old giraffe carving. "Dane can help us change my birthday."

Cora turned to Dane. "Let me guess-you want something in return."

Dane gave his thin smile. "Lucky and I have already settled upon my compensation. It's more about what Roshian wants."

Cora nearly knocked over the giraffe statue in surprise. "What does Roshian have to do with anything?"

"He controls timekeeping for the Kindred," Lucky said. "He'll tweak my records, but only for one thing."

The supply closet suddenly felt like it was closing in too tightly around her. "What?"

"You," Lucky said. And then he clarified, "He wants your hair. The same way he wants the antlers and the horns from the animals he hunts. I guess he has a special place for a human braid on his psycho shelf of lesser-species memorabilia."

Dane suppressed a laugh.

Cora's hand drifted to her hair on instinct, tangling in the curls. "I thought it was just the Axion who cared about that kind of thing."

Dane gave a shrug. "I didn't ask why he wants it. My guess is you're better off not knowing."

Her feet itched to pace, but the room was so small. "Can you give us a second to talk alone, Dane?"

Dane picked up a dusty bottle of schnapps and peeked out of the cracked door. "Five minutes," he said.

Once they were alone in the closet, Lucky ran a hand through his hair. "Listen, Cora, we can find another way. You don't have to do this."

She sank onto a box. "What other way? They'll come for you day after tomorrow if we don't, and you're too stubborn to hide out with Leon." She twisted the ends of her hair around her fist. "It's just hair."

"But who knows why Roshian wants it. Maybe he needs the DNA for something. Maybe he is a Council spy. Someone must have told the Council that you were behind our escape from the cage. This could be some elaborate scheme by the Council."

She leveled a stare at him. "The Kindred don't scheme. If they wanted to arrest me, they would just come take me."

Lucky shook his head. "I still don't like it."

"I don't either, but we don't have much choice. At least Tessela and Fian are usually around, in case anything goes wrong. Roshian might bend the rules every now and then, but he can't break them. He's bound by the moral code. And Dane wouldn't dare risk breaking the rules this close to his own birthday, when he's already practically got one foot in Armstrong."

"Still. It makes me nervous." Lucky's hand moved like he wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn't, and she started toying with her own fingers. For a second, the privacy of the closet reminded her of the first time they'd been truly alone, without the watching eyes of the Kindred, beneath the boughs of a weeping cherry tree. She had seen in Lucky a boy who didn't know his own strengths. A boy who just wanted a simple life. A beach. A beer. A guitar. A boy who, like her, had had all that taken away from him.

She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. His fingers were strong and knotty from years of farm work. The cage hadn't changed that. "Let me do this for you," she whispered.

His eyebrows knit together as though something troubled him. "For once," he said, "I want to rescue you. I want to make a sacrifice for you. After what happened in the cage, that night that I-"

He didn't finish, but he didn't have to. She remembered that awful feeling of inevitability as they'd climbed the stairs to his room and he'd started to take off her clothes with that delirious look in his eye.

"You don't owe me anything," she whispered.

"It isn't about debt," he said. His hands surrounded hers, growing warmer.

"Then what?" she asked. "We both agreed that kiss was a mistake."

"I know." He turned her hand over, tracing the markings on her hand, hesitant to continue. "But there's a reason the Kindred's algorithm matched us together. We're alike, in a way. We both need a greater purpose. You don't believe it, but it's true. The Gauntlet means more to you than you let on."

She wasn't quite sure how to answer, so she just watched him tracing the markings on her palm. "Maybe it does," she said at last.

"More important than you risking working with Roshian to save my a.s.s."

She smirked. "Your a.s.s is getting saved, end of story."

The tension between them had shifted, and she turned his hand over instead, tracing her eyes over the tattooed lines in his palm. "What do you think these markings say?"

"'Rejects,' probably," he concluded, and then frowned. "Yours is different from mine. Here, on your ring finger. The pinp.r.i.c.k is a lot bigger."

She rubbed her thumb over it, almost like she could wipe it away. "I noticed before. I don't know why."

"It looks almost like a ring," he said. "The way it meets the black band around your finger. Almost like a . . ." His eyes shot to hers. "Almost like a diamond."

She jerked her hand away and studied it closely.

It wasn't supposed to be a glistening star, she realized. Lucky was right. Ca.s.sian must have modified her markings just slightly-just enough not to raise suspicion-to hide this human symbol there as a secret between the two of them. A diamond ring.

"That . . . that can't be right," she stuttered.

But Lucky's face had darkened. "I bet Ca.s.sian did it intentionally. He hid a diamond ring in your markings as some kind of twisted kind of declaration. A vow." He squeezed his fist, hiding the markings on his own palm.

Cora kept staring at it. It couldn't be true, could it? A tattooed diamond ring? She parted her lips to deny it again, but the door shoved open, and Dane looked in.

"Well, songbird?"

She let her hand fall. "Give me some scissors," she said quickly, ignoring the marking on her fourth finger. "I'll cut my hair off right now."

"It isn't quite that simple." Dane held up two fingers, snipping them together like scissors. "Roshian wants to do the honors himself. Odd, I know. But to each his own."

Cora glanced back at Lucky, whose face was set with worry.

"Roshian will have to make complicated conversions to change up the new date. It will take some time," Dane said.

"We don't have time. Lucky turns nineteen in two days."

Dane's eyes shifted to Lucky over her shoulder. "Lucky isn't going anywhere, don't worry. I'll make all the arrangements and let you know when Roshian is ready to make the exchange. It'll have to be after closing. I'll leave a signal for you onstage."

"A signal?"

"You'll know."

She ran her hand down her curls. She'd had long hair for as long as she could remember. Jenny, Makayla-theirs was shorn close, and it didn't seem to bother them. She'd get used to it, but still, how much could they snip, snip, snip away at themselves before they stopped being human and started to be something else?

"All right," she said, reaching down to squeeze Lucky's hand, and only then remembered that, after closing, Tessela and Fian wouldn't be there to look out for her.

Lucky's eyes lingered on her ring finger, and his face darkened again.

A DAY Pa.s.sED. CORA felt the time slipping away as she went about her tasks like each minute was a token falling through slats, never to be recovered. She barely knew what words she was singing, and half the time they came out as jibberish. That night, she snuck out of her cell and curled up with Lucky, holding tight to his shirt collar, as though that could keep him there.

All during the next day-Lucky's birthday-she tried to catch a second alone with Dane to ask him about the plan, but he only ignored her. She sang her first set. Then her second. Roshian wasn't in the audience but Arrowal was, with Fian and two other Council members. The walls felt even more claustrophobic than they usually did. She was nearly dizzy by the start of her final set. She stepped onstage, and stopped.

Dane's yo-yo was tied in a pretty little bow around the microphone.

She whirled her head toward the bar, where Dane was shaking a drink for a Kindred woman. For a second his eyes met hers, and he gave a slight nod. This was the signal. She sang through her set with a shaky voice, singing songs she vaguely remembered from her middle school years, innocent songs about tire swings and first loves that wouldn't give the Council any reason in the slightest to stick around after closing to question her again.

At last, Tessela announced the Hunt was closing. Cora held her breath until every Council member had left. Shoukry finished cleaning the bar, and then they were alone. Dane turned down the lamps.

"Where's Roshian?" Cora asked.

Dane untied his yo-yo from the microphone, slipping it back in his pocket. "Waiting for us."

He started toward the veranda doors, but Cora snaked out an arm. "I need to see proof first. I'm not going anywhere with you until I know Lucky's birthday is changed."

Dane took a small envelope from his pocket. She fumbled with the flap and dumped out a metal tag, engraved with the Kindred's writing. "Flip it over," Dane said.

She did, and her breath caught. A date, in English. October 21, 1998.

Exactly one year after Lucky was born.

Dane smiled. "I told you to trust me, songbird. You aren't the only one who doesn't want Lucky to leave. Now, this way."

They pa.s.sed through the fluttering white curtains to the artificial outdoors, where she had to shade her eyes against the sun. She hadn't been on the veranda since the first day, when Ca.s.sian had shown her the savanna. She knew it wasn't real, just forced perspective and illusions, and yet her mind refused to believe that those scrubby hills didn't stretch as endlessly as they appeared to do.

Dane started down the stairs.

"Aren't we meeting him here?" she asked.

Dane jerked his head toward the savanna. "The light out there is better. Wouldn't want him to accidentally snip off an ear, right?"

She ran her fingers over the engraved tag, tucking it into her dress, and slowly followed him down the steps. She'd never been on the lower level, where the soil was sandy and patchy with dry gra.s.s. This was where the real action was, not up in the lodge. The garage, with its artificial trucks that ran along a bluelight track, and the armory, row after row of rifles. Her heart skipped a beat, seeing those guns. She knew they wouldn't work for her, and yet it seemed it would be so easy to grab one off that wall and blast her way to freedom.

Footsteps came from around the side of the garage. Roshian. Something about the way he carried himself made him loom despite his short stature. He let his eyes run down and up her body, settling on her hair. For a second, she wanted to go back on their deal. The idea of his hands on her, cutting away the hair she'd had her whole life, made her feel sick.

She glanced at the dashboard of the closest safari truck, where the rough carving had been made.

POD30.1.

It gave her a small boost of hope. "Let's get this over with," Cora said.

"Yeah." Dane's voice had an odd tone. "Sure."

She looked for scissors. Neither of them seemed to have a pair, and neither seemed in a hurry either, though Dane was giving off an anxious sort of energy. He pulled out his yo-yo, tossing it distractedly. A slow, uneasy feeling started to creep up her back. They had to do this fast so the others didn't get suspicious of her absence. And did they really need to come all the way out here?

She glanced toward the veranda. Dane was standing between her and the stairs, legs spread a little wide. If she tried to bolt back to the lodge, he'd catch her in a second.

"What's going on, Dane? I thought this was about my hair."

"Oh, it is."

Slowly, Roshian took out a long black case from the truck's backseat. Cora took a shaky step backward. Roshian was bound by the same moral code as all the Kindred. As deranged and self-serving as that code was, none of them ever went outside of its boundaries. Kidnapping children was fine. Dragging them out to a savanna and shooting them wasn't.

Roshian opened the case: a rifle, this one battered and dented. Not Kindred technology. Her heart started screaming for her to get out of there.

"What's going on?" she demanded.

"I asked you once how fast you could run," Roshian said. "Unfortunately, I never got an answer, but I have studied the way you move. You are flexible, and your reflexes are fast. I would guess that you can run quite fast when pressed."

She leveled a wary look at him.

He couldn't kill her.

He couldn't. He was Kindred. Was this some sick joke he and Dane were playing? A game?

"I suggest you start running," Roshian said.

24.