The Cage Read online

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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

  Dedication

  For Jesse.

  I’d travel to distant planets with you, and beyond.

  Contents

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  1. Cora

  2. Cora

  3. Lucky

  4. Cora

  5. Cora

  6. Rolf

  7. Cora

  8. Cora

  9. Nok

  10. Cora

  11. Cora

  12. Lucky

  13. Cora

  14. Cora

  15. Cora

  16. Nok

  17. Cora

  18. Cora

  19. Cora

  20. Leon

  21. Cora

  22. Cora

  23. Nok

  24. Cora

  25. Cora

  26. Mali

  27. Cora

  28. Cora

  29. Leon

  30. Cora

  31. Cora

  32. Lucky

  33. Cora

  34. Cora

  35. Rolf

  36. Cora

  37. Cora

  38. Mali

  39. Cora

  40. Cora

  41. Cora

  42. Cora

  43. Leon

  44. Cora

  45. Nok

  46. Cora

  47. Cora

  48. Lucky

  49. Cora

  50. Cora

  51. Cora

  52. Cora

  53. Rolf

  54. Cora

  55. Cora

  56. Cora

  About the Author

  Also by Megan Shepherd

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  1

  Cora

  THERE ARE CERTAIN THINGS the mind cannot comprehend. People fall into the same routines of thinking day after day: toss an apple and it falls to the ground. Pick a flower and it withers. Fall asleep in your bed and wake there the next morning.

  But this. This was like dropping an apple and having it fall toward the sun.

  Cora Mason dug her hands against her temples to steady the churning sea between her ears. She’d woken in a foggy daze minutes ago—or maybe it was hours—in what seemed to be an endless desert. Her bedroom windows were now rust-red dunes rising in hundred-foot swells. Her arched ceiling was a cloudless sky. Her lamp was a blazing sun searing her skin.

  It sure wasn’t Virginia.

  And it wasn’t like any desert she’d ever heard of. This wasn’t cacti and thirsty clumps of dry grass. This was an impossibly vast smear of red as far as she could see.

  Was she dreaming? In dreams, her mouth never felt this dry. When her father had first been elected senator, his security detail had trained Cora and her brother, Charlie, in what to do in the event of a kidnapping—stay in one place, don’t fight back, wait for help. But that had been a decade ago. She’d just barely started kindergarten. Did the same logic apply to a sixteen-year-old? There were no footsteps in the sand, no tire tracks, no indication at all of how she’d even gotten there.

  A starburst of pain streaked through her head. She hissed, pressing her temples harder. Only moments ago, she’d been in a car with Charlie, her down-lined parka pulled tight against the cold, cranking the heat as they drove to a ski resort to meet their parents. She’d had her feet on the dash, scrawling lyrics in a notebook.

  “What do you think of this line?” she had asked. “‘A stranger in my own life, a ghost behind my smile, not at home in paradise, not at home in hell’?”

  Charlie grinned as he took a left into the resort. “Not bad,” he’d said, “but a senator’s daughter can’t sing songs about hell.”

  Now, surrounded by sand, Cora felt panic clawing up her throat. She was supposed to be in that Jeep. She’d waited nearly two years for this. The four of them together as a family. No more custody battles. No politics and reporters. Just winter in Virginia. Parkas and snow. Her parents waiting with hot chocolate, not a couple anymore, but not bitter enemies either. She and Charlie had been close enough to see the resort over the next rise. Were her parents there, waiting, wondering how she’d vanished? Were they safe?

  The breeze stung her eyes, carrying a strange smell—granite and ozone. As she scraped her tongue with her teeth, she could taste the smell in the back of her throat. It triggered another memory. A dream. Hazy images of a man’s handsome face—bronzed skin, heavy brows, closed eyes—that danced in the back of her mind like a will-o’-the-wisp. The dream beckoned her, but the more she reached for it, the further away it floated, his beauty always frustratingly out of reach. Was he someone real that she could meet, and touch, and speak to? Or had she been unconscious for so long that she’d dreamed of an angel?

  Or . . .

  Am I dead?

  She hugged her legs close. Dead people didn’t sweat as much as she was. She was alive; she just had to figure out where. Stay in one place, the security guard had taught her. Wait for help. But if she stayed, she’d die of thirst or sunburn. She hugged her legs harder, fighting the urge to panic.

  Count backward. Ten. Nine. Eight . . .

  She forced herself to her feet. She’d find shade, or water, or some kind of town, and wait there for help.

  Seven. Six . . .

  She started walking. One more step after the last. One more dune after the last.

  Panic lingered in her joints, making her feel loose and unhinged, like her legs might walk away from the rest of her body. The blazing sun dried her tears into salty crusts that she tasted each time she licked her lips. She shaded her eyes and squinted upward, hoping for a helicopter, but there was only an eerie quiet.

  Where were her kidnappers? What was the point of leaving her in the middle of nowhere?

  Five . . .

  Ahead, the valley floor sloped sharply into a towering dune that was higher than all the others. She blinked up at the wall of sand, her body wobbling as she started to climb. Up, up, crawling more than walking, sliding back one step for every two forward. She brushed sweat off her forehead with her sleeve, then froze.

  The clothes she was dressed in weren’t her own.

  Her down parka and ski boots were gone. She was barefoot, with skinny black jeans and an oversized shirt for a band she’d never heard of, with thick black cuffs on each wrist. A punk look? She was more lace skirts and cotton dresses. The only concert she’d ever been to was her neighbor’s garage band, and she’d left with her hands over her ears after ten minutes.

  Now, she ran t
he tissue-soft fabric between her fingers. A white strap flashed beneath it. She peeked down her collar, and fear bubbled up her throat. Beneath her clothes were a white camisole and white panties. Not hers. Whoever had put her here had first dressed her like a paper doll, and then left her for dead. Her stomach lurched at the thought of strangers’ hands all over her. But whose hands? Who would do this?

  Don’t panic. Keep counting. Four . . .

  She was unhurt, as far as she could tell, except for the sunburn. But would she stay that way? She needed her father’s security guards. Or Charlie. All those years when they were kids, while her dad worked in Washington and her mother slept half the day away, Charlie had looked out for her. He was the one person she could always rely on, if you didn’t count Sadie, which you couldn’t because she was a dog. He’d told her old episodes of Twilight Zone as bedtime stories. He’d taught her where to hide her lyric notebook from their snooping mother. And six months ago, he’d picked her up when she was released from Bay Pines juvenile detention facility. He’d even punched a reporter who shoved a microphone in her face and asked how an upstanding senator’s daughter went from straight As to eighteen months for manslaughter.

  Three. Two . . .

  She pawed at her necklace like a lifeline. It held a charm for each member of her family: a theater mask for her mom; a golf club for her dad; a tiny airplane for Charlie, who wanted to be a pilot. All she’d wanted was for them to be together again, as close as the clinking charms on her necklace. She’d been so near to the resort where they would all sip hot chocolate like a family again—but her fingers grazed only air.

  The necklace was gone.

  Sweat chilled on the back of her neck. She threw a glance over her shoulder, suddenly overtaken with the feeling that she was being followed, but the dunes were empty. Breathing harder, she climbed the final few feet to the top of the highest dune. Please, let there be a road. A telephone. A donkey. The only thing she desperately didn’t want to see was another dune, and another, and another, stretching forever.

  She crested the dune with burning lungs, brushed the sand from her hands, and squeezed her eyes shut. She took a deep breath, and finished counting backward.

  One.

  She opened her eyes.

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  2

  Cora

  FROM THIS HIGH, CORA had a 360-degree view. The desert stretched in choppy waves behind her, but to her left was a field of rich black soil, and fruit trees stretching their branches toward the sun, and rows of rainbow-colored vegetables: purple eggplant, yellow squash, red tomatoes, golden corn.

  A farm?

  Cora crumpled to the ground as pain ripped through her skull. She cried out, squeezing her temples. Had she been drugged? Is that what the dream of her beautiful angel had been, a hallucination? She blinked furiously, but the farm didn’t go away.

  Count backward.

  Ten . . .

  She forced herself to look to the right, and nearly choked. Opposite the farm, a stony outcropping covered with sea-green lichen sloped into a valley of windswept trees. Enormous oaks, and firs, and evergreens; all covered with a dusting of white. Not like the leafless winter forests of Virginia, but an arctic tundra. A cold breeze blew, carrying a snowflake that settled on Cora’s sunburned palm. She shoved to her feet.

  Screw counting.

  She shook her hand wildly, pacing. Even more impossible was the slice of water directly in front of her. Gently lapping waves stretched to an ocean bay that made her stomach plummet like she was sinking. She spit out the phantom taste of salt water. An ocean didn’t belong here. She didn’t belong here.

  Sweat poured down her temples, despite the tundra wind. On the far side of the bay, mountains loomed, and even what looked like a cityscape. A desert, a farm, an ocean, a forest—habitats that couldn’t exist right next to one another. It had to be a secret government biosphere experiment. Or a rich maniac’s whim. Or virtual reality.

  The granite-and-ozone smell clogged in her nose, and she steadied herself until the sensation passed. She wasn’t a little girl—she could handle this. She had to. As her breath slowed, a dark shape appeared at the bottom of the hill, where the ocean lapped against the farm’s edge.

  If she squinted, the shape looked like a person.

  “Hey!” She tumbled down the path. Her feet tangled in the grass underfoot as the trail led between rows of peppers bursting with ripeness.

  “Hey! I need help!”

  The path gave way to a small beach. The person—a dark-haired girl in a white sundress—must have been panicked, because she was curled in the sand, frozen with fear.

  “Hey!” Cora stopped short at the edge of the sea, as black-deep water and reality caught up to her all at once. The girl wasn’t curled in panic. Facedown in the surf, hair matted, water billowing around motionless legs.

  “Oh, no.” Cora squeezed her eyes shut. “Get up. Please.”

  When she opened her eyes, the girl was still motionless. She forced herself to step into the surf, wincing as it swallowed her ankles, and dropped to her knees. In Bay Pines, one of the delinquents had suffocated herself with a plastic shopping bag. Cora had been writing song lyrics in the hallway as the police wheeled the body away: glassy eyes, blue lips.

  Just like this girl.

  Except this girl also had angry bruises on her shoulder, like someone had grabbed her. For a few moments, all Cora could hear was blood pulsing through her ears. A tattoo flashed on the girl’s neck beneath the bruises, a collection of black dots that meant nothing to Cora and never would, because she could never ask the girl about them. Behind her, the forest was perfectly silent, with only the soft falling snow to tell her that the world hadn’t stopped.

  She stood. The water seemed colder. Deeper. Maybe those bruises meant the girl had been murdered. Or maybe the girl had drowned trying to escape. Either way, Cora didn’t want to be next.

  She raced out of the water. Stay in one place. Don’t fight back. That was the advice she’d gotten as a kindergartener. But how could she stay in one place, with a dead body?

  Footsteps broke the silence. She whirled, searching the spaces between the trees.

  There.

  White clothes flashed between the branches. Two legs. A person. Cora’s muscles tightened to run—or fight.

  A boy trudged out of the forest.

  He was about her age. Cute, in a messy way. He wore jeans and a rumpled white shirt beneath a leather jacket, looking liked he’d stumbled out of a pool hall after a night of loud music and beer. As out of place as Cora—though he was barefoot, like she was. His dark hair fell around brown eyes that looked as surprised to see her as she was to see him.

  The boy broke the tension first. “Aren’t you . . .” His words died when he saw the body. “Is she dead?”

  He took a step forward. Cora scrambled backward, ready to bolt, and he stopped. He popped a knuckle in his left hand. Strong hands, Cora noted. Hands that could have held a girl under water.

  “Back away,” Cora threatened. “If you touch me, I’ll claw your eyes out.”

  Sure enough, that stopped him. He dragged a hand over his mouth, eyes a little glassy. “Wait. Do you think I killed her?”

  “She has bruises on her arm. She struggled with someone.”

  “Well, it wasn’t me! Look, I don’t know what’s going on, but I didn’t kill anyone. My clothes are dry. If I’d done it, I’d be sopping wet.” He paced to the edge of the surf, where the water brushed his toes—not afraid of the water, like she’d been—and rubbed his temples. “She must have fifty pounds on you, so I doubt you killed her, but someone did. We should get out of here before they come back. Find a phone or a radio. We can try that barn.”

  A phone. She longed to hear her father’s voice on the other end, telling her that it was all a misunderstanding . . . but a
girl was dead. Whoever the girl was, those bruises were more than just a misunderstanding to her.

  “I watch TV,” Cora said. “I know how this goes. You act all friendly and then strangle me behind the barn. I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  He rubbed a hand over his face, digging deep into his scalp, as though his head splintered with pain too. “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t TV. There’s no one but me and a murderer, so I suggest we help each other.”

  Cora eyed him warily. Her first day in juvie, a gap-toothed girl had offered her a contraband Coca-Cola—a welcome present, the girl had said, to help her adjust. Two days later, the girl had punched her in the ribs and stolen her iPod.

  You might have grown up in a rich-girl bubble, the gap-toothed girl had told her, but in here you have to learn the rules of the real world. First off: never trust a stranger—especially one who comes offering help.

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  3

  Lucky

  AFTER LUCKY WOKE IN a snowdrift with a splitting headache, wearing someone else’s clothes and missing his granddad’s watch, he’d narrowed down the possibilities: either he was going insane, or someone at the mechanic’s shop had dropped a wrench on his head and this was some freakish afterlife. Now, standing opposite the girl with the wheat-blond hair, he knew.

  He was definitely dead. And not just dead—he was in hell.

  That was the only way to explain Cora Mason.

  It had taken him a few moments to recognize her. Ever since waking, it had been all he could do to put one foot in front of the other, fighting the knife of pain in his head. Then, suddenly, there was a beautiful girl with hair so light it matched the sand. She might have been a vision, except visions didn’t dress like they were headed to a rave.

  Then she’d looked up, and her features had rearranged themselves, and shit—he knew her. The senator’s daughter accused of manslaughter. He’d followed her story for the last two years, surrounded by her painfully pretty face on television, read reports about how the accident tore apart one of the country’s top political families.