16
Nok
NOK HAD BEEN STANDING ankle-deep in slime for the last two hours.
The day before, when Lucky had suggested they search the habitats, this wasn’t what she’d had in mind. Lucky and Cora had gone to the forest. Leon had set out on his own for the mountains. Why she and Rolf had been given the swamp environment to explore, she’d never know. Next time she’d request someplace dry and warm, like the farm.
She looked at the sky between the breaks in the trees. Perfect and blue, but no birds. Around them, set into mossy banks, black panels watched. She shivered, thinking of the beast with the gleaming skin who had called himself the Caretaker. He looked like a man, but his shimmering bronze face reminded her of the iridescence of lizard scales. When she’d been a little girl, the monk in her village would read stories from a leather-bound copy of the Ramakien. There was an illustration of the god Phra Phai, with blue skin and a celestial beauty that masked his treacherous nature. That painting had always both terrified and enchanted Nok. That’s how she thought of the Caretaker, as Phra Phai. God of wind, giver of life—and of death.
Ahead, Rolf was nearly invisible among the trees.
“Hey, wait!” she called.
Rolf came tromping back through the slime. “Sorry.” He held out a twitchy hand to help her across a knot of roots, and her mood softened. How easy it was to manipulate boys like him. Shed a few tears, and they’d do anything.
Nok rubbed her arm, looking at the slime swallowing her feet. She’d gone along with Delphine’s lessons because she’d had no choice: Delphine controlled every aspect of their lives. The flophouse was supposed to keep them “safe” and the pathetically sparse food was supposed to keep them “thin.” Instead it kept them starved and enslaved as they were driven around to shoots in an ancient black van with sticky seats.
And Nok had been good. She could look into the camera and give the man on the other side exactly what he wanted. A smile full of promise, an alluring tilt of her chin. But each time, resentment had grown in her, bit by bit, like a cancer.
She blinked. Delphine isn’t here. For once, she didn’t need coy smiles. She could just be herself.
“No . . . I’m sorry,” she said sincerely. “I shouldn’t have snapped at you. It’s this headache.”
“We’ll turn back soon.” Rolf helped her trod though the sticky mud. “Wouldn’t want to stay out here after dark.”
“Seriously,” Nok muttered. “We’d probably wake up in the morning to find the Kindred had dressed us in Halloween costumes.”
Rolf snickered, and Nok gave him a surprised look. She hadn’t been joking.
They continued through the swamp, as Rolf pointed out each clump of green muck and gave her its scientific name—alder twig, cattail, loosestrife. She’d never met a boy more in love with slime; it made her smile as much as it made her roll her eyes.
“Look!” He slushed toward a cluster of fungus. “Pleurotus ostreatus. I didn’t know they grew in wetlands.”
“Swamp mushrooms.” Nok feigned rubbing a hungry stomach. “Mmm.”
He grinned.
They kept walking. She’d warmed up to him, she realized, as she watched him take careful steps ahead of her to avoid crushing any plants. Neuroses and fungus and all. She didn’t mind that he was four inches shorter than her and looked like he hadn’t seen daylight in weeks. Handsome boys were insufferable, always checking themselves out in mirrors. Judging by the cowlick in his red hair, Rolf hadn’t glanced in a single mirror since they’d arrived.
“What will you get with the token?” he asked over his shoulder.
She patted her dress pocket, where a heavy bronze token rested. Rolf had solved the swamp puzzle after only ten minutes. It involved listening for a bullfrog croak (it had a metallic ring to it—definite not real), then searching for water bubbles and reaching into the silty bottom to get a token before the bubbles stopped. “It isn’t really my choice, yeah? We have to save up to buy something Cora can make into a weapon.”
He glanced at her. “Well, if you could choose anything, what would it be?”
She took another slushy step through the slime. “More nail polish?”
No, stupid, she cursed herself. She didn’t care a quid for nail polish—but Delphine was still hiding in some deep pocket of her brain, telling her to say what he wanted to hear.
“Ah, scrap that. I’d take the radio,” Nok answered, more confidently. “The red one in the arcade. I liked the way the knobs formed a little face.”
Her first few months in the London flophouse, she’d both loathed her parents and missed them painfully. The only comfort she had found was a little shortwave radio she’d discovered crammed on a bookshelf, which she could tune to a Thai station. Now she had a feeling she would never see home again.
Her foot sank deeper in the slime, which splashed the hem of her dress. She cringed. Rolf rubbed the back of his neck, blinking a little fast.
“I could try to carry you,” he offered.
She snorted. She’d squish the poor boy. “It’s fine, really.”
As they kept walking, Nok wondered what kind of a baby they would have, if they did go through with the Kindred’s insane plan. Maybe with her looks and his brains, it would be some super child. Or else with his twitches and her height, it would be the most awkward thing ever. She pressed a hand to her stomach, feeling sick. Were they really going to have to go through with it? Sixteen years old and trapped in an alien zoo didn’t exactly make her feel ready to be a mother.