Hunter

by Emmy Chandler

  They don’t look like they believe me, but the one with the pack taps something on his wrist and relays what I said to another squad of guards evidently searching the east side of the enclosure.

  “Levin, you need to hold still,” the squad leader says. “We’re going to figure out how to get you out of here.” He stands and waves to the guard carrying my pack. “Help me get this thing off of him.”

  “I’ll call for backup,” Cooper says. “And a stretcher.”

  I can’t let them do that. I need them to march me back toward the Resort, so Maci has a chance to get away before someone comes for the body. Or bodies.

  “It’s too late for him,” I say. “If you move that hound, you’ll rip his throat out. But if you don’t, he’s going to suffocate. His throat’s already compressed, and the tissue is starting to swell.” I can’t actually see well enough in the dark to know that, but it seems logical. And it doesn’t matter if the other guards believe me. I only need Levin to believe. “Nothing you can do for him now but say goodbye.”

  “Shut the fuck up.” Cooper lifts the butt of his rifle over my head again, and I stare up at him, unflinching.

  Levin’s twitching becomes a frantic, terrified struggle on the edge of my vision.

  “Hold still, man!” The squad leader squats next to him again and grabs Levin’s arm, pressing it into the ground. “Help me hold him still!”

  The guard with the pack kneels on Levin’s other side, trying to stop him from hurting himself, but it’s too late. Panicked, and obviously in pain, Levin turns his head, ripping his own flesh open in Lucky’s immobile jaw.

  Blood pours onto the ground.

  “Fuck, man, hold still!” The guard with the pack digs a shirt out and tries to press it to the wound, but there’s no way to apply pressure around the metal hound’s teeth.

  In less than a minute, Levin’s struggles weaken into twitches. Then his limbs go still.

  “Cancel the backup,” the squad leader says. “Tell the shuttle to come prepared for two bodies.” He stands, then motions for Cooper to help him get me to my feet. “And let’s haul this bastard in.”

  As they pull me up and march me through the woods to the south, I can’t help but smile, knowing Maci is still out there.

  Knowing she still has a shot.

  19

  MACI

  I hate myself as I cower behind a tree trunk, listening to the guards cuff Callum. Listening to the crack of a rifle against his skull, and the thud when he hits the ground.

  When he starts talking again, I press one fist to my mouth to hold back a sob of relief. He’s injured and in custody, yet he still has the presence of mind to send the guards into the northeast quadrant of the enclosure on a fool’s errand to find me.

  This is all my fault. I shouldn’t have left him at the cabin. I should have found some way to convince him to help me. If he’d been with me, he would have heard the guards coming in time for us to hide or run. He wouldn’t have been dragged off to his own execution.

  He wants me to run. He sacrificed himself so I’d have that opportunity. I know that. But that’s even less an option for me now than it was before he gave himself up.

  I won’t abandon him to die here.

  When I can no longer hear the guards, I hold my breath and peek out from behind the tree. I don’t see any movement. Not even leaves blowing in the wind. It’s as if even the night has gone still, in sympathy for my loss.

  I’m going to get Callum back. I’m going to free Danna and Graham, and everyone else forced to live and die here for the entertainment of men and women too rich to pay for their own crimes. But that’s going to be infinitely harder now.

  The woods are still full of guards. I have virtually no supplies. And Lucky is…

  That damn dog was just a hunk of metal. He didn’t feel anything for me, or even know I existed, so it’s ridiculous of me to feel bad about his death.

  He was never even really alive.

  Yet tears fill my eyes as I kneel next to him, taking in the laser wounds riddling his sides and legs. He was the perfect combination of tech and pet. And he saved my life twice.

  At least he took two of the bastards with him.

  Unfortunately, my loss of Lucky has a more practical consequence; he was my way through the gate into the Resort. The entire pack of robo-dogs has permission to enter and leave the enclosure in their mission to help hunters track down inmates, as well as permission to enter the “kennel” in the underground level of the Resort. Without his proximity chip…

  Wait.

  My legs itch to flee the scene before the shuttle arrives to pick up the bodies and finds me here. But I fight that urge as I sink onto my knees next to the dog, careful to avoid looking at the two dead guards, one of whom seems to have ripped his own throat open on Lucky’s frozen jaw.

  I tap the screen on my wrist to wake it up, then access the local copy of Lucky’s programming, which I saved to the wrist com so I could transmit any change to his orders through the proximity chip rather than having to access the system. I tap through the menus until I find an interactive blueprint of his design. It’s no longer interactive, of course, because some asshole guard shot a hole right through the processor in his head. But it’ll still show me what I need to know.

  Which is the fact that the hound’s proximity chip is located in his tail, just below the transmitter that connects to the security system via a network of satellites orbiting the planet.

  I can’t take the hound with me. But I should be able to take his tail.

  “I’m sorry, Lucky,” I whisper as I stand and circle the poor dead dog. “I hate to add to the indignity of your current position, but I really need what you’re packing in the back.” And without any tools, I have no choice but to wrench his tail from his body. Which turns out to be easier said than done.

  His metal casing is virtually impenetrable by anything other than water or laser beam, evidently.

  When my first two attempts to pull his tail off fail, I sigh with a glance at the sky, to make sure there’s no shuttle on approach, then I brace one foot on poor Lucky’s hind quarters and grip his rear appendage with both hands, near its base. I bend it back and forth a few times, getting a feel for the built-in flexibility of half a dozen joints, which will make it harder to take the entire thing intact. Then I take a deep breath and jerk his tail to the left. Hard.

  The metal snaps beneath my hand, and when I let go, the tail hangs from the wires connecting it to the hound’s electronic innards.

  Perfect.

  I take the knife from my belt, then pull gently on Lucky’s tail until the wires are taut, which gives me about the length of my thumb to work with. Then I cut the wires as close as I can to the body of the hound, with one swift sawing motion.

  The tail is now useless, separated from its power source. But with the exposed wires, I should be able to connect it to another power source.

  The ideal would be the dog’s battery, which is probably still intact in his chest, but I can’t crack open his metal shell without some pretty hefty power tools. However, my wrist com has an internal, solar-charged power source, as do the wrist coms the dead guards are wearing.

  I slide Lucky’s tail into the pocket of my stolen pants, then I squat next to the corpse without a metal hound crushing its arm and use his still warm finger to disconnect his wrist com from the system. Killing all incoming and outgoing signals. Then I program my own fingerprints into the screen, just in case. By the time I’ve pulled the com from the corpse’s wrist, I can hear the approach of a shuttle—not with my ears, but with that deeper sense inside me.

  Moving frantically now, I search both corpses’ pockets and shove the treasures into my own without truly processing what I’ve found. Then I stand, say a silent goodbye to my poor dead dog, and take off into the woods to the southeast. Because what Callum told the guards has surely sent anyone in the eastern half of the enclosure toward the north.

  Hopefully they’
ve already passed me by entirely.

  The hike sucks. I don’t dare follow the trail left by Callum and the guards for fear that they’ll hear me. By the time I realize they probably didn’t hike all this way—they couldn’t have gotten here this quickly without being dropped from a shuttle or carried partway into the woods on something with a motor—I’ve already veered too far south to take the direct route.

  I also don’t dare try to find any of the cabins we stayed in on our way north, because if the guards have gotten smart at all, there’s someone stationed in front of every single one of them. Which means that near dawn, when the adrenaline has worn off and I’m stumbling around again, a danger to myself with the noise I can’t seem to stop making, I have nowhere safe to stop and rest.

  I nearly cry when I spot a familiar set of straight posts through the trees. There’s no one stationed at the hunting stand, either because they don’t expect me to take refuge in such an open place, or because they don’t expect me to have turned south, when my best chance of escape is through the northern gate.

  My legs shake as I climb the ladder, and I know I can’t afford to sleep for very long. But I can’t keep going without rest.

  Yet as I lie on my back on the platform with one hand in my pocket, gripping Lucky’s tail, all I can think about is the fact that Callum’s probably already at the Resort, and I could still be a day away, on foot. What if he’s already been executed?

  I stare up at the crimson foliage, painted an even brighter red by the sun shining through the leaves. Some of them are the color of blood, dark red and freshly shed.

  This whole planet is the color of blood. From the guard station, Rhodon looks like a gaping wound against the velvety blackness of space. And that’s exactly what it is. A wound inflicted upon humanity’s soul, infected and left to fester.

  I fall asleep with that certainty preying on my heart, and in my dreams, I’m forced to watch as Callum is executed, over and over again.

  When I wake, the sun has set again. The clock on my wrist com says I slept for more than five hours. Those were five hours I couldn’t afford to waste, yet they gave me sleep I couldn’t function without.

  I climb down from the tower and relieve myself, then I eat one of my last remaining protein bars as I walk, grateful for every puddle of moonlight. The sun rises on the start of my seventh day in the enclosure, my third without Callum. And still I hike.

  Around late afternoon, I eat the last of my food, and I’m trying to decide whether or not to look for some place safe enough for me to steal a few more hours’ rest when I see sunlight glint off something between the trees ahead. Due south. My exhausted eyes refuse to bring the glare into focus, so I rub them. Then I blink several times and try again.

  Metal. That’s sunlight glinting off metal.

  I push aside a clump of brush, and that glare comes into focus. It’s the wall! I’ve finally made it to the southern end of the enclosure, and there, beyond the gate and the broad, flat lawn, stands the Resort itself.

  My heart pounds so hard the sound echoes in my ears and bounces around in my skull. One of those windows looks into the room they put me in, naked and terrified. Another woman could be there right now, just as naked and terrified, yet even more scared of fighting back, after I was given a death sentence and sent into the enclosure.

  If my idea works, I can end this for the women in the dorm. For the men who’ve spent months in small basement cells. Yet now that it’s time to put my idea into action, I feel oddly paralyzed. The risk seems much more real now that I’m staring at the rear of the Resort. At the guards stationed on the back porch—surely just a fraction of the armed men and women waiting to deliver me, stripped and trembling, to Scott Hansen’s son for my execution.

  But Callum is in there. Callum, who saved my life repeatedly. Callum, who is gruff, and impatient, and short-tempered, except when I’m naked, when he’s fiercely passionate, but gentle and generous.

  If he’s still alive in there, I will damn well get him out.

  With my pulse still racing in my ears, I settle onto the ground behind a clump of brush, then I pull Lucky’s tail and the dead guard’s wrist com from my pocket and get to work.

  Prying open the back of the screen feels like a waste of perfectly good tech, but I don’t have any use for the second wrist com, other than the juice I can get from its solar-charged battery—a thin disk about the circumference of my thumb, which still has thirty percent of its max power, even though it hasn’t seen the light of day since it’s been in my possession.

  I remove the battery and connect it to the power wire protruding from the base of Lucky’s dismembered antenna, and I can tell from a single blink of the red light at the end of the tail that it’s getting juice. But short of connecting to the security system, which would give me away, there’s no way to know that the chip is working until I try it out.

  As the sun starts to sink beneath the horizon, I take a deep breath to steel my spine. Then I connect to the security system and use my illicit access to stop the lights along the top of the wall from automatically coming on at sundown. With any luck, I’ll have enough time to get through the gate unnoticed before the “glitch” is reported and investigated. And hopefully before guards show up, drawn by the signal I’ve had no choice but to transmit.

  After that, things get tricky.

  As soon as it’s dark enough, I sneak through the shadows toward the unlit gate. After several days hidden by the canopy, leaving the relative safety of the forest feels like stepping from cool spring grass onto a bed of hot coals, and there’s a part of me that thinks I’m insane for even considering what I’m about to do. I shove that part deep down and race toward the gate, clutching Lucky’s tail in my left hand, Hansen’s knife in my right.

  The end of the tail flashes red, and the gate starts to roll open. As soon as the gap is wide enough, I turn sideways and shimmy through, sending up a silent prayer that no one on duty saw that flash of light in the dark.

  The gate begins to roll closed as soon as I’m through it, and I shove the tail into my pocket as I turn right, sticking to the shadows along the fence. The rust-colored grass of the back lawn feels plush beneath the thin soles of my shoes after days of walking on uneven terrain littered by roots and branches, but there’s no time to linger and enjoy the relative comfort.

  If Warden Shaw has someone monitoring the security system, they know that minutes ago, I was right outside the gate. When they notice that the perimeter lights are out, they’ll probably realize I came through it.

  My heart thuds in my ears as I follow the fence around the edge of the lawn, until finally I arrive at the back of the huge building.

  The guards are so close now that I can make out their faces and hear their voices. They’ve realized the lights aren’t working and are arguing over who should have to report the malfunction to Commander Harris, who’s evidently under enough stress to want to kill the messenger. Hopefully due to the fact that I’m still at large. And that Callum and Lucky killed several of the guards.

  While they report the broken lights, I sneak past the back porch and down a concrete ramp to the kennel door—the only Resort entrance the hounds have access to, according to my wrist com.

  To my relief, thanks to Lucky’s tail, the door slides open silently as soon as I approach it, admitting me into a steel and concrete room that looks more like a shuttle mechanic’s service bay than an actual dog kennel. Wall screens are mounted above several work stations, which are littered with spare parts and diagnostic machines for maintaining the hounds. The remaining robo-dogs are lined up along the far wall, each standing on a thin black pad that looks like a giant version of a wrist com’s charging surface.

  The two nearest pads are empty, because Lucky and his partner are no longer with us.

  The door at the other end of the kennel should lead into the rest of the building. But I can’t get to that door without passing a glass-walled control room manned by a guard wearing a dog-s
haped insignia on the shoulder of his uniform. He has his back to me, staring at a screen built into part of the glass wall, but he’ll see me if I try to cross the room.

  Greer. It has to be.

  A man named Greer is listed as the master of hounds in the programming, and the fact that he’s standing there unharmed, despite presumably having a locator ID chip just like the rest of the guards, tells me that the hounds are all off-line. Probably because he figured out that if he activated them, they’d kill him.

  If the frustrated look on his face is any indication, as he stares at the screen in the glass room, he’s currently trying to undo my takeover of his department.

  I need to get past him.

  Wait. No. I need to get into that glass room. Greer is a manager, which means he’ll have security access at least one level higher than Dalton did. But the minute he sees me, he’ll draw his gun and call for backup—if he doesn’t shoot me on sight.

  Unless he doesn’t recognize me as the girl from the enclosure. Which will only be possible if I’m not wearing clothes stolen from a guard and he’s not looking at my face.

  Damn it.

  This is a really dumb idea. But it’s the only one I have…

  20

  MACI

  I duck behind a tall tool chest near the door and quietly strip out of my clothes. As terrified as I am by the thought of what I’m about to do, the hardest part is sliding the wrist com off my arm and burying it in the pile of discarded clothes. Underwear and all.

  Though I’m now completely nude, it’s the loss of the tech, rather than my clothes, that makes me feel vulnerable.