A slight shake of the head and then he sets his eyes on mine, a hardness flitting across his face. “Explain to me . . . all of this,” he says, his arms floating above him momentarily like a ballerina. “Explain the reason for this training orientation. After all, who needs training to hunt down hepers? Why the idiotic lectures, workshops, training sessions? And explain the festivities, the fanfare of the Gala, explain the reason for the media, reporters, and photographers flooding into this Institute as we speak. And explain why on earth we are arming the hepers with FLUNs.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t know.”
“Don’t say sorry,” he says. And he waits.
“I don’t know.”
“Not so smart after all. Are you?” His upper lip snarls up reproachfully, exposing the lower half of his fangs. “Fact is, you’re just like everyone else around here, all the incompetent staff who need to be hand-fed intelligence, my intelligence. Clueless. Brainless. Empty-headed.” His eyes stare out at me, flaring down his nose and upturned chin. “Empty as this Institute,” he says, bitterness souring his words. “Empty as this Institute,” he says again, quieter.
He turns his back to me, stares out of the window. When he speaks, the cratered emptiness of his voice surprises me. “It wasn’t always this way. The hallways used to hum with foot traffic; classrooms spilled over with the very brightest first-rate minds; laboratories were hives of activity, brimming with experiments conducted by top-notch scientists. And the heper pens! They were filled, from top to bottom, with dozens of hepers, young to old. Our breeding programme – my breeding programme – was about to really take off. There was energy about this place, a spark running along the walls. We had purpose, recognition, admiration, respect, even envy. We had everything.” He stops speaking, stops moving, his chest so still, it is as if he has stopped breathing. “Everything but self-control.”
And then his eyes turn to the sentries and staff standing stiffly around us, his icy stare pinning each of them like moths to the board.
“Until one day, we had virtually no hepers left,” he continues, turning to face me. “This will be the very last Heper Hunt. The Ruler knows this. But he is most unwilling to have what’s been a popularity cow for him come to an end. So he has devised a way to keep feeding off this Hunt for years to come, in perpetuity, even.”
Ashley June, off to my right, hasn’t moved. Not a sound out of her.
“A book. A non-fiction account of this Hunt. The public has always been insanely curious about the Hunt. The good citizens, who salivate over every detail of the Heper Hunt, will keep this book on the best-seller list for decades. And this book will not be a dry journalistic work. No; rather – and here is the stroke of genius – it will be a memoir penned by the winner. The winner of this Hunt.”
He strokes his cheek with the backs of his fingers, up and down, up and down. “Do you see how everything fits together now? Do you see why we have a training period? the Gala? the media flooding the Institute?”
And I see it. It all makes sense now. “It’s all for the book,” I whisper. “To draw out the Hunt, stretch it out to a week-long event, to provide material for the book. To make it all the more exciting. To make the stakes that much higher. The experience of the Hunt all the more enhanced, the victory all the more rapturous.”
The Director nods me on.
“I mean, the training period alone will take up five chapters. And it’ll be a chance to flesh out the hunters. The competitiveness between us, the conflicts within, all that will only be grist for the mill. It’ll build up anticipation, leading up to the Gala, then, to the climax, the Hunt itself. The book will practically write itself.”
The Director’s eyes shine with reluctant approval. “And the FLUNs? Why arm the hepers with FLUNs? Go on, go on, you’re doing well so far.”
“For excitement. No, more than that.” I pause, thinking. “To slow the Hunt down. Because these are the very last hepers in existence. What a waste to devour them into extinction in mere seconds. Chomp, chomp, gone, scarfed down in a frantic feeding frenzy. It’ll be almost anticlimactic. No, better to draw out the experience, to kill off the hepers slowly, one at a time. One chapter stretched into three.” I fight the urge to furrow my brow. “But that’s possible only if the Hunt is slowed down – by arming the hepers. It’ll increase the drama, the excitement, the pay-off for the eventual winner. And then the last chapter will be amazing. Drama to the hilt as the winning hunter drinks down the very last drops of heper blood. Down, down his throat . . . into oblivion.” I look at Ashley June, then at the Director, understanding at last. “Everything is for the book. For the Ruler.”
The Director is staring with a look of genuine surprise, his eyes wide, his jaw drooped and slack. Then his head snaps forward, then back again, a sharp staccato movement that cracks his neck. “Well done,” he says. “You really are quite the surprise.” His neck cracks loudly one more time, a bone-snapping clap that ricochets down the library.
Then he pauses: his eyes suddenly narrow into a dark and intense disdain. “And so that brings us back to you. The one thing I cannot figure out. How do you fit into all of this? And why the directive I received just a few minutes ago, again concerning you?”
“What directive, sir?”
“Why is the Palace so interested in you?” he asks, ignoring my question. “Everything else, I’ve figured out.” And every last vestige of brightness in his eyes is flung away. Only razors of darkness stand in his eyes now, so keen on mine, I feel them slicing into my eyeballs.
“I don’t know.”
“You’re lying,” he says, caressing his forearm with the backs of his fingers as if stroking a hairless kitten. “Tell me. Now. Tell me what’s going on. The Palace thinks it’s so smart with these random directives, thinks it can keep me in the dark. Every other day comes some new directive willy-nilly, some new twist on this Hunt. They want to keep me on my toes, they want to keep me in the dark. But I have my ways of finding out.” His words drop out of his mouth, sharp icicles falling into a dark canyon. “And of coercing it out, if necessary.”
My fingers, hung by my side, begin to tremble. I press them against the side of my leg. “I don’t—”
“Tell me!” His voice booms off the walls. Even as his words echo down the length of the floor, I see the anger rising in his eyes. He begins to move towards me—
“I know why,” Ashley June suddenly whispers.
The Director stops. Everyone turns to look at her.
She looks at me briefly, as if about to commit an unforgivable betrayal, then says: “It’s because” – her voice lowers even more – “he’s different.”
“What do you mean?” the Director asks.
She is standing in the shadows; now she steps forward, into a splash of moonlight. “He’s exactly what the Palace is looking for.”
Hesitation. Then: “Explain.”
“You said the winner will pen this book. So they need someone who can write. And with the media here, there’re going to be magazine interviews, TV talk show appearances, radio interviews after the Hunt. So they need someone well-spoken. But Heper Hunt winners have typically been loutish brutes, masters of physicality but not exactly the most articulate or cerebral of people. The Palace needs someone who is well-spoken, thoughtful, restrained, detail-oriented.” She flicks her chin in my direction. “And with him, you’ve got all that. I know: I’ve been his classmate for years. He’s always been an academic star, unwittingly. His intelligence is effortless. He’ll be terrific. In press interviews, in front of the camera, penning the memoir. And the Palace knows this; it sounds like they’ve thoroughly vetted him. Of all the hunters here, he’s by far the most media-ready.”
The Director turns his eyes on me, scrutinising me as if from a newly discovered angle.
“He might be a bit on the shy, quiet side,” Ashley June continues, “but even that’s a plus: it’s a quietness that’s compelling and attractive. Girls love it.” She pauses. “Trust me on that one.”
The Director shifts his stare away to look outside, a flicker of annoyance flitting across his face. “Who’s been giving you all this intel?”
“Nobody. It’s just guesswork, that’s all.” Alertness shines in her eyes. “Nothing you haven’t already thought of, I’m sure.”
“I see.” His left hand, glowing with a suffused paleness, strokes one of the attaché cases. His bony fingers lilt on the handle, brushing it with fear and disdain. “So you’re just guessing – you could be way off base.”
“Maybe. But I don’t think so.” She pauses. “But what about me? Why am I here?”
The Director raises his eyes to her and scratches his wrist in long, lethargic strokes. His pleasure is easily evident. “You are what we would call Plan B.”
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Pity that. And to think you’d been doing so well.” The Director sniffs. “Evidently, you’re just like everyone else, always needing me to spell things out for them. An hour ago, I received yet another directive. Concerning both you and him. You are Plan B. In case Plan A – him – fails to pan out, in case he fails to execute, you’re the safety net. Something goes wrong during the Hunt, he fails to deliver or is taken out of the action, you’re there to win the Hunt. You’re the insurance policy, the understudy winner.”
“I don’t think it’ll work.”
“But of course it will!” he says, mild irritation seeping into his voice. “You’re every bit the package he is. Smart – though I’m beginning to have my doubts; verbose – though a little too much, I’m coming to think; and very knowledgeable about hepers. They’ve told me about you, little girl, about all the heper clubs and societies you’ve been involved in over the years. Your heper knowledge will come in handy during post-Hunt interviews and whatnot. And besides, you’re quite the eye candy. You’d look good on camera, in photographs. Your pretty face would grace the covers of instant best sellers quite well. Yes, I can see it now.”
“You need to think about the bigger picture of the Hunt,” Ashley June says, her voice steely.
“I need to think? . . .”
Ashley June is silent: the silence of regret.
“You think you know better than me?” The words pepper her like pellets out of a shotgun, rancid with scorn. “Don’t tell me what I need to think, little girl.”
The Director closes his eyelids, his long eyelashes delicately interlacing. And with that, the temperature in the library, already low, plummets. Beams of moonlight freeze into pillars of transparent grey ice. I shoot a look at her. She knows she’s crossed a line – her skin is even paler than before, and her eyelids are fluttering.
The Director’s eyes draw down to the two attaché cases. He pulls them closer. “One of you’ll need to win the Heper Hunt for this plan to succeed. That’s what you wanted to tell me, isn’t it, little girl? Please. Don’t presume to share with me your pedestrian ideas. Because I already knew that. In order for you to grace the covers of magazines, to appear on talk shows, to be the talk of the town, one of you must win. Because yes, I’m well aware that there’re other hunters, many of whom are not only as desirous to win, but far more capable of doing so.”
He presses a button and the attaché cases open with a snap. He spins them around for us to see inside. A FLUN inside each case. The Director takes one out. “Nobody knows what really happens out there in the Vast during the Hunt, how dirty it can get. For one, the Hunt has never been videotaped: videocameras are too heavy, and besides, cameramen will simply throw the cameras down and join in the Hunt, unable to resist. And nobody really cares how . . . unsportsmanlike things can degenerate. Hunters have been known to . . . well, resort to dirty tricks. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, and the more dog it is, the more interesting it’ll be to read about later. Use these FLUNs on the other hunters. Everyone will think it was just the hepers who shot them. Somewhere in the Vast when you’re far removed from the Institute. One FLUN for each of you, three shots in each. Should be enough, no?”
“And what if we take out all the other hunters?” Ashley June asks. Her voice is quiet but not hesitant. “And it’s only the two of us left? What should we do?”
The Director’s reaction is almost violent. His hands cross together at the wrists, and he scratches deep white lines into the soft give of his wrists, his head snapping back like a sideways pogo stick. “What do I really care?” Beads of delirious light shoot out of his eyes. “What do I really care so long as one of you wins? Oh, you silly girl!” He suddenly stops moving as if remembering something; he looks at both of us sternly. “Only know this: I want a clear winner. It’s always better that way. No ties. The public does not like ambiguity. If it comes down to just the two of you . . . well . . . there can be only one. You will know what to do. Correct?”
Neither Ashley June nor I answer.
And he starts scratching again, long, slow strokes. “I see. I see. I see that I have not made myself clear. That I have not fully conveyed to you just how vested I am in the success of this Hunt. That I have not made clear how important this is to me, how one of you – and only one – must win the Hunt.” He places the tips of his forefingers on each eyebrow, runs them down their thin, soft arches. “Many people think I have a dream job here at the Institute. To be able to work in such proximity to the hepers. Those people are ignorant fools. This place is hell.”
His face turns graven, darkness shadowing over him. “A successful Hunt would give me a chance to leave this place,” he whispers. “This purgatory where heaven is only a glass wall away; but that glass is as thick as a thousand universes laid side by side. You can only take it for so long, to be tantalised with the sight and smell of hepers, yet to be deprived of it at every turn. It is its own type of hell, to be so teasingly close yet so impossibly far. To get away from this faux heaven . . . and be promoted to work where heaven is real – the Ruler’s Palace. To finally be promoted to Minister of Science.”
Another long pause pregnant with angst. “Have you ever . . . no, of course you haven’t. But I was there for a day. The Ruler’s Palace. When I was officially appointed to this position. There, in all its glory and grandeur. The reality surpassed even the loftiest of my expectations. Towering sphinxes of hyenas and jackals, slippery-smooth marble edifices, the endless, elegant retinue of cupbearers, scribes, harpists, pages, message runners, court soothers, guardsmen, the silky-robed harem of virgins. But that was not even the best of it. Have you any idea what that might be?”
I do not say anything.
“You might think it is the elegant pools lined with waterfalls, or the grottoes, or the symphonic hall with the petal-cupped mercuric chandelier. But no, you would be wrong. Or the aquarium filled with oysters and clams and squid and octopus that you can simply pluck out like a dandelion and devour. But you would be wrong again. Or the paintings, or the royal stable with rows of regal stallions as far as the naked eye can take you. But again, you would be wrong.”
He lifts his index finger weighed down by a heavy emerald-cut inset ring. Immediately, the staffers and sentries about-turn and walk out.
When the front doors close, he wets his lips and continues. “It’s the food. The most exotic yet fattiest of meats, the choicest and bloodiest parts to sink your teeth into even as the animal’s heart pumps. Pump-pump, pump-pump, just like that, as you chew on its liver and kidney and brain. Of dogs, of cats. And that’s just the appetiser. After that, the main course.” Out of the dark, I hear his lips quiver wetly. “Heper meat,” he hisses.
I stare blankly, a horror dawning on me. Don’t widen your eyes, my father’s voice bellows, don’t widen your eyes!
“Suppose I tell you there’s a secret stash,” he whispers. “That somewhere on the Palace grounds is a top-secret heper farm. Just supposing, of course. Because everyone knows that the last hepers on the face of the planet are in that Dome outside. But now, suppose that heper farm is underground, kept from view, spanning the whole length and width of the Palace gr
ounds. Just supposing, of course. How many hepers? you might be asking. Who can say? But during the one night I stayed there, I could hear their howls and cries at night. Sounded like there were dozens, possibly hundreds.” He strokes his cheek. “Perhaps – just supposing – enough to provide the Ruler a heper meal for the rest of his life. Just supposing, of course.”
He looks at us in turn. “So now you know, yes? I am firmly committed to this Hunt’s success. Meaning one of you – and only one! – will come out the winner. You do not want to know the consequences of failure.” He stands up. “Trust me on this one. So you will give me this. One of you will win. That is all. I have made myself clear.” He brushes by me and exits the room. The door closes behind him.
I let out my breath, and it’s a long time before I inhale again.
Afterwards, Ashley June is sent back to her room to be measured. A team of tailors – sombre with hangdog faces – later arrives at the library to take my measurements for the tuxedo, their voices hushed in the airy library. It’s a stressful experience for me, especially when the tailors lean in a little too close for comfort. I see their nostrils flaring; one of them even shoots me a curious look. I shoot him down quickly enough, but he gives me another odd look as the team packs up and leaves.
I head outside, wanting to be in open space. The last few hours have been intensely stressful. And it’s a beautiful night, perfect for calming my nerves. The sky is sprinkled with pretty sparkles of starlight; the crescent moon hovers high, layering the snow-capped eastern mountains with a film of crusted silver. Soft gusts of air sigh across the plains, lifting the tension from my shoulders.
I hear footsteps behind me, the soft kick of sand.
It’s Ashley June, walking towards me, her eyes tentatively on mine. When our eyes meet, her eyes fall shyly. She’s wearing a new outfit: a black satin camisole, hung low and tight. Her long pale arms glide down her sides, shimmering under the moonlight, slippery marble columns. The sand shifts and swirls under me, dizzying me, disorienting me.
The Hunt Page 13