The Hunt

by Megan Shepherd

  Cora made it blink again.

  I-T-S-C-O-R-A

  Slowly, Rolf looked over his right shoulder, and then his left. With a tentative finger, he pointed to the corner of the room. Cora could just make out an old-fashioned typewriter; she rolled her eyes. Rolf was really pushing her abilities. She concentrated on trying to remember which keys were which from afar, and tapped her message out in the air with her fingers, pushing her mind as hard as she could to make the corresponding keys move. Without amplifiers, depressing each key felt like rolling a boulder uphill.

  I NEED YOUR HELP.

  She sagged with the effort. Rolf hesitated. His hand went up to push at his hair a bit like he had when Cora had first seen him in the cage. He paced a little, throwing glances her way like there was something else he had to tell her. He snatched up the radio and pried the bulb out with his fingernails, and then twisted some wires around. When he pushed a button, it blinked.

  T-E-L-L-M-E

  She took a deep breath and focused on the typewriter again.

  HAVE TO BREAK SOMEONE OUT OF CELL SURROUNDED BY KINDRED. ADVICE?

  Rolf stared at the paper in the typewriter. He picked up the radio and pressed the buttons to send Morse code.

  D-O-N-T-G-E-T-C-A-U-G-H-T

  “What’d he say?” Leon breathed.

  “He’s being a smartass,” Cora muttered.

  “Yeah?” Leon seemed almost impressed. “Didn’t think he had it in him.”

  Then Rolf signaled again.

  W-E-N-E-E-D-H-E-L-P-2

  And he added:

  O-N-L-Y-H-A-V-E-F-E-W-D-A-Y-S-L-E-F-T

  “A few days left?” Cora whispered to Leon. “What does he mean? A few days before what?”

  “Oh yeah, he wouldn’t shut up about that before,” Leon said. “He worked out some equation of how long we’ve been here and how soon the Kindred could take the baby away.”

  “He can convert Kindred time to days? Are you sure?”

  “He had a whole notebook filled with numbers.”

  She turned back, focusing on the typewriter, but he started flashing a message first.

  C-A-N-Y-O-U-G-E-T-U-S-O-U-T?

  Cora paused. “They want our help getting out of there. We could get them into the drecktube when Serassi and the researchers aren’t there, but then where would they go? Unless . . .”

  Leon gave a suspicious grunt.

  “You already agreed to keep Anya with you. And you said Bonebreak’s lair takes up a whole sublevel. There must be all sorts of spare nooks they could set up for Nok and Rolf as a safe room. There’s even smuggled baby stuff, right? Cribs and diapers and things?”

  “Oh, for the love of . . .” Leon rubbed his face hard. “You want the Mosca to help raise a baby? Have you listened to a single thing I’ve said about them?”

  “I don’t expect them to read bedtime stories,” she shot back. “Just to give them a safe place to live until after I’ve run the Gauntlet, when Serassi won’t have any claim on their baby anymore.”

  “Bonebreak gets pissed enough just having me around. For him to put up with a crying baby would take serious cash.”

  “How much?”

  He sighed. “I’ll ask.”

  Cora turned back to the house, concentrating on the typewriter.

  AM WORKING ON A SAFE ROOM. HOLD ON. WILL COME BACK FOR YOU WHEN READY.

  And then she added:

  YOU CAN CONVERT TIME?

  Rolf read her message and nodded, not bothering with the radio.

  LUCKY’S BIRTHDAY IS OCT 21. HOW SOON UNTIL HE TURNS 19?

  Rolf bent down to his notebook and started writing furiously, working out the equation, pushing at glasses that he no longer needed. He set down the pencil and picked up the radio. The lights flashed and flashed.

  Cora let out a small sound of shock.

  “What?” Leon said. “What’s his spy code say?”

  Rolf, maybe worried they hadn’t seen his signal, flashed the lights again. A dark premonition washed over her. She willed the light to blink more, but it never did.

  Three blinks.

  “Only three days,” she said.

  21

  Lucky

  THE NEXT MORNING, LUCKY crouched on the backstage floor next to the zebra.

  He’d meant to stay awake all night, but he must have fallen asleep at some point, because suddenly Cora had been in his cell, shaking him awake with a hand pressed to his mouth to keep him quiet. She had whispered about her trip with Leon. About Anya’s voice in her head and how it was going to be harder than they thought to break Anya out. And then the worst: how Rolf had figured out Lucky only had three days until he turned nineteen.

  If he was being honest, he had just been glad to see Cora again. A tiny part of him had wondered, when she’d disappeared with Leon, if maybe she’d run. But she hadn’t, and she’d returned with some crazy idea to smuggle him out through the drecktube before his birthday and have him set up camp in a Mosca safe room.

  Like hell, he had told her. She hadn’t run, so he wasn’t going to either.

  Now he stroked the zebra’s neck, wincing at its sunken eyes and the blood crusted around its nostrils, and thought of how Mali had said that no one was looking out for the animals but him. He rubbed the zebra’s neck gently, long strokes along the direction of its hair, the same way he did with the horses on his granddad’s farm when they were laid up with colic. The bullet extractor lay on the floor beside him, ready to use. Press it to the wound and in minutes the zebra would be healthy again.

  But would it? he wondered. What does it really mean to look out for them?

  After all, just having a heart that pumped and lungs that breathed didn’t make an animal healthy. It only kept it alive until it could be shot all over again. Once, on his granddad’s farm, a yearling horse named Newt had been attacked by coyotes. Newt had broken two legs trying to get away from them and blinded himself on a wire fence.

  Get my rifle, his granddad had said quietly.

  But he could recover, Lucky had said.

  His granddad had taken one long look at the horse and shaken his head. Maybe he could survive, his granddad said. But not without suffering.

  Lucky picked up the bullet extractor hesitantly. Part of him wanted to toss it away and let the zebra die in peace. That was a cruel sort of kindness, not one a lot of people could stomach, but he thought maybe, if his granddad could do it, then he could too.

  A giggle came from the supply rooms, and he whipped his head around. Pika was in there debating aloud to herself whether zebra or giraffe tails were cuter.

  Who was he kidding? If he refused to heal the animals, Pika would just do it herself.

  He clenched his jaw and set the tool against the wound, extracted the bullet, and took out a revival pod from his pocket. Its waxiness rubbed off on his skin as he set it next to the zebra’s nose. The animal’s nostrils twitched. Then its eyelid cracked open, showing a half-moon of milky whiteness beneath. At last, the animal jolted awake.

  “Shh,” Lucky said, pressing a firm hand on its shoulder. “Shh, girl. You’re all right.”

  Slowly, its pulse returned to normal.

  A sneering voice behind him ruptured the silence. “What next, you going to train it to wear a little saddle?” Dane strode into the cell block. “Bet the Kindred would pay extra tokens to see that. Maybe they’ll transfer you to a circus menagerie. You could be part of the freak show.”

  “We’re already in a freak show,” Lucky muttered. “Look around.”

  Dane hovered in the shadows outside his cell, smirking. Then he went inside, rooted around a little, and emerged with a small notebook. “Here. A present. Now you can write down all these deep tortured feelings so the rest of us don’t have to listen to them.”

  He tossed Lucky the notebook. A few pages had been ripped out, but the rest were empty. Lucky threw it aside, next to his jacket. He didn’t like accepting things from Dane. He didn’t like even talking to Dane. But, right now,
he needed him.

  “Thanks,” he muttered.

  “Makayla said you wanted to talk to me, so talk.”

  Lucky could hear the note of interest in the other boy’s voice, behind the sneer. Not that he had anything against a guy liking a guy or anything, but Dane would be disappointed if he thought that’s how Lucky played.

  “Yeah. Yeah, it was cool of you to switch my work assignment before, and you said if I ever needed anything else—”

  Pika came in, lugging a bucket of water for the antelopes and dribbling water all over the floor. Her face lit up. “Hi, Dane! You need a break? You want me to take over making the announcements? I wouldn’t mind. Really.”

  Dane looked her up and down. “You? Onstage? The Kindred would probably mistake you for some sniveling little animal and try to shoot you. Too bad you don’t weigh enough for any kind of record.” He pulled out his yo-yo. “And keep your grubby hands off this. I know you’ve been trying to swipe it.”

  Pika’s face fell. Her braid sagged over her shoulder, the tip slightly damp. Her eyes went bigger and bigger until she had to draw in a sharp sip of air to keep from crying.

  Dane rolled his eyes. “I was kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” He reluctantly pulled out his pocket square and handed it to her. “Listen. Give the feed supply room an extra scrub, the insides of the cabinets and floors and everything, and maybe I’ll think about letting you play with the yo-yo tonight.”

  Her face lit up. “Yes, sir!” She giggled and darted off to the feed room.

  Dane turned back to Lucky. “Got to give them a little hope, you know?” His voice was low, like they were old confidants. “It keeps them distracted.”

  “It keeps them miserable.”

  Dane folded his arms, leaning back on the cabinets, appraising Lucky carefully. “You know, when you first showed up, I thought, here’s a guy like me, who understands the situation and can handle the truth. But I’m starting to think you’re just as blind as Pika, easily distracted by toys.”

  Lucky fought the urge to tell Dane to screw off. It wasn’t easy.

  Dane crouched down, reaching out a hand to pet the zebra, but his fingers went against the hair’s direction, and the zebra flinched. “So tell me what you need that’s so important.”

  “It has to do with time.”

  “You want a wristwatch? A clock?”

  Lucky turned away abruptly before Dane could see how much he hated asking for another favor. He repacked the revival pods in the cabinet with his back to Dane. “Don’t ask how I know this, but my birthday is in three days. I’m turning nineteen. And I’m on their throw-down-the-drecktube list, I can promise you that. I tried to escape from an enclosure. And I punched a guard once.”

  Dane appraised him with surprise. “I see. And you don’t want to be dragged away from your pretty little songbird.” Jealousy edged his words.

  “It isn’t about Cora.” The zebra was almost revived now, and Lucky reached for the harness. “It’s about not wanting to end up like Chicago.”

  “No one knows what happened to Chicago.”

  Lucky shuddered, imagining the charred body Leon had described. His hands started shaking as he slipped the harness over the zebra’s head and led it to its cell.

  Dane watched him work. “I’ll be nineteen in just a matter of weeks, too, though the others don’t know that.”

  Lucky closed the zebra’s gate. “You’ve got nothing to worry about, I’m sure. The Kindred will probably make you a prince on Armstrong, given how much you cooperate.” He wiped his hands off and looked at Dane. There was a cryptic expression on the boy’s face.

  “Converting human time to Kindred time isn’t a simple feat,” Dane explained. “It’s complicated even for the Kindred. They have timekeepers tasked with converting time on different stations and different planets. Roshian is one of the few timekeepers on this station. He doesn’t just convert it. He keeps all the records. I could ask him to change the birth date they have down for you. Just a little change, something believable—about to turn eighteen, instead of nineteen. He owes me a favor.”

  Lucky eyed him cautiously. “What will it cost me?”

  A smile flickered over Dane’s face. He jerked his head for Lucky to follow him into his cell, which he did, reluctantly. It was filled with trinkets and books, the nicest blankets, even a robe with monogrammed initials that weren’t Dane’s. Dane took down a cookie tin filled with pocket squares, and he pulled back the thick cloths and a few torn-out pieces of paper. Beneath were hundreds of tokens, carefully padded by the pocket squares to silence them.

  “You didn’t get all of those from mixing drinks,” Lucky said.

  Dane closed the tin, shaking his head. “The Kindred think of themselves as being above reproach, and most of them are—given their unique concept of morality. But every once in a while you find one who’s willing to bend the rules. One whose morality is a bit more tarnished. A bit more human, you could say.”

  Lucky folded his arms. “You mean Roshian?”

  Dane nodded. “You might be aware of the fact that on occasion he hunts all the way to the kill. A real kill. I look the other way. He pays well. You were onto something when you mentioned Armstrong. Only I don’t want to be a prince.” Dane’s eyes gleamed. “I want to be king.”

  Lucky tossed a look toward the cell block to make sure no one else was overhearing this nonsense. Pika was banging away in the feed room, and other than that, it was quiet.

  “I overhear the hosts and hostesses talking, sometimes,” Dane continued. “They say that on Armstrong, money is everything. The more tokens you arrive with, the more power you have. And all of this”—he shook the tin—“is going to set me up well, but I need more than money to be a king.”

  Lucky clenched his fist so hard that his knuckles turned white. “Let me guess. You need subjects.” Now the gift of the notebook was making sense—Dane was trying to ingratiate himself.

  “Not subjects,” Dane said. “Associates. Even with money, it won’t be easy to set myself up as a leader right from the start, with no one watching my back. But if I had someone loyal, someone I could trust, someone others inherently trust too . . . Someone who could work his way into Armstrong’s society and spread the word about how fair-minded and powerful I am.”

  Fair-minded? Powerful? Lucky had a hard time keeping a straight face.

  In the cell opposite them, the zebra had lain down. It was unnatural for a hoofed animal to lie like that, unless it was sick. The whole place felt infected.

  “I’m waiting for an answer,” Dane said.

  Lucky cursed under his breath. “You promise you can get Roshian to change my birthday?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then do it,” Lucky said reluctantly. “And in return, if we’re shipped off to Armstrong, I promise to tell people there whatever you want me to tell them.” He told himself it was an empty promise. His mind went to the carving that Chicago had made in the safari truck’s dashboard: 30.1. Which meant there was an almost 70 percent chance Earth still existed. Not much to hold on to, but something.

  He heard another giggle as Pika returned from the storerooms, and he started to go.

  “Not just yet,” Dane said, keeping his voice low. “Roshian’s going to ask for a favor in return, and I can’t spare any of my tokens.”

  Lucky dropped his voice even lower. “There’s not much I can do from back here.”

  “Maybe,” Dane said. “Maybe not. I think it all comes down to one question.” His blue eyes darkened. “You said this wasn’t about Cora. So exactly how close are you to our little blond songbird?”

  22

  Cora

  “GOOD,” CASSIAN SAID. “NOW raise them again, higher.”

  Cora let out a heavy breath, and the pair of dice fell to the table. They had been training almost every other day, and she’d had no idea how physically demanding levitation would be. At the start of their training, when it had been an effort just to nudge a die an inch
across a table, she’d felt like her mind might rip in two. Now she yearned to go back to that simple dull headache.

  Cassian reset the dice. The sounds of jazz music and clinking glasses filtered through the wooden screens of the alcove, distracting her, but not as much as her worries over Lucky. His birthday was in two days now.

  She tried to put Lucky out of her mind and focus on Cassian’s dice. By her count, the Gauntlet was just days away from reaching the station. Then she would have three more days while the docking procedure happened. Six days in all—not much time. Were the other candidates, the Scoates and Conmarines and Temporals, desperately preparing like she was?

  “Try it again,” Cassian repeated. “Higher. You must reach twelve inches and hold it there for thirty seconds before you will be ready.”

  “I know. I just need to catch my breath.”

  Cassian’s eyes flickered toward the screen. His hands kept flexing and unflexing.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered.

  He didn’t answer at first, but then he lowered his voice. “I have been debating whether I should tell you something.”

  She raised an eyebrow.

  He glanced in agitation toward the screen. “POD30.1. I have been looking into the algorithm’s prediction records. Usually they are stored in a database accessible to all Kindred with level-five and higher clearance. But the particular results regarding Earth have been flagged with a level-twenty clearance. I cannot access them. Only delegates can.”

  “Fian’s a delegate.”

  “Yes, and he has already reviewed the record at my request.” He blinked a few times too many. “There were . . . irregularities. The time stamp was off. Someone modified the results. It is possible—though not definitive—that Chicago could have overheard talk of this on a safari.”

  “So it’s true?” She felt her eyes widening. “They lied about Earth being gone?”

  “We know only that the record was tampered with. It proves nothing.”

  But it could prove everything, she thought.

  “Why would the Council tamper with it?”

  “They fear humanity is at the precipice of evolution. The Council does not wish to compete with another intelligent species. But if Earth were gone, they would not have to deal with the future of humanity. Only with the handful of humans they currently have in captivity, such as yourself. Easily controllable—so they assume.”