The Hunt

by Megan Shepherd

  “It’s our best shot.”

  “Then I want to come with you. And Mali too.” Lucky dropped his voice, though it was just the two of them. “I still don’t trust him.”

  “He told me something that might change your mind.” She glanced toward the door, making sure they were alone. She told him about the ship in hushed excitement, about what it could mean and where they might go. But his eyes didn’t light up the way hers had.

  “What’s wrong?” she whispered. “I thought this was what we all wanted.”

  “What about the Gauntlet?” he said. “And proving humanity’s worth?”

  “That hasn’t changed.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, wondering how this conversation was getting derailed. “All I’m saying is that after the Gauntlet is over and we’ve won freedom for all these people, we’ll have choices. The Kindred won’t be able to stop us from going home, and now we might have the means to do it.”

  But his eyes stayed dark. “What about Pika and Makayla and everyone? Will they be able to go back with us too?”

  She blinked. “I don’t know how big the ship is—”

  “And what about the other humans in the other menageries? There are hundreds. Maybe more. And there are other stations too.”

  “I get what you’re saying.” She tried to keep the tension out of her voice. “But I never agreed to take everyone home. Isn’t freeing them enough?”

  At her exasperation, his expression softened. “I’m not trying to give you a hard time. What you’re doing takes a lot of bravery. But when you made the decision to run the Gauntlet, you made a decision to stand up for humanity. That doesn’t end as soon as the last test is finished. You can’t flip the system on its head and then walk away to let everyone else pick up the pieces.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say, so she paced tightly, trying to process his words.

  “I know that isn’t easy to hear,” he continued. “I made a commitment too, to take care of these animals. As much as I miss home, I can’t break that commitment just because I want to sleep in my bed again and eat a real pizza.”

  “Home is about more than that,” she said testily. “And you know it.”

  “You’re right—we have everything on Earth. Family. Friends. But there’s one thing missing there.”

  “What’s that?”

  He paused. “Something worth fighting for.”

  Cora dropped her hand from the bridge of her nose and, for a second, felt a little dizzy.

  His face softened. “Listen, I didn’t mean to—”

  “Haven’t we been through enough?” she interrupted. “Cassian picked us because we were all misfits back home. Our lives were broken. Your mother’s death. My time in juvenile detention. Nok being trapped by that London agency, and Leon’s family in prison, and Rolf’s parents’ expectations. And what do we get for all of our suffering—locked in this prison for the rest of our lives.”

  She was suddenly aware she was shouting, and dropped her voice. “You can’t ask us to sacrifice more. We need this. After we win the Gauntlet, we’ll have a chance to go home and make lives for ourselves that are a little less broken.”

  Warm tears had gotten netted in her eyelashes. She pushed them out roughly with shaking hands. Lucky’s face was unreadable; only his eyes gave any hint of what he was feeling.

  “I don’t want to stay here, Lucky.” Her voice broke.

  He drew her into his arms. She pressed her face against his chest, surprised at how fast his own heart was beating. “I know,” he said. “We’ll see how it goes, after the Gauntlet. We’ll see how much chaos there is, how people deal with freedom. I’d never deny you a chance to go home if that’s what you really want, and I wouldn’t ask anyone else to give that up either. But just so you know”—he pulled back to look into her face—“I’m staying.”

  She jerked back in surprise. “Lucky, be reasonable.”

  “I’m serious. Working with these animals has reminded me of who I used to be. I went a little crazy in the cage, I know, but I’m not that person now. I’ve taken responsibility for these animals, and that might not seem like a lot, when you’re trying to free our whole species, but that’s dozens of living creatures who need me. I can’t run away from them. I don’t want to. I’m staying where we’re needed, whether you beat the Gauntlet or not.”

  Cora had so many things to say, and yet couldn’t seem to speak a single one of them. For the rest of the day, his words swirled in her head as she sang distracted songs while the others went about their work, a little more cheerfully now that Dane was gone. Christopher and Mali didn’t get into any fights. Shoukry slipped some sugar and lemon into Cora’s water as a treat. Makayla even jumped onstage and sang a song with her, though her voice was terrible.

  The whole time, Cora couldn’t shake Lucky’s words.

  Where we’re needed.

  SHE WAS STILL TRYING to put their conversation out of her head when it was time to meet Leon that night. Most of the animals had fallen asleep quickly, and the other humans too. She focused on opening her cell’s lock, ignoring how her pain was worsening, and the images of Roshian screaming in pain.

  She opened Lucky’s and Mali’s cells too. Wetness dripped beneath her nose but she wiped it away, hoping the others wouldn’t see. The three of them tiptoed to the feed room, then knocked twice on the drecktube door.

  Leon shouldered it open. “Took you long enough.”

  They climbed in, crawling in a single line in the maze of tubes only Leon knew, until at last they arrived at Roshian’s quarters. They were similar to Cassian’s; so similar that Cora’s thoughts, a little heady, kept swimming back to the night before. She had promised to forgive Cassian if he helped her. Part of her wondered if maybe that’s why she was so anxious to board that ship and run. Not just to go back to Earth—but to escape promises she had made.

  Leon pushed open a panel to reveal a hidden room. It smelled stale, like old paper. He flicked on a lamp. Inside were stacks of books, artifacts, and a dressing table. He dumped a box out on top of the table. “This is the stuff.”

  Lucky riffled through the box of supplies, lifting out a uniform.

  Cora inspected the other objects. Black contact lenses. The tube of metallic paste that wasn’t paste at all, but microscopic metal pieces. Papers and documents marking Roshian as a Kindred, along with notes he’d meticulously kept of ways they spoke and their mannerisms. She handed Leon the contacts.

  “Put these in. They have to cover your whole eye, not just the iris.”

  It was a hard black shell the size of half a golf ball. He groaned as he lifted his eyelid and jabbed the contact in with unskilled hands.

  Lucky sighed. “Let me. My granddad wore contacts and was always getting them stuck.” He fiddled around with Leon’s eye, trying to find the best way to insert the lens, and finally figured out, after a lot of Leon’s cursing, that he could slide it in from the top.

  Leon blinked with his one black eye.

  “Can you see?” Lucky asked.

  “Yeah. Like sunglasses.”

  He groaned again as Lucky jabbed in the other one. When it was done, he kept squinting and blinking, tilting his head to try to see out of the corners.

  “The Kindred don’t blink much,” Cora said. “You have to practice showing no emotion.”

  “You try shoving these in your eyes and not blinking.”

  “I don’t get how this paste works.” Cora squeezed the tube, and the contents came out in a single thick blob.

  Mali took it from her. “It is Axion technology. They use something like this to bathe but it is white. The pieces coat the body and attract dust and dirt like a magnet. Someone has modified this so that it clings longer and added small metal pieces to mimic Kindred skin.”

  “Roshian’s file said he was a med student studying chemistry,” Cora said. “Maybe he altered it himself.”

  Leon grabbed the paste from Cora’s hand. He slapped it onto his bare arm and, at first, n
othing happened. Then it slowly started to absorb into his skin, spreading like melted butter until his biceps was a shimmering copper color, then his forearm, then his shoulder. Once it was done, Cora eyed him eerily. If it wasn’t for the rumpled clothes Leon was wearing, it might have been Roshian sitting there, or any of the Kindred.

  “What does it feel like?” Lucky asked.

  Leon shrugged. “Like I look like a sparkly idiot.”

  “No, it’s good,” Cora said. “It’s believable. It covers your tattoos, and even the bruises.”

  Mali dumped the uniform in his lap. “Dress yourself.”

  Leon started unbuttoning his shirt.

  “The lotion doesn’t seem to rub off,” Cora said, rolling a dab of it between her fingers, “but I think it can be scratched off with enough pressure. I clawed Roshian and some of it came away with his skin. So try not to get into any fights. And think about how they walk so stiffly and solemnly, like you’re in church.”

  Leon looked at her. “Uh . . .”

  “How you think people act in church,” she clarified. “I’ll be with you the entire time. On the off chance there are still any guests there, they’ll be uncloaked and only concerned with themselves. And here.” She tucked the gun Mali had swiped into his uniform’s holster. “Even if it’s just for show.”

  Leon stared at himself in the mirror. “This is a really bad idea, you know that, right?”

  Cora patted his shoulder. “Let’s go.”

  He stood up, trying to move like a robot. It wasn’t a bad transformation, Cora had to admit. Physically, Leon’s size and strength were nearly the same as most Kindred’s, and the shimmering lotion and black eyes completed it. It unnerved her, seeing a Kindred with the face of her friend. Then he spit on Roshian’s floor, and Leon was Leon again.

  Lucky handed him a revival pod. “Anya will probably be drugged. You’ll need this to revive her. Mali and I will head back to the Hunt; we’ll see you in the morning, assuming everything goes well. Good luck.”

  “There is one more thing,” Mali said, eyeing the pod. “In her drugged state, Anya will probably not be able to tell that you are human. She has used mind control to attempt to murder every one of her Kindred owners. If you revive her, she will probably attempt to take over your mind and murder you too.”

  Both Leon and Cora stared at her.

  “I thought you should know,” Mali clarified.

  “Thanks,” Leon said. “I really needed that.”

  33

  Lucky

  BACK IN HIS CELL, Lucky couldn’t sleep.

  His mind juggled a dozen different thoughts. Worry that Cora and Leon would get caught, which was hardly an irrational fear given Leon’s track record. Worry that Anya would end up dead and the whole plan would fall apart. Worry that they wouldn’t be able to get Nok and Rolf out. And then worry that he’d completely screwed up everything by kissing Cora.

  He cursed under his breath. That kiss had been a mistake. He should have stopped her right from the start. Hadn’t he learned anything? Cora was practically hypnotized by Cassian, despite what she said, and she always would be. How exactly was he supposed to compete with a guy who was mix of a billboard model and superhero? Besides, even though he’d told Cora that he wasn’t that same guy who’d gone crazy in the cage, he didn’t trust himself sometimes. The memories were too fresh of that awful night when he had led her up the stairs to their bedroom, taken her dress off slowly, and all the while thinking what they were doing was right.

  Right. Well, he wouldn’t make the mistake of kissing her again, even if his thoughts did keep circling back to how soft her lips were.

  He quietly dug through his few belongings until he found the notebook Dane had given him, and flipped through the pages haphazardly. He’d filled most of them with his worries. It helped to put them down on paper, night after night, when he couldn’t sleep.

  His eyes skimmed over his last entry, from two days ago:

  We repaired a hurt antelope today. Jenny and Christopher dragged it in around midday; it had been shot in the shoulder. The whole animal was quivering, its eyes darting back and forth. It was a new animal—I hadn’t seen it before. Pika said we should name it Sunflower, because when Jenny first let it outside, it stood in the sun with its head tilted toward it, and smiled a little. I told Pika that antelopes don’t smile. Pika said Sunflower does.

  Now, he flipped to the very beginning. When Dane had given him the notebook, he’d noticed that a few pages were ripped out, but he hadn’t given it much thought. Everything in the Hunt was in disrepair. It hadn’t been until that morning, when they had framed Dane, that he’d found those missing pages in Dane’s cookie tin, stuffed between pocket squares.

  Now he unfolded the pages, tilting them toward the faint light of the nearest wall seam, and read them again.

  Manual Override Codes, Dane had written. In Case of Animal Emergency.

  Lucky scanned through the list of codes and instructions. The Kindred had entrusted Dane, as Head Ward of the backstage area, with keys and a supervisory position. The most powerful of the powerless, Lucky remembered taunting him, and Dane’s smug retort: Not powerless. Not at all.

  Apparently, he’d been talking about weapons.

  Kill-dart guns, specifically, that Dane could access in the event the wild animals caused an uproar. It seemed the kill-dart guns were locked away in a hidden panel in the medical room, but the code to access it was written right here. Not letters or numbers, but a certain shape Dane needed to trace on the wall to make it open.

  Lucky practiced tracing the same symbol on the dust of his floor until he had it memorized. He went to his cell door—he had left it cracked open when he’d come back in with Mali—and closed his eyes to listen. A few kids were snoring. One of the animals was chasing dream-rabbits in its sleep. He carefully pushed the door open, wincing in case the hinges squeaked, but they never did.

  He stepped out slowly. The clock above the door indicated Night was three-quarters over already; Cora and Leon better hurry. The blue glow of the lights cast a cold look over the cell room. He passed by the fox’s cell, and the fox looked up at him curiously. He held a finger to his lips and took another step but tripped over a deck of cards.

  The deck went skittering across the floor and he froze, one foot still in the air. Someone grumbled in her sleep on the upper level of cages. Was that Jenny’s cell? The blood rushed in his ears. . . .

  “We aren’t idiots, you know,” a voice said.

  He jerked his head toward Shoukry’s cell. The boy’s face loomed between the bars, and Lucky’s breath stilled. He could say that the lock of his door had broken . . . or . . .

  “Don’t worry.” It was another voice, from the opposite direction, and Lucky spun to find Makayla looking out from her own cell. “We didn’t tell Tessela before,” she said. “We aren’t going to now.”

  Snores came from the direction of Pika’s cell. She, at least, was still asleep.

  “You mean you’ve known this whole time that we can get out of our cells?” Lucky whispered.

  “Makayla and I caught on pretty quick,” Shoukry said. “Jenny and Christopher know too. It isn’t so surprising—there have been rumors for a while about kids gaining psychic abilities like the Kindred’s. Is it you, or Cora?”

  Lucky hesitated, not sure if he could trust them.

  “That’s what I thought,” Shoukry said. “Cora.”

  “Dane didn’t know,” Makayla answered. “We made sure of it. Slipped a few slivers of the reverse revival pods in his dinner cakes so he’d sleep deeply. There are benefits to being in charge of the food.” She grinned in the shadows. “We know about your friend in the drecktube too. He breathes really loud.”

  Shit. Lucky knew Leon would be trouble.

  “Whatever you and Cora and Mali are planning,” Makayla asked, “is it going to get us out of here, maybe even home?”

  Lucky looked in the direction of the drecktube. “That’s what we hop
e. It’s a long shot. But if Cora can—”

  “Don’t say it,” Shoukry said. “The less we know, the better. The Kindred have ways of extracting information from your mind that involve lots of tubes and lots of pain. Just, whatever you’re planning, don’t stop. I’ll cover for you the best I can.”

  “I will too,” Makayla whispered.

  “And me,” another voice said, probably Jenny’s. “And you can count on Christopher too.”

  Lucky blinked into the darkness. He had told Cora that they couldn’t leave the others behind, and now he was certain. All this time, the others had been watching out for them. He wasn’t sure how to express how much their trust meant, so he settled for a nod of thanks.

  He moved faster now, knowing the others were on his side. He passed by Cora’s empty cell, and then he was in the hallway. He didn’t need to worry about being quiet, but he was all too aware of the ticking clock.

  There was less light here; he could barely make out the shape of the medical room. By memory, he walked forward with his hands out until he reached the supply cabinet. He pushed it away from the wall and felt for the seams of a secret panel. When he thought he’d figured out its location, he traced the symbol from Dane’s instructions.

  Something beeped. The panel clicked open.

  Behind it was a drawer. He held his breath as he reached in. His fingers brushed something cold and metal. A gun. He counted ten smaller ones and at least three bigger ones, though the drawer went back quite far. He took out one of the smaller kill-dart guns. It was heavier than he had expected. Or maybe that was just the weight of his guilt for not telling Cora about this. But Cora was unpredictable, and so were Mali and Leon. That Kindred-made pistol Mali had stolen was only useful for show, which had secretly relieved him. Cora and Mali and Leon working with firearms couldn’t possibly end well.

  He cradled the kill-dart gun in his hand, taking a deep breath. He had no intention of using these weapons against any Kindred, or against any humans either. He kept thinking of that day when he’d been about to heal the zebra and had been reminded of that sick horse on his granddad’s farm.