The Hunt

by Megan Shepherd

  “Tessela,” Cora whispered. “What happened to Issander?”

  “You must have more faith in Cassian,” Tessela said. “There was a chance Issander was a spy, so he had her replaced. I will try to protect you, but only so far. The Council cannot suspect anything. Now, come.” She signaled for Cora to follow. Cora trailed her through the backstage door, which led to a corridor that smelled of both astringent and straw, like a stable. Tessela handed Cora a block of dry cake-like bread and then showed her into a two-story room lined with cells.

  Cora stopped abruptly. There were wild animals in half the cages, and human kids in the other half. The dancing girl, Makayla, was on the second story. The dark-haired bartender was near the bottom corner.

  “Here!” a voice yelled. “There’s an empty cage here.”

  That was Lucky’s voice! Cora whirled toward the sound. Behind his cell bars, his dark hair was just as rumpled as his safari clothes, but a little longer than she remembered. Weeks must have passed since she had seen him.

  “Bring her over here,” he said, gripping the bars tighter. He nodded toward an empty cage two down from his own, directly below Mali. In the cell between them, a small white fox curled at the bottom.

  Cora stepped into the cell, and Tessela closed and latched the gate. It was a simple metal latch that Cora could have easily reached through the bars and unlocked, but Lucky made a signal for her to wait. She looked away, self-conscious. She hadn’t looked in a mirror in weeks, but besides tangled hair, what did he see when he looked at her? The girl who’d assaulted him in the cage? The senator’s daughter he’d sent to prison?

  Or someone who’d once been a friend?

  She dared a glance up. With his hair shaggy like that, he looked more like the boy she’d first seen on an artificial beach, looking as utterly lost as she was. She had liked that boy. She just hadn’t liked what the cage had later twisted him into—someone complacent.

  But as soon as Tessela left, his hands squeezed the bars tightly. There was a determination written on his face that told her that boy on the beach had never truly vanished, and it lifted her spirits.

  “We can’t get out,” he said, and nodded toward the cell doors. The overhead lights clicked off, and a blue light clicked on above each of their doors. “Lightlocks. The other kids told me about them earlier today. They’re run by perceptive technology. They don’t unlock until the morning.” He paused. “It’s good to see you.”

  “You too,” she said quietly.

  From the cell above her, Mali stuck down a hand and waved.

  In the faint blue glow, Cora couldn’t quite read Lucky’s face. His hand went to his temple absently, the spot where she had once slammed a ceramic dog into his head to escape him. But then he reached out for her. She did the same, but five inches of space kept them apart. She was just about tell him that she was sorry for everything that had happened, when a deep voice interrupted her.

  8

  Cora

  “LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, IT looks like we have a new girl.”

  Cora turned toward the voice in the darkness. Two hands grabbed the bars of her cell and rattled hard, making her jump. A boy’s face pressed against the bars, grinning maniacally.

  The blond bartender, Dane.

  “Boo.” He let out a laugh.

  He took a yellow yo-yo out of his pocket and started tossing it up and down, up and down, carefree as though they weren’t all prisoners. As though one of them hadn’t been dragged off by guards just hours ago for no discernible reason, yelling about lies. The blue glow reflected on the boy’s buzzed head, hair a shade darker than her own, hooded eyes that cast shadows almost like the Kindred’s.

  “Welcome to the Hunt, songbird. You’re the third new cast member we’ve gotten today—we met the others this morning. What’s your name?”

  “Leave her alone,” Lucky said.

  Dane tossed Lucky a searing look, eyeing him up and down. “Friend of yours? Ah, the one you were asking Pika about. She must be. Not too many blondes around here. You must have someone powerful looking out for you, songbird, or they would have already sold your hair. I bet it was that Warden who brought you here.”

  “He’s no friend of mine,” Cora said.

  Dane raised an eyebrow. “That’s too bad. You’d do well to have powerful friends. A Warden on the outside, me on the inside.”

  Cora pushed to her feet, dusting grime off her hands. “How’d you get out of your cell, anyway?”

  “Within these walls, I’ve got the power.”

  “The most powerful of the powerless,” Lucky muttered.

  Dane shot him another look, this one darker. “Not powerless. Not at all. The Kindred have entrusted me with all kinds of power you know nothing about.” He threw the yo-yo again and snapped it back. “I’m Head Ward, which means I run this place after hours. I’ve been here the longest and the Kindred grant me privileges, like a key to my cell that can override the lightlocks, in return for keeping things nice and peaceful backstage. Let me introduce you to our ensemble cast.” He swept an arm out toward the other shadowy faces. “Directly above you, we have the other new girl, Mali.” He leaned in close and dropped his voice. “A strange one, talks funny, but it seems you already know each other. I saw you whispering together in the lodge. I let it slide because you’re new, but I’d better not catch you chatting in public again.” His hooded eyes flashed with warning, before he grinned again suddenly and turned back to the wall of cages.

  “Next to Mali is the hyena, and then there’s Makayla, from Vancouver, who you’ll be sharing the stage with.” In the faint light, Cora barely made out the dancing girl with the bandage on her knee giving her a wave, and then twisting her hand around to shoot Dane the bird behind his back. Cora barely hid her smile.

  “Then the two giraffes in the tall cell in the corner,” Dane continued, “and that’s Pika next to Roger, the bobcat. Pika runs the show back here during the day.” A dirty girl chewing on her braid paused in stroking the bobcat’s tail to wave vigorously. “And our three antelope in the other tall cage, and the kangaroo and lioness along the top row. Shoukry’s there on the bottom next to the zebra; he’s from Cairo. He bartends with me, as you saw today. Jenny and Christopher are on the bottom too—siblings from Australia. They work out on the savanna, leading the expeditions. And then there’s our other new addition, this pretty boy with an attitude.” His eyes lingered on Lucky’s cage, one corner of his mouth turned up in a cryptic smile. “And between you two is our arctic fox. From Canada, I believe. It likes to chew on anything it can get its teeth around. And then there’s you. And me, of course, in the cell between Makayla and the hyena. I was rescued five years ago from Cape Town.”

  Cora raised an eyebrow. “Rescued? That’s what you call being abducted?”

  “Precisely. I’ve been running this place ever since,” he added.

  “Ever since you failed out of one of the enclosures,” Makayla muttered loud enough to be heard across the room. Dane snapped his yo-yo back sharply and tossed her a look.

  “So here’s how it works.” He pointed to a clock above the doorway. It looked like the industrial clocks that had been scattered throughout Bay Pines, except there was only one hand, and instead of having twelve numbers, this clock was divided into four uneven slices. “That’s how the Kindred keep time for us. Right now it’s on Night—the longest block of time. That little sliver next to it is Morning Prep, when you change clothes and eat breakfast, but you have to hustle because it’s just a few minutes. The big block next to it is Showtime. That’s when you march out there and sing and smile and do whatever the Kindred want you to do. I run the bar and make the announcements, and I’ll be keeping an eye on you. Then it’s the final block of time: Free Time. About an hour, give or take, and it’s a privilege that can be revoked for bad behavior.”

  Cora rolled her eyes. “You seem awfully proud for a guy who’s betraying his own kind.”

  The shadows around Dane’s eyes dee
pened, so only the faintest glimmer of lights reflected in his irises. “Better to be working with the Kindred than against them.”

  She snorted.

  Dane started pacing. “What do you think, ensemble? Is she going to make it to Armstrong with an attitude like that?”

  “Not a chance!” Pika yelled back.

  Cora raised an eyebrow. “What’s Armstrong?”

  Dane stopped his pacing abruptly. He turned toward them with an incredulous look. “No one’s told you about Armstrong yet?”

  “We’ve been locked in a fake world,” Cora said. “We haven’t gotten out much.”

  The smile crept back onto Dane’s face. “Allow me to enlighten you, then. Armstrong is the closest thing to home we have. It’s an uninhabited asteroid, a small moon. Well, uninhabited by Kindred or the other intelligent species, that is. It’s home to displaced humans. A nature preserve, if you will. It’s where the Kindred send all the good boys and girls when they grow up. We put in our hard time as teenagers, and if we behave, we’re taken there when we turn nineteen. We’re free to govern ourselves, do whatever we want.”

  Cora eyed him warily. “The Warden told me about that place once,” she said slowly, “only he didn’t say it was paradise.”

  Dane smirked, undeterred. “I thought you didn’t trust a word out of our kidnappers’ mouths.”

  Cora narrowed her eyes, and Dane matched it with a thin smile. “Like I said, with that attitude, neither of you will ever see Armstrong. Do you know what they do with the ones who turn nineteen and haven’t behaved?”

  Lucky, next to her, went still. An eerie quiet spread from the other cast members, who shifted uneasily in their cells.

  “What?” Cora asked warily.

  “I don’t know,” Dane said, and pointed toward the corridor. “But each one of those rooms in there connects to a drecktube. It’s where we dump the animals if they die, and all our trash. The bad kids go in there and they never come back. You saw it yourself, today. The boy those two guards dragged off, Chicago. Until this morning, he occupied this same cell that you’re in now. That’s his blanket you’re hugging, as a matter of fact. He’s always been a problem—never wanted to clap when the guests told him to clap, never polished the rifles on time.” His voice lingered in a way that made Cora wonder if he was telling the truth. Shoving kids down a trash chute didn’t sound like a very Kindred thing to do.

  “So behave yourself, songbird,” Dane continued, “and sing for that Warden of yours, and one day maybe you’ll go to Armstrong instead of the alternative.”

  He stowed the yo-yo in his shirt pocket and climbed up the stairs to his cell. Pika tried to snatch the yo-yo from his pocket, but he slapped her hand away. She curled in her corner, sucking her braid, whining softly.

  From two cells down, Lucky was still strangely quiet. It was as though all his anger had suddenly emptied, and Cora didn’t know why, or what had changed. She wished she could see into his mind.

  She slid her hands around the bars.

  Well, maybe she could.

  She’d read Cassian’s mind once, though unintentionally. She hadn’t tried to read minds while trapped in the six-by-six cell, simply because there’d been nobody to practice on. But now she had a roomful of test subjects, and a boy whose thoughts she desperately wanted to read.

  She closed her eyes, concentrating. Before, when she had read Cassian’s thoughts, her mind had been completely blank. Broken. That wasn’t the case now, but maybe she could quiet her mind enough.

  Her thoughts reached out for Lucky, hoping to connect. And for a second, she thought she got a glimmer of something. It was shrouded in an overwhelming feeling of uneasiness. A number, maybe.

  The number 19? Was that right? He must have been worried about Chicago and what Dane said, but there was something more. . . .

  She got the sudden, eerie sensation she was looking into a hazy mirror. Or maybe more like watching herself on an old video recording, her hair extra bright, the dark circles under her eyes gone. Cherry petals were fluttering around her.

  Her cheeks blazed. He was thinking of her. She quickly severed the connection into his mind. It had been wrong anyway—she shouldn’t have done it without his knowledge. Her heart pounded as she wondered if he could somehow tell what she’d done.

  But then he sighed, and rolled over, and there was nothing.

  She stretched out a hand instead and tried again to reach him through the bars, but they never would be close enough.

  9

  Nok

  “THIS IS YOUR NEW home.”

  Serassi rested a hand on the knob of the red front door of a two-story house.

  Nok placed her palm flat on her belly. With the other, she squeezed Rolf’s hand. They stood in a cavernous warehouse so large that the walls were hidden in shadow. It was nearly empty except for two structures: the house with the red front door, and tiered rows of theater benches facing it.

  Serassi twisted the knob.

  The house was filled with heavy wooden furniture, a blocky television set, cabinets that looked painted on. Nok got the sense that she and Rolf had been brought to an enormous dollhouse, or maybe that they’d been shrunk down to doll size. She pushed back the paisley living room curtains, expecting to see opaque observation panels instead of windows. But here, the windows were real transparent glass, though beyond was only the empty warehouse.

  The house is perfect in every way, she thought, except one.

  There were only three walls.

  She turned to where the fourth wall, the front of the house, should be. Open space gaped, facing the tiered spectator seating in the same way that a theater was open to the audience. Carefully, Nok walked to the edge of the living room, where the floor ended abruptly. It was about a four-foot drop to the warehouse floor below. From the house’s upstairs level, the drop must be closer to fifteen feet. She let her bare toes curl over the edge. She could jump off, but where would she go? Wherever the warehouse doors were, they would be locked.

  Bright lights suddenly turned on from the direction of the seating area, and she shaded her face. Who exactly was going to watch them?

  “Nok.” She turned at Rolf’s call. He stood at the top of the living room stairs. His fingers were holding the handrail tightly, but they weren’t tapping. He’d shaken that bad habit during their time in the cage, and for a second, he looked like an entirely different person than the twitchy genius she’d first met. “You should come see this.”

  She followed him up the stairs, so nervous that her own fingers nearly started twitching. The entire house consisted of only four rooms, stacked two on two like a perfect cube, with a small cutout for a bathroom. Downstairs was a living room and a kitchen large enough to fit a dining room table. Upstairs there was a bedroom and a spare room, mostly empty now except for a rocking chair and a few boxes.

  She paused in the open doorway.

  Unassembled parts of a crib were leaning against one of the boxes. A tangled mobile of stars already hung from the ceiling, perfectly still in the windless room. She took a shaky step inside, touching the mobile to make it spin.

  A nursery—or at least the start of one.

  The mobile spun faster, or maybe the spinning was in her head. She suddenly felt like she was back home in London, trapped in front of flashing camera lights, a too-small dress riding up her hips. She felt sick and turned, but jumped to find Serassi blocking the door.

  “I don’t understand,” Nok said, breathing hard. “You said we weren’t capable of raising our own young. You said you were going to take away the baby.”

  Serassi eyed her calmly. “That was my original assessment, yes. We reproduce by collecting Kindred DNA and matching it for optimum genetics. The offspring are not born, but raised in communal grow houses from infancy through first-decade aging. As chief genetics officer, I have been working to engineer a similar system with humans. Soon, natural reproduction will be as obsolete for your kind as it is for ours. Your child mig
ht very well be the last born of natural means.”

  She almost looked pleased with herself, but then she blinked, as though she had forgotten something important, and cocked her head. “Though after observing you in your previous enclosure, I realized I might be missing a valuable opportunity to study authentic prenatal care in its natural habitat. Our knowledge of your child-rearing culture has heretofore been collected by studying artifacts: instructional books, videos, and recordings. I’ve learned that your kind has traditions that are never written down. It is my intention to observe these informal practices here.”

  Nok stumbled through her words. “So . . . we can keep the baby?”

  Serassi’s dark eyes swiveled to Nok’s belly. “As long as you prove yourselves useful to our research purposes.”

  “And if we don’t?” Rolf asked tensely. “You cut the baby out of her belly and kill us?”

  “The moral code prevents us from killing you,” Serassi answered, though from the way her voice lingered, whatever the alternative would be didn’t seem much better.

  A pain shot through Nok’s belly. Was it true? Would they really take Sparrow away before she was even born and raise her in some alien incubator somewhere, watched and documented just like Nok had been for all those photographers back home? “You’re monsters!” She lunged toward Serassi, but Rolf held her back. His muscles had grown from all the sledding and gardening in the cage, and he stopped her from clawing at Serassi.

  “Don’t,” he whispered. “She’s stronger than us. Think of Sparrow.”

  Nok let out a frustrated cry and spun away, breath coming fast. She pressed a hand to the base of her neck. The Kindred had fixed her asthma when they’d abducted her, but she still felt the ghost of tightness in her lungs.