The Hunt

by Megan Shepherd

  Her heart pounded. It was incredible what even this small sliver of hope could do to her morale. She pinched her eyebrows together and concentrated again on the dice. It was easiest if she let her mind probe the dice first, until she could wrap her thoughts around one as easily as if it were her own fingers moving them. She set her sights on the closest die, urging it into a wobble, then a spiral, and lifting it shakily, inch by inch, with the force of her mind until it hovered six inches. As hard as she concentrated, she couldn’t get it to rise any higher.

  “Mind reading,” a voice whispered in her ear. “The three little mice cheat with cheese, not with crumbs.”

  Distracted, Cora let the die fall.

  Anya was trying to communicate with her again, but as before, the words only came in nonsensical pieces that she could barely stitch together. Mind reading? Cheese? She had to get Anya out of the Temple soon, so they could speak face-to-face.

  Cassian frowned. “If your head is hurting, we should stop for the day.”

  She glanced at him cautiously. His face was calm—he hadn’t heard Anya’s voice.

  “No, it isn’t the training,” Cora covered quickly. “I just didn’t sleep well.” That, at least, was true—tossing all night worrying about Lucky. “I . . . had bad dreams. They were about the girl you took me to see in the Temple menagerie. The dangerous one. Anya, wasn’t that her name? I dreamed she had escaped and she came here and . . . and killed all of us. I can’t get it out of my mind. Could we go to see her again, just so I can reassure myself? I’m sure it would make my head hurt a lot less.”

  Cassian’s face remained a frustratingly impassive mask, even uncloaked. “That is impossible.”

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” she pressed. “You took me there before.”

  He removed a small metal tag from his pocket. “When we use these temporary removal passes to get humans out of their enclosures, the activity is logged. It is not worth the risk of the Council seeing the log and growing even more suspicious than they already are. Wait until after the Gauntlet. If you win, you can see her whenever you like.”

  His voice was curt as he reset the dice.

  She leaned forward. “I need to go now. Before the Gauntlet. Surely there must be some other way we could get there, without using the passes. There has to be a service entrance or something. The Council would never have to know.”

  “No.”

  “But there must be a backstage area, right? Some other way to reach her?” Cora realized her voice was growing a little desperate, as Cassian stopped arranging the dice. His head turned slowly. Even uncloaked, his eyes were dark.

  “Why are you so concerned with Anya?”

  “Like I said,” she replied, treading carefully, “because of the nightmare.”

  He studied her for a long time. He was uncloaked, so he couldn’t possibly see into her mind, and yet she wondered if her plan to cheat was written all over her face. She grabbed a die and gave an exaggerated sigh. “Forget it. But I’m tired of dice and cards. Can’t we work on something that isn’t telekinesis?” She tapped the die anxiously against the table. “The Gauntlet might test me on mind reading too, and we haven’t even started.”

  Cassian kept his eyes on her. She could feel him trying to unravel whatever was going on in her head. His fingers toyed with the die, just as hers did. It read 6. He turned it again: 3. For a second, she wondered what it would be like to read his mind. Control it, even. What would she have him do? Bow down to her. Sing and dance on command. Or maybe—just maybe—place his bare palm over hers again, so she could feel that flush of raw electricity.

  She felt her face burning, and looked away.

  “There is a logical progression to these training modules,” he said measuredly. “First you master nudging the dice. Then levitate them. Then we move on to mind reading. This process is how we will prove your higher intelligence: through measurable, documentable results. Unless you have other reasons for wanting to skip ahead?”

  She bit the inside of her cheek. “No. Of course not.”

  He reached out as if to set his hand over hers, and for a second her cheeks flamed again, desires she could barely admit suddenly coming true. But he only took the die from her to keep her from tapping it so neurotically.

  “You are anxious,” he said softly.

  “I just . . .” She looked away. “You’re right. I do want to skip ahead for a reason that has nothing to do with the Gauntlet.” She took a deep breath. She’d known for a few years that both her parents were having affairs long before the divorce, but her mother was far better at lying about it. Right before her mother told her father a lie, she would tilt her head down and let her hair fall in her eyes, and Cora did the same thing now. “I feel at such a disadvantage. You know every last thing about me. You watched me on Earth. You know about my time in Bay Pines, and you know about personal memories, like my dog, and my parents’ divorce. There’s an imbalance between us that I can’t get past. You can look into my head anytime you’re cloaked, but to me, yours is always closed off.”

  His hand rested so close to hers. An inch, and they would be touching. “This is what your agitation is about? You wish to see into my mind?” There was a trace of curiosity in his voice.

  For the briefest moment, she hated herself for the lie.

  “Of course.” She scooted to the bench next to his, so that their bodies were only inches apart. “The Gauntlet isn’t just about gaining new abilities. It’s about proving we are truly equal. And how can we be equal when I’m the one trapped here, and you can leave at any time?”

  The storm clouds in his eyes were moving, slowly, across his dark irises. “I cannot change that,” he said. “Until we prove humanity’s intelligence, you and all humans will always be caged.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “But this one thing—this you can change.”

  His fingers returned to turning the die: 2, then 4. Faster and faster, though his face remained impassive.

  “I want to know you,” she whispered, “the same way you know me.”

  The die in his hand abruptly stopped.

  Cora’s heartbeat sped, even though she didn’t want it to. It was undeniable, this thing between them. Always there, pulsing just under the surface. His hand was so close. So achingly close.

  “Cora.” In the privacy of the alcove, he could kiss her and no one would know. He wanted to. Badly. She didn’t need to be psychic to know that.

  A knock came on the wooden screen.

  Cora jerked upright, heart racing. Through the screen, she could just make out the familiar slope of Dane’s shoulders.

  Cassian straightened immediately. “Enter.”

  Dane slid open the screen. If he found anything odd about the two of them sitting so close, dice and cards untouched on the table, he didn’t even blink.

  “We’re closing shortly,” Dane said. “Perhaps you can continue your card game tomorrow. And, Cora, I wondered if you’d mind sticking around a bit longer. The zebra was sick, and I could use an extra set of hands cleaning up. I’ll have you back to the cell block before Free Time ends.”

  He gave a bland smile.

  “Um . . . sure.” Cora hurried to pick up all the cards and shuffle them into a stack. “Whatever you need. Cassian, just let me know when you want to . . . play cards . . . again.”

  She felt her cheeks blazing. She was in such a rush to get away that she didn’t stop to think about how odd it was for Dane to ask her a favor, until he led her to the Hunt’s supply closet behind the bar. To her surprise, Lucky was standing among the boxes of booze. His face looked grim.

  “What’s going on?” she asked, blinking hard.

  “Dane and I had a chat,” Lucky said quietly. “Come inside, and shut the door behind you.”

  23

  Cora

  CORA STEPPED INTO THE supply closet, squeezing between dusty boxes of booze, and inched the door closed. “Tell me.”

  Lucky nearly bumped into an
old giraffe carving. “Dane can help us change my birthday.”

  Cora turned to Dane. “Let me guess—you want something in return.”

  Dane gave his thin smile. “Lucky and I have already settled upon my compensation. It’s more about what Roshian wants.”

  Cora nearly knocked over the giraffe statue in surprise. “What does Roshian have to do with anything?”

  “He controls timekeeping for the Kindred,” Lucky said. “He’ll tweak my records, but only for one thing.”

  The supply closet suddenly felt like it was closing in too tightly around her. “What?”

  “You,” Lucky said. And then he clarified, “He wants your hair. The same way he wants the antlers and the horns from the animals he hunts. I guess he has a special place for a human braid on his psycho shelf of lesser-species memorabilia.”

  Dane suppressed a laugh.

  Cora’s hand drifted to her hair on instinct, tangling in the curls. “I thought it was just the Axion who cared about that kind of thing.”

  Dane gave a shrug. “I didn’t ask why he wants it. My guess is you’re better off not knowing.”

  Her feet itched to pace, but the room was so small. “Can you give us a second to talk alone, Dane?”

  Dane picked up a dusty bottle of schnapps and peeked out of the cracked door. “Five minutes,” he said.

  Once they were alone in the closet, Lucky ran a hand through his hair. “Listen, Cora, we can find another way. You don’t have to do this.”

  She sank onto a box. “What other way? They’ll come for you day after tomorrow if we don’t, and you’re too stubborn to hide out with Leon.” She twisted the ends of her hair around her fist. “It’s just hair.”

  “But who knows why Roshian wants it. Maybe he needs the DNA for something. Maybe he is a Council spy. Someone must have told the Council that you were behind our escape from the cage. This could be some elaborate scheme by the Council.”

  She leveled a stare at him. “The Kindred don’t scheme. If they wanted to arrest me, they would just come take me.”

  Lucky shook his head. “I still don’t like it.”

  “I don’t either, but we don’t have much choice. At least Tessela and Fian are usually around, in case anything goes wrong. Roshian might bend the rules every now and then, but he can’t break them. He’s bound by the moral code. And Dane wouldn’t dare risk breaking the rules this close to his own birthday, when he’s already practically got one foot in Armstrong.”

  “Still. It makes me nervous.” Lucky’s hand moved like he wanted to reach out and touch her, but he didn’t, and she started toying with her own fingers. For a second, the privacy of the closet reminded her of the first time they’d been truly alone, without the watching eyes of the Kindred, beneath the boughs of a weeping cherry tree. She had seen in Lucky a boy who didn’t know his own strengths. A boy who just wanted a simple life. A beach. A beer. A guitar. A boy who, like her, had had all that taken away from him.

  She took his hand and pressed it against her cheek. His fingers were strong and knotty from years of farm work. The cage hadn’t changed that. “Let me do this for you,” she whispered.

  His eyebrows knit together as though something troubled him. “For once,” he said, “I want to rescue you. I want to make a sacrifice for you. After what happened in the cage, that night that I—”

  He didn’t finish, but he didn’t have to. She remembered that awful feeling of inevitability as they’d climbed the stairs to his room and he’d started to take off her clothes with that delirious look in his eye.

  “You don’t owe me anything,” she whispered.

  “It isn’t about debt,” he said. His hands surrounded hers, growing warmer.

  “Then what?” she asked. “We both agreed that kiss was a mistake.”

  “I know.” He turned her hand over, tracing the markings on her hand, hesitant to continue. “But there’s a reason the Kindred’s algorithm matched us together. We’re alike, in a way. We both need a greater purpose. You don’t believe it, but it’s true. The Gauntlet means more to you than you let on.”

  She wasn’t quite sure how to answer, so she just watched him tracing the markings on her palm. “Maybe it does,” she said at last.

  “More important than you risking working with Roshian to save my ass.”

  She smirked. “Your ass is getting saved, end of story.”

  The tension between them had shifted, and she turned his hand over instead, tracing her eyes over the tattooed lines in his palm. “What do you think these markings say?”

  “‘Rejects,’ probably,” he concluded, and then frowned. “Yours is different from mine. Here, on your ring finger. The pinprick is a lot bigger.”

  She rubbed her thumb over it, almost like she could wipe it away. “I noticed before. I don’t know why.”

  “It looks almost like a ring,” he said. “The way it meets the black band around your finger. Almost like a . . .” His eyes shot to hers. “Almost like a diamond.”

  She jerked her hand away and studied it closely.

  It wasn’t supposed to be a glistening star, she realized. Lucky was right. Cassian must have modified her markings just slightly—just enough not to raise suspicion—to hide this human symbol there as a secret between the two of them. A diamond ring.

  “That . . . that can’t be right,” she stuttered.

  But Lucky’s face had darkened. “I bet Cassian did it intentionally. He hid a diamond ring in your markings as some kind of twisted kind of declaration. A vow.” He squeezed his fist, hiding the markings on his own palm.

  Cora kept staring at it. It couldn’t be true, could it? A tattooed diamond ring? She parted her lips to deny it again, but the door shoved open, and Dane looked in.

  “Well, songbird?”

  She let her hand fall. “Give me some scissors,” she said quickly, ignoring the marking on her fourth finger. “I’ll cut my hair off right now.”

  “It isn’t quite that simple.” Dane held up two fingers, snipping them together like scissors. “Roshian wants to do the honors himself. Odd, I know. But to each his own.”

  Cora glanced back at Lucky, whose face was set with worry.

  “Roshian will have to make complicated conversions to change up the new date. It will take some time,” Dane said.

  “We don’t have time. Lucky turns nineteen in two days.”

  Dane’s eyes shifted to Lucky over her shoulder. “Lucky isn’t going anywhere, don’t worry. I’ll make all the arrangements and let you know when Roshian is ready to make the exchange. It’ll have to be after closing. I’ll leave a signal for you onstage.”

  “A signal?”

  “You’ll know.”

  She ran her hand down her curls. She’d had long hair for as long as she could remember. Jenny, Makayla—theirs was shorn close, and it didn’t seem to bother them. She’d get used to it, but still, how much could they snip, snip, snip away at themselves before they stopped being human and started to be something else?

  “All right,” she said, reaching down to squeeze Lucky’s hand, and only then remembered that, after closing, Tessela and Fian wouldn’t be there to look out for her.

  Lucky’s eyes lingered on her ring finger, and his face darkened again.

  A DAY PASSED. CORA felt the time slipping away as she went about her tasks like each minute was a token falling through slats, never to be recovered. She barely knew what words she was singing, and half the time they came out as jibberish. That night, she snuck out of her cell and curled up with Lucky, holding tight to his shirt collar, as though that could keep him there.

  All during the next day—Lucky’s birthday—she tried to catch a second alone with Dane to ask him about the plan, but he only ignored her. She sang her first set. Then her second. Roshian wasn’t in the audience but Arrowal was, with Fian and two other Council members. The walls felt even more claustrophobic than they usually did. She was nearly dizzy by the start of her final set. She stepped onstage, and s
topped.

  Dane’s yo-yo was tied in a pretty little bow around the microphone.

  She whirled her head toward the bar, where Dane was shaking a drink for a Kindred woman. For a second his eyes met hers, and he gave a slight nod. This was the signal. She sang through her set with a shaky voice, singing songs she vaguely remembered from her middle school years, innocent songs about tire swings and first loves that wouldn’t give the Council any reason in the slightest to stick around after closing to question her again.

  At last, Tessela announced the Hunt was closing. Cora held her breath until every Council member had left. Shoukry finished cleaning the bar, and then they were alone. Dane turned down the lamps.

  “Where’s Roshian?” Cora asked.

  Dane untied his yo-yo from the microphone, slipping it back in his pocket. “Waiting for us.”

  He started toward the veranda doors, but Cora snaked out an arm. “I need to see proof first. I’m not going anywhere with you until I know Lucky’s birthday is changed.”

  Dane took a small envelope from his pocket. She fumbled with the flap and dumped out a metal tag, engraved with the Kindred’s writing. “Flip it over,” Dane said.

  She did, and her breath caught. A date, in English. October 21, 1998.

  Exactly one year after Lucky was born.

  Dane smiled. “I told you to trust me, songbird. You aren’t the only one who doesn’t want Lucky to leave. Now, this way.”

  They passed through the fluttering white curtains to the artificial outdoors, where she had to shade her eyes against the sun. She hadn’t been on the veranda since the first day, when Cassian had shown her the savanna. She knew it wasn’t real, just forced perspective and illusions, and yet her mind refused to believe that those scrubby hills didn’t stretch as endlessly as they appeared to do.

  Dane started down the stairs.

  “Aren’t we meeting him here?” she asked.