The Hunt (15 page)

Cora

CORA SHIELDED HER EYES
against the bright savanna sun.
It glinted off the hood of the nearest safari truck, blinding her so that all she could make out of Roshian was a dark outline.

She took a shaky step backward, nearly tripping over the uneven ground. “Dane, what's going on?”

He stood at the base of the veranda steps, blocking her. “You heard him,” he said quietly, tossing the yo-yo. “Run. You might have a chance.”

“You brought me here to
die
?”

His eyes snapped to her. “That's up to how fast you are. I can't say I'm optimistic.” He shoved the toy in his pocket, and when he spoke again, his tone was more resigned. “I'll tell Lucky that you died in an accident. I'll watch out for him. He could go far here.”

She contemplated hurling herself at him, clawing his face, ripping out clumps of his hair, but it wouldn't change anything—
he
wasn't in charge.

“You!” She spun on Roshian. “If this is just about some trophy, take it! I'll give you my hair, no favors in return, no questions asked.”

“It
is
the trophy I want,” Roshian said calmly. “But the trophy means nothing without the hunt.”

He picked up the old rifle, an enormous dark-gray monster that had to weigh twenty pounds, nothing Kindred about it in the slightest.

“Just run already!” Dane hurled his yo-yo at her feet.

She let out a hoarse cry. Her mind kept spinning, trying to find a rational explanation, as Roshian stroked the length of the rifle barrel. He couldn't do this. He couldn't kill a human. And then he rested a finger on the trigger, and her spinning mind stopped.

Apparently, somehow, he could.

“Only one way to escape the Big Bad Wolf,”
said Anya's voice
less whisper, and for a second, Cora was glad at least she wasn't
alone.
“That's to run.”

Cora's heart throbbed harder. Anya might think in riddles, but this one wasn't hard to decipher.

Cora turned and ran.

Heat rose from the ground, turning the artificial savanna into hazy waves. Tall grass. The watering hole. Rolling hills. Not many places to hide, which was exactly how it had been designed.

Behind her came the metallic clicks of a rifle preparing to fire. Back in DC, her father had once dragged her to a shooting range for a political photo op and made her put on ear protection and fire at a person-shaped target. She had hated everything about that dank cement room of sweaty men, but she remembered one thing: it was a lot harder to shoot a moving target.

Her long dress tangled around her ankles, slowing her, and she jerked it up around her knees so she could run faster, darting and weaving to make herself harder to shoot. Her feet pounded over stone and tufts of grass, throwing up sand behind her. She ran for the closest hill. If she could get behind it—

A bullet whizzed by her side.

She shrieked and veered to the right, throwing herself behind a tree. She could just make out Roshian on the horizon, still standing by the veranda steps. He had lowered the rifle to reload. Even if the bullets were artificial, they would still immobilize her so that he could slice her throat. Her breath slammed in her chest as she dug her fingernails into the tree.

What chance did she have? He was Kindred, and all Kindred were faster, and stronger, and smarter. Tessela, Cassian, Lucky, and Mali—none of them could help her, because they had no idea that at this moment a twisted creature in a safari uniform was lifting a rifle to aim again.

“Anya,”
she thought as hard as she could.
“Help!”

For a minute, there was nothing. The sun beat down mercilessly. It was only a matter of time before Roshian would corner her, shoot her, and cut off her hair and keep it as a deranged trophy. No one would be left to run
or
cheat the Gauntlet.

And then:

“Don't give up, little rabbit.”

The words batted around in Cora's chest, giving her just the slightest amount of hope.

“How?” Cora whispered aloud.

“Make a twin.”

Anya's voice echoed in her head. A twin? No, a
decoy
! That
would work, but Cora had nothing except the clothes on her back. She ripped the heavy golden fabric of her dress at the knees, and then tossed it over a branch so it flickered in the wind. Anya was right. From a distance, it might look as if she was hiding there.

She shoved off and ran for the hill. A gunshot went off behind her, splintering a chunk of the tree. The torn fabric of her dress fluttered again as he fired once more.

She dropped to all fours and crawled through the tall grass. Roshian would soon realize the decoy was just fabric and follow her trail of footsteps through the sand. She needed a way to not leave a trail. If there was a river, she could wade through the water to hide her tracks. If there was a paved road, she could walk on it. But there was only sand.

“The trees offer shelter.”

Cora tossed her head up, squinting into the high branches. “You've got to be kidding me.”

In the cage, Lucky had taught her how to climb trees—it had been terrifying for someone with a fear of heights, but effective. Now, she gripped the lowest branch of a mango tree and swung up into the branches thick with leaves. She climbed as silently as she could, remembering what Lucky had taught her, trying not to disturb the branches as she leaped to the next tree, and then the next. The trees didn't stretch far, but she just needed them to span the sandy patch where Roshian would see any tracks she left. It would look as though she had just vanished.

The last tree ended at a grassy patch, where she dropped down and crouched low.

She closed her eyes and listened.

It was completely quiet, except for her own strangled breath.
She didn't dare look over the grass to see where Roshian was. For all she knew, he might be ten feet away, stalking her with his mind.

A twig snapped nearby, and she bolted.

Bullets ricocheted in the grass behind her, spraying sand into the air. He was just on the other side of the mango trees. She tore through the grass, flinching as it twisted around her ankles, threatening to pull her back down.

“The Big Bad Wolf is clever,”
Anya's voice said.
“But you have magic too. Use it!”

Magic? Anya must mean levitation, but what was Cora supposed to do, stop the bullets with her mind? She could barely hold a die a few inches off the ground! If only there was something she could nudge, like Cassian had trained her, like a boulder perched on a cliff above Roshian. But there weren't any cliffs and the only boulders were on the ground.

Another bullet flew by her. She pivoted and sprinted toward the watering hole. At least there were rocks there, where the animals sunned themselves when they weren't in their cages, and some boulders she could hide behind. She raced onto the rocks, avoiding the water so she wouldn't leave a set of wet tracks for Roshian to follow. She dived behind a boulder and pressed her back against it, fighting to catch her breath.

No animal had ever escaped the Hunt. But she wasn't an animal. She was human, and that had to count for something. There had to be some advantage humans had that the Kindred didn't.

She heard Roshian's boots on the rocks just on the other side of the watering hole. He'd be there soon.

She thought of all the times Cassian had talked about the roots of his fascination with humanity. Curiosity. Art. Affection.
Forgiveness. None of that was going to help her against creatures with skin as thick as metal.

But not giving up—that might help. If Charlie were here, he would definitely tell her that
now
was a good time to be stubborn.

Cora rooted her feet.

The Kindred weren't completely invulnerable. Their hard, metallic skin was difficult to pierce, but what about the eyes? In Bay Pines, Cora's cellmate Queenie had once gotten in a fight on the exercise field with another girl much bigger than her. Queenie had never stood a chance in a fight, so she had gone straight for the other girl's eyes.
Cheating,
she had told Cora later,
can be useful for
a lot more than just cards.

Cora hunted through the pebbles and leaves at her feet until she found a small stick the width of her thumb, and maybe eight inches long. Hardly a match for bullets, but it was a chance. She scrambled around the boulder and found footholds to climb on top, moving slowly, making sure that Roshian was always directly on the opposite side so he couldn't see her. She pulled herself up, wishing her heart wasn't pounding so hard.

There he was.

Just on the other side of the boulder. Three feet below where she crouched, he was creeping silently, his rifle at the ready.

Three.

Two.

One!

She leaped off the boulder and landed on his back, using the momentum to sling him to the ground. He reacted fast, trying to twist the rifle around, but she was too close for him to aim. He tossed the rifle aside and drew a Kindred-issue pistol out of his
holster. She struggled to keep him on the ground, clawing at his arms. Blood spurted everywhere, though she hadn't felt a scratch. He let off a shot. Pain ripped through her shin and she cried out. He'd used a tranquilizer bullet—the chemicals were already spreading through her bloodstream, starting to immobilize her. He shoved to his knees, setting the end of the pistol against her forehead—even a tranquilizer bullet would kill her this close—but she drove the stick at his face first.

“Do it, little rabbit!”
Anya's voice urged.

It connected with a sickening
squish
. Roshian let out a scream that sounded impossibly human as he reached for the stick emerging from his eye socket. She stumbled back, breathing hard. Her leg was already numb. She looked down to see where she was bleeding. Her shin. Where else? Where was all the blood coming from? There was something gritty under her nails. Metallic, like tiny slivers of silver sand.

Roshian swung his head around to look for the rifle with his one remaining eye. She shoved herself to her good foot, limping, trying to get away before her entire body was immobilized. Hope surged with every footstep. The veranda wasn't far away. She might have a chance to climb those steps before the chemicals spread through her entire body. Crawl into the lodge, open the backstage door, scream until the others came running. Roshian surely wouldn't kill her in front of witnesses.

She reached for the railing. She couldn't feel her right leg at all, and her fingertips were going numb. She hobbled up, step by step.

At the top of the stairs, a bullet went off just over her head.

She collapsed to the stairs. When she turned, he was ten feet away, one hand clutched over the stick in his eye, the other eye
burning with fury. “One more step and I'll shoot you in the back of the head, even if it means ruining that pretty hair of yours.”

He sounded so savage, so brutal, so completely unlike a Kindred.

“Anya,”
she thought.
“Anya, what do I do?”

But Anya's voice said nothing now.

“Turn around,” he said. “I want to watch your face as you die.”

Cora

CORA'S LEGS WERE NUMB.

She couldn't walk. Couldn't crawl. Couldn't fight.

The safety of the lounge was so close, and yet impossible to reach.

Blood stained Roshian's torn safari uniform from where she'd scratched him. But it was too red: Kindred blood was so dark it was nearly black. And their skin was so tough that she could never tear it with her nails alone. She looked down at her hand—the jagged nails, and that gritty, silvery substance caked in them. It looked like circuitry. Minuscule metallic fibers.

Beneath the seeping blood on his arms, Roshian's skin was
pale.
Pale
.

“A wolf in sheep's clothing,”
Anya's voice whispered at the same time Cora realized it herself.

“You're human.” The accusation came out as a surprise. “That's why you can kill me.”

He clutched his bleeding eye harder. “An unfortunate fact for you.”

He cocked the gun.

“We're supposed to help our own kind!” she yelled. “Why are you conspiring with the Kindred when they're the ones who make us live like this?” She stretched her jaw. Her throat was going numb, and it was getting hard to speak.

“The Kindred don't know what I am,” he said. “No one knows, except the Mosca traders who make it possible. I was a graduate student when the Kindred took me. That was before they screened their wards, or else they would have known that on Earth I'd already killed. Deer hunting didn't quite satisfy the urge, so I studied to be a doctor. It isn't difficult to kill patients. Wrong medication. Complications during surgery.”

He stepped closer, nudging her leg with his boot. Her foot flopped to the side, no longer in her control. He crouched down, prodding her shoulder with the tip of his gun, smiling grimly when she couldn't lift a finger to stop him.

“I didn't care that I'd been taken,” he said. “I
like
it here. I like the Kindred. They think themselves so intelligent, but they aren't, at least not when it comes to deception. It was easy to escape from them. I've always been tall—at least by human standards. Well built. I thought, if only I had black eyes and metallic skin, I could pass myself off as one of them. So that's what I did.”

She urged her body to move, but it was frozen. It was all she could do to force words from her throat. “But surely they could tell. Your mind . . .”

He ran a hand down her hair, appraising it like it was already hanging from a hook in his room. “Read my thoughts, you mean?
That was easy enough to get around. They can't read minds when they're uncloaked, and they're always uncloaked in the menageries. So this is where I stay. I have no life outside of the menageries and my quarters.”

Blood kept seeping from the wound on her shin, but she felt nothing. Not a single muscle would respond to her internal screams to move. Soon, she wouldn't even be able to speak. All she would have left was her mind.

“But,”
Anya whispered,
“not all swords are held in the hand. Real power lies in the mind.”

“You've lived among them . . . without any . . . perceptive abilities?” Cora managed to ask.

He aimed the gun. “Flattery won't help you.”

“I'm serious. Not a single . . . ability?”

His smile started to fade. “I used my intelligence alone. We're smarter than the Kindred realize, even if their mental abilities are impossible for us.”

She closed her eyes.

“Oh, I know all about impossibilities.” She concentrated on the stick in his eye. Maybe she couldn't yet control someone else's mind, but she could levitate small objects. She wrapped her thoughts around the stick, imagining it was her hand, and she
pushed
.

The stick jerked.

Roshian screamed.

And then she pushed again. A nudge. And another. Roshian dropped the gun. She didn't let go of the stick with her mind. She pushed it farther, steadily and slowly, letting her anger cut through the pain piercing her head, through the sound of him screaming as he crumpled to the ground, through the blood that was dribbling
from her nose. He was human, and the human brain was soft and easily damaged. She pushed the stick farther, all the way, until it tapped against the back of his skull.

He collapsed facedown on the ground. Blood pooled beneath his head.

She released her hold on the stick. Her whole body started shaking, though she couldn't feel a single muscle. She couldn't stand. Couldn't move. Blood poured from her nose faster but she couldn't lift a hand to brush it away, and her skin burned, and then burned harder, and then she couldn't even feel it anymore. She knew she was crying because she could taste the tears. She might have been screaming, if her throat still worked. Her ears had gone dead too.

Then two hands grabbed her.

She looked at them as though from the far end of binoculars, small brown hands, nails as chewed up and torn as her own. Fingers pinched her arms and shook her, though she couldn't feel it. A face that was familiar. Stringy black hair and brown eyes that always looked angry, except for now. A mouth that was moving, though she couldn't hear anything. The girl took something out of her pocket. A smell, sharp and citrusy and peppery all at once, choked Cora's mouth and made her gasp.

Her sense of sound snapped back into her head at the same time as her reason. Mali. Mali was shaking her, waving her hand in front of her face. Cora heard her own breath coming ragged, half choked with blood that she leaned over to spit up. Feeling was returning to her limbs, and with it, a roar of pain. More footsteps came down the stairs. Leon appeared, looking from her to Roshian on the ground. He kicked at the body to turn it over, and gagged at the gaping eye socket wound.

“Christ, sweetheart! What did you do?” He dry-heaved into the bushes, and then wiped his mouth. “Sorry we didn't get here sooner. Cassian said the traps in the shipping tunnels would slow us down. We had to take the hallways.”

Cassian was with them?

More footsteps. Heavier ones.

Cassian came thundering down the stairs. He went directly to Roshian's body and pressed his shoulder to the ground with one booted foot, as though Roshian might try to get up, and then inspected the body to make certain he was dead. Cassian's head cocked at the sight of the too-red blood.

“I had no choice,” Cora choked, as her voice returned. “He tried to kill me.”

Cassian climbed the stairs to where Cora was doubled over, and gently tilted her chin up to look at the blood trickling from her nose.

“You killed him.”

“He kept coming. He was human—he didn't care about the moral code.”

She could tell from the lack of surprise on Cassian's face that he already knew. He ran a thumb gently along the sides of her face, brushing away the blood. He was dressed in his formal Warden's uniform; he must have been on duty before coming here. “You did this with your mind. You pushed yourself too far.”

“I had to. The bullet . . . I couldn't move.”

His eyes shifted to her exposed shin, where blood was still flowing from the bullet wound. “This is beyond my abilities to heal. I must take you to Serassi before you lose too much blood.”

She leaned forward, wincing in pain, one strap of the torn
gold dress slipping from her shoulder. A few steps off, Mali picked up a Kindred-made pistol Roshian had dropped. She inspected it closely, then aimed at the ground and squeezed the trigger, but nothing happened.

“What about the Council?” Cora said. “When Arrowal finds out about this, he'll investigate even more closely and figure out I killed him with my mind. He'll know I'm the agitator they're looking for. He won't let me run the Gauntlet—he'll probably throw me in prison.”

“Let me worry about Arrowal,” Cassian said.

Cora's eyes shifted to Cassian, and a new fear entered her mind.

His eyes were entirely black.

He was cloaked.

Which meant he could see into their minds. Hers was already masked with enough pain to shield her thoughts, but Mali's and Leon's weren't. Mali had enough training to be able to prevent him from reading her mind, but Leon didn't.

Cassian had to know that they could get out of their cells. That, for weeks, Leon had been hiding out with the Mosca. That they were negotiating with Bonebreak for a safe room for Nok and Rolf to raise their baby in. That all her training sessions with Cassian were only a lie, and that she had never once intended to actually run the Gauntlet.

Not helping him, but humiliating him.

She searched his eyes, but there was nothing but blackness. Did he know? Or had Leon somehow—miraculously—kept his thoughts private?

“You can't turn Leon in,” she blurted out.

Cassian didn't take his eyes away from her face. “We have more pressing matters,” he said, and stood. He took out the temporary removal pass from his pocket, then bent down to pick her up, but she shook her head.

“Promise me, Cassian. Leon isn't a problem. He's living in the shipping tunnels, that's all. You don't have to turn him in.”

Did he know that this went far beyond Leon being loose on the station? Did he know about her plan to cheat? Did he know
everything
? She thought back to their last training session. He had already been suspicious when she'd pressed him to help her learn to read minds, until she'd turned it on him and said it was because she wanted to know him better.

Did he know that was a lie too?

He turned to Leon and said quietly, “I suggest you disappear back into whatever hole you crawled out of, and never show yourself again. Another Kindred would not be as forgiving as I. And you, Mali—return to Free Time and do not say a word about what has happened here.” He turned back to Cora. “I will return to take care of Roshian's body.”

“But . . .”

“I will take care of it.”

His words had an edge, though his face was blank. Even cloaked, he had never been good at hiding his emotions. She didn't have to be psychic to read the anger and hurt just beneath the surface.

He picked her up as though she weighed nothing. His hand held her under her knees, flooding her with that electric sensation.
His chest against her cheek was thudding hard with his pulse, which was pounding too fast for someone supposed to be cloaked. When she looked up, his face was only inches from hers.

Just a few days ago, she had told him:
I want to know you, the
same way you know me.

He looked away from her, and she saw a flicker of something else beneath his cloaked mask. Pain.

Oh yes. He
knew
.

He carried her up the rest of the steps silently.