The Hunt (The Cage 2)

The blue light turned off. Off! Her breath caught as she tried to process that she’d actually done it.

“Cora.”

Another whisper, but different this time. It came from two cells down, where she could just make out Lucky’s silhouette. “You cried out,” he said softly. “What happened?”

A sleepy mumble came from one of the other cells, and they both froze. The mumble died down as whoever they’d disturbed fell back asleep.

She glanced at the extinguished lightlock. Hesitantly, she pushed it open. The door swung open soundlessly, and she stepped out quietly, tiptoeing past the fox, who stopped gnawing and looked up. She went to Lucky’s cell, fumbling out a hand in the darkness.

There.

His hand, through the bars.

She focused on the lightlock of his door. Open, she urged. The light shut off and once more she was flooded with the rush of success. She climbed in silently. His hands felt for her shoulders, and her hair, as though reassuring himself she was there.

His hand brushed her face and stopped. “Your nose is bleeding.”

She rested a finger on his lips to remind him of the sleeping kids. He was shaking. So was she. She stood on tiptoe and pressed her cheek against his. “I’m okay.” But her whispered words were stilted.

“All this training is hurting you.”

“It’s worth it,” she said. “Now, when Leon comes back, I can sneak away with him through the drecktube tunnels and find Anya.”

“He might not come back.”

“He will. Any day now, I know it. It’ll all work out before you turn nineteen.”

Excitement made her giddy. The thrill of all the progress she’d made. Anxious and frustrated, she kneaded his arms, her lips longing to form words to express her hope.

Instead, she kissed him.

She hadn’t meant to. She just wanted to celebrate this tiny accomplishment, this one thing. He pulled back, and in the dark she couldn’t see his eyes or tell what he was thinking. That was a mistake, she thought, and her fingers in his hair felt the bump from where she’d once hit him. But he wasn’t that crazed boy anymore. And she wasn’t that same wide-eyed girl anymore, either.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I didn’t mean—”

But his initial surprise didn’t last, and he kissed her back. Hard, like someone reaching out of the shadows toward a single point of light. And for a second she felt the way she had the first time they’d kissed. Back when he had been a farm boy with motorcycle grease staining his hands and she’d been so certain they would go home. He had kissed her softly, then. Not like Cassian had. Cassian had kissed like it was his first time—and it had been—and he wanted to experience everything in that single instant.

She broke off the kiss, breathing hard. She couldn’t do this. Kiss one boy while thinking of someone else.

She wiped the blood from her nose.

“I don’t know where that came from,” she started, but he silenced her by pulling her close, pressing another kiss to her forehead.

“You don’t need to explain.” His voice wasn’t angry. “It’s this place. It’s being far from home and only having each other.”

His voice caught on the word home. She wondered if he was thinking of his granddad back in Montana. His motorcycle, rusting and covered with dust in a barn somewhere. A world she might never see again either.

“Can I stay here tonight?” She hadn’t meant to blurt it out. But he was right—being so far from home made her feel like some limb was missing, and when she was with him, she felt just a tiny bit more whole again.

“Of course,” he said.

They curled up on the floor of his cell, blanket pulled tightly around them.

“What do you miss most?” he asked softly.

“The sky,” she answered. “And the air. How it smelled like rain sometimes, and you could see the storms rolling in from the distance.” She brushed away a tear forming in the corner of her eye. “Do you really think it’s all gone?”

He hesitated. She could feel his heart beating hard beneath his shirt.

“There’s something I’ve been trying to figure out,” he started. “Something I found when I went on a hunt with Mali a few days ago. It was carved into one of the trucks that Chicago used to drive.”

“Wait.” She pressed a finger to his lips, and he looked at her questioningly. “Do you trust me?” He gave a slow nod. “Let me try to read it from your mind.”

He hesitated.

“I need to learn how to read minds if I’m going to learn to control them.”

He looked hesitant. “Just promise you won’t root around in there too deep.”

She closed her eyes and concentrated. Her cheeks warmed as she thought of the last time she’d gone digging in his mind, and found memories of her. But this time, he was focused, too. On a word. No, a number. She could almost picture it, rough lines carved into a dashboard.

“Is it 30 . . . 1?” she asked.

His body went rigid in surprise. “Yeah. Well, close. It was 30.1, and it had the letters POD in front of it. I’ve been trying to figure out where I’ve seen numbers like that before.”

Her eyes went wide.

“I know where.” She couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice. “POD. It stands for Probability of Destruction. But Cassian says the POD for Earth is 98.6, not 30.1. If it was just thirty point one percent, then that would mean there’d be a nearly seventy percent chance that Earth is still there, which would be . . .”

“Incredible,” Lucky whispered.

Cora felt her heart thumping hard. “When they took Chicago away, he said the Kindred had been lying to us. Maybe, if he was the one who carved that into the dashboard, this is what he meant. Maybe he figured out the algorithm was wrong.”

“If it’s true, and if we could get out of here, we could go back home, tell everyone to come back with intergalactic weapons—”

She shook her head. “No one would believe us. They’d lock us up in a mental ward. Even if we could get someone to believe us, our rockets are nothing against the Kindred.” She shook her head. “No, we’re on our own. If we ever get free, we can’t tell anyone back home what happened.”

“So how do we find out if the probability is wrong?”

She paused. Cassian had insisted that the percentage was too small to even investigate, but what if Chicago was right? And what if Cassian didn’t know that the algorithm was wrong?

“Cassian didn’t want to look into it before, but this might change things.”

“Cora, he’s the enemy.”

The word caught her off guard. Enemy? It was a word she’d used herself to describe him, when they’d first learned that he was their captor, and again after he had betrayed her. And yet for some reason, it didn’t seem to fit anymore. “He wants to help us. And he’s as convinced as everyone e

lse there isn’t an Earth to return to. But if there is, and if we beat the Gauntlet . . . maybe we can go home.”

She smiled into Lucky’s shirt. She thought of a big, rolling sky filled with clouds, a sky that maybe Charlie was flying across this very moment in a small but sleek airplane.

At least for this one night, she didn’t feel hopeless.

VERY EARLY, CORA SLIPPED back into her cell. When morning came and the lights flickered on, she went about her usual task of checking the floor by the drecktube, expecting nothing.

She froze.

Today was different. Chalky words and a drawing of a hand with only three fingers had been drawn on the floor.

FOUND HER.

She heard footsteps behind her and hurried to wipe away the chalk marks just as Dane walked down the aisle for inspection, tossing the yo-yo. “Going to behave today, songbird?”

She smudged the last of Leon’s message. “Of course.”

“Just remember what I told you.” His eyes were on her, but his head was turned slightly toward Lucky.

She smiled tightly. “Right. Keep my hands to myself. I wouldn’t dream of anything else.”

It was all she could do not to look in Lucky’s direction.

Dane threw the yo-yo again. Cassian had said that if she did beat the Gauntlet, change wouldn’t happen overnight. It would take months to establish a system to bring humans equality, with some suffering longer than others. Maybe, in Dane’s case, she would make sure he was handed his freedom last.

17

Cora

AS SOON AS SHE could, Cora told Lucky about Leon’s message.

“I put a note down the drecktube telling him to wait until tonight,” she said, whispering across the water trough. “I’ll unlock my cell again. Night lasts at least eight hours; that should be plenty of time to get Anya—”

“Well, well.” Dane seemed to have been lying in wait, ready to pounce on them alone together.

Cora clenched her jaw. “We’re talking about work.”

He smiled thinly. “You have bigger concerns than me right now. Guards are outside. They’re demanding you go with them.”