The Hunt (The Cage 2)

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.”

26

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 surpr

ise. “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 . . .”