The Hunt (The Cage 2)

He raised a fist to bang on the door, but stopped. The last time he’d seen Lucky and Mali was when he’d abandoned them, unconscious and sopping wet, on a control room floor. There was a strong chance they wouldn’t be thrilled to see him again.

But still. It was Mali.

He raised his fist to knock.

He stopped again.

What if there were Kindred on the other side too? It didn’t seem likely; Kindred didn’t seem the type to hang around manure, zebra or otherwise. Lucky and Mali were probably locked in some jail or fake world behind that door; they probably needed him. He should knock.

But again, he didn’t.

Sweat dripped onto the chalky rock floor. What was he thinking, anyway? Rescuing them from some zoo-themed jail was a heroic thing to do—and he only looked out for himself. Back in Auckland, when he was just a tyke, his dad had taken him aside right before they’d locked him in prison. There’s nothing in the world more important than kin, he’d said, and pointed to the tattoos on his face that told the history of their family’s achievements. Your brothers steal, you steal with them. They fight, you fight with them. They go to prison, you go to prison too. Everyone else in the world can go to hell, but not your kin.

And Leon’s only kin on this station was Leon.

Slowly, heart pounding, he drew a zebra-stripe symbol next to the door with chalk, so he wouldn’t mistakenly stumble upon them again. Then he crawled away. He turned one way, then the other, trying to get away from the voice in his mind urging him to go back and help them. He crawled past the next few doorways, sniffing. He swore he smelled campfire smoke, and then later, strawberries, and stopped to make marks next to each of the doorways. He continued crawling down random tunnels, just barely avoiding another cleaner trap. Screw the map. And screw Lucky and Mali and the others. They aren’t kin, he told himself again. He just wanted to breathe some fresh air. Gulp it down, like a man dying of thirst would drink water. These tunnels were so tight. Were they getting smaller? Chalk was getting everywhere. It tasted ashy, almost like something burning. The air had taken on the smell of smoke, not the pleasant campfire smell from before, but like something roasting and rotten. He pressed a hand to his nose, his eyes bleary with the smoke, and took a corner too fast.

Something zapped his arm.

A cleaner trap!

There it was, that thin sparkly line, and his hand right smack in the middle of it. His throat closed up, but no ball of gas came. No flames.

And then he saw why.

Just ahead in the tunnel, curled in a ball, was the charred body of some kid who had already triggered the trap—it must not have been reset yet.

Leon jerked his hand out of the trap’s laser light, eyeing the charred body with a grimace. Judging by the smell, it had been there a few days, at least.

He crawled closer, shining his light on the body hesitantly. A black kid about his age, arms covering his face. Most of his clothes were too charred to be recognizable, though they were made of a khaki material with a lion emblem on the pocket. Leon nudged a pair of half-melted goggles around his neck. Part of the boy’s skin oozed off, and Leon gagged and stumbled toward the closest door.

“Gross gross gross.”

He shoved the door open a crack. Blessedly, it led to an empty hallway.

Fresh air came pouring in, smelling like ozone, and he gulped it greedily, trying to get the smell of burned skin out of his nose. He should climb out, figure out where he was, deliver this reeking package, and go drown himself in vodka until he’d forgotten everything he’d just seen.

He started to open the door farther.

But then he thought of that lion emblem.

The boy wasn’t far from the door where he’d drawn the zebra-striped symbol. Lions, zebras—it didn’t take a genius to guess the dead kid probably came from the same place where Lucky and Mali were being kept. What if Lucky and Mali ended up in the tunnels too? Would he be crawling over their charred bodies next?

He slammed the door closed. In the cage, he wouldn’t have hesitated to leave them behind. But something had changed. He had changed. For the first time in his life he had . . . friends. Friends who he’d rather not have die in a ball of fire. And in a way, he realized, his dad had been wrong. Friends mattered too.

Grumbling, he turned around. He retraced his chalky marks through the maze of claustrophobic tunnels, back toward the door with the zebra-stripe symbol.

Maybe—just this once—he could be a damn hero.

13

Cora

CORA BLINKED AWAKE TO find herself staring at the dead, black eyes of a deer.

She sat abruptly, nearly knocking heads with the mousy-haired girl who Dane had called Pika. She was in the backstage cell block. A dead deer lay nearby on the floor, half covered by a burlap sack. Pika absently stroked its snow-white tail.

“What happened?” Cora pressed a hand to her head. The deer’s blood made her remember other blood—Cassian’s blood—and the gleaming sharp point of the toy jack.

Lucky swam into her vision. “You blacked out,” he said. “Your nose was gushing blood. Cassian carried you back here and Pika revived you.”

The girl held up a greasy package that smelled like lemon, before heading to the medical room. Mali took her place, forehead knit in concern.

Cora sat up, wincing, blinking so her vision would refocus, and looked at the clock. Free Time, about halfway over. The other kids were spread out in groups around the room. Christopher was reading from a dog-eared paperback by the feed bins. Makayla was twisting her hair into tight balls, using the reflection of a metallic wall as a mirror. Shoukry and Jenny played dominoes around a makeshift table. Dane came in with a saw, ignoring Cora, and grabbed the dead deer’s legs. He dragged the deer into the corner, where he began hacking at its antlers.

Lucky leaned closer. “What happened to you out there?”

Cora squeezed her temples, keeping her voice low. “I told Cassian I’d work with him, but then I got overwhelmed. There were some game pieces. A jack, the kind with the sharp points.” She remembered Cassian’s touch on her cheek. “I . . . couldn’t stop myself.”

“You stabbed him?”

Mali leaned in on all fours, sniffing around Cora like an animal. She gave a flat smile of satisfaction. “Yes. She stabbed him with her mind. This is why her nose bleeds.”

Cora tossed a look around. The last thing she needed was the whole ensemble knowing her secret.

“Is this true?” Lucky asked. For a second—just a second—fear flashed in his eyes, as if he was looking at some freakish imitation of a girl, but then he blinked, and his eyes were only filled with concern.

“Has she died yet?” Dane called from the other side of the room. He kept hacking at the deer. When Cora narrowed her eyes at him, he smirked. “Oh. Still alive. Congratulations.”

She jerked her chin toward the saw. “I thought they didn’t kill the animals.”

“Not for sport.” Dane threw his weight behind the saw to break off an antler. “But this one was old. Organ failure. An exception to the moral code.”

“Why cut off the antlers?”

Dane wiped a speck of blood off his forehead. “Won’t fit down the drecktube with them attached.” He unceremoniously bagged the deer in the burlap sack, unlocked the tube with his key, and shoved the deer down the same drecktube that Chicago had probably disappeared down.

Pika sighed deeply. “Poor little deer. It had such a cute tail.”

Cora pitched her head down. Memories of the gleaming jack and that tug in her mind shot through like streaks of pain. The sound of the backstage door opening came, but she couldn’t bring herself to look up at the bright lights again.

“She looks sick,” a deep Kindred voice observed.

She jerked her head up. With her hazy vision she didn’t see more than a tall figure at first, and her head throbbed harder—if it was Cassian, what would she say?—but then her vision cleared. A dark-blue suit with

twin knots down the side. A face with a sharp wrinkle cutting down his forehead.

“She’s fine,” Lucky said quickly to Fian.

“I will be the judge of that.” Fian looked around the filthy room, as though one wrong step could get him contaminated. “Come with me, girl. I need to investigate this incident.”

She glanced at Lucky. They both knew that Fian was on their side, a secret member of the Fifth of Five initiative, but she was still wary.

Fian motioned for her to follow him into the shower room, which, with its groaning pipes, was the best place to talk in private. He cast one look at the dirty drain and stepped carefully to the cleanest spot on the floor.

“Why are you really here?” she said, once they were alone.

“Cassian asked me to check on your condition. He wishes to see you himself, but he thought you might prefer to speak with someone else.”

“Because of the whole stabbing thing, I assume.”

Fian only blinked.

She slumped against the wall. “You can tell him I’m fine. And despite what happened, I haven’t changed my mind. I’ll run the Gauntlet. We can begin training as soon as he wants.”

Fian pressed a hand against each side of her head gently. She tried not to recoil as he tilted her head up to inspect the dried blood rimming her nostrils. “Your mind needs time to heal first. Four days.”