The Hunt

  Copyright © 2014 by Stacey Kade

  Cover photography © 2014 by Michael Frost

  Cover design by Tyler Nevins

  All rights reserved. Published by Hyperion, an imprint of Disney Book Group. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 125 West End Avenue, New York, New York 10023-6387.

  ISBN: 978-1-4231-8748-6

  Visit www.hyperionteens.com

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  To Greg:

  Thank you for buying me more chocolate than any writer could ever dream of, for making me smile (usually when I least want to), and for understanding when I forget to bring your pants because the people in my head were talking.

  UNTIL I CRAWLED BENEATH THE designated Dumpster behind the abandoned Linens-N-Things and felt the brush of rough canvas against my fingertips, I really wasn’t sure that the emergency bag would be there, as my father had promised.

  My first Christmas, I’d been six. It had also been the first time Outside matched the color and sparkle of what I’d seen on television and in my “cultural training” videos in the lab at GTX. The houses in our neighborhood had been decked out with flashing Santas, red-nosed reindeer, and molded plastic Nativity scenes. And through cracks in the blinds, I’d watched people carry in plastic bags full of presents, brightly colored wrapping paper tubes poking through the top.

  This strange but wonderful event—so much preparation and fuss over it—called to me in the worst way. I longed to be a part of it. But our living room remained dark and undecorated, the carpeting empty of pine needles and shiny wrapped packages alike, even on Christmas Day. In our house, it was just another day. Worse, even, as my father retreated to his room and didn’t come out until the following morning. I was alone. And confused. According to lore, only “naughty” children were punished by an absence of gifts. But I’d done everything I knew to do, followed precisely the Rules my father had given me.

  Much later, I understood that it was because my father’s true daughter, the original Ariane, had died, and the traditions of the holiday reminded him too much of her. My presence only further highlighted her absence, inflaming a wound that would never quite heal.

  Still, it had been the first of many occasions that taught me to understand that my expectations, my hopes, were better kept in check. My father had done his best to be a parent for me (or so I’d believed until recently), but there’d been limits, ones I was usually unaware of until I bumped into them.

  This time, though, unlike all those years of dark Christmases, my father had come through. This gift, an emergency bag of supplies, cash, and who knew what else, was exactly where he’d said it would be.

  Feeling some measure of tension leave my body, I let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding and promptly choked on the cloud of dirt that rose up in response.

  “You okay?” Zane asked quietly. He was pacing nearby, waiting for me. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the scrape of his shoes on the concrete as he moved back and forth, watching for anyone approaching.

  It had taken us a little more than two hours to make our way here from GTX. We’d cut through backyards and taken side streets, doubling back when necessary and keeping to the shadows. But before any of that, we’d had to fight through the overgrown forest preserve that surrounded the GTX campus. Nothing like taking a branch to the face when running full-speed. I’d ended up keeping an arm up to shield myself, and consequently the skin between my wrist and elbow felt shredded, burning as if it were on fire. Zane hadn’t fared much better, new cuts and bruises on his face and arms joining those he’d already acquired in the last few days.

  I’d expected him to protest or even quit, turning around to head home. Which was, quite frankly, probably the safest place for him. But he’d soldiered on in determined silence. Well, he hadn’t said much. He had, however, crashed through the woods like a herd of drunken deer. Stealth training was not something taught in your average school system. But lucky, lucky me, I’d been enrolled in some “special” extracurriculars during my time with my father.

  Other parents taught their children how to ride bikes, fish, or bake cookies from the family recipe, but my father had spent countless hours passing along much of the training he’d acquired during his years in Special Forces. It had been, I guess, our thing, our shared interest. Maybe he would have taught his biological daughter, the first Ariane, the same stuff. Maybe not. All I knew was that the day I’d managed to sneak up behind him in the patch of woods near our house where we practiced, I’d never seen him more proud of me.

  Until last night.

  I shoved that thought away. I wouldn’t, couldn’t think about that now. “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said to Zane. “One second.” I bit my lip, tasting sweat and unpleasant grit, and contemplated my next move. Unfortunately, just because the bag was there didn’t mean I could actually get to it. I was already halfway under the Dumpster, trapped between the bottom of the trash receptacle and the concrete beneath it, which meant I had about zero leverage. And I was about ten seconds away from a major freak-out. Dark, confined spaces and I are not friends.

  Sweating and keenly aware of the metal ceiling above my head, I strained at the shoulder and managed to grasp a corner of the fabric. But it slipped away before I could get a good-enough grip.

  “Damn it,” I panted. Though the logical part of my brain knew there was plenty of air, my emotional side was panicking and sucking in oxygen at a far too rapid rate. I could feel dizziness beginning to build.

  This would have been so much easier if we could have just moved the stupid Dumpster to reach the bag from the other side. But that meant the shrill squeak of wheels and the rumbling thunder of the empty receptacle moving over the pockmarked and uneven concrete. Not an option on an otherwise quiet night when GTX security was out in force looking for us.

  I squirmed closer, a hiss of pain escaping against my will when a particularly sharp bit of rock from the degraded parking lot dug into the abrasions on my forearm.

  Zane knelt next to me and tugged at the hem of my lab-issued tunic. “I can get it,” he whispered. “Let me.”

  “What?” I asked, distracted. If I could just release whatever was securing the bag, I wouldn’t even have to be under here. I had the ability to move objects without touching them—one of the few perks of my extraterrestrial heritage. The scientists at GTX had played God with a scrap of preserved DNA from the alien entity found at the site of the Roswell incident in 1947, isolating the stem cells and splicing them into a fertilized human egg from a (presumably) willing human donor/surrogate.

  I was the result. But it wasn’t exactly ideal.

  Theoretically, I could lift the whole Dumpster into the air simply by concentrating on it, but my telekinetic abilities were a little unpredictable lately, du
e to lack of use. So stepping under a heavy metal object that might fall on your head at any second probably wasn’t a great idea.

  But if I couldn’t see what was holding the bag, I couldn’t undo it. And just yanking at it would only pull the Dumpster along.

  “I can get it,” Zane repeated patiently. “My arms are longer than yours.”

  “No, I can—”

  He bent down, his knees suddenly visible at the edge of my vision. “You know, it’s okay to accept help every once in a while.”

  Easy for him to say. I swallowed a frustrated noise. He didn’t understand. I’d spent years relying only on myself, trusting only my father (and look at how well that had turned out). I couldn’t just stop doing that. I didn’t know how. And with Zane, much as I wanted to trust him, much as he’d done nothing to make me doubt him, I could feel the other shoe—an ass-kicking combat boot with a steel toe and a thick tread—hanging above my head, waiting to stomp on me.

  Still, retrieving the bag was taking far longer than I wanted. And if Zane thought he could do it faster, all the better.

  “Fine,” I said, wiggling out. “Be my guest.”

  I stood up and folded my arms across my chest, watching in the moonlight as Zane stretched his six-foot-four frame out on the concrete and reached under the Dumpster.

  It was an ugly but appropriate bit of symmetry that the fate of my future life was tied so closely to an oversize trash can. That’s what the last ten years of my life had been—a big load of garbage. Lies told to keep me quiet and compliant.

  “Got it,” Zane said after an annoyingly short amount of time. That eighteen inches of additional height made a difference, I guess. He’d barely had to stick his head beneath.

  He dragged a small but full black duffel out from under the Dumpster until it lay next to him. Shiny metallic strips of duct tape, now twisted and tangled from Zane’s efforts, hung off the edges of the bag, like legs of an upside-down spider. From space.

  Zane inched out and pushed himself to his feet easily, biceps temporarily straining the sleeves of his green Ashe High lacrosse team T-shirt.

  “Thanks,” I said grudgingly.

  “I told you. Long arms,” he said with a shrug, and dusted off his hands. “My superpower.” He gave me a tentative smile.

  He was…joking. Almost like normal.

  I blinked, surprised. Well, it was what had passed for normal between us before everything went to hell and he learned I wasn’t who—or what—he thought I was. A few hours ago, I wouldn’t have thought that anything resembling that state would be possible again.

  Relief crashed into me, a heady sensation. “I guess they were out of Sasquatch DNA the day they made me,” I shot back. If he could joke, I could joke, right? Humor was a human coping mechanism. I’d used it before, but never about myself to someone else. It was a strange feeling, like stripping naked and waiting to see if people would notice.

  But in this case, laughing was a good thing, and I was rewarded by the bright flash of his grin. “Ouch.” He rocked back on his heels, clutching at his chest, pretending to be wounded.

  Then he stopped abruptly, his hands dropping to his sides.

  He was remembering what I’d done to Rachel Jacobs, one of his friends, the other night. I could see the images in quick flashes: Rachel coughing and choking at the pool party, grabbing at her chest as her heart fought against my control.

  I hadn’t killed her, but I’d come awfully close. And the shock and fear he’d felt at what I’d done was still close to the surface. And tied to his thoughts of me.

  I stiffened.

  “Sorry,” he murmured, looking away.

  I shook my head. “It’s not your fault,” I made myself say over the sudden lump in my throat. And it wasn’t. He hadn’t invented that scenario. I’d done it. For the right reasons, maybe, but it had gotten swiftly out of hand. Never mind that I hadn’t killed her or permanently injured her, even when her own grandfather, Dr. Jacobs, had later pushed me to do so.

  I couldn’t—wouldn’t—hold Zane’s reactions against him. How could anyone be expected to respond to this messed-up situation with equanimity?

  So, yeah. I guess we had a ways to go yet before “normal.”

  I knelt next to the bag and tugged at the zipper with shaking hands. But it was stuck.

  Without a word, Zane bent down and held the canvas sides steady. And this time when I tried, the zipper slid along the track smoothly.

  Before I could thank him, a tight roll of cash, bound with a rubber band, slipped out of the opening and bounced to a stop near Zane’s shoe.

  A quick glimpse in the bag showed there were a half-dozen identical bundles, right at the top.

  Whoa.

  Zane gave a low whistle. “I’ve got to start checking under more trash bins.” He picked up the bundle that had rolled free, looking at it more closely. “These are hundreds, Ariane. That means—”

  “Thousands,” I managed through my shock. When my adoptive father had told me he’d been adding to the emergency cash, I’d never dreamed he’d meant this much. “It’s probably his life savings,” I said, fighting the rise of conflicting emotions: a bitter sadness and fury.

  Mark Tucker had raised me as his daughter for the last decade. But he’d been working for GTX, the corporation that had created me, the whole time. I thought I’d escaped years ago. In reality, they’d just given me a bigger cage, so to speak, and put Mark in charge of monitoring my reactions to the world Outside. It had all been part of a larger plan, wrapped up in lies and deceit.

  Beneath the cash, a flash of white caught my eye. I shifted the money carefully to one side, revealing a thin, square envelope.

  My father’s bold but neat print was on the front: IF I AM NOT WITH YOU.

  My stomach gave an uncomfortable lurch as I plucked the envelope out, pinching it between my fingertips. A letter from Mark? I didn’t want to read it. He’d first told me about the emergency bag a few years ago. That meant the contents of this letter would likely be an excruciating rehash of everything I’d learned in the last twenty-four hours, a detailed play-by-play of the worst betrayal I could have possibly imagined. No, thank you.

  “Hey, Ariane? There are U.S. and Canadian passports in here. And one of those reloadable credit cards.” Zane held them up and squinted. “For a Talia Torv.”

  He flipped to the photo page in the U.S. passport. “She looks an awful lot like you,” he said, holding it up so I could see.

  It was, in fact, a picture of me. Last year’s school photo.

  “Except,” he said, frowning, “Talia’s eighteen, almost nineteen.”

  Of course she was. I laughed in a moment of near giddiness.

  “No one will believe that,” Zane said, his handsome face troubled. “You barely look your age.”

  He was right. My less-than-average height and preternatural thinness made me look younger than sixteen. My A-cup chest wasn’t doing me any favors either.

  I shook my head. “It won’t matter. If the documents are good”—and knowing my father’s relentless attention to detail, they were—“no one will question them.” Which meant, I could live on my own. Eighteen was the magic number. And with all that cash…

  For the first time, I felt a rush of hope, lifting the weight of despair and panic I’d been carrying around. Maybe, just maybe, this would work. Maybe I could leave Wingate and start a life, a real life somewhere.

  I glanced at Zane on the other side of the bag, where he was busily cataloging the rest of its contents. And maybe I wouldn’t have to be alone. We were supposed to be heading to his mother’s house in the Chicago suburbs, assuming we could get out of town. I couldn’t stay there with him, obviously; it would be the first place GTX would look. But maybe I wouldn’t have to go too far. The idea brought an unfamiliar fluttering warmth to my chest. I could make a home for myself, a life. And he could perhaps be a part of it. After all, he was still with me, a miracle if I’d ever seen one. He’d come for me at GT
X and stuck by my side, even after everything I’d done.

  “There are, uh, clothes in here,” Zane said, restacking the items with a haste that suggested he’d discovered something personal.

  Great. My face heated. Bra? Underwear? New ones or, oh God, tattered ones I hadn’t even noticed were missing from the laundry? I didn’t even want to think about it. It was silly to be embarrassed about something like that, I guess, considering. But I was still human. At least partially.

  Zane cleared his throat. “And keys. This one looks like an old car key.” He held it up, a bright orange plastic tag attached.

  “Let me see.” I took the key ring for a closer inspection. The plastic tag advertised U-Store-It. The first key was just a plain silver, but it was clearly too big to be for a house or a building. A smaller gold key hung below it on the ring. “Yeah, I think you’re right.” My father really had prepared for every contingency. Getting out of Wingate undetected would be impossible without a clean vehicle—one unassociated with me or my father.

  “So, then, where’s the car?” Zane asked.

  That was an excellent question. The parking lot in front of the building was completely empty. I’d checked it before sliding under the Dumpster. And there certainly weren’t any vehicles back here. An anemic patch of forest with massively overgrown weeds ran up to—and now over—the edge of the concrete behind the abandoned building. “I don’t know.” I took a closer look at the key ring. “Possibly in a storage locker.”

  But at which facility? There were probably a half dozen in and around Wingate, and at least a couple of them had to be U-Store-Its. At least from what I could recall. Not that I’d ever paid that much attention. Who pays attention to storage lockers?

  The trouble was, we didn’t have time to waste checking them out, especially without a car to get us there.

  “Maybe there’s something in there?” He nodded at the envelope that I was clutching.

  I glanced down at the letter, having almost forgotten it was in my hand. “Maybe.” But I still didn’t want to open it.

  He hesitated, then asked, “Do you want me to—”