The Hunt - Megan Shepherd Page 0,19

completely blank. Broken. That wasn’t the case now, but maybe she could quiet her mind enough.

Her thoughts reached out for Lucky, hoping to connect. And for a second, she thought she got a glimmer of something. It was shrouded in an overwhelming feeling of uneasiness. A number, maybe.

The number 19? Was that right? He must have been worried about Chicago and what Dane said, but there was something more. . . .

She got the sudden, eerie sensation she was looking into a hazy mirror. Or maybe more like watching herself on an old video recording, her hair extra bright, the dark circles under her eyes gone. Cherry petals were fluttering around her.

Her cheeks blazed. He was thinking of her. She quickly severed the connection into his mind. It had been wrong anyway—she shouldn’t have done it without his knowledge. Her heart pounded as she wondered if he could somehow tell what she’d done.

But then he sighed, and rolled over, and there was nothing.

She stretched out a hand instead and tried again to reach him through the bars, but they never would be close enough.

9

Nok

“THIS IS YOUR NEW home.”

Serassi rested a hand on the knob of the red front door of a two-story house.

Nok placed her palm flat on her belly. With the other, she squeezed Rolf’s hand. They stood in a cavernous warehouse so large that the walls were hidden in shadow. It was nearly empty except for two structures: the house with the red front door, and tiered rows of theater benches facing it.

Serassi twisted the knob.

The house was filled with heavy wooden furniture, a blocky television set, cabinets that looked painted on. Nok got the sense that she and Rolf had been brought to an enormous dollhouse, or maybe that they’d been shrunk down to doll size. She pushed back the paisley living room curtains, expecting to see opaque observation panels instead of windows. But here, the windows were real transparent glass, though beyond was only the empty warehouse.

The house is perfect in every way, she thought, except one.

There were only three walls.

She turned to where the fourth wall, the front of the house, should be. Open space gaped, facing the tiered spectator seating in the same way that a theater was open to the audience. Carefully, Nok walked to the edge of the living room, where the floor ended abruptly. It was about a four-foot drop to the warehouse floor below. From the house’s upstairs level, the drop must be closer to fifteen feet. She let her bare toes curl over the edge. She could jump off, but where would she go? Wherever the warehouse doors were, they would be locked.

Bright lights suddenly turned on from the direction of the seating area, and she shaded her face. Who exactly was going to watch them?

“Nok.” She turned at Rolf’s call. He stood at the top of the living room stairs. His fingers were holding the handrail tightly, but they weren’t tapping. He’d shaken that bad habit during their time in the cage, and for a second, he looked like an entirely different person than the twitchy genius she’d first met. “You should come see this.”

She followed him up the stairs, so nervous that her own fingers nearly started twitching. The entire house consisted of only four rooms, stacked two on two like a perfect cube, with a small cutout for a bathroom. Downstairs was a living room and a kitchen large enough to fit a dining room table. Upstairs there was a bedroom and a spare room, mostly empty now except for a rocking chair and a few boxes.

She paused in the open doorway.

Unassembled parts of a crib were leaning against one of the boxes. A tangled mobile of stars already hung from the ceiling, perfectly still in the windless room. She took a shaky step inside, touching the mobile to make it spin.

A nursery—or at least the start of one.

The mobile spun faster, or maybe the spinning was in her head. She suddenly felt like she was back home in London, trapped in front of flashing camera lights, a too-small dress riding up her hips. She felt sick and turned, but jumped to find Serassi blocking the door.

“I don’t understand,” Nok said, breathing hard. “You said we weren’t capable of raising our own young. You said you were going to take away the baby.”

Serassi eyed her calmly. “That was my original assessment, yes. We reproduce by collecting Kindred DNA and matching it for optimum genetics. The offspring