The Hunt - Megan Shepherd Page 0,40

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 else 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.”

“Guards?” Lucky started. “But why . . . ?”

And then his face went white.

Cora gulped down last of