The Hunt - Megan Shepherd Page 0,71

a lingering spark. Her body started shaking at the thought that after everything—the murder and the argument and months of anger—they were on the same side. There would be no more secrets or lies.

She staggered into the bedroom and paced, trying to calm her heart. He had left a drawer open, and she riffled through it. Black shirts made of a liquid-metal material that was like impenetrable silk; they were formfitting on him, but when she changed into one, it fell below her hips like a loose tunic. She pressed the fabric to her face. It smelled like ozone and salt, and for a moment the lingering image of Roshian’s bloody face disappeared, and she remembered standing in the ocean with Cassian, her face pressed against this same shirt.

Had he really meant his promise? Had she?

I could come to love you. . . .

The idea made her shiver with either nerves or excitement, and she balled up her dirty dress and shoved it into the back of the drawer, then slammed it closed. There was another drawer next to it. Curious, she tapped on it, trying to mimic whatever gesture he made to open them. She swirled her finger over the drawer’s surface, trying circles, stars, crosses, and then paused. Slowly, she traced the symbol that he had drawn for her once on the alcove table. The symbol of the effort to prove humanity’s worth, the Fifth of Five: a double helix with five marks for the five intelligent species.

The drawer opened, but inside she found only more clothes, a deck of cards, a few spare temporary removal passes. Then her fingers brushed something hard.

A small spiral-bound notebook.

It was cheap; the kind of thing you’d pick up at the dollar store to jot down grocery lists in. But the worn pages suggested it had been handled carefully for some time. She flipped open the cover, but there were only strange marks in pencil that varied in pressure, like the writer wasn’t sure how hard to press.

She flipped another page. It was just shapes. A small circle, a large oval, something like an elongated triangle. She flipped again. Similar shapes, only more confidently drawn. One line was marked through, and another carefully drawn next to it. As she kept flipping, the shapes continued to evolve until her eye could stitch them together into something recognizable. That triangle was meant to be a tail. That small circle, an eye. By the last pages, the shapes formed a roughly drawn picture of a dog, its ears perked up.

She stared at the drawings. Had Cassian taken this from one of the abducted children? No, there was something so odd about the drawing. The lines wavered as if the artist didn’t know how to properly hold a pencil.

She flipped the page again, and started. In the final drawing, there was a loop on the dog’s back strung with a chain. It wasn’t just any dog—it was the charm Cassian had once given her to remind her of Sadie.

He had made these drawings. Painstakingly, secretly, teaching himself how to make human marks on human paper to depict an animal from a lost world. Why? She ran through every explanation, but there was really only one that made sense.

He wanted to draw. He wanted to make art.

She closed the notebook and stowed it back in the drawer.

She lay down. The pounding in her ears abated, and she began to hear the sounds of the station. Electricity pulsing. Machinery whirring softly. Right now, he would be destroying Roshian’s body to erase evidence of the murder she had committed.

Her thoughts started to unjumble as she rested. She believed everything he had said. That he loved her and wanted to prove humanity’s intelligence badly enough that he would even help her cheat—a practice that went against his core nature. It made her think of her parents’ marriage being held together with lies. Her mother’s denial about drinking and about all those late-night sessions with her personal trainer—though she didn’t seem to lose a single pound. Her father’s string of affairs too, the campaign aides and the widow two houses down, and all the false promises about a stable life, about retiring from politics, when he never had the slightest intention. A relationship twisted by betrayal was no relationship at all.

But then she thought of the drawing. If Cassian was going to stand by his promise, then maybe she would stand by hers. Maybe he didn’t deserve giving up on. And