Page 111 of Beautiful Prey

“I’m a very correct man.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“And yet somehow I’m still the nicer Clement in your life.”

I let the conversation die there, looking back at the dark window and starting the count again. Six doses, seven by tonight.

I have a speech ready. I’ve had it ready since the flat. The three lines I’ve repeated often enough that I could probably say them unconsciously.

You don’t get to move people.

You don’t get to move me.

And if you ever touch anything of mine again without asking, I’ll make the rest of your life a very long transaction.

I doubt he’ll even listen, the arrogant prick.

Something moves beyond the glass, pulling my attention away from the speech as color spreads across the window.

Tempest rises beneath us, filling the view, a living world unfolding below and wiping every word straight out of my head.

It’s so green.

I don’t remember noticing it the first time I arrived. We’d been too busy, I guess, fearing the Hunt and learning the rules to win. The rules to be eliminated. Waiting to find out which one of us wouldn’t come back.

The only Tempest they let us see was black pine, gray weather, and sandstorms coming sideways off a ridge. That was the piece they put us inside.

But this isn’t that. The whole planet below us is green, with water lying out in the open where anyone could take it. Clouds stack across the sky, moving over weather nobody scheduled, and a coastline runs on and on with nothing torn out of it.

I put my hand flat against the glass before I think about doing it.

Is this what Calder would have looked like if greed hadn’t eaten everything first?

As though he can hear me thinking, Ryven shifts beside me. “Nobody digs here.”

“Why not?” I can’t take my eyes off the coast. “There’s a whole planet beneath us. Calder had one too, before people decided everything underneath it was worth more than everything on top.”

“Because this is Tempest.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It is if you have money.” He leans forward, looking past me through the glass. “Greed goes where it’s useful, Jade. You don’t hollow out the place where the people who make the rules live. You buy somewhere else and hollow that out instead.”

I watch the water move beneath us for a while. “There were two sandstorms during the Hunt. The first hit the eastern flats on the first day, and everyone following the maps went straight into it.”

Ryven nods. “That was the idea. Most candidates take the obvious route when they’re scared. Put a storm over it, and you thin the field before half of them even understand what happened.”

I look at him. “What?”

“You were never just surviving on the ground, Jade. You were surviving whatever the Houses decided to throw at you that day.”

Something cold settles beneath my ribs. “And the one that hit us later?”

“Same system. Ash’s father signs off on the whole package before the Hunt starts, including both fronts, the timing, the lot. That one ran early, though, turned overnight, and came through a day earlier than anyone expected it. Which is why half our people were still in the field when it hit.”

The storm. The tree. Asher’s blood in the sand.

“It nearly killed his own son.”