Page 9 of Beautiful Prey

People who stood shoulder to shoulder inside the hall no longer look like a crowd out here. A man changes direction when someone falls in behind him. Two candidates who came through the gate together part without a word. Someone farther ahead turns and tells another candidate to stop following.

I tighten my grip on my rucksack’s strap.

Where do I go?

For the first time since I left Onyx, there is no one beside me to answer.

I keep moving. When I look back from the tree line, dozens of candidates are already crossing the open ground behind the intake building. Beyond them, several columns of dust twist upward beneath the darkening sky.

The columns are now joining, twisting together as the dust climbs higher and spreads across the horizon.

My steps slow down.

Are they really going to unleash that on us?

“Look up,” I whisper, but no one does. They’re bent over maps, watching one another and the ground.

I glance back at the dust rising behind them. Maybe they’ve seen it, too. Maybe they just don’t know what it means yet.

Turning deeper into the trees, I pick up my pace. Branches scrape across my rucksack, and I listen beneath my own breathing for footsteps behind me.

Fewer of you means more for the rest of us.

The man in the hall may have said it out loud, but that doesn’t mean he was the only one thinking it.

Further back, the intake hall glows through the trees, a single bright box of glass. It makes me think of the snow globes sold at the market stalls on Calder, the ones you shake until white flakes fall over a tiny painted house.

I never understood why anyone would pay to watch the weather happen to someone else, but now I’m inside the shaken half.

The people behind the glass are warm as I try to work out whether any of them are standing at the windows, watching us scatter.

Would they even need the windows?

I duck beneath a low branch and keep going.

“There’s something I need to tell you.”

Onyx pulled an envelope from under his pillow. I knew the seal before he even showed it to me. Everyone on Calder knows that seal.

“No.”

“You haven’t even read it.”

“No.”

“I put my name in for the Hunt.”

I stared at him. “You did what?”

“It’s a medical sponsorship. Full coverage. Treatment, consultations, medication. Everything.”

“You can’t do the Hunt.”

His mouth tightened. “I know.”

A narrow animal trail cuts through the trees ahead, and I follow it. Thunder rolls somewhere behind me.

“Then why would you volunteer?”