The Trap Read Online Free PDF Page B

isolation.
    Three minutes later I jolt up, banging my head on the enclave ceiling. I remember the broad-shouldered man. I’d bumped into him at the Heper Institute only a few weeks ago, the night
before the start of the Heper Hunt. During the Gala. The man had cornered me in an otherwise empty restroom at the Heper Institute. He had asked me questions about the Heper Hunt, made a few odd
suggestions regarding it, and I’d dismissed him as a paparazzi hack. But then he told me—and I remember his exact words—something odd as he exited:
Things are not as they
appear.
    A skein of fear shoots through me, cocooned inside a metal coffin, deep in the darkness of the earth. What is that man doing here? Who is he?
    Things are not as they appear.
    And I suddenly recall something else he’d uttered as he exited the restroom, words spoken with an almost flippant casualness but which now echo off the walls of the metal enclave. Cryptic
words about Ashley June.
    You need to watch out. She’s not who you think she is.

Nine
    ASHLEY JUNE
     
     
    A
SHLEY JUNE PILLAGED the village all night. For the first hour, it was sheer delirium: a rampage through heper-ladled streets, a frenzied romp of a hunt with hundreds
of other duskers. The hepers—almost all girls—tried to flee, but their strides were oddly plodding and ungraceful. The duskers picked them off as easily as dandelions in a field. Some
heper girls tried to hide, just as futilely, under beds and inside wardrobes. They were eaten right where they cowered in an explosion of splintering wood. For hours, the snap of jaws and the
rattle of teeth cracked the night skies. Afterward, when there were no more hepers to eat, the duskers licked up dots of blood splattered on walls, wooden floors, the cobblestone paths.
    They ran their tongues over the village like a ravenous pack of wolves licking a bone clean.
    Still, the night was not without its disappointments. A large number of hepers slipped through their clutches, escaping on a train. More than a few dozen duskers made a dash for that runaway
train, ramming through the bottleneck at the bridge, and managed to cling on to the ribbed cages of the train. The smarter ones U-turned, headed right back into the heper village. They knew the
train was picking up speed and that the hepers were, in any case, unreachable behind impenetrable steel bars. There were more hepers in the village ripe for the picking.
    Afterward, the duskers’ bodies sated, their tongues licking bloodstained lips, they dozed upside down from street lamps and rooftops. Or they ranged toward the fortress wall, drinking
from whisky bottles discovered in the dining hall, where narrow slit windows served as near-perfect, almost custom-made sleepholds. They stared into the night sky, and their bloated, engorged
bodies quivered with satisfaction. They knew for a fact that no matter how many years lay ahead of them, they had experienced the apex of their lives. Nothing could ever top this. Perhaps that is
why they were so careless—they had nothing ahead of them anymore. Filled and satiated, they drifted into a deep, bottomless sleep, forgetful that they were outside, that they were facing
east.
    But Ashley June did not sleep. She was haunted by her encounter with Gene. She had hoped to meet him in the mountains, but in her most honest moments she had suspected him dead already. A
victim at the hands and fangs of a hunter, or perhaps of the Nede River. And yet there he was, standing in the middle of an empty street in the village square. As if by mutual arrangement, a
midnight tryst.
    She had felt two emotions. Most keen was an urge to protect him, to shield, to embrace. She approached him slowly, and how her lungs wanted to scream out. She had expected, with the turning,
some dilution or diminishment in her feelings for him. But they rumbled deep as ever, amplifying along her jaw and collarbone and spine.
    But she felt something else, too. She wanted to