5
H U N T E D
ADVANCE READING COPY
luck connected with his head. He let out a satisfying groan
(well, satisfying to me) and stepped back. I climbed higher,
my fingers now icicles, and fell over the other side, thud-
ding unceremoniously to the ground. On a normal day,
with normal reflexes, I could have leapt right over that six
feet of wire. Instead I crawled away.
“Oh, I’ll do it myself,” Rex huffed behind me. He had
drawn a gun.
I dug my nails into a slimy brick wall and pulled myself
up. By the sounds of footsteps and metallic clinking behind
me, big ol’ Rex was climbing the fence.
I pushed aside a pile of crates and discovered a boarded-
up window. Luck was with me! I launched myself through the
rotten wood and ran down a hall through the semidarkness.
Trash. Broken chairs. A multitude of blurry, red, rat-shaped
outlines fled from me.
I brushed by a mannequin with a dozen bullet holes in it.
Then I stumbled into a larger room. My left eye was begin-
ning to fail, blinking with blinding tears. The eyelid cemented
shut. I kept banging into things I thought were several feet
away. But I ran at full speed, ignoring the pain.
By the crashing and swearing behind me, it was clear Rex
was in the building. Humans were such loud, bashing crea-
tures—I’d never got how they survived the hunter-gatherer
phase. At least the drone wouldn’t be able to operate in such
close quarters. I stumble-ran through a gaping hole in the
wall into another building, then another. More rats scattered
before my feet.
