The Hunted

Set Up

Derek slung his arrows over his back and picked up his bow before he turned to look at me. I adjusted the backpack on my own back, my grip tightening on my knife as I looked back at him.

"It's going to work," he said. I nodded. Of course it would. He was the one who designed the Ki'i. He knew what the Elders and the Guardians were looking for. "This time tomorrow it'll all be over."

"One way or another," I replied. The corner of his mouth twitched down, but he didn't comment. I stepped forward and pressed my lips softly against his before I turned and walked away.

I didn't dare look back. There could be no mercy shown now. One of us had to die today.

I slid down the steep path that was often used as an advanced hiking course. Further down towards the stream were a series of logs and rocks on another steep incline that had to be navigated in order to reach a beach that was much nicer than the main beach. Derek, Jordan, and I had gone there once over spring break to avoid the drunks on the main beach. Before alcohol was illegal, I mean.

Now, we were heading away from the beach, both there for many different reasons. I wasn't going to receive my first kiss from Derek. I wasn't going to be shoved into the water by Jordan. Caleb wasn't going to be passed out drunk on the pavilion.

Nothing was going to be like it was again.

I stepped off the path, staring down at the piece of wood that Derek had carved a makeshift map into. The last thing we needed was to be on opposite ends of the zone, he had told me as he used my knife to carve it. We would both be stuck then.

I wasn't so sure that this was going to work. We were relying on the Guardians too heavily. Why would they care who won? Just because Derek had designed the Ki'i didn't mean that they weren't willing to let him die. They had been willing to frame him for the death of that Agent, wouldn't they be willing to let him die, too? Did it even matter that he had been the one to design it? The Elders had all of the plans they needed and all of the information that was required to make the Ki'i a success. He wasn't a necessary component of it anymore. He was disposable just as I was.

I had planned for four years to create the perfect trap for the Agent that had evaded the Officers of Justice for over ten years. He had been the top of his class, with an uncanny ability to blend in with society. When I had sat in my Agents History class, he had been dubbed the Chameleon Agent. Only once in ten years had he been identified and only because he had wanted to be. He'd killed dozens of people as he tore around the country, masquerading as everyone from commoners to celebrities. A master in his craft.

Every master has a pattern, though. I spent over a year mapping out his movements. Derek would sleep on the couch in the conference room while I poured over the suspected sightings of him. It was a long and complicated pattern, one that I had almost overlooked just like the other Officers. It was still a pattern, though.

And we got him.

His capture would be a field execution, which was the only reason why Derek was allowed to spend those long nights with me in the conference room. He had been selected as the Head Executioner due to his own excellence in his training.

The problem was, though, that we were being set up. The man we killed, the plans we had poured over, was not the actual data on the Chameleon Agent. I was given the real plans when I was fourteen, but at some point during those four years, they falsified data within it, making the pattern a little more clear.

I only figured it out as I sat in my cell the night after Derek shot the Agent. Yes, the man we killed had been an Agent. He had been an Agent who was looking for dissenters on the streets. Not an Agent who had killed dozens of people.