Free Wild Thing by L. J. Kendall Page A

hadn't decided yet if that'd be a good idea or a bad one.
    But today, since it was rainy, she decided she'd hunt inside, prowling down the cold stone passages with their high ceilings and thick layer of off-yellow paint.  Given how many rooms were empty and disused it was surprising how few people there actually were, here.  Only a few of the heavy wooden doors had a sign on them, and even then, most of those just had numbers painted on in black.  A few locked ones had nameplates, like hers and her uncle's.  But they were all boring.
    Today's hunting went well, though.  Right up until she shot her first victim.
    Normally, she just hunted in the grounds – for It or for small animals – but she'd been sitting in the cafeteria, bored, when Dr Ramsin came in.  Ignoring her completely, he'd gotten a drink from the machine and then left, still ignoring her completely.  Which had given her the brilliant idea.
    But when Dr Ramsin complained to the Director, she discovered the tiny problem in her genius idea.  With bow and arrows taken away, she'd had to wait a whole week before being allowed to use them again.  But she took her punishment like a grown up: she hadn't even complained about her prey cheating, by telling on her.
    And Uncle had been real nice, too.  At first she thought he might be angry; but if she had to guess, she'd say he actually thought it was funny.  All he'd said, in private, was that perhaps it would be better to hunt it , rather than his co-workers.  His voice had been all whispery, and he'd looked around to make sure no one else could hear – even though there was no one else around.
    It was cool having a big secret.  She wondered what the others would think if they knew she was hunting it.   Probably excited, or scared.  Pro'lly, they'd tell her to stop.
    Thinking about it in her room, afterward, she realized she had learned a lot from the experience, though.  F'r'instance, her uncle had explained how people made up rules – like not shooting each other – to try to keep themselves safe.  As if that would stop a real hunter!
    If she'd had proper arrows he couldn't've cheated by telling on her.
    Oh.
    She thought about that.
    If she'd used a real arrow, they would have worked out what killed him.  Sure, she'd picked a stretch of corridor not covered by cameras for the hunt.  But since she was the only one at the Institute who had arrows, the Director still would have known it was her.
    Wow.  Hunting people was tricky.
    The week after she finally got her weapon back saw the emptying of her quiver as one by one she lost her arrows.  She'd solved the problem of the rubber caps by first melting them with real fire – she'd been careful not to burn the Forest down, and to put the fire out properly, after – and then cutting them off quickly with the sharp knife, while the ends were still kind of melty.
    Later, she'd sharpened the ends.  But then they didn't fly properly, wobbling horribly through the air.  By the time she'd worked out that she needed extra weight near the tips, she was down to just two arrows, each with paper clips unfolded and wound round and round the shaft, near the tip.
    Then for three days she hunted deep in the Forest with her last, now brightly-painted arrow.  Wondering if it might come, finally.
    Or would it wait until she had none left?
 

Chapter 8 
    In Harmon's office, only the regular tapping of his Tik Tek MetaStylus punctuated the silence as he sat, oblivious to the decades of engineering that had made the combination computer and net access tool immune to such treatment. Deep in thought, he dragged representations of Imaginal structure components into the complex diagram he was building, occasionally murmuring and dragging annotations as he went.  Harmon didn't notice the door opening, nor the sad little figure trudging into his room carrying just a bow.
    'Uncle?'
    Frowning, Harmon adjusted the pressor-chain's handle-patterns from an absolute to a