To Hunt a Shadow
Coming Soon. Full Release on 1 September
‘Beneath it all, you're still that weak man who couldn't save his family.’
He never missed a target. Never asked a question. Never backed down.
Until her.
They call him The Hunter — a man forged from pain, who roams the galaxy eliminating prey with ruthless efficiency. His latest contract: eliminate a bounty hunter whose face he cannot know.
But when a small girl inserts herself between The Hunter and his prey, he must face the one thing he swore to destroy.
The father he buried.
A standalone Crooked Atlas story.
Read a taste below…
I never chose the name they gave me. It was simply what they called me in those times, the times in which I roamed the galaxy, seeking my prey and sowing terror into their hearts. Never did I hesitate at the blood I spilt. I was brutal, I was cruel, and I was unstoppable.
But now that man is gone, his phantom haunts little more than the bedtime stories that scare children to sleep.
That's what I always thought stories were for: tools to help block out the late-night screeches of Banchas—gruesome little beasts. Yet I find myself recounting this tale. Not because I want the person who reads this to know the man I truly was or to feel any ounce of sympathy for me, but because I hope whoever reads this will understand how grief can hold us and what might happen if we never let it go.
I wasn’t born a killer, as many people assumed. Some would guess I enjoyed the thrill—the chase, the kill—but that is far from the truth. I was moulded into a killer by loss, a loss that cut through my tender soul as easily as a Noble blade through human flesh. And as it turned out, I was good at it—the best, in fact. Someone out there gave me these skills. They chose this life for me. Who was I to deny them?
Except I did deny them in the end. This mission, the one I am about to tell the story of, is the reason I stopped, the reason I flew halfway across the galaxy, far from civilisation, and hid away. This is the mission that finally killed the one they called ‘The Hunter’.
#
I landed on the backwater desert planet of Katara later than I should have. Syndicate pirates had slowed me down. They were barely an inconvenience, but six ships, each manned by dozens of lowlife thugs, were enough to disrupt my breakfast. I would say that was the reason I shot up the entire town I docked my ship at, and that it was the frustration of the event which forced me to do it, but the truth is, I always did that when I landed on one of those barely civilised planets at the edge of occupied space. Not because I wanted to kill, but because of the efficiency it granted me. Annihilate the town I arrive in, leave a couple of terrified fools alive to spread the word, and watch as every settlement I visit gives me every lick of information out of fear that I’ll do the same to them.
That was what I had to remember as my boots clicked against the sandy rock, blood flowing in rivers down the cracks beneath my feet, watching the two I’d left alive scramble pathetically for their arc-bikes—not great machinery, but adequate enough to crawl across the desert dunes.
As one survivor rode away, spraying a cloud of sand into the air and leaving his friend helplessly unable to start his engine, I decided that one survivor would suffice this time—word spread surprisingly quickly on planets like this one.
The boy should have felt fortunate as I emptied my chamber into his skull. The dead are the lucky ones.
I holstered my weapon, watching as the survivor fled into the distance. The next town was many miles away, across the valley. That meant help was, too. It gave me plenty of time to begin my search.
My target was last seen heading for that town—sometimes I got lucky, and they were still exactly where they were supposed to be. Of course, there was the possibility she had died in the shooting, along with other second-rate scum littering the street, but I thought it unlikely. This target was known to be ruthless and cunning—a true killer—and those worms had fallen to barely a whisper of my true skill. She was still out there.
There was a name, or at least a name people used to spread fear of her, the tales about what she could do, but I never learnt it. She was simply given the same title as all my targets. The Hunted.
Refocusing, I caught the scent of beer wafting through the air—the town’s tavern was my guess. If any survivors remained, they were likely to have fled there. Perhaps a barman stayed behind, or maybe a drunken coward had pissed himself under the tables. I would soon find out.
It turned out that, for a dusty outback town, the bar wasn’t half bad. There were plenty of nearly-polished tables and a row of not-quite-dusty corner seats from which to watch the crowds. That was the classic mercenary choice of seat, but not my preference. I always stood, ideally leaning against a wall near the entrance, so I could shoot my target in the back of the head before they had even seen me. There are some, like those hypocritical Nobles from the core planets, who would have called my methods cowardly and dishonourable, and maybe they were right, but courage and honour never got anyone anywhere in this galaxy, not unless you had the Nobles’ power.
Fortunately, the bar wasn’t empty. I could hear the frantic breathing of someone hiding behind the pumps. The barkeep always stayed behind in these small towns. It was quite polite, really, because it meant that as soon as I arrived, I’d have the opportunity to taste the local brew. Of course, it was always tasteless on these dusty planets, but I’d been travelling for a long time—the taste of anything other than my own recycled piss would do me some good.
‘Come out, Barkeep,’ I began, sitting back in an old chair that seemed ready to snap. ‘I am here for your beer only. You may keep your life.’
There was a small gasp, smaller than I expected, as panic began to grip the barkeep. He knew his life was in my hands, yet he still hadn’t made my drink.
‘That will change if you don’t bring me one soon.’ My boots clunked as I laid them on the table. ‘I am not known to be patient.’
There was a moment of frantic breathing before, finally, a hand came up from behind the old bar and gripped its edge, nails biting into the wood. But it wasn’t the usual hand of some fat, old barkeep who used the same grease from his hair to fry the meat and wipe down the tables. It was small and soft, though still filthy, as all things were out there.
Her hair came first, knotted and dirty, though I guessed there was some blonde somewhere beneath it all. When the rest of her head came next, I expected her torso to follow, but it did not. I wondered for a moment if she was still crouching on the floor, but when I squinted and took a closer look through the filth that covered her face, I realised she was just a girl, no older than ten, with clothes like old sacks hanging over her body, seven sizes too large.
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