I wonder, too, why I could sense him when Claudia couldn’t. Is it because her father, like Piotrek’s, was not Progeny? Both of Ivan’s parents were; surely he would have felt Goran fifty feet away, as I did. But Ivan’s no longer here for me to ask.

*  *  *

We stop at a gas station in the red-roofed village of Delnice for fuel, coffee, and sandwiches, after which Claudia and Piotrek go in search of new phones. Luka and I find a bench in a small park just off the main street to eat our lunch in silence.

“You know,” I say, picking the tomato out of my baguette, “it’s not going to help for you to be mad at me.”

“I’m not mad,” he says and tears a bite out of his sandwich. A minute later he says, “I just don’t understand.”

“What’s not to understand? I need answers.”

“You need to stay safe. Staying alive is a lot more important than answers, Audra!”

“I had Claudia with me.” I don’t mention that I had in fact planned on going alone.

“You’ve known her less than a day!”

“And I’ve known you for what—a week?”

He exhales a forceful breath, puts down his sandwich, and looks away.

“You know,” he says. “In the time we’ve been together, you and I have had exactly one fight.”

“About your sacred duty to kill me?”

He grimaces.

“No. It was when you came back to me.” He shakes his head. “Oh my God. I cried like a baby. After months of not knowing whether you were alive . . . When you came back, I said the only way to stay alive was to go on. As though I were still hunting you, and you were on the verge of finding something I was waiting to acquire. Because we didn’t dare get found out. And I was happy to take every hour I could get with you for the next three years.”

“Three years?”

“Hunters don’t get forever, Audra. If we don’t make the kill and acquire the memory in five years, a fresh hunter’s brought in. And the old one is taken out.”

“Taken . . . out.”

He shrugs. “It makes sense. It keeps the hunter eager. It keeps the mark guessing. It takes care of the problem if we’ve been made. I’d been assigned to you two years before.”

I quit picking at my sandwich. In fact, I’ve lost my appetite.

“The Scions kill their own hunters?”

“I don’t think it happens often.”

“What happened to ‘one hunter, one mark’?”