The Trap (The Hunt #3) by Andrew Fukuda

In the final installment of Andrew Fukuda’s The Hunt Series, The Trap, Gene and Sissy now know they are the cure. On a speeding train headed straight for the Ruler’s palace they have no other options than to pray and try and escape once they are there. Once inside the palace, Sissy, Gene and the rest of the Dome kids manage to escape the tunnels; but watch in horror as the Mission girls are slaughtered and eaten alive by the Duskers working in the train tunnels. They thought they might be safe from the Duskers hiding in the lighted elevator, but when the elevator takes them to the highest tower of the palace they realize how wrong they were.

When the elevator lets them out, it is into a cest pool of unclean human bodies. They have entered the holding pen of Hepers that the palace keeps on hand. Everyone there is starved, unhappy and they know that death is imminent. But Gene and Sissy don’t want to give into the tower’s melancholy. They immediately start trying to figure away out of the tower, and a way to head East, Gene’s original destination and the land of Milk and Honey. All to soon the alarms sound, the Ruler is going to pick out his meal.

Gene and Sissy get taken, but not to the Ruler. There is an entire underground organization within the palace, an organization of Hepers. They want Gene and Sissy’s blood. The organization has been building an arsenal of weapons that when fused with the Origin will turn and Dusker it hits back into a human. The organization spends the day draining them of blood, to the point right before they pass out and then send them back to the holding pen, less the Ruler discover their absence during an inspection.

The Ruler has something else in mind for Gene. While nothing would be more satisfying than to eat the Heper who lived amoung them for years unnoticed, the Heper who made the Hunt look stupid; there is something more important. Taking down Ashley June.

Ashley June had been Gene’s first love, living just down the street from him Gene never knew that she was a Heper, but she knew all about him. During the Hunt they made plans, but Ashley June sacrificed herself for him and in doing so was turned into a Dusker. The Palace believes that she had always been one of them, just using a heper perfume to confuse the other players. Now Ashley June is working against the Palace, turning the people on the ruler, telling secrets and undermining the government. What is worse, the rest of the population is believing her, joining her movement.

Even in her Dusker state, she still loves Gene. The Ruler is sending Gene and Sissy to the Metropolis to kill Ashley June. Gene lived there for nearly two decades without being discovered, and is the only one even possibly capable of taking her down. Promises of freedom for them and the other Dome kids are what gets Gene and Sissy to corroborate in the assassination of Ashley June.

Gene sets out with alterier motives, he wants to turn Ashley June back even if it means betraying Sissy, but the secrets that Ashley June knows are more dangerous then he could ever imagine. Everything he has ever been told about himself, the Hepers and the Duskers has been a lie. Tryign to deside what is right and wrong isn’t so easy anymore, conflict between his old feeling for Ashley June and the relationship he has spent the last year cultivating with Sissy are at a head. But the secrets about who he really is, and the “cure” he and Sissy represent are coming to the surface and Gene no longer knows what to believe.