Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  I felt myself being seized around the waist and got lifted over the back of a couch by Hammer and set down on the chair I’d been aiming for. I turned my head to give him a thanks grin, and he flashed one back at me, before edging his way toward—well, toward something I couldn’t see in the press. Then I collapsed into the chair and turned toward my friends.

  My friends…

  I guess it had never occurred to me that I wouldn’t have friends here, although the intense competition among the Hunters for rankings had put me off at first. But now that I’d gotten things sorted out, I knew that there was a minority who took that competition way more seriously than our actual job, and then there were the rest of us. And the rest of us were not all that different from the Hunters at home.

  “Did you beat the storm in?” Trev asked as Dazzle spotted me, wormed her way over, and plunked herself down next to me on the overstuffed arm of my chair.

  “I was out with Archer and Knight, and we left before it showed over the horizon,” I said. “I checked: Knight’s in.”

  “Knight was the last one in, stubborn idiot,” said Dazzle, shaking her head. She’d let her pink hair out of the bun she usually kept it in, and it fell in untidy waves around her face. “I was just going on shift and got canceled. Good thing too; I was scheduled for the storm sewers. This thing wasn’t supposed to blow in until much, much later tonight, and we were only supposed to get the edge of it.”

  “It got stronger and faster and did a course change a couple of hours ago.” That was Regi, a tall, thin guy with a face like a bloodhound. “We’re in for a night. Probably longer. Oh, well, you can’t always predict what one of the big ones is going to do.”

  That…seemed odd. I’d never seen a storm do that back home. But no one else seemed to think this was out of the ordinary, so I let it slide without questions.

  “What about the people in Spillover?” I asked, looking at the others. Regi shrugged—not indifferently, just like I don’t know.

  “That’s what Knight was probably doing out so long,” Dazzle said finally. After the big Gazer Hunt that had ended so disastrously with the death of Ace’s brother, Paules, she’d warmed up to Mark. In fact, a lot of people had. “I bet he was passing on the warning and making sure they could get into some kind of shelter.”

  “At least when the storm’s over, we won’t have to worry about sweeping the storm sewers for a while,” Trev said as someone brought a tray full of drinks by and we all took one. I looked up at the person as I got mine, and realized with a start that not only did I not know her, but that she was wearing a uniform of a pale green tunic and matching pants. I smiled at her and she smiled back at me, after looking startled, and then took the now-empty tray and vanished into the crowd.

  That must have been one of the staff. It was the first time I had seen one of them, outside of encountering them in the Recreation Center. Everywhere else, except the Med Center and the Style Center, they were invisible. But before I could consider this further, more of the staff came sashaying through the crowd bearing huge round metal platters. Three of the platters got put down on the table in the midst of us, and as a delicious aroma wafted around us, I stared at what was on them in disbelief. The only time I had ever seen this food was in pre-Diseray vids. The legendary delicacy—pizza!

  Oh, we knew how to make it on the Mountain, but we never had the oven space or the fuel for the kind of hot fire needed to do so, and on top of that we lacked some of the ingredients. The others were not hesitating for a second. They were diving on the metal platters like they were starving, so I went for the one nearest me.

  Now, I was used to food down here being just a little disappointing compared to the stuff we ate at home—well, except for the food in the fancy places Josh had been taking me to. But this pizza…

  I felt my eyes widening, and then I closed them in pure pleasure. Before I knew it, the slice in my hand was gone, and I went back after another one immediately. Dazzle caught my eye as I grabbed that second piece, and grinned.

  “Oh. My. God,” I said, in answer to the question in her eyes. “This is amazing!”

  “And it’s so horrible for you! I think that’s what makes it better!” she agreed enthusiastically. “We only get it on storm nights. I think it’s to keep our endorphins up.”

  Well, my endorphins were probably about to gush out of my ears. I got a piece from a different pie, and it had other stuff on it, which was just as good. By the fourth piece, I was ready to call it quits and just wallow in my chair. But then they brought around more pizzas that had apple slices, raisins, honey, and spices, and it would have been rude not to have some of that.

  Everyone else was just as stuffed; the babble of conversation died down, people started finding places to sit, including the floor, and someone tuned the vid-screen to what looked like a club. It was jammed. The music was really good, though.

  “Is that a recording?” I asked Trev.

  He shook his shaggy head. “No, it’s a storm party. People who won’t have to go to work tomorrow go to their favorite clubs when there’s a storm warning up. They’ll just stay there, dancing and drinking until the storm’s over. That’s probably the vid-feed from someone famous.”

  I nodded. Herd instinct, and weren’t we pretty much doing the same here? Something as big as that storm out there…made you want to huddle together and do things to forget what’s outside.

  But that made me think of Mark, and I texted him. Want some pizza?

  I got back an immediate reply. I was debating that, but not in the mood for a crowd.

  That decided me. I’ll bring you some. That was only fair. Mark was one of my best friends here. The least I could do was bring him pizza.

  I KNOCKED ON MARK Knight’s door; my Perscom had led me right to it, of course, even though I had never been to his suite. “Pizza-bot!” I said as I balanced one of the platters with a mix of slices on it, including the sweet stuff. The platter stayed warm somehow, which kept the food warm. When he opened the door, I handed him the platter. “Did you get warning out to the people in Spillover?” I asked.

  He looked surprised and pleased that I had asked. “They actually keep better track of the weather than we do,” he said. “But, yeah, they got under shelter, the ones I knew how to find. There’s more protection out there than you might think—from storms, anyway.”

  But not from Othersiders…Well, by my way of thinking, and by Mark’s too, that was why there were Hunters patrolling out there.

  But he was standing there looking awkward and I knew why. Knight is a Christer, and engaged to a home girl on top of that. If he didn’t invite me in, it would look rude, and if he did, well, by his lights he was compromising my virtue (such as it is), possibly being unfaithful to his girl, and possibly endangering both our souls.

  “Thanks for looking out for them,” I said. “And now that I know you aren’t going to waste away, I’m headed back to the lounge.”

  “If you want a good look at the storm, pull up one of the external feeds on HQ,” he said, looking relieved. “I’ll just say I’m glad there’s a foot of reinforced ’crete on the roof.”

  I nodded; he succumbed to temptation and started eating. He offered me the tray politely, but I waved it away.

  “I should let you enjoy your food. And at least we’re going to find the storm sewers clean of Othersiders for a bit after this.”

  He nodded. “They’ll be fishing Othersider bodies out of the reservoirs for a couple of days. I don’t envy whoever has that job.”

  Huh. So that’s where the storm sewers lead.

  “Back home, we saved the storm water too; it’s less contaminated than the ground and well water,” Mark said, reminding me that his original home had been something not unlike a death trap. Then he smiled. “But now we don’t have to, unless we feel like it, thanks to you. I got my first batch of letters today since they moved. My people love it in your mountains….” Then he blinked. “I wonder if you got letters too?”<
br />
  I didn’t mention that I could get letters anytime I wanted them now. Bya had been taking notes for me to my Masters and back. But that was just my Masters.

  “Maybe I did. I haven’t been back to my rooms yet.” Now I did want to get back there, and not because I was hiding from the storm.

  “Don’t let me keep you. I was reading mine and I’m only halfway through them.” He smiled and ducked his head and blushed a little, which let me know he’d had more than one from his girl.

  “Jessie?” I asked. “That’s her name, right?”

  “It is.” Now he looked awkward, like he was a tweener or teener in the throes of a first crush. Which I guess would be normal for his people, since they pick a one-and-only, if they get to pick and not get arranged marriages. So he’d never flirted or experimented the way my people did. It was cute, actually, the way he blushed on and off. He had it really bad for this girl.

  “Thanks for letting me know about the letters!” I said, and gave him a little two-fingered salute as I turned to go.

  “Thanks for bringing me pizza!” he called after me.

  I headed down the halls, which normally were empty but now had the occasional person in them, mostly people in the staff uniforms. Sure enough, when I opened the door to my rooms, there was an open box full of envelopes on the little table next to the sofa.

  Now more than ever I was glad I wasn’t under that intense camera scrutiny that the non-Elite Hunters were. My reaction to word from home wasn’t anyone’s business but my own.

  There was a big stack of letters from my Masters, using just their names and with the return address being Anston’s Well rather than the Monastery. The ones on the top were all from Master Kedo, and I plopped down on the bed and tore open the first one.

  The letters were cryptic, but just in how he was coding things about Hunting, as if he and the others were doing it the hard way, the way that Apex thought they were Hunting, with guns and traps and explosives, instead of with Hounds and magic. Unlike the messages he sent back with Bya, he also took the time to just catch me up on ordinary things happening at the Monastery and with the other Hunters and Hunters-in-training there.

  That was good. Not so good were letters from Lady Rhiannon and Ivor Thorson, a couple of the other Masters, basically advising me that some of the people down in Anston’s Well and other villages were…not impressed with what I was doing. Apparently, the settlements and villages that had receivers had been getting the four hours of my channel every day by burst-cast—I guess they did that with every Hunter that hadn’t come out of Apex: sent their channel stuff back via burst-cast so people could see how their local hero was doing. And there were people who thought I was getting a swelled head and were not shy about saying so.

  Ivor and Rhiannon weren’t saying that they thought I had a big ego. In fact, they said it was a good thing that I was Elite now because there wasn’t as much coming back via burst-cast to give people gossip fodder, and when there was something, I was always part of a bigger team. But they did warn me that some folks I’d thought were friends were…turning out to be…not. That those people were spreading all kinds of gossip about how I was getting above myself.

  Honestly, it gave me a real sick feeling in my stomach to read that and the names of people I thought I trusted, because how could I ever counter that? It wasn’t as if I could go home and show them that I hadn’t changed, that I wasn’t wallowing in all that luxury and fame they were seeing, and thinking I was better than them. My eyes stung, thinking about it, and for a minute, I forgot about the storm.

  That was when the storm reminded me—all of us in HQ—that the bad old days of the Diseray were not entirely gone.

  The entire building shook, rattling everything in my room, and the lights flickered and went out in the middle of the shaking.

  I stayed put even though my heart was racing like there was a Drakken after me. The worst thing you can do in a situation like this is move, especially move when your gut wants to panic. The shaking stopped; the lights stayed out. I made a mental map of the room I was in, making sure that if the lights stayed out, I knew how many steps it was to the door to the bedroom, and from there, how many to the closet where my pack from home was. I had a flashlight in there and some chem-lights. And then my Perscom lit up, reminding me that in a pinch I could use it as a flashlight.

  “Stay calm and stay put, everyone. We got a series of direct lightning hits on and around HQ, and the local grid is down. We’ll have stand-alone, emergency power up shortly.”

  So I stayed where I was, with my ears ringing a little from how quiet it was in this room, although the thunder was still a distant presence. Back home, of course, it’s always very quiet because we don’t have a lot of things running all the time. But here, there was always the hum from electronics and lights, a faint but ubiquitous sound that I had stopped noticing consciously after a while. And there was the sound of the air moving in the ventilation ducts, a different hum from the cool-box when it turned on, a lot of things I had gotten used to, and now were just gone, leaving silence. But not a complete silence—there was still the faint and muted rumbling of the thunder beyond the thick walls, and the distant whine from the wind as well. It made me conscious all over again how the whole building was vibrating from something that was just not adequately described by the word “storm.”

  I felt the air moving first, then heard the hum as my cool-box came up. Then some of the lights, which were dimmer than usual. My Perscom lit up again. “Limited electric for now. No vid. Try an old-fashioned book,” someone announced, dryly. That surprised a laugh out of me. Well, I was certainly well supplied with those. “Or you can use your Perscoms; wireless is still up.”

  I felt Bya tickling the back of my head, not like he was alarmed, but more like, Would you like me there? As it happened, between the unhappy-making letters and the threat of being thrown into the dark again, I did. I cast the Glyphs and opened the Way, and he came through in greyhound shape.

  I turned off all the lights I didn’t need and moved into the bedroom with Bya and my letters. He laid himself alongside me while I read; not only was it very comforting to have him there, but it was very comforting knowing that if some monstrous tornado hit HQ, between his Shields and mine we would survive the second or two it would take him to bamph us both out together.

  The last ones were a stack from Kei, my best friend from back home. She was absolutely full of cheerful news, ordinary stuff from all the villages on the Mountain and in the valleys, things the Hunters had left out. Like who was paired up, who had broken up, who was doing what new projects. She was now an item with Dutch down in Silverspring—I giggled and hugged Bya over that; it was about time she noticed how crazy he was for her! She described three new outfits she’d made for herself. She’d been watching my vids. She loved what I was wearing as a Hunter, and went into verbal spasms over the dresses I’d worn on my dates with Josh. She thought Josh was adorable. She’d been down with some of the others to meet Mark Knight’s people when they arrived to join up with Brother Vincent’s “flock.” “Stiff,” was her estimation. “But I think they’re all right. They seem grateful to be here, and gratitude will take them a long way. They don’t know about everything yet”—by which she meant the Monastery—“but we figure that’ll come when we know how far we can trust them.” I already knew the Masters were thinking of letting them in on the secret soon. Her letters were almost as good as being with her…and she had all sorts of advice about how I should act around Josh, which I was really happy to read. In fact, I read those parts of her letters over a couple of times to cement them into my brain.

  There was still no sign of the electrics coming back to normal, so I padded around the rooms making sure everything was turned off that could be turned off, went back to bed, and cuddled Bya. I had a reader from home with a lot of books on it. I chose one at random and started reading. They were mostly pre-Diseray fantasy because we’ve found we can glean a lot of thing
s about how to use magic from them. This one was written in very florid language, and it made me nod off.

  The alarm from the vid-screen in the bedroom woke me up. Bya was still there and the building was still vibrating, but all the electrics were back. I could tell from the hum and the brightness of the reading lamp above my head. “Schedule,” I said aloud, and the vid-screen lit up with Canceled showing for the whole day. “Weather,” I ordered, and studied the screen. That was an ugly storm, and it was huge. It seemed to be circling around a center, like a hurricane, but without an actual eye. Was this normal? Up in the mountains, blizzards could last for days, and I had seen storms that circled like this, so I didn’t know.

  Well, no point in lolling around in bed. If I wasn’t going Hunting—and now I was very glad I’d put myself back in rotation after the Drakken, so my Hounds didn’t need manna—then I should work out, maybe get some target practice in. I got cleaned up and dressed, sent Bya back, and headed for the mess.

  It was pretty full, what with everyone having gone to bed early last night and all three shifts canceled. I grabbed food, found some space at a table with Dazzle, Hammer, and a couple people I didn’t know, and sat down to eat and listen.

  From the chatter, I gathered that the storm parking over us was unusual but not unheard of. Hammer at our table and a couple other Hunters within earshot had stories of monster storms that lasted two or more days. “The good news is that there’s not one Othersider that will move during a storm like this, not even the Thunderbirds. It’s too much even for them. Should finally move off us by nightfall,” Hammer finished. “Enjoy the rest while you’re getting it.”

  That sent people off on their plans for the unexpected free day. I stopped listening. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do; I just knew I wasn’t going to lie around and watch vids all day, or join the people who were planning on marathoning a game they all liked, something where your game avatar wore power armor and was shooting at an invasion of sentient robots. I never could see the point of vid-games, but I guess that might be because I grew up shooting at monsters for real and was not kept safe from them as an Apex Cit.