Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  Still, it never hurt to be cautious before I went blundering into a situation. “A heck of a day?” I replied.

  “I heard you discovered a whole new sort of Othersider. A snake-man?” he answered. “I saw some restricted footage of it. Down in the storm sewers.”

  So he knew where I had been today, but maybe not why or that I had been under the Hub. I decided to be cautious.

  “Nowhere near as bad as tackling that Wyvern solo or playing bait for the Drakken,” I told him, leaning against him a little and sipping my drink. “They startled us, is all, and it’s never a good thing the first time you run into something brand-new and hostile.”

  He nodded. “And now we’ve got something new to worry about.”

  I thought about that before I spoke. That was the neat thing about Josh: I knew I could talk to him seriously about things and get sensible answers back. “I’m not so much worried about the Nagas as I am about what else might be on the horizon,” I replied, staring out at the lights and thinking that every one of them represented a cluster of people who were nothing more than items on the menu to the Othersiders. “This isn’t a good sign, something we’ve never seen before cropping up right in the sewers. It was bad enough that things were getting dangerous down there, but it’s much worse that something we’ve never seen before shows up for the first time underground.”

  “Or,” Josh corrected, “we’ve just been getting a lucky break for a while, and now things are going to correct back to normal, which means a lot more dangerous than we’ve been used to. That would be my reading of it. In either case, we’re much better prepared to face a wave of new Othersiders than we ever have been in history.”

  “I guess it’s not the first time this has happened?” I hazarded.

  “Not even the second or the third,” he told me. “I looked into this. No matter what we tell the Cits, we’ve been living on borrowed time. We got a long break, thanks to the Barriers, but the Othersiders aren’t stupid, and they can adapt.”

  “I guess so….Out where I come from, we don’t have Barriers to protect us, so we never got the idea in our heads that anything was safe,” I said. “So…back to business as usual….”

  “Whoa, wait.” He gave my shoulders a little squeeze. “You’re not the only Hunter in the village now. It’s not all on your back to take care of these things, Joy. It isn’t even just on the Hunters. We’ve got better weapons, we’ve got Mages, and there’s PsiCorps. You haven’t even counted us into your equation, and PsiCorps has a lot of tricks up its sleeve. A lot more than anyone knows, actually.”

  I wasn’t entirely sure what PsiCorps could do against attacking Othersiders, since a Psimon can only handle one critter at a time, but it didn’t seem very polite to say that, so I kept my mouth shut. I mean, seriously, sure they were fine one-on-one, but what would a Psimon do against a whole gang of things like Nagas? And mind-reading wasn’t going to help a lot, other than tell the Psimon the Othersider he was facing hated him and wanted to feed on him. Unless…unless all those mind-readers were all mind-controllers too, and that was what he meant about “having tricks up their sleeves.”

  But if all they could do was control one mind at a time…yeah, a mob of Kobolds could take one down. “Well, if their plan is to sneak infiltrators in, so far, it’s not working real well. The good thing about going down in the storm sewers is that there’s a limit to the size of what can get down there,” I said. “And I have a pack of eleven.”

  “There you go,” he said approvingly. “Want another drink? Or something to eat?”

  “Another drink would be lovely,” I said. “Something different?” Because if that tea was as rare as he said, it was probably expensive, and even though I was halfway certain Josh’s expenses when he took me out were being covered by either the prefect’s office or Hunter HQ, I wasn’t completely certain, and the last thing I wanted him to do was impoverish himself just to treat me. I made a mental note to find out for sure and offer to carry my share if he was taking the whole burden. Only fair, right?

  “I got a bunch of mail from home before the storm,” I said as the table delivered two new drinks, and told him about the letters from Kei and some of my friends—omitting the fact that some of them were Hunters, of course.

  Unless he was really good at faking enthusiasm, which I was inclined to doubt, he enjoyed hearing about them. Our way of life probably was as strange to him as living in the city had been to me. He was fascinated by details: how we used solar, wind, and bicycle generators for electricity but relied on highly efficient wood burners for heat. How we used not just wells and rain but snow catchments for water. That we had indoor plumbing, just like here in Apex, using water towers on the roofs for pressure, even though we didn’t have a central water-and-sewer system.

  And the bigger aspects of living outside the Barriers—like how we ran our Hunting patrols (I was careful, implying that everyone out there was perfectly ordinary), and all the ways we’d found that unmagical people could take out Othersiders.

  “It’s amazing that you aren’t under attack more often,” he said after a while, which was something I had been expecting and working out an answer to. Josh was anything but stupid, and sooner or later I had figured he’d wonder just what sort of strange immunity we had that kept us relatively safe.

  Now I was nervous. Sure, I had my Psi-shield on, but a Psimon can read body language as well as thoughts. Would he suspect I wasn’t telling him the whole truth? And if he ever found out how many Hunters and Mages we had, what would he do with the information? I had to hope I could tell enough of the truth to satisfy him, without telling too much.

  “We’re above the snow line,” I told him. “The farms are all down lower, but where we actually live, the snow never melts. There’s not many Othersiders that can tolerate that kind of cold, and even the ones that can aren’t able to take it for long. The cold itself is a weapon, but we have something else.”

  “What would that be?” he asked, intrigued.

  “We found exactly the right density for cold-forged iron to mask how many of us there are and repel most of the Othersiders at the same time,” I told him truthfully. “So we don’t have to have iron fences or anything like them. We have cold-forged iron nails pounded into the wooden palisades around our villages in patterns. So far, the only things that are able to get past that cold-iron pattern are really big Othersiders, and they hate the cold just as much as the little ones do.”

  “With only one Hunter up there, I guess you need to be creative,” he said. “I wonder if they’ll get someone else to pop Powers with you gone?”

  “Maybe.” I finally decided that the best way to get him off the track of the Mountain was for him to answer some questions. “So since you mentioned popping Powers, when did you find out you were a Psimon?” I asked.

  He kind of…stopped…for a minute. Uh-oh…awkward…“It doesn’t actually work that way for us,” he said finally, tensing up a bit. “You don’t find out. You’re born that way.”

  No hope for it. I’d just have to plow on. But at least it would give him something to think about except the Mountain. “Uh…huh,” I replied, trying to think through that. “Like, literally? You’ve got Psi-powers as a baby?”

  He relaxed again. “Yeah, which is why we usually get taken away to the Psimon crèche.” His tone turned wry. “You can always tell when a baby’s a Psimon. They never stop crying. And I mean never. Even in their sleep.”

  “’Cause they can’t get away from everyone else’s thoughts around them, and they don’t know how to shield yet?” I hazarded. He nodded. “But you said usually. You weren’t?”

  “My mom was a Psimon,” he said. “I think my dad was too, but I don’t know for sure, and no one ever told me. By the time I was born, he was out of Mom’s life, and PsiCorps let Mom raise me. She could do what the crèche would have done; she could shield me until I was old enough to learn how to shield myself, and teach me how to use my abilities right along with lea
rning how to walk and talk. When I was old enough for school, I went to school with the Psimon crèche kids, but I got to come home at the end of the school day.”

  I didn’t have to imagine how hard that was, having these things you could do that set you apart from people around you at a young age, because obviously that was exactly what had happened to me. At least he’d had a mom. A mom who must have loved him an awful lot to insist that she was going to keep him and raise him herself, all alone.

  The words came out before I had a chance to think about them. “You must have the best mom in the whole world,” I said sincerely.

  That made him go quiet for a long time. Finally, he said, “Well, all the times she kept telling me to use your outside words, Josh, when it was so much easier to tell her what I wanted to say telepathically made me mad…but…yeah.”

  I wanted to ask more questions, but I decided against it. He kept talking about his mother in the past tense, which suggested that something had happened. I figured if he wanted to tell me what that something was, he would, and if he didn’t, pushing to get it wouldn’t be a good idea.

  And then I leaned over and kissed him so he wouldn’t have to tell me anything.

  We’ve been kissing for a while now, but we’d always had to do it where there weren’t cameras watching, our opportunities hadn’t been many or long. This time we were completely private, and I was plenty ready to take things a little further.

  Not crazy further, but…yeah, we did some making out, and it was just as exciting as I’d fantasized. I loved the way he made me feel, all tingly and warm and a little euphoric. I loved how his fingers felt on my skin and in my hair, and I was glad I’d left my hair loose tonight for him to run his fingers through. I wasn’t consciously following the coaching that Kei had given me, but I’d probably read those parts of the letters over so many times it had finally gotten into my subconscious. For once, I didn’t feel awkward, or like I was making missteps, or nervous.

  He was the one to break it off first, with a little sigh of regret. “I need to be careful…” he said reluctantly.

  “Careful?” From the way he said it, he didn’t mean it in the way I would have.

  “A Psimon is…discouraged from getting too physical with someone he’s attracted to, because that can form psychic and emotional links that have the potential to get in the way when you least want them. Even through Psi-shields,” he said after a moment. “Instead of reaching for the person you’re supposed to read, you can end up reaching for the person you want to read. Supervisors take a dim view of that,” he added, with a grimace.

  What? That kind of pissed me off. Back home, I think we had people who would have been recruited into the Psimons if they’d been living in one of the big cities, but they tended to join the actual monks, and…I wasn’t really sure what they did, other than serve as a sort of early-warning service. But they sure weren’t discouraged from doing normal things like making out!

  Okay, okay. It’s not Josh’s fault. Change the subject.

  “So, what’s it like to be a kid here?” I asked instead. Awkward again, but…what else could I do?

  He laughed at that, a little nervously. “Near as I can tell, it’s a lot less responsibility,” he told me. “All those chores you turnips have to do! No wonder you never learned how to play vid-games!”

  “Well, duh!” I laughed. “So that’s what you do? Play vid-games?”

  “They’re supposed to be educational!” he protested. “And a lot of them make you actually exercise. I guess I could probably ski for real, if I ever got on a mountain. And snowboard, and I know I ran a lot.”

  That was when it hit me. Two things hit me, actually. The first was that kids really were not free here, free to be outside—and that was why they did all their playing using vid-games. Whether their parents understood it or not, the people in charge were acutely aware of the fact that it was not safe for them to be outside without one-on-one supervision. To allow them that freedom we kids in Safehaven and Anston’s Well had would mean they would have been trained as we were—trained that the world is an incredibly dangerous place, trained in all the things they needed to be able to do to keep themselves from being lured off or carried away. And to give them that training would completely destroy the illusion of safety their parents had.

  “Did you ever get to play with other kids?” I asked finally. “Not over a vid-feed. Together.”

  “Once I was in the Psimon school, yeah,” he said. “You don’t want a kid with psionics playing with a Norm.”

  I could see that. Kids lose their tempers; they don’t know not to act on their impulses. Depending on what Josh’s abilities were, well, a fight with another kid could end with a kid in a coma instead of a kid with a bloody nose or a black eye.

  “And we were always supervised, two adults for every six kids,” he continued. “Just to make sure we didn’t…Well, you know, bullies. Psi-gifted kids are valuable, like Hunters and Mages. You don’t want to lose anyone with potential to be a Psimon.”

  “Lose anyone?” I said, not sure I understood what he was saying, or implying.

  “Start subconsciously repressing their powers,” he said hastily. Maybe too hastily? What kind of “crèche” was this? What kind of school? Then he flipped the subject as if trying to avoid exactly that question. “Kids with minimal powers get weeded out at around nine or ten and go to a different school, where they are taught mostly regular stuff and how to use what little they’ve got. They’re never in PsiCorps at all. That’s why they’re available to take jobs with the vid-channels, work as gifted assistants, or go into the army.”

  This was getting way too serious. So I changed the subject entirely and asked him about what other storms had been like—and what he and the others stuck in Uncle’s building had done during them. It turned out they did a lot of stupid things that often ended up really funny…and resulted in edicts like Personnel shall no longer engage in racing games using office chairs and Personnel shall not use the copying machines for copying any object other than a document.

  At that point, both our Perscoms beeped, letting us know that we weren’t entirely off the leash on this date, and that we both were on duty in the morning.

  “Our masters call,” I said wryly. He laughed. “Look, you live, what, a few blocks from here?” I continued. “There’s no reason why you should ride back all the way with me only to turn around and ride back by yourself.”

  “But I like your company,” he objected, so I gave in and we ordered a pod and he went with me back to Hunter HQ. Unfortunately, we got a driver-run pod, so we just held hands until the pod delivered me back where I’d started. I wished we’d had another chance to make out a little more. And I kind of wanted to smooth things over after the way he broke off that kiss. I went back inside feeling as if I’d somehow missed something, even though I wasn’t sure what it was I could have missed.

  THIS TIME I WENT down into the storm sewers from an entrance to the west of the Hub. The pass-box at the door of the little bunker accepted my Perscom just fine, and the Hounds and I made our descent.

  The sewer tunnel looked so innocent, and once again smelled of nothing but scoured cement and damp—but after turning up those Nagas, even if I hadn’t been a Hunter I would have regarded it with suspicion. I looked over the Hounds and decided that since we were alone, I’d let them arrange themselves around me as they saw fit. “Form up how you want,” I told them as they all turned their muzzles toward me, waiting for orders. “We’re heading to the Hub again.”

  Bya and Myrrdhin (who seemed to have become Bya’s default second-in-command) both nodded. Myrrdhin ranged on ahead of us, Bya put himself right at my side, and the rest packed up loosely around the two of us.

  We moved slowly, much more slowly that we usually did in the open. That was partly because I would stop every twenty paces or so, in order that we could all listen and probe with other senses for a few moments. If I’d still had my own channel, our progress woul
d have put my viewers to sleep.

  But this wasn’t all that different from the way I patrolled in the deep forest. Stop frequently and listen; let the Hounds use all their senses. Use all of mine as well. I wasn’t as good at detecting magic and magical creatures as they were, but there were a few times when I’d done so before they had.

  On the other hand, I had one thing going for me that they didn’t, down here in an all-man-made Hunting ground. I knew machinery. And sometimes I could tell when something wasn’t quite right.

  As we had made our way down the tunnel, there had been distant sounds getting louder. I already knew from my map what it was: a pumping station, sequestered in one of those side tunnels that contained pipes and cables. The storm runoff didn’t need to be pumped, but sewage and potable water sometimes did. And the nearer we got, the more I became aware that there was something “off” in how the pump sounded. As if it was straining, or not functioning quite right. “Contact Apex Power and Water, Reclamation Division, human operator,” I said, feeling sure that there must be humans in charge of things there as well as computers. There was. I immediately was put in contact with a bored-looking woman who sat straight up and stared at the screen, flustered, when she saw who was calling her. “Hunter Joyeaux here,” I said crisply, before she could stammer out anything. “I’m patrolling sector”—I switched screens and checked my map—“six seventy-one and I’m just on the other side of the wall from what I think is a pumping station.”

  I’ll say this for her, she went straight to business. “It is, Hunter.” Then she frowned. “This is odd. That pumping station was just given an inspection and a clean bill of health less than a month ago. But now—”

  “Now there’s something wrong with it. I thought so,” I said. “Don’t send anyone down here yet. I’ll keep in touch. Hunter Joyeaux out.”