Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  That startled a half laugh out of her, at least, as if she was surprised that I’d made a joke, and hadn’t expected me to be friendly. “Thankee,” she said, then ran off. I plodded back to my room. I was really glad that shower had a seat in it, because I don’t think I could have stood upright much longer.

  I had another dream about Karly. We were standing in the middle of a big, open space. There was nothing at all around, just flat grass as far as the eye could see. We were looking at the horizon, where there was one of those monster storms boiling up. This time I could see it from the beginning, just the tops of the clouds at first, high and far and anviling out. Then more, the clouds growing darker toward the base, then at last, the whole storm itself, black as night at the base and the land underneath it, lightning lancing through the clouds, lighting them up from inside, like a jar full of lightning bugs. More lightning, a lot more, striking the ground over and over again, under the base. And I started to panic because it was coming toward us, there was nowhere to hide, and there was nothing I could do to make it stop. In the dream, it never occurred to me I could Shield—all I felt was this paralysis of fear.

  And Karly turned toward me, solemnly, and said, “It’s coming.”

  That was when I woke up.

  I tried to think what it might mean—of course, there was the perfectly obvious, which was that I’d taken Archer’s warning about a “surge” starting, and translated it into dream terms. Being the most obvious, that was probably what it was.

  I didn’t have precognitive dreams, although a couple of the monks were supposed to. No one on the Mountain would ever say who it was, so the people with the power wouldn’t feel pressured to come up with future-telling all the time. So it probably wasn’t precognitive. It probably was my subconscious warning me Archer was right.

  But I knew that if we were going to be in for something like this “surge” thing, I wouldn’t dare send Bya off with messages to my Masters unless I had a good—no, an overwhelming—reason to believe we wouldn’t have a callout. Which basically meant never, until the surge was over.

  Have I mentioned before that being responsible sucks? Because it sure did at that moment.

  I KEPT BROODING ABOUT this all the next day; I’d taken a storm-sewer patrol, but my mind really wasn’t on it. It had rained last night, by my standards a huge thunderstorm, but only an orange-and-red blob a bit bigger than three times the size of the city on the radar, and all the tunnels had about two inches of gradually draining water in the center. So far we hadn’t had any luck in scaring anything up. I was walking along the side to avoid the water, more because I didn’t want to alert potential adversaries to our presence than to avoid getting my boots wet.

  Gwalchmai was the lead scout right now, and before I could analyze what was going on in my head anymore, he called to us.

  There is another one of those dead humans, he said. This one is warm. I have sniffed and searched, but I find no magic and nothing but his scent.

  That galvanized me and made me forget about anything else. Warm? Bloody hell, I thought, and sprinted down to where Gwalchmai was standing guard, with the rest of the pack loping along beside me. No point in worrying about noise now.

  I checked the sewer map on my Perscom, and this was the same general area where we’d found the first three dead Psimons. We all rounded a corner and found Gwalchmai standing over another collapsed Psimon.

  The body was down the end of a dead-end tunnel with a big access grate up to street level above us. The first thing I did was to go past the corpse and look up. With Dusana’s help, him getting as big as he could and me standing on his back, I managed to get up high enough to poke at it with the tip of my shotgun, but it didn’t even rattle. That meant nothing had pried it up because those things were bolted in place, not hinged, so however the dead man had gotten where he was, it wasn’t from the street.

  I dropped down next to the body, which, like the two I’d paid attention to, looked old. Old, frail, and bald. Best to verify what Gwalchmai had told me; I checked it using the infrared scan on my Perscom. Gwalchmai was right; though the Psimon was deader than a stone, he was still faintly warm. The Perscom reckoned time of death to have been about four hours ago, given that he was lying on ’crete. ’Crete would leech heat out of the body, and the ambient temperature down here would add to how fast the corpse cooled, but the Perscom had a calculator for all that. How far can you trace his footsteps? I asked Gwalchmai, who had the best nose of the entire pack.

  Not far, the Hound replied regretfully. I sighed. I knew why. The water, of course. The dead Psimon’s shoes were still wet, in fact. It looked as if he’d trudged some distance through the water, effectively breaking his trail.

  I pointed my Perscom at his collar badge and initiated a data handshake. Sure enough, I got the little green triangle icon of a download for a second, and then there was a new file on the Perscom. I sent it straight to Uncle, along with some vid, and then erased it and the vid from my Perscom. You know, just in case. Four dead Psimons, and I was the one who’d found them all? That was going to make PsiCorps very unhappy with me, and I didn’t need them to find anything on my Perscom that wasn’t completely innocent.

  Here’s the thing. Uncle had sent me down here because he thought there was something going on—but he hadn’t given me any indication of urgency. I figured that meant there’d been one, maybe two dead Psimons down here before I started patrolling over the course of several months.

  Now there were four, plus those two, and those four had turned up within weeks of each other. So something had changed, and so far as the Psimons were concerned, not for the better. PsiCorps couldn’t just handwave this away. They were going to be looking for someone to blame, and who better than me?

  Then I stood up, called it all in, and looked at the pack. “No dinner today,” I said, annoyed. “We might as well go back to the surface because—”

  Sure enough. My Perscom went off. I got a text from that cold senior Psimon ordering me to meet him at the nearest exit point. I guess he was pissed I hadn’t waited for him the last time.

  Or else he was pissed that I’d found a body that wasn’t cold.

  Or maybe both.

  I ordered a pod, and we began our trek to the exit.

  But then…I got an idea, and I put myself back on the duty roster. I might be able to dodge that Psimon after all.

  Lucky for my Hounds and lucky for me, just as the Psimon got out of his pod, I got a callout with Scarlet; the location was that dead industrial area of Spillover where Ace’s brother had gotten himself killed.

  The Psimon looked very annoyed when I answered the Perscom instead of immediately talking to him. I tried not to smirk as I replied with, “Roger, HQ. On my way.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the Psimon, but not sorry at all. “I have to go; I’ve got a callout, and callouts don’t wait. I need your pod.” I turned and practically jumped into his pod, leaving him standing there, mouth gaping with astonishment that I had dared to just run off and leave him before being dismissed. And then steal his pod!

  I’d won. I didn’t have to talk to him and I’d effectively snubbed him, and there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.

  Best of all? He’d be stranded until the pod I’d called could get there.

  I waited until the pod was a good block away before I started laughing.

  I needed to clean up before I went to dinner. I’d missed the mess-hall time, but that didn’t matter all that much. I’d just gotten out of the shower and into some comfortable clothing when I got a call from Josh. I’d been expecting one after I’d sent Uncle that vid and the ID information from the Psimon, and I wasn’t at all surprised when he asked, rather too casually, “Have you eaten yet? Would you like noodles? There’s a place where I used to live that’s not far from your HQ. It’s called Noodles, conveniently enough.”

  “No, and you’re reading my mind. I love noodles, and they don’t serve them much in the mess. I thought
you Psimons weren’t supposed to do that without probable cause!” I replied, smirking.

  “I was ready to suggest something else, but I’m always happy to relive my childhood,” he replied, just as lightly, although anyone who really knew him would probably be able to tell he was tense. “Meet you there?”

  “I might start without you,” I replied, pulling on boots. “I’m starving.”

  “Be my guest,” he replied, and hung up.

  Well. You weren’t really expecting this next meeting to be a date, now, were you? I asked myself. Given what I’d just sent Uncle, Josh’s mind was probably on anything but making out.

  Needless to say, I made damn sure my Psi-shield was working before I set one foot out of my rooms. Josh wasn’t the only Psimon out there. He wasn’t even the Psimon I needed to worry about. There was always the possibility—no, probability—that PsiCorps was watching one or both of us, and I wasn’t going to make it any easier on them to find out what was going on with me than I had to.

  PsiCorps was supposed to be on our side. But someone in high circles in Apex was playing nasty political games with Uncle. And a Psimon could, all too easily, have manipulated and controlled Ace into working for them.

  When I arrived at Noodles, the little shop on the first floor of the big apartment block where Josh had grown up, I was the only customer, which made me a little suspicious. Then again, it was after the supper hour…and the staff didn’t seem at all nervous, or far too casual, which would have been a tip-off that something was up. But caution never hurt anyone, so I pretended a calm I didn’t feel, ordered just exactly as if I was late for my dinner (which I was) and starving (which I was).

  The order arrived promptly but not too promptly, and I had already started on my bowl of pho when Josh turned up. He was wearing clothing that looked old, a sweater and pants that had been worn a lot, something I almost never saw anyone doing here in Apex, and something I had never seen him do. He was also wearing sunglasses, even though it was dark now, and Noodles wasn’t exactly lit up. He slid into the seat across from me, punched something on the menu in the tabletop, and finally pulled off his glasses. His face had a pinched look, and his eyes were clouded with an emotion I couldn’t read.

  “Did you delete those files after you sent them to Prefect Charmand?” he asked in a whisper. His shoulders were all tensed up, and he hunched over the table, leaning as close to me as he could get. Right now I was really glad we were alone in here. I figured that if there were another Psimon anywhere in the building, he’d know. You can’t Psi-scan through a Psi-shield, so in order to scan us, a Psimon would have to drop his own block, whether inherent or mechanical. Any snooping going on would have to have been by someone actually right here in the shop.

  I nodded. He relaxed marginally. “Good. Here’s the thing, Joy. I knew that Psimon.”

  I blinked. “How?” Then I bit my lip, since that wasn’t exactly a tactful response. Good going, Joy. Nice job. “I—I’m so sorry, Josh—”

  Josh interrupted me. “Not like that. He wasn’t a friend or anything; we weren’t really encouraged to have friends. But he was in my classes! He was older than me because his Powers popped late, but he can’t—I mean couldn’t—have been a day over twenty!”

  I stared at him. “That’s…crazy….” I said after a long pause. “That’s not possible. If I were making a judgment, I’d have said that body was over ninety!” My spoon was halfway to my mouth, forgotten. I put it back down in the bowl. “How is that even possible?”

  Josh shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it wasn’t him? Maybe the guy you saw stole the uniform? That’s all I can think. Except that…from the vid you sent me, it kind of looked like the guy I used to know, only really, really old.”

  “Could it have been a relative? His grandfather or something?” Now my mind was racing, thinking up all kinds of crazy theories. “Maybe it was an old relative that wasn’t supposed to be in Apex, someone in Spillover maybe, and your guy slipped the uniform to him so he wouldn’t get stopped, and he was sneaking into the city by way of the sewers? And then he just fell over dead?”

  “And that would be why, exactly? I could see slipping him some decent clothing, but why would he sneak someone in wearing a Psimon uniform? People don’t just get randomly stopped in Apex unless they don’t have a registered Perscom and don’t look like they fit in. It’s not that hard to get a registered Perscom. And besides, anyone that a Psimon wants admitted into Apex gets admission and Cit status. We don’t get all the perks that Hunters get, so that’s what they give us.” Josh shook his head. “None of this makes any sense.”

  Talk about coming up with crazy theories, all my watching old vids back at the Monastery gave me about a million of them. Theories were one thing, though; facts were another. We just didn’t have any. Because there were three dead Psimons at least before this fourth one.

  Josh’s noodles came. I finished mine. I am pretty sure we were both scared and confused, although I was probably more scared than confused, and he was probably more confused than scared. He mostly just played with his food; well, that was the difference between Apex-bred Cits and the people where I come from. Where I come from, you never take the presence of food for granted, and you always eat what’s set in front of you, unless you are literally sick and can’t keep it down.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked finally. Because I could kind of tell that what was going through his head was something he figured I wouldn’t want to hear, and I was beginning to have a lot of ideas about what that might be. “You might as well tell me because it’ll probably come out sooner or later, and I’d rather sooner than later.”

  He managed a wan smile. “You don’t make things easy on anyone, do you?”

  There were a lot of responses I could have made, and frankly, I didn’t know which one to pick. I settled on a shrug.

  “I think…” He gulped. “I think maybe we should break things off between us.”

  And I just sat there, half of me stunned, a fourth of me just wanting to cry, and a fourth of me nodding in agreement. “You mean,” I finally managed, “for good? Or just for now?”

  “For now!” he said immediately, which made me feel a teeny, teeny bit better. Not much, but a little. “It’s just…I’ve got a lot of reasons, but none of them have anything to do with you.”

  “Well…” I looked at his hand, not at his face. The tabletop was smooth, reflective glass, now that we were done ordering and the screen under it was off. His face was reflected in it, like the face of someone drowned, deep underwater.

  So was mine.

  Right now I was all knotted up. He said none of his reasons had anything to do with me, but that wasn’t how it felt. It felt like he’d been keeping secrets from me all this time. It felt like, down underneath, I’d actually known that and was trying to push that knowledge away. Maybe they’d been pressuring him to get inside my head already….

  Yeah. My “creepy Psimon boyfriend”…I guess Retro was right about that.

  “This sucks,” I said. He nodded.

  The silence was so deep we could hear the staff in the kitchen talking to each other, and people out in the shopping area. My hand was the same temperature as the tabletop—cold.

  “If…when all this is sorted out…would you…” he began. “I mean, I shouldn’t even ask you. You might hook up with someone else who’d…”

  “Or I might be digesting inside a Drakken,” I said. Cruel, I know, but I wasn’t feeling as generous as I might have been. “Let’s not make any promises, okay? I really like you a lot too, Josh. But you don’t even know if this is going to get sorted out, much less when. And I don’t know what tomorrow is going to shove in front of me. I don’t even know if I’m going to go back to my rooms or back to a callout. You go on doing your best for Uncle. I’ll go on doing my best for this city. And let’s just leave it that way for now.”

  I got up and walked out, calling a pod from my Perscom before I’d gotten as far as t
he shop door. I didn’t look back. And I could tell you that I’d done it that way so if anyone was watching, he’d look appropriately devastated, or I would, or both of us would. But the real reason was because—since there was going to be breaking up, I wanted to be the one to do it. I didn’t want to be the one sitting there and trying to figure out ways to make it work after all, even though I knew all my frantic planning was utterly futile. I wanted to be the one walking out, not the one left behind.

  Maybe I am mean. And maybe I’m a coward. I don’t know. I just knew I didn’t want to prolong the pain, pretending that there was some way to salvage this when we both knew there wasn’t.

  YOU KNOW HOW WHEN the universe decides to crap on you, it never just craps on one thing?

  I didn’t even get as far as the sidewalk before I got a call from Uncle’s office. I stopped just outside the outer door and took it.

  Maybe it was just a secretary with a message. Did Uncle work this late?

  The face on my Perscom was Uncle, but—

  The background was the prefect’s seal. Every button was fastened. “Hunter Elite Joyeaux, I know it’s late, but I require your presence here in my office. There are some matters we need to clear up.” He couldn’t have been more formal and official if he’d been making a public announcement.

  Uh-oh.

  “On my way, sir,” I replied just as formally, and got in the pod and gave it my destination. He’d already closed the connection a nanosecond after I said “sir,” so I put a quick call in to Kent.

  “Senior Elite Armorer,” I said as soon as he answered it, signaling him this was serious business. “I’ve been ordered to report to the prefect’s office. I don’t know how long this will take.”

  He looked startled. So that meant he hadn’t been alerted to this, which meant I wasn’t being called on the carpet for anything on the record. So what am I being called in for that would make Uncle go official? “There’s nothing on your schedule from this end, Elite Joyeaux. I’ll make a note of it. Check in as soon as you go officially back on duty.” It was a given that Elite were always on duty, so unless I was going to be arrested for something, I could get called right out of this meeting. And if we were in a “surge”…well, the last attack had happened at oh-dark-thirty, right?