Elite: A Hunter novel

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Will do, sir,” I replied, and shut the connection down. The lighted buildings of Apex glided soundlessly past my window, and I pushed all my brokenhearted feelings down in a box in my head, slammed the lid down, and sat on it. Metaphorically speaking. I could sort through them later and maybe come to some kind of terms with them. Maybe. When the pod dropped me off at Uncle’s building, at least I wasn’t ready to burst into tears right that second.

  Rather than talking, though, because I wasn’t sure I could yet, I presented my Perscom to the guards, who checked theirs and waved me through. There was one elevator in the lobby with the door standing invitingly—or threateningly—open. I took it, the scanner read my Perscom, and up I went.

  A secretary/receptionist was on duty at the front desk; a new one, so I guess Uncle did work late enough to require more than one secretary. “Please go in, Hunter,” she said as soon as I opened the office door. “They’re waiting for you.”

  They? I just knew this couldn’t be good.

  It wasn’t.

  When I walked in the door, the very first thing I saw, even before Uncle Charmand, was the rigid back of someone in a Psimon uniform. A very, very, very high-ranking Psimon, judging from the epaulets and the shoulder jewelry. She had swept-back white-blond hair, and that was all I could see of her. She was standing, facing Uncle, who was sitting behind his desk.

  I stopped in the middle of the room and saluted. “Elite Hunter Joyeaux Charmand reporting as ordered, sir,” I said, staying in the salute.

  The Psimon whirled, and I caught a momentary look of shock and surprise on her face. Well, of course, she wasn’t used to people “sneaking up on her”; she hadn’t sensed me arriving, since Hunters walk very softly, and I had my Psi-shield on. The look of utter hatred she had on her face before her expression smoothed out into a cold mask felt like a slap. I don’t often take an instant dislike to anyone, but this Psimon had a face like a ferret, and she carried herself as if she was trying to project with body language just how superior to everything and everyone around her she considered herself to be.

  “You—” she said. “You’re the one that allegedly found four PsiCorps members dead.”

  Allegedly? That’s an odd choice of words. I certainly found them. Unless she thinks I did something more than just find them…

  Since that wasn’t a question, I didn’t say anything. In fact, I made up my mind that anything she got out of me, she’d have to pull out. I wasn’t going to volunteer a word.

  She waited for me to say something. I let my salute down, but I continued to say nothing.

  It was Uncle who broke the silence. “This is Senior Psimon Abigail Drift, Hunter Charmand. The chief officer and head of PsiCorps.”

  Oh, great. I was pretty sure I knew exactly what she wanted. One Psimon dead was awkward. Two dead, and it was going to get hard to keep the word about it secret. Three dead, and the secret had certainly gotten out. Four, and you needed someone to blame. A scapegoat, someone to accuse of murdering Psimons. I had “history” with Ace Sturgis. She could concoct some wild story about me wanting revenge on PsiCorps because they’d let him escape. I’d do, for someone to point a finger at anyway.

  “She’s here to ask you some questions,” Uncle continued.

  No, she’s here to conduct an inquisition.

  The Psimon prowled around me with her hands behind her back, while I stayed where I was and attempted to be as stone-faced as she was. She didn’t order me to remove my Psi-shield, which probably meant—what?

  She knows Uncle is recording all this. That was a possible explanation for why she didn’t demand the shield come off, but I sensed it was a partial one. She knows that if she demands I take off the shield, it will be on record she did so, and then anything I say would be invalid because she could make me say whatever she wanted. That was the most likely. There were plenty of people who didn’t trust Psimons and PsiCorps because no one really likes the idea of mind-readers. Compared to Hunters, they were distinctly unglamorous, and there was a substantial percentage of the population who suspected they went waltzing through any unprotected Cit’s head whenever they pleased, laws or no laws.

  “Just how is it that you came to be on the scene every time one of my Psimons turns up dead?” she snapped at me, trying to catch me by surprise.

  “I am the only Hunter, Elite or otherwise, patrolling that part of the storm-sewer system, ma’am,” I said with stiff politeness. “I am the only one who could have found them. If I had not, they’d simply have lain there until the next storm washed them into the reservoir.”

  Chew on that for a while.

  “That was at my request,” Uncle put in, as if it was an afterthought. “There had been attacks on maintenance crews that the conventional police squads could no longer handle without arms that would do considerable damage to the sewers themselves. Since Elite Joyeaux has a pack of eleven, I deemed it possible for her to patrol solo there. She is also my relative, and I knew I could absolutely count on her being discrete and not spreading rumors about what she found there.”

  “Yes, yes, we know all about your special niece,” Drift replied. Her expression didn’t vary, nor did her tone, but the hatred behind her eyes drove every other thought out of my mind but this: she wanted blood. And mine would do. She spat another question at me. “Did you kill them?”

  That was so unexpected, I was shocked, almost into a panic. I hadn’t expected an actual accusation; I’d been prepared for an elaborate dance of innuendo but not this. “No, ma’am,” I said, and stopped myself quickly before I said anything more. The first rule of being interrogated is to never volunteer anything. The second is, never elaborate a simple answer.

  “According to the readings we got from the recordings made at the time of the discoveries,” Uncle said as if he were speaking to a child, “the other Psimons all died six to twelve hours before they were found. I’m sure if you were to check the many, many records available, you will discover that Elite Joyeaux was elsewhere during those times, often with multiple witnesses.”

  Of course I was. I should have thought of that.

  “There are ways of falsifying those records,” the Psimon snapped.

  “Really? There are?” Uncle replied, in tones of deep interest. “I would be fascinated to hear about them. I would also be fascinated to know how you came to hear about them. Security holes are my department, after all. Are you withholding information from my office? That’s a very serious breach of protocol, if not the law itself.”

  The Psimon just stared a hole in him, or tried, anyway.

  “We could also come to the question of motive, although as any good detective will tell you, you need to find the means first, then the opportunity, all bolstered by evidence, and then you will have the motive without needing to look for it. You don’t immediately go about accusing every random person who has motive to kill someone.” He chuckled. “If you did that, you’d be arresting a great many innocent people. Still! Where’s the Hunter’s motive? She didn’t know these Psimons. She has no grudge against PsiCorps. She certainly isn’t inclined to slip away from Hunter HQ and slaughter random strangers for fun. If she wants to kill something, there are plenty of Othersiders out there.” He spread his hands wide. “Drift, you’re grasping at straws. If you are really looking for a murderer, and not something else, you’d be better off to hand over the bodies and what evidence you collected to me and let my detectives do the job they’re paid to do. So far the only cause of death we were able to determine before you confiscated everything was that your Psimons died of simple old age and multiple system failures.”

  The Psimon’s attention was completely off me now. If I had wanted to know who might be playing deadly political games with my uncle, well…I had one answer now, anyway. The only question in my mind was this: Just how far was Psimon Abigail Drift willing to take this game?

  “She might have no motive,” Drift growled. “But you certainly do!”

  I half expected
a spirited rebuttal. But Uncle just snorted with contempt. “Drift, first of all, if you know of a way to murder someone with old age, it will come as news to me. Secondly, if I wanted to undermine PsiCorps, there are a great many things I might do, but randomly murdering Psimons is not one of them. I’m the last person you need to worry about in this case. If you want to know who’s behind this, look to your own ranks. Your position in PsiCorps is just as vulnerable to ruthless ladder-climbers as any other CO’s is.”

  Uncle was outwardly calm, but I could read him. He was too deliberately relaxed. He’d lived on the Mountain; he must have learned relaxation techniques so his body language didn’t give him away. I knew at that moment he was balancing on the edge of a sword, and if Drift called his bluff…

  The Psimon glared at Uncle, then abruptly turned on her heel and left. But not before shooting me one last, venomous look. She bought it. At least for now.

  When the door had shut behind him, Uncle motioned me to a chair. I took it, because my knees felt shaky. “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “Do I look that bad?” I replied.

  He shook his head and shut down the electronics in his desk, then sat down himself. And he let down his mask. He looked very shaken. So…like I thought, at least half of what he’d said was bluff. “You look very unhappy, Joy.” He grimaced. “Josh called me and told me you’d broken up, so I would be warned that PsiCorps might make an immediate move. It seems he was right. That must be what just precipitated this little visit. The timing is too exact to be a coincidence.”

  “It is?” I said. I was too tired and stressed to be clever.

  “Drift will use anything and anyone she can get leverage on.” Uncle shrugged. “I take chances having Josh here in the office, and I trust him—to a point, but not beyond that. I need him, or to be more exact, I do need a Psimon—and better the devil you know. Your breakup was in public. And Josh’s call to me was probably monitored. Any chance they could pressure him to get inside your head was gone, so Drift gambled she could rattle one or both of us.” He changed the subject quickly. “I have the feeling Drift is not going to release any more than I already have, and certainly not the IDs of the previous victims before I put you down in the sewers.”

  “Wait, you had remains of other victims?” I replied. “How many other dead Psimons have there been before this?”

  “Just some bones and pieces of torn uniforms, without the collar IDs,” Uncle replied, steepling his fingers together. “Which PsiCorps confiscated. It could have been one or several dead Psimons. Drift never did give me a straight story about why we found the remains in the sieves at the head of the reservoir, so I decided someone needed to start going down there, not just to clear out the Othersiders, but to see if more dead Psimons were going to turn up.”

  “What happened to the ones—the earlier ones?” I asked.

  “From the marks on the bones, Ogres ate them, probably the pair you eliminated. But given what you found, it’s very clear that the Ogres didn’t actually kill them.”

  “I’m just a Hunter,” I said faintly. “I don’t have any idea why they died!”

  Uncle smiled reassuringly. “I know, Joy. I’m not expecting you to solve this particular mystery, especially since it seems pretty clear Drift doesn’t want it solved.” He chewed a little on his lower lip as he thought. “Well, I don’t have Josh to use as a contact conduit for you, but Kent’s perfectly safe; if you need to send something to me or say something to me that can’t go through official channels, and can’t be handwaved off as my niece wanting some family time, go to Kent.”

  “I’ll do that, Uncle,” I replied, and stood up to go. He got up himself.

  “We’ll go down together, shall we?” he said. Actually, I was kind of glad of that, and nodded. As we left his office, the lights went out behind us, and he paused for just a moment at his secretary’s desk. “Go on home, Grace,” he said. “And call two pods for us, will you?”

  We went down in the elevator together, and there were two pods already waiting for us when we got to the external door. Uncle’s was manned by a driver who probably served as a bodyguard as well; mine was driverless. We said good night, and Uncle being formal again, we shook hands and I saluted. Then we got in our pods and went our separate ways.

  As soon as the pod got to the street, I called to put myself back on duty. I had only just done that, when Armorer Kent called. “Private, encrypted channel,” he said. “Rank hath its privileges. What’s going on, Joy?”

  I told him everything because he needed to know everything, and that Uncle wanted me to use him as an indirect connection to the prefect’s office from now on. All the time, I was wondering—how much had PsiCorps been pressuring Josh to get inside my head? Lots? None? Did he think that now, with four dead Psimons to account for, they were going to start? Was that why he had broken up with me? Or had he broken up with me because he knew he’d never be able to get anything out of me and didn’t want to get in trouble?

  Had it been to save me, or to save himself?

  Kent signed off, and I put my aching head back against the pod cushions and contemplated the wreck my life had turned into over the course of a few hours. At least there was nothing else that could go wrong.

  I did not expect to have a message waiting for me from Mark when I got back. I certainly didn’t expect the contents. Meet me at the fishpond at 22:00, it read. Don’t reply to this.

  My first response was exasperation. Now what? I could only think of one reason why he’d tell me not to reply; he didn’t want his Perscom to go off and have Jessie ask him who it was. And that, all by itself, boded nothing good.

  But it was Knight. I couldn’t say no, now, could I? So instead of curling up in my room around Bya and a hot mug of Chocolike, and having a good cry, I dutifully made my way to the atrium, the garden, and the pond full of colorful fish.

  There were lights there, but he hadn’t turned them on, so there was only the faint illumination coming up from the water of the pond from the three underwater lamps. He sat at on the side of the pond, throwing food to the fish, and his posture told me everything I didn’t want to know.

  “So,” I said, sitting down facing him. “Let me just fill in the blanks, here. Jessie doesn’t like it here. She doesn’t fit in, and she wants to go home—or back to her folks, anyway. She wants you to come with her. And she’s jealous of me.”

  I’d have laughed at the look of astonishment on his face, if I hadn’t felt so miserable myself. “How did you—”

  I shrugged. Oh, I could have explained how I’d seen this coming because I knew the Christers back home. Christer girls plainly could not fathom how any girl could be just friends with a guy. And given they were raised in a flock, like a bunch of hens, they pined for the familiarity of the flock if you took them out of it. “Jessie probably had some vision in her head of how things were going to be when you got married, and it looked a lot like the lives of her friends. But now she’s found out that you can be gone at any time, without warning and without telling her where you’re going. She’s discovered that you’re hobnobbing with women she secretly thinks are more glamorous than she is, because they’re Hunters and have all the fancy Hunt suits and photo shoots and all that. And she’s figured out there’s not a lot for her to do, because there aren’t any other Hunter wives; any Christer women she could meet up with are a scary pod ride away all alone, and you don’t need her to mend and make, work the garden, or farm the bigger plots. She’s probably used to sewing circles, quilting bees, community suppers, and canning gathers, and all that sort of thing, and here, she can’t even cook you a meal. So she wants to go back, and she obviously can’t go back without you. That would mark her as a failure in the eyes of her people, that she can’t keep her man at her side.”

  I didn’t go into all the religious crap she was probably churning over in her head. And maybe regurgitating at him. That was kind of inevitable, and it was nothing I could argue with, unless I wanted to alien
ate Mark.

  “I can’t go back,” he said miserably. “I could have, maybe, if I hadn’t gone Elite, but now—”

  “I dunno, you might be able to,” I said, which I hadn’t wanted to say, but I owed him the truth. “There’s only one other Hunter out there”—I darted him a look, and he nodded; I was pretty sure that Jessie had told him there were other Hunters back home, though she wouldn’t know about the Mountain and the Monastery and Safehaven yet—“and if something were to happen to him, the folks there could petition for an Elite to be assigned there, and they’d be within their rights.”

  And all that would take would be for me to send a message via Bya that my “mentor” needed to have a tragic Hunting accident, and that they needed a new Hunter, an Elite by preference, because they were getting bigger and badder nasties. HQ would probably be so relieved that an Elite was all my people were asking for, they’d send whoever volunteered without a second thought.

  Knight nodded again, slowly and deliberately. “I can see where having an Elite out there to replace all the good you were doing would be something they could ask for.” And he gave me a little nod and a ghost of a smile, which was the one good thing that had happened this evening. Then he patted my shoulder, to reinforce that he completely understood why we had hidden the fact there were other Hunters up there. Heck, I bet his people would have hidden his existence if they could have gotten away with it. For that moment, it was us turnips against Apex…and us turnips had to stick together to protect our people.