Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  I started scrolling through the channels. Channels and channels…it was crazy how many there were. It was when I got to H that I felt absolutely stunned, because…okay, there was a Hunters channel, which was what I had expected, given what I’d been told. But there was also a channel for each and every Hunter I’d seen today and a whole lot more. I picked Ace’s, and was assaulted by loud music. He was somewhere dark, but with a lot of flashing lights, and a lot of people, dancing. A little message at the bottom advised me this was a live feed.

  The cameras did follow us everywhere.

  I had to; I picked my channel. I mean, who wouldn’t, right? I was almost expecting to see myself on the bed, but to my relief, it was just the interview I’d given to the military debriefer on the train, followed by when I was showing the other Hunters how to grind down a Shield. Not much of that; you couldn’t really see the magic unless you had the Eye, and that went with being a Hunter, so it would be really boring to someone who wasn’t a mage. Then it cycled to the edited encounter with the Othersiders. That’s when I found out I was already number nine in the top ten Hunters.

  No wonder Ace was annoyed.

  I cycled through some of the other Hunter channels. The main one was a summary with clips of what everyone had been doing, and some sort of rankings thing, and some talking heads talking gossip. The individuals had live feed if they were doing something interesting, like Ace was, or interviews or dockues or old feed if they weren’t. And always, so often it was starting to sound like a mantra, there was that little fanfare, followed by the AT and Apex logos, and the same voice saying, “And that’s your Hunters on the job! Keeping Apex and the Territories safe!”

  I remembered something another of my Masters had once said. Be careful when someone repeats something too often; things that are repeated often enough can start to seem to be true, even when they are not. So…this was getting repeated over and over.

  Meaning? That we had to convince the Cits that we could always keep them safe. To do that…maybe that was what the sports-star stuff was all about. It would trivialize what we did, sure, but it would make the Cits feel everything was all right, when not only were the Cits not safe outside the Barriers, but they weren’t all that safe inside them, either.

  Did Uncle know? He had to. He was in charge of all the Hunters that weren’t with the army. Was this something else he’d been trying to warn me about?

  Apex was full of more people than I could imagine. Lots and lots of people, all crowded together. And if they were constantly on edge, waiting for something to get in over the Barrier and attack—

  I closed my eyes a minute, trying to think it all through. All right, think of them like a—a herd of deer. Deer are always on edge, always ready to be attacked. Just crack a stick when walking, and poof, they’re gone, in a panic. And all those Cits, on edge, all the time…if they even thought there was an attack, they’d go running off in all directions. Running into danger, getting in the way of Hunters, throwing whatever was supposed to be going on into utter chaos.

  And then, well, then they’d exhaust the fear, and not react when there was danger. The only way to prevent that was to make them feel everything was under control. But if you made Hunting seem more entertainment than it was protection…

  Gladiators. We were gladiators. To make the Cits forget that Apex was under siege. To make them think that defeating things was…well, not easy, but a sport. Like a shooting contest where occasionally someone got a little bloody. To make them think that the things that did get past the Barriers were trivial, and no more dangerous than a bad dog. So if they happened to see a Hunter out there in their neighborhood, taking down something, they wouldn’t run screaming for the nearest shelter and scare everyone else around.

  I turned my attention back to the feed. It boggled me to think how much time was spent just putting these feeds together. And how many people watched them? Everyone? It couldn’t be everyone, there were too many channels. But evidently, it was a lot of people.

  The…strangeness, the intrusion of it, hit me at that point and made me feel all cold inside. This thing that we Hunters were here for…this wasn’t clear-cut and simple, the way it was at home. At one level, I was still a Hunter, but on another, I was supposed to deceive all those people, make them think something that just wasn’t true. I wasn’t used to lying. And to have my life itself be a lie…not all the private bathrooms in the world could have made me want to stay here if someone had given me the chance to go. I wanted to curl up in a ball of misery and cry, and there was no reason why I shouldn’t, but there was also no reason why I had to do it alone.

  I drew the Glyphs and opened the Way, and Bya walked slowly through it in his dog-shape, gave me a long look, and then jumped up on the bed with me. I put my arms around him; of course, the moment I did, he knew everything that was wrong and settled down. I cried into his silky fur and finally fell asleep with my head on his shoulder.

  When I woke up, it was in complete, black dark. That alone would have told me where I was, if I wasn’t always aware of my surroundings. But nothing could have hammered home the difference between here and there more than that darkness.

  I lived in a box with no windows now. Like a toy someone had carefully put away until wanted.

  I SLEPT AGAIN. Then, same as ever, even though the bedroom didn’t have a window to the outside, I woke up at dawn, or close enough to dawn as made very little difference. Bya was gone, of course. I was always on dayshift on the Mountain, and waking at dawn was something that was as much a part of me now as the Mandalas on the backs of my hands. The black dark was a little off-putting, and it took me a minute to fumble my way to the light switch in the headboard of the bed, but after that I got back on track. It didn’t take me long to get ready, and once I had, I checked my Perscom. “Schedule,” I said, assuming there would be such a thing. I was right. The Perscom obliged, showing me that I was supposed to report to the armory in two hours. Just then a soft chime went off in the whole suite, followed by an impersonal female voice. “Hunter Joyeaux is due in the armory at oh eight hundred hours,” it said. Well, so this was the equivalent of the Monastery bells. At least I wouldn’t oversleep.

  I reminded myself that I was still a Hunter. I still had the same job, and maybe what I was doing was even more important, since the Cits didn’t have a clue.

  I followed the map to the mess; there was almost no one in it. Only me and Knight. I decided that an ally wouldn’t come amiss, if he’d unbend to me, so before I got my rise-meal, I went over to him. He nodded, then looked surprised when I didn’t head for the food line.

  “I didn’t get a chance to thank you for helping me out yesterday, Senior Hunter,” I said, with just a touch of formality. “I apologize for my poor manners.”

  He looked at me as if I had grown a second head. “You’re welcome. Is everyone so mannered where you come from?”

  I smiled. “We’d get smacked if we weren’t,” I said.

  He laughed. He looked entirely different when he wasn’t dour. He actually looked like some of the pictures in the King Arthur book I read once. “Well, you probably shouldn’t be polite to me,” he said. “I’m a ranker, but not very popular with the other Hunters.”

  I shrugged. “The other Hunters probably never had much to do with a Christer, but there’s three villages of your people in my old Hunting territory. We got along. I don’t see any reason why you and I shouldn’t. Besides, where some of this comes in, I am a turnip, and I reckon you’ll be more inclined to explain than Ace.”

  He regarded me thoughtfully for a long moment. “All right,” he said finally. “Go get your breakfast and come ask your questions.”

  I did. Thanks be, there was stuff there I knew. Eggs were good, and real, and so were fried potatoes. I filled my tray and came and sat down across from him. He put his own empty tray aside, folded his arms, and waited for me to ask something.

  “Rankers, trending, all the Hunter feeds on the vid,” I said as
I sat down. “The armorer explained how we’re supposed to be making the Cits feel safe. So what’s a ranker, and what’s trending, and how can anyone watch all those channels?”

  He snorted. “Rankers. We’re all ranked by popularity, and that’s determined by how much our channels get watched. We’re gladiators of a sort. You know what gladiators were?”

  I nodded, my mouth full.

  “Trending means you’re going up in the ranking. Some other cities have Hunters showy enough to get some feed here as well. They have a channel for each Hunter, and for anyone else who’s popular: musicians, artists, dancers, actors.” He shook his head. “Other channels come and go, but they always have one for each Hunter, and one channel for the Elite teams. There’s an entire industry just built around making things to put on the individual Hunter channels.”

  “That’s—crazy—”

  “It’s not as hard as you think. If you watch, unless there’s a live feed, there’s generally no more than two hours’ worth of actual stuff, then the channel repeats. I’m fairly sure it’s all designed to keep regular working people—not ones with money, who could go places and do things—inside and watching during all of their free hours. They actually are safe if they do that, and watching is passive. Passive people don’t ask questions. Passive people don’t even think of questions to ask. They just accept that they are perfectly safe, no matter what, and that all the fighting Othersiders they see is something that could never endanger them, even if they recognize the area.” He took a bite. “Mostly, though, they won’t. Only rarely do things get as far as sectors where people are actually walking around outside, and you’ll discover that most people think that some or all of it’s fake.”

  I had to blink at that. Knight was smart. I don’t know if I would have been able to work that out for myself.

  “There are about a hundred Hunters here, not counting the Elites,” he continued. “Sometimes more, never less. We run on three shifts, and there are about two dozen of us that are popular enough to be called rankers.”

  So—that was what that word meant. “And they vid everything?” I said faintly.

  He made a face. Mind you, it wasn’t really noticeable, but I’m trained to catch little things. “Everything. And when there isn’t something juicy, the talking heads will speculate and hint. So watch what you say and do, or the next thing you know, they’ll be turning you and Karly into a couple.”

  I wanted to face-plant into my eggs. “Oh god,” I groaned. “It’s worse than back-fencer gossip….”

  “It’s back-fencing on a big, anonymous scale, because everyone doing all the gossiping on the ’puter net hides behind IDs, and no one’s accountable for what they say.” He shook his head. “It isn’t just Apex that gets the feeds, and it isn’t just the Hunters at Apex that have channels, but Apex is…” He searched for a word.

  “The Apex,” I supplied. “Like Holly-woods was before the Diseray.”

  “Dies Irae,” he corrected with a slight frown. “You unbelievers always get it wrong.”

  “The Diseray? That’s what everyone calls it—” I looked at him askance. “Except you Christers? What’d you say again?”

  “Dee-es Ear-ray,” he replied, sounding it out. “It obviously wasn’t the Apocalypse since not one person got Raptured, so it had to be something else. Dies Irae means ‘Wrath of God.’”

  Well, this was news to me. Of course, even though I Hunted for the Christers, they were all pretty closemouthed around us “unbelievers.” They didn’t like to talk about their religion at all to outsiders. Especially they didn’t like to talk about it to the folks from Safehaven and the Monastery. Maybe because their Big Moment had turned out to be such a letdown, and we Hunters and the army were the ones that had pulled their bacon out of the fire.

  “See, now, that’s one reason why people don’t like you,” I said mildly, and took a bite of apple. “That ‘unbeliever’ business. It’s very unfriendly. You Christers act as if the only people in the world that believe in anything is you. Other people believe. They might not believe in the exact same thing as you do, but they still believe, and telling them they don’t is unmannerly, not to mention wrong.” I waited to see if he was going to take anger at that. It was something I had been dying to say to a Christer’s face since the day I’d first met one.

  He stared at me as if every word that had come out of my mouth had been so completely unexpected that he didn’t know how to respond to what I’d said. Finally he began to chuckle. “You’re very blunt, Joyeaux Charmand.”

  “A Hunter who wastes time in beating around the bush generally becomes a dead Hunter,” I pointed out. “Is it true you call your Hounds ‘angels’?”

  “Only to annoy people like Ace,” he admitted. “And make the home-folk happy. Although they have wings, and they are mightily handsome.”

  I was envious. “Yours fly? Mine don’t. I’ve asked them to, but Bya says they don’t do that.”

  “Yours talk? Mine won’t. I wish they did. Every time they want to tell me things, we have to go through a game of Twenty Questions.” He traced crude Mandalas on the tabletop with a wet finger. “Given a choice between fly and talk, I’d take talk.”

  “Good point.” I thought over my first day, and wondered how his had been. A whole lot harder than mine, for certain-sure. “Why are you here, anyway?”

  “Same as you, I got told to come. Or maybe not quite the same as you, my people were told that either I came or some of their shipments were going to get delayed.” His face darkened. “But we’re closer to Apex than you are, out there in the west, so we already had a good idea that I was going to get that sort of encouragement. Preacher did some negotiating, so I guess my people got a better deal than just bending over for the blackmail whip.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said softly, meaning it. “But why would they do such a thing?”

  “Because my Hounds and I are holy terrors on the Othersiders, and even if most of the Cits think of us as entertainment, Apex needs the best Hunters.” He wiped out his tracings with the flat of his hand. “If you didn’t get it from the armorer, I’ll tell you now. It’s a constant state of siege outside the Barriers. The Othersiders never forget that Apex is the target to take down if they want to conquer the whole continent. Don’t you forget it, either. No matter what people outside these four walls think, not all the Hellfire missiles in the arsenal will keep them safe without Hunters. The Elite take out the big stuff, but there aren’t a lot of the Elite, and often as not they’re handling things Cits aren’t supposed to know about. We’re needed as much as they are, if not more.”

  “But what about the—” I sensed someone approaching from behind.

  “Morning, Knight,” said Karly. “You want me to answer that?”

  Knight spread his hands. “Morning, Karly. She’s your responsibility. Be my guest, unless you think I’d do a better job.”

  Karly put her tray down at our table, and it didn’t look like she’d taken offense. “Did you warn her that unless she’s into that, she’d better go all young and innocent-eyed and sexless as a baby doll, or the flacks will pair us up?”

  I blushed. Knight got a little lopsided smile. “Something like that,” he admitted. He turned to me. “What the Cits haven’t figured out yet, and no one is saying out loud, is some of the really deadly but smaller Othersiders can get through the outermost Barriers, the ones way out there at the edges of the farming fields. Actually through them. Then they find ways over and under the Prime Barrier.”

  I felt my eyes go wide, and I felt my insides go to ice. “What?” I blurted. Because…well, that was supposed to be impossible! I mean, I knew there were ways of sneaking around the Barriers, or getting under or even over them, but through?

  Both Knight and Karly nodded. “That’s why we have the army out on the farms and patrolling all the perimeters. And there are the Elite Hunters too. Things go down bad, now and again the Elites get scrambled inside the outermost Barrier as well as outside
of it.” Knight was sober-faced. “They get vidded, but it doesn’t always get shown, and when it does, it always gets reported as being shot outside all the Barriers.”

  No wonder the government was so worried about people being sure they were safe.

  “There’s not been any drop in the numbers of kills,” Knight continued. “Not since I’ve been here. Granted, it’s not Drakken and Gogs but the ones that are horse-size and smaller—”

  “They’re the smart ones,” I finished for him. “That’s not good.”

  Knight picked up. “And the Psimon are always scanning for things that have gotten in and might be hiding, and there’s a special cadre among the APD that’s always looking for signs of Othersiders in hiding. And there’s us. Because our Hounds can sniff the scent with no problem, so we’re encouraged to go out and show ourselves—”

  I was startled yet again. The Psimon were scanning inside Prime Barrier for Othersiders? Could that mean they were watching for…Folk? Inside the Prime Barrier?

  Knight glanced up at one of the corner cameras. “I’ve been here as long as is reasonable if we’re going to pretend this is just the only three up at this hour sharing an idle chat over Caffeelike. Good Hunting to you.”

  Pretend? Then, well, it made sense. They were editing everything we said and did, so yeah.

  Karly tendered me a sympathetic look as Knight sketched a formal salute and marched out of the room. He really lived up to his Hunting name. His outfit somehow suggested armor, and he never seemed to just walk anywhere. I sighed again and looked down glumly into my juice.

  “I hate all of this,” I said. “The vidding, the star stuff, and the secrecy. But I hate being away from home, and I expect I’m just going to have to get used to all of it. People need to be protected, and that’s what we do.”