“Ma and Pa are still doing all right, but…” He shrugged. “You get to know what the signs are that the poison is getting to people, and the early signs are there. I’ve got a girl; they fixed us up back when we were little, and we suit each other. Her name’s Verity. Verity Clark.” His voice softened when he spoke the girl’s name, and I smiled a little. “I’m hoping I get a high enough ranking I can get double quarters eventually, so I can bring her here, though I don’t know if she’d like it.”
I nodded; a couple of the Christer settlements on the Mountain do that too; arrange matches for kids from families that are friendly with each other. Then they marry them off quick once they get past sixteen or so. Given he had a girl, I was kind of surprised he hadn’t married her already. By my guess, he was about eighteen, nineteen. But maybe his people didn’t marry off as quick as the Christers I was thinking about did.
It made me a little sick, though, to think of Knight’s people, dying by inches because they lived on poisoned ground. I resolved to think on that for a bit and tucked it in the back of my head. It was time to get moving again. Knight and the Hounds and I had a lot of ground to cover.
And we hadn’t gone far before we ran into another something I hadn’t seen before.
Knight’s Hounds alerted, and came zipping back to us, and began going through a little dance. Mine coursed back through the ruins right after them, and I got the word from Bya what was up before Knight puzzled out what his Hounds were trying to tell him.
“There’s a flock of little things with butterfly wings out there on about an acre of tumbledown,” I said. “Bya says they look to be flitting around something that looks like a celebration or a fair or—”
“Goblin market,” Knight identified grimly. “They use it to catch children—the ones that don’t know any better and get drawn in are never seen again.”
Bya gave me details on how the market was set up. Several dozen Othersiders, all child-size, all with butterfly wings and clothing that looked as if it were made from flowers, were playing music, dancing, and playing games amid displays of what looked like choice fruits. They hadn’t put out any outliers, so evidently they didn’t know we were in the area yet. I recounted all this to Knight.
He nodded. “I don’t usually get this far. It’s a lot of ground for just me and the Hounds to cover. They might have been doing this for…well, weeks, months even.” He looked me over shrewdly. “Can you put a dome over the place to catch them all?”
Mentally, I calculated size from what Bya had shown me, and shook my head regretfully. “Too big. Half that size, maybe—” But I was thinking fast. “I could do a net, though. Same amount of energy, just spaces between the energy strings. Only problem is they’ll escape it by stretching the holes sooner or later.”
“As long as you can keep the escapees to four or fewer at a time, that’ll do. With all our Hounds, we shouldn’t have any trouble taking them all down.” He looked over the Hounds, who all looked up to him as to a pack leader. “You Hounds spread out all around the perimeter,” he ordered. “I don’t want anything escaping if they manage to squeak out of the net. It’ll be your job to get what does.”
Bya nodded, and mine ghosted off…which kind of surprised me in a pleasing way, since they hadn’t shown any indication to accept anyone but me as a leader since the last time one of the Masters Hunted with me. I’m not the sort of person to take offense if there’s a team Hunt going on and someone else is alpha. It’s about the Hunt, not who the leader is.
I concentrated for a moment, and sketched out the right Glyphs in the air, forming up my net, while Knight watched, sober-faced. It didn’t look very impressive; in fact, it looked like a transparent ball of yarn, glowing a little, hovering in the air in front of me. Well, that was because it was all packed down tight. I remember the first time I finally managed the net spell; it took me so long to figure out I needed to make a magic weave, then combine it with the expansion spell, that I think I plainly exasperated Master Kedo. I’m not usually that dense, but it was my first combination, so…I think I had an excuse. I reached out and plucked it out of the air, and hung on to it with my left hand. I wanted it ready to throw the moment I needed it. I could have spread it all out and floated it over the top of the Goblin market, then dropped it, but I thought they would probably see it if I tried that.
Knight and I slipped up on the open area surrounded on all four sides by roofless, ruined four-story buildings. It looked as if these buildings had all been part of the same thing, with a grassy courtyard in the middle. Another apartment complex? Probably. It was a good place for the Othersiders to set up their Goblin Fair; if you didn’t know there was something going on here, you likely wouldn’t see it, since they were screened by the buildings.
And when we got there, we saw a dozen of them swarming around their prey. They’d got themselves a kid.
Too young to know better, or maybe nobody had ever warned him about these things, or maybe just too curious for his own good, the raggedy, dirty-faced, half-starved-looking boy had a dazed and dazzled expression on him as he stared at the pretty things. And what kid would be suspicious of something that had big wings like a butterfly, a sweet and innocent face, and the chirping voice of a bird? No matter how many times you told him, in his heart he would know that nothing that pretty could be bad, right?
And especially when it looked like he hadn’t had a good meal since he was born, and they were holding out big, shiny fruits to him, breaking them in half to show the succulent flesh dripping with juice. He was reaching for one when I fired the crossbow at the creature holding out the fruit to him.
In an instant, they whirled to face us and showed their true nature.
They were still winged but had the wings of bats, wasps, and flies. Their limbs stretched and thinned, they lost all but a few tattered rags of clothing, their skin darkened to leather, their hair to a few patches on their skulls. Their faces stretched and developed muzzles, with yellow eyes and huge mouths full of rows and rows of needle teeth. They opened their mouths to hiss or snarl at us, and as the child screamed and ran off in terror, I pulled back my arm and threw with both natural and magic strength, and the net expanded as it flew through the air. As soon as it was in place, I dropped the net of magic over them. Then I pulled all the edges in tight and held on for dear life.
Something that big is hard to hold. I could feel energy and strength draining out of me, and I had to physically hold on, exactly as if I had a half-acre net full of goat-size, fighting animals that I was trying to control. One escaped into the air almost immediately and was taken by one of Knight’s Hounds, who flashed down like a hawk on a bird. Another got away, this time scrabbling off into the ruins; Bya got him. Then I was too busy trying simultaneously to keep the damned things off me while keeping the net around them to pay any attention to what Knight and the Hounds were doing. Those fangs were dripping with something, and I didn’t want to get bitten to discover if it was spit or poison.
They did escape, by ones and twos, but never more than that, and I got the impression from the fire-gouts, the figures running and flying around in my peripheral vision, and, above all, the ear-piercing, high-pitched screams that the escapees never actually got away. And Knight kept firing into the creatures still in the net, taking them down one at a time while I closed the net tighter and tighter around the ones that were left. An odd thing happened while I was doing that; it felt as if something—not the camera—was watching me, with intense concentration. And maybe there was, but the Hounds didn’t alert, and I didn’t have the attention to spare for anything other than what I was doing. I had to make sure the horrors didn’t escape more than a couple at a time.
Then nothing was escaping. My Hounds surrounded the netted things that finally realized their doom and stopped struggling and began to scream.
All the Hounds, Knight’s and mine, leapt on the remaining creatures in the net; there was a lot of thrashing, a lot of shrieking, and then it was over.<
br />
I let the net dissolve, and happened to look down at a body. “Ick,” I said, half in disgust and half in fascination, as I watched what was left of the Goblin dissolve into blackish-brown goo.
Knight came over to me and looked where I was looking. “Yeah,” he said. “Goblins do that. You’ve never seen it before?”
I shook my head. These flatlander Othersiders had a whole new flock of types that were new to me. Othersiders I’d killed before either just stayed dead bodies, or evaporated.
“If you just kill one, it’ll stay whole for a while, but if the Hounds are around to eat their manna as they die, they go to goo right away.” He crossed the battlefield, picking up our spent ammunition, shaking the goo off it. “Thanks, Joy. I’ve never been able to take out a whole market before. My magic isn’t that strong, or that versatile, outside of a really, really good Shield.” He glanced over at me and smiled grimly. “This’ll be a lesson they won’t forget. When the rest of the swarm shows up to find out what happened to the marketers, they’ll know it’s not safe for them to set up here anymore.”
“And there’s one kid who won’t trust a pretty Othersider again,” I observed. I glanced around to see if there was any sign of the boy we’d rescued. There wasn’t—I felt those eyes on me again and thought for a moment I saw a hint of movement and a flash of pale purple out of the corner of my eye, but there was nothing in the empty window where I thought something had been when I turned to look at it fully. Light can do funny things in ruins. Just a bit of old rotten cloth or a shard of glass in a window, and you think you see a spook. The Hounds still hadn’t alerted, so I put it down to that. I fought off the creeped-out feeling and cold hand of fear down my back and reminded myself, yet again, that this was no different from Hunting at home, where Folk could show up any time. “You say you don’t know what they do with the kids they take?”
“I’ve never found bones or other remains.” He handed me my crossbow bolts. “Once, I managed to get there just as they were leaving. They’d opened up a kind of door in the air, like one of our Portals, and the last of the kids was just going through.”
I couldn’t help but remember how the Folk Mage who had addressed me as “shepherd” had asked me to hand over some of my “sheep.” Had those kids been spirited off to join such a flock? What happened to them when they were? Did they become slaves or playthings?
Or did they become something else entirely: walking, portable sources of manna or life-energy to be drained whenever one of the Folk felt like it? Human milk cows…
Right about then was when the fatigue hit me and I went a little unsteady; it all must have shown in my face. Knight didn’t touch me, but he picked up my pack and his and nodded. “That’s enough for anyone’s day.” He spoke into his Perscom. “Hunters White Knight and Joyeaux, heading back to base.”
“Roger, Hunter,” the Perscom replied, and that was what we did. I was already thinking of jokes I could make on myself with the others when I hooked up with them after supper.
That night in the lounge was the best time I’d had since I got to Apex City. I felt comfortable with everyone, and they were easy with me. We had a different sort of snack this time, two kinds of what they called “pretzels,” which I’d heard of but never seen before.
And Karly turned up! She looked pale and shaky, but everyone was really happy to see her, me especially. It was pretty obvious she was a regular in the lounge meets. She turned down the snacks but accepted spicy tea and sat down next to me on a two-person couch.
“Well, everything they say about a Gazer-head is true,” she told me as she moved very carefully. “Tell you what, kid, I think it is all kinds of not fair that I am having the worst hangover of my life without a good time to show for it.”
Everyone laughed at that, but sympathetically. “I got the edge of a Gazer-stare once,” said Trev, as he settled in next to a girl with green stripes dyed into her black hair and put his arm around her. “I don’t even want to think about what your brain bucket feels like now.”
And then we went over the vids, and I got a couple of good tips about how to hold my net spell and not have to get as close to the net itself as I had when I was holding the Goblins. Tonight there was even some vid from an Elite team, taking down a really huge Drakken, and I got to see how it was done. Basically, it was pin the wings, then the tail, then the head on the end of that long, long neck, then they chipped away at him until he just collapsed. It was crazy impressive, and the Drakken was so big that to get him all in frame you never saw the Hunters except as tiny little figures around him. Each one of them was about the size of one of his talons.
Karly left early, but so did I. I was tired, and besides, I wanted to see what one of those channels for “Cits who are famous for being famous” was like. It was like watching a party where I didn’t know anyone, didn’t know any of the jokes, and didn’t much care for the music. But it surely was pretty. I thought maybe if I ever got a chance to go to a party like that…well, it might be fun if I knew some people there. We could never match all that gorgeous stuff in a million years, back home.
That was when my Perscom chimed, and the vid-screen in the outer room lit up. “Incoming call,” said that impersonal voice, “from Psimon Josh Green. Accept?”
“Yes,” I said, and immediately regretted it. I should have said “voice only” because I didn’t know what I looked like at that moment and—
But it was too late. Josh was on-screen, and presumably so was I. I forced myself to leave my hair alone and sat down in a chair. “Hey,” he said, grinning. “That was quite a performance yesterday. Thought I’d call you to see how you were doing.”
My heart rate took a little uptick. “I wasn’t the one playing bait for a Gazer,” I pointed out, then realized that had come out wrong, or could be taken in a way that I hadn’t meant, and added, “but, thanks for checking!”
If Josh took it badly, he was better at covering it than any guy I’d ever known. “I can’t even imagine trying to face off against a Gazer,” he said. “The prefect said you’d be fine, that you probably Hunted worse than that before breakfast, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to think properly if I didn’t check for myself.”
“Uh…” I felt myself getting really hot. “That’s awfully nice of you. I mean, you don’t even know me.”
“Yeah. But can we fix that?” he said, and his expression seemed so genuine…but he was a Psimon. A Psimon! He could so easily just be angling for a chance to tiptoe through my head! Of course, I wasn’t going to say that. Luckily, he either noticed things were on the verge of getting awkward, or that I was running out of things to say. “Right now, though, I’m pretty sure you have an earlier morning coming than I do, so now that I know you’re okay, I’ll say good night. Sleep well!”
“Night—” I said, and then he rang off.
I was so flustered I had to do three full reps of my Aki-Do exercises before I had worked it all off. Because when I wasn’t trying to keep from acting like an idiot in front of him, now I had time to think…and wonder if he had some other motive in calling me than the one he’d said. What if he was trying to get close to me to get at my uncle for someone? What if he was trying to find out how much Uncle had warned me about?
But Uncle had told me to blend in, and a lot of the other Hunters seemed to have pair-ups and romantic interests that their channels showed. So shouldn’t I try to do something like that? And if Josh was trying to get close to me for some sneaky reason, and I was already thinking about that possibility, couldn’t I blend in and maybe find out his real motive at the same time?
But…oh, this was making my head hurt. Why couldn’t things here be simple?
The next morning my vid-screen came to life as soon as I brought the lights up in my room. It was the armorer.
“You are off today, Hunter,” he said. “That’s policy. Two big Hunts in two days nets you a full day off. You’ll Hunt again with Knight tomorrow.” Before I could answer him, the screen blan
ked out.
Well. Now what would I do?
The question was answered before I got to do more than get myself up, clean, and dressed, when there was a little chime, and a mechanical voice said, “Incoming call from Psimon Josh Green. Accept?”
“Yes?” I said, assuming that since this was during the working day, it was something from my uncle. Official congratulations for high ranking or something. Josh’s head and shoulders filled the screen against a blue background with the PsiCorps logo on it. I put on my best manners.
“Psimon,” I said, nodding formally.
He raised an eyebrow and smiled faintly. “No need to be formal, this isn’t an official call. I’ve free time tonight. Want to come with me to a couple of places? Your schedule has you off today.”
It took me a minute to parse out what he was saying, and it surprised me so much that I blurted “yes” before I actually thought about it.
His smile broadened and again I felt my cheeks flush. “Good! Be ready and at the front at seven. I won’t keep you waiting to eat longer than that, I know you Hunters get testy if you’re made to wait too long for dinner. Green out.”
The screen blanked. I sat there in shock. I’d just been asked on a date. A date! I hadn’t had a date in…well…a long time, and I’m not sure those meet-ups at the village Satterday and Holly Day dances constituted what anyone would call a “real” date. I was kind of half excited, and half supernervous. Nothing that Josh had said when I’d met him had made me think he was being anything other than polite when he said he’d keep track of me—and not even that first call yesterday had made me think he was going to make a second one. Oh, if only Kei was here! She was so much better at the boy stuff than me. It all came so naturally to her; she could be flirting with three guys at the same time, with them in front of each other, and it all was cute, and each one of the three would be sure she was flirting only with him. She was almost as good as a Psimon at knowing what boys were thinking. And what kind of a date would I have here? He’d be taking me out in public! Wasn’t he worried I’d do something wrong?
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