Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  There was still stuff that was uneasy-making, but like my Masters kept saying, “You don’t build a bridge by throwing everything you can find at the river.”

  Then, as if the day hadn’t already been good, when I got back to my rooms there was a message on my big vid-screen from Josh. I got fluttery feelings in my stomach as I dialed him back. Although not all of them were from how I was starting to feel about him. Dammit, I hated having to have all these suspicions!

  This time he wasn’t in his uniform or in front of the PsiCorps emblem; it looked like I’d caught him at home. There was a plain cream-colored wall behind him; he looked like he was sitting on a couch. I recognized the style of what he was wearing as what the computer had called “casual,” and instead of PsiCorps colors he was wearing a sort of khaki.

  “Hey!” he said, and grinned. “Well, for someone who tried to talk a Wyvern into eating a hand grenade, you’re looking good. How are you feeling?”

  “About healed,” I said.

  “Good. Healed enough to go out again?”

  I checked my Perscom to make sure that I was still going to be on sick leave the next day. I was, so I nodded yes.

  “Excellent—it’ll be easier this time, we’ll just go to dinner and see a play—” My system gave a funny warble, and he broke off whatever he was going to say. “That’s another call coming in for you, I’ll bet anything it’s the prefect, so I’ll let you answer it. They’ll want his congratulations on your feed. See you tomorrow night!”

  “Bye—” was all I managed, and then the screen changed. And it was Uncle, just like Josh had said.

  “Joy, I am pleased to see you are looking fit,” he said. But for a moment his face said I was worried sick about you before he smoothed his expression over. If I hadn’t been looking for the change, I might not have caught it.

  “I am very hard to keep down for long, sir,” I said. “Besides, I have good people around who’ve got my back. People like White Knight, for instance.”

  There was no mistaking the look of relief on his face. “Good,” was all he said, but he got my meaning, I think.

  We chatted for a bit more, then he commended me for a highly successful Hunt and ended the call.

  I realized as I reached for a bottle of water and drained it that I’d had more going on in the last week than I had in a month on the Mountain. It was crazy.

  And tomorrow was another date with Josh. I didn’t know what he’d planned on, but—well, I’d find out tomorrow.

  Now, if I could just figure out how to stay under the radar so Uncle didn’t need to worry about me, I might even get my life under as much control as the Othersiders would let me.

  AS I EXPECTED, in the morning there was a text message from the medics authorizing me to go on the date.

  It was a little creepy all over again, realizing that there was almost nothing I could do that would be private.

  Once I was on my feet and dressed and limbered up, and I had a light breakfast, I did something I hadn’t done since I got here. I left the building without having an assignment, and started a run around it.

  Now, what I really wanted was to go back down into some part of the city that wasn’t a factory, or a vat-farm, or anywhere else near the main Barrier. But before I did that, I needed to be able to navigate without a Perscom. I was pretty sure that was how all the cams found us and kept track of us. If I left my Perscom in my room, I stood a chance of being able to wander around without having people watching me. So I needed to get myself oriented, match some landmarks to the map, and memorize the map.

  Easiest way to do that was to go out running.

  And it was astonishing how fast the cams found me when I got outside. I couldn’t have gotten more than five hundred yards before I had three following me. By the time I was hitting my stride, I had a swarm, because every station wanted an “exclusive” and none of them were willing to share feeds or use the cam for my personal channel on the chance it might get edited.

  I pretended that they weren’t there and acted as if I was concentrating on my run. What I really was doing was picking out the things I could orient by, and matching them to the map.

  I was circling out, encompassing the schools, noting where each one was in relation to Hunter HQ, and what was around it.

  Something I noticed was the lack of smell. There was a little scent from the grass, but not much else. It wasn’t that different from the filtered air in the HQ building.

  Off to the east was the cluster of tall buildings that was marked “Core District” on the map. That was the Hub. That would be where Uncle’s office was. It looked as if it was about a half a mile away.

  But for now it was time to go back. I turned around and ran the distance back to HQ as hard and fast as I could…catching the cams by surprise and leaving them to try to catch up.

  This time when I got to the Image Center, one of the designers was waiting with that beautiful dress draped on a girl-shaped form, and he sat me down in front of it. “Now,” he said, combing his hair back with his fingers. “I suppose there is no way I can talk you into a different dress for tonight, is there?”

  I gave him a look, and he sighed.

  “All right, then, I got this old thing out again so I could reassure you that all we are doing is altering it, so we can alleviate your allergy to wasting resources.” He said it like it was a bad thing, but I was not hardly going to back down on this.

  Besides, I liked that dress.

  He rolled a touch screen over to me and began rapidly doing things with a touch-pen to the image of the dress. In a moment he had all the changes in, giving me long, draping sleeves and a hem that was just at my ankles all the way around, instead of the train. And a little transparent collar that would frame my neck. To me, at least, it looked like an entirely different dress.

  “I think it looks great,” I said with enthusiasm. He looked a tiny bit mollified, but not much.

  “You’re really handicapping me here,” he muttered. I tried to look apologetic, though I didn’t feel in the least like I should be. And that was when Karly showed up.

  “Hi! Did you know I’m going to a play?” I asked her, as the designer whisked the dress off the form, then draped it over his arm and sauntered off with it. “Do I need to learn anything?”

  “Not unless you’ve never been to a play,” she replied, though her face said she figured I hadn’t.

  “We put on plays all the time at home,” I said cheerfully. “I’ve been in ’em, but mostly as scenery. I’m not too good. We did Shakespeare a lot.”

  “Oh, well, then this won’t be a surprise to you. Let’s get you back to your quarters and paint you up like a show pony.” She motioned to me to follow her.

  Karly was pretty good at makeup; better than I was, for sure. The dress and jewelry arrived in one of the little robot carts, and Karly helped me get assembled. I wasn’t sure exactly what a tiara was, but it turned out to be a crown. This one was made of black metal with glittery gray and silver stones in it. It looked heavy, but it wasn’t, and once Karly got done putting my hair up and fixing it in place, it felt pretty secure.

  The weight had the effect of making me hold my head up very high, and Karly grinned with approval. “Keep your head up,” she advised. “You want to look as if that tangle with the Wyverns didn’t even leave you winded.” And by that point, it was time for me to go down and get picked up by Josh.

  This time, just like the last time, he came in a driverless pod. I imagine it’s obvious by now that we don’t use anything like pods where I come from. When I had to travel any distance, it was usually by horse with the Hounds around me, or rarely—like when I went all the way down to the little town where the train station was—in a vehicle that uses methane from our compost piles for fuel, and is heavily armored. We had a couple of the small ones, and one big one, up at the Monastery. I know how to drive them, though I didn’t do it often.

  When I sailed out of the entrance of HQ with my crown glitt
ering and all the beading on my dress catching the last light of the sunset, Josh was already standing next to the pod door, waiting. I thought he grinned a little appreciatively. I was sure of it when he leaned over before closing the door for me and said quietly, “You look like a vid-star.”

  “Thanks,” I said, as he got in on the other side, and I kept from fiddling with my hair by a deliberate act of will. “But I think the one who looks like a vid-star is you.”

  He did, too. He’d dressed to match me, in steel gray, and he looked…well, more than good enough to make all the girls back home jealous of me. I wondered if he had designers and people to help him the way I did….

  Oh, probably not; Psimons were supposed to be pretty invisible and not draw attention to themselves. Unlike us, they weren’t entertainment.

  “So,” I finally said. “Are we going to the same restaurant again? Because that was pretty amazing.”

  That gave him the chance to tell me more about the restaurant. It was the same one as last time, but it seemed they had different areas with different themes, and tonight we’d be the “guests” at a “royal dinner.”

  The meal was interesting, though maddeningly complicated, with a different set of silverware for each thing we ate. Josh told me it was from a menu of some dinner a king of England gave around 1910, and that most of what we were getting was, first of all, faked (though you probably wouldn’t have guessed it if you tasted it) and, second of all, tiny, tiny portions compared to what the long-ago people would have gotten. Really, each course was no more than a taste, which was just as well, because we’d have been hideously, obscenely stuffed otherwise. There were costumed actors playing the parts of other famous people who might have been at that dinner, so listening to them was like being right in the middle of a play instead of just watching it. There was a couple who were obviously having an affair, a couple of politicians who were having a sort of verbal fistfight, the king was eyeing women all up and down the table, and I was one of the ones he tried to flirt with from a distance.

  After that we went to the real play.

  And that was when I nearly had a meltdown. Because the play was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which we never do. If just thinking about the Folk can summon them, what would having an entire audience full of people watching a play about Folk-like creatures do? It would not be an exaggeration to say every hair on my body was standing up, and the only reason I didn’t look like I’d grabbed a lightning rod in a storm, with my hair-do like a dandelion puff, was because Karly had plastered my hair in place with stuff. It didn’t help at all that the set was so realistic, as opposed to what we did with our cobbled-up props and effects back home. I was going half crazy trying to keep track of everyone in the theater, and kept my Psi-shield in my Perscom activated and thought hard about my One White Stone. The effects and makeup and costumes that the actors playing the fairies had made them look way too like Othersiders for me to be anything but paranoid, because I couldn’t help expecting Othersiders of some sort to respond in some way. Up on the Mountain we’re even cautious about just reading the play, and never do it alone. There’s always someone with you to make sure you break your concentration every few lines. You know, just in case.

  I never was less than Hunting-alert the entire time I watched the play, even though not one other person, not even Josh, seemed to think we were anything but ultra-safe. And I didn’t dare ask him about it, not here, and not now.

  The only time I got a rest from the hypervigilance was in the breaks between acts, when Josh and I went out like everyone else did for drinks in the lobby. Most people seemed to be drinking alcohol, but Josh brought me something clear and sweet and tasting of honey and mint, and no alcohol in it that I could discern. And believe me, if you even whisper the word “booze” over anything I eat or drink, I can taste it. It’s just another thing the Masters trained me in—that, and drugs, and poisons. Because when you are out on a long Hunt, you end up having to forage, and the Othersiders know that and often mess with the food and water sources. And absolutely the last thing I wanted to do…given the context of this play…was to have my guard down at all.

  And of course, all this time, I had to act as if everything was normal and fine. Hunting was way less stressfull!

  We talked with some of the other people, who all wanted to meet me, and it was the usual sorts of questions, mostly about Hunts. Everyone wanted to know about Hunts. That was something I could talk about easy, without worrying about tripping myself up in a lie, so I did. I just tried to be polite and all, and not look as if I was wishing I had a full load-out on me, and finally a bell would ring and we’d go back to our seats for the next act.

  But there was one thing in those intermissions that was really, really weird…and that was, I had the distinct feeling that there were people watching me, and not in the “fan” sort of way, but in an unfriendly sort of way. It wasn’t Folk. I know what that feels like. This was just people. I never actually caught anyone staring at me, but then, I was surrounded by so many people, and there were many places in that theater where people could watch and I probably wouldn’t spot them. It wasn’t like the cams always on me, which was impersonal enough not to make me notice. This was like being spied on by someone who was there, in person. Had I attracted unfriendly attention somehow? Was it someone sicced on me because of Uncle? Josh didn’t seem uneasy at all, though, and wouldn’t a Psimon have caught people who were doing that?

  …Unless the spies were wearing Psi-shields like I was…

  When the play was over, we waited long past when most people had left, and now that it was over and nothing bad had happened, I started relaxing. Finally, Josh leaned over and said, “Joy? What’s wrong? I was going to take you backstage to meet the actors, but you seem really tense.”

  Well, there wasn’t anyone else around, especially not near us, and this wasn’t exactly a glamorous moment. So I took a chance and probably gave the controller who was monitoring everything we said and did before it went out over the air a heart attack, and I looked Josh in the eyes and said, “Are you people insane? Doing that play? We won’t even say the name of it where I come from! It’s about the Folk, don’t you even realize that?”

  I could almost hear the censor going into overdrive and switching the view to the crowd outside or something, as Josh blinked at me.

  “Uh—” he said. “They can’t—”

  “Do you know that? For sure? Because there is no way on this green earth that I would ever, ever take a chance on risking what they can and can’t do on based what they’ve done in the past!” I countered. And he looked…blank.

  “Why would the Folk come because we’re watching a play?” he asked.

  That was when I had to grab my temper with both hands before I lost it. “You flatlander Cits are insane,” I said with exasperation.

  “Joy, this isn’t the first time this play’s been performed here,” he pointed out. “It’s more like the thousandth. And nothing has ever happened, because we take all the precautions we need to.”

  And like that, all the anger and the nerves just ran out of me like I was a bucket with a hole in it. “Yeah, bring logic into it,” I said sourly. “You could at least have warned me. I spent the entire night getting ready to fight off a Folk Mage with just my magic, my Hounds, and a handful of hairpins.”

  He could have laughed at me, and I had to give him this much—he didn’t. And he didn’t act like I was some kind of idiot for getting worked up about it. He just went to this little door by the stage and talked to someone I couldn’t see. Then he let me sit there a little longer, and then, as the guys with brooms came to sweep up between the rows of seats, Josh and I left by a side door. The pod was waiting for us there, so he must have signaled for it.

  “Well?” he asked as I sat back in the seat.

  “Don’t you dare laugh at me,” I whispered. “Where I come from just thinking about them too much can draw their attention, and you had a whole theater full of people con
centrating on nothing but.”

  “And Psi-shields on the theater strong enough to knock your knuckles on,” he stated. “I’m sorry, I really am. I had no idea you were on edge the whole time. Please, accept my apology—and compliments, because if I couldn’t tell you were upset, then neither could anyone else. Next time it’ll be Romeo and Juliet. I just thought you might enjoy something that didn’t end tragically.”

  “As long as there’s no magic in it, whatever it is will be fine,” I replied. “I never accidentally called to a Folk Magician, but I—”

  I stopped myself quickly before the words “I know someone who did” came out of my mouth.

  “—I’ve read the journals the Hunters who’ve been posted at my village kept,” I substituted, hoping my moment of hesitation hadn’t been noticed. “It’s way too easy to call them, and you don’t want to be there when they come.”

  “All right then. I inadvertently ruined your evening. I’m going to fix that.” He learned forward and spoke at the front of the Pod. “Hub. Prefecture.”

  The pod changed direction, and since we were already within a couple of streets of the Hub, pretty soon we were pulling up to that underground door where I’d first been taken when I got here. Different guards were on duty, and it seemed they recognized Josh even without his uniform. “I’m just taking Hunter Joy up to see the Sky Lounge,” he said as they gave him a dubious look.

  Their faces cleared. Evidently this was something that was all right. One of them stayed on guard at the door while the other escorted us as far as a different elevator. We got in. There was only one button, and Josh pushed it. I’d thought my first elevator ride was wobbly-making. This one had me grabbing for Josh’s arm!

  He didn’t seem to mind.

  The door opened on what looked like a single big room that was all windows on the outer walls. As we got inside, I could see there was an auto-bar, like on the train, just to one side of the elevator column.