Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  There were a couple of people here in uniform, and a couple in civilian clothes, but the room was mostly empty. Josh took me over to a side where no one was sitting; there were couches facing the windows, and beneath us was Apex, all lit up. “I’ll get us something to drink,” he said, and left me there for a moment to marvel.

  He brought me more of that honey-and-mint stuff, with ice in it, and we sat back in the soft cushiony couch and looked at the lights. And finally I relaxed completely. Partly because if there was any place in the entire city that was safe, this was probably it. And partly because this was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. It looked like the cityscape from an old vid, like all the stars in the sky had fallen and were burning on the earth. “Wow,” I said finally. “Just…wow. And you get to come here?”

  “It’s the off-duty and break lounge for everyone in the building,” he said. “They don’t like us to leave the building when we’re on shift. Like it?”

  “If this was how I’d seen Apex for the first time, I think I would have been in love,” I said honestly.

  “I think I am just now figuring out how badly I messed up, taking you to that play without any warning, and without any reassurance that we plan for things like that here. It must have been as bad as a Hunt.”

  I sighed. “Worse. I was trying to figure out how just two of us and my pack could protect the entire theater until the Elite got there.”

  “I’m an idiot. And I am really sorry. I hope this makes up for it a little.”

  There wasn’t much I could say to that, because even I didn’t know the answer to his implied question. We just sat there, in the quiet. There was very soft music playing from hidden speakers. We sipped our drinks…and at some point, he reached for my hand, and I was not at all inclined to take it back. We didn’t say anything, but then, I guess a Psimon is used to that.

  And just when I was getting…very comfortable with the situation, my Perscom went off. And so did his. We looked at each other, then looked at our wrists.

  “Curses,” I said, feelingly, because it was a reminder I needed to be back.

  “Same,” was all Josh could say. We got up, left our glasses at the bar, and got into the elevator. By the time we got to the door with the guards, our pod, or one just like it, was waiting.

  But of course, the moment was over. Stupid Perscom.

  Josh cleared his throat as the pod sped away, heading for HQ. “You handled yourself very well tonight. Really, like a veteran in the crowd.”

  I blushed again. “It’s just being nice to people,” I said awkwardly.

  “It’s more than that. You are a good Hunter and a good person, Joy.” He gave me a long, slow smile. “You know, most people are very nervous around a Psimon, even when I go out of my way to turn on the charm. Even then, they don’t want to be reminded of what I am. But you? You accepted me.”

  I felt even shyer at that point. And I was getting red, I could tell. “Well, I…You’re nice, and you’re fun to be with. And Uncle likes you and trusts you.”

  “You’re a lot like him, probably more than you know. He cares about people too.” It was the way that Josh said that, it made me feel all tingly good. “And both of you try to see the best in everyone. That’s rare.” I was blushing even harder now, and very glad that it was dark in the pod. “You make the people who are around you feel good about themselves, you know. That’s even rarer.”

  “I…uh…” I had no idea what to say next as he gave me a long and measuring look.

  And then, right out of the blue, he leaned over and kissed me.

  Not on the top of the head like Mark, either, but a real, full-on kiss. I was tingling all over, so I kissed him right back, and felt his hands running through my hair and then moving down my sides. Heart pounding, I pressed closer, erasing the distance between us, when I felt him slip a little piece of paper into my hand.

  Hiding it from the camera. Somehow, I doubted it was a love note.

  He kept on kissing after that, so I did too, but now I was concentrating on slipping that paper into my glove. He broke it off as the pod slowed to a halt, and smiled. I smiled back, but I was kind of confused. Had he kissed me because he needed to pass me a note, or had he decided to kiss me, then remembered the note? Could he have given the note to me earlier? Or—what? He looked like he was going to say something when a speaker chimed in the pod, and a voice said, “Hunter Medical advises that Hunter Joyeaux should have been in her quarters half an hour ago.” Stupid medics.

  “I guess we have gotten our orders,” he said as the pod door opened for me. I got out, and he caught my hand before I moved away. “We’ll do this again—but do me a favor, don’t go and get hurt just so you have the days off, all right?”

  “I promise,” I said, and then he had to let go of my hand as the pod door started to close, and the pod moved off.

  I waited until I was in the bathroom before getting to the bit of paper, and read it under cover of washing the makeup off my face. It was from Uncle. I recognized his handwriting.

  Josh had smuggled me a note from Uncle. Which meant Uncle trusted him completely.

  Which must mean I could trust him too.

  Proud of you, it said, which gave me a very warm glow. The rest of it, though, not so much.

  Two arrows meeting each other, and a stick figure between them. That meant someone in the high political rankings was maneuvering, and he was caught in the middle of something. Then the word sides with a line through it. That meant that right now he was not taking sides, which could be smart but could also be dangerous. And it meant that either side, or both, could use me as leverage against him. And finally: Be careful. Ace has powerful friends.

  I grimaced and let the paper dissolve in the water and run down the drain. And here I thought I was deflecting Ace. But if Uncle went to all this trouble to warn me…maybe not. And it looked like things were even more complicated for Uncle than I had thought. I’d figured there was just one person putting pressure on him to stay quiet—but this note said there were at least two factions involved and he was trying to stay out of both, and I couldn’t even begin to figure out how I factored into that. I could only assume that if he’d gone out of his way to tell me this in his note, then I did.

  Then there was Josh. And now that kiss was a little disappointing, and a little confusing. He’d had other chances to pass the note to me tonight, hadn’t he? I was sure he had. But then, he didn’t know I’d have the presence of mind to wait to read it in private.

  Not for sure, anyway.

  But the kiss had been the real thing.

  I hoped.

  I WAS REALLY GLAD to be back to Hunting again. I met up with Mark at breakfast as usual, and after some small talk he briefed me on the new territory we’d be working today.

  Mark looked happy to see me suited up and looking ready to go. “This time we’ll be working the other direction,” he continued. “Mostly vat-farms and hydroponics inside the Barrier. We’ll be working outside Karly’s old territory.” He grinned a little. “Some of the others actually got a bit jealous that we bagged two Wyverns and you got that nest of Ketzels, all in the same day, so we got more people who usually patrol inside the Prime Barrier who wanted to come out and work Spillover a bit. They see a chance to up their ratings with just a couple of days’ worth of work.”

  I shrugged. “Every day someone Hunts out in Spillover is another set of Othersiders that definitely is not going to get inside the Prime Barrier. More power to them, and good Hunting.”

  We fist-bumped and laughed. Then we armed up and headed out.

  It all sure looked familiar as we passed through the vat-farms, and by some of the small pens that held the animals the clonal cells came from. Well, small by my standards, I’m used to people grazing stock on huge pastures, helped out by dogs. Real dogs, not Hounds, but big ones, with a lot of wolf in them. We got out of the pod at a Barrier pylon. The difference between our side and the Spillover side could not have been more
stark. Our side was all these clean rows of windowless blocks, and off in the distance, the glitter of the hydro farms under break-proof glass. Spillover was…well, the same bleak wreckage as the Wyvern territory had been. No one lined up at this pylon, and we passed through without seeing anything more than a wary cat scuttling away.

  “When was the last time you Hunted this section?” I whispered. Somehow this place made me feel like whispering.

  Mark shook his head. “More than a year. No idea what we’ll find, but…”

  I summoned the Hounds. The Glyphs burned on the ground for a while after they came through, which was often a sign of trouble nearby. “But?” I prompted.

  “All that good food over there”—he waved at the buildings across the Barrier from us—“makes people desperate.”

  “Hmm,” I replied. I could see his point. I was also not about to stop anyone who was trying to get over there just to feed himself and his family. Mark and I exchanged a look as our Hounds ranged close around us, getting the feel of this part of Spillover, testing with a lot more senses than I have.

  “Well, if people are hungry…” I let the words trail off, and Mark nodded. Unspoken; we would hunt as well as Hunt. Even if no one turned up, the Hounds would know if we were being watched, and we could leave the game where it would be found.

  “I don’t think we should split up today,” Mark said as we moved out into the ruins. These seemed to have been industrial buildings; the useful machinery had long since been scavenged away, but there were still big metal frames for things between the huge buildings, and a lot of rail track embedded in what was left of the paving. As yet, no one inside the Barrier had needed that much metal, evidently. See, this is why we don’t need many mines anymore; we’re still mining the bones of the old world before the Diseray.

  “No argument here,” I replied. Somehow this part of Spillover was spookier than anyplace I had been before. Maybe because I felt dwarfed by what was here, where in the other parts, the wrecked buildings had clearly been sized for humans. These buildings had been sized for giant machines, whose human attendants had crawled all over them like ants servicing the giant queen.

  Made me feel very insignificant. There might have been some parts of Apex that had machines and buildings like these, but I had never been there. My mountains may be enormous in scale, but they don’t make me feel insignificant, more like I am a part of something grand and glorious. This was a new sensation, and I didn’t like it one bit.

  We trotted along for the better part of an hour, following one set of main tracks. There was game here, probably because there was a lot of weed patch and brush growing up in the parts that weren’t paved, or where the paving had crumbled away. Mark and I both bagged a fair number of bunnies, and once a deer bounded away from us in the distance, too far for me to make the shot. Despite these signs that no one had been this way in a long time, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone watching us. Someone other than the cameras following us, that is. It wasn’t like the creepy feeling I had at the play. I kept expecting to see one of those flashes of movement out of the corner of my eye. Two different kinds of watchers…one malevolent, the other passive.

  I wondered about Uncle’s note. What did he mean by “Ace has powerful friends”? I mean, what exactly could those friends do to make things difficult for me? After all, I was being watched practically every moment from the time I left my rooms, and maybe even in them, though I had requested not. How could Ace or his patrons—I assumed they were something like patrons—actually do anything? They’d be caught, surely.

  Unless, of course, the people on the other end of the cameras decided to make the vid go away, the way they obviously did whenever Mark and I talked about something that they didn’t want the Cits to know about. Even after the fact, there could be two sets of footage, one raw, one altered, the way the Folk Magician had been altered out of that confrontation I’d had with him.

  Right, then. More conciliation on my part toward Ace. Act as if I admired him.

  The motive for those “friends,” well, that was as easy as human nature. I could think of one motive right away. Put two bored people together and I will promise you that they will find something to bet on. Now that I knew we were gladiators, I had no doubt that people were betting on us. Ace’s friends were certainly betting on him, and would not take it kindly if I overtook him.

  Mark didn’t seem any happier about this area than I was. By now I knew him well enough to tell when there was more edge to his usual alertness. “I feel like I’m being watched, even though the Hounds haven’t found anything,” I said finally.

  “We might be,” he said, which kind of startled me. “Not everything’s been stripped out of here. This was a high-tech area before the Dies Irae, with a lot of security cameras all over the place. No telling how many of them are still live.”

  What the—“Live?” I repeated. “But—who would be—”

  I never got the chance to finish that, because out of the corner of my eye I caught a glint of light where a glint of light shouldn’t have been, and at the same time Bya shouted Danger! into my head. I reacted instinctively…because the Mountain has been attacked in the past by those who didn’t come from Otherside.

  I rammed into Mark with my shoulder, knocking him down and sideways, and allowing myself to fall with him. I picked a good spot to knock us into, behind a big triangular concrete thing that may have been a building once. I was glad I had chosen wisely, because a second or so later, bullets pinged off it.

  I felt as if I had grabbed hold of a live wire. That is never a sound you want to hear near you. My skin went cold, and my nerves sizzled, and every time a bullet hit, my whole body jerked a little.

  “Damned fools!” Mark swore. And immediately apologized. “Not you, Joy. And my language—”

  “I’ve heard worse,” I said, getting that little mirrored gadget out of my pack and peeking over the top of the concrete thing with it. Yep. Sure enough. I could just make out someone on the top of one of the buildings with a—

  The mirror shattered and the gadget was knocked out of my hand. I yelped. It stung!

  Sniper rifle. And someone good on the other end of it, to hit that little gadget from so far away.

  I gritted my teeth, shook my hand to get the feeling back, and told my heart it had better slow down. “Who is that?” I asked. “Othersiders don’t use sniper rifles!”

  More bullets peppered our position.

  “No,” Mark replied grimly. “But there are people out here who do. Not everyone who’s stuck outside takes being left outside the Barrier quietly. And not everyone who gets booted out, or escapes out here, likes who’s in charge of the Allied Territories.”

  Okay, that one blindsided me. Isolated thugs, looking to pick off Hunters to loot the bodies for our goodies…isolated bandits, picking off anyone to loot the bodies…We got them on the Mountain, too, of course, and in the early days there had even been a lot of rival warlords fighting over what remained of civilization, and there were still a few of those around to this day.

  “Separationists?” I asked in a half gasp. There were still a few settlements of them out our way, folks who hated the premier and the Territories, though there’d never been one left alive long enough when they attacked us to walk us through their philosophy. So I really had no idea what their malfunction was. Were they completely insane? Had they been spellbound? Or were they just fanatics in a different direction than religion?

  “Rebels of some sort, I guess,” he said, trying to get a sight on the sniper without exposing himself. “We’ve heard rumors about crude organization out here. Some people who think they’d be better in charge than the premier. And there are always people who just have to pee in the cornflakes, because.”

  I suppose in the back of my mind it had never occurred to me that the army would allow anything of the sort to exist anywhere near Apex City, and that’s why it blindsided me.

  Like the fact that we we
re gladiators, only more shocking to me—there hadn’t even been a hint of this back on the Mountain.

  Then again…there wouldn’t be, would there? No reason why the monks and the Masters would know, not living down here, and only seeing what Apex showed us. After all, I knew there were lots of things that the government didn’t want the Cits to know. This was just one more.

  I heard a peculiar sound. It sounded like a bullet breaking something expensive. Then another. Then it occurred to me what it was. The sniper was taking out our cameras! I started to giggle. Mark looked at me as if he thought I was getting hysterical.

  I just shook my head. “I’m okay. Can I handle this?” I asked. “Getting them off us, I mean. I have an idea.”

  The last of the cameras exploded before it could get out of range. “Be my guest,” Mark said, and winced as more bullets pinged off the concrete, making my nerves scream too. “I have no ideas except to wait until he runs out of bullets.”

  Bya! I called mentally, and a moment later I was smothered in crazy-colored Hound. Are there many far-eyes on us?

  Many, he agreed.

  So, these skunks were using the old security cams, just like Mark had suggested.

  And are there more men, with or without guns? I asked.

  Only three.

  Well, that was good news. Make the eyes watching us sick, keep Mark’s Hounds from getting shot, then bind the men. Like we do with drunks and locos. Call me when you are done.

  He plastered my face with his tongue, and the little cuts where chips of concrete and camera-shrapnel must have hit me stung for a moment, then he bamphed out.

  See, I didn’t want to hurt these guys. Not yet, anyway. It’s always a lot more effective when you can scare someone into leaving you alone. And as I’ve said before, my Hounds are really, really special.

  Mark was only beginning to see just how special.

  “I take it you’ve sent out the Hounds?” he said.

  I nodded. “I told Bya to tell yours to stay out of range. He’ll let us know when it’s safe to come out.”