“I’m on my way with the field kit.” Kent had way more experience than I did in treating things in the field. I didn’t touch the man except to make sure his airway was clear. Kent was there within a minute and took over from me.
“For the future, this is anaphylaxis, combined with something else. I’m treating the former,” the armorer said, administering something in a blue color-coded pen-syringe. “HQ, this is Elite Senior Kent. We have a civilian down with a Manticore sting and need immediate evac for him.”
“If you need someone to stay behind, I will,” I volunteered. “I can interview the Cits while I’m here.”
“Good, thanks” was all Kent said as we heard our chopper coming in.
So that was what I did—which gave me almost two dozen witnesses who could say where I was while Bya was making Josh “vanish.”
There wasn’t much they could tell me; the Portal had opened while they were offloading the harvested squashes from the trailers, and their supervisor had the presence of mind to get them all into the building and get the outer doors barred before the Manticores tore down the electric fence. That gave them time to get into the building itself and reinforce the locks on the doors with a big physical bar.
Unfortunately, that didn’t hold, and one guy—our victim—had been caught alone when the Manticores tore the door off its hinges. He panicked and tried to sprint across the hallway to the rejoin the rest, and that was when the Manticores stung him and dragged him out.
They were more than rattled, so I promised that the Hounds and I would not leave them until a repair crew arrived with a better answer for their protection than the simple electric fence and flimsy outer doors. I had kept the mic open to HQ as they spoke; I wanted to make sure HQ heard directly from them, because what they had to say was disturbing, to say the least.
It appeared that Apex took their plight seriously, because what arrived was not just a repair crew but army troops and engineers, and reinforced doors for the cargo bay and building. By the time I left, repairs and improvements were well under way, and the army had established a defensive perimeter to make sure everyone stayed protected until the repairs were complete.
I climbed into one of the cargo choppers for my return trip, after sending all the Hounds back. It was a little strange, riding in this big, empty thing that didn’t have an open door to look out of.
I called in once I was strapped in and the chopper had lifted off. “Elite Joy to HQ.”
“Go, Joy.”
“Inbound on cargo chopper. Any orders?”
That was good. Kent must have taken care of the debrief. Although the attack of these Manticores was not an important one, at least on the surface of it, I knew it was a lot more serious than it seemed. The Manticores hadn’t been there simply to wreck things and kill people. They’d been there to take humans prisoner.
Just as I had wondered…except now we had direct eyewitness proof of it.
I’d had plenty of time to examine that poor man, as well as take the eyewitness testimony; he’d been stung in the arm, and he hadn’t taken in enough poison to kill him. As Raynd had pointed out, if he’d been stung in the chest or the eye, he’d have been dead regardless of how little poison was pumped into him.
So they had intended to take prisoners, and with that many Manticores involved in the attack, it was clear they’d intended to take more than one.
As far as I knew, this was the first time—ever—we had actual proof that the Othersiders had attempted to take human prisoners. I had no doubt it was on orders of the Folk.
Which begged the question that was likely on the minds of everyone in the know: What did they want with prisoners?
FINALLY, THE MENTAL CONTACT I was waiting for came. Are you in your rooms? Bya asked politely.
Yes! I said, and before I could say anything else, Bya bamphed into my bedroom. He was in the form of a house cat, but before I had taken another breath, he had expanded to his normal form.
Well! That was entertaining, he said genially. Shall I show you?
I didn’t need to be asked twice. He jumped up on my bed, and I joined him, putting a mindless drama-vid on. He cuddled up next to me while we pretended to watch.
But what I was really watching was Bya-memories.
The first part went pretty much as I had expected. As Josh, Bya had puttered around the office until Uncle sent him home. Part of the puttering had been to make sure Josh’s Perscom could guide him to Josh’s apartment; I’d shown him how mine worked, so he was familiar with one. I had expected some worry or trepidation over this on his part, but instead I sensed only excitement. This was all new to him; he had experienced HQ and the Monastery, but no other human buildings in Apex. So he enjoyed his stint pretending to be Josh, and he enjoyed the “going home” part even more. Elevators were fascinating for him—I felt the things he had felt, and he had a way of sensing not just motion but direction. When the doors opened on the ground floor and he stepped into the lobby and out onto the busy street, he was alert and fascinated. All of it was intriguing to him, all of it worth paying attention to. He’d walked to Josh’s apartment building—it wasn’t far, and he was much too fascinated by the buildings, the people, and eventually the shop windows to take a pod.
I had to smile at his reactions. He was just like a kid seeing new things, or a turnip seeing a place bigger than a village for the first time.
He managed to use his Perscom to navigate without being obvious about it, and when it registered the building Josh’s rooms were in, I felt his disappointment. Before going into the building, he stopped at a little pocket-park nearby—not much, just a couple hundred square feet of trees, grass, and bushes. Josh had recently gotten into the habit of sitting there for a while before going home. It had the advantage of being overlooked by just a single security cam. Bya took a seat and surreptitiously examined a spot under some bushes, out of sight of the security cam. A human couldn’t have hidden there, but there was plenty of space for something considerably smaller.
Once Bya had been sure he knew the spot he had chosen down to the smallest root and pebble, he entered Josh’s building, took the elevator to the fourth floor, and presented Josh’s Perscom to the door lock as he’d been instructed.
Once it opened, he went in, turned on the vid, ate a prepared meal—which was a surprise to me because I didn’t know he could eat like a human—and after a very little bit, went to bed. Josh had told us that was not unusual for him lately.
He left the Perscom on the bedside table when he did that.
But of course, as soon as the lights were out, Bya transformed into a house cat, leaving behind the pajamas and the Perscom, and bamphed himself down to the spot at street level and sauntered away. From there, he got to HQ in a series of bamphs and ended up in my room.
I expected something much more exciting, I told him. You turning into a snake and slithering into the ventilation ducts, maybe, or a gargoyle and flying out the window.
He nudged me with his nose. How many times did the Masters tell you “simpler is better”? No one looks at a stray cat. They would have reacted poorly to a gargoyle flying overhead, or a snake coming out of a vent.
I petted him. You are wise, I said. I’m sorry you missed out on the manna from the Manticores.
There will be more tomorrow. The program ended and he got up off the bed and stood there looking at me expectantly. I cast the runes, opened the Way, and he went back “home.”
So…assuming that Josh’s Perscom didn’t send out an alert when there wasn’t someone wearing it—which would be kind of stupid since lots of people took theirs off when sleeping—he wouldn’t be missed until tomorrow morning, There were dozens of security cams that now had vid of Josh behaving normally right up until the moment he entered his apartment door. Josh hadn’t mentioned any cams in his apartment, but I hadn’t wanted to leave that to chance, which was why I’d asked Bya to go through the whole sham of eating, viewing, and going to bed. The only possible glitch
in all of this was if there were cams that recorded heat signatures—there would be a moment when “Josh” suddenly shrank, then vanished. I didn’t know what the authorities would make of that….
But we just had to take that chance. This had been the simplest—and we hoped the best—way of getting Josh out and leaving behind a puzzle that the authorities would have a hard time unraveling, and an even harder time linking to Uncle or the Hunters, particularly me.
So now I had to act normally. Tomorrow Josh would fail to turn up, Uncle would “try to reach him,” and when calls went unanswered, would report his absence to PsiCorps. And then…we’d see what happened.
I crawled into bed, feeling the adrenaline that had kept me going drain out of me. And the relief I’d been riding on, now that Josh was safely away, gave way to more worry. Sure, Drift couldn’t get her claws in him, but now what were we supposed to do with him? Leaving him in Spillover wasn’t an option.
At least, I didn’t think it was.
I wished it was possible to send him to the Mountain. There, the problem of how the heck he would keep himself fed simply wouldn’t come up. He could go to the Monastery, he could use his Powers to help the Hunters, and he could probably train anyone who had psionics under the supervision of the Masters. But that just was not an option. Not while there was a chance PsiCorps could trace him there.
The best thing would be to somehow get him on a train and get him far enough away from Apex that PsiCorps would be unlikely to find him again. But that led to two more big problems: how to get him on a train in the first place, and how to get him some set of skills that would let him eat. He hadn’t seemed all that enthusiastic about plucking the knowledge of a mechanic out of someone’s skull, I guess because he just wasn’t enthusiastic about becoming a mechanic in the first place. I couldn’t really blame him, but what else could he do? I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like farming, and anyway, he didn’t have the strength for it. He could probably teach kids, especially if he pulled skills out of a teacher, but would he like it? It didn’t really fit with what I knew about him.
I tossed and turned as I tried to come up with a solution and pretty much came up empty-handed.
I guess I just don’t know him….
That was the thing that kept occurring to me over and over. Every time I tried to match Josh up with something he could do besides be a Psimon, I couldn’t make a fit, mostly because I didn’t know how he’d react to the idea.
Heck, I had a better idea of what my old friend Kei or even Mark would consider a reasonable way to make a living than I did of Josh! Mark would farm or hunt or both, obviously. Heck, I knew what Cielle would do; she’d probably design and fabricate clothing. But Josh? I hadn’t a clue.
Which was pretty sad, really. You would think I’d know more about a guy I’d spent a lot of time kissing, wouldn’t you?
I guess I should have spent a lot less time kissing and a lot more time talking, I thought as I turned my hot pillow again. Guess I’m not as savvy as I thought I was.
My day started early. I was just back from an eight-man callout (more Manticores, plus Minotaurs and a couple Ogres, all on another raid on an ag-station) when my Perscom went off with an unfamiliar ID. I was glad that I was in armory getting resupplied at the time; it would be a very good thing to have witnesses.
I accepted the call, and the face of a cold-looking Psimon—a Senior Psimon by his discrete badges—came up on my screen. In fact, I knew this guy. He was the one who’d given me such a hard time after I found the first body of a dead Psimon down in the sewers.
“How can I help you, sir?” I said politely.
He launched straight into it without any warning. “Have you had any contact with Psimon Josh Green today?” he barked at me.
I blinked several times but responded immediately. “No, sir, I’ve been busy since I came on shift. Is there a problem?”
“What about last night?” he continued, glaring.
“Night before last, sir. We don’t talk every day.” Which was true. We’d been very carefully keeping things to every other day, at most. “I just don’t have time—”
“Do you know where he is?” the Psimon interrupted, startling me, which was good, since my reaction to his rudeness was pretty much the sort of way a perfectly innocent person who hadn’t just helped their Psimon escape would act.
“At Prefect Charmand’s office at this hour,” I replied—by now I’d gotten a small audience. Cielle, of course, and Kent, and Mark Knight. “If he’s not there…”
“He’s not there,” the man stated flatly. “The prefect is concerned. Do you know where he could be?”
Voice-stress analysis, I reminded myself. “Do I know where he could be?” I said, repeating his question. And then I thought extremely hard about Josh all alone in that shelter, and all the ways he could manage to hurt himself because he didn’t know how to take care of himself there the way a Hunter would have. “Could he have had an accident?” I asked. “Have you checked with a hospital?”
“That will be all, Hunter,” the Psimon said, cutting me off. And then he hung up on me.
“Was he talking about your boyfriend?” Cielle asked, half concerned and half bewildered.
“Josh, yeah,” I said. “I can’t imagine what could have happened. Maybe he fell over something and hit his head and he’s lying on the floor unconscious….Does that even happen here? It does at home. I—”
No one had a chance to answer me, because Uncle called next. “Joy, did Josh talk to you last night?”
“No,” I replied, thinking hard about all the ways this could go wrong. Genuine stress entered my voice again. “And PsiCorps just called me asking the same thing! What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” he told me. “Josh didn’t call in this morning, and I got no answer when I called him. Don’t worry, we’ll get to the bottom of this.”
And he hung up on me.
Before anyone could ask me anything else, we got a callout. I never thought I would be grateful to Othersiders, but their timing could not have been better.
Uncle called me back later when I was off shift, giving me the story we had agreed on. That Josh had gone home and apparently disappeared from there. That at least he hadn’t been found sick or hurt, and that I was not to worry. Which would have been a really stupid thing to say to me had I not known exactly where he was.
PsiCorps called me immediately afterward—that same cold Psimon, informing me that Josh’s disappearance was a matter for internal security now, and I was not to say anything to anyone about it.
“Yes, sir,” I said meekly, doing my best to look terrified. I must have convinced him, because he finally got an expression on his face. Smugness. So smug I wanted to slap him. Then he hung up.
Which was just as well since I’m not sure I could have kept up the act much longer.
“Internal security”—what could that mean? Did they think he’d run, or did they think he’d been kidnapped? I’d never heard of someone being kidnapped right out of the heart of Apex, and with all the security cams around, I wouldn’t think it was possible. Unless…
Unless a Folk Lord could do it.
And that was something they wouldn’t want even a Hunter to know.
Ah, more likely than not, it was just that they figured he’d run (which he had!) and they hadn’t been able to deduce how he’d done it. With any luck, they never would.
The next morning, Kent signaled to me as I checked out my weapons in the armory. Obediently, I slipped through the rest of the Hunters and moved toward him. “Joy, I want you to run a sweep of a sector of Spillover I’m concerned about. Cover as much as you can,” he said. “You’re the only one with enough Hounds to do so effectively.”
“Yes, sir,” I said, but he wasn’t finished.
“There’s a prediction of weather today, but now that we’ve stocked all those shelters, if you get caught too far from the Pylon, there ought to be at least one within running distance, sinc
e you can ride one of your Hounds,” he told me. He raised one eyebrow at me. It took me a minute, but then the light went on in my head.
“Yes, sir,” I repeated, and raised my own eyebrow. “I’ll take a pod out. Too bad the rest of you won’t have that option.”
“Well, if the storm looks bad enough, we’ll call in evac,” he replied. “And if it’s not, it won’t be worse than we faced at the Barrier.”
And just then, we got a callout; he assigned a team of four to it, and I called a pod.
While I was in the pod, I took the time to check out the storm that was moving in—how fast it was coming and where it was expected to hit first. The general projection was that it was about three hours away; I made a rough guess how far three hours of sweeping would be from Josh’s shelter, and sent the pod to that part of the Barrier.
This was another spot I hadn’t been to before, and I could see why Kent had a valid reason to be worried about what this part of Spillover might hide. On the Apex side of the Barrier, it was all warehouses. On the other side, though, it was nothing but tumbledown ruins overgrown with trees.
A forest? Where almost anything could be hiding, from rebel humans to large groups of Othersiders? Right against the Barrier? This was insanity!
Or hubris. The “nothing ever came from there, so nothing ever will” attitude that Cits and those who should have known better both seemed to share here. Well, we’re going to do the most thorough sweep of this area it’s ever had, I decided. I couldn’t get to the other side of the Barrier and open the Way fast enough. Once the Hounds came through, they shared both my astonishment and my outrage. Pretty soon they were formed up in a line on either side of me, and we began our sweep.
It wasn’t easy because this wasn’t easy ground to walk over. There had been a lot of buildings here originally, and now there wasn’t a wall that was more than knee-high. Dust, dirt, and debris had all settled in here, and the forest had seeded itself in the pockets of dirt and grown undisturbed. Now the trees were as tall as anything on the Mountain, but the ground underneath them was still rubble. The only good thing was that ground like this merely supported sparse grasses and weeds, so there weren’t fifty million wait-a-minute bushes to have to push through.
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