Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  As soon as I saw the uniform, I had my One White Stone up in my mind. I didn’t want some random Psimon getting even a single stray thought about the Mountain, the Monastery, and the Masters.

  The soldier took my bag from the steward, who didn’t even get off the train. The door slid shut and the train accelerated out of the station. We hadn’t been stopped for more than a few seconds.

  “Joyeaux Charmand.” It was the soldier, and it was a statement, not a question. “Psimon Green and I have been instructed to take you to Prefect Charmand.”

  I put my Hunt-face on, and nodded gravely. “Thank you, soldier,” I said. “And Psimon. I appreciate the courtesy.”

  It was obvious where I was supposed to go, because even though I had never seen one in person, the gray transpod was familiar to me from vids. There’s really no good way to say this—it looked exactly like a gray roach egg, a sort of rounded rectangular box with windows in the top half and a door in the middle. It waited at the side of the platform—a curiously bare slab of concrete, although I expect when important people use it, there are all manner of temps put up to make them comfortable. The soldier, looking so stiff I thought he was going to shatter inside his crisp khaki uniform, led the way. The blond Psimon followed me as I followed the soldier. He stowed my little bag in the cargo hatch of the pod. My other bags, I assumed, would catch up with me. The Psimon opened the door of the pod for me, and I climbed in.

  There was a rear-facing seat, a front-facing seat, and a pilot seat. I took the front-facing seat, leaving the Psimon with the other. I hoped he wasn’t prone to motion sickness. The soldier took the pilot seat, and a moment later we pulled smoothly away. He was guiding it manually for now, as we wove our way through the streets of the complex. Soldiers and military vehicles everywhere.

  The Psimon pushed the glasses up on the top of his head and gave me a cocked eyebrow and a little quirk of the lips that wasn’t quite a smile. His eyes were an intense blue. “So. You’re probably wondering why a Psimon came for you. Call me Josh, if you like.”

  “Um,” I said cleverly. “Actually this all happened a little faster than I was ready for. I hadn’t gotten to the wondering part yet.”

  He laughed. “I’m Prefect Charmand’s personal Psi-aide. That means I do things like ensuring that if he doesn’t want people to know where he’s going, I can keep Psi-sniffers confused. So I’m here to make sure no Psi-sniffers figure out where you are, once the texers on the train start spreading the word that you got off here. On base, no one is going to probe us. Once we match up with traffic, we’ll just be one more transpod in the stream to them.” He did something to the window controls. The view outside darkened just a little, but not much. “And now if any face-rec is running, it won’t pick you up through the window.”

  It was a little like he was speaking a completely foreign language. I puzzled through it with difficulty. So he was Uncle’s personal man, so…could I take a chance on dropping my concentration? No, better not. He was going to make sure no one could find me telepathically…which they could, even though I was thinking about the One White Stone. That just meant they couldn’t read my thoughts, not that they couldn’t find me. But how could vid channels hire telepaths? “I thought everyone Psi-sensitive was supposed to be in PsiCorps,” I said, after a moment.

  “Marginal talents are of no use to us,” he replied with the casual arrogance of someone who knows he’s good. “Maybe in the past, before there were physical Psi-shields and when even the least bit of Psi could be put to use, but not anymore. But a lot of the channels use them as chasers. We’re green. Thoughts of you ended at the train; with me running interference, this transpod will sniff as holding three ordinary Cits.”

  “Oh.” Well what else could I say? “Ah, thank you…”

  He cocked his head to one side, looking at me thoughtfully. “For someone trending, you really are awfully vid-shy.” He put two fingers to his temple and closed his eyes for a moment. “There, the prefect knows you’re confused and concerned. I expect he’ll have someone who can advise you.”

  I felt, at that moment, totally helpless. “I’m…from this little village in the Rockies,” I said. “We get vid from Apex a couple times a day when they punch the signal through all the Othersider chaff and we have electricity to use to run the community receiver. Everything else has to wait for the weekly mail. One block of this base probably holds more people than my whole village.” Of course, that didn’t count the Masters’ Monastery, or the people brought there to train, or all the other settlements on and around the Mountain…but it wasn’t a lie.

  I expected a superior smirk, but what I got was a look of sympathy. “When’d you pop Powers?”

  The lie was so ingrained it slipped smoothly off my tongue. “Six months ago. The village waited to make sure it wasn’t going to fade, then contacted the prefect, and it’s taken this long to arrange things.”

  “And how long have you been Hunting?” he asked, looking a little surprised. “Because that standoff was ace.”

  “Every day since I popped.” That was pretty much the truth, although as a precocious ten-year-old Hunter, I wasn’t allowed to Hunt much except the gremlins in the fields at first. “Well, with Powers. Without Powers, everyone Hunts, we can’t afford not to, so…since I was old enough to use weapons. Too many of them, too few of us.”

  “It shows,” he said, now with some respect. “I bet you were already used to driving off the strangelings without Hounds before that, too.”

  “Not as much as you might think,” I replied. “We keep the village up above the snow line. They can’t go there, so the village itself is a haven. But the farm fields? The grazing meadows? Every day. I got a lot of practice in six months, and plenty before that with weapons.”

  He shivered. “I’ve only ever seen Othersiders on vid,” he replied slowly.

  We passed through a set of gates and out into the main traffic; the soldier engaged the auto, and the traffic stream took control of the transpod. He turned the pilot seat to face me and relaxed visibly. “I want to thank you personally, Hunter,” he said with a lot of the same look in his eyes that the Cits in the passenger cars had had. “My brother is second gunner on that train. You saved his life.”

  “We saved everybody’s lives,” I corrected. “I did my job, they did theirs.”

  He had this My brother tells it different look on his face. “Figure I was the hand and the brain,” I said. “The soldiers in that armed car were a hammer. Without me, they wouldn’t know where to hit, when, or how hard. Without them, I had nothing to hit with.”

  The guys exchanged a guy-look. Finally Psimon Josh opened his mouth. Actually, he snickered first. “Can you imagine Ace saying something like that?”

  “Glitterboi? Never in a hundred years,” the soldier replied, with a disgusted look on his face.

  “Can someone please tell me about this Hunter Ace?” I begged. “They talked about him on the vid last night like I should know everything about him.”

  The soldier laughed. “He’s a Hunter, and I’ll admit he’s really good, and he’s fantastic to watch when he Hunts seriously dangerous Othersiders. It’s even better watching him and his brother, Paules, Hunt together. But he thinks he’s king of the world, and acts like it.”

  “I heard they had to build a second Hunter HQ just for his ego,” Josh deadpanned, and the soldier laughed. “His admirers think he’s very good-looking. He’s certainly very flamboyant. I don’t follow his channel, but you can’t help getting bits of him on the news feeds, because he’s on all the time.”

  “Wait—” I said. “Channel? He has his own channel?”

  “Every Hunter does. They’ll explain it to you at headquarters.” I wanted to push for more info, but Josh was turning those intense blue eyes back on me. Measuring. What was he looking for? I thought about my stone.

  Meanwhile there were a lot of other uncomfortable but exciting things tying me up inside. This was the first time ever I had been
alone with two guys around my age that I hadn’t grown up with, and both of them were, as we say back home, keepers, though in different ways. The soldier was as chiseled as a heroic statue, while Josh was kind of baby-faced and sweet-looking when he wasn’t giving you one of those gimlet stares. He had an easy smile, with one dimple and crystal blue eyes. I prayed he didn’t notice my cheeks flush every time he looked over at me. I wanted him to keep looking, but I wasn’t sure how to get him to do that without being obvious about it.

  This was all really, really different. It was one thing to be joking around and mock-flirting with boys you’d known all your life, especially when most of them were interested in someone other than you. It’s fine to be twirled around at a Satterday dance by a Hunter you’d worked with for years, with both of you knowing you just need to let loose and work off some steam.

  But to be sitting with two yummy strangers, alone, and wishing you could get one of them in particular back to that Satterday dance and show off a little for him to see where that went?

  Let’s just say I was glad I had the stone to hold in the front of my mind, because I sure didn’t want Josh to pick up on any of that, either, and it sure was emotionally loaded. What would he think of me?

  Not that it mattered, in the end, which was depressing. I knew I was supposed to go right to the training quarters and I would probably never see him again.

  Still…

  “My girl is all fangirly over Ace,” the soldier grumbled. “All that lone wolf business.”

  “And his tragic past,” Josh said, smacking his forehead with the back of his hand and putting on a pose, like the hero in a melodrama.

  The soldier grinned. “I had to keep him from sniffers once,” Josh went on. “He acted like I was something he was going to scrape off his shoe as soon as he was alone.”

  That was when I saw it happen: Josh went from “scary Psimon who can see inside your head” to “one of the guys.” The soldier relaxed and they started in on guy-talk, and left me sitting there not understanding more than a quarter of what they were talking about. Which was kind of good and kind of sucked, cause it would have been nice to have them both treating me at least a little like I was a girl, if not a nova star.

  But…on the other hand, Josh was a scary Psimon that could see inside my head, and I had a head full of things I didn’t want him to see. So, Uncle had sent him for me, all well and good, but no matter how cute he was, I didn’t dare drop my guard around him.

  So I looked out the window at what could be seen of the city. Pretty much what it looked like in vid, clean and shiny, lots of buildings that went from three to eight stories tall, in various inoffensive pastel colors. Hard to tell as we zipped past in the regulated traffic stream what they were. Not like you were allowed to have things like, say, strings of wash hanging outside your house in the big cities. It wouldn’t be practical; all those people crammed into one building, where would all the wash go? And not like you’d need to, with the way people can live in cities, I guess.

  Traffic slowed as we got into the Hub, and here were all the shopping places, the lighted-up signs, vid-boards two stories high, some people dressed like the Cits on the train, all looking like they were in a hurry to get somewhere and do something. But there were also lots of people dressed quietly, too, stuff in very subdued colors, and nothing radical about it. Except for the heels on the shoes most of the women wore. How could they walk in those shoes? A couple of times I actually caught my own face on one of those vid-boards, and the footage of the Hellfires going off, which was a jolt and just seemed completely unreal.

  The soldier turned his seat around and put his hands on the controls, although he didn’t use them. It was quiet in the transpod, but if I put my hand on the glass, I could sense the vibrations of noise outside.

  As we got to the center of the Hub, the crowds thinned to almost nothing, though pod traffic was as thick as ever. Buildings loomed above me, steeper than the mountains, blocking off the sky. It was exactly like being in a deep, deep canyon. And nothing like the pictures in old books and vids of how cities used to look. Because, of course, Apex Hub had pretty much been built in about a decade, and all by the same people: the Army Corps of Engineers, mostly, with some of the Cits that had gotten rescued and protected. There wasn’t any real variation in the buildings—there were three models, actually. There was the rounded tower, the stepped tower, and the straight tower. They were all made of the same cream-white stuff. That made sense when you knew the army had done most of the planning and construction. After all, when the army has something that works, they just make a lot of it. They were all smooth, without any ornamentation, with row after row of recessed windows. About the only way in which they differed was by height. All at once, I realized what it was Apex Hub reminded me of—one of those big model cities that had been built to show “the city of the future” that I’d seen in old vids. And as soon as I realized that, I had to wonder…had the builders actually seen one of those old pictures, or old vids, and deliberately copied it? That sounds like something the army would do too. If it works in a model, it probably works in real life, right?

  Abruptly the pod made a left-hand turn, and we whisked down a ramp into a lighted cavern underneath one of the buildings. A moment later, we pulled up next to a glass door, with blast doors open to either side of it, and stopped.

  “Good luck, Hunter Charmand,” the soldier said formally, with a little sketch of a salute as my door opened. “Pleasure serving you.”

  “Thank you,” I told him, and didn’t have time to say anything else as yet another soldier came around to the side of the pod and stood at attention, clearly waiting for me to get out. So I did, and discovered that Psimon Josh and I had an escort of four soldiers in fancier uniforms, dress uniforms, to take us to my uncle.

  This was getting more intimidating by the moment. But I stiffened up my spine and nodded like this was all my due, and followed them into a building that swallowed me up and probably wasn’t going to spit me out any time soon.

  I HAD NEVER BEEN in a building like this in my life.

  The Monastery was big, but it was all wood inside, and beautiful. We didn’t waste anything, so even dead, bark-beetle-killed trees got used in the interiors, where the flaws and bug-tunnels were transformed into a zillion works of art. When the monks weren’t doing spiritual things or training, they were generally doing something with their hands, and a lot of them were woodcarvers. So door frames, beams, window frames, door panels, wall panels—anything that could be made ornamental either was, or one day would be. And if it hadn’t been carved yet, it had been polished until it glowed. The regular houses in the village were also wood, with plenty of ornamental touches on them, too. After all, when winter came, and you were a farmer, you had a lot of time on your hands, and what better use to make of it than to make your house a little nicer?

  This building was Purposeful, like that, capitalized. The floor was something smooth and gray, the walls were a different, lighter gray, the ceiling was lighting panels, and there was no ornament anywhere. I wasn’t sure what the floor and walls were made of, but it wasn’t anything natural. Here, it was really obvious that the army had built this place. If something was useful, had an actual purpose, was functional, then it went in. If it didn’t, then it got left out. Or, more likely, it was never even considered in the first place.

  Of course, since we get vid, I’m not a complete turnip, I know an elevator when I see one, and that’s what Josh was herding me toward. There were two more soldiers at the steel elevator door, one on each side, and they got in with us, flanking us. Josh pushed the top button, and up we went. Feeling myself rising, moving…that was unsettling. Once, we’d had a little earthquake up at the Monastery, maybe caused by some of the Othersiders that had gotten into the old mines. It had made my insides go, No, the ground shouldn’t move! just like this elevator did. I was just glad I wasn’t claustrophobic.

  Of course, a Hunter can’t be. Like the time K
edo and I had doubled up to chase some Tommyknockers out of a mine the Rock Knob settlement was trying to reopen. There’d been barely enough room in some of the shafts for us to go single file, and we’d been forced to use the hand-tap code because we didn’t want to alert the little horrors by talking. I had never been so glad to have my Master and mentor with me than that day; he kept reaching back, not just to “say” something, but to give my hand a squeeze, ’cause that’s the sort of thing he did. I needed every squeeze. Dark, close, and quiet beyond anything I’d ever experienced before…and the only thing telling you that you weren’t alone down there was the tap on your wrist from your partner, and the sense of your Hounds ahead of and behind you….

  More gray corridor ended in a closed gray double door with more soldiers. My soldiers saluted those soldiers, who saluted back, and opened both doors.

  The reception room inside was a relief from the gray; it was still Purposeful, but the floor was covered in brown carpet, the walls were a warm yellow-beige, and the receptionist’s desk at least had a wooden top, even if the rest of it was metal. Wow, this place even looked like vid I’d seen of an army office! You’d think that since Apex got stuff from all over, Uncle’s own office would be fancier…but no. The receptionist smiled brightly at us—she was wearing a jacket just a little darker than the walls. “He’s cleared his schedule, Psimon; you and Joyeaux can go on in,” she said.

  There were two more double doors in the wall behind her desk. My soldiers went ahead and opened both for us, and Josh and I went on past them and in. The doors closed behind us.