Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  But wasn’t this exactly what I’d been thinking about? That he was a Psimon, that he might be trying to get closer to me to read what I was hiding behind my Psi-shield and my One White Stone?

  Or again…he hadn’t said anything last night. Could this have been Uncle’s idea? Was there something Uncle needed me to know that he couldn’t explain directly? If so, what was it?

  Thank goodness Karly turned up at my door, or I wouldn’t have known what to do. She still looked really pale and shaky, but also really determined.

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I asked.

  “Remember I told you everything is vidded, or at least public record?” I nodded. “Your date tonight is already registered on your public schedule. Since I’m still officially off duty, I’m going to help you get ready for it.”

  I gaped at her like a real turnip, kind of in shock. I mean, yeah, intellectually I knew I was being watched, but…

  “The Image Center isn’t that far,” she said. “And this is likely to take all day. But you’re going to need me or someone is going to bully you into something ridiculous.”

  We went up an elevator to the third floor—I could have run up the stairs, but I didn’t want Karly to stress herself. The Image Center turned out to be this all-white room with a man standing in it, waiting impatiently, next to a big white chair. “Sit!” he ordered, and gave Karly the stink eye, but Karly folded her arms over her chest and didn’t budge, so he just heaved a big sigh and muttered something to his Perscom, and a panel rose up, and a second big white chair that had been behind it rolled by itself into the room and parked itself next to mine.

  We both sat down.

  I hadn’t believed Karly when she’d said it was going to take all day to get ready for my date, but it turned out, I should have. I’d forgotten completely about the vid-star aspect of all of this, and I was informed that not only was Josh taking me out on a date, he was taking me out to something vid-star rank. Much bigger than that fancy party I’d watched on the Cit channel last night. Dinner was just the start of it. The rest of the evening would be spent at the Strauss Palais.

  Karly explained it all to me as this strange man was having my whole body scanned all over again.

  “It’s a new trending thing,” she said. “There are the sorts of clubs that Hunter Ace goes to—”

  “Loud, crowded, and dark.” I nodded. We call that mash-dancing, and we replicate it as well as we can, given we don’t have three-fourths of what we’d need. But what we do have is bonfires, and that sort of formless dancing goes well there.

  “Exactly, and you’ve already been given outfits that would have fit there. This is different. This is a club where you wear a very specific sort of costume. It looks like a ballroom out of a palace, and all you do is waltz. It’s called Straussing; the club is the Strauss Palais.”

  “Wait, what?” I said, bewildered. I thought I knew what a waltz was, but I got the feeling that what I knew and what this was were as different as my old Hunting gear from my new stuff.

  “Don’t worry, that’s why you’re here early. They’ll start designing the gown now, and while it’s fabbing and until they can fit it and the accessories to you, someone will teach you how to waltz.” The man turned off the scanner, I stepped off the platform, and a tall, willowy blond man with arched eyebrows came through one of the doors and took me by the hand. I looked uncertainly at Karly.

  “That’s why I’m here, kid,” Karly said. “I’ll make sure he doesn’t turn you into something idiotic.”

  Well, if I couldn’t trust Karly, who had already helped me once with the clothing they wanted to put me in, who could I trust? I let him draw me away.

  And for the next couple of hours I worked harder learning how to dance than I had any time outside of a hard Hunt. When we stopped for lunch, I was as hungry as if I had been Hunting all morning. I didn’t go down to the mess; I ate with the designers as they showed Karly and me the designs.

  I didn’t object, since they also showed me some vid-capture of Straussing, and what they made for me was nowhere near as ridiculous as some of the enormous foof-things that the girls in the vid were wearing.

  “I wouldn’t let him put you into one of those—cake dresses,” Karly said. Now I was so grateful she had come along to help I could have kissed her.

  What they’d made for me was restrained in comparison. “Edwardian,” was what the chief designer said it was. Two gowns, really, one kind of a coat over the other. The one underneath was a dark gray that faded up from the bottom into a pale, pale gray. It had a tightly fitted top with a high waist and no sleeves. Over that was a dark charcoal gown with the same high waist and fitted top, cut low, with short sleeves, and heavily done all over with embroidery of silver peacock feathers. Silver peacock feathers in my hair, and a silver peacock-feather choker, and my Perscom hidden under a little bouquet of flowers on my wrist. It was still…a lot. Though nothing nearly like as much as what Karly called a cake dress. I just hoped I wouldn’t look too silly.

  “I think you’ll be safe enough now,” Karly said, when I’d finished approving everything. “I’m going to go put a bag of ice on my head.” I grabbed her hand when no one was looking and mouthed, Thank you, and she managed a grin, gave me a thumbs-up, and left.

  Then it was back to the dancing practice with the instructor, then to be worked all over like a prize sheep at judging time. And it seemed I wouldn’t have to learn how to use all that makeup on short notice because I wasn’t allowed to touch so much as a brush. They did it all, then told me to hold my breath while they sprayed something on me. Then they messed with my hair until they were happy, and only then did they put me into the dress. And I mean that, I was not allowed to dress myself, which was just as well, because I don’t think I would have known, quite, how to put it on right. By that time it was close to when I was supposed to go, and Karly and Trev and Sara and Dazzle and a couple of others turned up to see what I looked like “cleaned up,” as we’d say at home.

  So…finally…they let me look in a mirror.

  And I honestly, truly didn’t recognize myself.

  I looked like a rockster or a vid-star.

  Karly laughed as I gazed into the mirror, dumbfounded. The rest applauded.

  “Your expression says it all,” Trev said with a chuckle, and mock-bowed at me. “You’re a credit to the Hunters.” One of the chimes I had gotten to know so well rang through the room.

  “And just in time,” Karly said. “That’s your fifteen-minute warning, and since you had better not run in that dress, it should take you about that amount of time to walk to the entrance and meet the Psimon.”

  I didn’t so much walk as drift in a kind of daze. And somewhere deep inside me I was still thinking that this wasn’t me, that I was going to feel ridiculous, that I was going to make a fool of myself.

  But…oh…the look on Josh’s face when he stepped out of the pod and I stepped out of the shadows to meet him?

  Priceless.

  Dinner…well, it was pretty clear that either Josh came from a much more important family than I’d thought, or someone else was paying for it, because not one bit of it ever saw the inside of a synther or a vat. He’d taken me to some place that was made to look like it was outdoors even though it was in, and the lighting was all twilight. There were “stars” in the ceiling, and you could hear crickets and frogs, and every little table was in its own little foliage-surrounded alcove, with candles on it.

  But after that first burst of dumbfounded shock, Josh redeemed himself. He made me feel comfortable and he didn’t spend the time showering me with stuff about how beautiful I looked or anything like that.

  “Is this anything like where you came from?” he asked, once he’d ordered for both of us (Karly had warned me this was how it was supposed to go, so I had just sat back and let him).

  “Yes. No. Both,” I said, as the fellow he had ordered from came back with little fancy bites of something. And wine. If they were giving
me wine at the beginning of the meal, I had better be careful. “Sometimes, when it’s safe, we have dinner on the porches, where we can see the stars. But we can only do that because we’re above the snow line, so everyone is all bundled up, and there’s no frogs or crickets, and even when its safe, everyone has a gun or a bow near at hand. And I think our food is better than here—yours is fancier, but ours is…more real.” I ate one of the little bites, and then had to say in honesty, “On second thought, I take it back about the food.”

  He laughed.

  But I wasn’t going to sit there and let him ask all the questions. The more I learned about him, the better off I was. He might let something slip that would help me figure out his game. Or if he had one. “Have you lived here all your life?” I asked. “Did you always know you’d be a Psimon?”

  “Yes to both, at least as far as I can remember,” Josh replied, sitting back in his chair a little and sipping his wine. I nibbled at one of those bites. “Psi talents usually show up very young, if they’re going to show up at all. I can remember hearing thoughts and projecting them before I could actually speak. They had to put a Psi-shield on me so I would learn to talk—thinking what I wanted into my parents’ heads was so much easier than talking!”

  We both laughed. And funnily enough, hearing about him as a little kid, seeing that Psi-powers were, to him, no different than being left-handed or a natural singer, made his being a Psimon less threatening, somehow. Weird, I know, but it was like this was something he couldn’t help, and now he was just doing what he could with it. I asked him to tell me about living in Apex City. It didn’t take a lot of prompting. And I wanted to hear about Apex from someone else besides Knight. Because there is always more than one side to everything. By the time the main course came, I’d learned that the Psimon school was run by one of the premier’s oldest friends, who hand-picked the assignments for every strong Psimon that graduated. From the way he talked and the things he didn’t say as much as the ones he did, I gathered that this was a live-in school and you basically didn’t see your parents much once you were in, that while the kids were encouraged to think of themselves as a kind of family, they were not encouraged to get too close to each other. And that the attitude of people outside of PsiCorps toward the Psimons tended to make them feel very divorced from the Cits. That was less so in the army, but then, rarely was a Psimon ever called on to go snooping inside a soldier’s head for sedition.

  Then he started telling me stuff about what other Psimons did, the ones not in the army. I knew about the Psimons going with the army to take out Psi-strong Othersiders. I knew now that some of them scanned constantly for Othersiders. And I had known that they could pick up unshielded thoughts casually, which was why I’d kept my own mental shield up when I met him—and still had my guard up even now.

  But this was the first time I had heard that a lot of them would spend shifts sitting in an observation post letting open thoughts drift through their heads. That made me mighty uneasy, and mighty glad of the Psi-shield in my Perscom. Even if Josh wasn’t snooping, how would I know who could be? Some of what Knight had said seemed to be weighing pretty heavily on the truth side.

  Josh wasn’t the sort that got that kind of assignment, though. He had gotten assigned to my uncle extremely young.

  And, from everything I could tell, my uncle had proceeded to treat him as if he was kin. “I think Prefect Charmand taught me how to be a human being again, as well as a Psimon,” he admitted over dessert. “Sometimes I wonder if that would have happened if I’d been assigned to him later, and looking at some of the other Psimons…” But he didn’t finish that thought. Instead, he looked at my face, then my empty plate, and said, “I think we need to work off that dinner, don’t you?”

  THE POD DROPPED US at the front of a building that was like every other building: tall, utilitarian. But the front was all lit up, and projected on the flat front was something I had never seen before, ever. It was a façade of a palace, only a fanciful one, made to fit the expanse of the building itself, and so convincing you would have to touch it before you convinced yourself it wasn’t all carved up in ornamental leaves and swirls and creatures. And over the door of the place, words a full story tall were apparently carved. STRAUSS PALAIS.

  Kind of hard to miss.

  There were lots of people coming out of pods pulling up to the place, all of the men in formal suits like Josh was wearing, some of the women in gowns even more fantastic than mine. But at the moment, we were the only ones surrounded by hovering cams, and I was forcibly reminded—because the cams hadn’t been so obviously present in the restaurant—that people were watching everything I was doing.

  That’s just downright spooky, and I felt more than a tad bit on edge. And just plain…way, way, way out of my depth. There was more wealth in one of those dresses than any of the settlements on the Mountain saw in a year! And I felt unsettled. Except…nothing ever came out of nothing. People didn’t get given things like this, unless maybe they inherited money, and even then, somebody had worked for it. Right? Even I had worked for the gown I was wearing.

  But I couldn’t help thinking about that raggedy little kid in Spillover….How many years of meals would he get for the price of one dress?

  It was hard to think when there was all of this around me, and maybe that was the point. Maybe all this was supposed to distract people like me. Seductive. Like my bathroom…

  We went in the door, and it was a big hall, about two stories tall, with stairs at the back, and what I figured were refreshment bars on either side of the stairs. Josh slipped his hand in mine and squeezed. We went right up the stairs and stood for a moment at the top, surveying and being surveyed.

  The music was coming from everywhere; they must have had a wizard speaker and projection system. I literally could not have imagined anything like this, and had to fight another wave of feeling like any second someone was going to spot me for a phony and throw me out.

  Gilded arches ran along all the walls except for where the sweeping staircase came down, and framed by the arches was a landscape of an amazing formal garden at twilight, all lit up, right out of a pre-Diseray vid. The ceiling was the starry night sky. There were seats and tables of various sorts around the edges, just under the arches, but most of the floor was reserved for dancing. Right then, although this was incredible, I was feeling just as tense as if I was staring down something as dangerous as that Folk Mage. They’d told me things were different here. But did they know how different?

  The music that was playing now was for a medium-speed dance, and the partners rotated beneath us like pairs of flowers gyring and floating in a slow-moving stream. Some were better than others. So many things to worry about!

  “Shall we?” Josh asked as the cameras hovered.

  He must have done this a lot, because he just flowed us in, and before I could squeak we were safely circling around our mutual center, going with the clockwise flow of the greater dance.

  At first I was really busy counting in my head, making myself feel what Josh was about to do rather than trying to anticipate it. That’s harder than it seems for a Hunter; we are all about anticipating what the Othersiders are going to do next, and planning five or six steps ahead of them. I finally got myself in the right headspace, and it all snapped into place and I could relax and pay attention to what else was around me. I managed not to be overwhelmed by all this…glittering, gleaming stuff. And then I started feeling light-headed again, because of Josh. His arm around my waist was nothing like the instructor’s—it felt warm, and sort of…personal. My hand on his shoulder was cold; the one in his hand was warm. He smelled clean, and a little bit like cedar.

  The dance we had joined ended, and another one began immediately. Now, I am in pretty superb shape, but I had to wonder about how well Josh was going to hold up. There was no way that he was in as good shape as a Hunter. No one, not even a message-runner, is in as good shape as a Hunter. I could probably dance for hours; this was n
othing like as hard as running my territory back home from dawn to dusk with my full load-out on my back.

  But I should have realized that these things were designed to exhaust mere Cits, many of whom probably never walked more than fifty yards at a time. After four more dances, the music ended with a chord that everyone but me seemed to recognize, the couples separated, and the men bowed and the women did this thing called a “curtsey,” with their skirts spread out around them. My skirts were narrower, so I did this dip with my arms out instead of spreading out my skirts. Then the floor cleared, all of us going to the little tables around the edge. The light dimmed, the lamps on the tables came up, the scene playing out behind the arches turned to a garden at night illuminated by fireflies and candle lanterns.

  I couldn’t help but keep half an eye on it, waiting for a swarm of Othersiders to invade it, even though I knew it was just a projection.

  Girls in black-and-white outfits with really short poufy skirts, white aprons, and big foofy white bows on the tops of their heads came around, and I realized these were more “waiters.” Josh ordered something while I scanned around us. He didn’t seem to notice.