Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  Light came up in the center of the room, and a couple who were so beautiful they didn’t look real swirled into the middle of the floor. She was wearing a dress with a train about three yards long, over another skirt with row after row of ruffles, and a built-up behind, all in gold satin. He was wearing a matching gold satin outfit, but it wasn’t a tuxedo; it looked something like a military dress uniform, only there were fanciful things up the front and lots of loops of braid at the shoulder and platelike epaulettes with fringe on them. She picked up her train and fastened the end to her wrist in an incredibly graceful, sweeping motion. The music started and they danced. I had to stop myself from staring at them with my eyes as big as saucers.

  Professionals, of course. We knew about professional dancers at home; their performances were one of the things we liked to be sure to catch. But, wow, this sort of thing is so much more impressive in person than on a vid-screen. I forced myself after a while to just half watch with a look of admiration (I think) on my face, while I half watched everything else. Most people were only paying cursory attention to the dancers. A lot were talking. A lot were furtively eyeing us and the other Apparently Important People. The people who had cams hovering over them were…well…acting. Just like they’d been acting when they danced. The dancers didn’t seem to care. Probably even when a Hunter and a Psimon weren’t here, people didn’t pay that much attention to the professional dancers. This was mostly a reason for people to catch their breath, drink, and rest a little.

  I wished I had suggested something else, something more like what a regular Cit would have done, something to make me blend in better. But I was here now, and I had to make the best of it. This was part of the job, right? Because if things were really, really dangerous, no Hunter would be wasting time at something like this. This was all part of making the Cits feel safe. And I was with Josh, who was better-looking than any boy I knew back home, and who seemed really happy to be with me, and even if he had some other motive for getting close to me, at least right now he was good company. And if Kei ever saw this, I knew she’d be talking at the screen, trying to give me advice I couldn’t hear, mostly about flirting.

  But on the other hand—this was all so amazing, it was all I could do to keep from gawking! There was a little girl inside me who wanted to run around the room, peering and poking at all the fancy dresses, running to see how they made the garden scene look so real, asking questions of the professional dancers.

  What Josh ordered had come. It was fizzy; my sensitive tongue caught a bit of alcohol in it, but not so much I was worried about it affecting me. It tasted like a lot of things, nothing I was familiar with, and was acidic and faintly sweet. I gave him a look of enquiry. “Sham-pane,” he said. “It’s a kind of wine.”

  So, some sort of fizzy wine. I would have preferred mineral water, but I guess that is hard to come by here. I sipped it carefully. He leaned over the table to speak.

  “The dance periods are called ‘sets,’” he said. “Now, every other set, it’s expected you are to dance with whoever comes to ask you, and I am expected to go ask other women, until the last dance of the set. Then I come claim you.”

  “I only dance with boys?” I said. He nodded.

  “Or, rather, you only dance with people dressed like boys. There might be some lizzes here, but they’ll be in proper partner outfits, and only the one in trousers will ask you to dance.” He shrugged. “This is all as formal and regimented as an army drill.”

  I nodded. That would be all right. It wasn’t exactly egalitarian, though. I mean, back home, a girl can ask a boy to dance as well as a boy can ask a girl. And why couldn’t one of the girls-dressed-as-girls ask me to dance if she wanted to? And the business of the man being the one to lead in the dance. You’d think it would be the better dancer, whichever partner it was. Things felt out of balance again. But then I thought about those huge dresses, like bells, and pictured what would happen if two women wearing those tried to dance together, and I had to stifle a giggle. No…that would not work, not at all.

  The professionals finished their routine and bowed out to a spattering of applause. The lights came back up again, and as we put down our empty glasses, there sure was a rush of people to get to our table. Quite by accident one older man, who had gotten up just as the rush began, got shoved to my side of the table, and, a little annoyed at the rudeness, I touched his elbow to say I would dance with him.

  He looked shocked, then delighted, then embarrassed, then delighted all over again, and the lady he was with practically clapped, her face a big grin. This was one of the couples that just seemed to be here because they wanted to be, which made me feel good. If I was going to be the prize catch, well, someone who deserved it should hook me.

  So, much to the jealousy of the others, he led me out. The music started with a big chord, which I now recognized meant we were supposed to bow and curtsey, then we positioned ourselves, and we were off.

  He wasn’t as good as Josh, but he was having so much fun that it was fun to be with him. He was enjoying himself so much I didn’t feel so stifled by everything around me. It even felt a little like being in the community hall on a Satterday Night. When he made missteps, I just echoed him so it looked like it was on purpose. When the dance ended, he thanked me, squeezing my hand. “Hunter Joyeaux, that was wonderful! You made me look like—”

  “A gentleman, which you are, and it was fun—” was all I managed to get to say before I was claimed by another eager…well…sycophant. This one chattered through the whole dance, which was all right, he was doing such simple steps it was easy to follow him and answer him at the same time. Didn’t I love Apex? Wasn’t it a huge difference from the mountains? Did I—would I—did I think—

  I have to say it was rude and intrusive by home standards, but I suppose this was one of the people who’d started to follow my channel, and I guess watching practically everything I did, at least in public, made people think they’re somehow part of your life and entitled to know more about it. I just kept myself calm, tried to look like this was as much fun as dancing with that older fellow, and talked to him nicely and remembered how the Masters would answer when there was something they didn’t want to discuss, sliding away from the topic the way they slid away from the blows people tried to land on them. And as soon as I got the chance, I curved him to talk about himself, which he wasn’t at all averse to doing.

  That pretty much repeated itself until Josh got me for the last dance of the set, and a different quartet of professional dancers took the middle—this time the women danced on the tips of their toes, which kind of made me startled, since I didn’t even know that was possible, and it looked like they were defying gravity.

  Josh saw my face and chuckled. “I was going to chat with you about White Knight, but it’s sheer curiosity on my part and I can see you want to watch the ballee dancers. At least, I think that is what they’re called. Ballot dancers? That can’t be right. It’s not a social dance, it’s a watching dance. Usually they do whole—plays, I guess you’d call them, only it’s all in dance. This just started getting resurrected from a vault of vids and books someone found about four years ago.”

  Well they were dancing a little play right out there in the middle, and all I could think was that I couldn’t imagine how anyone could balance on the tips of their toes, let alone dance on them, without magic. I even figured out what the play was, before too long—it was from Shakespeare, Othello, which of course ends badly, but it ended badly in such a gorgeous way that you couldn’t feel the same sad you would if it was the play. He let me watch in peace, and then came a set when he was my only partner. Having had all those other fellows made me realize how good he was, and I said so. And oh, it was so wonderful feeling his arm at my waist and his hand holding mine—but I didn’t want to tell him that. I didn’t want him to think I was thinking all this meant more than he was thinking it meant, and…

  Oh why couldn’t I have been Kei?

  And why did I
have to keep second-guessing all this?

  “When did you have time to learn to dance like this?” I asked finally.

  He made a little face. “I cheated,” he told me.

  I giggled, and then tried to cover my mortification that I had giggled. “How do you cheat at learning dancing?” I asked.

  He let go of my waist and briefly tapped the side of his head. “Psimon, remember? I mind-rode one of the pros. With full permission of course.”

  I was astounded. I had no idea you could get physical memory that way, but I guess you can. It was creepy actually—and made the stories I had heard back in the mountains about how a Psimon can imitate you so well your closest relatives can’t tell the difference seem more plausible.

  I felt as if I ought to say something, but I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I changed the subject slightly. “Would you want to do this again?”

  “The question is, would you?” he responded, throwing the ball back at me.

  Well what was I supposed to say? I didn’t want to make him feel bad, if he’d chosen this to entertain me. But…all this…Had this really been his idea? Was it Uncle’s, and was this the sort of thing that was supposed to make me blend in with the other Hunters? “It’s fun…” I managed, thinking of what it would be like a second time, when I might not be so intimidated and self-conscious and maybe I’d have a better idea about Josh’s motivations. When I might be more sure about him, be able to think more like Kei and manage to say all the right things that would make him think of me as someone he wanted to get to know a lot better.

  “Then we’ll do it again.” He consulted something somewhere over my head, or at least seemed to. “However, I am reminded that a Hunter’s day begins early, so this will be the last set of the night I am afraid. All your fans will be disappointed.” Again the reminder of how many people were watching. I could never get away from it.

  “I can’t stay out too late,” I agreed, feeling the unseen pressure of those cameras on me. “I’m ready to get back.” Although I wasn’t, not really. I wanted this to go on until I was too tired to make one more step. I wanted to get a chance to hear more about him. Most of all, I wanted to get relaxed enough that I might be able to read him a little better. I wondered if he’d been given some sort of signal, or if that stare over my head had meant another Psimon was talking to him. It could have been either.

  A pod was waiting for us when we left, and we got into it and sped away. But then Josh put the privacy screens up on the windows, and kind of dropped his air of smoothness. “I have to apologize just a little if you felt like I was overdoing things. You know, the Palais, the fancy dinner…”

  “It was fun…” I repeated. “But I kept thinking about the people where I patrol, and the ones back home, like my friend Kei. They never even see anything like all that. I’ve never even seen anything like that. We didn’t know people lived like that here.” I bit my lip a little, and my eyebrows furrowed. “Kei would go insane. She’d say it was like Sleeping Beauty’s ball.” I was confused. I only could think one thing. I was not going to “get used to this.” I never wanted to be the sort of person who looked at an expensive dress or a fancy meal and thought yawn, instead of how many poor families could be fed with that money, or how many rounds of ammo could it buy to protect people outside the Barriers?

  “Well, this is what you do,” he told me firmly. “Remember your image. Remember you have to have and keep an image. If you are going to fit in, you have to keep your head down and your ratings up.”

  I nodded. He had not been privy to what Uncle had tapped out for me, yet here he was using practically the same words. So maybe Uncle trusted him enough to tell him some of our secrets?

  He dropped me at the door to headquarters, bending and kissing my hand as he handed me out of the pod, which made me blush, and then he got back in the pod and sped off and I went up to my rooms. When I got there, I stripped off the gown, sent it down the cleaning chute, and got into the shower. As the hot water sent all the makeup down the drain, and I went from being the exotic thing I’d seen in the mirror to being me again, it felt as if I could think more clearly. More like myself.

  I looked into my eyes and told myself that I wasn’t going to turn into a female copy of Ace. I’d never see myself in the mirror again, if I let things change me like that.

  “We’ll split up for the morning. Stay close enough that if one of us runs into trouble, the other can get there fast,” White Knight said over biscuits and gravy, “but far enough that it counts as Hunting solo. It’s the next step of your assessment.”

  I nodded, though I hadn’t expected to be doing any solo Hunting quite this fast, once I’d been told what was what.

  “The other thing is that because there are two of us, we’re going to be going deeper into Spillover than I usually patrol,” he continued. “Truth to tell, I’m not sure what to warn you about, because I haven’t been out there in over a year.”

  Now…we have some smart people up on the Mountain. I mean book-smart, not just survival-smart. When the Diseray happened, we ended up with a mix of both, and that’s kind of the way it stayed. So something that one of my teachers—as opposed to my Masters—taught me was how to look at numbers, as in where things are changing over time. That’s a lot easier here, the computer does it all for you, so I’d asked my Perscom to show me some stuff. “Whatever it was like then, it’ll be worse now,” I said. “This morning I asked the computer to show me Hunts over time for the last five years. Everything stayed pretty flat for four, but this year is getting worse month by month. It’s very gradual. Like, it’s not as if things have doubled from this time last year. But there is a slow and steady increase in the numbers and the hazards.”

  That sent both his eyebrows shooting toward his hairline. “I knew it felt that way,” he said slowly. “But you’re telling me it wasn’t just me?”

  I nodded my head.

  Knight sucked on his lower lip. He tapped his own Perscom. “Reasons for increase in Otherside incursion over past six months?” he queried aloud.

  “Population pressure: probability fifty-four percent,” the Perscom said. “C and C orders: probability fifty-two percent. Personal vendetta: probability forty-nine percent. All other probabilities twenty percent or less.”

  “C and C?” I asked.

  “There’s some indication that at least some of the Folk actually work together, with something like a Command and Control structure of their own, like we have in the army,” Knight replied, and scratched his head. “I’ve never seen anything to make me think they were…but I never thought to ask the Perscom if things were getting worse around here either.”

  “I want some grenades this time,” I said finally. “If we need anything bigger than that, we need an Elite, or artillery or air support and at least another Hunter. Can we get artillery or air support?”

  “Not in Spillover, unless we actually see a force trying to knock down the Barrier,” Knight said truthfully. “Or something equally nasty that could get inside.”

  The pod dropped us at a different part of the Barrier this time, and if my memory was correct, it was nearly to the spot where we’d routed the Goblin market.

  This time the door we went through didn’t have a guard, and there was no one lined up to come into the safer zone. The safer zone was utterly unpopulated; what looked like huge windowless buildings, maybe for manufacturing, surrounded another huge windowless building. Knight nodded at it. “Prison,” he said briefly. “Factories around it. Underground tunnels to the factories. Humans are all tucked behind a lot of concrete and ferrous metal. That keeps the Othersiders from even bothering to roam here for the most part. And as for the prisoners, no prison is escape-proof, but who’d try to escape when you’d be as visible to anything that was here as a laser dot in a coal mine?”

  Good point.

  We passed into a landscape even more devastated than before. There were no signs of human habitation. That didn’t mean that there
weren’t any humans here, it just meant there were no signs of them. Anyone who lived here was deeply in hiding.

  I was conscious of the grenades on my belt; even at home they weren’t part of my usual load-out, and when I carried them, it meant there was probably going to be something serious to deal with.

  Or I might have to start an avalanche, but usually we use sticks of home-brewed TNT for that.

  They were smaller than I was used to, but that meant I could throw them farther, which was probably a very good thing. “Close” counts with a grenade….

  Once inside, Knight and I split up. He directed me to go back in the direction we’d patrolled the last time; he went out to “new” territory. I cast the Glyphs and called the Hounds; we took our usual solo pattern. Six of the seven ranged out around me, with Bya beside me. I scanned the sky; he scanned the ground, with senses much keener and more varied than mine.

  I found the site of the Goblin market; it was deserted, with no trace of the puddles of goo the Goblins had turned into when they died. The wind whistled forlornly among the buildings; I thought about the half-starved kid I had seen. And when I saw a bunny peeking around a lump of broken-off cement, I didn’t even think. I sent Bya after it. Bya ran off and dispatched it, then fetched it, like a retriever. He knew what I was thinking, of course—he always did—and with a toss of his head he flung the limp body of the bunny into thin air. Well, apparently thin air. I knew where it had gone, because when we didn’t Hunt, my Hounds and I just hunted. Bya had a place Otherside where he stored what I killed. I guess nothing Otherside found dead game at all interesting.

  So while we scouted for trouble, I did what I did at home; I had the Hounds keep an eye out for game. Twice more we got something, a squirrel and a second bunny. I was watching for something else too. That kid.

  I figured, scared as he was, he’d had my face and Knight’s branded into his memory as people who had helped him. And I figured he would be watching for us. So after covering a fair amount of territory and coming back to what you might call the “neighborhood” where the Goblin market had been, I spotted one eye under a shaggy shock of hair peering over the corner of a broken window at us.