Hunter

by Mercedes Lackey

  Karly scratched her head a little, then shrugged. “That’s all right with me, if it’s all right with Joy,” she said. “I don’t mind going back to a territory I know.”

  The armorer nodded. “Normally someone just marked to go solo would get an older territory someone’s been working regularly,” he said to me. “But you have more Hounds than Karly, and aside for that one slip with the Wyverns, you and your pack have proven that you’re seasoned and ready to work a tougher territory alone.”

  “We’re both on perimeter territories. It’s a long way back to HQ. You know what this means, don’t you?” Karly asked me.

  I shook my head.

  “It means you’re going to have to fight me for the last fish taco every night.” She kept her expression perfectly deadpan right up until that moment.

  Even the armorer laughed.

  Well anyway, there it was, I had my own territory, and the Hounds and I fell back into our old and well-rehearsed pattern. The only difference between this and home was that I took a pod out to District F-22 instead of walking out there, or riding a horse, then called the Hounds after it rolled back to the pod-station. Then we arranged ourselves in our usual formation: me and Bya at the center, the rest ranged out around us. I like the pattern of working the perimeter of a territory, then moving inward. Generally if something is trying to hide, that drives it toward the center, rather than out into someone else’s territory. That’s how all of us worked at home. Mark didn’t do that—but then, he generally worked Spillover alone, so I suppose it didn’t matter.

  F-22 had plenty of places for nasty things to hide. You wouldn’t think it, looking at it from the road, where everything was all blank buildings and lawn. But that was just the façade you saw from the single road that went along one side of it. Actually since no one but Hunters ever ventured between the buildings, no one had bothered clearing away more of the pre-Diseray wreckage than was needed to build the factories and the housing blocks. In fact, a lot of the rubble just got dumped on top of the other rubble. There were trees and bushes growing out of the piles, and weeds almost as tall as me. Lots and lots of places for things to hide. I’d checked, and before I got it, F-22 was only worked about one day every two weeks since it wasn’t anyone’s assigned spot. It was right up against Spillover, and as I now knew, that meant that there were probably several ways for Othersiders to get in besides over the Barriers like Gazers did.

  Or under them. Just because we had never seen Othersiders digging tunnels, that didn’t mean they couldn’t, or wouldn’t. I was beginning to have my suspicions about those storm sewers too. How hard would it be to figure out where the hatches were and break into them from the Spillover side? It might take a good long while, but if the Barriers didn’t go down as well as up…or didn’t go down more than, say, six or eight feet…it would just be a matter of the Othersiders figuring out that they could get in that way without being detected, then doing the work.

  Maybe I couldn’t find anything, not because it wasn’t happening, but because it wasn’t happening in the open. After all, in old books we had up at the Monastery, prisoners of war escaped by digging tunnels all the time, and they did it with guards watching them day and night.

  Truth to tell, while I missed working with Knight, it felt good to be on my own. I only had to look out for myself, not anyone else, and if I thought of the buildings as rocks or cliff-faces, this wasn’t too unlike being home.

  And like home, in between sweeps, there were a lot of little nuisances to be herded up—all of them flyers and small enough to miss being detected as they zipped over the Barriers. There were the Fay, smaller and lighter versions of the Goblins, about the size of butterflies. Really cute, until they bit you and the wound started blistering and festering immediately from their poison, and even their spit was toxic. If I saw one Fay, I knew there were dozens within a few feet of it, so I just made a net over the area and tightened it down. It didn’t have to be strong, so I could spread the magic thinner than I did the net I used on the Gazers—the same amount of magic, but more like a spiderweb than a fishing net. Fay like to torment things, and I got lucky; I saw a flock of them torturing a rabbit before they saw me. I cast my net over them and tightened it down before they had any idea I was there, and I let Dusana have them.

  I cleared out six more flocks of the little terrors by the time I was done with the surface of F-22. Then it was time to check those storm sewers. Honestly? I was expecting worse than I found. I was expecting Knockers. Instead, I got Kobolds. Like Knockers, only smaller, weaker, and cowardly. A tribe of them might be able to hurt a child—and children were their favorite prey, because it was easy to scare kids, and they seem to get a kind of high off of human fear. But they were no match for us. The Hounds herded them like sheepdogs, got a good group rounded up, then went to work. I didn’t shoot so much as a single bullet all day.

  But we covered a lot of ground, though by no means the entire territory, and I was pretty weary by the time I sent my sated Hounds back and called the pod. F-22 was a lot bigger than I had thought, and to be absolutely honest, I don’t think we got to more than a quarter of it. Working our way through those overgrown piles of rubble was tough. It was easier to work through a forest!

  When I got back, it was late—pretty much everyone else had already eaten. But Mark was still in the mess hall and he grinned when he saw me. And so was Karly. In triumph, she waved the last bite of a fish taco at me and popped it in her mouth with a grin. I rolled my eyes, then put together dinner from what was left, and went over to join them. My Perscom pinged as I sat down and I checked it reflexively.

  “Well, that’s a pain,” I said, irritated. “I thought everything here in Apex was supposed to be flawless.”

  Mark laughed at that. Funny thing, he was laughing a lot more since he and I had partnered up. “They’d like the turnips to believe that, yes. What’s the matter?”

  “Nothing big.” I nibbled what had looked like a square of cornbread. To my pleasure, it was a square of cornbread. Cornbread and chili…It really was feeling like home today. “Just there’s some glitch that they can’t track down. They told me to work F-22 today, and now they want me to keep doing it, but the actual schedule still says Karly is supposed to be there, and I’m supposed to be in Karly’s old territory. They just told me to ignore the schedule.” It was countersigned by the armorer, so I didn’t see any reason to doubt it. Karly checked her Perscom. “Same here,” she agreed. “Probably some Tech punched in the wrong code somewhere.”

  Mark nodded and sipped at his drink; clearly he was not at all averse to keeping me company. I was glad; even though it had been good to solo, it was always better to be around people when you got off patrolling. “That happens once in a while. About six months ago, the schedule showed Dazzle and me with switched territories. Can you imagine Dazzle working Spillover?”

  I pulled up her vid-feed from today on my Perscom, which showed her going over pages and pages and pages of outfits. “At least she’d look good doing it,” I said as I showed it to Mark, who rolled his eyes but smiled.

  “How tired are you?” he asked out of the blue.

  Well that got me curious. “Not very. Walked a lot, but I’m used to that. Why?”

  “I just wondered if you’d had a chance to try out the swimming pool yet,” he said diffidently. “And wondered if you could swim, actually.”

  Swimming pool? I swam in ponds at home, of course. And I vaguely knew what a swimming pool was—a sort of artificial pond. “No, and yes,” I replied.

  “Well, would you like to? It’s one of my favorite places to relax. At this time of night it’s popular, but not crazy.” He glanced over at Karly. “You too, taco thief.”

  “Sure!” I said with enthusiasm because, really, who doesn’t like swimming? I didn’t worry about if the designers had supplied me with a bathing suit, even though I hadn’t picked one out myself. I hadn’t picked out underwear or nightshirts either, but I had a ton of both. By
now I knew that the designers, given the option, would have supplied me with twenty. “Should I meet you there?” I asked, knowing my Perscom would show me the way.

  “Absolutely.” He seemed very pleased. Well, yeah. I had myself a good little chuckle over that one. Because, after all, Knight was a Christer, and most of the Christers I knew were practically body phobic about showing anything. Except, of course, it was perfectly all right to show some flesh if you were swimming.

  We both turned to look at Karly. She shook her head. “I’m bowing out,” she stated. “I swim just well enough to keep from drowning and I do not consider it a pleasure. I like my water hot, in good long baths and showers.”

  I left the mess hall and trotted back to my room. Sure enough, there were not one, but three swimming suits in the closet, all charcoal and silver of course. I picked the one that would cover up the most, just to spare Knight, although I toyed for just a little bit with the notion of wearing the one that was mostly straps….

  But I liked Knight and I didn’t want him to be so embarrassed that he went and drowned because he was trying so hard not to look at my boobs and butt.

  I threw the suit over my shoulder and trotted off down the hall. My Perscom took me to a whole other part of the building marked “Recreation.” It puzzled me for just a second, when I read it as “re-creation” and tried to figure out what swimming had to do with re-making anything. Then I realized what it was. We didn’t call it “recreation” on the Mountain, we called it “having fun,” or “playing games.” But hey, we’re turnips.

  They had a whole two rooms, male and female, just for changing clothing. Funny. The Masters and monks teach us all not to be body shy, and half the time when we’re soaking in the communal baths, we’re all naked, being too tired and sore to take the time to do more than strip down and get clean before we soak our bruises in hot water. When you’ve just been beating back a pack of Black Dogs, trust me, getting sexy even with the best-looking guy on the planet is the last thing on your mind anyway.

  So I came out of the changing room into this big, echoing room under enormous light panels, with a huge rectangular cement tank full of water in the middle of it. It was the cleanest body of water I had ever seen in my life—that was what struck me most. Our ponds were nice, and they were clean and the water smelled good, but they weren’t crystal clear like this was. It was very artificial, and very inviting. Knight was already there, in a pair of baggy white trunks. I have to say, he was nicely muscled all over. Made me glad I had at least something to show in my suit, instead of the two little bug bites I’d had for a chest a couple of years ago. I padded up to him in my bare feet and grinned.

  “That looks like one fancy see-ment pond there, mister!” I said, trying to really sound like a turnip, and he laughed. “Is it cold?”

  “Jump in and find out, and I’ll race you,” he offered.

  I snorted. “If you’re going to race me, we have to do it right. Diving start.” I wasn’t worried about it being too cold. Remember where I’m from. The only way we get hot water on the Mountain is from the one hot spring where the Monastery is, or if we heat it ourselves in big boilers for baths. The only way water’s too cold for me is if it has ice floating in it.

  He seemed game enough, so we did a proper race. Mark was bigger and stronger, but there was less of me to push through the water, so we came out pretty close, me touching the wall just a little behind him. After that we just swam lazily back and forth for a while, then took turns diving (which I love even though I am no good at it), then swam some more until we were both getting wrinkly hands and that kind of good, lazy tired that means you’re going to sleep really well. There were some other people there, most of them not Hunters, which was interesting—I mean, I knew in theory that there were other people living and working here, and obviously things like the food weren’t coming out of thin air, but this was the first time I’d seen any of them. Most of them seemed to know each other, and organized a game at one corner of the pool that involved a ball and a net. It looked like fun, but I was tired, and I felt kind of odd about just joining them.

  Something occurred to me at that moment—it was almost as if nothing whatsoever had happened out there, when Paules got himself killed. Why was that? Had Ace, and by extension, Paules, made himself so disliked that none of the ordinary folks that worked here felt any sense of loss at all?

  I remembered what Josh had said about Ace…that Ace had treated him like something beneath him. So maybe it wasn’t so much that Paules had made himself disliked, but that his brother had, and people just transferred what they felt about Ace to his brother.

  Karma, I thought, and reminded myself sharply that no matter how mean Ace had been, no one deserves to see someone close to you die. Especially not like that.

  Mark and I parted at the changing rooms, and since he hadn’t said anything about wanting to see me back to my room, I didn’t hurry in changing. But he was waiting when I came out.

  Okay, I have to admit, I was happy about that. Even though all he did was quickly hug my shoulders and say, “Good Hunting tomorrow, Joy.”

  I managed to hug him back before he strode away. “Same to you, Mark,” I called after him. “And thanks!”

  It was beginning to feel like I had a new best friend in Mark and a big sister in Karly. I went back to my room grinning like an idiot and feeling good all over, and went straight to sleep without even bothering to check my channel.

  So, by the third day, I had figured out it was going to take me four days to work all of F-22, which gave me a rough idea of how I wanted to cover it. Obviously I didn’t want to fall into a predictable pattern, or any smart Othersiders would just move to stay one step ahead of me. I did have maps of the storm sewer system, which helped when we went underground there, but I had the feeling even though I was trying to be unpredictable, I wasn’t so much Hunting the sewers as just chasing what was down there elsewhere down the line. That was irritating. Even more irritating was the growing suspicion that somewhere, there was a way into these sewers from the outside. Maybe it wasn’t a big opening, but that was enough to let a lot of nasty stuff in. By the time I got to the fourth day, I was pondering ways of temporarily closing off parts of the tunnels so I could at least chase things into dead ends that they weren’t expecting. Could I convince headquarters to put in some sort of gate system down here?

  I could do that in a mine—but this was a sewer. The problem with a gate was that stuff that got washed into the sewer would get hung up on a physical barrier, which would mean sending someone down here periodically to clean it out, which—no, that was no solution.

  The problem was, to me, it looked as if Apex had near-infinite resources, but that surely couldn’t be the case if we still had people exiled in Spillover. So I wondered, as Bya and I nosed through a rubble pile, looking for little nuisances hiding among the roots, just how much energy and materials that would cost. And how would I persuade someone else that it was something needed if I couldn’t even persuade myself?

  And that was when the alarm on my Perscom went off. It had never done that before—and even as I was turning my wrist to look at it, a mechanical voice came out of the speaker.

  Hunter down, FF-12. Hunter down, FF-12. Hunter down, FF-12. Nearest Hunter respond. Nearest Hunter—

  FF-12? Factory Farm Twelve? I knew that territory number! That was Karly!

  I wasn’t the nearest Hunter, I was miles away. Forever far—but I started running anyway, because I wasn’t going to just stand there when my first friend here was in trouble—

  Then Dusana came out of nowhere and literally blocked me. I ran into his side and bounced off. Before I could scream at him in fury to get out of my way, Bya shoved his nose between my legs and boosted me up to the top of Dusana’s back. Like I was mounting a horse!

  Dusana was bigger than a horse, and I had never, ever ridden him before. He’d never offered, I’d never asked. But with Bya’s shove, I scrambled aboard and grabbed at t
he spiky, bristly neck-crest that passed for his mane, clamping my legs around his torso.

  Hold on! he said in my head. This might have been the third or fourth time in our lives that he’d talked to me—mostly Bya does the talking for all of them. I crouched down and held on for dear life, having no idea what was coming next.

  Then my stomach turned inside out, my lungs went upside down, and my eyeballs tried to drill themselves into my skull as he bamphed. With me on him. He bamphed!

  Not even the Masters had ever said they could bamph with a passenger. If I hadn’t been fighting something a hundred times worse than vertigo and trying not to throw up, I might have been stunned from the shock.

  We landed as if he was jumping over an obstacle, and I vaguely recognized that we’d gone line-of-sight for about a mile, when he gathered himself and did it again. And again. My inner ear and my gut were sure we were going to die, and my brain didn’t want to register what my eyes thought they were seeing. Partly because I was still seeing things with my eyes squeezed tight shut.

  Finally he stopped bamphing and held stock-still; I slid off and threw up—but I knew we were in Karly’s territory, right by one of the storm sewer access hatches, and it was open, with one of her Hounds flat and dead beside it. I stumbled to my feet as soon as I stopped vomiting and ran for the sewer hatch, all my Hounds beside me. Bya and Shinje bamphed down ahead of me as I grabbed for the top of the ladder. I could already tell there was something badly wrong, because the lights were out. I did something risky, put my insteps on the outside of the ladder and slid down instead of climbing down.

  Ahead of me, I could hear my Hounds growling; the kind of high-pitched growl that means they’d come across something really nasty and dangerous. I couldn’t see anything, and I wasn’t going in there with no lights, even though I could smell blood. But Dazzle was a good teacher and I’m a fast learner; before I even took time to think about what I was doing, my hand shot out and a ball of light like a tiny sun hurtled from it, hit the ceiling, stuck there, and blazed.