“That makes sense.” Josh nodded. “There’s a lot fewer Psimons powerful enough to control a Vamp than there are Hunters, and—well, they’re pretty much monitored day and night.” He made a face. I knew why. No one trusts the really powerful Psimons. I mean, seriously, someone who can get into your head and make you do anything he wants? You can’t blame people for not trusting them. Even I had been glad for the Psi-shield I had in my Perscom when I was around Josh.
Mark sucked on his lower lip. “I suppose,” he admitted reluctantly. “There are a lot more Hunters, and with Hounds, you can corner a Vamp and herd it where you want it, basically. I mean, between the ones under the prefect and the ones in the army, there are a couple hundred Hunters in Apex alone, and it pretty much could be any of them.” He laughed mirthlessly. “Even me.”
Josh ran a hand through his hair and grimaced just the tiniest bit. “The prefect wouldn’t have sent me to talk to you if you weren’t trustworthy.” At that moment, Kalachakra decided to go over and wrap herself around Josh’s ankles. He scratched her absentmindedly and she sighed with happiness.
Mark looked at that gesture of trust sourly. He knew what it meant. When Hounds have a bond with their Hunter the way mine do with me, well, they have fine-tuned instincts for people who can’t be trusted. So no matter what Mark wanted to think, Josh was here for exactly the reason he claimed: to try to help me figure out how I could defend myself. It was the skulking around that was the worst. The not knowing. “If I could just drive him into the open—” I muttered between clenched teeth. “If I could just figure out a way to find him out—” I pounded my knee with my fist. “If only I were home!” I snarled. “I could challenge him, no matter who he was, even if I couldn’t prove he was the one that killed Karly. Or if I could just get myself into a position where I was too valuable to mess with, I could—” I stopped, because suddenly…was it possible? Was that the way? Make myself too important to touch?
“What?” Josh and Mark demanded together, seeing the look on my face.
“How do you become Elite?” I asked.
They were silent for a moment. “Good Lord, that’s risky—” Josh said slowly.
Mark nodded. “But she’s right. If she can pull this off—”
“No one will ever be able to touch her afterward,” Josh finished.
“So there is a way!” I said.
Finally it was Mark who turned to me. “Yes. It’s actually pretty simple. You petition the armorer for Hunter Elite.”
Josh nodded. “You can petition to take the trials and no one will question if you’re good enough. You are that good. You faced down a Folk Mage. You took out a Wyvern and a Vamp solo. You’re a seven-Hound team—” He looked around and did a double take. “Wait a minute—”
“Nine Hounds,” I corrected him weakly.
“Nine?” They both gaped at me.
“Hold and Strike—Karly’s Hounds—asked to join my pack.” I shook my head. “Never mind that. Tell me more.”
Mark scratched his head. “I can almost bet no one is going to see this coming. Most Hunters won’t go for Elite. We have regular shifts. Elites are on call twenty-four-seven. No regular shifts, no regular territories, and they don’t have channels like the regular Hunters do, because they’re going after things we don’t want the Cits to think about, or Hunting in places we don’t want the Cits to know Othersiders can get into. We get to go do fan-service, which even Karly thought was fun. They don’t. Every six months or so, you get some upgrades, if you’re a ranker, based on your rankings. Bigger quarters, nicer things, a little more time off. Elites don’t get any of that, because they’re not in the quarters long enough to do more than sleep, and they never get time off unless they’re hurt and recovering.”
“Never mind that,” I interrupted. “How do I make Elite after I petition?”
“To get Elite you have to pass Combat Trials. Nobody has passed in at least a year—and it’s risky, because these are full-combat, no-holding-back trials that end with you versus another Hunter, and even though the trials stop cold if the Hunter gets hurt, there can be accidents.” He waited to see if I got it.
“So, you can get hurt, which really sucks, and you could be out and not on your channel, and—” I raised my eyebrow.
“And no one will know why, because the Trials aren’t broadcast until after they are over, and only if you passed.” Mark nodded. “So you aren’t Hunting or on your channel, which means your rankings fall while you recover.”
I thought that over. It made sense. It would be humiliating enough to go for Elite only to fail—why humiliate the Hunter further by making that failure public? And why crater the Cits’ estimation of him? But if you got hurt, no one would know that either. They’d only know your channel was showing old vid and, people being people, would figure you were slacking.
“So…I’m guessing at least a couple of Hunters have been worse than just hurt?” I continued.
“Years ago, but yeah, there’s been at least one death that I know of.” Mark confirmed my guess. “Now, they will stop the trial if you get hurt, because we can’t afford to lose Hunters; that was something everyone agreed to after the last death. But you are absolutely right. Once you’re Elite, you’re practically untouchable.”
“And once you’ve passed the Trials, not only will it not be possible for someone to come after you, not even the prefect’s worst enemy in the world would try to use you as a pawn,” Josh concluded. “That would be insane. If we can’t afford to lose Hunters, we doubly can’t afford to lose an Elite. From everything I’ve seen or heard, the Elites are tight. If they thought someone was messing with one of their own…they’d do something about it, and whatever it was, it wouldn’t be anything anyone would be happy about.”
I felt resolution build. “It doesn’t help me figure out who killed Karly. But what it does do is clear the way for me and Uncle to work to find that out ourselves. That makes sense. I get off the chessboard. Then we can figure out what’s going on and who’s pulling the strings where.”
“And Elites report directly to the prefect too,” Mark pointed out. “That not only makes you and your uncle safer, it makes it possible for you to talk whenever you need to. I won’t lie, Joy, this is going to be hard, but I think you can do it. I’ve seen you in combat. You’ll be doing this without your Hounds, but that’s not a handicap for you.”
Well, I had to agree with them. I looked at Bya. He nodded solemnly, and I stood up, my nine Hounds with me. “Right, then.” I looked at Mark. “So, how do I apply?”
I STOOD IN something they called a “Sky Box”—which was more like a luxurious apartment with lots of windows in it—and looked down at the Rayne Stadium. This stadium was a new construction, so far as Apex was concerned; it wasn’t more than twenty years old. Before that, the idea of gathering that many Cits together in one place would have been insane—laying out a giant buffetOthersiders simply could not resist. Today, no one would be watching except other Hunters, and not from the stadium itself.
No one else would see this until after the Trials were over.
It turned out that applying for Hunter Elite had been astoundingly simple. And in the few days it had taken for them to schedule the Trials…no one and nothing had made a try at me. It had been in the back of my mind after I proposed the idea that this might actually push whoever was after my hide—if, in fact, anyone was—into making one more attempt. But nothing happened. Mind, every time I had gone out Hunting, I had been so much on alert that I actually shot two cams out of the air…and at least one of my Hounds slept with me every night…so maybe, just maybe, they had given it up as a lost cause.
“You’re absolutely sure about this, Joy?” the armorer murmured from just behind me. “You can say you’ve changed your mind, even now. But once you set foot on the turf down there, you’re committed.”
“Absolutely,” I said firmly.
“All right then.” I heard him turn; I kept looking down at the field. �
��She’s all yours, Citizen Pierce.”
Now I turned to find myself facing a woman I had seen on the vid channels a lot. Gayle Pierce; I remembered the name. She was wearing an outfit that was impossibly stylish, and she was surrounded by cams.
“Joyeaux!” she exclaimed, as if we were old friends—which, I suppose, she certainly wanted everyone to think we were. “I can’t say I ever anticipated interviewing you like this when you first arrived here!”
I smiled very slightly and nodded. “I can’t say I ever expected to have this much attention paid to me,” I replied, trying to sound modest. “It’s an unexpected and overwhelming honor.” The cams were vidding, of course. This was going to be part of the broadcast that would be played before they showed my Trials. Not live, of course. So far as my fans were concerned, I was getting a training day. Still, I’d have to tread carefully.
“Well, what everyone wants to know is this: why did you decide to apply for Hunter Elite now?” she asked. “You’re the fastest trender ever. Why give all that up to become Elite?”
“Well, Gayle, when I first got here, they asked me what I wanted,” I replied, using her first name, implying that same “special relationship” she was banking on. “I told them that my reason for being here is to serve and protect the Citizens. Now that I’m here, now that I’ve seen how the Hunters here in civilization work, I know the best way I can do that is to try to join the Elite. The Elite take on the creatures beyond the Barriers, making sure they never come near Apex, so our Cits remain safe.”
“But what if you fail the Trials?” she asked breathlessly.
“Then I’ll work harder, learn more, and apply again,” I told her.
“But what made you decide you were ready now?” she persisted.
I took a deep breath. “I’ll show you,” I said, and right then and there, I formed the Glyphs and cast them, and my Hounds came through.
All nine of them.
I have to say, she counted—did a faint double take and counted again—and the look on her face was worth gold. “I’d like you to meet my pack,” I said into the silence and to the cameras. “Bya, Dusana, Begtse, Chenresig, Shinje, Kalachakra, and Hevajra all came with me. But Hold and Strike have just joined my pack in the last few days. They are the survivors of my mentor Hunter Karly’s pack. And because they chose to join me, making our pack the strongest that has ever existed in the history of the Hunters, I decided that the best way to honor Karly’s memory was to try for Elite until I won it.”
This was quite the bombshell; I hadn’t told anyone other than Mark and Josh about how Karly’s Hounds had joined mine, so no one but us knew until this point. Josh had been the one who had advised me to keep it quiet until the last minute. He figured that it would make a big impression at the inevitable interview. Josh also said it might rattle whoever our enemy was, and make him slip up, revealing himself. I thought, why not? It was worth trying.
“Hunter Karly’s Hounds—” Gayle was as close to stammering as her training and composure would allow. She put her left hand up to her left ear. “Well, Joy, you certainly know how to drop a bomb on an interview!”
I shrugged, gesturing at the Hounds. “I guess they’re like Hunter Karly herself was; they are as focused on protecting the Citizens as she was, and they know I am too.”
“Your Hounds will not be allowed to participate in the Trials; does that make any difference to you?” Pierce said, getting her composure back.
I shook my head. “Being Elite means you can take care of yourself in case you and the pack get separated. Besides, it’s not a trial for them—we already know how good they are. It’s a trial of my abilities.”
“And whatever surprises you can bring to the table!” Gayle giggled. “Well, I predicted you would be full of surprises for us the first time I introduced you on vid!”
“And obviously you were right, Gayle,” I said with a little smile.
She actually simpered. I guess reporters respond to flattery just like about everyone else. “Well, I hope the rest of your surprises are all good ones for you, Hunter Joyeaux! Good Hunting in your Trials! This has been an interview with Hunter Joyeaux Charmand; Gayle Pierce for Apex News.”
The cams all zipped away, and Pierce turned off the high-intensity charm. “Good interview, Hunter, and thank you for keeping your little surprise until I could get to you,” she said.
I hadn’t saved it for her, but I wasn’t about to tell her that.
“I’m glad I could help,” was all I said. She looked at me curiously.
“You really mean that, don’t you?” she said, sounding surprised.
“It’s what we do,” I told her, in all seriousness. “Hunters, that is. Help.”
She blinked at me, for once at a loss for words. Finally she found some. “You are very like your uncle.” The way she said that, it was clearly not a compliment—more like a statement of something that baffled her. But I chose to take it as a compliment.
“I certainly hope so,” I replied, and checked my Perscom. “Looks to be just about time.”
“So it is.” She snatched the last remaining cam out of the air and stuck it in her bag. “Good luck in the Trials. I think Apex could use an Elite like you.” And she sounded a little surprised at herself for saying it.
A few minutes later, I followed the directions on my Perscom, which took me through a locker room and out into a tunnel that would dump me onto the manicured turf of the stadium. Well, what used to be the manicured turf of the stadium. I was wearing Hunt gear and carrying a full load-out. Josh and Mark and I had been going over the Trials documents practically word by word, so we had made sure of two things. The first was that every bit of my load-out was waterproofed, because the documents had specified a certain amount of swimming. The second was that I had little packs, about a mouthful each, of very dense energy food, sugar and protein combined. Wasn’t the best thing I had ever eaten, but I knew I was going to need it.
I came out of the tunnel into the light. I knew in general what I was about to face, and there were a limited number of obstacles that could be presented. But I wasn’t going to have any time to think about what I saw. I was going to have to take everything on the fly and react to it immediately. The speaker system that I guessed they used for big events here came to life. “When you are ready, Hunter,” someone said. I didn’t recognize the voice. In front of me was—a gauntlet.
The “series of dangerous obstacles” sort of gauntlet, of course. And timed. All the Trials were timed. The moment I started, the clock started ticking, and if I didn’t finish before that clock ran out…I failed.
This first of the Trials was a path I was going to run along that spiraled into a safe zone in the middle. And this was why I was going to need those energy packs. I was going to be spending energy. A lot of energy.
And there was something else going on here, something I had not told Josh or Mark, because they’d never have gone along with this plan if I had.
There was every chance that someone would be able to booby-trap these tests. Whoever’d been able to sneak a Vamp into the sewers could just as easily have the access to make one or more of the things I was going to face deadly.
Ahead of me was a green path with tree and bush stand-ins on either side. This part of the Trials was all evasive, but it was going to be pretty showy, and I had no doubt there were cams everywhere. I tried not to think too much about how many of the things I was going to be evading could have been tampered with. Right, I told myself. How different is this from Hunting? It’s not. You just have to be sharp. I took a deep breath and started running.
And I brought up my Shield. Except my Shield, like that Folk Mage’s, wasn’t just tuned against magic.
My Shield probably wouldn’t stop a real gunshot, but what I was supposed to be coming up against were nerfed arrows and spears and rubber bullets. They’d hurt if they hit me, but between my Wall and the dodging I was going to be doing, I was pretty sure there wasn’t going to be a lot
that got through.
Right at the first jag on the trail, I caught a hint of movement and flung myself sideways. A nerfed spear zinged out of the “brush” and glanced off my Shield. I kept right on going at the same speed.
All my nerves felt on fire. Arrows and spears, even real ones, I could deflect, no problem. But bullets…Just keep that Shield tight. And keep dodging.
I felt the path rising under my feet and I knew I was about to hit the next part of the Trials. The reason why my load-out was waterproofed. I didn’t have a lot of time when I hit the top of the ramp and saw it—the long stretch of water between me and the next part of the path.
I was going full speed, and I didn’t hesitate. At the edge of the water I pushed off into a long, flat dive. The requirement was that I swim underwater for a hundred and fifty feet. Soon my fingers hit the end of the tank, and I grabbed the rungs of the ladder I found there, hauled myself up and out, and hit the trail running again.
I was met by blasts of literally freezing air, so frigid it made fog and had little ice crystals in it. In seconds I was bone cold. Is there someone counting on the cold to slow me down? I forced myself to push through the cold and kept going.
Then I did come to a screeching halt, right at the edge of the next obstacle.
Ahead of me was another tank, this time full of something that might look just like mud, but which I knew was going to be more like quicksand. Dotted across this tank were little green islands just a bit bigger than my foot. Some of them were supported. Some of them were not, and would sink right under me, leaving me floundering in the mud.
But I wasn’t a city-raised Hunter….
I had the tank in seconds and tested my theory as to which lump of stuff was safe by trying the nearest tussock to me. Some of them had moss and some had grass. It was almost the same length, but if you are raised out in turnip land, you know moss from grass at a glance. I got mud-splashed, which only added to the fun of wet, freezing clothes, but I made it to the other side without slipping but once. Then I lit out running again.
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