Elite: A Hunter novel (14 page)

My Hounds didn’t much care for it either, and they went alert and cautious. One or another would peel off from the pack to check out side tunnels or suspicious sounds every few minutes. I was letting Myrrdhin and Bya handle all that; there was no way, with my limited human senses, that I would be better at deciding what to investigate than they were.

And I was very grateful for the flashlight installed on the top of my shotgun where sights would be on a rifle. There were too many shadows down here; I liked being able to flood where my gun was pointing with light.

I was just about ready to turn everyone around and start making our way back, when Gwalchmai called us.
I believe you should all come here. There is a body,
he said in my mind.
It is freshly dead.

Well, that left out it being a victim of the flood.
Human, or Othersider?
I asked.

Human,
came the reply, making my heart sink.

All the things it could have been ran through my head as the rest of the pack and I caught up with Gwalchmai in a side tunnel, one without a camera and with only one feeble little light in it. I dreaded finding it was a maintenance worker. It would be almost as bad to discover one of the police. Was it possible it could be an ordinary Cit who had managed to get a door open and had gone wandering down here out of curiosity? I had a weird and unsettling wave of all kinds of stuff come over me: anger and grief—mostly grief—and fear, to the point where I had to stop for a moment and put a hand on the wall to steady myself. My throat got tight and my eyes stung, and suddenly, as I choked back a sob, I understood why. The last body I’d found in a sewer tunnel had been Karly’s….

But when the beam from my flashlight fell on the body, I saw with a shock by the black-and-silver uniform that it was none of these things.

It was a Psimon. I felt sick and a little scared and jumpy all at the same time.

I was as much puzzled as I was shocked. Why was a Psimon down here in the first place? I hesitated a moment, then decided not to get any closer than I was. Because I’d seen vid-dramas, and I knew enough about police stuff to realize this might just be a murder scene, and anyone who was going to investigate didn’t need me trampling all over the evidence. Nor did they need any magical presence other than Gwalchmai near the body. There was such a thing as forensic magic, and if eleven Hounds and I swarmed the vicinity, it would be as bad as sending a herd of kids romping all over the place.

Are there any wounds, or other signs of violence?
I asked Gwalchmai.

No,
he said shortly.

Well…that didn’t necessarily eliminate murder. It just meant there was no blood, and nothing on the part of the body that Gwalchmai could see.
Come back,
I told him, as the others gathered closely around me.
I need to call this in.

I was shivering as I did so. It’s not that I am a stranger to death; no Hunter is—usually horrible, violent death. I’ve seen nearly twenty folks dead in my life, a lot more hurt bad, and come way too close to death myself more than I like to think. But this…this was putting the hair on the back of my neck up. “Hunter Joyeaux,” I said. “I’m in sector 832 of the storm tunnels. Psimon down, fatality, cause unknown.”

The comm link went very, very quiet. As I stood there in the semidarkness, every movement we made, every click of claw or shuffle of feet echoing strangely out of the tunnels around us, I felt a cold sickness in my gut. This was wrong in ways I couldn’t quite quantify but certainly felt.

“Have you approached the body?”
came the reply, finally. It wasn’t a voice I recognized. Not one of my usual dispatchers.

“No, sir,” I said promptly. “One of my Hounds discovered the Psimon and ascertained he was deceased. I kept all the rest away and have not approached myself.”

“PsiCorps verifies they will handle it from here. You are to vacate the immediate area and make your way to your exit promptly and without further investigation. HQ out.”

All I could think was,
Well, all right, then.
Orders were orders, and I followed them. I wasn’t going to go blindly, of course, nor was I going to leave something behind me to ambush me from the rear, so I sent the Hounds around to cover everything that might hold a nasty surprise behind us, and headed back to my exit. They didn’t find anything else—more to the point, they didn’t find any signs of what could have killed the Psimon. I didn’t know whether to be more worried or relieved.

On the other hand, I most certainly
did
want to be away from that spot as fast as I could. I suspected that PsiCorps would send its own to see to this…and I didn’t want to be there when they came. They would certainly notice I wore a Psi-shield. They might want to know why. They might order me to turn it off, and they would be perfectly within their rights to do so, seeing as I had found a Psimon dead. And I had no idea if my mantra of One White Stone would be sufficient to keep them out of my memories of the Mountain, the Monastery, and the Masters. It worked well enough against the Folk, but…high-ranking Psimons were supposed to be better than even the Folk Mages at psionics.

It hadn’t been lost on me that most Hunters don’t like PsiCorps. PsiCorps
really
doesn’t like Hunters. Most people, not just Hunters, don’t trust them, and I don’t know why they don’t like us, unless they don’t like all the attention we get. Worst case, my finding a dead Psimon was going to look very…unusual, and no one likes “unusual.” And if PsiCorps decided to make an issue out of it, they’d want to know why I was down here and not the regular police, since this was under the Hub and so
supposedly
safe. Then they’d be asking how I found the body “so easily,” and might try to imply I knew the Psimon was in trouble and
let
him die.

The only way to completely establish my innocence would be to take off my Psi-shield and let them waltz through my skull, which…was not going to happen. The best I could hope for would be that they would leave me alone.

When I emerged from the tunnels, I knew I was not going to get my wish. There was a Psimon waiting for me, standing beside a waiting pod. He was nothing like Josh; his backbone was so straight he could have had a poker instead of a spine, and he literally had
no
expression on his face. He was bald as an egg, and he could have been a statue or a giant doll. He hid his eyes behind a dark visor, and it was clear from the way he turned to watch me lock up the entrance that he had been waiting for me.

“Elite Hunter Joyeaux Charmand,” he said, making it a statement, not a question.

I suppressed a shudder at his cold tone, turned, and faced him. “Yes, sir,” I replied. “At your service, Senior Psimon.”

I’d been down there all afternoon, and the sun was well into the west. It was behind me and glared into his face. He didn’t seem to notice.

He didn’t beat around the bush at all. “You are to say nothing about the unfortunate victim you found under the Hub,” he told me severely. “That is a direct order, Hunter.”

Not that he had any right whatsoever to give me orders. The Hunters reported to Uncle and Premier Rayne and no one else. But the last thing I wanted to do was to give him any excuse to look deeper than the surface. So I just dropped my eyes and nodded and said, “Understood, Senior Psimon.”

He looked at me coldly for a moment longer, not with any curiosity, though I guessed he was trying to gauge whether or not I would obey him. So I added, “What do I say to my superiors, Senior Psimon? If they ask?”

“That PsiCorps thanks you for discovering our unfortunate comrade and is undertaking an investigation on its own,” he said.

“Thank you, Senior Psimon,” I replied, and that seemed to satisfy him. Without another word, he got into the pod, and it whirred off. I waited until he was well out of sight before heaving a sigh of relief and summoning a pod of my own.

When I got back to my room after dinner, my message indicator was flashing. But when I pulled up the message, I got something I had never seen before.

First, the words
State your designation and name
flashed on the screen. Puzzled, I said aloud, “Elite Hunter Joyeaux Charmand,” and the screen flashed with
Voice recognition verified.
Then the screen said
State unlock code found on your Perscom.
I checked my Perscom, and sure enough, a text message headed “Unlock Code” had just been sent to it. I opened the message and spoke the words aloud, just some nonsense strung together for a security code.
Unlock code verified
said the screen, and a simple text message appeared.

It pretty much said the same thing that the Psimon had said, but in more detail—you know, the sort of detail you’d go into with a five-year-old who is trying to find a loophole in your orders not to eat the cookies. “But what if I just nibble the edge? But what if I just lick them?” A first, I thought it was insulting, actually, and I started to get angry, when it occurred to me that if they were being this condescending they were hopefully underestimating me.

But then my latent paranoia kicked in, and it stopped being insulting and started being frightening.
Remember that even the Elite are not immune to disciplinary actions if you violate orders,
it continued.
Discipline can include your home community as well as yourself.

It ended with
need not reply,
which is just as well, since I might have been tempted to say something I shouldn’t have. First they send a senior Psimon to loom over me and intimidate me.
Then
, when I think I’m in the clear, they follow it up with a threatening message? They threaten my
home
? Then I got scared all over again at how easily they had manipulated me into being angry.
Psimons know
all
the buttons to push,
I reminded myself. And they must have known damn well that with a turnip like me, threatening my people was absolutely where I was most vulnerable. Well, look how Mark Knight got blackmailed into being sent here! I had let myself get complacent about them, being with Josh so much. But Josh wasn’t like the Psimons that my Masters had warned me about, or like the one I had just encountered. That one was much more like the Psimons I had been told to avoid. Even if they didn’t get directly into my head, it was clear they knew exactly how to manipulate me so I’d let things slip or let stuff about home get into my surface thoughts where it would more easily be read.

And where there were hidden Hunters, it wouldn’t take much for the Psimons to figure out there were probably hidden Psi-talents just waiting to be gathered up. If my people back home tried to resist having their protectors snatched away, they’d probably find themselves facing the army…and if they didn’t, there’d be nothing between them and the Othersiders but their physical weapons and the snow.

I’d been complacent. I hadn’t been thinking. That had to stop, right now.

Just as I came to that conclusion, I got an
incoming call
alert on my vid-screen and accepted it without looking to see who it was first.

“Hunter Joy,” said my uncle, with a hint of a sardonic smile. “You’ve likely heard from the PsiCorps by now.”

“Twice,” I said sourly. “I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I am not to talk about what I found except with my superiors.”

Uncle nodded, as if that was exactly what he had expected. “Your conclusion?”

I blinked. “Uh…speculation, sir. This is not the first PsiCorps body that’s been found down there.”
Which is why you sent me and not someone else.

“What PsiCorps forgets is that I am the prefect of police,” he said, with steel in his voice. “Evidence of a serial murderer beneath my city is more than enough justification for me to order an investigation, regardless of the wishes of PsiCorps, and I have done so. But meanwhile, since you are already assigned to patrol down there, I would like you to keep me informed if—when—you find any more bodies.”

“Vid, sir?” I said. I was reasonably sure this exchange was not being recorded and was probably encrypted.