Elite: A Hunter novel (30 page)

The only person I felt like talking to was Mark, but Mark was somewhere else. Phooey.

I wasn’t alone in the lounge, though. Archer was nursing a beer after inhaling more food than I thought any one person could eat, his Hounds all flopped down around him. Scarlet was pensively eating sliced fruit and petting her pack leader; like the rest of her Hounds, he was a mastiff-size bat-winged dog. She had that expression on her face that told me she and he were “talking,” and then she looked up at me and smiled.

“Djinni says he will work with your pack any time we like,” she said as her Hound looked over at us and nodded. “He is very pleased with how the coordination went.” Bya raised his head and dog-grinned at them both.

“I can’t believe we all pulled that off,” I admitted. “If I’d had any idea what we’d be doing, I think I might have thrown up.”

Scarlet laughed, a deep, throaty sound that made Archer look over at her and smile with appreciation. “That’s a silly thing to say. Elite don’t throw up until
after
the fight is over.”

I put my head back against the back of the chair and stared up at the ceiling. “What just happened out there?” I asked nobody in particular.

“It could be the start of what we call a ‘surge,’” Archer said finally. “There was one the year I first went Elite. The Othersiders pick out hard targets and throw so much at them that we’re forced to upgrade defenses all around.” He sighed. “A few bigger cities that don’t have Barriers will have to get them, cities like Zion with walls and 30 mm cannon will have to upgrade to Hellfire missiles, and so on….” He shook his head. “This’ll cost a lot of money, which means less money for other things. That puts stress on the entire system, and a lot of it. That’s one of the drawbacks to making sure the Cits feel safe; they
don’t
feel any urgency to upgrade defenses, not even for themselves. There’s going to be complaints, and people here in Apex, and New Detroit, and the other cities with Barriers will be saying that the smaller places ought to pay for their own defenses. It sets the Cits in the big cities against the ones in the smaller ones, and the smallest towns against everyone. Then people in villages and small towns demand to be let into the big cities, even though there isn’t room for them.”

I said out loud the thing Master Jeffries had suggested. “But what if the Barriers have stopped working?”

“That, my young friend, is something
we
do not need to worry about,” Archer replied. “That’s for the techs and squints. What we Elite will have to worry about is the callouts until defenses get upgraded. What the rank and file of the Hunters will have to worry about is facing what we are not around to handle. If this is a real surge, that is. It might just be one of those random times when the Othersiders throw a massive attack at us for no reason we can tell.”

But I could tell from Archer’s expression that he was pretty certain this was one of those “surges.” Probably because of all the things that had been getting past the Barriers here in Apex and the fact that we’d just seen two brand-new sorts of Othersiders in less than a month.

What do you think?
I asked Bya.

I do not know. And I do not like that I do not know. I am glad we have a big pack; we can keep you safe.
He raised his head, and Myrrdhin, who was lying on the sofa across from us, looked back at him and nodded.

I was thinking of other things…like home, and making sure
they
were going to be all right.
The Monastery will be safe, now I’ve warned them. If things get really bad, everyone can retreat up above the snowline to Safehaven. Even Knight’s people; I don’t think anyone is going to begrudge them shelter just because we haven’t had time to break things to them gently.
After all, it wouldn’t be the first time the Mountain had taken in people who didn’t know the secret.

It may be that this is something else, something new,
Bya said, quite unexpectedly.

Like what?
I asked, startled.

The Folk Mage said to beware, that things were not what they seemed.
Bya looked up at me expectantly.

So?
I replied.

What if he did not mean with us?
Bya asked.
What if he meant—with Them? What if he meant things are not what they seem with the Folk? What if
…
perhaps even the Folk have their sort of politics, and those politics affect us?

I don’t know either, Bya.
I shrugged.
I guess all we can do is hang on for the ride.

I finally had enough energy back to send the Hounds all home by this point, and it seemed a good time to do so.
You ready to go back?
I asked Bya and Myrrdhin. They nodded, and the others got up from where they were sprawled in various parts of the lounge. We moved out into the hall, and since it was momentarily empty, I went ahead and cast the runes there.

As the last of my Hounds went through, I heard a gasp behind me. I turned, and there was Jessie, although it took me a minute to recognize her. She had her hair pulled back in a tail, and she was wearing the kind of uniform the staff wore.

“Jessie Knight?” I said, bewildered. “What are you doing”—
quick, think of a polite way to say it
—“in a crew uniform?”

She hesitated. “Mistuh Severns said it was all right.” She had a thicker accent than Knight did. “I didn’t bring much t’wear, an’ wearin’ it makes me stick out like a sore thumb.”

And the stuff Cits wear makes you feel all wrong.
I could get that. It made
me
feel very strange when I’d gotten all that Hunter gear, and I’m not normally one for turning down pretty new clothes. Given what I knew about the Christers from home, she probably found everything
but
the staff uniforms to be “immodest.”

“Oh, there’s nothing wrong with wearing what makes you feel comfortable!” I said quickly. “I was just surprised to see you in the uniform is all. Uh, did I startle you? I’m sorry—”

“I just ain’t never seen the Ang—I mean, Hounds put away before,” she told me. “Mark never does it in front of me.” She seemed a bit defensive to me, but maybe I was just reading something that wasn’t there.

I shrugged. “Usually we send the Hounds home before we come back to the base, but we were all too tired to do that, so we brought them back with us. It was a rough fight—”

I stopped because she had gone white. “Is Mark—”

Well, that told me she had no idea what we’d been doing, which was probably just as well. “He’s fine; we’re just all tired. He and I were on the same subteam for the whole thing. Last I saw he was eating one potato stick at a time, with his Hounds around him,” I said. “In the little Elite kitchen.”

I could tell she was vibrating between running to make sure he was all right, and staying here and being polite. And there was a flicker of something there too. Anger, maybe, that she hadn’t been told this was going on.

“How d’you know that?” she blurted, and there was resentment in those words. Resentment that
I
had known where her husband was, and she didn’t. And something else flickered across her face for a moment. Doubt, absolutely, and with it, jealousy.

Oh boy. I should have known. Christer girls that I knew all worried that Outsiders would somehow come and steal their men. They can’t seem to grasp the fact that a guy and a female can just be friends.

It probably didn’t help that she’d only been married two days and Mark had run off without telling her where he was going, and that it was a callout. And here I was, telling her basically that I had just spent more time with her husband than she had today.

But she still didn’t leave…still was held by the manners she’d had drilled into her.

And now
I
was torn. What would Mark want? Would he want her falling all over him, fussing at him, when if he was as drained as the rest of us it was all he could do to put one potato stick after another into his mouth? Or would he think she didn’t love him anymore if she
didn’t
come running to fuss over him?

“Go on, see for yourself he’s all right,” I said. “The Perscom will show you the way. Just remember he’s probably so stupid-tired he won’t even be able to remember his own name, much less yours. So don’t expect him to make any grand speeches about our magnificent triumph on the battlefield.”

That startled a half laugh out of her, at least, as if she was surprised that I’d made a joke, and hadn’t expected me to be friendly. “Thankee,” she said, then ran off. I plodded back to my room. I was really glad that shower had a seat in it, because I don’t think I could have stood upright much longer.

I had another dream about Karly. We were standing in the middle of a big, open space. There was nothing at all around, just flat grass as far as the eye could see. We were looking at the horizon, where there was one of those monster storms boiling up. This time I could see it from the beginning, just the tops of the clouds at first, high and far and anviling out. Then more, the clouds growing darker toward the base, then at last, the whole storm itself, black as night at the base and the land underneath it, lightning lancing through the clouds, lighting them up from inside, like a jar full of lightning bugs. More lightning, a
lot
more, striking the ground over and over again, under the base. And I started to panic because it was coming toward us, there was nowhere to hide, and there was nothing I could do to make it stop. In the dream, it never occurred to me I could Shield—all I felt was this paralysis of fear.

And Karly turned toward me, solemnly, and said, “It’s coming.”

That was when I woke up.

I tried to think what it might mean—of course, there was the perfectly obvious, which was that I’d taken Archer’s warning about a “surge” starting, and translated it into dream terms. Being the most obvious, that was probably what it was.

I didn’t have precognitive dreams, although a couple of the monks were supposed to. No one on the Mountain would ever say
who
it was, so the people with the power wouldn’t feel pressured to come up with future-telling all the time. So it probably wasn’t precognitive. It probably was my subconscious warning me Archer was right.

But I knew that if we were going to be in for something like this “surge” thing, I wouldn’t dare send Bya off with messages to my Masters unless I had a good—no, an
overwhelming—
reason to believe we wouldn’t have a callout. Which basically meant never, until the surge was over.

Have I mentioned before that being responsible
sucks
? Because it sure did at that moment.

I KEPT BROODING ABOUT this all the next day; I’d taken a storm-sewer patrol, but my mind really wasn’t on it. It had rained last night, by my standards a huge thunderstorm, but only an orange-and-red blob a bit bigger than three times the size of the city on the radar, and all the tunnels had about two inches of gradually draining water in the center. So far we hadn’t had any luck in scaring anything up. I was walking along the side to avoid the water, more because I didn’t want to alert potential adversaries to our presence than to avoid getting my boots wet.

Gwalchmai was the lead scout right now, and before I could analyze what was going on in my head anymore, he called to us.

There is another one of those dead humans,
he said.
This one is warm. I have sniffed and searched, but I find no magic and nothing but his scent.

That galvanized me and made me forget about anything else. Warm?
Bloody hell,
I thought, and sprinted down to where Gwalchmai was standing guard, with the rest of the pack loping along beside me. No point in worrying about noise now.

I checked the sewer map on my Perscom, and this was the same general area where we’d found the first three dead Psimons. We all rounded a corner and found Gwalchmai standing over another collapsed Psimon.

The body was down the end of a dead-end tunnel with a big access grate up to street level above us. The first thing I did was to go past the corpse and look up. With Dusana’s help, him getting as big as he could and me standing on his back, I managed to get up high enough to poke at it with the tip of my shotgun, but it didn’t even rattle. That meant nothing had pried it up because those things were bolted in place, not hinged, so however the dead man had gotten where he was, it wasn’t from the street.