Elite: A Hunter novel (33 page)

“Just some bones and pieces of torn uniforms, without the collar IDs,” Uncle replied, steepling his fingers together. “Which PsiCorps confiscated. It could have been one or several dead Psimons. Drift never did give me a straight story about why we found the remains in the sieves at the head of the reservoir, so I decided someone needed to start going down there, not just to clear out the Othersiders, but to see if more dead Psimons were going to turn up.”

“What happened to the ones—the earlier ones?” I asked.

“From the marks on the bones, Ogres ate them, probably the pair you eliminated. But given what you found, it’s very clear that the Ogres didn’t actually kill them.”

“I’m just a Hunter,” I said faintly. “
I
don’t have any idea why they died!”

Uncle smiled reassuringly. “I know, Joy. I’m not expecting you to solve this particular mystery, especially since it seems pretty clear Drift doesn’t
want
it solved.” He chewed a little on his lower lip as he thought. “Well, I don’t have Josh to use as a contact conduit for you, but Kent’s perfectly safe; if you need to send something to me or say something to me that can’t go through official channels, and can’t be handwaved off as my niece wanting some family time, go to Kent.”

“I’ll do that, Uncle,” I replied, and stood up to go. He got up himself.

“We’ll go down together, shall we?” he said. Actually, I was kind of glad of that, and nodded. As we left his office, the lights went out behind us, and he paused for just a moment at his secretary’s desk. “Go on home, Grace,” he said. “And call two pods for us, will you?”

We went down in the elevator together, and there were two pods already waiting for us when we got to the external door. Uncle’s was manned by a driver who probably served as a bodyguard as well; mine was driverless. We said good night, and Uncle being formal again, we shook hands and I saluted. Then we got in our pods and went our separate ways.

As soon as the pod got to the street, I called to put myself back on duty. I had only just done that, when Armorer Kent called. “Private, encrypted channel,” he said. “Rank hath its privileges. What’s going on, Joy?”

I told him everything because he needed to know everything, and that Uncle wanted me to use
him
as an indirect connection to the prefect’s office from now on. All the time, I was wondering—how much had PsiCorps been pressuring Josh to get inside my head? Lots? None? Did he think that
now
, with four dead Psimons to account for, they were going to start? Was
that
why he had broken up with me? Or had he broken up with me because he knew he’d never be able to get anything out of me and didn’t want to get in trouble?

Had it been to save me, or to save himself?

Kent signed off, and I put my aching head back against the pod cushions and contemplated the wreck my life had turned into over the course of a few hours. At least there was nothing else that could go wrong.

I did not expect to have a message waiting for me from Mark when I got back. I certainly didn’t expect the contents.
Meet me at the fishpond at 22:00,
it read.
Don’t reply to this.

My first response was exasperation.
Now what?
I could only think of one reason why he’d tell me not to reply; he didn’t want his Perscom to go off and have Jessie ask him who it was. And that, all by itself, boded nothing good.

But it was Knight. I couldn’t say no, now, could I? So instead of curling up in my room around Bya and a hot mug of Chocolike, and having a good cry, I dutifully made my way to the atrium, the garden, and the pond full of colorful fish.

There were lights there, but he hadn’t turned them on, so there was only the faint illumination coming up from the water of the pond from the three underwater lamps. He sat at on the side of the pond, throwing food to the fish, and his posture told me everything I didn’t want to know.

“So,” I said, sitting down facing him. “Let me just fill in the blanks, here. Jessie doesn’t like it here. She doesn’t fit in, and she wants to go home—or back to her folks, anyway. She wants you to come with her. And she’s jealous of me.”

I’d have laughed at the look of astonishment on his face, if I hadn’t felt so miserable myself. “How did you—”

I shrugged. Oh, I could have explained how I’d seen this coming because I knew the Christers back home. Christer girls plainly could not fathom how any girl could be just friends with a guy. And given they were raised in a flock, like a bunch of hens, they pined for the familiarity of the flock if you took them out of it. “Jessie probably had some vision in her head of how things were going to be when you got married, and it looked a lot like the lives of her friends. But now she’s found out that you can be gone at any time, without warning and without telling her where you’re going. She’s discovered that you’re hobnobbing with women she secretly thinks are more glamorous than she is, because they’re Hunters and have all the fancy Hunt suits and photo shoots and all that. And she’s figured out there’s not a lot for her to do, because there aren’t any other Hunter wives; any Christer women she could meet up with are a scary pod ride away all alone, and you don’t need her to mend and make, work the garden, or farm the bigger plots. She’s probably used to sewing circles, quilting bees, community suppers, and canning gathers, and all that sort of thing, and here, she can’t even cook you a meal. So she wants to go back, and she obviously can’t go back without you. That would mark her as a failure in the eyes of her people, that she can’t keep her man at her side.”

I didn’t go into all the religious crap she was probably churning over in her head. And maybe regurgitating at him. That was kind of inevitable, and it was
nothing
I could argue with, unless I wanted to alienate Mark.

“I can’t go back,” he said miserably. “I could have, maybe, if I hadn’t gone Elite, but now—”

“I dunno, you might be able to,” I said, which I hadn’t wanted to say, but I owed him the truth. “There’s only one other Hunter out
there
”—I darted him a
look
, and he nodded; I was pretty sure that Jessie had told him there
were
other Hunters back home, though she wouldn’t know about the Mountain and the Monastery and Safehaven yet—“and if something were to happen to him, the folks there could petition for an Elite to be assigned there, and they’d be within their rights.”

And all that would take would be for me to send a message via Bya that my “mentor” needed to have a tragic Hunting accident, and that they needed a new Hunter, an Elite by preference, because they were getting bigger and badder nasties. HQ would probably be so relieved that an Elite was
all
my people were asking for, they’d send whoever volunteered without a second thought.

Knight nodded again, slowly and deliberately. “I can see where having an Elite out there to replace all the good you were doing would be something they could ask for.” And he gave me a little nod and a ghost of a smile, which was the one good thing that had happened this evening. Then he patted my shoulder, to reinforce that he completely understood
why
we had hidden the fact there were other Hunters up there. Heck, I bet his people would have hidden
his
existence if they could have gotten away with it. For that moment, it was us turnips against Apex…and us turnips had to stick together to protect our people.

“You know good and well that no one is going to want to go there but you,” I continued. “There isn’t even a single Apex Hunter that will want to go back there. I’d have precedence over you, if I volunteered, because it was my home first, but I won’t bump you if they say someone can go. I won’t lie to you, I think something’s building and we’re going to need every Hunter Apex has, Elite or not; if nothing else, this is probably the start of something Archer told me about called a ‘surge.’ You can ask him about it. But you’re going to be no good to anyone if you’re getting torn up over this, and the armorer isn’t an idiot—he probably knows what’s going on with you already.”

He sighed heavily. “Don’t tell Jessie this—” he began.

I snorted. “She wouldn’t believe it if I did. If she’s jealous enough of me to make you meet me here in secret, she won’t believe a word that comes out of my mouth. But if things get to that point where you’re too stressed to Hunt properly, then I think maybe it can be arranged.” I sighed. “Remember, this is why Kent warned you to come to him if you and Jessie started to have problems. You all stressed out means we have half a Hunter out there when we need to have you at your sharpest.”

I had been going to tell him about me and Josh…but now, why should I put another weight on his shoulders? It wasn’t fair, and friends don’t do that to friends.

“My pa would tell me I’m a fool for not keeping my woman in line,” he said unhappily.

“Your pa is an idiot,” I said, not feeling at all charitable toward
anyone
that was contributing to this mess. “Unless he means you should beat her, in which case he’s a sadistic bastard, and if I ever meet him, I’ll break his jaw.”

Knight stared at me, openmouthed, for a long time. “You know, I think you actually might,” he said after a long silence.

“Damn right I would.” I threw food to the fish. “Then I’d ask him how he likes
being done by as he did
.”

Actually…right at that moment, I really would have liked to have a target like that in front of me.

“Well…he doesn’t beat Ma…” Knight said uncertainly. “It’s—”

“Never mind. I know, it’s a godliness thing,” I replied, cutting him off because I didn’t want to get into an argument with him over “godliness” and how woman was decreed by scripture to obedience and all that rot. And I didn’t want to get into an argument that if his Jessie’d had an upbringing that didn’t keep shoving her in that role, she might have had the gumption to try and fit in here. Because those were arguments I would never win, and anyway, Karly hadn’t fared any better with her wife when she popped Powers, and they had both been Apex born and raised.

I wished devoutly for a callout at that moment because the only thing that was going to make me feel
any
better was to kill something. But, of course, given the turn my luck had taken, there was nothing.

“I don’t know what else to tell you,” I said finally. “I really don’t.”

“I thought once I got her here, everything would be grand,” he mourned. “The hard part would be over, and we could be happy.”

Yeah, I can relate.

“You could try flirting with Scarlet,” I said. “Then at least she’d stop being jealous of
me.”

He gave me a long, long look. “You are devious, Joy.”

“Never pretended to be otherwise,” I pointed out. “I’ve been forced to be devious since I got here.” Then I softened. “Look, the Personnel guy, Rik Severn, was supposed to find something for her to do. Tell Kent to build a fire under him and find her something that will really occupy her right now. Maybe she can see something else that can be done with the inedible parts of what we farm, or improve the critters who supply the cores for the cloned meat. Maybe she can work with the kitchen to build us some new recipes; heck, maybe she can figure out a way to make the basic ration biscuits taste a little less like wooden slats. And that’d be helping out the downtrodden, or at least, as downtrodden as a Cit gets around here, so that would be godly.” I let out my breath in a puff. After my initial annoyance, I was beginning to feel a little sorry for her. Only a little, but…yeah. All this had to be hard on her. Maybe all it would take would be finding something useful for her to do. Something to make her more than just “Mark’s wife.”

He shook his head and dusted off the last of the fish-food crumbs on his hands into the pond. I did the same, and we both stood up.

“Good luck,” we said at the same time. I laughed weakly.

Then we said a clumsy good night. I left first because I just couldn’t take any more awkwardness.

When I got back to my room, I opened the Way and Bya stepped through. He looked up at me soberly.
It has been a very bad day,
he observed.

“Not the worst, but…yeah.” I made that cup of Chocolike that I’d promised myself, and turned the vid-screen into a “fireplace” so I could stare at the flames while I cuddled up on the couch with Bya.

I wished this were yesterday. I wished I could rewind all of it. I wished I’d known about Abigail Drift weeks ago, because there might have been something I would have done differently if I had.

I wished I was a Psimon and I could read
everyone’s
mind to find out what the
hell
they were all up to, even if I couldn’t actually do anything about any of it.

You do not wish to be a Psimon,
Bya said vehemently, although he didn’t say why.
No matter what, you still have your pack.

So I do,
I replied, and put my head down on his soft back.
So I do.