Apex: A Hunter Novel Page 12

  There were plenty of Othersiders here, as expected. Acres to hide in and right on the Barrier itself? The only thing that was surprising was that there weren’t entire colonies of the big, dangerous kinds. We hadn’t gone half an hour in before the Hounds were full to bursting with manna, and I had taken to using magic to burn the excess they were passing me. It was all little stuff: Piskies and Goblins, a Redcap or two, Willow Wisps—stuff that I used to Hunt at home without too much trouble.

  At the end of an hour and a half we came out of the forest and into the sort of ruins I expected for Spillover. We stopped for a brief rest then, since I was pretty tired of stumbling over piles of rubble that never seemed to end. I braced myself against a tree trunk and had a look around.

  After going into Spillover so much with Mark Knight, I’d gotten to know the kinds of places where the people who inhabited Spillover were likely to try and live, and this wasn’t one of them. Looked like this area was a bit marshy, probably a breeding ground for mosquitoes and all other kinds of bugs; I could pick out the wet spots by the presence of cattails. The walls of long-gone houses were few and far apart. But big. I reckoned they’d been very fancy in their day, with property that was measured in acres rather than feet. Maybe this had all been an area for very rich people, nicely landscaped, with pretty little ponds and a stream or brook linking them.

  At least I was wearing good waterproof boots. I was in for a slog.

  Not surprisingly, the only things here were wildlife and a few Willow Wisps that we startled up out of their rotten logs. They didn’t look like much, just glowing globes, but they could hypnotize you and hold you until something more lethal came along. A levin bolt took care of those, if one of the Hounds didn’t snap it dead first. The worst of it was the sucking mud, if I made a misstep, and the smell. Ugh. Stagnant water, rotten vegetation, and whatever was festering down in that mud. And as I had feared, mosquitoes. Lots and lots of mosquitoes. I was reduced to putting up a light Shield to keep them off, or I would have been sucked dry.

  My Perscom went off with a warning just as we got out of that area; I looked up and to the west, and sure enough, there were the tops of the storm clouds. The radar feed I pulled up showed it as mostly orange with some angry red spots. Unfortunately, we were a lot farther from Josh’s hideaway than I had thought we’d be when I entered the forest. I called in the Hounds, who circled around me, looking from me to the sky.

  “Yeah,” I said aloud. “I think we’re going to have to make a run for it. Any of you want to go back Otherside?”

  Hold and Strike—who couldn’t bamph—pushed to the front of the pack and looked at me hopefully. I opened the Way for them, and they jumped through. So did Gwalchmai; Myrrdhin, however, elected to stay with the rest of the pack. I swung myself up on Dusana’s back and looked down at them. “All right, pack. Time for a race.” I pointed in the direction of Josh’s shelter. “That way.”

  And we ran. As soon as Dusana launched, I put my head down along his neck and put my wrist up to my mouth. “Elite Joy to HQ,” I called in, a little breathlessly. “I’ve been caught by the storm. I’m seeking one of the shelters that is right near me.”

  “Roger that, Elite Joy. Stay safe out there.”

  “Will do. Roger, out.”

  Well, that took care of things. Now no one would be mounting a search for me if I fell out of touch for a few hours.

  The Hounds all kept close to me; this was no time to go scaring up something we might have to fight. Thunder growled off to our left, and the light slowly dimmed as the tops of the anvil clouds reached out and overshadowed us. When we were about halfway to Josh’s hiding place, I checked the radar again. Sure enough, the storm was bigger than before, and more of it was red. I made myself as small on Dusana’s back as I could, and I felt him put on more speed.

  But I wasn’t frightened; if anything, I was getting a big rush out of this. Honestly? It was wonderful. The ground streamed by underneath us, and what wasn’t running away from us was just heading for shelter itself. Dusana ran far faster than any horse I had ever ridden, and much more smoothly. For just these few minutes, I wasn’t Hunting, there was nothing threatening the city worse than a little bit of weather, and I was completely and totally free. The wind tore my hair out of its tail, and my nostrils were full of the smell of green things and that scent that means rain is about to hit.

  If only we could have run like this forever, it would have been heaven.

  Drops began to patter around us. Shields up! I ordered. The Shields would guard us from rain and probably from lightning, unless we had a direct hit. And we wouldn’t; I knew how to dissipate lightning skyward by making connection with the Shield, something every Hunter learns on the Mountain.

  We finally reached the building where the shelter was hidden. Dusana stopped and knelt at the staircase so I could tumble off his back; we all collapsed our Shields. I stumbled down the stairs and presented my Perscom to the outer door lock. It accepted me and popped open; I held the door open for the Hounds, who poured through, and I got inside and slammed the door shut just as a torrent of water dropped down out of the sky.

  It was pitch-black down here. The Hounds could see in the dark, but I didn’t have night-vision goggles with me. No worries; on the Mountain, one of the first things anyone with magic learns to do is make a light. I spun up three mage-lights and sent them to hover above my head. The second door was closed and probably locked; I presented my Perscom to it too, and it unlocked with a faint click. I sent the mage-lights ahead of us, into that big common room. There was absolutely no sign of life there.

  Exactly as it should be.

  While the Hounds sniffed around, I went to the door that led into the kitchen. I tried it; it was locked.

  Exactly as it should be. In the back of my mind I had been worried that Josh hadn’t taken Kent’s instructions to heart—or worse, that he’d meet us at the door with a gun, drawn and ready, that he didn’t really know how to use. Instead, he’d been smart. He probably kept the inner door locked, and when he heard the outer one go, he’d gone to ground.

  So I knocked on the door. “Hey, Josh, it’s us. I mean, it’s me and the Hounds.”

  I heard some furniture scraping the floor on the other side of the door, then the sound of a bolt being thrown. The door opened and Josh peered cautiously around the edge of it. He smiled hugely when he saw me. “Joy! I didn’t expect to see anyone so soon.” He pulled the door open wider. “Come in here, it’s a lot more comfortable. Aren’t you going to be missed?”

  I followed him and the mage-lights followed me, floating just above my head like a halo; the Hounds were still investigating the shelter. The kitchen area didn’t have anything except a water-purifier operation going, but then, the supplies Kent had stocked this place with were Basic Ration Biscuits, which didn’t need any prep. Josh had cleaned the kitchen up, though, which was probably wise. I didn’t want to think about how many rodents had probably run over those counters.

  “Nobody’s going to miss me. A storm just moved in, and I let HQ know that I was seeking shelter,” I said as we left the kitchen and entered the storage room. “Oh, hey, I like what you’ve done with the place.”

  This room had been meant to store supplies for several hundred people for several months, so even with all the stuff Kent had ordered to be stored here, there was plenty of space. But Josh had constructed a false wall of wreckage about halfway down the room, backed by the boxes of supplies. Once we had squeezed through to the other side, where he had a single light going, I saw he’d made himself a pretty cozy living space. On one side was the bicycle generator and the battery holders, ready for charging. On the other, he’d taken a table and put two of the mattresses under it, one across the back between the table and the wall, one on top, and piled the rest along the sides, leaving one he could pull across the front after he closed himself inside. It was a very cozy little “cave” that his own body heat would keep warm. That had worried me; he was far enoug
h belowground that in winter the place probably wouldn’t get anywhere near freezing, but it would still be uncomfortable, and hard to sleep.

  “There’s plenty of water,” he said. “Wherever that cistern is, it’s full. I’ve figured out how to wash clothing in the showers, and I just leave what I’ve washed hanging in there to dry.” He shrugged and smiled wryly. “This is better than I thought it would be, and camping out in the ruins would still be better than whatever it was Drift had planned for me.”

  “About that,” I said. We made ourselves a comfortable place to sit on a couple spare mattresses while I told him about what had happened after he “disappeared.”

  When I told him what Bya had done, he looked thoughtful. “I wonder how they’re going to take that,” he said. “There are folk tales about people—people with Psi-powers—vanishing out of their beds. Drift hates those, and any other stories like them, that imply anyone with psi can do…well…occult stuff.”

  I raised both eyebrows. “Do you think they might actually believe you—what?—vibrated yourself into the ether?”

  “If they can’t find any other explanation, they might,” he replied. “Drift really does try to put fear of anything superstitious into her Psimons. Back in school, if our teachers found out any of us were participating in anything remotely religious, the teachers would make fun of us unmercifully. As for all those old occult and psychic things people supposedly used to do before the Diseray, well, you’d get days’ worth of lectures on how they were dangerous practices that would drive you mad, or worse, open you up to manipulation by Othersiders.”

  “And disappearing out of your bed would qualify as worse, I guess,” I hazarded. “Well, I hope that’s what they decide on. Anything that unsettles them is something I highly approve of.” I paused. “Do you think Drift might decide that opening yourself up to Othersiders would include being stolen from your bed by them?”

  He shrugged. “I have no idea. How would they get to me in the first place? The Barrier is pretty effectively keeping them out. I mean, unless they had some way of taking over my mind and somehow empowering me to make a Portal. Ace certainly was affected by the Othersiders while he was inside the Barrier. For all I know, Drift’s figured I was too.”

  He was right. There was no telling what Abigail Drift had decided. I just hoped she had eliminated Uncle and me from being the probable causes.

  ABOUT AN HOUR WENT by as Josh showed me what Kent had left him, and what he’d improvised on his own. I looked through the bookcase of books. Kent had been…very practical about what he’d left here. Every single one of those books was some kind of wilderness survival manual—from how to make fire, shelter, and clean water with minimal supplies, to how to snare, kill, clean, and cook game over a fire. Very useful, of course…but not what I would call entertaining. It looked from the books with bits of toilet paper stuck in for markers that Josh had tried to make a start on some of them but was finding them heavy going. I already knew there was nothing on the Perscom that Kent had given him other than the barest of basics—the kind of vids and books that came preloaded on every Perscom—because I’d looked it over after Kent got it for him.

  I dropped down on a “couch” he’d made out of mattresses covered with an opened sleeping bag. Josh started to make tentative little moves toward me, taking one of my hands and putting his arm awkwardly around my shoulders, that suggested he wanted to do something other than just sit there and talk. And while part of me wanted that too—a lot—I reminded myself what I’d determined. I really didn’t know him—not enough to trust to send to Anston’s Well, much less Safehaven and the Mountain. So much as I wanted to hold hands and kiss and all that…I needed to figure out as much as I could about him in the few hours the storm was going to give us.

  “So besides charging batteries and rearranging boxes, what are you doing out here?” I asked.

  “Well…mostly that,” he replied, taking the hint and removing his arm from my shoulder. “I’ve done a very little bit of exploring around the building this shelter is under, and I found a few little odd things, but I haven’t done much else.” He made a face. “I had no idea how much I depended on vids and games until I lost access to them. It’s almost impossible to play anything for any length of time on the Perscom screen, and there’s nothing but a couple of nature vids on it anyway.”

  “You could read,” I replied with envy. I had downloaded so many books into my Perscom since I got here…and no time to even look at any of them unless there was a storm.

  “Uh…” He flushed, embarassed. “Yeah, I suppose I could if I had anything I might like. Those survival manuals aren’t exactly something you breeze through for fun, and there’s not much else down here.”

  I tried not to goggle at him. “You don’t read?” I couldn’t imagine it. When I thought of all the winter nights I spent tucked up in my bed reading one of the real paper books from the Monastery library while a blizzard howled outside, a hot brick wrapped in towels at the bottom of my bed under the covers to keep my toes toasty…I’d have gone insane with boredom if I hadn’t had that library to dive into.

  “Not much,” he admitted, flushing more. “It’s just so much easier to watch a vid….”

  “Well, I have a metric ton of books on my Perscom,” I said firmly. “Let’s figure out what you might like. I’ve been reading some that were like that game we were playing, remember? Magic, and set in the same time, pre-Diseray. Let’s look at those first.”

  We put our heads together over my Perscom and started looking at first chapters. Pretty soon we had a good idea of what he might like, and I linked our Perscoms and transferred copies to him. You can tell a lot about someone by the kinds of stories he likes, or more tellingly, the kinds of characters he likes. In a couple of hours I had learned more about Josh than I had in weeks.

  And it was shocking. Shocking to discover how much had been kept from him as a Psimon, even though he’d had a “relatively normal” childhood. But at least I didn’t learn anything that would change my mind about how I felt about him.

  The Hounds settled around us, listening as we talked. He was more than a bit self-conscious at first, with all those eyes on him, but after a while he got used to it. Once in a while Bya would suggest a book I’d forgotten I had.

  Every so often, I’d go to the door to check if it was still raining, since my Perscom got no reception down here. When we’d loaded about fifty books onto his Perscom, I decided to see if there was something to be done about the lack of reception.

  “You know, I can’t believe they’d have a shelter without a radio,” I said at last. “I mean, that would be the one way they could find out if there was anyone else left, right?”

  “I…guess?” Josh replied, looking a bit bewildered, which made sense now that I realized he knew very little about pre-Diseray history.

  “So the radio is probably long gone, most likely taken when this place was looted for the stores, but the external antenna should still exist,” I explained. “And that will give us a way to get reception down here for our Perscoms.” I got up. “I’m going to look for it.”

  I took two of my mage-lights with me and went into the big common room. Since Josh trailed after me, I decided to think aloud. “You’d assume the radio would be here,” I said as I scanned the walls for something like a conduit that would lead to the building above. “Because everyone in this place would have wanted to know if there was any contact with the outside world, and even find out if friends and relatives had made it into shelters themselves.”

  I didn’t see anything like a conduit, so I tried to put myself inside the heads of some of those pre-Diseray authorities. Who were…authoritarian. “Now, the people who built shelters like this, though, probably wouldn’t have been too pleased about the Cits crowding around the radio, every single one of them wanting to do something with it. So…that means they’d want it under their complete control. And the one room in the entire shelter that would absolutely be under
the complete control of whoever was in charge would be—”

  I turned back around and pointed at the kitchen door.

  “—the supply room!” I went back into the room Josh was using for his living quarters and went all the way to the back wall. There were boxes stacked there all the way to the ceiling. Because of course there were. And there was a rolling ladder here that actually still worked—more like a rolling staircase, really—so I climbed up and began moving the top boxes away from the wall until I found what I was looking for.

  It was a conduit coming down out of the ceiling along the wall, just as I had thought. And it wasn’t connected in any way with the electrical conduits.

  I won’t go into all the work we had to do, but in about an hour or so, the supplies had been restacked and we had a functioning antenna to the outside of the bunker. Josh was baffled as to how this was supposed to work, but I did some trial and error with a length of wire and discovered we got decent reception by attaching one end of the wire to the metal wristband of the Perscoms. A little more rearranging of supplies and mattresses, and Josh had a nice comfortable spot he could use to check feeds and watch anything being broadcast.

  “Don’t do anything active,” I warned. “I mean, you know not to make calls unless it’s an emergency, but don’t download anything or even connect to a database. All that stuff is recorded, and if a Perscom out in Spillover starts downloading vids, someone is going to take notice and maybe investigate.”

  “Don’t some people in Spillover have Perscoms?” he asked. “I mean, some of them used to be Apex Cits, after all.”

  “You can bet that every one of them has its ID number on record,” I replied. “You can’t handshake an active feed without a Perscom ID. Watch,” I said, and showed him how when I connected to the active feed for Hunters, my Perscom logged in for me. His face fell. “But, look, whenever I’m out here, I’m supposed to be out here. I can handshake and download, then transfer to you. The rest of the time, just watch the passive broadcast stuff.” There were four channels from all the ones available in Apex via ’net that were on broadcast, for the benefit of the towns and villages around Apex. The signal traveled quite a distance. It wasn’t the hundreds of channels you could get if you were in Apex and connected to the wired ’net, but it was better than nothing. At least now Josh wouldn’t be quite so cut off.