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  I blinked because that sounded…well, like something out of an old pre-Diseray vid. “Distance?” I asked.

  “If I can see it, I can hit it,” she said confidently. “I’ve hit things half a mile away if they were big enough to see at that distance. Only it’s magic energy, of course, not like a real laser, so if the thing I’m aiming at has a good Shield or something like that, it just splashes off.”

  “I can still see a use for it, if I can grind a hole in the Shield,” I mused. She nodded.

  “When you showed us how to do that, that’s what Ace and I did.” She made a face again. “I hate to keep bringing him up, but—”

  “But you got partnered a lot, and anyway, I’m pretty sure when he went rogue he wasn’t actually sane anymore.” I let that drop but didn’t give her any details. No one was supposed to know that Ace had been playing footsie with the Othersiders shortly after his brother died. Heck, I wasn’t supposed to know that, but Uncle had slipped me in to watch Drift interrogate Ace, probing his mind psychically while she did so, and I had heard all the important parts.

  Cielle nodded thoughtfully. “He never was right after his brother died. We…kind of stopped spending time together, actually. I was trying to be sympathetic, but he got really distant, and finally I just gave up. I figured he was handling things his way, and eventually we’d go back to normal. Except he didn’t.” She traced a pattern on the table with her finger. “I guess that sounds pretty shallow.”

  I didn’t say anything because, really, what could I say? Yeah, it does? Or I guess you didn’t have much of a relationship? I’m not the most tactful person in the world, but that would be pretty awful even for me.

  “We didn’t have much of a relationship,” she said out of the blue, echoing my thoughts so closely I was startled. “I guess we were sort of using each other for ratings, you know?”

  Actually, I did know, but I was not such a terrible person as to say so out loud. “It is what it is,” I said with a shrug. “Look, I’m not in any position to get judgmental. My boyfriend was a Psimon who was probably just trying to get into my head to find out if I could be used against my uncle. From everything I saw, Ace was more focused on staying number one in the rankings than anything else. Kind of hard to compete with that level of ambition.”

  A look of relief flashed over her face. “Yeah, that,” she said, and changed the subject to ask very detailed and pointed questions about what it was like out beyond the Barriers.

  She smiled and shrugged when I asked her about her background. “My father and mother are both APD. The last thing I wanted to do was go into APD myself—it’s all work and no fun—but I got lucky and popped Powers, so here I am.”

  Well, that explained quite a bit.

  “And this isn’t all work and no fun?” I pointed out. “When was the last time you went clubbing? Or did fan service? Or had a full night of sleep?”

  “It’s still more fun than I’d have in the APD,” she retorted. “And way better outfits. I still have my fans, and I’m in the top twenty. Besides, Hunting is tons less boring than walking or driving around on regular patrol, the same patrol every day, doing the same things on the same schedule. That would drive me insane with boredom.”

  Suddenly, she stopped, put her hand over her mouth, and flushed. “Oh my god,” she said, looking stricken. “I mean, people are really in horrible danger and these monsters are destroying entire towns or trying to, and I’m…talking about trending….” She went even redder. “Somebody should drown me.”

  Until she’d said that herself, I was thinking the same thing. Now, not so much. “Hey, it’s the way you’re used to thinking,” I pointed out. “Back when I first got here, people got whole days off just because of one tough Hunt! I bet it’s hard to get out of the habit of thinking about trending and fan service first.”

  “Yes, but you don’t think that way!” she replied with a grimace.

  “And I’m a turnip who was raised in a place where we start training our kids to use firearms at about age six. And where we regularly have people killed, all the time.” I shrugged. “We can’t help what gets installed when we’re little.”

  “You’re being a lot nicer about this than you should be,” Cielle said after a moment.

  I shrugged. “You didn’t stop being nice just because you said something you caught yourself on the next second. I stick my foot in my mouth often enough, too, you know.” I changed the subject, then, to the APD, partly because I really did want to know more about what they did, but mostly to get her mind off her fumbles. In that moment, I decided I really did like Cielle—for herself, as well as what she could do. She was nothing at all like Kei, but somehow, she reminded me of Kei. By the time breakfast was finished we were trading jokes.

  We moved from the mess to her rooms (and oh my god, the pink overload), and I called up all the private Elite vids I had access to and reviewed the Hunts since the attacks had resumed. She listened, and she watched, and she just absorbed it all with focus and concentration. After the first hour or so, she began volunteering things. Like when her Hounds would have come in handy, and when that magic blast of hers would have taken out this or that monster.

  “Oh, Nagas—” she said, when I decided to bring up the vid from the last Hunt. “They’ve got no chance against me. Once the Hounds feed me, I can cut a whole couple of rows of them in half with one sweep.”

  “Nice,” I commented with approval. “You are definitely my new best friend.”

  She laughed at that.

  At some point we were both starting to yawn, and I called things to a halt before it got too late. “Early morning,” I pointed out. “We always meet in the armory and suit up. From there, either Kent or Dispatch sends us out, and we’re usually on the move before the dew is burned off the fields—unless, of course, the night shift is still in the middle of something, and in that case we move as soon as we can get ourselves out the door.”

  “Has that happened yet?” she asked. For the first time, she sounded apprehensive.

  “No,” I admitted. “But keep it in mind, and keep energy squares in your kit in case that ends up being breakfast in a chopper.”

  “Ugh,” she said, making a face. “Well, I volunteered…but ugh. I’ll see you in the morning, then.”

  “Absolutely.” She let me out, and I headed back to my room, mentally chuckling. Drakken, Harpies, Nagas, Ogres—none of these things fazed her. But making a breakfast out of energy squares in a chopper did.

  I WOKE UP IN a good mood, an hour ahead of my alarm and well rested, thanks to the storm. I felt more like myself than I had in weeks.

  Cielle and I had hit it off, and it was beginning to look as if I was going to have a female friend relatively near my own age for the first time since I got here. I missed that. Of all the people I’d met since I got here, it was Mark and Karly that I’d connected with the best. Now Mark was keeping his distance for the sake of his wife, and Karly, well…Karly was gone.

  But Cielle—yeah, I could see that. I got the same feeling from her as I did from Kei back home. There’d probably be some rough patches, but there was real potential there for a friend.

  I grabbed my breakfast and ate in a hurry. Cielle came in just as I was leaving and we waved to each other. I was thinking about getting in some practice on the range with a couple of the weapons I hadn’t been able to use in the last few weeks.

  I had just turned the corner to the corridor that the armory was on, when I literally ran into Josh.

  I jumped back about five feet, managed not to squeak, and stared at him, my heart racing.

  There were dark circles under his eyes, and his blond hair was disheveled. He stared at me, the same way he’d stared at me the last time we’d encountered each other, his blue eyes full of emotion. But there was something new in his expression this time. I thought it was desperation. “What…are you doing here?” I managed finally, surreptitiously triggering the Psi-shield on my Perscom. I was calming down, fast
. I’d faced two giant Drakken not that long ago; one human wasn’t going to keep my heart racing for very long, even if it was Josh.

  He looked around, then grabbed my elbow. I let him. There wasn’t anything he could do to me, not right here, not even if he’d been sent by Drift personally to kidnap me. I could put him into a wall if I wanted to, and I was pretty sure that Psimons didn’t get martial arts training. “Can we go somewhere else?” he asked nervously. “Please? I’d rather not talk about this in an open corridor.”

  I stared pointedly at the hand on my elbow. He removed it, flushing. “In here,” I said, going a few more feet along the corridor and opening the door. “Ammo storage. Nobody is going to come in here until the ammo in the armory runs out.”

  This was one of several small, fireproof, blast-proof rooms along this corridor fitted with heavy metal shelves filled with case after case of ammunition. Heaven help anyone who was in here if there was ever an earthquake. I had wondered why the Hunter HQ was so big when I first arrived; once I became Elite, I learned the reason: HQ was supplied for a prolonged siege. We had enough stores of just about everything to hold out with the current complement of Hunters and staff for at least a year. We also had independent emergency power, and in a pinch, the swimming pool could easily serve as our water source after distilling the water.

  There was zero chance we’d be overheard here. No sound would get past the heavy door.

  When the door was closed, he turned back to me. He still didn’t look any better. If anything, he looked even more wretched, as if he had been sleeping badly, and maybe not eating. “Joy, I need your help,” he said, pleading. “There’s no one else I can trust.”

  Which was, of course, exactly what he would say if Abigail Drift was setting me up for something. I folded my arms across my chest, controlled my breathing, and tried not to think how much I owed him (and how much I liked him). “And I should trust you, why, exactly? Your boss—”

  “My boss is the problem, and I don’t mean your uncle,” he replied, interrupting me. He took a deep breath. Glancing down, I saw his hands were shaking. “I’m in trouble. I think. I mean, I don’t know for certain but—”

  “In trouble with Drift?” It was my turn to interrupt, since he was babbling to the point where I was willing to accept that this might not be a setup.

  He nodded. “I’ve got a friend in PsiCorps Admin, and my friend says that Drift has been trying to get me transferred, but your uncle keeps fighting it. Now with things getting worse and worse, attacks coming on all those towns just outside the Barriers, and people outside the Barriers going missing, my friend says she’s probably going to appeal to the premier and tell him I’m needed elsewhere.”

  People going missing?

  Hold that thought for later. Concentrate on Josh’s problem now.

  “She’s going to tell him you’re needed for the project that overclocks Psimons and kills them.” I set my jaw. “I can see that. Your punishment for not getting dirt on me she could use, I guess?”

  “I guess.” Josh wasn’t on the verge of hyperventilating anymore, but he still looked miserable. And now I could identify the other emotion—he was scared. I didn’t blame him. I didn’t know how many Psimons Drift had killed with her overclocking experiments, but the number wasn’t insignificant. “It’s supposedly not exactly the same thing, and she’s supposedly getting better results, but that’s a lot of supposition. My friend thinks she’s not going to approach this as ‘I want Josh,’ but instead she’s going to go to Premier Rayne and present him with her data, and Rayne will give her pretty much anything she wants. I’m not the only Psi-aide she wants, but…Drift holds grudges. And I didn’t perform to her specs.”

  That was the first admission I’d gotten from him that he knew Drift intended him to pick my brain. And it was a funny thing, but rather than making me madder at him, it made me feel more sympathetic. There had been any number of times that he could have said that my Psi-shield was giving him a headache and asked me to turn it off, and I might have. And that would have given him another chance to snoop on my thoughts. But he hadn’t.

  “I’m not sure what I can do,” I said slowly. Then an idea occurred to me. “You know what, though, why don’t you drop some hints that I might be thawing? That might buy you some time. If Drift holds grudges that badly, she’s got a bigger bone to pick with me than with you.”

  All the tension drained out of him. He grabbed one of my hands, held it in both of his, and babbled his thanks. I let him. This looked genuine. Genuine fear, and genuine relief. I didn’t think he was a good enough actor to fake it.

  And dammit anyway, I wanted it to be real. I wanted him to have really liked me, and maybe even done his best to keep me out of the political tangles at the top levels of Apex.

  “You’d better make some tracks back to work,” I told him, opening the door and shoving him out. “You don’t want to arouse suspicions by turning up late. I’ll start accepting your texts again—just make them look tentative. And don’t send too many. Just one at first. Like we’re making up.”

  “I will. I can do that,” he said fervently. And then he sprinted for the door, probably to call a pod in order to get to work before Uncle got there.

  And me? I headed to the armory to check in with Cielle. I had a lot to think about, and I wasn’t going to do that now.

  When we bailed out of the chopper, Cielle and I weren’t entirely sure what we were going to get into; our information was only to talk to the mayor, and something about a building. But the mayor of the village had seen the chopper incoming and ran out to meet us as we jumped out—at a proper chopper pad, no less, marked by a big H painted on the grass.

  I summoned my Hounds before I said anything; without my Hounds, to strangers who don’t recognize me, I’m just a girl in Hunter gear. With a pack of eleven, I’m Holy crap, it’s Hunter Joy! As expected, the trick worked again; when the Way opened and all my Hounds poured through, the man’s face went from Crap, they sent me just two girls? to OH!

  Cielle followed my lead and brought her handsome fellows over as well; she had neglected to say that while her Hounds did indeed look like coyotes with bat wings, they were also a delicate shade of slate blue. Which, of course, literally paled in comparison to my Alebrijes. “Elite Joyeaux and Hunter Cielle,” I said to the mayor, when all the Hounds were across and I could close the Way. “We didn’t get any details on your situation, just that it required Elite.”

  “We keep all our farming and transportation machinery for the whole village in there,” he said, pointing at a concrete dome in the middle distance. “After the storm we went to open it up and get what we needed, and Ogres rushed us. We got the door shut and locked and called for help.”

  I didn’t bother to ask how many, because counting the Ogres would not have been a high priority for them at that point in time. I just assumed: a lot.

  We had lucked out. Ogres, even a whole tribe of them, are not that bad, and certainly nothing we couldn’t handle. Obviously the Ogres had been moving on the village when the storm broke, so they rushed in, found the door to what looked like a concrete hill could be opened, and holed up. After almost two days in there without food, they’d be angry and hungry. Under other circumstances, the right answer would have been to lob a few grenades in and slam the door again, but these folks couldn’t do that. Not without wrecking every piece of large mechanical equipment they had.

  “Let’s look the situation over,” I said, and our guide nodded. “If I were you, I’d get people in the village to take cover while we handle this. I’m pretty sure nothing is going to get past us, but there’s no point in taking chances.”

  The mayor seemed very relieved at that; he nodded and headed into the village, while the two of us and our Hounds headed for the building.

  This wasn’t going to be pure cake, but it was something I could have handled alone, which meant it was a really excellent way for Cielle and I to shake out our partnership.

 
We paused outside the building; the door, probably steel, was a great big thing that moved on a track, certainly big enough for a good-size harvester to fit through. There wasn’t a lock on it per se, but there was a bolt holding it firmly shut. Something was beating on the door from the inside.

  “Well,” Cielle said, eyeing the door without any sign of alarm. “We need to make some kills to power up the Hounds so they can power us up.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “My Shields are pretty good. How about I wall off that opening, we open the physical door, and I let through one or two Ogres at a time?”

  “Mine aren’t good enough to pen up anything that can hit that hard, so if you want to do that, the Hounds and I should be able to take them,” Cielle replied, looking happy that I had come up with a plan. This could be her real weakness; that she either didn’t know how to concoct a plan of attack, or she didn’t think she could. In either case, that could be easily cured with practice.

  But meanwhile, I’d take over the planning for this incident, unless she spontaneously came up with some good ideas.

  I looked around. There didn’t seem to be anything she could get on top of, so I positioned her with Chenresig and Shinje next to her for extra protection. I put my Shield up, covering the entire opening of the building, then slammed the bolt back in its socket. A single push sent it quickly sliding along its track, and I jumped back as an Ogre crashed into my Shield and bounced off.

  The Ogre was about eight or nine feet tall, with an oversize head covered in long shaggy hair, heavily bearded, dressed in a fur tunic, and carrying a great big honking club. His hair was kind of greenish, as if it was growing mold or something. And oh dear gods, he stank. Not as bad as a Gog or Magog, but…feh.

  He was back on his feet in an instant, and another one—a female—rushed past him, hitting the Shield and bouncing off. She was shorter and kind of squat, with white hair and incongruously dressed in a long leather dress with a leather apron. Ogres are ridiculously strong and a lot quicker than they look; quick enough to have killed my Hounds if my pack hadn’t been so clever and careful. They can swing those clubs far faster than they ought to be able to, and their aim is so precise it might as well be laser-guided.