Apex: A Hunter Novel Read online

  “That’s what I thought,” I said, feeling suddenly doubtful. “But—”

  Kent actually laughed. “Joy, he’s a soft city boy used to having his meals on time and made by someone else, a proper bathroom, a proper bed, with all kinds of protections keeping him safe from Othersiders. Under normal circumstances, he’d never agree to live in the kind of conditions he’ll find in Spillover. Trust me, if he’s lying, there is not one chance in a hundred that he’d actually follow through on this.”

  I sighed. Well, Kent was probably right. Perversely, I found myself wishing Josh would try to make excuses, because then at least I’d know for sure where I’d stood with him from the beginning.

  “I’ll contact Charmand. You contact Josh. Meet him somewhere when your shift is over, tell him your escape idea, and we’ll plan our next moves when we know his reaction.” Kent rubbed his forehead with his hand, and I realized that he was just as beaten down as the rest of us. I was so used to him being the towering strength that held the Elite and the Hunters together that I had been ignoring all the signs that should have told me the constant battles were wearing on him as much, or more, than the rest of us.

  I patted the curb around the pond with my hand. “It doesn’t have to be right this minute,” I said. “Or even today. Uncle would tell me if he was getting pressured to release Josh. And anyway, Josh is PsiCorps. He’s not one of us.”

  Kent took my invitation and sat. “You seemed to like him well enough,” he replied, with a sardonic tilt to his eyebrows.

  “I did….I—” I fumbled for words. “There are more important things to think about than how much I like a boy,” I finally said, looking away, and I was glad it was dark enough here to cover my flush. “But he helped me a lot, and I owe him for that.”

  “Joy, look at me,” Kent ordered, and reluctantly, I did, still feeling my cheeks burning. He put one hand on my shoulder, the way my Master Kedo used to when he was going to tell me something important. “I am very pleased you have your priorities in order, but that doesn’t mean you need to bottle up your feelings and never let them out. Got that?”

  Now I was flushing even hotter. “I don’t—actually know how I feel anymore,” I stammered, and to my horror, I felt my eyes starting to sting. “I mean—he might have been putting on this huge act just so he could get inside my head!”

  “And he might have been putting on a huge act for PsiCorps, to protect you,” Kent pointed out. “Before, we had no way of proving which it was. If he was putting on an act to manipulate you, then I know you’ll take the hit and keep going. But if he wasn’t, well, you know you had a real, genuine friend you could count on, and that means a lot. And as for the rest, that’s between you two, but”—he smiled slightly—“don’t think that because things are hard right now you need to sacrifice everything, including your feelings. There is no official position on fraternization with PsiCorps personnel as long you take appropriate precautions—”

  I choked.

  “—to make sure Josh does not take unauthorized strolls through your skull.” His grin broadened. “Or any other member of PsiCorps, for that matter. Why, Joyeaux Charmand, what did you think I meant?”

  LUCK WAS KIND TO me the next day. The callouts were light, nothing Cielle and I couldn’t handle by ourselves, but we ran late, jumping out of the chopper after the mess was already closed. So I had the perfect excuse to call Josh.

  He answered immediately. “Hey!” he said, looking surprised, a little shocked, and maybe some happy thrown in there too. “I didn’t expect to talk to you in person tonight. What’s up?”

  “Hey yourself. The mess is closed, I’m just off shift and starving, and I’m getting really tired of what’s stocked here. Seems like this might be the only time we can actually get together. Do you know someplace quiet we could get something decent to eat?” I said, with some emphasis on “quiet.”

  “Do I ever!” He lit right up at that. “Take a pod to twelve-twenty-two Catalpa. I’ll meet you there.”

  As soon as he hung up, I called a pod, then ran back to my room and threw on the first outfit in the closet. I managed to get out of HQ and into the pod without my Perscom giving so much as a chirp. One very good thing about our breakup—there weren’t any cams following me anymore. Oh, my Perscom would register where I was, but the last several weeks of nonstop work plus the breakup had made me no longer newsworthy. I was just another of the Elite now, not someone who was trending.

  Twelve-twenty-two Catalpa turned out to be a huge building, and I was afraid at first it was something like the Strauss Palais, or some sort of huge entertainment complex. But as soon as I got in the door, I knew I was wrong.

  It was, essentially, a building full of shops and places to eat and drink. Like the main street of a big town, or a downscale version of the commercial part of the Hub. I waited at the entrance, and a few minutes later, Josh came in, wearing one of his beige-and-brown outfits. Good, he looked just like an ordinary, middling Cit. There was nothing to draw attention to either of us.

  “Hey!” he said. “This is the building where I grew up. Apartments on floors three through ten, everything anyone needs on the two bottom floors, and a recreation center in the basement. Come on. I know a nice quiet place to eat.”

  There weren’t a lot of people on this floor, but then, it was the supper hour, so I guess people were mostly eating in their own apartments. Josh led me to the middle of the place, then turned left, and we walked to the dead end of the corridor between shops. There, on the right, was a little eatery with an illuminated sign that said, simply, NOODLES.

  We went in. There were three or four people studiously working their way through big bowls of noodles. We took a booth at the back; you ordered from a vid-screen in the table. And that was all this place served: noodles in a glorious profusion of styles, mostly Asian as far as I could tell. My eyes went straight to a dish I hadn’t eaten since I got here. Pad Thai. I stabbed the selection with my index finger, my mouth already watering as the screen registered my choice.

  Josh nodded. “I think I’ll have the same thing. This was my favorite place to eat when I lived here, because it was so quiet.” I nodded too, understanding what he meant. Psimons are not only sensitive to thoughts; they can be sensitive to sounds as well.

  Our meals came quickly, and we dug in with single-minded concentration. He was hungry, as if he’d been working hard all day and this was his first good meal. And I was starving as I always was. It wasn’t until we’d finished, the noodle bowls had been taken away, and we’d gotten some sliced fruit to share that we started talking again.

  “How quiet is it here?” I asked. “In the whole building, I mean.” He raised his eyebrow, then closed his eyes a moment, putting two fingers to his right temple as he did.

  “No one of any useful sensitivity in the building,” he said. “And no cams in here except for the security system. Nobody famous ever comes here, mostly just people that live here. Most of them are salesclerks or office workers.”

  “Good. Because I think I have a plan.” Quickly I got him up to speed on what Kent and I had worked out so far.

  He stared at me for a moment in disbelief. My heart started pounding. I tried not to hope….

  “How soon can you get me out of here?” he whispered urgently.

  We spent more time talking than I had thought we would, to the point that he ordered more fruit and drinks for us out of politeness to the shop owner. Now that he had committed, I wanted to be sure he knew exactly what he was committing to—the dangers of Spillover, the primitive conditions he’d be living under, everything. I went into great detail about the bugs and vermin, about the heat and cold, the weather—what storms would be like for someone living in an old building—about the damp, about everything.

  He didn’t care.

  And I wanted to get up and dance.

  “Josh,” I said, taking hold of one of his hands and making sure he was looking right at me. “I don’t know how long this is
going to last. I don’t know if it will ever be safe for you to come back to Apex. You might be living out there for a lot longer than any of us guess. Right now, all you’ll have to contend with are the bugs and the weather and the Othersiders—but fall is around the corner, and winter will be far worse.”

  “I’ll take that chance,” he replied firmly. “But will this get you in trouble?”

  “When you disappear, I’ll be either in my room at HQ or out Hunting, well away from Spillover, and my Perscom will show that,” I promised. “And if someone comes and asks about where you are, I’ll just get frantic and worried about you, and maybe hint tearfully that you might do something stupid. And that will be the truth, because I actually will be frantic and worried about you.”

  He smiled faintly. “And I do stupid things all the time. You won’t have to lie about that, either.” He turned over his hand and held mine. I got butterflies in my stomach. “Thank you,” he said fervently.

  “Thank me when you’re out,” I retorted, though I didn’t take my hand away. I reminded myself that this was no time to think about romance. “This is going to take some careful planning, and that will take time. You’re going to have to be patient.” I thought about what else he could do to prepare. “You can start watching the older Hunting vids, especially if you can get uncut stuff from Mark Knight’s Spillover Hunts. But mix them up with other vids so you don’t give away where you’re running to. If you’ve got a way to look up some of the old pre-Diseray survival manuals, you probably ought to.”

  For the first time he registered hesitation. Had he been faking this? Was he about to try and back out now? Had he just been stringing me along all this time? My heart fell. “Reading and watching vids isn’t going to give me skills,” he pointed out after a long moment, biting his lip. “If I start fumbling around, I could get myself hurt or worse. Maybe I can talk Mark into letting me take it from his mind? Then I’d have actual physical skills, the way I learned Straussing….”

  Oh boy. That was absolutely not going to happen. Mark knew about the Mountain and the Monastery, and there was no way in hell I was going to let any Psimon, not even Josh, play around in his head, even if Mark was willing.

  “Mark’s people live in proper houses; they aren’t camping,” I said, giving him a little bit of stink-eye. “They have electricity, Perscoms, trucks, indoor plumbing, bathrooms, high-efficiency woodstoves, and running water. Same for my people. Just because we’re turnips, it doesn’t follow that we’re camping out in caves and cooking dead squirrels on sticks over open fires.”

  “Oh…uh, sorry,” he said, shamefaced. “I didn’t mean…”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find ways of making sure you know what you’ll need to know,” I promised, though I hadn’t the faintest idea how I was going to do that, much less what information he’d need.

  My Perscom went off—it was an alarm I’d set. We both looked at it, and he must have read the time, because he made a face. “You need to go back, don’t you?”

  “My shift starts at seven a.m.,” I reminded him. “And it goes for twelve hours. Sometimes more.”

  “Then I’ll be grateful for every minute I got,” he replied. He lifted my hand and kissed my knuckles. I blushed, but I didn’t take my hand back. “And more than grateful for your help.”

  We walked out together, and we held hands until our pods came. It didn’t feel like we’d erased all that stuff that had come between us, but it did feel like we were starting over, which maybe was better.

  “Listen,” I said as the first pod rolled into sight. “If things suddenly go bad, send me a message, mark it ‘urgent’ so my text alarm goes off, but just say, ‘Do you like roses,’ okay? Then go to Uncle. Maybe he can hide you in a storage closet somewhere.” I was only half joking with that.

  “I will,” he promised. My pod had arrived, so I stepped into it and left him standing there all alone on the sidewalk.

  I looked back at him as the pod drove away, knowing he couldn’t see me through the darkened glass. He stood there with his arms crossed over his chest. Everything about his posture told me he was scared. And as the pod turned the corner and he was lost behind the building, all I could think of was the great big reason for why I felt so guilty about him.

  This was my fault. If I’d never turned up, he’d never have gotten in trouble for not getting into my head.

  Kent strode into the mess looking like he’d gotten a decent night’s sleep. Actually, everybody but me looked that way. I’d tossed and turned, worrying about Josh, feeling guilty about Josh, wondering what Josh was going to do after we got him out, wondering where we would actually put him so he didn’t end up in worse danger than he was now.

  At least we hadn’t gotten a callout.

  “All right, Hunters, we may not have much time before a callout, so I want you to pay attention, especially any of you that are going out into Spillover. Watch the monitors.”

  A map of Apex came up, and that’s when I realized, somewhat to my surprise, that Apex was not a series of nicely nested, neat circles within circles. The main part of the city, where most of the population lived, was a mathematically laid-out grid of streets inside a rough oblong. But after that, things got messy. Each successive layer got more and more amoebalike, with protrusions and indentations.

  Spillover was a sort of kidney-shaped thing just outside the last Barrier, an area that butted up against the enormous army base in the south, and an area marked “uninhabitable” in the north, complete with the signs for radiation and poison. That kidney shape that represented Spillover was what the armorer zoomed in on, until landmarks showed on the map.

  “About fifteen years ago, the then armorer and I had a project in Spillover,” Kent continued. “We were hunting out all the emergency shelters that were still sound, cleaning them out, restocking them, and putting new locks that responded to Hunter Perscoms on the doors. The idea was that if you were caught by a storm out there, you’d have a safe place to hole up for as long as it took for the storm to pass. As it happened, storms have never moved in so fast that we weren’t able to get people back, so we never needed them, and people have forgotten them. But,” he continued, looking sober, “as you know, Hunting the Othersiders itself has changed. If we get a major incursion in Spillover, we may need a safe place to store the injured until they can be evacuated. Or if you’re Hunting Spillover and bite off more than you can chew, you’ll have a safe place to take cover. That’s why I’m updating all your maps with the locations, and I sent out restocking parties today. Any questions?”

  Well, I had one, but it wasn’t one I could ask aloud. Nobody else had a question, though—and that was when we got the callout.

  Cielle and I were paired up with Kent and Raynd; we got to the target just in time to keep a Gog and Magog from destroying a set of grain storage silos. Cielle was pretty exhausted and fell asleep on the way back; then my Perscom vibrated. I looked down, and Kent was texting me.

  I’ve added one shelter to your map. That’s where your friend will go. And Scarlet’s in on the plan. Well, that would make one thing a lot easier—establishing my alibi.

  I flashed Kent a relieved smile; he gave me a wink, then leaned back in his seat. I felt as if half the world had been lifted from my shoulders. Poor Josh wouldn’t have to try and survive in one of those ruined buildings, constantly watching for Othersiders and the “rebels” that were still out there, who were little more than bandits. He’d be in a safe, secure place stocked with everything he’d need. It wouldn’t be fun, and he’d probably be a bit less than comfortable, but this was something an Apex-bred boy could cope with.

  I had just sluiced off the several pounds of yuck and sweat in the shower and was reaching for a robe when my Perscom went off. With a groan I didn’t even try to suppress, I reached for it—and the message on it woke me right up. Report to my office. Senior Psimon Abigail Drift requires your presence.

  I tried not to panic. Because, of course, the first thing th
at sprang into my head was that Drift had discovered we were trying to help Josh escape from her claws. Or rather, that I was. And the second thing that sprang into my head was that Josh had been a much better actor than I had thought, had been stringing me along all this time, and he was the one who’d turned us in.

  I hated this. I absolutely hated this. I was a Hunter. I should be worrying about Othersiders. I should not be looking over my shoulder, waiting for someone who was supposed to be on my side to stab me in the back!

  I dressed with precision and care, going for a Hunting outfit, the one that looked most like armor. Only when every hair was in place, every seam precisely aligned, and my Psi-shield turned on did I head for Kent’s office.

  I tapped on the door, which opened to let me inside. Drift was there, her white-blond hair slicked back, looking more like a ferret than she had the last time I saw her. “You requested me, Senior Elite?” I said politely to the armorer, ignoring Drift. Tonight she wasn’t in PsiCorps HQ, or in my uncle’s office. She was in Hunter HQ. And if she intended to play power games, I wasn’t going to just go along with it. Stupid, maybe, but I was more than tired of Abigail Drift.

  Kent’s eyes crinkled a tiny bit at the corners, but his mouth stayed sober. “Senior Psimon Drift wishes to ask you a few questions, Elite Joyeaux,” he replied. Since I had not been told to sit, I didn’t. Sometimes sitting puts you in a position of power, but sometimes it doesn’t, and I preferred to be at eye level with Drift. What I did do was go into a relaxed “parade rest” stance. Damn if I was going to give her the deference of being at “attention.”

  “Very well, Senior Elite,” I said, and waited for Drift to get on with it. She frowned, clearly not caring for my attitude. I concentrated on my One White Stone. I might be angry and scared, but I wasn’t going to let her see me sweat.