Apex: A Hunter Novel Read online

  “When you first arrived here, you were frequently seen in the presence of a Psimon, were you not, Hunter?” Drift said, her tone as cold as the frozen Mountain in midwinter. Well, now I knew for sure this was about Josh.

  “Psimon Josh, yes, Senior Psimon,” I replied, keeping my own tone as bland as unflavored oatmeal. I wasn’t going to let her intimidate me, but I also didn’t dare antagonize her. Don’t offer any information, I reminded myself. Only answer exactly what she asks. I probably should not have even said Josh’s name, but it was too late to go back now. It was really, really tempting to point out that she was probably the one who had set us up for that initial date in the first place. It was equally tempting to point out she had known damn well we were seeing each other and if she hadn’t liked the idea, she should have said something after the first date.

  But that was volunteering information. Don’t volunteer information.

  There was a lot of mistrust of PsiCorps by the Cits, which was only to be expected, given that there was absolutely nothing keeping them from sifting through the average person’s thoughts on a whim. But there was even more mistrust and animosity between the Hunters and PsiCorps; I had to wonder how much of that was due to Abigail Drift herself. She surely did not like Hunters—the way we were idolized by the Cits—at all. And she hated my uncle. I was certain she figured him for being the one thing standing in the way of her gaining more power with the premier.

  “Recently you had a falling-out with him,” Drift continued, glaring at me.

  “Yes, Senior Psimon,” I repeated. Good gods, if she was going to beat around the bush like this, her interrogation was going to take all night! On the other hand, if I kept dribbling information out in bits and pieces, maybe she’d get impatient and give up. Not likely, but I could hope.

  “And what was that falling-out about?” Drift demanded.

  “With all due respect, Senior Psimon, that’s none of your business.” That, I thought, was what the answer of someone who was totally innocent of chicanery would be. “It was personal, and had nothing to do with my status and position as a Hunter, or with PsiCorps.”

  Just a tiny little fib, not quite a lie. And, well, when you dissected everything down to basics, the reason I’d sent Josh packing was completely personal. I was trying to protect him. And not from PsiCorps. From Drift herself.

  “So long as her personal life does not interfere with her duties, she’s not required to answer any questions about it, Senior Psimon,” Kent said.

  “Well, the falling-out certainly affected my Psimon’s ability to perform his duties!” Drift snapped.

  “And with all due respect, that is between you and your subordinate, since I have seen nothing to complain about in Elite Joyeaux’s performance,” Kent replied, with a face as calm as one of the Masters’.

  If Drift was supposed to be the prime exemplar of the impartial, emotionless Psimon, she was certainly doing a bad job of it. Then again, she had all but promised Premier Rayne that the PsiCorps was going to be the salvation of Apex and the whole country, and so far, she hadn’t been able to come through on that promise. I wished Uncle were here. He’d have known what to do to turn the tables on her. I’d just have to hope I could stay a step ahead of her.

  I concentrated on my One White Stone. It was an actual stone, one I had selected from among the thousands in the bed of Troublesome Creek, where it ran down between the settlements of Double Mill and Graeme’s. As Master Kedo had instructed me, I had picked out the first stone that caught my eye and attention. I think it was quartzite, the stuff that sometimes has gold in it. This stone didn’t have any gold, but it attracted my eye because of the way it caught and held the sunlight; it had been rounded and tumbled by the waters of the creek for hundreds of years, probably, and fit perfectly in the palm of my hand. I studied it over the course of an entire day, from midmorning until sunset. And then I put it back in the creek. The point was not to physically own it; the point was to know it, and know it so thoroughly I could occupy my mind with it for as long as I needed to.

  I think maybe it was a good thing I was concentrating on it at that moment, because she seized me by the chin and stared into my eyes. Hers were like two gray marbles, the pupils contracted down to pinpoints. I thought about my Stone.

  Whatever she was expecting to get from that gesture, she was disappointed. After a moment, she let go with a snort of disgust. Kent said nothing, and neither did I.

  “You renewed contact with the Psimon,” she said into the silence. “Why?”

  A flash from Kent’s eyes warned me to tread very carefully, as if I had not already known that. “Three reasons, Senior Psimon Drift,” I said, finally. “First, he was unhappy that I had broken things off, and I didn’t like thinking about how I’d made him feel. Second, I realized that I was the one who was in the wrong, so I needed to apologize. And third, I missed his company.”

  All true. All absolutely and completely true. So true she could have probed my mind at that moment and seen it herself. I stated them in a matter-of-fact tone, not a defiant one, and prayed that was the right play to make.

  Kent chuckled, an unexpected sound in the tense silence. “Come now, Senior Psimon. My Hunter and your Psimon are both youngsters. The young are going to have emotions and hearts to break whether you like it or not.”

  Drift pulled her attention away from me and leveled another frozen glare at Kent, who seemed utterly impervious to it. He just smiled and shrugged.

  “My Psimons are expected to know better,” she said coldly. “My Psimons are strongly discouraged from forming personal attachments.”

  “Then you were a fool to encourage your Psimon to escort Joy on dates,” Kent countered, and she went rigid. “Oh come now, the control you have over the Psimons is well known. He wouldn’t have been permitted to breathe in Joy’s presence, much less take her Straussing, if he hadn’t had your permission and encouragement. And I agree, seeing a handsome young Psimon escorting a pretty, charismatic, trending Hunter was a good move on your part. It put a softer, more acceptable face on PsiCorps. But you took a risk when you did that, the risk that the youngsters would actually like each other. They did—you lost—so move on and let them handle the situation themselves. Your Psimon will be a great deal less distracted if you just let things take their natural course without coming here to bully his girlfriend.”

  Drift stood there with her mouth agape for a full minute, I swear. Of all the things she expected to have said to her, I reckon Kent’s speech just then hadn’t even appeared on the list of possibilities.

  Finally she just turned on me again and pointed a long white claw at me. “No more upsets!” she ordered me.

  Kent laughed out loud. “I don’t think that’s anything either of us can control,” he pointed out. “And it’s not in their control, either. Let it go, Senior Psimon. You’ll just have to accept there are some things no one short of a god can do anything about.”

  Well, if his previous statement had left her without a word to say, this one gave her a mental meltdown. She opened her mouth and closed it, then drew herself up and looked down her nose at him. Which was hard, since she was a lot shorter than he was. “I’ll take it under advisement,” she said icily, and walked out.

  We both looked at each other. I sat down hard, without waiting for permission.

  In the next moment, Kent took the chair behind the desk. “Well, we dodged that bullet,” he finally said and then looked at me. “You do know she was trying to get around your Psi-shield, right?”

  “I didn’t know, but I guessed,” I replied, and sagged in the chair. “Do you think she had…” I left the end of the sentence dangling.

  But he shook his head. “I think that her little experiment with her Psimons isn’t going as well as she promised the premier. I think she wants to find something to take her frustrations out on. You and that boy made a good target of opportunity.”

  I wasn’t at all sure of that. But she had definitely left dis
appointed, so whatever she was looking for, she hadn’t gotten. “Can a Psimon get past a Psi-shield?” I asked, pursuing the previous thought.

  “That’s the rumor.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “You have to be something special in the way of a Psimon, they say, and you have to have physical contact. Of course, she might just have wanted to make you feel about four years old.”

  “She managed that,” I admitted.

  After a little more conversation with Kent, I went back to my room. But I wasn’t at all sure that his conclusions were right. I didn’t think that Drift was looking for someone to terrify—she had plenty of her own Psimons who were afraid of her. Maybe, just maybe, she had been trying to send a message to my uncle that she could exercise her power over me anytime. Kent had blocked that particular move, making it clear that I was a Hunter, first, last, and in between, and he would stand by me.

  Maybe she was trying to see if Josh had told me anything that she didn’t want to get out. Like details of her experiment, and how many Psimons it was devouring.

  Or maybe she was just fishing for anything she could find. Anything at all.

  It was all making my head hurt.

  This did make one thing very clear, however.

  When Josh escaped, I had to have an ironclad alibi. I had to be somewhere else. Preferably with a record of the fact.

  I wished I could grab Mark at that moment and just talk his ear off about it. I really, really missed having a friend who was in on most of my secrets. Cielle would have been ideal, but I didn’t dare let her know what was going on with Josh. But Mark was safe….

  No, that was me being selfish again. There was no good reason at all for me to drag him into my troubles, and every reason to keep him out of them. The fewer people who knew about what we had planned, the better.

  FIRST, A STORM—A SHORT one, only half a day—which was exactly what we needed to recuperate. Then as soon as the sky cleared, another (thankfully) disorganized raid on the part of the Othersiders: this one, providentially, in Spillover. Also exactly what we needed. I tried not to get excited, but it looked as if the stars were aligning perfectly.

  The Othersiders must have been thinking that the storm would lock us down for longer than it actually had, because their target was a bricked-up tunnel that ran under the Barrier. It was led by a single Folk Mage, one of the feral ones.

  Kent, Cielle, Raynd, and I managed to run the Folk Mage off pretty quickly, and the gang of motley Othersiders he had been leading evaporated. We Hunted out the whole area and didn’t find much except mud. “I’m going to check on something,” Kent said as we gathered at a good landing spot to wait for our ride back. “Tell the chopper pilot we might be five coming back.”

  He strode off into the jumble of ruined buildings before anyone could say anything. This was the chance we had been waiting for.

  Now. Follow Kent, I thought to Bya.

  Cielle and Raynd gave me quizzical looks. “I have no more idea than you do,” I replied, doing my best to sound baffled. “Let’s send the Hounds back. The chopper will be here any minute.”

  Nice thing about having so many Hounds, and half of them Alebrijes: in the flood through my Portal when I opened the Way, what with all the milling around and all the crazy colors and patterns, the other two didn’t even notice I was one short.

  The chopper arrived shortly after that, and I told the pilot that we were waiting for Kent and maybe a passenger. A few moments later, Kent came running toward the craft through the weeds and bushes with someone following him.

  They both jumped in and fastened down, and the chopper took off before they got all their straps cinched. Between Othersiders and the rebels who were still somehow operating out here, pilots didn’t like to linger.

  Cielle and Raynd gave the newcomer the hairy eyeball. He looked like a typical denizen of Spillover: weather-beaten jacket, shabby brown “utility” tunic with a heavy belt, and darker brown pants with boots much the worse for wear. There was not much to be seen of his face under the heavy growth of dirty blond facial hair. He had blue eyes, and as you might imagine, the hair on his head looked as if any barbering he’d had in his life had been done with a knife.

  The only thing he had on him was a very old-fashioned and heavy Perscom. I caught Cielle and Raynd both trying to give Kent silent signals of What the heck is going on? without being too obvious about it.

  “Informant,” Kent said over the radio, since the noise of the chopper motor made ordinary talking impossible. “Needs to report to Charmand in person.”

  Raynd’s and Cielle’s eyebrows went back down, and they nodded. This made perfect sense, of course. Although no one had ever said anything officially, everyone knew there had to be informants among the rebels. Uncle would have been insane not to try to plant them out there, especially after Knight and I were ambushed, back before we were both made Elite.

  We all settled in for the short ride back to HQ.

  Well, Bya said with amusement in my head. Will I do?

  I suppressed a smile. Just don’t pant. Or try to drink from the toilet.

  Bya’s snort of derision was purely mental. Actually, he’d been practicing taking human form for days, and he’d gotten really good at it. Kent and I had both been impressed when he showed us the end result.

  When we arrived back at HQ, Raynd paused at the door, and of course, so did I.

  “Do you need help, Armorer?” he asked, giving Bya another dubious look. But Kent and Bya both laughed. Bya did an excellent human laugh.

  “No. Al here is an old friend of mine,” Kent replied, with a slap on Bya’s shoulder that made dust rise from the jacket and tunic.

  Nice touch. Did you roll in the dirt before you got on the chopper? I asked.

  Of course I did. Part of the disguise. Also a reason for Kent to get me real clothing. Because the “clothing” he was wearing right now was actually his own hide, and he’d need real garments for the next part of the plan.

  “Bloody hell.” Kent coughed, waving his hand in front of his face to dispel the dust. “I’d better take you to my quarters and get you cleaned up before I take you to Charmand, Al.”

  Bya shrugged. It wasn’t quite a human motion; it was too fluid, more like a ripple of the shoulders than the up-and-down motion of a shrug. But Raynd wasn’t paying as much attention to “Al” as he was to the dust, which was going everywhere and making him cough slightly. “In that case, sir, I’ll go wait for the next callout,” Raynd said.

  “You do that,” Kent replied, and motioned to Bya to follow him. I headed for my next position—Scarlet’s room, where she was waiting for me.

  Scarlet had a suite of rooms that reminded me so much of the Monastery that I was overwhelmed by waves of homesickness. Her personal colors of red, brown, and gold could so easily have been gaudy, but instead, due to the spare simplicity of her furnishings, everything in these rooms had a distinctly Eastern, minimalist flavor to it.

  “You’re sure you want to go through with this?” I asked nervously as we exchanged clothing. We were very nearly the same size, and I’d copied several of her Hunting outfits, so we already had sets of Hunting gear that were identical in cut and only differed in color.

  “Of course I do,” she chided. “Seriously, Joy, you need to stop asking that. You’re not just my fellow Elite, you’re my friend. That’s the only reason I need.”

  I swallowed around the lump in my throat—a lump composed of equal parts fear and gratitude. I still could hardly believe Scarlet of all people was going to be not only an active part of this insane plot, but an eager one.

  Of course, if we got a full callout, this whole business would fall completely apart. It all hinged on the fact that we’d gotten a heavy half-day storm, and so far we’d never yet gotten a full callout in the first twelve hours after a storm.

  At least now the waiting was over.

  Once we’d completed our clothing exchange, Scarlet and I hugged, and under cover of that hug, exchanged Per
scoms as well. The software would be unable to tell that we’d made the exchange. Now, as far as the system was concerned, Scarlet was me, and I was Scarlet.

  Scarlet gave me a wink as we broke apart, and put her hood up to shield her face—something I did a lot anyway, so no one would think twice about it. Then she left. She’d go to my room and wait for her next signal on my Perscom.

  Meanwhile I waited in her room for mine.

  About ten minutes later I got a text from Kent. Prefect Charmand wants a debrief on our observations while we’ve got a few hours of clear time. Helipad, now.

  I confirmed with a five-by-five, which was what Scarlet would have replied, rather than a Roger, which was my usual response. I put the hood of Scarlet’s outfit up and headed for the helipad at Scarlet’s rapid, long-legged pace rather than my own trot. Of course, if anyone ran motion analysis on either of us, we’d have been busted for sure. But the point of all of this was to obfuscate everything so that no one would bother to investigate the Hunters once I was superficially cleared. And while all this song and dance of switched identities felt contrived and stupid, Uncle and I were both pretty sure that if I wasn’t directly involved with the rescue, Josh wouldn’t go along with it. If he was being straight with us, Uncle didn’t think he’d really trust anyone but me. And if he wasn’t, well, he’d want me along to make sure to cement my guilt, but he wouldn’t know Scarlet and I had switched Perscoms as well as clothing.

  Kent and Bya nodded at me as I got into the chopper, which took us to the pad on top of the Admin building where Uncle had his offices. Bya was cleaner and wearing real clothing rather than the stuff he’d manufactured out of his own hide.

  The receptionist wasn’t at her desk; Uncle had messaged her that she was to take the day off when the storm moved in. Again, this was usual for a storm day. Also no different from any other storm day was that Josh had already been at the office, and aside from not being able to move about the city for those few hours, his workday had proceeded the way it always did.

  Kent and I went down to Uncle’s office, where we stayed talking for about an hour. Kent reported some unverifiable stuff about the rebels in Spillover—mostly that thanks to all the Othersider activity, they were taking a lot of causalities. Bya mostly nodded rather than talk, but he did put in an occasional word or two. Then Kent reported the fact that the Othersiders had started to target Apex’s food sources in their raids. I nodded or occasionally shrugged. And here was the first level of uncertainty; would anyone notice this was slightly out of character for Scarlet? Well, we hoped not.