Elite: A Hunter novel (20 page)

Even Ace’s former friends were making no effort to defend him now. It was one thing when he’d gone after me and another when he’d basically given a big fat “up yours” to every Hunter ever by going over to the Othersiders. Ace’s former girlfriend, Cielle, was pretty bitter about it.
“‘Trust
me, baby,’ he kept saying,” she said to a little group of sympathizers. “‘I know what I’m doing, baby, you don’t need to know anything.’ And sure, I
bet
he knew what he was doing! He was selling out to
Them
the whole time! I bet he even had a deal going with Them so he always had what looked like fantastic Hunts and he’d stay number one! Lousy cheat! I wonder how many of us he planned to hand over to Them?” There was a lot more in that vein. She’d gotten the notion in her head that Ace had been grooming her to present to the Othersiders. She might have been right.

Needless to say, although there were cameras here as always, not a one was broadcasting. So the Hunters could say exactly what they liked, and they were not holding back. If someone didn’t have a nasty Ace Sturgis story of his own, there was always the opening to commiserate with someone who did.

Sure, some of this was sour grapes, but all of it was fueled by the deep sense of betrayal shared by everyone in the room. When it had just been Ace trying to murder me, that was terrible, of course, but people told themselves it was just Ace going ape over his brother’s death. But this was an outright betrayal of every single one of us. It hit everyone on a personal level. They were angry, outraged, and personally offended.

There was a certain satisfaction in hearing Ace getting smeared by
everyone
. I’ll admit it. Sometimes I am not a nice person, and that not-nice person was feeling vindicated right down to her toes. The bad-mouthing also made me feel a little less depressed.

But what really got rid of the depression was that when I was about halfway through my breakfast, a bunch of grapes appeared in front of my eyes. “I thought about an apple, but that’s a Christer thing,” said Retro from behind me. “I always preferred the Romans. Care for a grape?”

“Sure,” I said, taking one off the bunch and popping it in my mouth. He came around with his tray and plopped himself down across from me.

“So. Our Bad Lad has flown the coop.” He made a birdlike shape with his hands and flapped it off. “Am I the only one not surprised?”

“I guess…I guess the prefect probably isn’t,” I said after a moment of thought. “He was the one that wanted Ace somewhere they’d have to pump sunshine to him. But other than him and you…I guess so.”

He picked up a piece of bacon, eyed it critically, and ate it. “I’ll admit, it was more dramatic than I pictured. I figured he’d make an illusion doppelganger of himself during a fight and just walk away. Probably go sell his services as a Mage to a warlord somewhere, or one of those bandit paramilitary groups. Or, hell, he wasn’t in a position to be picky, to the anti–Premier Rayne bunch of wannabe rebels out there in Spillover.” He raised an eyebrow at me. “Mind you, any of those would have been a significant comedown in the world.”

“You know who I wouldn’t want to be right now?” I said slowly. “The army Mages he must have been palling up to. He royally shafted them,
and
now they’re probably being raked over the coals for not keeping a tighter leash on him.”

“True, oh wolves,” he replied, which actually made me smile briefly because it meant he’d read
The Jungle Books
too. “Have some grapes,” he added, offering me the rest of the bunch. I was polite and only took about half.

“Why aren’t you angry about this?” I asked—because of everyone in the room, Retro seemed to be the only one that wasn’t treating Ace’s defection like some
personal
betrayal.

“Waste of my time,” he said, and chuckled. “Look, it really is. I got angry at him when he tried to
murder
one of us. After that, so far as I was concerned, he was not getting one second more of my attention, unless and until I was in a position to do something about him. When I’m not Hunting, I want to be having a good time, and being eaten up with anger is
not
having a good time.” He cocked his head at me. “So, want to have a good time?”

I was saved from having to answer when
his
Perscom went off. He looked at it, shook his fist at the ceiling, and dashed off.

When I was done, I reported to the armory, which was also packed. Kent came out of his office, looked around, and announced that he had decided to hold an impromptu briefing for us, which was probably smart, since that would short-circuit a lot of speculation. Right now, people were still in the shock phase and venting about Ace. But Hunters are smart; they have to be or they don’t survive. I gave it less than forty-eight hours before people started taking the little bits that they knew and blowing them up into full-blown stories.

“This is what we know so far,” he said when we’d all settled around the room.

“All the cam footage has been gathered up, and if there was any doubt before, there’s none now. You might as well know the truth, since you’re likely to be the ones to butt heads with him. Ace Sturgis definitely defected to the Othersiders. We’ve got cam footage of him going through one of their Portals of his own free will.”

There was some murmuring, but no one sounded surprised. Angry but not surprised.

“The good news was that there were no Cit casualties,” he continued. “The bad news is that the analysts have a theory that the entire attack was staged in order to cut Ace loose.”

Well, that’s going to tilt over the hive,
I thought. It might have taken people a while to come up with that theory on their own…but on the other hand, maybe it was best to just get it in the open now. Would people speculate less if they thought the authorities were already trying to figure out what that meant and what we could expect?

“They lost an awful lot of minions just to get one human Mage,” Archer observed, his voice skeptical. “The Folk Mages are better than ours are. What could they possibly want with Sturgis that they couldn’t get easier with one of their own?”

Inside information,
I thought immediately.
Details on defenses. Even if Ace doesn’t know
how
the defenses are constructed, or even how they work, he knows where they are and where the controls are. And he knows the Hunters, knows their powers. A lot of them, if not all of them.

“When have you ever seen the Folk concerned about their foot soldiers?” countered Flashfire, one of the Elites whose pyromancy left me in awe. “I’ve seen them fling a couple hundred onto the barricades only to wander away when they got tired of the fight and leave the grunts to fend for themselves. We all have. I can easily see them sending in their cannon fodder just to distract us while they hooked Sturgis.”

“If all the troops were supposed to be was a distraction, that would account for the lack of tactics. They didn’t seem to give them any direction at all,” Hammer observed. “They just opened Portals and turned the troops loose.”

“And the minions they brought were not the sharpest knives in the drawer,” added his brother. “Minotaurs? Harpies? A Gog and Magog? Pretty dim, all of them, when left to themselves. If the Mages had been controlling the underlings, that still could have been a viable attack force—but they weren’t. As a distraction, though, they were perfect. They forced us to divide our forces, and that gave them an opening to separate Sturgis from the rest of the army Mages so they could grab him.”

Kent held up his hand. “No need to convince me. We were played like fiddles. I don’t know
why
the Othersiders wanted Sturgis, but it can’t be for any reason that’s good for us.”

They all discussed this for a while; meanwhile, I had been struck by an entirely different idea, and I wondered how many of them had thought of the thing I’d just thought of.

In order to pull all this off, somehow the Othersiders had been able to communicate with Ace while he was under observation and incarceration.

Kent pointed at Archer, Hammer, and Hawk. “You three are the senior Elite and our best tacticians; you know everyone’s strengths and weaknesses and how best they can work together. I want you to brainstorm combinations with me today. The rest of you, take your normal routine. All but you, Joy, I want to see you for five minutes first.”

Does he have cam footage of the Folk Mage talking to me after all?
I throttled down anxiety. The rest filed out—all but the three he’d indicated and me. “Joy,” Kent said soberly. “Sturgis was after your head, and I don’t imagine that’s changed at all. How are you doing?”

I bit my lip. Tell the truth and make him think I wasn’t up to being Elite? Or try to hide it and get caught anyway and prove I wasn’t? Either way I could be in trouble. “Better than last night,” I said finally, deciding to try and cut down the middle ground. “When it happened, all I could think of was Ace getting his hands on me and throwing me to the Folk. And the same last night. It was a rough night.”

Kent nodded in sympathy. “Not a surprise, I’d have been more surprised if you weren’t worried. So what are your thoughts?”

“I’m still worried,” I admitted. “But I’ve got a pack of eleven, and two of them used to be his. They should know him better than anyone. I’ll put my trust in my Hounds.”

He nodded, satisfied. “Just to be on the safe side, I’m going to move your quarters. He
shouldn’t
be able to get into the city, and he’s a wanted man; every cam system has his face in it. But he’s human; he can pass the Barriers without getting fried, and he might get some sort of illusion magic from the Folk that will change his face even for the cams, so I’m taking no chances.”

That actually hadn’t occurred to me last night, and I think I would have been in hysterics if it had. I resolved to sleep with one of my Hounds from now on.

“It’ll be taken care of by the time you’re back from your stroll in the underground,” Kent continued. “Just check your Perscom.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, and took that as a dismissal.

The storm sewers were very uneventful. Just small fry, and very few of them; if I’d had a channel, my viewers would have been very disappointed. By the time I got back, as Kent had promised, all my things had been moved to another part of HQ. I got a slightly better suite of rooms out of it; the shower was amazing, and it did so many things that it came with its own manual. The next time I needed to have a good long cry, I could do so seated under a waterfall of hot water, and finish up by steaming myself in a steam bath or in a one-person hot tub. No more sitting on the bottom of the tub and blubbering—I could recline and weep in style.

I still felt shaken and scared and desperately wanted to go back to the Mountain. I had done a pretty good job of covering that while I was patrolling, but not so much once I was alone. I contemplated having another good cry in my new shower…or maybe, going to the lounge and joining in the snarky critique group, if they’d still have me now that I was Elite. Should I call Josh? I wanted to, I wanted to so badly, but…

Poop. I’m calling him.

“Hey,” Josh said as soon as he accepted. “You all right? Need me to come stand guard over you while you sleep? I look awesome with a fire-ax.”

That made me laugh for the first time since Ace escaped. And it also let me know that Josh knew about Ace escaping. “No, not really. I think Bya would resent you trying to take over his job.”

“Well, all right, then. In that case, how about if we go for a walk in the Hub? It’s fun this time of night, and it’s not something you’ve ever seen on foot before.” He paused for a moment. “This is one of those ‘hide in plain sight’ things. Unless cams are specifically looking for you, and they won’t be, you’ll go unnoticed. Everyone knows that Very Important People only travel by pod. Nobody is going to pay any attention to us if we just dress like normal people. There’s street food if we get hungry.”

That pretty much decided me. I’d wanted to see the Hub afoot anyway, and I was used to doing a lot of walking. Josh would probably get tired before I did.

“I’d like that,” I said. He smiled.

“I’ll send a pod,” he replied, and before I could reply, he signed off.

On a whim, I dressed in some of my old clothing from home; the oatmeal-colored tunic that Kei had embroidered for me, a wide leather cincher belt, and my doeskin pants. I left my hair loose and didn’t put on any makeup at all. Then I went out to the door to wait for the pod. The sun set while I was still en route.

It dropped me off at a corner just on the edge of the Hub, and Josh was waiting under a streetlight for me. As if he had somehow read my mind, he was in some of the casual stuff he’d worn during the storm, and he looked nothing at all like a Psimon. I was positively ambushed by the relief and happiness I felt seeing him like that, waiting for me. I hadn’t realized until just now how much better I felt when I was with him.

He grinned to see me. “See now, here we are, just two turnips in the big city, going for a stroll to gawk at the lights and all the things famous people do. Nobody is going to pay the least bit of attention to us.”