Elite: A Hunter novel (36 page)

Here and there some of the big Othersiders that didn’t disintegrate when they died created odd, dark mounds that looked out of place in the flat field.

I slumped down into the grass at the side of the road, and wondered, dully, how bad the toll was. It had to be bad.
I
had barely survived, and I had a pack of eleven. How well could someone with two or three Hounds hope to fare? Or an army Mage with no Hounds at all?

I thought bitterly of the Psimons, standing in safety on the other side of the Barrier to do their work—then immediately felt bad about thinking poorly of them.
They
weren’t trained to handle weapons the way we were.
They
had no way of defending themselves, once they’d mentally locked into a target and began messing with its mind. And since they were the only ones of us whose only powers worked across the Barrier, of course they needed to stay behind it.

And I shouldn’t think of them as a bunch of cowards because they had.

Besides, they’d probably been under orders.

And besides that—face it, they’d saved our sorry asses. If it hadn’t been for them turning up when they did, we’d have gotten overwhelmed. As it was, we’d only just
barely
beaten the Othersiders back.

If it hadn’t been for them
…
the Prime Barrier would be down right this minute, and Othersiders would be pouring into Apex.

I was vaguely aware of someone trudging up to stand next to me. I looked up; it was the armorer, and my relief at seeing him made me feel dizzy for a moment. “Joy,” said Kent, sounding relieved and just as exhausted as I felt. Then I felt panic because his head was bandaged, his arm was in a sling, and there was a huge bandage covering his right thigh. This was Kent! Kent never got hurt!

“Who’s hurt?” I asked, seeing what was in his eyes. “Who’s—”

“Everyone’s injured. Archer, Flashfire, and Scarlet were evac’d to the hospital. Archer’s still unconscious. Retro’s dead, and Bull. Steel…” He shook his head. “Missing, but…there’s no ping from his Perscom, and his comm’s dead.” He took a deep breath, as my throat closed and my eyes burned. I knew what that meant. Now I felt guilt just pour over me. I should have been paying attention! Ace had slammed him out into the mob, and it was my fault! I should have gone after him! I began to cry; Kent was so exhausted he didn’t even notice—or maybe he noticed, but what could he do? “That’s just in the Elite. We’ve lost twenty-three of the ranked Hunters, and half the ones left need serious recovery time. I’ve never seen anything like this. It’s like—like the Breakthrough and the Diseray, all over again. This is more than a surge. They’ve escalated this into all-out war.” The exhaustion in his voice came as a shock, on top of everything else. I had never heard the armorer sound like this. Ever. “If it hadn’t been for PsiCorps, they’d have hammered us into the ground.” I could tell how much he hated admitting that. “Can you wait a while for transport?”

“I’ll be all right,” I lied. “You see to the people worse off than me. I’m just worn-out.” The truth was, I was so exhausted I was slurring my words. But then, so was Kent.

“Thanks, Joy,” he said, and stumbled off, I supposed to check on people who had actual injuries.

I lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky, which got brighter and blue, while my eyes streamed tears. Steel was probably dead. Retro
was
dead. The guy who’d gone out of his way to make me laugh, regardless of how he was feeling, was gone. And what had I ever done for him? I was too tired to think. Which was just as well because I didn’t want to think about Steel, or about Hammer, his brother. How could I face Hammer now? At least Mark wasn’t missing or badly hurt.

Finally, someone in an army uniform came and shook me enough out of my daze to get up and load into a transport vehicle with a bunch of other Hunters. This wasn’t a pod: it was more like a goods transporter, and we all sat on the floor with our backs braced against the wall. I didn’t recognize any of the others; I only knew they were Hunters by the tattoos on the backs of their hands and their Hunting colors. Nobody said a word the whole way back; two of the seven actually fell asleep, curled up on the hard metal floor.

Good gods, what are we going to do if the Othersiders attack again?
I suddenly thought, and felt a moment of sheer panic at the idea of having to turn around and go back to the Barrier, because I had nothing left to fight with.

But that was when we pulled up at HQ, and we all more or less tumbled out of the transporter. We staggered into the building, and I headed for my room since there didn’t seem to be anyone wanting to debrief me. I sat down on the couch, just for a minute—

The minute lasted twelve hours, according to the clock on my vid-screen when I woke up.

WHEN I CAME TO—IT wasn’t exactly “waking up,” since the entire twelve-hour period had passed in something like a dead stupor—the vid-screen displayed a single message, dated from about two hours ago.

Report to the armory.
It took me a couple of minutes to grasp what it said, actually—I still felt stupid with exhaustion. I shoved myself into a sitting position with arms that still felt as clumsy as if they were made of wood, and everything that had happened all came rushing back, and I burst into tears and cried myself into throwing up.

Oh, Steel, I am so sorry—

It was my fault. We were on the same team, and if he hadn’t been with me, Ace would never have attacked him. If I had been paying attention, if I’d had
my
Shield up or even just the Shields of my Hounds, he wouldn’t have gotten knocked away.

I didn’t want to report to the armory. I didn’t want to have to face Hammer. Steel had been
with me
when he’d been blasted by Ace. I was probably the last person to see him alive. I didn’t want to have to tell Hammer that. I didn’t want to tell him I hadn’t gone to Steel’s rescue. Even though there was no way I
could
have gone to his rescue, since Ace was monofocused on turning me into component atoms. Yet, at the same time, I knew I had failed Steel, failed all my fellow Elite. I was the Hunter with a pack of eleven. I was supposed to be able to do the impossible, right? What could I possibly say to him?

I wasn’t hungry. In fact, after throwing up, my stomach was all twisted in knots, but I downed a couple of meal-drinks. Then I went and stood in the shower for five minutes and changed before I left for the armory, still trying to figure out what to say to Hammer. The walk there seemed both too short and took forever, at the same time. What was I going to say, not just to Hammer, but to everyone? How were we ever going to repulse another attack like that? Some of us were dead, all of us were exhausted, and the Psimons were in no better shape than we were. How could we ever save the city?

And Ace…we were lucky he’d just been so focused on me that he ignored everything else. If he’d actually turned his attention to getting through the Barrier, he
would
have. He could have cut his way through the defenses like they were made of paper, and once he’d gotten inside the pylon, he could have destroyed the workings from the inside and taken down the Barrier.

At that moment, as my hand touched the doorknob, all I could think of was Ace, with that Folk Mage behind him, doing impossible things, as if he’d gotten some sort of super-serum boost like in a pre-Diseray story, or had tapped into a whole new power source—

And out of nowhere, that was when I remembered what “my” Folk Mage had said when he’d grabbed me and had shook me so hard for a moment that my teeth had rattled.

“Do not just look, shepherd.
See!
Power always comes from
somewhere!”

I froze with my hand still on the knob. Because at that moment, things started falling together. What if I ignored that this was a member of the Folk, who had always been our deadly enemies? What if I forgot his weird behavior?

The Folk almost never said anything directly. “Power comes from
somewhere
” was about as close as one of them was ever going to get in telling me how they—specifically, how
Ace
—had gotten overclocked. Besides, he would have known that, as a member of the enemy, I would never trust anything he just told me until I saw it for myself.

So, I should not let myself get distracted by the source of the warning, and concentrate on what I was supposed to figure out. The first, that things were not what they seemed, had been something I already knew. But he had also told me that there was something right in front of me that I wasn’t seeing.

Right in front of me. And right after he’d yelled that at me, Ace had shown up.

Ace. Doing things he shouldn’t have been able to do, more powerful than anyone I’d ever seen, even the Masters. And the Folk Mage, standing behind him, who instead of joining Ace in attacking me, had apparently been doing
nothing
—or at least, had been passive until the moment came when they had to escape or be savaged to death by Myrrdhin and Gwalchmai.

Except that if “my” Mage was right, I’d been wrong about all of that. I had looked, but I had not seen. Now…what if the Folk Mage
had
been doing something? It just hadn’t been obvious.

What if he had been acting as Ace’s power source?

It was one of those things the Masters were always saying:
As soon as you realize the candle is a flame, your meal is cooked.
Once you know something can be done, you’re halfway to doing it yourself. It had never occurred to me—or anyone else, I guess—that it might be possible to share magic. But magic was just another form of manna….

It wasn’t that crazy an idea. I already knew that some Hunters could supply manna directly to their Hounds. I could do that, for instance. What if that feral Mage, acting as a sort of power supply, was the reason why Ace had been doing impossible things, things he never could have done on his own with only his own magic energy to fuel his spells?

If that was true, it meant that not just manna, but magic itself could be stolen, donated, or shared. And that information could change everything.
Would
change everything. If that was true, I knew where us Hunters could get “power supplies.”

All that flashed through my mind in the time it took me to open the door to the armory. Suddenly, I felt something I hadn’t for the last twenty-four hours.

Hope.

Someone had hauled in chairs for everyone to sit on, and it was obvious from the slumped shoulders and postures of exhaustion that everyone was just as drained and dispirited as I had been. And that didn’t even take into account all the bandages and bruises and other signs of injury. Even Armorer Kent was sitting, one wrist and the opposite ankle strapped into elastic supports, his eye blackened, a big bandage on his head, and the bulge of another on his right thigh under his clothing. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him sitting down except when we were on a chopper. He looked toward the door as I opened it, and nodded at me.

“Here’s the last of us,” he said, and waved me toward a chair. I felt horribly conspicuous as I edged between two rows of seated Elite to get to it. I didn’t look for Hammer; I was just as glad I didn’t immediately spot him. I still didn’t know what to say to him.

Kent looked past me. “Go on, Siren. You were saying?”

“Well, PsiCorps has been all over the news feeds,” said a woman behind me—I didn’t recognize her voice. “Taking credit for saving the city, and pledging they’ll do it again.”

“They can’t, not unless the Othersiders hold off any more attacks for a couple of weeks at least,” Kent replied. “The Psimons are as depleted as we are. Half of them were collapsed on the ground at the Barrier, unconscious, if not dead, the last I saw.”

There were uneasy murmurs at that. “We’re in no better shape,” Elite Mei protested from two chairs over. “There’s not a single one of us who isn’t hurt or exhausted or both. We aren’t ready to face another attack like that.”

Kent’s jaw tightened, but a shadow passed over his face. “No, we aren’t. I—”

“Sir?” I said, putting my hand up. “I—sir, I maybe have an idea—”

Now all eyes actually
were
on me, and I squirmed a little in discomfort and began to doubt my sudden inspiration. What if I was wrong? But Kent nodded. “Go ahead, Joy.”

So, into the silence, I explained about facing Ace and the Folk Mage. Described how the Mage had acted. I kind of decided
not
to mention “my” Folk Mage because I was pretty sure that if I did that, everyone would think my mind had been melted a bit by him. Heck, I’d have thought the same, except that I had eleven checks on my behavior, and none of my Hounds were treating me any differently.

“…so I couldn’t figure it out, how Ace could be doing all that spellwork without dropping over, unless he was getting magic power from somewhere else. It’s been stewing in the back of my mind until I got to the door of the armory. And that’s when it hit me—that what if that Folk Mage hadn’t just been acting as his minder, what if he’d been acting as Ace’s battery bank?” I concluded. “And if he could do that, maybe we could too. That would mean we wouldn’t be limited anymore, if
we
could find another source of magic energy.” I didn’t add that we wouldn’t need PsiCorps next time, though I was pretty sure that thought had occurred to just about everyone here. “Think of what each of us could do, magically, if we had twice, three times the magic power available to us!”