Elite: A Hunter novel Read Free

guard to use his magic against the Othersiders the army deals with), Ace had been working with someone else, someone who had never been caught.
    Steel cocked his head to the side; listening hard, I could hear the heavy whomp whomp whomp of a couple of cargo helichoppers. “That’s the disposal crew,” he said. “We might want to move back to the station and the landing pad.”
    Since I had no particular wish to watch and maybe get splattered with yuck, I nodded, and we all backtracked along the path between the blueberry bushes I’d taken leading the Drakken away. The guys started helping themselves to berries as we walked, which was all the invitation I needed to do the same. Sure, we get whatever we want to eat at HQ, and Hunters get fed really, really well, but working magic makes you hungry.
    Fruit off the bush is always the best, anyway. The berries weren’t the same as wild blueberries; they didn’t have the same intense, slightly tart flavor, but they were bigger and sweeter than the ones back home, and I liked them better than the so-called “blueberry jam” they served at HQ.
    The guys were slowly recovering as we walked. The bushes were as tall as Steel’s head, and the ground between the rows had some sort of dense, small-leaved ground cover growing over it, to discourage weeds. The stuff was hardy; it didn’t really even seem bruised by us walking on it.
    “Good Hunt,” Steel said, around a mouthful of berries. He was the strategist of the two brothers, as I’d learned on the chopper ride into the drop zone. This was the first time I’d worked with them alone, rather than being in a full six- or eight-man Elite team.
    His brother grunt-laughed. “Any Hunt you can walk away from is a good Hunt.” He and Steel fist-bumped. The helichoppers must have landed, because there were no more sounds from their blades, but there were other noises behind us now. A breeze carried the sound of chain saws revving up, so the cleanup crew was already at work. Otherwise the only thing you could hear out here was the sound of wind in the bushes and the songs of birds and beneficial insects. That was part of the job of the ag-station—growing bugs that ate other bugs and releasing them at the proper time, and maintaining food stations that attracted bug-eating birds. There’s a lot of farming stuff we don’t do that they did before the Diseray, and spraying poison all over everything is one of them.
    When we got to the station, some of the techs were already outside, fixing the transformer and jury-rigging a link to the wind array, and the rest were looking at the deep scores in the concrete of the building. They kept glancing at us rather shyly, as if they wanted to thank us but were diffident about it. Steel solved that by walking up to them as casually, as if we had not just flattened a Drakken.
    “Everyone all right?” he asked. They seemed to take that as the cue that it was okay for them to flock around us and ask for autographs. Crazy, right? But believe it or not, Steel and Hammer both reached into thigh pockets and pulled out little palm-size cards with their pictures on them. Right there, after just having killed a Drakken, they were signing their names, as if they weren’t ready to drop, as if they were in a club or a bar. I was hanging back, but Steel beckoned me forward and pulled out another set of cards from his other thigh-pocket. This lot had the whole Elite unit on it, including me. I didn’t remember posing for that, but I suppose that someone had pasted the picture together from our individual shots. So I signed those. And our Hounds milled around and accepted attention from anyone who’d give it to them. Mine reverted to greyhound shape as soon as they saw the crowd, maybe to keep from scaring anyone, although at this point you’d think all those people who’d watched my channel would know what they looked like.
    So weird. So very, very surreal. Back home, Hunters were just not idolized