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HUNTER CAME TO SUDDENLY, jerking into a sitting position and immediately feeling a sharp pain in her chest.
"Take it easy," said Hobson, placing a hand on each of her shoulders and gently but firmly pushing her back to a reclining position.
She sat on the floor of the kitchen, propped against the wall using someone’s backpack to allow her to lay back. Off in the corner opposite, two bodies lay under a tarp. Hunter assumed they were the bodies of Williams and Tombs. The bodies of the people who attacked them were nowhere to be found, but she could vaguely sense the minds of two survivors who had been tied up and were left outside in the rain.
"How long," she said and stopped, pain shooting through her chest as she took a breath. "How long was I out and how bad is it?"
"Almost two hours," said Hobson. "And not as bad as we’d thought. Your vest took the brunt of it, but at such close range, you still have two broken ribs."
Hunter nodded. She could feel that her ribs had been wrapped tightly and was glad that even before she’d shown up, everyone who took shelter in Edinburgh Castle had mandatory training in basic first aid. She accepted the bottle of water Hobson handed to her, but as she drank, she noticed several of her compatriots giving her odd looks.
"What is it?" she said after swallowing.
"The King," said Hobson, hesitantly. "Doesn’t think that woman committed suicide."
Hunter glanced over to where the King sat, off by himself, as usual, then back to Hobson.
"She put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger. How would His Royal Highness like to classify that?"
"He says... that you forced her to do it. With your mind."
Taking another swig of water, Hunter carefully closed the bottle and set it down before slowly and with great difficulty – not to mention shooting pains through her entire torso – got to her feet. Bracing herself against the cool stone wall, she looked to each surviving member of the team. And intentionally not Arthur.
"I see. So this is where the paranoia starts."
"No one ever catches you off guard," said Hutch, the only one actually looking her in the eye. "And you always seem to know when the ril-galas are attacking."
"I saw her face when she was about to pull the trigger," said Grieve. "It weren’t the face of someone doing something they wanted to."
"I saw your eyes," said Ransom, staring down at some kind of insect as it crawled across the toe of her filthy hiking boots.
Moving gingerly over to the fire, Hunter served herself a cup of beans. They were still warm, but they were overcooked. She didn’t care – she was hungry and angry and in pain.
"I didn’t know if it would work," she said.
Even though no one had been speaking, the room seemed to find a higher grade of silence. Hunter ate a spoonful of beans while she tried to figure out how to word things so that people – regular people – would understand.
"It... wasn’t a simple process. I first had to make her feel shame at what she was doing. Disgust, even. And once I made her understand that-."
"Bloody hell," said Wiggins. "Listen to you, talking like this shite is normal!"
"Look around you and then, please, tell me what ‘normal’ is," said Hunter.
"It isn’t fucking with people’s minds until they kill themselves," said Hutch, his hand – consciously or not – settling on his holstered sidearm. "We don’t even know who you really are or where you came from. You just showed up one day."
"I am exactly who I’ve been for the last year and a half that we’ve been fighting this occupation, Mister Hutchings," she said. "And I am also a weapon. A weapon designed by and discarded by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics."
There was dead silence as she finished her beans and then tossed her mug aside.
"I was born in Lijiang, China to a very, very poor family. When I was four, I began to show signs of extrasensory perception. When I was five, my parents heard that the government was looking for children who had shown such signs, so they sold me to a government division called Project Nightwatch. I spent the next twenty years of my life in a lab, being forced to undergo testing and experimentation and endless hours of training to become a psychic assassin and when the project was deemed a failure, I was scheduled to be liquidated."
Picking up the water bottle again, she opened it and drank.
"So I escaped. I killed nine men in the process, if you were wondering – all by conventional means, if you were also wondering about that. I was on the run for a year before the Commonwealth caught me and imprisoned me and made a deal to hand me over to ATC Castle for research purposes. But I was fortunate in that the ship that was to transport me to ATC Castle happened to be the HMCS Vimy Ridge, commanded by Finn Radko."
She noted a few people straighten a little. Most survivors had seen the ril-galas autopsy broadcast before the ril-galas had killed all off-world communication and so knew who Radko was.
"He freed me in exchange for my help as a means of early detection. And then, of my own free will, I came to Earth, despite the fact that the Commonwealth, the Soviets and ATC Castle have all put a price on my head," she said. "I came here to help fight the occupying force."
"You should have told us all of this," said Hutch.
"Why?"
"Because we deserve to know who we’re sharing space with!"
"Do we indeed? Do the rest of you agree?"
There were murmurs of agreement.
"I see. In that case," she said. "Hutch, perhaps you’d like to share with everyone why a man with no military training is such a skilled bomb-maker? Ransom, maybe you’d like to explain the four tally marks you have cut into your left forearm? I’m sure the rest of you have secrets in your past you’d all like to share? Despite being a psychic, I have never gone into your minds looking for your secrets or digging into your pasts. We are now who we have become since the ril-galas invasion. At least, that’s how I see it. I don’t care how you came to be an expert at explosives. I don’t care if someone was a priest, a porn star or a contract killer before the world changed – all I care about is who they are today and whether they’re helping keep the human race alive."
She ran a hand through her hair, surprising even herself at how emotional she was becoming. It was a strange feeling after having spent so much time devoid of any emotion but anger.
"I had no choice in what I was trained to be. What I was brought up to be from the age of five. And I didn’t think I would ever have a choice... but then Radko opened my cell door and gave me the chance to choose the kind of person I wanted to be," she said, then spread her arms wide. "And this is what I chose. A life lived on the razor’s edge, fighting to protect those who need protection."
Dropping her arms, she winced slightly. The action caused a ripple of pain through her ribs.
"If that isn’t good enough for you, then you are a bunch of hypocrites who aren’t worth my efforts."
When no reply was forthcoming, Hunter shook her head and stepped outside, sheltering from the rain under an overhang. She could hear murmured conversation inside the kitchen, but couldn’t make out individual words. If she’d reached out with her mind, she had no doubt she could pick out what each person was thinking, but she found she didn’t care.
A chill was just starting to set in when Ransom appeared at her side, carrying Hunter’s jacket. The girl helped her put it on without a word and then just stood for a moment, staring out at the torrential rain battering the castle’s grounds and curtain wall.
"Kills," she said finally.
Hunter turned to look at her.
"The cuts I made on my arm," said Ransom. "I’m counting kills."
"I would have thought you’d killed more than four ril-galas," said Hunter, already knowing, or at least strongly suspecting, what Ransom’s response would be.
"Human kills."
Hunter just nodded.
"You don’t look surprised," said Ransom.
"When I saw you take out that traitor and then saw a fresh cut on your arm, it was easy to put two and two together," she said. "Without resorting to mind-raping you."
Ransom had the good sense to wince at that.
"I’m sorry I didn’t stick up for you in there. I should have."
"It’s fine. I don’t expect anyone to understand me or my past or how I feel about any of it."
To Hunter’s surprise, Random chuckled humourlessly.
"Yeah, knowing the kind of horrible things you’re capable of and being more than a little afraid of it? Who could ever understand that," she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
Pushing up her sleeve, the young redhead held out her left arm to Hunter. There were four short scars visible, plus the fresh one Hunter had noticed earlier, making five and not four as Hunter had thought.
"The first one was a guy I saw back home hunting moose," said Ransom. "They’re endangered. I guess most things are endangered now, though. He didn’t see me – I was always really good at stealth. I was surprised at how easy it was, just an arrow through the throat."
She pulled down her sleeve and crossed her arms over her chest. The temperature was really starting to drop.
"And it felt good," said Ransom. "Three of the five were before the ril-galas came. The fourth was right after the shit hit the fan and everyone was all panicky. I didn’t even need to worry about being caught."
"Harley..."
"No, I just want you to know that I get it. Why you didn’t want to talk about your past. I get it. When I think about what I was before all of this, it scares the shit out of me," she said. "I think maybe you and me are the only people in the universe whose lives were saved by the invasion. For me anyway, it gave me a place to focus these... I dunno, these tendencies? Urges? I don’t even know what to call them. But whatever. I don’t care. Psychic assassin or not, I still consider you a friend."
She looked up at Hunter with a sad, lopsided grin.
"Think a psychic assassin and a teenaged serial killer can still be friends?"
"I can’t think of a better pairing."
"Hunter!"
She and Ransom turned quickly at the shout from the doorway. Hobson stood there, looking excited.
"Grieve was going to set up on overwatch upstairs," he said. "And... you have to see this."
Hobson immediately turned and headed back inside, Ransom and Hunter following close behind. He led them upstairs to a small room, in which the furniture had all been pushed to one side. Standing in the centre of the room was Grieve, and beside him sat a piece of machinery, large, but not overly so. Straps had been attached that indicated it was designed to be transported like a backpack.
"It’s a transmitter," said Hobson. "A long-distance transmitter."
"The same kind we used to use in the Black Watch," added Grieve. "When we were deployed and need to call out into orbit for evac."
A transmitter that could launch a transmission into space. Hunter tried her best not to get her hopes up. But if it worked, they might be able to reach someone, anyone who could help them, not to mention find out how the war was unfolding off-planet.
"Is it functional?" she asked.
"It appears to be."
"And you can operate it?"
Grieve nodded.
"We take it with us," she said. "I’d offer to carry it, but..."
"Not with your ribs in the state they’re in," said Hobson. "I’ll carry it."
"As soon as the storm breaks, we send out a transmission with as much power and as wide a dispersal as we can manage," said Hunter. "And then we get on the move immediately."