The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  ***

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you need to?”

  Alex hesitated, entranced by the honey-light, by the metallic flicker in the depths of her pupils.

  “I need to learn how to be good to you.”

  She sighed, the sound of leaves falling on the water.

  “It’s hard to argue with you when you say all the right things. But we don’t have much time, and I miss you so much...”

  “But I’m right here. And you...are you here, Eerie? Is this you?”

  Her hand on his neck, like the warmth of the sun on his skin after an interminably long winter, like rain on cracked earth. His nerves sang when they touched, in a language that he responded to on a fundamental level that did not require understanding.

  “In a sense. It is difficult to explain. Words do no justice to the depth of our relationship. We are alike and distinct. We share almost everything, but she is not aware of me yet. When she comes to know me, there will be no distinction between us.”

  Not a seduction, but an appreciation of their entanglement. Not hallucination, but the clarity of synesthesia, a juxtaposed lexicon of sensation and response. The vocabulary of two bodies and their intermingling.

  “I’m confused. Are you Eerie?”

  Her smile was not Eerie’s shy half-smile. It was like the cold of predawn receding as the sun rose, lemon juice and sugar, the smell of old books, and the soft ash of burnt incense.

  “I chose that name because that is what you call me.”

  “You aren’t making sense.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Alex,” she said softly, stroking his arm. “Just be here with me, in this moment.”

  He was torn, stricken with indecision, the fear of making another mistake. It was almost funny – with Emily, he had known it was wrong, but he did it anyway, because he wanted to, because he knew what he wanted. Here and now, Alex was afraid to do anything, because he didn’t know what would be right.

  Their lips met, and she tasted the same, sweet and exotic. Her body remained soft and yielding to his touch. But the eyes, the light...

  “Can’t you explain it to me? I don’t understand what is happening.”

  She smiled again, the expression that was hers and was not, the face that was familiar but moved in unfamiliar ways. He pulled away, sat up, tried to clear his head, but she followed him.

  “You are right,” she whispered, her breath tickling his ear; the taste of honey, the sound of the waves breaking in this distance, the moment before sleep. “I cannot take what should be hers to discover. You are both still learning, and I do not have the right to cheat myself. But I miss you, Alex, every day. Will you just hold me, until our time is over?”

  She melted into his arms, and time stretched out, dilated, shrank away from him. There was never enough, he realized, and felt the aching grief of memory, the refined sadness of the transience of things.

  “Given the chance,” she may have said, before her eyes fluttered closed, before the honey-light dissipated, “I believe that you could save each other.”

  ***

  “I have news.”

  “I should hope so. Are they dead? Did you take any prisoners?”

  “No. There were complications.”

  “Fucking hell. Aren’t there always. What did you get for me?”

  “I’m not completely certain,” Mitsuru said, looking across Alistair’s old desk at Alice Gallow and producing the sheet of folded paper, “but I think we may not be the only ones fighting a civil war.”

  ***

  “This is a little…”

  Eerie twisted her hands in a ball.

  “Did I…did I do anything weird? I did something weird, didn’t I?”

  “No. Well, okay,” Alex admitted. “It was a little bit weird. Not bad weird, just…”

  Eerie looked over at him, clearly upset. Despite the situation, he couldn’t help thinking that she still looked cute, wearing nothing but his T-shirt and the bottom half of her rainbow striped bikini.

  “I don’t remember,” she said, drops of water flying from the ends of her blue hair when she shook her head. “I don’t remember anything. Did I embarrass myself, Alex? Do you hate me now?”

  Alex embraced her. She fit comfortably into his arms, even in distress.

  “No,” he said, trying to be reassuring. “You didn’t do anything…well, that is to say, nothing you did upset me or freaked me out. No need to worry.”

  Eerie studied his face closely.

  “So I did do something,” she softly, her arms tight around his middle. “Was it something bad?”

  “N-no! I mean, of course not. It wasn’t bad. You were just, you know…cryptic. And affectionate. I’m a little confused, but there’s nothing to be upset over.”

  Eerie squeezed him and pressed her face against his shoulder, and Alex was afraid that she would start crying. Then she pulled herself together and relaxed her grip, looking up at him with eyes that were entirely her own.

  “You want to try it again? This time, I promise that I won’t forget anything.”

  Nine.

  The limo was a Cadillac, because that was the only brand on the market which carried the necessary armor and communications equipment. In any other circumstance, Anastasia wouldn’t have been caught dead in an American car.

  The car, like many things in Anastasia’s life, was primarily for appearances, because it was expected for someone of her station. If she had used anything less, then her enemies might have suspected something, and Anastasia preferred to discourage speculation on subjects that she kept genuinely mysterious. A bulletproof car, with a shielded engine, run-flat tires, and a blood bank stocked with Type O negative blood in the trunk wasn’t really entirely necessary – though she had to admit that the powerful communications hub was rather convenient, particularly in areas that lacked reasonable information infrastructure – but it was expected.

  Not that an attempt on her life while she traveled was out of the question – she had in fact already survived three; four, if the bombing in Madrid that was actually intended for her father was included. But the likelihood that anything so crude would be attempted on a New York State highway was extraordinarily small, particularly on the relatively short trip to the airport for her flight to Reykjavik. The Thule Cartel had refused to allow her to apport to their compound – in order to protect the secrecy of the location – or to provide her with an apport technician of their own, so she was reduced to the clunky inconvenience of air travel.

  As good as her private intelligence service was, there was no particular reason for Anastasia to be aware of the Arleigh Burke–class destroyer that was currently more than a hundred kilometers offshore, only recently out of dry dock for repairs, headed to deployment in the eastern Mediterranean, patrolling the waters off Lebanon and Cyprus. While her security forces routinely monitored a variety of communication channels relevant to her current position, they did not include the encrypted U.S. Naval frequency that was frantically relaying information regarding a sudden and inexplicable malfunction in the ship’s vertical-launching system, which had resulted in the hot-launch of a fully armed Block IV Tomahawk cruise missile. She was therefore equally unaware of the simultaneous failure of a number of fail-safe and anti-missile countermeasure systems that should have prevented the weapon from entering U.S. airspace.

  When Anastasia arrived in Reykjavik, she would be met be an enhanced security detail, and the route to her meeting with the Thule Cartel leadership would have been cleared in advance, including the deployment of decoy and trail vehicles, fixed position snipers, and even hijacked satellite reconnaissance. Far less was deemed necessary for a drive less than an hour long through the relative security of the continental United States, however, so there were no Black Sun personnel in place to observe Brennan Thule using a powerful set of Zeiss field glasses to observe her limo from the crest of a nearby hill, recently clear-cut and conveniently free from visual obstructio
n.

  The Tomahawk cruise missile was capable of subsonic speeds above eight hundred kilometers an hour, which meant it took a little more than seven minutes for the warhead to reach its target. This was enough time to trip the various virtualized monitoring systems that the Black Sun Cartel had distributed throughout any number of military and civilian networks, including a number that were attempting to track or disable the missile that had mysteriously taken flight and armed of its own accord. Despite the enhanced and hardened communication system in the limo, none of this data was relayed to Anastasia or her minimal security detail.

  Anastasia Martynova typically traveled with both a precognitive bodyguard and an apport technician, as was standard procedure for securing the presumed heir to the Black Sun. Just lately, however, the heir to the Black Sun had been capricious and impulsive, travelling with minimal security details and taking unplanned journeys. At the moment, Martynova’s apport technician and her bodyguard were occupied with clearing the airport and vetting the crew of a waiting plane, leaving her security for the short drive to a pair of trained Operators, veteran security personnel from the Black Sun Cartel. They were capable in their own right, but neither were precognitive. Brennan Thule had thoroughly researched all of this before he decided on the current plan of action.

  Anastasia Martynova had a record of surviving assassination attempts that was almost unrivaled, and a rumored immunity to combat protocols – no doubt a function of her unknown Deviant Protocol – so the means needed to be indirect. Accordingly, no protocol was deployed against her. Brennan’s technopath ability was employed only to arrange the Tomahawk’s launch, to control its guidance and arming systems, and to prevent critical information from reaching Martynova’s limousine before effective defensive measures could be taken.

  When the limo, and the road around it for tens of meters in every direction, was reduced to a smoking crater by the deployed warhead, Brennan Thule had every reason to believe that Anastasia Martynova was dead.

  Naturally, none of that stopped him from dispatching a kill-team to make certain.

  ***

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You can’t just leave it there.”

  “Can and did. I answered your question. You asked why you found me and Eerie in your secret bathhouse. I explained.”

  Rebecca leaned forward, brushing the hair from her face.

  “I am going to put this cigarette out on your eye,” she grumbled. “You know what I’m talking about, boy. What did she say before the two of you started making out? The other, I mean – the one who lives inside Eerie?”

  Alex’s eyes widened, but just a little. He had clearly nursed a suspicion that Rebecca knew more than she had initially let on.

  “Eerie told you?”

  “She didn’t have to. I felt it when that one showed up. That’s why I came looking.”

  “You already knew about…her.”

  “Yes. Sort of. More like I’ve encountered her before.”

  “Yeah? And what did you think?”

  “Let’s leave that for the moment, though I will share my thoughts with you. I want to know what you thought, first.”

  He considered. Alex Warner, Rebecca thought cynically, would make a terrible poker player. She didn’t need any of her substantial empathic abilities to know exactly what was going on in his semi-vacant head. Then again, teenage boys rarely had surprising motivations.

  “I think she was sad,” Alex said finally. “She was crying for some reason. She kept saying she was happy to see me, that she missed me. And she was so much like Eerie, on one level there was hardly any difference. But the way she talked, and her eyes...”

  Rebecca nodded when she was sure that he didn’t intend to continue. She knew what he meant, anyway. There were genuine physiological changes involved – she had witnessed them herself. When Eerie had one of her episodes, it was as if she were possessed. Worse, Rebecca wondered if whatever possessed her was there all along, watching from the background.

  “It made me feel like I don’t know her at all at first. But maybe that’s why she likes me. I don’t know what’s going on in my own head half the time. Maybe it isn’t that different for her, even if she is schizo, or whatever.”

  Rebecca cooled off her own anger automatically. He didn’t know what he was talking about, she reminded herself. Conversations with Alex often required an extra dose of tolerance.

  “She reminded me of Eerie, and I liked her because of that,” Alex continued on, oblivious as always to the people around him. “That’s got to mean something, right?”

  She softened.

  “Eerie isn’t schizophrenic, Alex. She doesn’t have multiple personalities, or any psychological problems at all, by the standards of what she is. As far as I can tell, Eerie is a completely normal and healthy Changeling. What is normal for her, in other words, might be very abnormal from a human perspective.”

  “I see what you mean,” Alex said, nodding. “Kinda. What happened, though?”

  “You’d better not laugh.” Rebecca got a cigarette going, then realized she already had one smoldering in the ashtray, and stubbed it out sadly. It was too much to hope Alex hadn’t noticed, but he was kind – or self-absorbed – enough not to mention it. “The only person I’ve ever told this was the Director, and he laughed until I left the room.”

  “I’m not going to laugh,” Alex said earnestly. “I can’t even imagine the Director laughing.”

  “Don’t. You ever think much about time, Alex?”

  “Oh God,” Alex said, shaking his head. “Whenever I ask a question about anything, the answer begins with the goddamn origins of the universe.”

  Rebecca glared until Alex took the hint and shut up.

  “Ask Vivik sometime. He can wrap your head up like a pretzel. What’s significant in this case is fairly easy to explain – time isn’t sequential, Alex. Time isn’t a bunch of events that happen in chronological order. That’s just the way we perceive time,” Rebecca said, pausing to let it sink in. “You with me?”

  “If time isn’t chronological, then what is it?”

  She took his furrowed brow as a genuine attempt at understanding, or as close as Alex would come to one.

  “I’m no good at this shit. It depends on what flavor of physics you subscribe to; a lot like religion. Some people think it’s a wave, other people think everything happens simultaneously. I’ve heard people argue that the universe replicates and divides with every decision, theories of a super- and substructure for the universe…”

  “Pretend I didn’t ask.”

  “I know. If you let them, physicists and philosophers will start waving all sorts of math in your direction, trying to prove their point. But the important bit is this – time only seems linear because that’s the way we experience it. The Fey aren’t like us, though. Maybe you’ve gotten so used to hearing it that you’ve forgotten what it means – but Eerie isn’t human. She is profoundly different from you and me.”

  Alex thought it over, scratching his head. Rebecca ached to use empathy to urge him along – it was almost second nature – but she had promised not to do that, and Rebecca honored her promises, to the extent that it was possible.

  “Then you think Eerie doesn’t experience time the way we do?”

  She gestured vaguely, her hand waving between them.

  “Sort of. I think she forces herself to see things our way, or at least tries to. I think that’s part of what makes Eerie the way she is. I don’t think that Eerie’s actually crazy, Alex – I think reconciling her Fey half and her human half skews her perceptions.”

  Alex rubbed his jaw thoughtfully.

  “Okay, so, when this all happened, I was talking to…”

  Rebecca ground out her cigarette in the ashtray, her mouth suddenly filled with a foul taste.

  “I think you were talking to Eerie.” Rebecca watched Alex closely to see how he would react. “Eerie from some point in the future, when
she has developed a different perspective on time, in line with her Fey ancestry. Eerie looking backwards, as it were, remembering – except memory works differently when time isn’t sequential. Theoretically, everything happens all at once. I think she was reliving a memory, Alex, while experiencing it for the first time.”

  “I was talking to future Eerie? But, not really?” Alex said uncertainly. “Wow. That is all truly fucking weird. How’d you figure all this out, Rebecca?”

  She tried to laugh it off.

  “I didn’t really,” she admitted. “This is mostly speculation. We don’t really know much about the Fey.”

  Alex’s mouth fell open.

  “Wait a minute,” he said, clearly annoyed. “You don’t know at all. You’re just guessing.”

  Rebecca shrugged. There was no point in arguing.

  “I’d like to call it an educated guess.”

  “None of you people,” Alex said shakily, standing up, “know shit. You just make guesses and then we die when you are wrong.”

  Perhaps her compassion was curtailed slightly by knowing Alex, by her awareness of his own self-centered nature. It could have been that she spent too much energy curbing her natural instinct to comfort him, empathically, or that she had simply witnessed this same scene too often.

  “Alex, it isn’t like that.”

  His eyes offered a challenge. He was still undecided, but he was also looking for an excuse to leave, a casus belli to storm out and feel self-righteous.

  “No? Then explain it to me.”

  Rebecca reached for another cigarette automatically, even though she still had the terrible taste in her mouth from the last one, but to her amazement, Alex reached out and knocked the pack off of her desk.

  “Would you fucking stop it,” Alex yelled, his face red with frustration. “Just explain it to me, Rebecca, so that I can understand. No bullshit.”