The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “So sorry,” Hope clucked, picking through her salad with a methodical determination. Alex watched, fascinated with the process. He couldn’t help but wonder what ingredient merited such a patient search. “I don’t do it deliberately. I can’t help it if people like me. It’s in my nature as an empath. But Emily should have explained all of this to you by now.”

  “Look, I’m really not in the mood,” Alex snapped, tossing his fork onto a plate littered with side dishes he’d picked at without enthusiasm. “If you’ve got something to say, Hope, then say it. I don’t have the energy for all this cloak-and-dagger nonsense. Just tell me what it is that you want.”

  “Would Anastasia Martynova do that for you?” Hope asked, stabbing a particularly large cherry tomato with her fork. Alex felt let down by her anti-climactic selection.

  “That is probably her only good quality,” Alex conceded. “Anastasia is frank.”

  “Well, then, I will endeavor to be so as well,” Hope said. “Your behavior of late, as I am sure you realize, is alarming to my friends and I. We have been informed of events in our absence, obviously, but some of the reports appear to be… erroneous. To be, as you desire, frank, we believe that we have been misled. Further, it seems obvious from recent events and our own brief time here that your life is already entangled with Anastasia Martynova, perhaps unavoidably. Chandi here wants to give Emily another, brief chance. Grigori believes you lost already, to the Black Sun or to that bizarre changeling. He wants us to take appropriate action. I have my opinions, which are not particularly positive regarding your friend Emily and her veracity. Was that frank enough?”

  “Yes,” Alex said meekly.

  “And? What do you think of all this?” Hope finally took a bite, one small nibble from the miniature tomato, her eyes placid, almost bovine in satisfaction. “What do you think I should do about you, Alex? Is there something that I’ve gotten wrong?”

  Alex took a bite of mashed potatoes to buy himself time. It was a transparent gesture, and he knew it, but he genuinely didn’t know what to say. Then he had a flash of inspiration. Alex was thinking of one Michael’s little talks on Aikido, about how any situation could inverted with the proper application of force and control, how advantage was merely a matter of perception.

  “Here’s what you’re going to do,” Alex said firmly. “You are going to stop jerking Emily around. She stays in the Academy until she graduates, no matter what happens. And Eerie, who is not what you are thinking she is, whatever it is that you are thinking, you leave alone. If you want to have any chance of recruiting me, any chance of having me hear you out, then you will promise me these things. If they do not happen then I will march my ass straight over to Anastasia and volunteer. You understand me?”

  Alex was trying very hard to imagine himself as the kind of person who said things like this. He was trying very hard to sound not confident but rather nonchalant, as if he didn’t really care about their response, as if the outcome was never in doubt. He didn’t even notice Emily standing behind him, not daring to touch him, but hovering as close as was possible.

  “Well, Alex, that sounds a great deal like you want us to do you a favor,” Hope said indulgently. “Which, I might add, we are more than happy to do. But, if you would,” Hope said, nodding at him pleasantly, “remember that we’ve done this for you.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said uncertainly as they stood up in rough unison, Hope nodding at him again and Grigori glaring suspiciously, before they left for another table far across the cafeteria, where groups of students having lunch screened them from him.

  Emily walked forward and reached for him tentatively.

  “Alex,” she said softly, her fingertips on the back of his neck. “I don’t think you should have done that.”

  * * *

  “I didn’t expect you to come here,” Gaul said. His tone was civil, he felt, given the circumstances. Anastasia Martynova was not the most welcome guest, particularly when she announced her intentions in advance and arrived in state, trailing Renton and Timor, both of whom sat patiently in his puzzled secretary’s room. “At least, not so openly.”

  “It seemed important to me that this visit be on the record. I need a favor from you, Director, and I need it done so that everyone knows about it.”

  “I see,” Gaul said, not actually seeing it. He disliked Anastasia Martynova because she represented a blank as far as his precognition went. It was an unforgivable flaw and, as far as he knew, unique to Anastasia Martynova. On a personal level, however, he found her alarmingly easy to work with.

  “I have done you a number of favors in the past, yes?” Anastasia said, crossing her ankles daintily.

  “Yes.”

  “In perfect confidence?”

  “As far as I am aware, yes.”

  She nodded firmly, as if emphasizing their agreement.

  “Then, you had to have some suspicion that this day was coming,” Anastasia said reasonably. “I want something in return. Nothing major. You won’t have to put yourself out too far.”

  “Yes?”

  Anastasia explained her request, Gaul adjusted his glasses, and then they regarded each other cautiously.

  “The Hegemony will never allow it.”

  “They will. They are sending two representatives along, so there should have no complaints.”

  “Oh?” Gaul prodded again, when he realized she was gathering herself to head for the door.

  “Oh yes,” Anastasia said, smiling indulgently. “The Muir sisters. Surely you’ve heard of them?”

  12.

  “Are you sure you’re ready for this?”

  “Hey, shut up, boss. You’re ruining my concentration.”

  Alistair obediently disappeared from her head. Alice Gallow sighed with relief, and then returned to the task at hand. She was clinging to a ledge twenty-five stories in the air; her feet sideways to make the most of the three inches worth of space the windowsill afforded her. Below, she could barely hear the evening traffic from Fifth Avenue. She had her hands up above her head, trying to find purchase on the sill above her, the twenty-sixth floor, where she wanted to be. She couldn’t remember ever having free-climbed before, but her body seemed to know what to do automatically, by muscle memory, and she figured if she couldn’t trust her body, then she couldn’t trust anything.

  Finding purchase with her hands on the ledge above her, Alice went up on her toes, shifting her weight to her hands briefly while she walked her legs up the sides of the windowsill. She braced one foot after the other as high as she could manage, wedging the toes of her shoes into the mortared space between the stone blocks that made up the building’s façade. She had to stop halfway, so she could give her aching fingers a rest. Alice felt perfectly calm, hanging there above the sounds of horns and sirens, the wind whipping through the gap between the buildings, coming off the Atlantic and achingly cold. Alice couldn’t remember much, but she knew that she hated New York. She’d felt it since she arrived, the day before yesterday.

  Of course, the view of the city she’d gotten wasn’t exactly the most flattering.

  She’d come directly from Central, so the first few hours she spent scoping the rough area outlined by the dossier that Alistair had implanted before she’d left, and caching portions of the gear she’d brought where she thought it might prove the most useful, in case what she had on her person turned out to be insufficient. She’d found everything to her liking, as much as possible when she was in Manhattan, so she navigated the surprisingly dim subway system to Brooklyn to a club that Rebecca had told her about. It was a metal bar supposedly; Emperor blaring in her ear buds as she walked past the eclectic crowds of hipsters, Orthodox Jews, black teenagers and homeless people, to get her in the mood. It turned out to be more of punk bar that played metal-inspired hardcore, but Alice made the best of what was at hand. She had four drinks and was hit on three times. The second guy was the cutest, but the last one had managed to make her laugh, and that seemed more importan
t, that night. She decided to forgive his spiky hair and bad tattoos. She let him buy her another drink, and then went back to his flat somewhere in a dilapidated warehouse loft a few blocks away. Alice spent most of the night with him, returning to her hotel in the early morning, tired, disheveled, and thoroughly pleased with herself.

  She had harbored secret anxiety for weeks that she might have forgotten something important about that stuff too, but it all came back to her as soon as her clothes came off.

  Alice spent the day taking naps and short walks, reading over files and deciding between her three potential targets. Whichever one she picked, she knew Alistair would throw Xia and Mitsuru at the other two if it looked like she wasn’t in trouble, and probably the new girl he was holding in reserve too, the vampire. She didn’t know where Alistair had gotten such excellent intelligence lately, but she didn’t worry much about it. Killing Witches was her thing, even she could remember that. Eventually, Alice picked the hardest target with the prettiest face. She liked it better when they were pretty.

  The afternoon had stretched out interminably. New York was muggy, and she felt listless. She’d ended up watching four hours of the Discovery channel. Some guy named Mike Rowe, whose warm voice she found soothing, narrated every show she watched. Nearly everything she learned was new to her. When the sun finally consented to set, she pulled out her hardbound diary and jotted down notes from the day, just in case, and then showered, leaving the door to the bathroom wide open behind her. Since Rebecca had found her, she had weird anxiety about small, tiled spaces. She dried, dressed, and double-checked her kit, confirming everything was in order.

  The subway was nicer than she remembered it being, and she felt pleased with herself for remembering. Midtown was wrapped in weeknight quiet, so she saw only cops, service workers in orange vests, and ragged homeless people. She’d climbed by hand, because she was worried that an apport would rile the Ether, letting the Witch know she was there before she announced herself.

  Resetting her grip, she pushed off with her feet and pulled with her hands, jumping for the handhold above her. Her fingers caught and then, for a long moment, she was certain that her grip was bad, but her fingers held, and she wriggled her way up on to the ledge, standing on the balls of her feet to make the most of the narrow space. She clung to the side of the building as she shuffled, painstakingly making her way over to the corner of the building where the target had her offices. The lights were still on, just as they were supposed to be, the blinds were closed the way they always were, according to surveillance. Attaching the rig to the office window was trickier than she had anticipated, and it took almost half an hour of fumbling before the suction cups latched on correctly and the electronic fuse activated. She retreated around the corner to the office’s other window, then took a flashlight from her bag and taped it to the wall beside her, so that she was spot-lit by the powerful Xenon bulb, her shadow vivid and black.

  Alice took a series of deep, timed breaths. She shook out her hands, and hugged them underneath her arms until her fingers were no longer numb and cold. She extracted a black matte H&K USP Elite and a phosphorus flare from her bag, and wished that it had been practical to carry a shotgun across town and then up the side of a building. Alice stared into her shadow for what seemed like a long time. When she was sure she was ready, she hit the button on the detonator and then let the shockwave push her from the ledge, as she fell backwards through her shadow.

  She hit the carpeted floor of the office hard; physics demanded it. It was undignified but necessary. Alice rolled hurriedly to her feet and found that things had gone better than anticipated. The charge had been shaped to spray the interior of the room with broken glass as well as a load of metal-tipped fletchettes, and it had done its job well. There was one man down roughly in the center of the room, with another in a suit bending over him and talking rapidly into an earpiece, while a third approached the shattered window cautiously, his gun drawn and held close to his body. Her target huddled behind a desk with a fourth security guard standing protectively over her, covering the guy advancing on the window with a snub-nosed Israeli submachine gun. Everyone in the room was looking the wrong way, so no one noticed her arrival until she moved.

  Alice being Alice, that was too late.

  The Witch noticed first, of course, because she could feel the distortion in the Ether that the port caused. She raised a barrier instinctually, but that actually made things easier on Alice. She had to take out the guy with the submachine gun anyway, and the barrier simply meant that she didn’t have to worry about any strays hitting the Witch.

  She and Xia had done rock-paper-scissors for assignments back at Central, and he’d won, rock smashes scissors, so he got the kill order. They’d given the other kill order to Mitsuru, because it would be her first Witch, and it was about time the girl was officially baptized as an Auditor. That meant that Alice had to bring her date back home with her tonight.

  She dropped the flare behind her, and then raised the gun and fired three times, aiming for the head, wishing again that she had a shotgun loaded with solid slugs. She didn’t know if the guards were human or Weir or what, so she had to assume the worst. The H&K fired .45 caliber rounds, and she’d loaded it with these horrible explosive Tungsten bullets called ‘Fang-Face’, designed to tear big fucking holes in flesh. If they were Weir, she’d need them, too.

  His head exploded like a jack-o’-lantern with an M-80 inside, so she shelved any further worries about his species. She squeezed off a couple more rounds in the direction of the two remaining guards, by the window, more to keep them ducking and moving than anything else. They all went wide, but Alice was set by then, having dropped down to one knee and taken careful aim at the one who’d been smart enough to draw his gun. Alice fired twice and then dove forward, through her own dancing shadow. She stepped out of the shadow of a broken lamp on the other side of the room, in time to see the place where she’d just stood obliterated by some kind of blue fire working that the Witch threw. Alice used the moment to pick off the guard she’d been shooting at, the .45 making a nasty mess of his head.

  The last guard had scrambled behind some file cabinets and drawn his gun, and he came embarrassingly close to getting the drop on Alice. She dove through her own shadow again, a moment before he sprayed the spot with bullets from his Ingram. She emerged from the shadow of the file cabinet next to him, her knee slamming into the meat of his thigh and her gun butt colliding solidly with the side of his face, her other hand grabbing for his gun. He reeled backwards, but kept a hold on the Ingram. The guard spun and twisted to avoid the shots she fired, assuming she was aiming for him, moving with an inhuman grace that gave the game away. He was a Weir.

  As he raised the Ingram, Alice stepped forward and kicked him in the chest. As she he had hoped, he rolled with it. Her bullets had left spider web cracks in the safety glass behind him. There was a look of utter surprise on his face right before he fell silently to the street below, too dignified or shocked to cry out. Alice assumed that the Witch would have something aimed for her back, so she followed him out the window, a perfect swan dive into the faint shadow cast by the lip of the ledge. It was a complicated apport, because she had rely on her memory of the room to pick a destination, and factor in momentum.

  She felt a momentary dislocation, a physiological static as she passed through the Witch’s barrier, or rather, the ghost of its presence in the Ether. Then Alice hit her, shoulder first, barking her shin and elbow on the desk as she took both of them to the ground. She ignored it, focusing on grabbing for the Witch’s hands. They wrestled for a moment, and Alice had to give the Witch credit; she was a strong and capable fighter, particularly considering she had just been attacked from behind. She scratched and clawed, catching Alice on the forearm and drawing blood. Alice managed to get a lock on one of her hands; she twisted it and stepped forward, shifting her weight to the right and turning her wrist in the opposite direction that it would normally turn. It snap
ped and she left it at a grotesque angle. The Witch grabbed her arm and howled in pain. Alice took the opportunity to drive her gun barrel up underneath her chin.

  The file was right. She was cute. Alice fumbled for a moment with the top drawer in the desk, then managed to get it to slide open without removing her gun from underneath the Witch’s jaw.

  “You want to live, put your hand in there,” Alice said, nodding at the drawer.

  The Witch shook her blond head, batted her enchanting blue eyes, and said, “What?”

  Alice pushed up on the gun, hard, so that her head bent backwards.

  “No talking,” Alice said, grinning evilly. “Put your hand in the drawer. Now.”

  The Witch reached down fearfully, and before she had a chance to recoil, Alice kicked the drawer closed on her hand. She leaned into it, putting all her weight on the boot until she was certain the Witch’s fingers were broken. The Witch cried and thrashed around helplessly, torn between pain from her fractured hand and fear of the gun in her face.

  “Oh, come on,” Alice scolded. “What did you think I was going to do?”

  Alice let up on the pressure, and the Witch snatched her mangled hand away, holding both arms out in front of her as if she didn’t know what to do with them, one dangling at the wrist, the other with smashed fingers. Alice took the gun away, then whipped it backwards into the Witches jaw with as much force as she could put behind it, breaking her jaw and laying her out.

  “Okay, Gaul,” Alice said, breathing heavily. “We got a live one.”

  13.

  “We would be honored, if you would join us,” Anastasia deadpanned, as Alex walked into the dining room, Emily hovering nervously behind him with a guilty expression on her face.

  “This doesn’t really seem like the time for pop culture references,” Alex murmured, surveying the people at the table. He’d been expecting official representatives from the Hegemony, or something similar. He had not been expecting Anastasia Martynova and Therese Muir to be sitting at the table opposite each other, Therese gripping an enormous glass of white wine and looking extremely unhappy. Anastasia was flanked by the pleasantly smiling Timor, and Alex couldn’t help but wonder where Renton was.