The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Alex had to laugh with her. There’d been a Mormon temple a few blocks from his high school, so he had a good idea what she meant. Katya handed him her bottle, so he tried the pink stuff again, and it still tasted weird, like orange juice gone slightly off, but not as bad as before.

  “I’m not really sure,” Alex admitted, handing the bottle back to her. “I don’t know why I agreed to come, except that I didn’t really have anything else going on. I guess it seemed like a better idea at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s nice and everything, but I sort of wish that I’d stayed back at the Academy.”

  Katya nodded. She must have been content with the answer, because she didn’t ask him anything else, but he was certain that he caught her glancing at him out of the corner of her eye a few times. He had the unpleasant sensation that he was being evaluated, gauged, weighed on a scale and then set aside, found wanting.

  “Hey… question for you,” Alex said, watching the sun creep toward the water, growing redder as it descended. “You went to some sort of Black Sun school for assassins, right? What was that like?”

  Katya frowned and then took a longer swig off the bottle. She didn’t seem too happy with the question, but at the very least, it seemed to have shifted her attention off him, for which he was grateful. She offered him the bottle again, and then dug it partway in the sand by her towel when he refused.

  “It was a lot like the Program, but all of the time,” she said grimly. “How many Black Sun members do you know?”

  “Well, uh,” Alex said, trying to count in his head. “You, Anastasia, Timor, Renton…”

  “Right, so basically just Anastasia,” Katya said, pursing her lips. “Well, the people in the cartel are nothing like her. She’s at the top, you see, and she’s smart, so you can’t really tell how ambitious she is. But the people underneath her? Ambition runs through her followers like the plague. I was lucky, actually, because I had Timor with me. Otherwise, it would have been lonely. You can’t really trust or like anyone you meet there. It’s just… well; you must have some idea by now. Lots of killing, not all of it simulated. Lots of doing things you’d never want to do, until it doesn’t bother you anymore.”

  As she spoke, Katya’s voice changed, from her usual cool flippancy to a lower, contemplative tone. She was staring out at the ocean, now blood red, as the sun sank slowly down into it, so rapt that Alex studied her without fear of her noticing. It was funny, now that he thought about it – Katya was kind of attractive, in her own way; but normally she carried herself with an air of hostility that obscured it. He didn’t feel it at all, now, and he wondered why, but he didn’t think to hard about it. He couldn’t exactly ask, after all.

  “At first it doesn’t seem that bad, because you have to finish the Program before you can go. Those first couple of weeks, while they test out your potentials and gauge your abilities aren’t too terrible. The first time you have to kill some poor farm animal is pretty terrible, but after a while, it starts to become routine. But after you’ve been there for a while, eventually, it hits you – everything you do there, everything you learn, everything they teach, it’s all in the service of murder. And everyone there, all the people around you, each of them spends their waking hours dreaming up ways to kill. The Academy can be tense, with the cartel conflicts and everything. But, can you imagine sitting down to dinner with a bunch of murderers-in-training, all speculating on how they would kill you over their soup? It gets to everyone there, eventually. Nobody wants to hang out, or make friends, or date or anything. I was glad when Anastasia said she was pulling me,” Katya said quietly. “I don’t really want to go back. Although I have to admit that it colored my way of thinking.”

  “You don’t say?”

  “Yeah,” Katya confirmed, smiling over at him. “For example – if I wanted to kill you, Alex, and do it so that no one looking at the body could figure out how you had died, how do you think I would do it?”

  Alex was a little alarmed by the turn in the conversation, but he had been at the Academy for months, and was sort of getting used to this sort of thing. He glanced around at the beach that surrounded him.

  “Well,” Alex said, biting his lip uncertainly, “I guess you’d either bash my head in with a rock, or stick needles inside me somewhere horrible, right?”

  “You are a very direct thinker, aren’t you?” Katya laughed, uncapping her ice-choked bottle, drinking from it, then taking an ice cube from her mouth and holding it up in front of him. “If I used needles, I don’t think it would be very hard to figure out that I did it. I would use ice, silly. An ice cube this big, there’s better than a dozen places I could put it in your body that would kill you real fast, but once the ice cube melts, there wouldn’t be anything left to clue anybody in on what happened.”

  Katya smiled and capped off the demo by popping the aforementioned ice cube back into her mouth.

  “Huh,” Alex grunted, thinking about it.

  “You know,” Katya said idly, “I was thinking you could do the same sort of thing. Freeze a small area. Ice crystals in the brain, or in the blood next to the heart. Assuming you could get that unwieldy protocol of yours under control. I bet it would be faster to operate, as well, if you tried to do less with it.”

  “No way,” Alex said definitely, shaking his head. “I can’t get that kind of precision with it.”

  “Is that so?” Katya said contemptuously. “And you know this because you’ve tried this already?”

  “Well…”

  “Thought so,” Katya said smugly.

  Alex sat quietly, not exactly embarrassed, just considering. He cleared his throat before he spoke again.

  “Well… could you teach me? To aim it, I mean. To do what you just suggested?”

  Katya looked over at him seriously, and again, he got the unpleasant sensation that he was being weighed and evaluated.

  “Okay,” Katya agreed.“Sure. But you’re gonna owe me.”

  Alex sighed theatrically.

  “I should have figured. What do you want?”

  “I’ll let you know once I think of something,” Katya said, standing up and straightening out her swimsuit, then glancing back at Alex. “Do you want to swim before dinner?”

  After considering it briefly, Alex got up to join her.

  * * *

  Eerie coded by rote, one-handed, while she poured the contents of a purple Pixie Stick on her already stained tongue. She’d had her headphones clamped over her ears the entire day, listening to music from her sticker-covered laptop, but they must have started to pinch her ears, because she’d taken them off a few minutes before. She brushed her hair back behind her ears, the tips still red from the pressure of the headphones, and tossed the candy wrapper into the trashcan by her feet, which was about half full.

  She hadn’t bothered with real food since she’d come down to Processing. Adel El-Nadi knew this, because he had been waiting for her to head to the commissary for lunch for two days now, so that he could casually join her at her table and strike up a conversation, but it hadn’t happened. He had adjusted his plans today, waiting by the vending machines with a cooling cup of coffee, the same place where he had encountered her regularly last summer. However, Eerie appeared to have brought candy with her this year, and she had hardly left her desk. Which is how he found himself skulking along the balcony above her work area, looking down at her blue hair and debating himself.

  Adel came to no conclusions, except that he had an awful headache.

  When he had first met Eerie, Adel had been a final-year student at the Academy majoring in computer science and programming language. He was just another intern doing routine maintenance on the massive, constantly mutating body of code that constituted the Etheric Network. Since then, he’d left the Academy and turned down a number of cartel offers to work instead at the Academy’s Processing facility, coding new extensions for the network, cutting-edge field applications and revolutionary new procedures for protocol storage and download.
In a single year he’d been promoted twice to network architect, and he now had his own small team – four coders, a tech, and two interns. He’d burned through any number of favors trying to get Eerie assigned to his team. There were only two female interns, after all, and a number of the team leads had fond memories of Eerie’s two previous summers working there. Adel was single-minded when he wanted something, though, he did what he had to do to get her assigned to his team.

  Now, he thought bitterly, outside of routine meetings and handing out assignments, he’d barely managed to talk to her. She’d seemed more subdued when she arrived this time, less bouncy and eager than she had been in previous years. For the first time, Adel got the impression that she didn’t want to be there. She wasn’t unfriendly, but she hadn’t given him the giant, enthusiastic hug that he was used to receiving as her normal greeting, and she had barely responded to questions during the orientation sessions. Not only his questions, either, or he would have had an idea where he stood with her and changed tactics. Instead, she was like that with everyone. He wasn’t sure if he was worried about that, glad, or what.

  Then, of course, there was the strange offer he had received, from a girl he didn’t really know, making fantastic promises in return for one small favor.

  He had earned his headache last night, drinking at a friend’s apartment in Central with a couple of the new interns. It had taken most of the night, and many more drinks that he was accustomed to, because he didn’t want to come right out and ask any questions that would have given his motivations away, but he did eventually get some of the story about Alex Warner, and his on-again-off-again involvement with Eerie. He thought at the time that Eerie was simply making a mistake, but he couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been wrong about her from the start. How to talk to her, though, when she didn’t seem to want to talk to anyone?

  One of the staffers came walking by on their way to buy a cup of Ramen from one of the machines, giving Adel a friendly nod and a curious look as he walked past. Adel quickly bought a soda from the machine and then retreated to his cramped office. It was dark inside, because he had covered the windows with construction paper and unscrewed the overhead lights so that they wouldn’t compete with any one of the four different displays. He clicked through documents on his desktop aimlessly while he brooded and contemplated the offer.

  It had come via a dummy email account the day after Eerie had arrived. The sender claimed to be Emily Muir, a Hegemony girl from the Academy that he didn’t know. Apparently, she was Eerie and Alex Warner’s classmate, and seemed as upset at their relationship as he was. Adel had no idea how she had found him. It would have taken a powerful empath to recognize the crush he had nurtured for the Changeling. The email was concise, detailed, and made a number of intriguing and lurid offers in return for one very simple thing. A false forward, an email purporting to come from the school account of one Alexander Warner. Emily Muir had already helpfully provided the text, and he had done the necessary work two days before. The email had been sitting in his outbox ever since, waiting for him to click a single button.

  He wasn’t sure what would happen to Eerie if he sent it, but he was certain it wouldn’t be good. On the other hand, the email he had received promised him some very good things. Moreover, Adel was lonely, and resentful of Alex Warner.

  Adel sulked in the dark of his office for an hour, before clicking the ‘Send’ button in a gesture so impulsive that he could only stare at his hand afterward, wondering how it had done such a thing without consulting him. He reread Emily Muir’s email until he didn’t feel anything other than barely suppressed excitement.

  Eventually he returned to his assignment, a new head’s-up display for a ballistics protocol that Auditor Aoki used frequently. He spent about twenty minutes conceptually attacking it from different angles, before he decided that he was wasting his time. He reached for the forgotten soda blindly, and his questing fingers managed to knock it over, covering the papers on his desk with neon-green foam and causing Adel to curse to the greatest extent a secular Moroccan upbringing allowed.

  “Adel?” Eerie asked, only her head peeking around his doorframe. “Are you okay?”

  “Fine!” Adel shouted without meaning to. “Just fine. I just spilled this; ah… what can I do for you, Eerie?”

  He made an utterly pointless attempt to make a neat pile of the print outs and documents that he had soaked with bright green soda while Eerie wandered into the darkened office, taking a seat on the only chair that wasn’t covered with a pile of folder-bound technical manuals. Her face was blank, but that told him nothing – from experience, he knew that was the way she usually looked.

  “I need to go back to the Academy,” Eerie said seriously, “tonight.”

  “Ah… yes?”

  “Yes,” Eerie agreed solemnly.

  Adel felt the time stretching out disastrously, his smile growing terser as he panicked behind it. He felt a perverse urge to turn his monitor so that Eerie could see what he had done, to show her how false her expectations were. Then he caught the look in her eyes, the obvious eagerness, and he had to choke back his resentment.

  Adel put his hands down firmly on the desk, resolved himself, and did his best to look solicitous.

  “Eerie,” he said carefully, “is this something I can help you with? Maybe something you would like to talk about?”

  Eerie shook her head.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?” He felt as if he were running a fever, sweat dripping down his brow and the small of his back. “Because if I could help you, Eerie, then I would like to.”

  “Why?” Eerie asked, sounding more curious than usual, leaning forward so she could see him clearly in the dark room. Adel fought the urge to twitch and fidget.

  “Because I like you, Eerie,” he admitted, amazed at his own forwardness, and a little afraid, too. “Because, after last time you interned here, I had hoped we might have a chance to get to know each other better…”

  “I’m sorry,” Eerie said gently. “I would like to be friends with you, Adel. But I got a very important email. From an important friend. And I have to go now. Maybe we could talk later?”

  “I see,” Adel said, stiffly. “Can I ask who you need to see?”

  “Alex,” Eerie said softly. “He was supposed to be gone all break, but he came back early. I want to go see him, Adel. Please.”

  “Well, if you really think that you must,” Adel said reluctantly, wondering again with a slightly uneasy twinge what exactly it was he was involving himself in. “The Administration won’t be happy, of course, since you are supposed to be with us until the end of break…”

  “That can wait,” Eerie said, shaking her head. “I can be in trouble later.”

  “Okay,” Adel said, mentally washing his hands of the matter. “Then go, if you think you have to. I won’t tell anyone, so they probably won’t notice until sometime tomorrow.”

  If Eerie hadn’t leapt to her feet, right then, so excited that she barely managed to remember to thank him, he might have warned her. At least that is what he told himself. Instead, he felt a perverse satisfaction in hustling her out the door, as she was so eager to see her boyfriend.

  “The bus should be by in twenty minutes,” Adel advised her helpfully. “Oh, and Eerie? Have a good time.”

  * * *

  “Whoa, Alex,” Renton said, blocking him with his arm. “Charm offensive.”

  “What do you mean?” Alex asked, struggling to peer past Renton and over the brush that separated him from whatever he was looking at.

  “Must be,” Timor agreed solemnly.

  Alex finally wriggled around Renton to get to the edge of the bluff. The sea stretched out below them, dotted with islands no bigger than their own and a clutch of small, wooden fishing boats, separated by waters that were a color of blue Alex had never seen before. The hillside below them was green with low brush and scrub, and a narrow dirt path wound down through it, to a small, white sand b
each at the base, gently lapped at by rolling blue waves. It was one of three beaches on the island; the smallest and least accessible, but apparently it was also Anastasia’s favorite. Svetlana had taken the girls half an hour ago, while Renton had suggested they walk.

  Anastasia was sitting on a towel, securely beneath a massive beach umbrella, no part of her white skin exposed to the late afternoon sun. She wore a black sundress that left her skinny legs bare, but covered whatever bathing suit she had chosen to wear. Nearby, but in the sun, Svetlana lay on her side on a towel, wearing sunglasses and a mundane burgundy one piece. Therese sat by herself on the sand, wearing a long t-shirt over her suit and reading a paperback in the sun. Katya was out where the waves broke, swimming a vigorous freestyle. And then there was Emily.

  She must have seen them; she had to have known they were watching. She walked along the edge of the beach, her feet in the surf, profile against the sun reflecting brilliantly from the water. Her bikini was blue, and not overly revealing, but as with everything else, Emily knew how to wear it. She never looked at them, not once. She just strolled along, pausing to adjust her sandals, to dip her hands in the water. Nobody said anything for a little while.

  “For the first time,” Renton said softly, “I am actually a little bit jealous of you, Alex.”

  Alex nodded in agreement. What could he say?

  “Can we go down to the beach now?” Timor asked, shifting impatiently.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Renton muttered, starting down the path.

  Alex was in the back of the group the whole way down, wrestling with himself, his eyes on the ground. He was past the point of making another decision, he knew that, but he was no closer to committing himself to anything. He was just letting things happen to him again, like his life was a movie, something to be observed and perhaps enjoyed, but not directly controlled. He cursed himself for the hundredth time since arriving; for saying those things to Eerie before he left (and probably, he feared, burning that bridge), for agreeing to come here in the first place, for coming here and failing to enjoy it because he was too busy beating himself up for making the decision in the first place.