Sofia said nothing, willing her whole body to stillness, drawing upon generations of training and breeding for composure.
“What do you want from me?”
“Do you know what I do?”
Eerie looked at her with a somber expression that would have been perfectly normal on any face but her own, and Sofia questioned all her prior interactions with the Fey. Had this always been inside of her? Had her prior weirdness and oblivious nature been an act? Or had something changed, changing her so radically that Sofia could hardly recognize her?
Even through the morass of potential grief, Sofia felt a tingle of excitement.
Uncharted territory.
“I change things,” Eerie said, as if that explained it satisfactorily. “Nothing needs to happen to your son. Well, I guess something must happen, but it doesn’t have to be, you know. The bad thing. That bad thing, anyway. I could change it.”
“How would you do that?” Sofia sat down beside the Changeling, feeling a bit lightheaded. “How can you change what will happen?”
“It’s like a game,” Eerie said, her voice low, confiding in Sofia. “I can move the pieces. It’s hard, and I can only do it a little, just nudge them. It would be enough, though. I can make nearly sure it won’t happen.”
“Nearly isn’t what I’m after,” Sofia said, deciding to be honest. “I need to be certain.”
“Nothing is certain,” Eerie said, sadly. “Nothing ever will be. It isn’t certain that he’ll die, if I do nothing, and there’s nothing I can do that will make certain that he will live. I can shift the odds in his favor. That’s all.”
“I still don’t understand what you mean to do,” Sofia said. “And I’m not convinced that I need your help.”
“You know that you do, and I need yours, so let’s not tell each other lies,” Eerie said, looking a trifle annoyed, and dazing Sofia further. “I won’t tell you how I will do it, but I promise I will change things for your son. I will give him the best possible chance.”
“I see,” Sofia said, blood pounding in her temples. “What is it you want in exchange?”
“I know that you don’t know where Alex is,” Eerie said, studying Sofia with grotesquely dilated eyes. “I think you know where he will be, though, and I want to know, because I am looking for him, and I can’t find him on my own.”
That giddiness again, rising in her chest like a zeppelin, lifting the weight of her future grief.
Sofia had dreamed of Alexander Warner the night before, which was oddity, as she had never met the boy. In the dream, he was standing beside a black SUV with Emily Muir and a Black Sun assassin whose name she had forgotten, doing nothing of note. She had wondered about the significance of it all morning, and the sudden understanding was as satisfying as fitting the last piece into one of the giant puzzles that her husband favored.
“I see,” Sofia said. “I think I can help you.”
“I know that I will help you. Shall we?”
“How should we do this?” Sofia asked, surprised at her own impulsiveness. “Shall I tell you first, or…?”
It was as if there were an impossibly brief and violent earthquake, though Central had no seismic activity, and nothing in the room was disturbed. Sofia felt discombobulated, as unsteady as a small boat in high seas, but the feeling passed before she could even put her hands to her eyes.
The air in the room was so full of golden sparks that Sofia was afraid to take a breath, for fear of inhaling one.
“I’ve already done my part,” Eerie said. “Please tell me where, okay?”
***
Alex was expecting an apport, so he was very surprised when a man with several facial piercings and a scruffy beard arrived at the gate to the Far Shores, on the winding road that crawled up the foothills, driving an SUV that had seen better days, if the bullet holes in the front panel above the tire were any indication.
“Come along if you are coming,” Emily said, climbing into the passenger seat. “We are on a schedule.”
Katya and Alex exchanged a doubtful look before climbing into the back seat, Alex holding the door and Katya clambering across the bench to the other side.
“This is Carlos, a friend I made in the Outer Dark,” Emily said, patting the driver on his broad shoulder, exposed by the threadbare tank top that he wore. “Carlos, these are my friends from the Academy, Alex and Katya.”
“Nice to meet you,” Carlos said, the smile beneath his bristly mustache offering a flash of incongruously perfect teeth. “Seatbelts, everyone. This could be a rough ride.”
“Are we going far?” Katya asked.
“Not too terribly far,” Emily said, glancing at her phone. “Not even fifteen minutes, under normal circumstances, but things being as they are in Central, we’ll probably need to take back roads.”
“Looks like someone took a couple shots at you, Carlos,” Katya observed, leaning out to look at the bullet holes. “Was that today?”
“On the way over here,” Carlos said, chuckling. “The main road is nightmare. You know, Emily’s old family place. The old Muir estate. You’ve heard of it, right?”
Alex shook his head, while Katya nodded, and Emily made an uncomfortable face. Carlos only seemed to notice Katya’s response.
“Thule set up a sniper’s nest there, and they are taking shots at anything that drives by,” Carlos explained, turning on to a dirt track that led into the woods that bordered the Academy. “They got a roadblock, too, but it wasn’t quite finished, so I managed to pull around it. That won’t work again. Looked like they were setting up a fixed gun, too, maybe.”
“That’s a problem,” Emily said, still intent on her phone. “I’ll have to warn Adel, or he’ll never make it back.”
“You’d be safer back at the Far Shores, Miss,” Carlos said. “You and your friends.”
“I appreciate your concern,” Emily said, smiling at him. “I need Alex’s help for this particular errand, and I’m afraid Katya doesn’t trust me enough to leave him alone with me, so we are stuck making it a group outing.”
Carlos laughed uproariously, pounding the steering wheel a couple times and nearly taking them off the narrow track that wound through the woods. It wasn’t even really a road, Alex decided, as he and Katya were tossed about the cab, but rather a trail for pedestrians and bicyclists.
“Worried that she’s going to steal your boyfriend?” Carlos leered at Katya in the rear view, nearly sending them off the road. “I don’t think you need to worry. He’s not much to look at, is he?”
“He’s definitely not my boyfriend,” Katya said, clinging to the door handle. “Maybe ask Emily what she thinks about him.”
Carlos laughed, only just avoiding wrapping them around the blackened stump of a tree struck by lightning. Alex held on to the seatback in front of him for dear life, but he felt no anxiety, trying instead to recall if he had ever seen lightning in Central.
“I see,” Carlos said, winking at Emily. “I misread the situation.”
“It’s not a big deal,” Emily said, her smile a formality. “Slow down, will you please? Our passengers are not quite as resilient as you and I.”
“Sure, sure,” Carlos said, slowing down very slightly. “Are you a student at the Academy, young man?”
“Not anymore,” Alex said, meeting Carlos’s eyes in the mirror. “I’m an Auditor.”
Carlos blanched and was silent for the space of two hair-pin turns.
“What about you, young lady?” Carlos asked hopefully, turning his attention to Katya. “Are you still at the Academy?”
“I wish,” Katya said, glaring at him. “I’m Anastasia Martynova’s personal assassin.”
Carlos went paler than before.
“And an Auditor,” Alex reminded her.
“That, too.”
“Is that a fact?” Carlos grinned nervously. “You have some friends, Miss Muir.”
“You have no idea how right you are, Carlos,” Emily said, busy with her phone. “Pre
sent company very much included.”
Alex waited until he was almost certain that he was going to vomit before he raised his voice.
“Uh, hey,” Alex said queasily, grasping on to the headrest of Emily’s seat. “How far are we going?”
“We are nearly there,” Emily said, glancing up from her phone. “Just a few more minutes.”
“Okay,” Alex said. “Good.”
“Carlos, if you don’t slow down, I think Alex might puke in your car,” Emily said, texting away with an apparent immunity to road sickness. “Maybe crack a window, Alex?”
Carlos slowed to the sort of speed common to a paved highway, but it was an improvement. Alex rolled the window down, leaned back in the seat, and closed his eyes tight.
He made it, but it was close.
Emily gave a few directions, near the end, but Carlos seemed to know most of the way, despite a lack of signage or obvious routes. The track they followed continued to degrade, and branches whipped across the sides of the SUV as they drove. Stones and potholes rocked the vehicle, and the all-terrain tires spat out a stream of sand and gravel. The forest thickened as they approached the steeper grades above the Academy, and then thinned out into regular clearings dotted with stumps and saplings on the slope, the result of recent logging.
They followed a logging road along the base of what was mostly sheer rock and crumbling cliffs, and then they were back into the trees. They turned off the dirt track and rolled across several meters of pine needles, coming to a stop in front of a barrier made by felled trees, a half-dozen mossy trucks making further progress impossible.
“Come along, Alex,” Emily said, stepping out. “This won’t take a minute.”
Alex hurried after her, ignoring the way Carlos winked at him as he trotted by. Katya followed at a short distance, grumbling to herself.
The trees they walked between were enormous, the largest Alex had ever seen. Immense black oaks were separated by tall copses of redwoods, a handful of fragrant cedar towering above the rest, blocking nearly all the grey light from the sky. The variety and spacing looked wrong to Alex, and he suspected the wood was cultivated, rather than wild, even if it was ancient.
“What is this place?” Alex put a hand on the orange-brown bark of one of the giant cedars as he passed it, and it was far softer than he expected. “Where are we?”
“That’s a secret, actually,” Emily said, finally putting away her phone, which could not have possibly had service. “But you know I don’t mind telling secrets. This is technically part of the Academy, even this far up the mountain, so maintenance is the responsibility of the Director, though clearly not much of a priority. The Director comes out here once or twice a year to pull the allotment of nanites for the new Introductions, and that’s about it. The approach is meant to be guarded, and the staff telepaths keep an eye on it, but…” Emily shrugged her tanned shoulders. “You know how things are right now.”
Emily led him around a pair of gnarled and broad oaks this time, and then there was only rock in front of them, and a door set in the mountain side. The door and frame were of typical issue, painted institutional green, and looked wildly incongruous with the granite slope, dotted with tufts of withering grass.
“This is a lonely place, don’t you think?” Emily put her finger to the lock on the door, and for a moment, her finger seemed to flow into the mechanism. The lock turned, and then the door opened. “Not many people come here, or ever have.”
“I know where we are,” Katya said. “What are you up to, Emily?”
“Why does everyone ask me that?” Emily laughed. “I already told you what I’m doing. Come now, Alex. Let’s make this quick.”
She waved him into the tunnel, pausing to activate the string lights tacked to either wall.
The tunnel was cut directly into the stone, bored out smooth and perfect. Alex could not see where it ended from the entrance. He hesitated and turned to Katya.
“Where are we?”
He kept his voice low, but it still echoed down the tunnel, and he was sure that he heard Emily chuckle.
“The Source Well is down there,” Katya said grimly. “I’ve seen pictures.”
“What the hell is…?”
“The Source Well is where the nanites were discovered,” Emily called out, from somewhere further down the tunnel. “It’s not a well, really, but a cistern. They are stored in solution in a cache basin down here, in the solid rock, a safe distance from the aquifer and from outside contamination. One of Central’s true feats of engineering.”
“Yeah,” Katya said. “What she said.”
“Do we go?” Alex glanced around nervously. “What do you think?”
“We’ve come this far,” Katya said, heading down the tunnel. “I want to know what she’s doing.”
Emily must have kept a decent pace, because they didn’t catch up to her in the tunnel.
The tunnel was in partial ruins, though when Alex looked closely at the damage, it did not appear to be the work of time or abandonment. Chunks of stone had been split from the walls, and the ceiling was covered with black burn marks. The tunnel led down to a massive, high-ceilinged chamber that was in even worse shape. Temporary supports and metal struts were placed throughout the chamber at regular intervals, supporting damaged buttresses high above.
A cruder tunnel followed that, and after a few short twists and turns, they found Emily waiting for them in the final chamber.
The walls were rough stone and the ceiling was low enough to make Alex duck. The room was empty aside from Emily, no furnishings aside from a trio of work lights that provided uneven illumination.
A stone manhole was set in the floor, and around it was a great deal of new concrete and patching. The heavy carved capstone had been tossed aside, to reveal a small well beneath, brimming with still and unremarkable water.
“There was a fight here,” Katya said. “A big one.”
“Yes,” Emily said. “The Anathema fought the Auditors down here. It ended in something of a stalemate, but John got what he wanted out of it anyway.”
“You seem to know a lot about it,” Katya said, eying Emily. “Was that something you were involved in?”
“Only peripherally,” Emily said. “I was quite occupied at the time.”
“Why are we here?” Alex asked, crouching beside the Source Well.
“I’ve told you before. What happened to the three of us wasn’t right,” Emily said. “The whole of Central is wrong. We were children, and they made us into something worse than what we should have been, and for no good reason. I won’t stand by and watch them do that to another generation of children.”
Alex dangled his fingers in the Source Well, expecting to feel something special – a sting, perhaps, or some sort of tingle – but was surprised to feel nothing, not even wetness. Then he remembered the dismemberment and replacement of his fingers and switched to the other hand.
It felt just like any other water. Perhaps a bit colder than he would have expected.
“They killed my sister and they killed my parents,” Emily said. “They killed me. I won’t let it happen anymore. I want you to do what you did to the World Tree, Alex. I want you to freeze the Source Well and destroy the nanites.”
“You are out of your fucking mind, Emily!” Katya grabbed Alex’s shoulder. “You can’t just destroy the Source Well! Do you even know…?”
I need you to do this for me, Alex, Emily thought, crouching beside him and dangling her own fingers in the Source Well. For a moment he thought he saw something there, a liquidity at her fingertips, but dismissed it as a product of the poor lighting. I need your help.
I want to help, Alex thought, shaking his hand dry. I do.
But you won’t?
This is a big deal.
The World Tree was a big deal, and you were fine with that.
That belonged to John Parson, though, right? I was fine destroying the Anathema World Tree. I’m not so sure about doing the same thi
ng here. Isn’t Central doomed without this place?
Central is doomed, Emily thought. There’s no changing that. We don’t need protocols to live in Central, if we maintain the Etheric Network and the Fixed Apport Stations. We don’t need telepaths or precognitives, and we don’t need Anathema or Auditors. We don’t need cartels.
Are you sure? Haven’t our protocols kept us alive?
The trouble your protocol has saved you from is trouble that your protocol caused, Alex. Don’t you think?
I’m not sure what to think. What happens if I freeze this place?
The Source Well freezes, the nanites die, and we go back to the Far Shores. Everything else stays the same.
This won’t end the war? It won’t affect anything?
You know as well as I do that Anastasia plans to bring the war to Central. You remember the Black Sun’s agenda, don’t you? If she gets access to the Source Well – and at this point, who’s to stop her? – then she’ll perform mass Introductions. She’ll contaminate water supplies with nanites, all over the world.
So?
One in four don’t survive Introduction here in Central, Alex, and that’s with precognitives choosing likely candidates and telepathic monitoring during the Introduction. Can you imagine what the death rate will be like among the general population, with no precautions or screening?
Uh, a lot?
It will be a catastrophe.
I don’t know.
Why are you so reluctant, dear? Do you truly care if there are more Operators or not?
I don’t want everyone to want me dead, you know? Ms. Gallow won’t like it if the Source Well is destroyed.
Ms. Gallow doesn’t like anything but killing.
My point exactly. I’m trying not to make her list.
Don’t worry about it. I’ll take the blame, if blame must be taken.
How? Katya’s is right here – and if you hadn’t cut her out of the conversation, she would be letting you know how pissed she is at the suggestion.
Katya means well, but she was born into a cartel, and lived her whole life as part of the Black Sun. She is worried about their interests, not her own. How could it negatively impact Katya to destroy the Source Well? Think about what has happened to her, Alex. Think about all the terrible things that have been done to Katya, because she was given a protocol that gave her a choice between being useless and being a murderer.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 11