Was it because it was horrible? Or because Rebecca had done it?
Alex didn’t think so. Those were contributing factors, sure, but that wasn’t why he kept returning to the scene.
Something had felt wrong.
He had felt something, in the Ether, and perhaps even seen something with his cold eye, when he glanced back down the beach over his shoulder.
He tried not to think about it too hard, focusing instead on washing his hair an unnecessary second time.
“You’ve been in the shower for a while,” Leigh called through the divider. “You okay in there?”
Alex nodded.
“I’m fine,” he yelled, when he realized she could not see him. “Got lost in thought.”
“I’m leaving,” Leigh said. “Gonna go find Emily.”
Alex stood in the water until it ran cold and he was a shivering mess of goosebumps. He got out and dressed, tossing his field gear into a laundry basket he seriously doubted anyone was monitoring on his way out into the blustery evening.
The Sea of Ether was active, and thunderheads were arrayed across the horizon. The air was charged with static, and dark clouds loomed not far from the Far Shores. The storm seemed to linger at an uncertain distance off the coast, an unfulfilled promise that he had already learned to disregard in just a few days.
Vivik waited on a bench in the center of a dead lawn between the buildings, looking as if he had not slept in days.
“Hey,” Alex said. “You been waiting long?”
“I was starting to wonder if you came back,” Vivik said, grinning. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” Alex tried to smooth his hair into order, having forgotten to comb it. “It wasn’t that bad.”
“It looked pretty bad.”
“You watched?”
“I monitored the Operation,” Vivik said. “With Emily. That’s my job, remember?”
“I should, by now,” Alex said. “Where is Eerie?”
“With Katya,” Vivik said. “They went for a walk on the beach. They should be back soon.”
“Did you already have dinner?”
“Yeah, but I could use something to drink. Do you wanna go to the commissary, or do you want to go over to Emily’s?”
Alex hesitated, debating between the small crowd of nervous refugees and the mediocre food of the commissary, and the peril of seeing Emily.
His stomach made the decision.
“Is it okay if we go to Emily’s? Will she mind?”
“She won’t mind,” Vivik said, standing up. “I’m not sure if she’s there, but even if she isn’t there will be leftovers.”
“That works,” Alex said, hoping that Emily was anywhere else.
The wind from off the coast was stiff as they walked, and Alex wished that he had taken the time to dry his hair.
Vivik hummed tunelessly as they walked, and there was an unusual bounce to his step.
“What’s gotten into you?” Alex demanded. “Did something happen?”
“What? No! Nothing happened.” Vivik blushed, and Alex knew immediately that something had. “My mind was just wandering, that’s all.”
“Don’t give me that. You’re practically skipping. What the hell happened?”
“Nothing. Really!” Vivik looked away. “Nothing important.”
“Something happened,” Alex said, shoving Vivik. “Tell me! You know all the dumb shit that I’ve done, right? It’s only fair.”
“It’s really nothing.”
“Come on, man. Just tell me.”
“Okay. It’s not that big of a deal or anything, though,” Vivik said, giving up so cheerfully that Alex suspected he’d wanted to all along. “You know Leigh Feld, right? The vampire?”
“Uh, yeah, I know her,” Alex said, smirking. “I just walked by her in the locker room.”
“Oh yeah, of course. Well, uh…”
Vivik grinned and shrugged.
Alex stopped in his tracks, staring at Vivik.
“Wait a minute. You don’t mean to tell me…?”
“Yeah,” Vivik said, grinning like an idiot. “Yeah.”
“Holy shit,” Alex said. “You’re dating a vampire?”
“No, no!” Vivik waved him off. “I don’t think we are dating or anything.”
“You are messing with me!” Alex grabbed Vivik by the shoulders. “You seriously did it? You nailed a fucking vampire?”
“Well, yes, I suppose,” Vivik admitted, a little flustered. “I don’t see how that…”
“I can’t believe it! She’s so…she’s…” Alex gestured uncertainly. “She barely even spoke three words to me!”
“Yeah. Leigh, uh, she doesn’t seem to talk very much,” Vivik said. “We’ve hardly…”
“She never talks to anyone except Emily, and she’s so…dude. Have you seen her in the field?”
“Sure,” Vivik said. “Of course.”
“She’s like a machine,” Alex said, with a dazed look. “She just fights and bleeds and it’s…it’s so crazy. Like Margot on steroids or something. She fucking loves it out there. She just runs right into the bad guys, you know? She just buzzsaws through them, and gets all fucked up, and she doesn’t even care.”
“It’s pretty scary,” Vivik agreed. “I mean, she is a vampire.”
“Right. She’s got fangs, and she can’t die, and everything. That’s nuts, man.”
“I thought maybe you’d get it a little more,” Vivik said. “You are dating a Changeling, you know.”
“I get it, really,” Alex said. “I’m just in shock. You and Leigh, man. That’s quite a couple.”
“We aren’t, though,” Vivik insisted, beet-red. “She’s not interested in that sort of thing.”
“No way. No fucking way!” Alex shook Vivik by his shoulders. “You did a one-night stand with Leigh?”
“No, it’s…I don’t know, actually,” Vivik said. “She said she wants to come over again tonight.”
Alex smacked Vivik on the shoulder hard enough for it to hurt.
“You lucky bastard!” Alex laughed. “You aren’t dating a vampire; you guys are just hooking up. That’s amazing!”
“Yeah.” Vivik grinned. “It kinda is.”
“It really is! I mean, Leigh is super-hot.”
“Yeah.”
“That ass alone, man.”
“Dude. I know.”
“No offense, but she’s way out of your league.”
“Hey! I could say the same about Eerie.”
“I agree with you. You got lucky, and so did I.”
“Yeah. Maybe you’re right,” Vivik said. “Sorry. I just…I had to tell someone.”
“It’s cool,” Alex said. “I’m happy for you.”
The wind continued to batter them as they walked toward the townhouses, growing more forceful as they left the partial protection of the larger buildings behind them. Their eyes were naturally drawn to the massive thunderheads that rumbled angrily in the distance.
“I have to ask,” Alex said suddenly, jarring Vivik from his reverie. “Is she…is she cold?”
“Cold?” Vivik blinked. “I’m not sure what…”
“Margot said she was turning into a statue. Her skin was like marble,” Alex said. “My eye, and the tips of my fingers…they’re cold, all the time.”
“Oh.” Vivik blushed. “She’s not cold like that. She’s not a vampire the way that Margot was. They made her in a lab, you know? She was grown in a tank. The Anathema slaughtered maybe half the vampires in the world to feed to her. She’s special, I guess.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Alex said, touching his numb eye. “Lucky her.”
***
It took hours for enough of his neural network to rebuild for some semblance of consciousness to return. Alistair considered it fortunate, then, that the process of restoration was automatic. He was deeply in tune with his physical self, masterminding the reconstruction of his body from surrounding organics and useful raw materials.
&nbs
p; He did notice that nothing seemed to be left of his body, somehow, and that he was operating with little more than a brain stem, but that very state precluded surprise. There was too little of Alistair to register something as complex as an emotional response to stimuli.
Particularly in the absence of nearly all stimuli.
The surrounding medium was aqueous, which was helpful for the reconstruction, and doped with preexisting nanites, which was even more so.
He did not ask questions or wonder. He had the same approximate self-awareness as a potted plant.
Further time passed, and various milestones were reached.
When complete containment of the brain was achieved, he noticed that the medium in which he existed was buoyant.
When his first optic nerve signaled his mostly restored brain, Alistair knew that he was in almost total darkness.
The nerves came in slowly, and that was the worst part.
Each relay and synapse was exposed and unprotected, feathering out in anticipation of tissue not yet present, and his entire sensorium was a maelstrom of sensation, weight and pressure and pain. It was like being baked in a kiln, an obliterating heat that scoured his mind clean of all thought.
He could only endure and wait, while his body remembered itself.
The rest took less time. Musculoskeletal reconstruction was an engineering problem, while the nervous system was a work of art.
Tendons expanded and tightened. Muscle corded around fresh new bone. Blood was replenished by deep red marrow, a thirty-minute-old heart pumping blood through vessels that had existed for half that time.
Alistair had returned to himself by the time the nanites started work on a new pink epidermis, starting base layers of skin cells and then forcing cellular death while a new layer grew beneath, accelerating the process of filling in and expansion.
He knew where he was before he opened his eyes.
He knew exactly what he would see.
Despite having been there only once, the location was intimately familiar. He had found a vault with his name on it here, wandering in the wet darkness beneath the Thule estate, among unseen corridors and alcoves that haunted him no less for having been obscured.
His fingers had traced his family name inscribed on an ancient arch, the letters cut into the stone so many years before that the cuts had softened and crusted over with mildew. He had entered the vault, and had floated on his back, in these same doped and poisoned waters. Staring into the darkness, for seconds or hours he could not say, he had opened his mouth, and let the waters in.
He had died here, for a short time. And now…
Something close to the opposite.
The Anathema way of return was severe and torturous, a process of diminishing returns that left him weakened each time he repeated it.
This was something else. Not at all gentle or clean, but birth is neither.
Perhaps that was too much. But if this was not a rebirth, then it was at the very least a radical renewal.
He floated for a while, his awareness slowing syncing with his new body, allowing the toxins to fully penetrate his skin and work their way into his blood stream, feeling the acceleration of his new heart and the feverish, prickling sensation of the psychedelics taking hold.
The waters beneath the Thule estate were strange, and Alistair tasted deeply of that strangeness.
It felt nothing like the first time.
Having no name for the emotion he felt, and no prior experience with it, Alistair told himself that it felt like coming home. He wondered if Gabby would be willing to let him take her name, or whether she would prefer to adopt his old, bad one.
Either possibility intrigued him.
He had noticed the young woman watching him not long after his ears had been completed, identifying her by her respiratory patterns.
She was quiet, but she needed to breathe, and the chamber they shared was small.
He simply chose not to acknowledge her until it suited him.
“You’re awake, aren’t you?”
She had activated a battery-powered lamp, he realized, which floated in a buoyant housing beside her. She stepped closer to look into his eyes, and he could see her better.
The water came up to her elbows. She wore a dress despite that, and the skirt floated around her like the petals of a flower. She was smiling, but the smile in her eyes differed radically from the one on her face. The latter was wholesome. The former was something else entirely.
“You are awake! I knew it. You’re a jerk, Mr. Alistair! How long have you been ignoring me?”
The hallucinogens in the water filled in every darkened corner with glowing and vibrant patterns. It was hard for him to pay attention to anything else.
Gabby needled her way through his innate shields with clumsy brute force telepathy, making a total mess as she did so. He could have stopped her, of course, but he felt no desire to do so.
“My uncle told me you would be here. He can’t see the future anymore, but he can still monitor the Network for unusual activity. Like, for example, the death of an Administrative User.”
He had been connected during most of the fight, except during Alex’s intervention.
Realizing how fortunate he had been to reconnect to the Network right before he had lost consciousness, Alistair shivered.
“You want to know how it works, right? It’s not that complicated. The waters of this vault are separate from those of the labyrinth. The nanites in the water here are your own, leached during your previous visit. When your body was destroyed in Central, those orphaned nanites started reconstruction here.”
“I remember everything, right up until the moment I died,” Alistair said. “This isn’t a backup. How is this possible?”
“It is an irrational process,” Gabriela said. “That is the nature of our gift. It has mutated your Anathema nature into something else.”
“Can every Thule Operator do this? Can you?”
“Not at all!” Gabriela laughed. “I had no talent for resurrection in the first place. The labyrinth cannot give you anything, it just changes what you already had.”
“I heard that Brennan Thule had an impossible protocol that let him talk to machines,” Alistair said. “And you’re an empath who doesn’t feel other people’s emotions.”
“That’s not all,” Gabriela bragged, “Benji can negate other people’s protocols.”
“Is this place the reason why all Thule protocols are so…?”
“Irrational?” Gabriela laughed. “Of course. It’s the big family secret. Now you know.”
“And Gaul let Emily Muir in on this?” Alistair finally stood in the waist-deep water, marveling at his new limbs. “That’s too bad.”
He took a step forward, his sensitive new feet a little uncertain on the mossy stone floor, and Gabriela flinched away, suddenly conscious of his nudity.
“My uncle told me what you said.”
“About what?”
“Are you really going to make me say it?”
“I’m absolutely going to make you say it.”
“Uncle Gaul says that you have succumbed to my charms,” Gabriela said, maintaining the insincere smile that seemed to be her default expression. “He said that you’ve become enamored with me and obsessed with the idea of our marriage.”
“All of that is true,” Alistair said, stepping a little closer in the near-dark. “What do you think?”
“I think you should have asked me first.”
“What would you have said?”
“I would have told you that you are an old man and the idea of marrying you grosses me out,” Gabriela said pleasantly. “I don’t want you to touch me and I certainly never want to sleep with you.”
Alistair laughed, but it was a little forced.
“Is there a ‘but’ coming, or did you get your dress all wet just to come and tell me how little you think of me?”
“You were capable, when you rescued me. You never seemed afraid,” G
abriela said, the smiling briefly disappearing. “That’s the good stuff.”
“Not exactly the impression I had hoped to make, but it’s something.”
“It was,” she said. “I liked Grigori, you know.”
“You’ll like me,” Alistair assured her. “I’m more fun.”
“Grigori is an Auditor.”
“I was Chief Auditor!”
“His family is rich and important.”
“I’m way more important,” Alistair boasted. “And if you want rich, no problem. I’ll make it happen.”
“You’re so old, though! How old are you?”
“I’m legal, don’t worry,” Alistair said. “You won’t get in trouble.”
“You’re old enough to be my father. Older, even.”
“That just means I can buy you booze.”
“Grigori’s status befits my own, as the child of a Great Family. You are an outcast of an expunged family.”
“I will make sure you get everything you ever wanted,” Alistair said. “If anyone ever makes you even slightly unhappy, I will kill them myself.”
“I don’t know,” Gabriela said. “I’ve read about your family.”
“You aren’t supposed to do that,” Alistair said. “No one is. Even their memory is Anathema.”
“Are you like them?”
“You tell me,” Alistair said. “I think we both got a pretty good look at each other in the field, when I rescued you. I liked what I saw. What about you?”
Her smile went away, but he was no surer whether the uncertain expression she wore instead was any more legitimate.
“You had your moments,” she admitted. “I still wish you had asked me directly.”
“Why? Gaul is the head of Thule Cartel. I had to get his approval eventually.”
“I have ambitions of my own, Mr. Alistair. You seem like the kind of guy who is all about himself, all the time.”
“Up until quite recently, that was true,” Alistair said. “I’ve only thought about you since we met. It feels weird to admit it, but I swear it’s the truth.”
“You see?” Gabby sounded delighted. “You have your moments.”
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 64