He focused, remembering Samnang’s instructions. There was neither inside nor outside.
Alex reached for the Absolute Protocol, and it met him halfway.
***
The Senior Representative shrieked, a banshee’s wail that carried across Central. The sky above the ruined library was illuminated as the last of the Horrors caught fire and rained down like meteors on the Mistress of the Black Sun.
Anastasia stood calmly through the bombardment, her skirts rippling with agitated darkness.
Representative Parson shrieked again and lurched forward, his distended limbs stuck together with a tarry blackness that oozed out from between his yellowed and calcified ribs. His fingers were massive chopping blades, and his mouth was a funnel lined with razors.
Anastasia folded her arms and waited.
His charge passed through her harmlessly.
The Senior Representative howled in frustration and threw his arms wide.
The ground fractured, deep rifts opening in the dirt. The cracks rushed toward Anastasia.
She held up her hand, and her skirts flared.
Darkness rushed out from beneath them, colliding with the tremors in the broken earth in an explosion of shattered crystal and black mist.
***
Alex tasted the Ether on his tongue and at the back of his throat, the acrid flavor of oxidizing metal and migraine headaches. The blood pumped sluggishly through his veins, coagulating as it cooled.
Ice crystals bloomed in his forebrain, destroying tissue and disrupting neural pathways.
Blackened tissue collected at the base of his lungs, weighing like lead upon his diaphragm.
All that was left of his mind was the cognitive machinery of the Absolute Protocol.
The Ether opened for the Church of Sleep like the arms of a lover.
***
The Church burnt and curled at the edges like a manuscript catching fire.
The Senior Representative reached for Anastasia and was repelled by a dark energy that radiated from within her. Their energies collided and appeared in flux as they contended with each other. The Senior Representative cried out and lashed Anastasia with a great surge of telekinetic power.
She closed her eyes and let it pass through her. Then she reached for the Senior Representative.
He disappeared just before her fingers closed on him. Parson reemerged from an impossible direction and grabbed at Eerie, narrowly missing. Rebecca cried out and made it halfway to her feet before Parson tossed her aside. The Senior Representative brought his scissor-fingers down upon Emily, but she turned to water and passed harmlessly between them.
Ten thousand black eyes focused on the Changeling.
Parson reached for Eerie, scissor-fingers extending from severed joints.
Mitsuru Aoki caught his arm and held on to it.
Her eyes were so red that they looked like globes of blood, but the veins beneath her skin burned a vibrant white gold.
She emptied her mind of everything but the protocol, tasting the candy Eerie had given her at the back of her throat.
Activation.
The eternal cloud cover above Central broke, and the Senior Representative of the Fifth Assembly of the Church of Sleep was struck with an unearthly radiance.
Radiant Death.
Parson struggled and cried out, while Mitsuru clung grimly to his arm, his tumorous skin dissolving into steam in her hands. Bathed in feral radiance from the heavens above Central, the Representative was flayed down to his splintered bones.
The sunlight devoured the Representative with a billion tiny teeth.
Epilogue
Strands of sleep clung to her stickily as she woke. Her dreams tasted of salt and chamomile and lingered on her tongue as she licked her lips. She mouthed words in an invented language and felt acute resonance, extended across this moment as every other.
Her names came to her, the old one first, and then the second, better one. The one he liked, and she therefore preferred.
The fear sank into her chest before she even opened her eyes.
Her heart in her throat, she rolled over and reached out, sighing with relief when her fingertips brushed his arm. He was in bed beside her, bare-chested and snoring with his mouth wide open.
“Sleepyhead,” she said softly, brushing the hair from his eyes and resolving to give him a haircut that week.
Her hair did not need to be washed again until Friday, and she had showered the night before, so Eerie dressed quickly, choosing her clothes from what was strewn across the floor. Black tights, jean shorts, and a hoodie with a skateboard logo she had appropriated from Alex’s closet.
It was a big day, but there was no need for anything fancy.
No one who mattered would see her.
Alex was still snoring when she finished her makeup, so she kissed him on the forehead and went downstairs for breakfast. There was grape punch in the refrigerator, made the way she liked it, so thick with powder that it was more gel than liquid, and a plate of jelly beans on the counter.
Eerie ate only the red ones but finished three glasses of punch in quick succession.
Properly fortified, she gathered her things and left the townhouse, following a little footpath toward the main campus of the Far Shores. Her route took her between the new buildings currently under construction, meant to accommodate the refugees who had decided to become permanent residents, rather than returning to Central. The dormitories were a temporary solution, but they were superior to the tents that a few of the refugees still occupied. The drab new buildings were starting to take shape beneath exoskeletons of scaffolding and framing, and a handful of workers were presently occupied pouring concrete.
She was frequently troubled by a debilitating fascination, during the short hours of her recent days, and was easily hypnotized by process and function. She lost hours in the contemplation of simple machinery and was entranced by the slow routines of the tai chi class that met regularly beneath her window. She might have stopped to watch the spinning vat on the back of the concrete truck on another day, but today was special, and Eerie had places to be, so she tore her eyes away reluctantly and hurried on.
She arrived at the first of her destinations to find Emily Muir sitting on a picnic table outside of the former Administration building. She was wearing her hair down, her lower tresses curled, and the sundress and sandals she wore made her look as if she planned to head to the nearby beach.
“Good morning, Eerie,” Emily said. “How are you?”
“I’m good,” Eerie said. “Thanks for breakfast.”
“I wish you’d let me make you something nicer,” Emily said, joining her. “Even cake or pie seems more substantial.”
“Too much bread,” Eerie said. “I’m good.”
“If you say so,” Emily said, holding the door for her. “How do you feel about today? Nervous? Excited?”
“You can tell, can’t you?”
“It would be rude not to ask,” Emily said. “Besides, your halo is inscrutable to me, dear.”
“What does that mean?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Emily said, leading her down a moderately busy hallway. “You seem nervous.”
“I’m not nervous,” Eerie said. “I’m scared. The club hasn’t met in months! Not once since Katya—”
“We have been a little busy.”
“I haven’t been to the Academy, either. I haven’t even set foot outside of the Far Shores, since…well, you know. Since everything.”
“The Academy was your home for almost your entire life. I’m sure that it has been difficult to leave it behind, particularly under such strained circumstances. Central hasn’t been a very welcoming place just lately, has it?”
“I don’t know if I’m not wanted,” Eerie said, following Emily into an elevator, “or if I don’t feel comfortable there anymore.”
“Oh, dear. Do you still blame yourself for what happened?”
Emily put her thumb on a scanne
r, and a little light in the elevator panel turned green. She pressed the second button from the bottom.
“I don’t just blame myself,” Eerie said, looking away. “I blame you, too.”
Emily smiled.
“Fair enough.”
“You could have told Alex about breaking free of the Anathema,” Eerie said. “He thought you would die if John Parson did.”
“We’ve been over this. I’m sorry I didn’t tell him,” Emily said. “But you could have told him yourself, if you wanted.”
“Yeah.”
“You didn’t.”
“It wasn’t my place, and I…I don’t like talking to him about you.”
“I understand,” Emily said. “Listening to him talk about you was my least favorite thing.”
“Yeah. Same.”
“Maybe you aren’t in the best position to criticize me for being honest with Alex,” Emily suggested. “Guilt does no one any good.”
“Now you sound like Rebecca,” Eerie said. “I don’t like that.”
“It’s only natural for empaths to be concerned with the people around us,” Emily said. “If it helps you any, I don’t hold you responsible. Anastasia had both hands in, and Gaul had been at it for years! Not to mention yours truly. You did less damage than some, and you had better reasons than most.”
Eerie threw her arms around Emily.
Amused and surprised, Emily patted the girl on her indigo head.
The Changeling did not let go until the elevator doors slid open.
“Do you think you’ll be okay, going ahead by yourself?” Emily took her hand as they walked down the short hallway, the air made humid by the collection of pipes than ran along one side of the cinderblock passage. “I have some meetings and a working lunch planned, but it’s nothing so important that I won’t reschedule if you need me.”
Eerie hesitated for a moment, assailed by her various worries.
Returning to the Academy was enough of a challenge, but today presented further obstacles. The necessity of the apport stations, for one, since anything but station-to-station travel was still impossible beyond line-of-sight, thanks to the lasting disruption caused by the displacement of the Church of Sleep into the Ether. That meant coping with long lines and inspections, as well as a certain amount of dizziness, dictated by the technician’s accuracy and engagement.
Adel oversaw the Far Shores apport station, along with the local branch of the Etheric Network, which was another hurdle. He was nothing but nice to her these days, but in a desperate and sweaty way that made Eerie profoundly uncomfortable.
Of course, visiting the Academy meant contending with Rebecca.
Least pleasant of all to anticipate was a visit she had not yet made to the cemetery.
It was better not to think about that, or she might start to cry.
“Why are you being so nice?” Eerie’s dilated eyes were wet. “I don’t deserve it!”
“If we all got what we deserved, I doubt I would be here,” Emily said. “Besides, we’re friends, aren’t we?”
“Yes,” Eerie said, sniffling. “Club members, too. You’ll be there tonight? On time?”
“I will,” Emily said, holding the door to the apport station for her. “You can count on me.”
***
Lord North took his coffee black, but the staff at the Administrative building could not help themselves when it came to providing accoutrements, so much of his desk was occupied by a silver tray crowded with potential options. A sugar bowl, three different kinds of milk – of which only one was dairy – a dish of lemon, a plate of biscuits, small jars of honey and cocoa, and a rainbow of artificial sweetener packets were all available.
Henry helped himself to coffee and hoped that his guest would put at least a little of the clutter to use. He wondered if the staff simply threw it all away every day and was appalled at even the thought of the waste.
Henry considered doing something about it, and then decided reluctantly that it was beneath his station as Chief Administrator to even ask about the garbage. Any involvement would demean him.
Arriving at that conclusion had become a regular occurrence in his life of late.
He checked his hair in the mirror in the corner and found it lacking. He took a comb from his pocket and went to work.
His secretary, Mrs. Garret, knocked twice before she let his ten o’clock in, allowing him to take his place behind his desk. The secretary was an inheritance from his old friend Gaul Thule, who had requested that Henry look after her in his will. The entire document was voided, of course, when the Thule name was stricken from the records and the cartel was dissolved, but Henry decided to honor the request regardless.
That had been a fortuitous decision, as Mrs. Garrett proved to be the only person in Administration who knew where everything was, from personnel files to payroll records. It only took Henry an afternoon to discover that her services were indispensable.
By the end of his first week, he had put Mrs. Garrett in charge of everything he did not manage personally.
“Good morning, Chief Administrator,” the young man said, his sun-bleached hair and freckled cheeks hinting at many hours spent out in the elements. “It’s good to see you.”
“You look well, Nathan,” Henry said, smiling as he guided the young man to a chair. “The new position agrees with you. Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“Do you take milk or sugar?”
“Black, sir.”
“Of course,” Henry said regretfully. “Something with it? A biscuit, or a muffin?”
“No, thanks. I’ve eaten already. Madison is doing nutrition and home econ at the Academy this semester, and she has given my household staff very firm instructions on the subject of the most important meal of the day,” Nathan said, laughing. “She’s not to be argued with, sir.”
“That is true of her mother as well,” Henry said, taking his seat behind the desk. “It is not a particular surprise that Madison would inherit her mother’s failings alongside her strengths.”
“I don’t mind, sir,” Nathan said, sipping his coffee. “I admire Madison’s spirit.”
“That’s good. I have high expectations for both of you.”
“As do I. Tell me, if you would, sir – has your daughter spoken of our engagement?”
“She has,” Henry confirmed, unable to keep the smile from his face. “Madison has spoken to Sofia and I at some length. I will not betray my daughter’s confidence, Nathan, but I do not mind telling you that her impression of you is extremely favorable. Even I, the architect of the match, have been surprised at how well the two of you seem to get along.”
“Is that so? Good. I think no less of her.”
“That said, her behavior of late has been more erratic than I would like,” Henry added. “She has become willful, and clashes with her mother regularly. Her academic performance has been more than satisfactory, but her behavior at the Academy has been uneven. A product of her age, I suppose.”
“I was difficult during my own teenage years,” Nathan said, putting aside his coffee. “I do not wish to waste your time, sir. You called me because we have business, I’m certain. Can I assist you in some way?”
“I’m certain that you can,” Henry said, taking a file from within the locked drawer of his desk, and handing it over to the young man. “Serafini Ricci continues to take her obstructive, if principled, stand in the Assembly, blocking the consolidation of the Hegemony into a singular force, preventing Kevin’s ascent to higher office, and therefore your own.”
Nathan inspected the files carefully, his lips occasionally moving along with his reading.
“She’s a dangerous one,” Nathan said, putting the file back on North’s desk. “Serafina was very well-liked at the Academy, and she’s popular with the other Great Families. She’s even more sympathetic now, after the murder of her parents. She is a blood relative of the Martynova family and counts several Great Families among her relations, and is
a political ally of Darby Weathers and Emily Muir. Silencing her would be difficult, and anything further would be extremely risky. The Hegemony would protest vigorously if anything were to happen to her, and the Black Sun might very well do more than that.”
“A delicate situation.”
“I am certain that Lady Martynova is indirectly supporting Serafina’s political career, though I cannot prove it yet. Miss Ricci has the funding to buy herself friends as needed, when her ideals aren’t enough.”
“I agree with your assessment. Dear little Sara has always had friends in high places. Kevin is quite fond of her, as is Sofia.”
“How unfortunate,” Nathan said, pursing his lips. “What would you have me do?”
“I want to avoid open conflict with the Black Sun for as long as possible. Central is still half in ruins and depopulated. We cannot afford any course of action that would lead to war, and Lady Martynova has made it clear that Serafina enjoys her protection. We will need to do something more subtle than intimidation or removal.”
“You sound as if you have a course in mind.”
“I believe I have an angle of approach. Sara’s attachment to the Black Sun is the key. She is heart and soul of the opposition camp in the Assembly. The Great Families may be fond of her personally, but they are conservative by nature, and dislike anything that upsets the natural order of things.”
“I’m to find evidence painting her as a revolutionary, then. Or a traitor, perhaps?”
“The solution does not need to be so dramatic. I think showing her to be an unwitting tool of the Martynova family would be enough to discredit Serafina, and by extension, the entire opposition.”
“As you say, sir,” Nathan said, finishing his coffee. “I’ll get to work on this immediately. Unless there is something else?”
“Nothing that cannot wait,” Henry said. “I assume that you will attend this evening?”
“Oh, yes,” Nathan said. “My only regret is that I cannot take Madison with me, sir.”
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 87