The Anathema tc-2

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Pretty much exactly what you said, but maybe angrier,” Alex admitted, holding out his hand so she could work the left glove over the tape.

  Margot appeared to think about it while she did the same to his right hand.

  “I’m not that angry, because I don’t think that much of you,” Margot said casually, a thin, polite smile on her face. “I don’t like seeing Eerie with you. Emily is vapid and weak, so I don’t really care what you do with her. But the idea of you and Eerie, well, I don’t approve. Getting close to Emily might be the first thing you’ve done since you showed up that I can support. Keep it up. Eerie will get over you eventually, I’m sure.”

  “Hey!” Alex objected. “Maybe I deserve some of that. But it was a little harsh, don’t you think? I mean, I do like her…”

  Margot shrugged. She’d let Eerie cut off her hair, right before she started field study, and he was still trying to get used to it. It was a little ragged around the nape of her neck, but it didn't look bad. Still, Alex had to give it up to anyone brave enough to let Eerie get near their face with scissors.

  “Not harsh enough, I guess,” Margot said, looking away, her expression terse and strained. “You know I live with her, right?”

  “Well, yeah…”

  Margot sighed deeply.

  “You want to see her?”

  “Wait, what?” Alex asked, scratching his head with one gloved hand. “I thought you said I sucked?”

  “You do, but that girl is raving mad,” Margot said, looking at him briefly, and then hesitating. “Look, I can get you in, tonight, after dinner. Do you want to or not?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “Okay. Then meet me outside the library after dinner. Wait on the back steps. When I’m sure everything is cool, I’ll come for you.”

  The plan puzzled him, and he opened his mouth to tell Margot as much, to say that her time with Audits had made her paranoid, but she turned and walked away before he had the chance, striding off toward Katya who was patiently waiting her turn to be taped up. Alex looked automatically for the bouncing pigtails that were no longer there as Margot walked past him, and for a second, he felt a kind of giddy happiness at the thought of seeing Eerie. Then he remembered all the weird things that he had done, that he would have to answer for, and his apprehension returned. He wasn’t exactly sure how long Michael stood there, just off to his side, waiting for him to notice.

  “Hi,” Alex said sheepishly. “Sorry. I was thinking.”

  “Wouldn’t want to interrupt that,” Michael said, wearing his usual implacable grin. “But anytime you’re feeling up for it, I know this Muy Thai instructor who’s just dying to meet you.”

  “Right,” Alex said, grabbing his headgear and mouthpiece from the gym bag. “I thought it had been a long time since someone kicked my ass.”

  Michael clapped him on the back as he led him along, toward one of the gym’s three elevated boxing rings, and laughed. He wore a white t-shirt and board shorts, and as always, Alex was profoundly envious of his physique — Michael looked, more or less, as if someone had carved one of those ancient Greek statues of the gods out of some kind of lustrous, dark wood, then added dreadlocks and black tattoo work for good measure. He was easily the most popular teacher on staff, the best physical trainer and protocol instructor, and the most patient man Alex had ever met. Michael was also the object of more than a few crushes from students in the combat program, some of whom stared jealously as he walked Alex across the room.

  “Thanks for not letting Margot do it,” Alex said tensely, biting down experimentally on his mouthpiece, a nervous habit he seemed to have picked up lately. “I think she might have tried to kill me.”

  “I’m not a sadist, son,” Michael said, looking surprised. “This isn’t the Program. I wouldn’t do that shit to you. I’m trying to make you better, that’s all. I don’t like seeing people get hurt, much less my students.”

  “I think you’re the only one here who feels that way,” Alex said gratefully. “I can’t decide whether it was better when Miss Aoki was in charge or Miss Gallow, but they’re both pretty awful, aren’t they?

  For a second, as they approached the side of the ring, Michael looked so unhappy that Alex couldn’t believe it. Then it was over, so fast and out of character that he found himself doubting that he’d seen it all. Nothing, after all, bothered Michael, not like that.

  “Yes,” he said, grinning. “But let’s get back to the job at hand, alright? The last time we did this, every time you clenched, you let him get you in a Thai plum,” Michael said, putting his hands on the back of Alex’s neck, fingers interlocked, to illustrate. “Then he can hit you with knees all day, son. You have to keep him outside, work your jab and throw some low kicks, keep him cautious. You have reach, I keep telling you, but it’s no good to you if you don’t use it.”

  Alex nodded, put in his mouthpiece, strapped on his headgear, and clambered through the ropes, thinking all the while that Michael could have been talking about a lot more than just his reach.

  15

  Alice was in her diary room, printing the day’s events in laborious capital letters into a red leather book with cream-colored paper, a cup of coffee she had forgotten about an hour ago sitting, ice-cold, next to her elbow. All around her on the old writing desk, similar red and black leather-bound volumes lay in haphazard stacks and piles; the left side for the ones she had been reading, the right side for the ones she had completed in recent years. Behind her, the walls of the room were nothing but inset bookshelves, unstained brown wood and row after row of leather and cloth bound diaries, hundreds of them, in varying states of repair. She didn’t know how old she was, but the other day; she’d gone looking for the oldest diary in the room. The best she’d been able to do was one from 1922. She’d been freaked out by that, but she hadn’t said anything to Rebecca or Alistair when they came around regularly to pester her.

  She’d probably spent too much time up here recently, though she knew from her diaries that she’d always preferred to retreat here. Alistair’s download had restored the framework of her memories, recent events and happenings, the names of the people around her and some of her past with them, but none of the context had come with it, and her own mind felt alien to her, like someone had replaced the furniture in her bedroom while she was out with things that were nice, but not quite the same. Still, it worked well enough that she could manage, and every day she remembered other bits and pieces, not memories exactly, but feelings and preferences, foods and people she liked and disliked, things that she knew how to do, books she’d read and movies she’d seen. She’d put a Darkthrone album on the stereo the other day, ‘ Panzerfaust ’, the same one that was playing softly on her laptop right now, and was fairly certain they were her favorite band. Stuff like that had been happening all day, and trying to remember it all and write it all down gave her a headache.

  When she wasn’t trying to preserve what was left of her, she read the diaries. It was fascinating, some of the time, like reading a series of fantasy novels populated entirely with people she knew but remembered only vaguely. At random, she’d pulled a volume that was more than a decade old, and found herself reading a detailed description of a night that she’d spent with Michael, the scratches her nails had left across his broad, muscular back. She blushed to think that she had considering flirting with the handsome black man the night before at dinner. Four hours later, reading another diary, she’d discovered why they no longer spoke, and did some more blushing.

  Alice read the most about the people around her, what she thought of them, what they had done together. Rebecca was interesting, because she was one of the only people that Alice really remembered of her own accord, along with Xia, who she’d remembered not to hug when she’d seen him, because he was pathological about disease, and lived in a sealed clean room in the Science building at the Academy. Something about Rebecca, just thinking about her, made Alice feel a little safer, a little better, and she knew th
at she trusted her, as far as she was willing to trust anyone. Alistair, on the other hand…

  He had come to see her several times since that day, treating her, helping her reconstruct her memories into some sort of order, and he was unfailingly polite. She respect him as a boss, it was obvious, and the diaries were replete with stories of his prowess and brilliant improvisations in the field, but she didn’t like having him in her head. Actually, she had to take a long, hot shower after every one of his visits. Her diaries had made this relationship all the more problematic.

  Many of her diaries had asides, notes written directly to herself, on the assumption that she would forget eventually. Most of them were not particularly significant, though a few of them had been helpful. The one that concerned her was brief, but it had been underlined several times for emphasis.

  ‘Something is wrong with Alistair,’ it read, her normally neat block letters slanted with agitation.

  There was nothing else in the diary that helped her understand the note, but it fed her own growing distrust of her supervisor, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d have been able to hide that from a telepath of Alistair’s ability, during their little reconstruction sessions. She didn’t know why she wasn’t supposed to trust him. She wasn’t even sure how much she trusted the diaries, or the woman who’d written them. However, she had to lean on something, and the disjointed, verbose diaries seemed like the most solid thing available to her.

  The first weeks had been the worst, when she felt the entire time as if she was trying to scramble up a gravelly hill, sliding backwards further with every step she took forward. She could see pity in the eyes of everyone she met, when she couldn’t remember their names or who they were, and more often than not, she protected herself by responding with hostility and the cruel smile that her face settled in almost automatically. That, at least, she felt comfortable with; that she knew was her own. Lately it was a little better. It had been days since she had met someone and not known who they were, or made a colossal misstep in conversation. She’d been reluctant, when Gaul had approached her and offered her a temporary teaching position, running the Program, because she thought she didn’t remember how to do it. But when she’d actually gone out there, to the shooting range and the cavernous room with the tile floor dotted with tiny, irreversible bloodstains and the rough painted circle, it all came flooding back, and she’d thrown herself into the work. It helped her to center herself, and she knew instinctively that she had looked to violence for that in the past as well.

  It didn’t hurt that Alex Warner turned out to be almost as fun to pick on as Mitsuru was.

  Alice wrote until her hand cramped up, until she was certain that she’d written down everything important, all of her conclusions and suspicions, the whole of the day’s events in as concise a manner as possible. Then she went back to reading, one of the diaries she’d pulled from the wall earlier, a recent one. The things she’d been doing right before she disappeared.

  She was so engrossed in the diary, and the knock at the door was so quiet, that at first Alice wasn’t sure that she had heard it. She crept up to the door out of habit, light on the balls of her feet, then remembered that there was no peephole, and reluctantly opened it a crack instead. She looked outside, sighed for effect, and then opened the door to let Rebecca in.

  “Finally. I could feel you standing on the other side of the door, you know. What a fucking day, let me tell you,” Rebecca said, breezing past her, her brown hair tied back in a bun with something that looked like a chopstick sticking through it. She wore a tight blue t-shirt with the UCLA logo and worn, comfortable-looking jeans, a lit cigarette in her right hand. “I swear these kids spend their free time plotting ways to make my life miserable. When Gaul pulled me from the field I thought I was getting a reward. A vacation, or at least a desk job with weekends off. I thought that life would get easier when no one was shooting at me.”

  Rebecca glanced around the room, then perched herself precariously on the corner of Alice’s desk, nudging the trashcan with toe of her shoe, so she could knock the ash from her cigarette into it. Alice barely managed to avoid laughing aloud. She’d already known Rebecca would refuse any chair in the room — without needing her diary to remind her, she knew that.

  “Since when did you ever give anyone the chance to shoot at you?” Alice asked fondly, sitting back down in front of her desk, and closing the diary she had been reading.

  Rebecca winked at her with a wry grin.

  “Somebody has been doing their homework on the old days, I see,” Rebecca said, smiling. “Been reading about our many adventures? Have you read about the thing in Greece yet? The one with those two amazing Algerian cousins?”

  A piece of Alice’s memory fell out of the sky, whole and vibrant, just like that. It was a good thing. She felt warm and her skin tingled, thinking about that night, lying on the beach on a very small island with the wind off the Mediterranean cooling the sweat on her naked back.

  “Yeah,” Rebecca sighed. “That was back when I used to get laid occasionally.”

  Rebecca snuffed out her cigarette and dropped it into the trashcan, then hopped back up and started wandering the room. She crouched over the laptop and switched the music over to Minor Threat. Alice let it pass. She had learned that Rebecca hated black metal earlier in the day, from her diaries.

  “Why don’t you, then, if you miss it?” Alice asked mischievously. “It’s not that hard to arrange.”

  Rebecca snorted and resumed her position on the exposed corner of the desk. It looked uncomfortable to Alice, but whatever.

  “I’m not like the rest of you people,” Rebecca said, taking a hard-shell plastic case from one of her pants pockets and opening it. “I don’t want to have to go to work the next day with the person I just slept with. It’s… icky. Uncomfortable. Besides, my job practically requires me to be all of these kids’ big sister. That’s a very fragile notion. I have to try and stay as perfect as possible in their eyes.”

  Alice laughed at the idea of Rebecca keeping up the appearance of virtue — Rebecca, who chronically smoked, swore, and littered with a haphazard apathy. Of course, thanks to her empathic gifts, no one held any of that against her. It just wasn’t possible.

  “Besides,” Rebecca continued blithely, pulling a neatly rolled joint from out of the plastic case, “I’m not even remotely attracted to anyone here. Not my type.”

  Rebecca lit the joint and inhaled, coughed briefly, then, with her eyes red and watering, offered it to Alice. Alice wondered if she did stuff like that, and couldn’t remember. She refused, just to be safe, and Rebecca shrugged.

  “Remind me,” Alice said, trying to sound casual. “What is your type?”

  “That reminds me of a story, actually,” Rebecca said mischievously, pausing occasionally to pull at the smoldering joint. “We did a job together in Venezuela one time, out in the jungle — FARC country, you know? Anyway, we’re slogging along through the brush and the trees, and it had been raining for days. It was terrible, my hair smelled like mildew, and this purported guerrilla group we are supposed to check out aren’t anywhere. Finally, after three days, we drag ourselves into this little village, way the fuck out there, expecting nothing but Indians. Instead, it turns out that there’s this whole group of graduate students from the University of Ohio at the same village, anthropologists, and they end up offering us dinner. So we’re hanging out, getting drunk on this awful moonshine they distill themselves out there in a tin boiler, and waiting for them to finish cooking some sort of stew, when you tap me on the shoulder, and you point out this guy to me, one of the students…”

  Alice kept smiling expectantly for a moment. Rebecca remained silent and motionless so long that she got worried.

  “And? Rebecca? Hello?”

  “Did you feel that?” Rebecca asked, her eyes filled with worry.

  “What?”

  “Alice,” Rebecca said, dropping the joint, still burning, into the trashcan, a
nd taking her gently by the shoulders. “Did someone just apport into the Academy?”

  Alice closed her eyes and looked for the silver veins running through the Ether that marked passage, the roiling of the endless fog. They were there, as obvious and temporary as contrails.

  “Yeah. Multiple ports, actually. Why?”

  “Because they are all angry, angry and scared,” Rebecca said, heading for the door and pulling Alice behind her. “Come on.”

  “Where are we going?” Alice asked, grabbing for the shotgun and bandolier that sat next to the door, blunt, mean, and reassuring.

  “Wherever they’re going,” Rebecca said grimly.

  “Where is that?”

  “I don’t know,” Rebecca snapped, pulling her along. “I haven’t figured out who they are here to kill yet.”

  It seemed to Alex like he waited on the steps for a long time. It wasn’t unpleasant, though; he was sore and battered from Michael’s class, and it felt good to be out, watching the sun sink behind the sea of fog below the Academy. There was a certain pleasant tension, torn between eagerness and anxiety at what would happen with Eerie. Alex hit play on his mp3 player, and it brought him something new, something odd and electronic, something he’d never heard before. That meant that Eerie had put it there, when she plugged his player into her laptop last week. The singer’s voice had been pitched-shifted into a frantic, sexless thing, the desperation of a late night nervous breakdown over a long-distance call.

  He decided it didn’t fit his mood, and skipped ahead until he hit something more innocuous, a hip-hop group from Hong Kong called Lazy Motherfuckers. He only had a different sweatshirt and jeans to change into, but they were his nicest sweatshirt and jeans. Stretched out on the warm grey stone, lying there thinking about nothing in particular, until he felt Margot looking down on him, even though he’d never heard her approach.