If it was a test, then Alex wasn’t the first to fail it. There was a girl somewhere else, and a bed that he wouldn’t be sleeping in tonight. And then there was the naked girl on top of him, the smell of saltwater from her hair and the softness of her breasts cupped in his hands, and the utterly unprecedented thing that they had done together, that had left them both moist and out of breath and looking at each other with different, softer eyes. The first time was over quickly and a little embarrassing, but still a revelation for Alex. The second was sweet and languid, continuing for a time that was indeterminate and utterly consuming.
Alex considered guilt, in the interval between, when Emily excused herself and went to the bathroom, and then put it aside. It was too soon, and he was still too much in the glow of pride and excitement. He wished that he could have called someone to brag, even if he did feel a bit bad about it. Then, when she returned, Emily was too warm and permissive, such an immediate and fascinating reality that Alex had no room in his mind for anything other than her, for the places where their bodies met and joined.
He told himself he had tried. Alex lay contentedly beside her, neither of them moving much, in the warm, floral-scented darkness on her side of the bed. Eventually she begin to move along the length of him, and he reached for her and pulled her close. Her hair fell across his face as she kissed his collarbone, her nails scraping his chest…
“What was that?” Alex asked, sitting up halfway and almost spilling Emily from off him.
“Hush,” Emily instructed. “You are the least romantic boy.”
Alex laid reluctantly back, his eyes closing. Then it happened again, this time much louder, the bed shaking slightly beneath them.
“Okay, what the fuck is that?” Alex asked, again sitting up partway. “You heard it that time, right?”
Emily smiled at him.
“Alex, it’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said reassuringly. “Try and focus on being here with me, okay?”
“That was definitely gunfire,” Alex said, pulling her down with his free arm. “You should stay down, keep out of the line of fire while I try to figure out what the hell is going on here…”
“Alex,” Emily pouted, gripping at the sheets bunched up in her hands. “You really don’t like me at all, do you?”
“No, I do, but… is this the time?”
Alex stood up and took a single step toward the window, meaning to sidle up to the wall next to it and peer cautiously outside, and then he stopped and looked down at his feet.
“That’s weird,” he said. “The floor is totally soaking wet. There’s like an inch of water in here…”
“I know,” Emily said, pulling her slip up and sighing. “I turned the tap on a few minutes ago, when I went to the bathroom. I didn’t think you’d notice. And I’ll probably need it.”
“You’ll what?” Alex asked, puzzled. “Emily, none of that made any sense to me. Do you know what is going on here?”
“I made a deal, Alex. You forced my hand and I made a deal, but not with the people expected me to. Silly boy,” she said, laughing or crying, he couldn’t tell which in the dark. “You don’t even know the names for the things you should be afraid of. Anathema, Alex. The exiled are returning to take back what was theirs. I made a deal with them, Alex. Now I get everything that I ever wanted, only not the way I wanted it. Would you like to hear how I paid them, what I had to do because you wouldn’t make up your mind?”
There was a brief, intense pounding on the door, a pause, and then part of the lock fell off and the door flew open.
“Alex! Emily! Look, I hate to do this to you, but I need both of you to get somewhere safe and oh my fucking God,” Katya said, horrified, taking one faltering step back. “What the hell is going on here?”
“Please shut up,” Emily said, glaring at her. The water swelled up around Katya, briefly, appearing to swallow her, a splashing column of water in the shape of a girl, and then it collapsed to the ground again. Katya made a strange, frantic motion with her arms, clutching at her neck, and then she fell down, sideways, and started to kick out her legs.
“Why is she doing that?” Alex said, pulling at his feet, which seemed to be attached to the soaked hardwood floors, up to his ankles in icy-cold water. “Why is she making those noises?”
“Because she is drowning,” Emily said callously. “Like they did to me. The Anathema. It was weeks ago, before we left on break. I was frightened for days beforehand. Did you even notice? They came and they took me to a place that looked like a temple built out of stone, like the Academy but all translucent blues and greens. There were pools there, deep enough that you couldn’t touch the bottom once they covered it over. It was dark and cold and I held my breath as long as I could. They said the water was full of nanites, but I didn’t know for sure until I after took that first, deep breath. Then everything changed. I am not who I used to be, Alex.”
“Why would you let them do that to you?” Alex asked, bewildered and horrified. “Why didn’t you ask for help? I would have helped you!”
“You had a hundred chances to help me, and you never did. Now I don’t need anyone’s help, ever again. And if you try your protocol on me, Alex Warner,” she warned sternly, “that water you feel all over your skin will freeze. You’d kill yourself, trying to kill me.”
“Emily,” Alex said, “I’m really sorry. I wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.”
The needle impaled her head, only one end visible, poking out of her hair on one side, a bit above her ear, like an ornament. Alex howled and grabbed for her body as she fell.
“I sure would,” Katya croaked, coughing as she stumbled across the room and grabbed Alex’s shoulder. “God that hurt. I wasn’t sure whether I could port the water out of my lungs or not. Alex, we have to go, she’s not…”
Alex was holding an armful of water that was leaking back to the floor. He ignored Katya pulling at his arm and stared at it as it melted away. It all seemed so unreasonable. He thought of Emily sitting next to him in class, her flowery handwriting, the worried look she got every time he did something stupid, and he simply couldn’t reconcile it.
“No,” Emily said, out of a slowly rising column of water that only vaguely looked like her. “She most certainly is not.”
“Alex,” Katya commanded, pulling him to his feet. “Run.”
The Weir lunged, spittle flying, and Mikhail Bashmet ducked the attack easily, not even paying it much attention as he whipped the hatchet in his left around, removing the top part of the Weir’s head, along with a bunch of indeterminate matter that hit the trunk of the tree behind him with a wet, plopping noise. He barely heard it, moving forward, leaving behind the dead Weir, hunting whatever it was the pack was dying to protect.
All around him, operatives of the Black Sun moved through the pine trees and the great tufts of ferns, killing Weir and Ghouls with silent precision. The air crackled with discharged protocols, and with the potential energy of more, held in reserve for the right moment. The shadows were thick beneath the trees that fought and clawed for every inch of sunlight, but for those with the right eyes, the forest was lit from within for miles around, the last stand of Taos Cartel. A few members had gone to ground in Washington, along the Canadian border, out on a small ranch not far from the Snake River. When Mikhail’s extermination team arrived, Weir had come boiling out of the primitive structures of the camp like insects, allowing the occupants to flee to the woods. After mopping up the beasts, Mikhail and his team had followed. It had galled him, requesting that another team be ported in to supplement his own in this operation, but now that they had come so far, he was glad of the extra men.
“Where are they?”
Mikhail called out to Don Tran, his tracker and remote viewer. He looked up from the corpse in front of him and pointed, toward a distant hill crowned with trees, where Mikhail thought that he could see movement.
Leaves broke and crackled beneath his boots. He moved fast now that he had the trac
e, the thread of fright and desperation that marked the trail of those that had fled before his team. It wound through the brush and the undergrowth, over the ridge and partway down the valley. They were still bridging a narrow stream when he finally caught up to them. He steadied himself on the uneven surface of the rocky slope, aiming the. 40 pistol he had clutched in both hands. A woman, the one trailing behind, cried out and fell, and then was swallowed up by the swollen water as her companions plunged onward, Mikhail pursuing. The creek slowed him down a little. He caught the man near the top of the next ridge, the hatchet burying itself right in the center of his back. The man fell, cursing him, and for a brief moment, their eyes met.
And then he said the word, and Mikhail’s brain, reacting in primeval horror, relayed it to every neighboring mind before tearing itself apart in revulsion.
The meeting stretched on, through the afternoon, much too long for North’s taste. It was George Muir from the Raleigh Cartel, again, as usual, protesting his family’s shrinking interest in the covert Iranian opium trade that had been their traditional area of expertise. He had already wrung whatever consolations he was going to receive from the Hegemony for this perceived breach of territory, and he knew it, but he was offended and frightened by his family’s failing fortunes. He expressed this by making long, aggrieved speeches at the meetings they were still obligated to invite him to.
North had heard it all before, so he had tuned out shortly after the blowhard had begun talking, his eyes drifting out to the window to the blue sky and the rolling hills outside of Dublin, where they were doing this quarter’s financials. That put him in the position to see it first.
“Something is wrong,” he said firmly, cutting off Muir in midsentence, while the whole room turning to face him.
“What do you mean?” Tuttle asked suspiciously, squinting at him through the rolls of fat that surrounded his eyes. “You do not have the floor at the moment, Lord North.”
“You fools,” North sneered, gesturing at the window while he walked purposefully for the exit. “See for yourselves.”
At first it was only one person, a man, running along the road that connected the retreat buildings to the main security gate. He wasn’t wearing the normal uniform of the security forces, but the snipers stationed on the roof took care of him, so that didn’t seem too ominous. The men in the room, largely older, largely fat, had already begun to nudge each other and exchange whispered speculation on whether the younger North had finally lost it, the same way the elder had done so many years before, when another man came around the same curve, running as if his life depended on it. Followed by another. Then several more. The snipers felled the first few, but soon there was a whole crowd, a small army of strange people rushing the building, heedless of who the security staff shot.
And when they one of them got close enough, they said the word.
Eerie hesitated at the entrance to the old Physical Education building, currently unoccupied and slated for revamping next year.
“Alex?”
She said his name softly, probably too softly for anyone inside the ragged old building to hear her.
She debated a moment longer, then ducked underneath the caution tape and opened the front door, which had been left unlocked and partially ajar. Eerie stepped into the half-lit room, one side flooded with yellow light from the streetlight outside, the other shrouded in the shadows of the interior of the building. The whole place smelled powerfully of dust and mildew.
“Alex?” Eerie asked again, hopefully.
“Not exactly,” Steve admitted, stepping in the front door behind her and shoving her unceremoniously aside, while Charles closed the door firmly behind them. “I guess you’ll have to make do with us.”
Eerie caught herself on the arm of a chair covered by a paint-smeared drop cloth in time to avoid hitting the stripped wooden flooring. Her knitting basket went clattering to the floor and overturned, spilling yarn and darning needles.
“What?” Eerie looked from one sweating, leering boy’s face to the other. “But, the email said…”
“I know,” Steve said, moving forward, reaching for her with one massive hand, while Eerie shrank away. “What can I say? I am as surprised as you are. I always figured Emily for too good to talk to the likes of me, but I guess we both misjudged her, right? Anyway, I’ve wanted to settle things with your piece-of-shit boyfriend for a long time now, for my teeth. He ain’t here, so I guess that makes you the next best thing, right?”
“Maybe better…” Charles suggested evilly, his face flushed and ugly as he advanced on her.
Eerie backed up until she bumped up against one of the walls, sending a cloud of dust puffing up around her, like a halo in the late afternoon sun.
“What do you mean?” Eerie asked quietly, her fingers knotting in the fabric of her oversized sweatshirt.
Charles laughed his nasty little laugh, and Steve ambled forward, with a smug, self-satisfied grin on his face as he reached out again through the dust and the strange golden motes that filled the air, his hand clenched tight around her arm.
“Oh, you don’t get it?” Steve asked, his voice rich with mock sympathy, his face red and swollen. “I got the strangest email this morning. It turns out that Emily wants you gone in the worst way, and she’s willing to give us all sort of things, including a free ride into the Hegemony, if we take care of it for her. We were sent here to make you disappear, retard. And no one will care if we take our time about it.”
“Alistair?” Vladimir said, clearly stunned. “Why are you here?”
The old man’s laboratory was a mess as always. The two long tables were both covered with components and machinery, pipes and coils of wire, the remnants and wreckage of a dozen experiments, failed, functioning, and ongoing. Alistair picked up a length of steel pipe that looked about right on his way over, still a little groggy from the apport in.
“The boss sent me,” Alistair said jovially. “There was something I had to take care of here.”
Alistair looked up at the cells that hung across the second level. The traumatized witch that Alice had brought home was the only current occupant. Alistair winked at her, her eyes widened in terror, and she shrank back into the corner, as far away as her cell would allow.
“That’s odd,” Vladimir said, frowning. “I was sure Gaul told me that he had sent you out on assignment a few days ago.”
“Oh, now I understand the confusion. You see,” Alistair confessed, rolling the pipe around the palm of his hand, “I don’t work for him anymore.”
Vladimir spun to face him as he advanced, gripping the table top next to him for support, water leaking out of the corners of his wrinkled, weepy eyes. Around him, a circle flickered to life, a frenetic ring of unintelligible words burning faint orange.
“Alistair, you can’t be serious.”
“I can,” Alistair said, swinging the pipe at the his wrinkled head and connecting with the side of the skull. Vladimir toppled without making a sound, the orange ring around him disappearing as he hit the floor. “You never gave me enough credit, Vlad. None of you did. For such ambitious men, you could be very short-sided when it came to your proteges.”
Alistair’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he strained with the effort of wide-spectrum broadcast telepathy.
“Come on,” he said, to whoever was listening. “The door’s wide open.”
Across Central, apports were completed and gateways opened. Central had scarcely sunk into darkness when they begun to kill.
23
“Here is the thing,” Gaul said patiently, folding his hands on the desk in front of him. “There is an excellent possibility that things are about to get ugly, and that I may be forced to deal with this situation without a number of my usual tools. This is why I have brought you back early from your vacations. For whatever reason your potential in this situation was overlooked by my unknown adversary, but not by me. In short, I am going to need your help, ladies and gentlemen.”
The small group of people in his office muttered, exchanged glances, whispered and nudged each other. However, no one left, and no one looked anything more than excited and eager. Grigori and Margot exchanged challenging glances, while Vivik was already occupied in pouring over the probability matrices on Gaul’s desk.
Kids, Gaul thought sourly.
“Very well,” Gaul said crisply. “Let’s discuss the plan, shall we?”
“Alex, I need you to pay attention, because this is very important.”
Someone, a girl, in front of him. Who was it? He couldn’t seem to focus his eyes, and his head kept lolling forward and to the side uncontrollably. She put one hand on his cheek, steadying him, while she put something else behind his neck. The sensation was so overwhelming that it took him some time to identify it, but eventually it came to him.
A cold towel.
“An unfortunate thing has happened, Alex. I’m honestly not sure exactly what yet, and I find that very upsetting. You have had an experience, no need to think about it right now, that you also found quite upsetting.”
White face, red lips, pale blue eyes, black dress… Anastasia? Could the girl be Anastasia? No, Alex decided, it wasn’t possible. Because this girl looked as if she might have been upset, worried about him, and that could never be.
“I need you to stay with me, Alex, because I have a number of things that I am taking care of, at the moment, and frankly, you are hardly my priority. Please try and focus. I am tired of repeating myself.”
She had ribbons in her hair. It could only be Anastasia. But, how? And why would Anastasia be helping him? But maybe he was being unfair to the girl. In some ways, she had done nothing but help him since he had come to the Academy.
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