“Through the woods,” Katya said coolly, tapping her foot impatiently.
“Yeah.”
“Which are filled with…? I don’t know. Anathema, I suppose. Lots of them.”
“Well, yeah. I mean, I have to, right?”
“I suppose,” Katya mused. “The only other girl in the world who was willing to sleep with you decided that she preferred death, so your options for the future are limited.”
“Hey,” Alex said, genuinely hurt and not fully able to disguise it. “That’s really harsh, even for you.”
“Sorry. You’re just going to have to deal with it.”
“Well, whatever. I have to go for Eerie. I said some things that I wish I hadn’t… and now that I think about it,” Alex said, wondering why he was confessing this to Katya, of all people, “there are some things that I want to say that I should have said. Right now, I’m trying not to compound my mistakes. So, while I appreciate your help, I’d appreciate it even more if you would lay the fuck off. Please.”
Katya regarded him narrowly. It could have gone either way. He wasn’t sure how many of the needles she had left woven into the lining of her jacket, and he found himself watching her hands intently. Then she shrugged and walked off, toward the gate, stepping neatly over the corpse of the Weir, head steaming from internal temperature deferential.
They made it halfway to the gate, which seemed good, given how crowded the woods seemed to be tonight. At least, for variety’s sake, they managed to stumble over the next group of Anathema, rather than vice versa. Both Weir looked very surprised. The human — well, no, Alex reminded himself; the Anathema with them looked even more so.
Katya threw one of her needles at him, overhand, and he ducked to avoid it, reaching for his gun. It flickered out of sight in mid-air, holding onto the momentum when it reappeared somewhere inside of him, emerging, point first, from the right side of his chest, poking out from between his ribs. He dropped the gun he’d been holding and stared at it in horror. Alex held out his hand, measuring from there, and waited for the Weir to move. He didn’t have to wait very long.
They were faster than he anticipated, and he almost didn’t get the first one, on the way in, which would have been a problem, because Katya was still digging through her pockets. He had to try twice, in rapid succession, unpleasantly aware that every pinhole meant a few more hours of his life lost to dreamless, hollow sleep. His first attempt grazed the back of the Weir’s skull. The second one hit the mark, and the thing fell down in the same horrible convulsions. Alex spun to face the final Weir, knowing the he would be too late to stop it, wondering if Katya had worked anything out.
The Weir dropped to its knees in coughing, choking spasms, close enough that Alex could smell its foul breath. He turned and looked at Katya gratefully as the thing died.
“Fuck, man, I thought you were out of needles or something,” Alex gasped, his hands on his knees. “I would’ve been dead.”
“Actually,” Katya said modestly. “I did kind of run out of… accessible needles. I actually killed that one with a handful of dirt. Whatever works, right?”
“Accessible?”
Katya blushed.
“Yeah, can we not talk about that?”
“Right,” Alex said, turning back toward the gate. “You’re right. How do you think we should do this? Do we walk right in, or what?”
As they walked along, he could hear clothing rustle and shift behind him. He risked one quick look back, and caught her fussing with her skirt lining, and got a good idea about where the “inaccessible” needles were stored. Then Katya caught him looking and glared, and he sort of wished he hadn’t.
As much as Alex tried to keep his mind on other things, it returned again and again to Emily. He recalled the strange things she’d said, the water bleeding out of her skin, watching her disintegrate in his arms; it was like a sore in his mind, constantly threatening to occupy his attention. When he actually gave in and tried to think the whole scene through, though, Alex drew a complete blank. His mind fixated and recoiled over the sheer horror and impossibility of the situation. Alex remembered what she looked like in her white dress on a sunny afternoon not so long ago, on the other side of the Gate he and Katya were cautiously approaching now, and it caused pain that ran right through him, nestling in his chest as if it planned to stay. However, if he had been asked to explain, there would have been nothing he could articulate.
It got quieter as they approached the gate, and there were more bodies scattered around the trees and the road, some of them probably people he’d seen around, some of them maybe even people he liked. He tried very hard not to look at them.
The road broadened into a plaza, a roundabout with a stone pavilion in the center, directly in front of the Gate. There had been a bus stop and a rain shelter in its shadow, but now there were only fragments of torn metal bolted to the stone that reminded him of the way Emily laughed on a certain afternoon. Katya motioned for him to be quiet as they approached, and something about the gesture recalled the way it had looked — Emily’s lovely, well-proportioned head marred and violated by a thin, rounded piece of metal — and for a moment, he thought he that couldn’t go on any further. Then he saw them, standing near the Gate and talking in low voices. Anathema, dressed for battle, in face paint that he couldn’t identify but he knew indicated their cartel membership. He didn’t need to be able to read it to recognize them. He’d seen the same paint a half-dozen times tonight, and the people wearing it had always been trying to kill him. There were five of them, and all of them had guns.
Alex crouched in the brush, not far from the edge of the woods, where the road begin. Katya bent down beside him. The heavy skirt and jacket combo she’d worn had seemed unreasonably warm on the island. Now he envied her the heavier clothes.
“What do we do now?”
Katya opened her mouth to answer, and then she closed it again, and shrugged.
“I have three needles left,” she offered. “Can you take some of them from here? I’m going to have to get closer…”
As it turned out, she didn’t have to, after all.
Normally, an apport was delivered as close as possible to ground level. When Svetlana performed an apport, Alex noticed that he often had the sensation of falling slightly, on arrival, probably due to inexperience. But whoever put Grigori twenty feet above the huddled group outside the Gate did it on purpose. Apparently, the electric blue crackling aura that surrounded him was enough to be absorb the impact.
The two men who were caught below him, not so much. Alex sincerely hoped they were dead. They sure looked dead; with a whole lot of what was supposed to be on the inside suddenly squeezed out by Grigori’s telekinetic dive-bomb. A shallow crater contained the carnage that Grigori was still in the process of extracting himself from.
The first one of the survivors to react was a guy wearing one of those ski-mask things that people use to rob gas stations. He must have been a pyrokine, and he clearly wasn’t stupid. Apparently, he didn’t need to use his hands to operate his protocol, because the air around Grigori ignited while the man leveled his squat British bull pup SMG, flicked off the safety, and started pumping rounds into Grigori, who had gone up like a Christmas tree in February. Alex moved to help him automatically, before he even thought about what he was going to do, but Katya pulled him down by his arm, hissing her disapproval. She indicated with curt, angry gestures that he was to follow her. She crouched and then lead him off to the side, flanking the remaining men near one side of the Gate. Ten steps later, Alex realized why.
Grigori was invisible inside the Roman candle he had become. But he wasn’t flailing or falling down. He was moving toward the men, slowly but surely, and beneath the layer of livid orange flame, Alex could see brilliant blue undertones.
He had seen Grigori use his protocol before, once or twice, when he visited sessions of the Program, but he didn’t really understand it that well. Grigori was some kind of wideband telekinetic, as
Alex understood it, powerful but with an extremely limited range and a blunt, dramatic dispersal. He couldn’t project or strike at a distance like Michael. Instead, he used his protocol almost entirely in contact with his own body.
Grigori crossed about half the distance between him and the remaining Operators before they had the good sense to kill the fire. Underneath, Grigori was sheathed in a shimmering blue field that ebbed and waxed around him, tidal fluctuations in high speed. He looked a bit cooked and unhappy, but otherwise unhurt. Two of the men had the good sense to start using their rifles, banana-clipped AK-47s. The last one had the even better sense to go for his radio. Alex could only assume that meant that the squad telepath had been one of the two unfortunates that Grigori had landed on.
Grigori got his hands on the closest one, the pyrokine. The air in front of his fist radiated a livid blue as he concentrated his telekinetic abilities down into a single point. Alex had seen him do this before, once, but it had been as part of a demonstration, on a block of concrete. The effect on the pyrokine’s abdomen was similar, but much uglier.
One of the other ones must have been a telekinetic. Alex didn’t actually see it that well, but whatever happened, it knocked Grigori over and sent him skidding across the pavilion, the shifting energetic field that surrounded him tearing a furrow in the old stone of the road, raising sparks and making an awful squealing sound. He hit the wall next to the gate hard, sending chips of stone and dust flying. Fortunately, for Katya and Alex, all of this made so much noise that the Anathema didn’t notice them circling around until they were close enough to do something about it.
Katya was supposed to go first, and he was supposed to hang in reserve, since she could strike multiple times rapidly, and he had only managed to figure out how to do it once, with a long windup. But something about the remains of the post in the ground where the bus stop had been, where Alex had stood with Emily, brought back memories; the sly way she smiled when she was enjoying a private joke, the way she would nestle, comfortably, underneath his arm, the way she looked in a dress that she liked. Now all of these memories were poisoned.
Alex put his arm out in front of him to use as a visual reference. But he didn’t open a pinhole. Instead, he let his anger decide for him, and it went for the walls of reality like a scorpion’s stinger, white-hot at its sharpest point, clawing free of him like a living thing and then tearing through to the Ether like it was frictionless. There was no resistance whatsoever. The hole he opened to the Ether was about the size of a basketball, and expanding rapidly, fueled by his irrational anger.
It was crueler than he expected. The air temperature dropped first, shards of frozen water shattering against the stone with a sound like gentle music. Then the men fell, and that was ugly, as they choked on the frigid air that burned their lungs. Their skin blackened and crackled, frostbite expanding manically across their bodies; but they lived on somehow, not exactly screaming, crawling around and moving spasmodically. Eventually, he supposed, their blood froze or their hearts stopped from the trauma. He didn’t actually see that part, because he kept his eyes firmly closed until he was sure they were dead, and then he closed the rent to the Ether.
Grigori, sheathed in a telekinetic field, and Katya, needles dangling from slack fingers, had both stopped to stare at Alex.
“Alex,” Katya said softly. “You’re going to fall asleep again. You can’t do that sort of thing.”
“I’m past caring,” Alex said curtly. “I have places that I need to be, and no more time for this bullshit. Grigori, who sent you here?”
Grigori rubbed his stubbly chin and looked at Alex with obvious curiosity.
“Maybe I have misjudged you, Alex Warner,” Grigori rumbled thoughtfully. “I did not realize that you were so capable.”
“Whatever,” Alex said irritably. “I want to be done with this. I have other things to worry about, and I couldn’t care less about your opinion. Now, who are you here for, and what do we have to do next?”
“I see,” Grigori said, slowly, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Very well. I’m working for Gaul. He had Choi port me over here when he said the time was right. Vivik had you two tagged a half-mile away.”
“What’s it like inside there?” Alex asked, inclining his head in the direction of the Academy. “How bad is it going to be, getting to the infirmary?”
“Its hit and miss,” Grigori said, nudging one of the dead Anathema with his shoe. “There are some places that are pretty safe, like around the Admin building where Gaul’s got the kids all bunkered up. Some others aren’t. But you don’t need to worry. Gaul sent you a guide.”
“Oh, then you aren’t coming?” Katya said brightly. “Pity.”
“Please, Katya,” Grigori said, walking off. “Do try not to get yourself killed. It would be such a shame.”
Alex shrugged and then he and Katya walked through the gate. Things on the other side looked a little bit better. Then their guide stepped from the shadows, an uneasy smile on his face, and his hands in the pockets of his brown tweed jacket.
“Katya, Alex,” Mr. Windsor said cheerfully. “Either of you two fine young people up for an evening stroll?”
“Therese,” Anastasia called out, stepping carefully through the burning wreckage of the western wing of the house, holding her skirt bunched in front of her, trying vainly to protect the embroidery on the hem. “Come out, come out, wherever you are…”
She peered around the burning remains of one wall, the one destroyed by a telekinetic attack shortly before reinforcements had arrived from the organized combat forces of the Black Sun and driven back their attackers, at a cost that was currently being tallied. She didn’t see anything but darkness and trees moving in the wind behind the wall, so she stepped gingerly around it and continued.
“Oh, come on, Therese,” Anastasia said impatiently. “I have other things that I need to be doing. And your sister doesn’t have the kind of contacts to beg favors from the Anathema. However, you do, Miss Foreign Affairs Liaison. I would have helped her, you know. She would have been a Lady of repute in the Black Sun, and you would have done well for yourself, too. Instead, you let them drown her in a hole in the ground, and now she’s a monster. What did you get for that, Therese? And what have they made of you?”
Anastasia crossed her arms and planted her feet, not worrying for the moment about the velvet in her skirt, no doubt damaged beyond repair by the soot.
“You flooded my island. You destroyed my house and you ruined my dinner. You made my sisters cry, and you failed your own sister, you pitiable thing. You had better show yourself and get it over with. I know you are out there. Renton is telling me so.”
“I am not hiding,” Therese said calmly, walking out into the open, dressed for a day in the office in grey slacks and a white blouse, her hair back in a neat bun. “I was simply waiting to see which of your servants you planned to hide behind.”
“None of them. Not for you, dear,” Anastasia, said, walking toward her. “For you, I’m making an exception. Back when you used to work for the Hegemony, you would have dreamed of having this opportunity. Congratulations are in order. You are about to find out what my protocol can do.”
Therese’s smile was sickly, even in the dark.
“Your mistake, Anastasia. The Outer Dark has been kind to me,” she gloated. “I have heard the rumors of you, the anomaly in the Martynova clan, and your mysterious deviant protocol. Whatever your secret, you are no match for what I have become.”
“Therese,” Anastasia said, her voice suddenly soft. “Tell me you didn’t plan it this way. Tell me this all went horrible awry, that you did not deliberately let them do that to your sister.”
Therese froze, and her expression became muddied, uncertain.
“Why? What does it matter? Because you were ‘friends’ with her? Please. You were trying to play Emily.”
“Of course,” Anastasia acknowledged. “Honestly, I was getting tired of acting the lonely and secretly s
elf-conscious heiress. But that isn’t that point. She is your sister,” Anastasia added, glaring. “That is a responsibility that I take seriously.”
“You have no idea,” Therese barked. “Don’t give me that crap, rich girl. You’ve never had to do anything for your sisters. You have no idea what it was like with Emily. I did everything I could to protect her.”
“You gave her to the Outer Dark, and they made her a walking corpse, a Drown. Don’t bother with the good sister act. We are way past that now. Tell me,” Anastasia said softly, taking one deliberate step toward her, then another, “did they put you in that pool, first? Or did you let them do that to her? She was a really good cook, too. I won’t forgive you for it, whatever your reasons or rationale.”
“I am not a Drown,” Therese hissed, the air around both of her hands smoking and steaming. “They have made me so much more than that. You cannot imagine, Martynova, the scale and the sheer power of the Outer Dark.”
“Then give me a demonstration,” Anastasia invited. “I have a a bit of a surprise planned for you, too. Shall we see whose is better?”
25
“Mr. Windsor?”
“No need to be so formal, Katya. Please call me Gerald, both of you. We aren’t in class, and you’ve earned the right.”
“Alright, whatever,” Katya said, tossing her hair. “Are we safe with you?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Don’t play dumb,” Katya said, sighing. “Your protocol, teach. Can you do anything notable? It’s my job to keep this kid,” she said, jerking her thumb at Alex, “safe. So I’d like to know if you are going to be any help. Because, you know, I could have found the infirmary on my own.”
Mr. Windsor laughed pleasantly, ignoring Katya’s contemptuous expression.
“Not to worry, Katya, I’m not going to be entirely useless to you. I do have abilities of my own, you realize. However, I don’t think you need to exercise such vigilance, not while we are on campus, anyway. It may not look like it, but we have things well in hand, here.”
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