Eerie didn’t say anything.
“He tried to set me on fire!” Alex pleaded, holding the arms of his scorched sweatshirt for examination. Eerie remained silent, keying commands into the keyboard in her lap, never even looking up at him while he fidgeted. Her display, from Alex’s angle, appeared to show nothing but fields of scrolling numbers.
“I wasn’t trying to hurt him or anything. It’s just that people have been trying to kill me all day, and I sort of thought that I was still being attacked by them, and…”
“Alex,” Eerie interrupted, “what are you doing here?”
“Damn it, Eerie,” Alex swore softly, “I came to make sure you were okay.”
“Oh?” Eerie asked, still glued to her display.
“Yeah,” Alex affirmed, slumping down against the wall and crouching there. “I figured that if I showed up and saved you from the bad guys all cool-like that you might, I don’t know, forgive me.”
“For what?”
“For all the shit I pulled,” Alex said, surprised how angry he was with himself. “With Emily, over Break, the stuff that I said before it. All of it.”
“And you came to save me?”
“Yeah.”
“I see,” Eerie said, finally turning to face him, her expression blank. “But I don’t need saving.”
“Yeah, clearly,” Alex said, shrugging. “I was worried about you, though.”
“I see,” she repeated flatly.
The silence stretched out while Alex squirmed.
“Eerie. Can I do anything to make this better?”
Eerie finally put down the keyboard and turned so that she was facing him, her hands sitting neatly on her long grey skirt. She’d changed her hair again, he noticed — the blond streaks were gone, replaced with a varying blue tint. It looked good, he thought, but he didn’t think this was the time to point it out.
“Tell the truth,” Eerie suggested. “Alex, are you here because you lost Emily?”
He thought about it for a minute. He figured she deserved that much.
“No,” he said finally. “I’m here because I am afraid that I’ve lost you.”
Eerie sat still for a moment, and then she looked away, her face, as always, unreadable.
“You are upset with me,” Alex said, sighing and standing up. “I’ll go. Just let me know if you change…”
“Alex,” Eerie said softly, cutting him off. “Why do you think I’m upset?”
Alex considered this for a moment, frozen in the act of standing, wondering if it was some kind of trick question.
“Because of Emily,” he said hesitantly. “Because I went on break with her…”
Eerie shook her head emphatically.
“No?”
She shook her head again.
“Okay,” he said, spreading his hands, “then why?”
“Alex is stupid,” Eerie muttered. “You really don’t get it?”
Alex shook his head. He was genuinely puzzled. All he could think was that Anastasia or Katya had gone back on their word, and told Eerie the whole story of the events of the break.
“No,” Alex said, trying to purge his mind of the memory of the weight of Emily on top of him.
“Do you know what I have to do tomorrow? Did you think about that at all?”
Alex shook his head again, his eyes on the floor, unable to face Eerie. He could feel his cheeks burning. He hadn’t so much forgotten about Margot’s impending funeral as much as he had deliberately forgotten about it, unable to fully comprehend the idea. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment how callous he was being.
“Do you even care?”
Alex kept his eyes on the disarray on the floor. He fought down an insane urge to start crying, out of exhaustion, out of self-pity, in the hopes that it might make Eerie feel guilty and relent. However, he didn’t want to embarrass himself like that, and anyway, Eerie deserved better after everything that he had done.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, his hands balled into fists. “I’m broken up about Margot, too. This is all new to me. Really, I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. He worked up his courage, remembering Windsor’s odd reaction, the night of the attack, and asked the question. “Eerie… did — did something happen over break? To you, I mean. Something bad?”
She didn’t answer.
“I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s cool, I don’t want to make you or anything, but I was really worried, the whole time, and if you hadn’t made me this thing, this cushion thing, I think I’d probably be dead right now, and as soon as I could, I came here to…”
He trailed off when he realized she had started typing again.
“I’m sorry, Eerie,” he said quietly, cursing himself.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, staring again at her display. “I understand.”
“No, you got it all wrong. I came here to tell you…”
Eerie shook her head.
“Not right now, Alex,” she insisted. “I have things to think about. And I think you should go.”
Alex felt cold. Suddenly, unaccountably cold. He managed to nod at the back of her head, and for some reason, he was smiling while he did it, some sort of automatic social reflex. His whole mind had gone numb on him, as if he had an injection of Lidocaine.
“Okay. Alright, I will go,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “But when you get it figured out, please give me another chance. Because, I promise you Eerie, my mind is made up.”
The pillow she threw missed by a mile, but it still made him jump. When he turned back to face her, there were tears running down her cheeks, and her eyes blazed with an anger he had never seen before.
“It’s not all about you!” She howled, her voice catching.
“Eerie…”
“Just go! Just… just go away.”
He stood there, looking contrite, hoping she would take pity on him, and hoping she would forgive him. Eventually, he realized that she wasn’t going to, and he bowed his head, sighed, and then he let himself out quietly. She kept herself in front of her computer, pounding out code so fast that she was sure she would have to redo all of it later, until well after she heard the front door close behind him, until she was sure that she wouldn’t go to the window to see if he was still out there.
“Stupid,” Eerie muttered, aware that she was crying but refusing to acknowledge it. She slid her headphones over her ears, bent over her keyboard, and stayed that way until she could only stumble, half-blind with sleep, to her bed, falling asleep with her clothes still on, her face still streaked with tears.
There were many funerals that week, and though he was not expected to attend all of them, he felt that it was his responsibility to do so. He’d known about many of the death were coming, after all, long before they’d happened, and he’d thought himself resigned to it. The future that he had steered them toward, he knew, was the brightest and best that he could manage. Nevertheless, faced with the physical reality of the carnage it was built on, Gaul felt part of himself recoil. Therefore, he forced himself to face it, one grieving family after the other; seven days of watching the ground swallow coffins. Margot’s funeral was the most painful by far.
In general, the student’s funerals were more difficult, because he couldn’t help but take it personally. Steve Taylor and Charles Brant nagged at him even though he hadn’t thought much of either boy. But there were many different kinds of unpleasantness for him to experience. Certainly, he had not enjoyed facing the Raleigh’s, who were burying one daughter and dealing with consequences of their other daughter defecting. Knowing that their daughter’s most likely killer was standing across from him, right now, on the other side of Margot’s coffin, in a tasteful black mourning dress, that was a bit hard to swallow. She’d been justified, certainly; but he didn’t think that she’d needed to go as far as killing her. There was no way, of course, for him to confront her openly. The Hegemony would use it as a pretext for war.
And things on that scor
e were very fragile at the moment. A final tally was still being made, but the numerical losses were heavily weighted against the Black Sun, with four cartels defecting on top of significant casualties during the fighting. Their previous dominance was reduced to a rough parity with the wounded Hegemony. The losses the Hegemony had suffered were less severe, but whereas the entire Martynova clan had survived, much of the Hegemony’s leadership had been destroyed in a single attack, and many cartels were in disorder while matters of succession were handled. Still, the balance had shifted, and if the Black Sun’s ascendance was still overwhelmingly likely, it had at least been postponed.
Gaul looked at the faces arrayed around him, and he updated his list. There was always more to do, after all. They had not just lost the dead, after all. There were all sorts of casualties.
Rebecca stood at the head of the coffin, reading poetry that he couldn’t be bothered to identify, looking like she was about to be sick. It wouldn’t have mattered to Margot, anyway, who had no family to mourn her in the first place. Instead, she had a weeping, blue-haired changeling, Anastasia and an honor guard from the Black Sun, and a few members from the staff at the Academy who had raised her. Doubtless, Rebecca was the most grief-stricken of all of them. The empath suffered greatly during the funerals, unable to shield herself from the full weight and gravity of the grief that surrounded her.
Michael sat beside her, looking as somber as Gaul had ever seen him. He was close to the students, and their loss had wounded him more than Gaul would have expected. Part of him took a vindictive and petty satisfaction in it, as Michael’s moral objections to Gaul’s plans from years ago still stung him. However, it was unnerving to see the big, powerful man gritting his teeth as he watched the coffin lower into the uneven ground of the cemetery, out in the rolling hills of the Fringe, underneath the eternal fog at the outskirts of Central. Vladimir watched from a distance, a nurse standing behind his wheelchair. The bandages on his head shone white against the grey sky.
Gaul wondered if the second time Margot had died was any better than the first. He wondered if she would have blamed him; he wondered how much of the blame genuinely belonged to him. He knew he was hardly innocent.
He was surprised to see Alex there. He had been asleep for most of the week, since the attack, attached to an IV in the hospital. It was funny, how mercurial young people could be — the last time Warner had been in a coma, he’d had a rotating cast of visitors at every hour that infirmary staff would permit. This time, he had been left alone, except for the nurses who tended to him. Even Katya had contented herself with mounting a camera in his room so she could monitor him remotely. Now, he noticed, Eerie was being led with great care around Alex by Gerald Windsor, while the boy watched helplessly, obviously desperate to talk to her. Vivik put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, whispering to him, restraining him. Gaul remembered Therese Muir’s funeral, remembered the orders he had signed for the dissolution of the Raleigh cartel, and decided he didn’t feel bad for him at all.
Rebecca, clearly uncomfortable and having trouble walking in heels and a dress, seized Gaul’s arm for support and pulled him along as the funeral broke up.
“You need to try and be subtle,” she warned, pausing for a moment to light a cigarette, and then grabbing his arm again. “Everyone sees you evaluating them, and it makes people nervous.”
“You are right,” Gaul said, surprised at how moody he sounded. “When you were in the hospital, I actually thought that this place might fall apart.”
“That’s almost a compliment. The funny thing is, while I was in the hospital, when I wasn’t fantasizing about murdering Alistair, I was worrying about you falling apart,” Rebecca said, smiling while she led him on a rambling walk through the headstones, away from the new additions and back toward the older, less emotionally loaded graves. “How are you holding up, by the way?”
“I should be asking you that,” Gaul said, the dew from the grass soaking unpleasantly through the legs of his slacks. “But I’m worried, since you asked. The cartels are depleted and in disarray. The Hegemony is trying to decide whether to lick its wounds or to attack the Black Sun now, while they are at their weakest. John Parson is alive, somewhere out in the Ether, he has a supply of nanites that he can use to make living weapons, and one day soon, he will come back here. No one feels safe in Central anymore. And the Auditors have never been weaker…”
Rebecca nodded sympathetically. Gaul could tell from the way she hugged his arm that she had bad news for him, bad news that he had already anticipated, so he braced himself and waited while she stared off at the sun peaking over the sea of fog that surrounded the Academy, working up her courage.
“About that. I know that Margot was your most promising candidate. I heard that Grigori turned down the invitation to join the department as well. Mitsuru isn’t at her most stable; frankly, neither is Alice. But I’m afraid you are going to lose one more Auditor, Gaul.”
Gaul had seen it coming, but it still shook him to hear her say it. He was grateful that she hadn’t mentioned Alistair, because he didn’t want to think about his Chief Auditor, or the way he’d looked, before Parson and the rest of them ported from the underground chamber that held the Source Well. Still, he didn’t like thinking about the Auditors without Rebecca Levy.
It hadn’t been her alone who had turned the tide, of course. Alex had provided the power for the whole operation. Actually, it had been frightening how much power Alex had expended, acting as a catalyst for Rebecca’s abilities, but at the end of it he didn’t seem tired, or even aware of how remarkable what he had done was. Rebecca knew exactly, of course, but she was too modest to say. Privately, though, Gaul knew that she was just as aware as he was that what she had done, with Alex’s help, was perhaps the greatest feat of empathy in recorded history.
Rebecca had broken the lines of communication and control between John Parson and the Anathema in Central, inserting herself into the heart of their network, following the same well-worn paths of manipulation that Parson had provided. She couldn’t take control of his soldiers directly, but she had been able to play on existing fears and frustrations, phobias and weaknesses. In addition, she had freed the Weir and Witches the Anathema held in thrall, who immediately fled or turn on their former masters. By the time Black Sun forces, led by Anastasia Martynova, and Hegemony troops, led by Lord North, had swept into Central, their opposition was largely in the midst of an emotional meltdown. Those that had not been able to flee were cut down ruthlessly. A few prisoners were taken, mostly out of curiosity. The rest had been burned at the barren eastern edge of Central unceremoniously, in the great charnel pit, black with the ash of centuries of bones.
“I assumed as much,” Gaul admitted. “Can I ask why?”
“It was nothing you did,” Rebecca said comfortingly. “But I messed up, Gaul. I missed it all. I missed that they turned Alistair. I didn’t notice the command implants in Alice and Mitsuru. I didn’t even notice that Emily and Therese Muir had become desperate enough to turn to the Anathema. I failed completely, at the part of my job that matters the most to me. And,” she added hesitantly, “I think it was a mistake to try and do both things at once. I should have retired when I took the job at the Academy.”
“I’m not so sure,” Gaul said doubtfully, glancing down at a worn headstone as they passed it, wondering who was under it, and how much rain had to fall on a piece of carved limestone before the words washed away. “But I respect your wishes. I’ve always wondered, though — why did you turn it down, when I offered you the chance to become Chief Auditor? Why did you insist on becoming the school councilor instead?”
Rebecca bit her lip and didn’t answer for a little while. Gaul let it be.
“Mitsuru Aoki,” she said finally, tossing the stub of her cigarette off to the side, oblivious as always to Gaul’s glare. “After she went wrong, I blamed myself. I figured that if I had been there from the very start, paying attention, that I could have made a difference. I
guess that’s why Alex Warner is such a big deal to me — he’s so much like her. I want it to turn out differently for him. If I can get him to trust me again — if I can get all of these kids to trust me — then maybe I can do it. I have to try, Gaul, and I can’t be your Auditor and their friend at the same time. For what it’s worth, I’m really sorry to put you in this position.”
“its fine,” he lied, knowing that she wouldn’t believe him for a second. “You may even be right. Everything may end up depending on this class. We may not have the opportunity to train another, if we can’t succeed with this batch. Speaking of which — any thoughts on the untimely passing’s of Steve Taylor and Charles Brant?”
“None in particular,” Rebecca said unconvincingly. “I suppose they must have been killed in the attack.”
“I thought the same thing at first,” Gaul continued, studying Rebecca minutely. “Then I received the autopsy results. Despite what I had assumed, it seems that the bodies had been there, out in the old PE offices, for at least a day before the attack. Does that strike you as odd?”
“Odd,” Rebecca nodded, agreeing.
“Here’s something even stranger — they were poisoned, both of them, with a toxin that our labs haven’t seen before and can’t identify. Something very quick acting. Something that, judging from the concentrations in the bodies, they touched with their hands shortly before they were overcome. However, as I’m sure you are aware, nothing of the sort was found in the building. There were, however, signs of struggle.”
Rebecca nodded, frowning.
“Observations?”
“It’s a mystery,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “It must have happened during the attack. Didn’t one of Chris Feld’s people have weird necrotic powers? They must have been hit with something that accelerated decomposition.”
“I suppose so,” Gaul agreed slowly. “On an unrelated subject, I understand that Eerie had an accident of some sort, and was admitted to the infirmary briefly? I hope she didn’t come to some sort of harm?”
He made sure that Rebecca understood what he meant by the seriousness of his expression.
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