The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  “Maybe we should take a break,” Vivik suggested, with forced cheer. “Take a minute for everyone to calm down, and then…”

  “Shut the fuck up, Vivik.” Katya didn’t even bother to glance in his direction. “I mean it.”

  He believed her.

  As of sometime earlier that morning, when the ladies started to bicker and snipe, Vivik had come to a grim conclusion – he had agreed to take a long trip with two women who hated each other. Vivik wasn’t prone to despair, but any other reaction seemed hopelessly optimistic.

  He had to consider the possibility that this was a punishment. His sins weighed upon him even more since they left Central. Vivik almost wanted it to be his turn, just to get it over. He had a schedule to keep and obligations fulfill, though, so he kept it to himself.

  Derrida burst from the water and bounded over to them. Katya cried out, but it was too late. The dog shook himself dry, drenching all three of them with the resulting spray. The dog then snuggled in beside Eerie’s leg, grunting cheerfully. The Fey petted him obligingly, seemingly unbothered by his wet coat.

  “Do you want me to finish?”

  Vivik did, in fact, want to hear the rest of Eerie’s story, but was afraid to speak up. He wasn’t sure exactly when he became aware that Katya and Eerie didn’t like each other. It was more of slow realization than a sudden revelation, punctuated by snide remarks and long silences. Their hostility bubbled just beneath the surface of every interaction, but they had started to go at each other in earnest shortly after they started walking this morning. The heat and the bleak salt flats that stretched out to the horizon did nothing to improve their dispositions.

  Finding the creek at the end of the day was a relief, after hours of punishing desert sun. They set up an early camp in the shade of one of the handful of trees, and Vivik went downriver to bathe for the first time in days, leaving the girls to get a fire going. He came back half an hour later, clean and jubilant, to find a roaring fire and equally lively confrontation in process. He suggested that Eerie tell her part of the story to distract them from each other.

  That was apparently a grievous mistake, the ramifications of which were still unclear.

  “Why don’t you let me try?” Katya’s smile was saccharine. “Ana brought you in, on contract, to wipe Alex.”

  “Why Eerie?” Vivik asked, risking life and limb. “The Black Sun has plenty of telepaths.”

  “Sure, but telepathy wouldn’t cut it.” Katya shrugged, apparently unruffled by his interruption. “It wasn’t enough that Alex not remember who he was; we needed everyone to believe that he had died.”

  “You can’t…” Vivik looked closely at the Fey, who had her back to them, facing the river. “Can you do something like that, Eerie?”

  “Back then, I could.” It sounded like an admission of guilt. “As I age, I weaken. I used most of it up fixing Alex.”

  “Making Alex into what you wanted,” Katya corrected sternly. “You didn’t just remove all traces of Alex’s existence. You built something new to replace it, didn’t you?”

  Eerie turned to face Katya, her expression remote.

  “Yes?”

  “Yes.” Katya nodded. “That’s why I got curious. Ana kept me away from Alex for almost a year, you know. Didn’t even tell me he was in Central until right before she called me back to watch over the spoiled brat. I was ready for it to be weird, you know – I was ready for him not to remember me.”

  Vivik was hardly convinced by Katya’s tone, but he kept that to himself.

  “What I wasn’t ready for,” Katya said, her voice sharpening, “was for Alex to be a completely different person.”

  Eerie just stared at Katya and gently petted Derrida’s damp head.

  “Let me tell you about my cousin, Alexei.” Katya used the trunk of the willow tree to stand up, and Vivik grew more anxious. “He was smart, like his sister, and funny. I mean, he was an eleven-year-old boy – he didn’t bath enough, and he was too loud, and he always wanted to tag along whenever Leila and I did anything. That aside, he could make you laugh with his antics, and he was brave enough.”

  No one said anything. Vivik couldn’t imagine what he might have offered. Katya leaned against the tree and folded her arms.

  “Yeah,” Katya said, smiling nostalgically. “Smart like Leila. Secretly ruthless, too.” Katya’s voice went dead. “Just like his sister. The whole Rostov clan were tough as fucking nails – elite Operators within the Black Sun since before the merger with the Triad.”

  Katya stomped over to Eerie, looming over her and glaring furiously, hands on her hips. Derrida whined and nudged Katya’s leg, while Eerie looked up blankly.

  “Alex is a fourth-generation Operator, descended from one of the founders of the Black Sun Cartel. His grandfather oversaw the expansion into the mainland and the absorption of the Han Combine. Alex’s father avenged his own father’s assassination, murdering the successive heads of the Han Combine until the cartel dissolved, and stood against Joseph Martynova for leadership of the Black Sun.”

  Eerie offered nothing in response. Katya’s mouth twisted into a snarl, while Derrida hurried over to the safety of Vivik’s pack, watching worriedly from behind their gear.

  “Kirill Rostov was man enough to take the measure of Ana’s dad and not back down. He was a nice guy, liked to sing opera, but the last man in the world you wanted to mess with. You understand what I’m saying? Alex’s father decided he didn’t have quite what it took to take down the Martynova Cartel, but he was sure that his kids had it in ‘em. Smart money was on his daughter, Leila, but things happened.”

  Vivik tried to match that up to the sleepy, self-centered boy that he knew, and couldn’t make it work. Eerie’s expression never changed.

  “Generations of badassery,” Katya emphasized, leaning close. “That sound like anyone you know? What happened to that Alex?”

  “Anastasia told me to get rid of him,” Eerie explained flatly. “He’s gone forever. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “No!” Katya clenched her fists by her thighs. “That’s not it! He was just supposed to forget. No one said anything about him becoming someone else. You saw the situation, and you took advantage. I want to know why.”

  “You’re wrong,” Eerie said, with a shake of her head. “You don’t understand the deal I made with Anastasia. I did what was asked of me.”

  “Maybe we should let Eerie finish her story,” Vivik suggested quietly, fully expecting to be ignored. “Or maybe take a break and have dinner?”

  He was ignored.

  “What deal? Ana paid you to wipe Alex…”

  “With what?” Eerie asked softly. “How do you think she paid me?”

  “I don’t know,” Katya growled. “Not sure I care.”

  “I told her,” Eerie explained. “When she called me. Anastasia, I mean. She asked what it would take, and I told her what I wanted. She wasn’t happy! Tried to give me something else, but I wasn’t interested.” Her tone grew shrill, while the words came faster. “I told her. Anastasia gave him to me. I didn’t do anything wrong! I told her…”

  “You told her what?” Katya demanded. “What did you tell her?”

  “I wanted someone who wouldn’t break or run away.” Eerie shivered and sank deeper into her hooded sweatshirt. “Rebecca told me that I was dangerous for normal people. Everyone left, or made fun, or took advantage. I fixed that. A lot of other things, too.”

  “Oh God.” Katya covered her mouth. “Tell me you are joking.”

  “Nuh-uh. It’s the truth. I had a long time to work on him, after all.”

  “Wait a minute.” Katya froze in place. “Are you saying you were in contact Alex after he was wiped? You were visiting him, when he was supposed to be hidden from the entire world?”

  “Yes, of course!” Eerie confirmed proudly. “I visited him as often as I could arrange it. It would have been mean to leave him alone.”

  “Eerie!”

  “Anastasia knew
! It was only when he was alone!” Eerie insisted defensively. “Alex never remembered anything. I need to touch him! That’s how my protocol works!”

  “I bet it does,” Katya sneered. “Are you telling me you wanted a sleepy halfwit as a boyfriend?”

  “His protocol isn’t my fault!” Eerie wrung her hands. “I would never have given him something like that. That was the Church of Sleep, I bet, interfering. They are so mean! You wouldn’t believe how mean they are. They wanted me to come back, for the first time, but I don’t want to, no matter what. So, they decided to use Alex to get to me, which isn’t fair, because I worked really hard to make Alex just right!”

  “Just right?” Katya stared at her incuriously. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “You’re being mean because you’re jealous!” Eerie pointed at Katya. “Alex loves me, or he will love me, which is the same thing! He doesn’t even remember you. You are old, and alone, and lonely, and that is why…”

  “The Horrors,” Katya said, taking a step forward. “You never explained. What was all that?”

  “Obstacles, put in the way of any who might seek the Outer Dark,” Eerie said. “They would have stopped us, so I had to arrange it so that we never met them.”

  “But we did meet them!” Katya cried out. “Or, you did, at any rate.”

  “Not really,” Eerie said. “Not anymore.”

  “What does that mean? What did you do to the Horrors, anyway?”

  “Nothing! Well, a little something. I moved them. To where they should have been. Where they already were. Where they are now…”

  “You are really pushing it,” Katya said quietly, practically leaning her forehead on Eerie’s brow. “If I decide that you are a threat to Alex’s wellbeing, I will kill you, Eerie. I will fill your brain full of needles and leave you to be eaten by whatever the fuck kind of buzzards this sandy hell offers. I’ll tell Alex you fell into a pit or something, and you know what? He’ll be bummed out. He’ll cry about it for a couple of months, because he’s a melodramatic kid. And then he’ll get over you.”

  “No.” Eerie shook her head sadly. “He’ll die.”

  “What?”

  “He will die.” Eerie shrugged, as if it were a tragic inevitability. “If we don’t find him pretty soon, Alex will die for sure.”

  “Why is that, exactly?”

  “What?”

  Vivik thought Katya would hit her. Instead she threw her hands into the air in frustration.

  “What the fuck do you think? Why would Alex die if we don’t find him in a month? It’s been weeks already.”

  “Exactly. There are enough of my cells in his system to last about a hundred days, give or take. His system will purge them eventually, though, and then…”

  Eerie looked away.

  Katya seized her by the chin, and forced Eerie to meet her eyes.

  “Why?”

  “My whole body is a drug,” Eerie said, with a defiant shrug. “Alex is an addict. It’s so not my fault.”

  ***

  He is not meant to be in solitary. Alex has done nothing to merit it; worse, even the staff would agree. It is an administrative mix-up, a legal confusion that they are hurrying to correct, he was assured, when he was first transferred. H has since languished in a cell the size of a bathroom; sleeping on a thin mattress on a concrete shelf, using crude plumbing that frequently backed up, and eating three bland meals a day.

  There are no visitors, or he is denied the privilege – this is never made clear. Every other day, he is escorted to an enormous shower room, where he showers alone and quickly. Once a week, he is taken to a courtyard with a pull-up bar and just enough space to pace in the sun, and given a few hours to exercise.

  Sleep has become irregular beneath the perpetual glare of the fluorescent lights, which are dimmed for eight hours, but never turned off. He speaks aloud or hums occasionally, to remind himself that he has a voice and the gift of language. He cannot remember when he last heard a human voice, except for the commands and announcements that crackle from the overhead speaker.

  The isolation and the lack of sleep eat away at him. The lights buzz and his back aches and water drips from the back of the toilet into a small puddle, and the time will not pass. Nothing changes.

  He closes his eyes and keeps them that way until he can no longer stand it.

  When he opens them again, hours or minutes or days later, nothing has changed. Beneath the stark lighting, Alex has the pallor of a ghost, of the corpse that he has begun to suspect he has already become.

  There is nothing to miss – no more home, no more family. There is no future ahead of him, but he is filled with dread nonetheless.

  The only thing he possesses is time, each moment exactly as the last. He is unsure when he arrived, or how long he has been in this cell, but his conviction that he will never leave it grows with the agonizing march of seconds. The puddle behind his toilet never seems to grow, despite the steady drip. The lights flicker occasionally, but never die. His meals arrive on trays, pushed through a slot by a hand he never sees. Perhaps he tries to say something – a greeting? A cry for attention? – but he is not certain. In any case, there is no answer.

  The time will not pass.

  Alex stares at the lights until his eyes hurt, holds himself on the tips of his fingers and toes until he falls to the cement floor of his cell. He paces the tiny space between his cell door and the toilet in three shuffling steps, counts until he loses track of the numbers. He closes his eyes, shut tight, and remains like that, face down on the mattress.

  He exhales, rolls over, and then cries out and recoils, pitiful as an injured puppy.

  Perhaps he falls asleep. He gradually comes to the awareness that he is no longer alone.

  A girl is perched at the edge of the concrete sleeping platform, knees together, looking nervous and claustrophobic. He breaths in, and there is a hint of spice in the air, and it makes him want to weep, the change is so beautiful. She watches him curiously, but without any evident fear in her saturated eyes. He attempts to speak, and the words emerge in a hesitant jumble, misshapen products of the rusty machinery of his linguistic center.

  She is patient, waiting silently for him to collect himself. This does not come as a surprise.

  “Did you miss me, yet? Are you happy to see me? I can’t wait for that part.”

  “Who are you?”

  It is the wrong question, and he knows that before he finishes the sentence. She shakes her head and he is entranced by the movement of her blonde hair, the fragrance of sandalwood she emits. He is so desperate to talk to her that the words are crowded out of his mind.

  “My name is too hard for you to say, and you always forget it, anyway,” she explains softly, golden fireworks in the black sea of her pupils. “You like to call me Eerie.”

  ***

  Vivik took a cautious step forward, his hands open and visible, his voice pitched low and soothing.

  “Why don’t we just calm down, ladies?”

  Katya ignored him and continued to shake Eerie. She had grabbed the Fey by her oversized hoodie and had her pressed up against a tree trunk, subjecting the Changeling to frequent rattling.

  “How many times?”

  “Put me down!”

  “Fuck you!” Katya shook Eerie like she expected prizes to fall out. “How many times did you visit him?”

  A slow smile crawled across Eerie’s face, and Vivik knew that things were about to get a lot worse.

  “Whenever I felt lonely,” Eerie said, with bright-eyed conviction. “Are you jealous?”

  Katya’s eyes blazed.

  “Why the fuck would I be jealous? You broke the deal you made with the Black Sun, Eerie. Alex was supposed to disappear.”

  “Nuh-uh! Anastasia knew. Now put me…”

  Katya sneered, and Eerie tumbled from her hands, landing with a thud on her backside.

  “Ouch! You dropped me!”

  “You told me to,” Katya growled,
pacing like a tiger confined to a cage. “You keep saying Ana knew. Why should I believe you?”

  “I don’t know,” Eerie said, perplexed. “It would make things easier?”

  “Don’t play dumb. What sort of deal are you claiming Ana made?”

  “Anastasia knew about my project,” Eerie said, rubbing her lower back resentfully. “She agreed to my terms. Why did you think I was helping the Black Sun?”

  “Project? You mean Alex? Anyway, I have no idea why you got involved! I figured money, or favors, or something.”

  “I was twelve, Katya.”

  “I said I didn’t know!”

  “I’ve never wanted much of anything,” Eerie said. “Anastasia told me that she doesn’t like to work with me, because I’m hard to pay.”

  “She mentioned that to me, too,” Katya admitted reluctantly. “What kind of project were you working on?”

  Katya’s tone was dubious. To Vivik’s surprise, Eerie’s cheeks evidenced the slightest blush, her eyes floating aimlessly.

  “Oh, you know. Personal stuff. Private stuff.”

  Vivik opened his mouth, but some measure of self-preservation kicked in, and he shut it without saying a word.

  “No way.” Katya approached the Fey with renewed menace. “It’s not your private business anymore, not if Alex is involved. He’s my cousin, and this whole thing is my responsibility.”

  “Big deal,” Eerie scoffed. “He’s my boyfriend. That trumps cousin.”

  “You think that’s still the case, after all this shit?” Katya eyed the Fey in a manner that disquieted Vivik. “We’ll see. What did Ana give you, in return for your help?”

  “Not telling.” Eerie stuck her tongue out at Katya. “Ask her yourself.”

  Vivik braced for the worst.

  When the worst did not arrive, he decided instead to be daring.

  “Eerie, that’s not fair,” he reminded, with an apologetic smile. “We promised to share with each other.”

  “Easy for you to say!” Eerie did not break away from her staring contest with Katya. “You don’t have any bad secrets, Vivik.”