The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

“You mean in the field, right?” Rebecca shook her head. “Don’t answer that.”

  “Both.”

  “I said…”

  “I heard you.”

  “Great.” Rebecca sighed, and lit her cigarette with a frustratingly undersized Bic. “What about the kids? How are they holding up?”

  “Good, all things considered. Losing Alex wasn’t much of a blow, but Katya running after him…”

  “I don’t want to talk about that.” Rebecca’s voice took on a slight tone of authority. “The remainder, please.”

  “Hayley seems a bit distracted, and her loyalties are anybody’s guess, but she’s surprisingly capable. Seems to find a new way to use her protocol every week,” Alice said, her demeanor impatient and disinterested. “Min-jun is a fuckin’ rock. If I had a dozen Auditors with his disposition, maybe I could actually get something done…”

  “I’m working on it,” Rebecca said earnestly. “I hope to find you more help shortly. The current class at the Academy has a few interesting prospects. What about the newer recruits?”

  “Hmm? Oh, you mean Chike?” Alice shrugged. “He’s good. Too nice to be an Auditor, if you ask me, so I try and keep him out of the line of fire. No complaints, though – he follows orders, makes good decisions, and his apport range is staggering, if a bit limited by that point-to-point restriction.”

  “You still think you need a second apport technician?”

  “Fuck yes. I’m not a damn moving service. Still think you need to ask me a bunch of stupid questions?”

  Rebecca sighed, pulling the trash can over so she would have a place to flick her ash.

  “Fine. What about Karim? His history still gives me pause…”

  “I don’t know why. He has a history of shooting people. That’s what we recruited him to do.” Alice made a face at Rebecca. “What exactly is the problem?”

  “He was a contractor, a mercenary. I’m not sure how much trust we can place in him.”

  “Alistair betrayed us, and he was the Chief Auditor for years,” Alice said, with a sneer. “I don’t think tenure is a guarantee of loyalty.”

  “True. You trust Karim, then?”

  “I understand him,” Alice snapped. “Better than you, anyway. Talk to him yourself. You’ll see that you have nothing to worry about.”

  “Okay. I will.” Rebecca sighed, and then tossed the burning end of her cigarette out the open office window. “What about Xia?”

  “Mouthy,” Alice said, with a wry grin. “Always talkin’ my ear off.”

  They both laughed harder than the joke merited.

  ***

  Michael was easy to find. Though his duties as an Auditor were consuming, he always found time for the gym, even after she was forced to officially forbid him from leading his beloved P.E. courses. He was fond of the main gym at the Academy, despite the excellent facilities available to Auditors at the Far Shores – and the time he found just so happened to be the open gym session favored by his former pupils.

  Rebecca thought it was the cutest act of official defiance she had encountered, and overlooked it.

  Michael’s eyes widened in surprise when he saw Rebecca enter the gym, wearing an Adidas workout top and yoga pants that had lived in a drawer for nearly two years, since Mitsuru gave them to her as birthday present. The synthetic fabric was weirdly soft and far tighter than she was used too, and she felt periodically compelled to tug her shirt down over her backside.

  The Director ground her teeth while she walked over to the free-weight area. There was a flurry of animated whispering as the students and faculty became aware of Rebecca’s presence. This was followed by a surprisingly rapid exodus of the facilities for safer environs. The nearby spin class was flooded with late participants, while many other gym goers decided that the track or the pool were better options for their pre-lunch workout.

  That was the good and the bad of being the Director in a nutshell. Rebecca sighed to herself as she stepped on to the thick pads that protected the floor from the impact of the weights, wondering how soon she could credibly retire.

  “Director! I wasn’t expecting you here.” Michael grinned and set aside the squat bar he had been preparing, which to Rebecca’s eyes appeared comically laden with weights. “Decided to burn off a little excess tension?”

  “Exactly.” Rebecca did her best to smile through the lie, extending the tendrils of her empathic protocol with only a twinge of reluctance. “You know how much I like a good workout.”

  Michael laughed pleasantly. Rebecca held a secret affection for Michael; his cheery personality had the side effect of empathically buoying her own mood. For Rebecca, his relentless optimism truly was infectious.

  “Well, maybe I can help you out,” Michael suggested. “Want me to spot you for a few reps?”

  Rebecca cast about the room.

  “What about the stationary bikes? Are the bikes for wimps or something? Do you even do the bikes?”

  “Calm down, Becca,” Michael said, patting her gently on the shoulder, concerned that she might break under pressure. “Everybody does cardio. If I’m paying attention, anyway. Come on – let’s go for a little ride.”

  Rebecca followed him across the room with the enthusiasm of a patient on their way to a root canal. The stationary bikes were thick and white, and resembled a bicycle only in the most general sense. Michael made his machine look small and vaguely ridiculous, while Rebecca needed two tries to get her leg over the bike beside him. Her empathic protocol, fueled by her burning embarrassment, forced the stragglers who remained from the room, consumed by a frantic desire to be anywhere else.

  “What kind of ride did you want to do?” Michael asked, powering up the touch screen that controlled the machine and scrolling through options. “How long do you want to go?”

  She was a drowning woman, casting about for rescue.

  “I think mine is broken,” Rebecca said hopefully, jabbing at the unresponsive touchpad. “Nothing is happening.”

  Michael leaned over and tapped the power stud on her display, treating her to the smile that caused so many students – and faculty – at the Academy to crush on him.

  “Fixed it.”

  Rebecca frowned, and nudged him, tampering with a mixture of empathy and light telepathy.

  “No.” She shut the screen off again. “It’s definitely broken.”

  Michael leaned over again, but instead of hitting the power button, he just tapped at the dormant touchscreen, seemingly puzzled by its failure to respond.

  “Okay,” he said, with a shake of his head, dreadlocks barely held in check by a trio of beige rubber bands. “Well, we could just move over to other machines…”

  Rebecca grimaced and focused a bit harder.

  “Nope. All broken.”

  Michael looked up and down the row of a dozen stationary bikes, surprised and appalled.

  “You must be kidding!”

  “’Fraid not. See for yourself.”

  She let him check a couple machines, before slipping the suggestion that he had already checked them all into his mind. Rebecca felt a little guilty manipulating her friend, but it was a hell of a lot easier to live with being deceitful than it was to exercise.

  “Why don’t you go ahead and ride?” Rebecca suggested helpfully, climbing down from her perfectly functional stationary bike. “I’ll just hang out. I had some stuff I wanted to ask you about, anyway.”

  Michael looked confused for a moment, then she nudged him again, and he nodded and smiled. She didn’t need to make him get on the bike and start riding – he did that of his own accord – which was good, because she didn’t have the heart to force it.

  “I thought as much.” Michael pedaled casually while he set resistance. “What’s the issue, Director?”

  “No issue,” Rebecca hedged. “Just wondering how you were doing.”

  Michael laughed, standing up on the pedals for leverage on the simulated uphill.

  “That’s an odd thing to
bring you down to the gym. When was the last time I saw you down here, ‘Becca? Didn’t you make a New Year’s resolution to work out at least once a week…?”

  Rebecca lacked the telepathy to gracefully remove the memory from his mind, so she settled for making him lose interest in the subject. She smirked, Michael laughed, and that was that.

  “Back to business!” Rebecca watched the display sketch out the severity of the simulated hills Michael faced with a sympathetic wince. “I wanted to check in, see how the Auditor thing was going.”

  As Rebecca spoke, she gently probed Michael’s psyche, searching out pain, worry, and jealousy, and then smoothing out that negativity. No matter how honest, after all, his words would not tell her the truth of what she needed to know. It was likely that Michael did not know himself.

  If she had the option, Rebecca would have expelled Michael from the Auditors and returned him to teaching.

  He was an Auditor for all the wrong reasons. Protecting his former students from the Academy, for example…or out of love for the Chief Auditor. It was a recipe for disaster, and infuriatingly condescending to boot. Mercenaries and psychopaths Rebecca could work with, but Michael’s motivations confounded her. Compounding the issue, Michael was an inherently gentle personality, forced to subvert that side of himself to work in the field. His work was good, but it came at a steep personal cost that Rebecca would have preferred he not pay.

  Of course, she did not have any such option. If anything, Rebecca needed more Auditors.

  “Fine, I think.” Michael was only slightly short of breath. “So far, so good.”

  “You feel…you know…comfortable?”

  He laughed and gave her a look.

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. Do you sleep at night? Does the work bother you?”

  “I sleep okay.” Michael was lying, but that was just as good, as far as Rebecca was concerned. “The work…can get to me on occasion.” Michael frowned, contemplating some misery that Rebecca left private. “Then I remember what happened when the Anathema came to Central. I remember what Alistair did. That makes it easier.”

  “Sure. Revenge can help you cope for a while. Tends to burn out faster than guilt, though.”

  The display mounted to the stationary bike finally showed level ground instead of the seemingly endless incline that Michael had selected. When he settled back in the seat and dialed back his efforts, Rebecca detected a fleeting sensation of disappointment in Michael, and was befuddled by it.

  “I’m fine, Rebecca. If I wasn’t, I would come to you.” That, fortunately, was the truth. The rest of Central might regard her with suspicion, but Michael trusted her with only limited and understandable reservations. That responsibility weighed on her. “Is that really all you came to talk about?”

  “No. What do you think about the rest of them?”

  “The Auditors?”

  “Yeah. Who else?”

  Michael grunted and shook his head.

  “That’s not my business. Ask Alice, okay?”

  “Fine.” Rebecca’s finger’s twitched, and she battled the desire for a cigarette. “Something more in your field, then. What about the kids? Haley and Min-jun. How are they doing?”

  She could not read his expression, but empathy filled in that blank. Michael felt a poignant mixture of pride and sadness.

  “Fish in water.” His smile was rueful. “Exactly as we made them.”

  ***

  He knocked so softly that she nearly missed it, dozing in her chair, her shoes kicked off and her feet up on the desk. His emotional presence was only a little more obvious than his arrival, despite her empathetic awareness.

  That was normal, where Xia was concerned.

  “Come in! It’s open.”

  He handled the doorknob gingerly, despite the latex gloves. His goggles were treated with an iridescent reflective coating, so she saw herself, shaded purple, when she looked in his eyes. A filter mask was tied around the lower half of his face, the skin between the goggles and the mask coated with a shiny layer of antibiotic gel. His hair was neatly combed and trimmed short, but dry and dull, a side effect of the harsh shampoos he subjected it to twice daily. He wore surgical scrubs over a base layer, which was expedient, because then he only needed to burn those at the end of the day.

  Rebecca yawned and waved him in. Xia walked to the center of the room, the furthest point from contact with any object in the office, and then stood uneasily. From experience, she knew better than to offer him a chair or her hand.

  “Hey, Xia. Sorry about that.” Rebecca sat up and rubbed her eyes. “It’s been a long day already, and yes, I know it’s just barely the afternoon. How’s business?”

  His term for it, according to Alice – “business”. What he called the work.

  Xia had been an Auditor for nearly ten years. He was recruited directly by Alice Gallow, after she discovered him in a clandestine laboratory affiliated with an Audited and expunged renegade cartel. He had not attended the Academy or received training in Central, before joining the Auditors. He was an unclassified pyrokine, and his protocol was assumed to be Black.

  That was somehow the total contents of the files Rebecca had located thus far on Xia. The rest was probably lost in one of mad Alice’s diaries, but Rebecca didn’t feel like digging through her best friend’s lost memories right then.

  Xia nodded politely, and waited. The patience she felt radiating had such confident depth that Rebecca was certain Xia would have stood there all day, in silence, without complaint or question, aside from a gradually increasing need to bathe.

  “Good. How’s the new crew? Are they gonna make it?”

  Xia narrowed his eyes thoughtfully, and then nodded again.

  She got to the meat of it.

  “What about Alice? How’s she holding up?”

  A moment of uncertainty. A strange and, to Rebecca, exhilarating, second-hand vulnerability. A perfect and convoluted morass of emotion, a conflicted masterpiece she could only admire and pity. The human heart, she mused, and its glorious and pained complexity. There were no words for such matters.

  Then the rush of feeling receded behind the wall of Xia’s reserve and loyalty, steely and resolute.

  Xia nodded.

  “Okay, then.” Rebecca yawned, only remembering to cover her mouth when she felt Xia’s restrained horror. “We’re good.”

  A final nod, and he turned to go. She waited until he had the door open.

  “Xia.”

  He paused, but did not turn around.

  “Look after her for me, okay?”

  He nodded, before departing as quietly as he had come, leaving behind a faint antiseptic odor.

  ***

  One advantage of being the Director: she hardly had to wait for a requested apport. The Network showed Chike Okoro as the Auditor on call, so she had them send her to the Far Shores.

  She found him twenty minutes later, on a bench not far from a score of employees and researchers, all earnestly mimicking the slow movements of their elderly Tai Chi instructor. The instructor was deliberate and graceful, and Rebecca found herself captivated by the display, and the peaceful unity of purpose the group radiated. She was eventually distracted by a beacon of nearby mirth. Chike Okoro watched from a nearby bench, an open book sitting in his lap, laughing at her reaction. She smiled and went to join him.

  Chike closed his book and patted the empty bench beside him. Rebecca sat beside the rangy African, high cheekbones marked by childhood pox, deep brown eyes warm and impish. There was no need to look at the book cover to know he had been reading something Christian, likely in one archaic language or another. Chike was fluent in five languages, including ancient varietals of Greek and Hebrew, and enjoyed talking about Jesus in all of them.

  “Director!” Chike smiled in greeting. “A pleasure to see you here.”

  “Hi, Chike,” Rebecca said, patting his broad hand. “Not joining the fun?”

  “Not
my cup of tea,” Chike said. “I was here first, actually, reading peacefully…”

  “…when a hoard of Tai Chi practitioners descended?”

  Chike’s smile was wide and endearing. Rebecca was secretly jealous of the excellence of his teeth, which were brilliantly white and perfectly aligned; much better than her own, despite years of braces and bleaching.

  “That is about how it happened, actually.”

  “Come on. This has to be a scheduled class, right?”

  “Oh, I’m sure.” Chike laughed. “I spend much of my down time here, when I’m on call. There is so little of the Far Shores that is green, after all.”

  Chike nodded at the uniform yard of Kentucky bluegrass that occupied most the commons, the air around them fragrant with the smell of a recent cutting, the sharp odor of chlorophyll. The poor soil and arid conditions at the Fringe prevented any extensive planting, though they were experimenting with trees on the surrounding hills to serve as a windbreak, along with a variety of drought-tolerant scrubs and succulents sourced in Arizona and Southern California. The landscaping crew gave it their best effort, but the Far Shores campus had been expanded in such haste that little thought had been given to aesthetics, so they had little with which to work.

  “I can see why it’s popular.” It was, clearly. On the other side of the green, a group of support staff were kicking around a soccer ball, while a vet tech threw a Frisbee for one of Haley’s dogs. “Nice day.”

  It was, for whatever that meant at the Far Shores. The Fringe was the last inhabitable piece of land at the boundary of Central, alongside the limitless sea of Ether, and therefore well below the eternal cloud cover that smothered Central. The area was known for high winds and dreary, damp conditions, but the clouds were bright this afternoon, and only a little cooler than conditions at the Academy.

  “It is pleasant enough, though I would prefer to be elsewhere,” Chike said. As always, he was honest to a fault. “The Far Shores is not particularly hospitable. I prefer conditions at the Academy.”

  “I get you.” Rebecca nodded sympathetically. “I think we all prefer it. But the Auditors need infrastructure and support staff, and only the Academy or the Far Shores have the capacity to host all that. I know it kinda sucks out here, but you must realize why the Auditors can’t be near the kids…”