The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  ***

  “They didn’t invite you to the Black Sun thing, I suppose?”

  Rebecca briefly stopped licking the spoon – which was covered in a glob of cookie dough purloined from the Academy kitchens – and shook her head.

  “Anastasia’s party in China? You know, they actually did. I’m just not going.”

  “What? You lazy bitch!” Alice threw her hands in the air in amazement. “Don’t you have to go?”

  “Nope.”

  “But you’re the Director!”

  “Yeah. I had Mrs. Barrett send flowers, though, so I should be covered.”

  Rebecca reached for the cigarette lighter on the bedside table, holding the cookie dough spoon aloft to avoid messing her comforter. Alice watched the process in amazement, the Director of Central doing her best to stay under the covers.

  “What are you doing? Stop fucking around!” Alice tugged the comforter off Rebecca, to discover her in a faded Bruins t-shirt and underwear. “You’re the damn Director now, Becca!” Alice slapped the lighter from Becca’s hand, sending it flying across the room.

  “Well, that was rude. What’s your problem, Alice?”

  Alice shook her head in disbelief as Rebecca turned her attention back to the cookie dough. Alice sighed, and then slapped the spoon out of her hands and into a pile of dirty clothes on the floor.

  “Hey!” Rebecca rubbed her bloodshot eyes. “I was eating that!”

  “I know!” Alice shouted, stomping around the room, aimlessly throwing clothes into a pile in the corner. “You live like a stoner dropout, Becca. Like a gross teenage boy! What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  Rebecca pulled the covers back over her stubbly legs and shrugged.

  “Dunno. Being me is hard, I guess?”

  “Not doing your job is hard? It sure doesn’t look that way,” Alice groused. “I can’t believe you’re skipping Martynova’s debut! Have they ever invited the Director to one of their internal events before?”

  “Nope. New thing, I guess.”

  “You are a fucking disgrace,” Alice moaned. “Why aren’t you going?”

  “It sounds boring, for one,” Rebecca explained, ticking off reasons on her fingers. “Those Black Sun people creep me out, second. Third, every time I go to China I get blackout drunk and then I’m useless the whole next day…”

  “You could just not drink. Or moderation, maybe?”

  “No way. You clearly don’t know Black Sun parties. Four, I confiscated a bunch of pot brownies last week from some freshmen…”

  “Oh, no! Becca!”

  “…and they were way stronger than I anticipated.”

  “I can’t believe you!”

  “Yeah, well, I figured, better not to go at this point, right? It’s only been a few hours since I ate them, and it’s already pretty crazy.”

  “That’s…you are so bad at your job! Why are you such a terrible Director?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because I didn’t want the job in the first place?” Rebecca squinted at Alice and attempted to look crafty. “Hey, do you want to try and get one of the cooks to make us a pizza? It’s nearly dinner, and I really should eat something.”

  “You are a disaster. How do you get away with acting like this?”

  “You know,” Rebecca said, with a shrug. “Usual way?”

  “Doesn’t anyone ever get pissed at you?”

  “No! Of course not!” Rebecca concentrated for a moment. “There. Now you aren’t pissed either. How about that pizza?”

  Fourteen

  A film of tears and mucus sealed his eyelid shut, and the violence of the opening tore out eyelashes and drew a few sluggish drops of blood from the surrounding tissue. Alex’s right eye snapped open like a pressurized vessel rupturing. His other eye remained stubbornly shut, despite Alex’s best efforts.

  He was confined, his movements restricted. His mouth and throat were terribly dry, a wad of something foreign stuck at the back of his throat and threatening to choke him. He knew little else.

  “Alexander Warner, do control yourself!” Samnang folded her arms. “We don’t have the time…”

  There was nothing but stagnant blood and dumb pain in Alex’s dull brain. He produced something between a growl and a moan in the back of his throat. He made a clumsy fist, and bashed it against the fogged Plexiglas shell that restrained him, to no effect.

  “Alexander, stop! You will further injure yourself.”

  He flailed about in a panic, pounding the egg-shaped cell around him with his forearms. The interior plastic panels popped and cracked, revealing thick sandwiches of pressed circuit boards behind them, but no possibility of escape. The clear shield that separated him from Samnang’s baleful glare was slightly ajar from the chamber itself, but he could not force the hinges open from the inside.

  “Restrain yourself, Alexander! This device was programmed by the Anathema to keep you alive for interrogation, not to heal you. You will only aggravate your injuries if you struggle!”

  Alex remembered the lessons he had received from Rebecca, during their interminable stay on the false beach. He shook out his hands, grimacing at his diminished fingers. Closed his eye and went through a breathing routine.

  Then he put his intact hand on the transparent outer shell. Derived from an advanced acrylic, the material was tough beyond any terrestrial circumstance, resistant to any impact short of a local catastrophe, fireproof and magnetically shielded, garnering no additional brittleness even at subzero temperatures.

  “Consider your actions,” Samnang urged. “If you use your protocol, you simply accelerate the process of falling back into my hands. As soon as you fall back to sleep, Alexander…”

  Alex operated the Absolute Protocol.

  The acrylic shell fogged, then frosted, and then finally turned a milky white opaque. The evolution chamber started to emit an intermittent low moan, punctuated with dramatic pops and rattles. The surrounding atmosphere was cooled to the point of frigidity, liquid oxygen pooling in glistening puddles around the chamber. Condensation sparkled on the synthetic shell of the chamber, as a blanket of tiny ice crystals sprouted atop it. The acrylic blistered and warped, deformed by temperature deferential.

  Alex squirmed about and put his back to the wall of the chamber, his good leg jammed against the acrylic shell, and pushed.

  Nothing happened, aside from the sole of the hospital slipper he wore adhering to the chilled shell. Alex lashed out again at his confinement, striking his injured leg against a restraint, and then howling in pain.

  Emily reformed from a sluggish puddle on the icy floor.

  “I’m sorry to be so late, but that took quite a while!” Emily glanced at the frozen evolution chamber. “Ice is a slow state of being, in more ways than I anticipated.”

  Samnang turned to face her, evidencing no surprise. The Yaojing and the Anathema did not bother with the pretense of breathing the lethally chilled air.

  “Emily Muir of the Anathema. You are not supposed to be here. Why have you returned?”

  “To give Alex something from his girlfriend. I think that perhaps he has become stuck.” Emily pointed at the chamber, from which the occasional muffled scream emerged. “I’ve just joined this club, you see...”

  Three of the characters beneath Samnang’s eyes flickered to brilliant life, and she lunged at Emily like a rubber band snapping. The Yaojing caught Emily by the neck and squeezed her fingers deep into her throat.

  Emily tutted at Samnang and collapsed into a puddle, reforming immediately behind her.

  “You should know better,” Emily chided, cracking her neck. “I felt you poisoning me, incidentally. That’s a nasty biotoxin you dreamed up, Miss Banh. The sort of thing that could survive an Anathema state change, even kill one of us. Not me, not today, though. An accident of nature, I suppose. I don’t mean to be a bother!”

  “How annoying,” Samnang said, shaking milky-white poison from her fingernails. “Count yourself lucky, then. Others of yo
ur kind have fared worse.”

  Emily nodded, glancing at the corpses of the frozen medical and interrogations staff scattered about the room. Those closest had been killed instantly by the operation of the Absolute Protocol. Those at a distance had a bit more time, which they had used to huddle together near the blocked door in a doomed attempt to escape, slowly freezing to death.

  “That’s a good idea, you know, that toxin you generate.” Emily fixed her thumb on one of the scattered drops of poison on a nearby wall, and then put it in her mouth. “All sorts of people might be interested in a trick like that.”

  “I ask you again, Miss Muir. Why have you returned?”

  “Like I said – for Alex.” Emily glanced around at the impossibly cold room. “I think anyone who doesn’t need to breathe will probably be fine, don’t you? It’ll have to be Leigh, then. I’ll tell Prosper to send her direct, instead of popping over himself.”

  Samnang gave her a contemptuous glare.

  “That won’t work,” the Yaojing explained, eyes like twin furnaces. “There is a suppression field over the Spire, as you must know.”

  “Alex wrecked that,” Emily said cheerfully, pinching her lip while she managed simultaneous conversations. “As soon as he kicked the Absolute Protocol into high gear.”

  There was a brief energetic ripple, and then the small space beneath the debris was even more crowded. Leigh Feld ducked beneath the uneven ceiling beside Emily, the vampire’s straw-colored hair in a long ponytail, hands in her pockets. She yawned, displaying her augmented teeth as she tried to pop her ears.

  “Jeez, Leigh!” Emily eyed her mesh-paneled yoga pants and neon-accented trainers. “Did I catch you on the way to the gym?”

  Leigh Feld, true to form, ignored her.

  “What’s this?” Leigh sniffed the frigid air, indifferent to the deadly cold. “You want me to fight the Yaojing, Emily?”

  “No, no!” Emily waved urgently in the other direction. “The evolution chamber. The chamber! Open it up!”

  Leigh sighed in obvious disappointment, and then turned her attention to the forced evolution chamber, rigid and crackling with extreme cold.

  “I wouldn’t do that.” Samnang made no move to stop her. “Circumstances will worsen for everyone, I assure you.”

  Leigh studied the exterior of the chamber briefly, and then extruded a set of bony claws from beneath the nails on her left hand.

  The first swipe shredded the acrylic pod, while the second sent the external shell flying.

  Alex was buried in layers of circuitry and surgical tubing, bloody ends torn free in his struggle. Leigh grimaced at the odor of necrotic flesh and retreated, as Alex thrashed weakly in a bed of IVs and electrodes.

  “Oh, you poor thing,” Emily said quietly, as Alex freed himself. “Poor, poor dear.”

  Alex struggled from the chamber, falling to the ground with a pathetic cry. His legs trembled and swayed as he tried to stand. He was naked and smeared with the contents of a torn catheter, one eye like a grotesque well sunk into his face, hot red lines of infection spreading out from his maimed hand and split leg. Trickles of fresh blood joined the dried stuff caked beneath his eyes and above his upper lip.

  His first step was a failure, his injured leg buckling. Beneath a layer of frozen blood and pus, occasional hints of bone peeked out beneath rotting skin on his leg. Alex struggled up from the icy floor, one hand clamped to the side of his face, only partially concealing the festering hollow housing the withered remains of his left eye. The hand that shielded his wounded eye was notably lacking fingers.

  “You are thinking of revenge.” Samnang cocked her head to study Alex, like an unfamiliar animal at a zoo. “That would be foolish to an extreme.”

  Alex lurched forward and grabbed hold of Samnang with his undiminished hand, snagging her hair just above the temple, his reduced hand taking a rather feeble hold on her wrist. Samnang gave him a look of annoyance, but made no attempt to move.

  “You underestimate me,” Samnang said quietly. “You have no concept of how grievous…Oh.”

  “Alex!” Emily called out, hurrying over with Leigh in tow. “Please stop!”

  Samnang’s arm froze wholly, a layer of ice sheathing her arm from fingertip to wrist, and frost was quickly colonizing the side of her face.

  “This is a mess,” Leigh snapped, blocking Emily’s progress with her arm. “Stay back, Emily.”

  “It’s okay,” Emily assured Leigh, trying to push past her. “Alex would never hurt me.”

  Alex drove Samnang’s half-frozen head into the nearby boulder. Her forehead caved and splintered, ice chips and fragments of frozen bone flying from the point of impact. He snarled and drew his arm back. The second blow left wet red crystal smeared across the metal wall. After the third impact, Alex dropped Samnang, her head deformed into an unrecognizable mess of slushy tissue and pink fluid.

  The Yaojing never even made a noise.

  “Are you sure?” Leigh hesitated. “Because…”

  Alex turned his bleeding eyes to the empath and the vampire. He took a clumsy step in their direction, blood leaking from between his gritted teeth. The Anathema got a good view of what remained of Alex’s left eye, inspiring a pained look from Emily and an expression of disgust from Leigh.

  “I’m sure,” Emily said, with a bob of her head. “Stand aside.”

  Leigh eyed the boy shuffling toward them like a half-frozen sleepwalker, and was unconvinced.

  “I think we should just knock him out real fast, and then have the heartfelt reunion somewhere else.”

  “It’ll be fine, Leigh. Please trust me.”

  The vampire hesitated, watching Alex lurch in their direction, pink liquid welling from his perforated eye and staining his cheek.

  “If you say so.” Leigh took a few grudging steps back, and then folded her arms. “If he even tries to hurt you, though…”

  “That won’t happen,” Emily said, with a beatific smile. “Alex would never hurt me.”

  Leigh looked doubtful. Alex staggered, foaming at the mouth like a rabid dog. Emily smiled gently and extended her hands.

  Alex stumbled forward, seizing Emily roughly by her bare arms.

  Emily wrapped him in a tight embrace. Alex struggled in her arms, back stiffened, but Emily refused to release him. Alex relaxed slowly, soothed by whatever Emily whispered into his ear. He laid his head on Emily’s shoulder, and a choking sob emerged from his throat.

  “Everything is okay now, Alex,” she said soothingly, patting his back. “You’re okay now. I’m here. You’re okay.”

  Alex blubbered and sniffled into Emily’s shoulder, leaving a bloody smear on her skin, while Leigh crouched to examine the frozen wreckage of Samnang.

  “Your boyfriend really did a number on the Yaojing,” Leigh remarked, poking at an icy chunk of brain matter. “That can’t be good.”

  “Alex is my ex.” Emily stroked his overly long hair with fondness. “As you well know. As for the Yaojing, if Marcus is to be believed, then Alex bought us a bit of time, at most.”

  “Typical. Nothing in this fucking place dies properly.” Leigh stood and wiped her hands on the synthetic fabric stretched across her thighs. “Why didn’t you stop him?”

  “I wasn’t expecting Alex to wake up in such a foul mood,” Emily admitted. “The swab I took from you-know-who woke him up, but it didn’t heal him the way I anticipated. I don’t understand why Alistair insisted on only stabilizing Alex before interrogation. It’s sloppy, and so risky! I should have been better prepared.”

  Alex shook his head and wiped blood and snot from his face.

  “Emily?” He blinked hard with his good eye, and made a strained expression. “For real?”

  “Yes, Alex dear,” Emily said, with a broad smile. “I am very for real, and happy to see you.”

  Alex’s mouth opened, but all that came out was a jumble of frightened words and sobs.

  “I know just how you feel.” Emily patted him on the head.
“Psychic torture. I caught the edge of it from outside. Samnang Banh was mucking about with your dreams, right? You were trapped with the Yaojing in some sort of nightmare, right?”

  The light went out of Alex’s eyes like a candle being snuffed. He gave her a fraction of a nod.

  Emily slid quietly into his traumatized brain, all defenses stripped and disassembled, the essential infrastructure of Alex’s mind razed and damaged beyond all recognition. It was like returning to a favorite park to find it clear-cut, and though she concealed her response, Emily was saddened by the wanton destruction. She flooded his thoughts with calm and his brain with endorphins, drowning Alex’s trauma in artificial serenity.

  “Don’t worry about it too much,” Emily advised, squeezing his arm fondly. “You’re safe now.”

  Emily was considering the insertion of a small amount of hope and optimism when a surge of reflexive suspicion nearly drove her from Alex’s emotional mind state.

  “Safe?” Alex released his hold on her and took a self-conscious step away, nearly falling over in the process. “You’re Anathema!”

  “Well, yes, that’s true, but…”

  “So was…”

  “Not really!” Emily protested. “Samnang Banh is an agent of the Church of Sleep. An ally of convenience at best.”

  “Alistair,” Alex said, his face darkening. “Where is he?”

  Leigh glanced about nervously, like invoking his name might invite his presence.

  “Far away, I hope. The real world, I assume. You see…”

  “This is fucked,” Alex said, face dark with furious blood. “You joined them.”

  “It’s a bit more complicated than that, actually…”

  “They killed Margot,” Alex said, numb-tongued and thick-lipped. “Shot her.”

  “Alex, I…”

  “Tortured me,” Alex ranted, eyes wild. “Cut me up!”

  “Now, that’s not fair. I tried to stop that!”

  “How could you, Emily?” Alex demanded hysterically. “Everything’s been wrong, since…”

  “Does your boyfriend always whine like this?” Leigh asked contemptuously. “I’m starting to regret the rescue.”