The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4)

by Zachary Rawlins

  Alistair’s grip on her throat tightened, and the edges of her vision dimmed.

  Katya picked a spot two centimeters behind Alistair’s eyes and hoped that it was important, apporting a few ounces of chilly cistern water into his brain.

  The Anathema’s grip slackened. Katya smashed her elbow into his forearm, breaking the hold, as her vision continued to dim. In a confused panic, Katya tried to find the surface of the water, which should have been just overhead, and failed, splashing about in vain.

  She reached for the air and her fingers smashed into the stone bottom of the cistern.

  Katya’s lungs convulsed in horror, her mouth opening unbidden and her throat filling with water.

  Eerie grabbed Katya by her shoulder and hair, and pulled her out of the water, struggling to push her over the lip of the cistern. Katya did her best to help, unable to make her limbs move to draw breath.

  The Changeling rolled her out of the cistern, and then hurried over to Katya’s side, shouting and shaking her in a vain attempt at revival. Ashen and frantic, the Changeling put her index finger into her mouth, swirled it about for a moment, and then shoved the moist digit between Katya’s lips.

  Katya did not mind as much as she expected to, because she was certain that she was dying. She resented the Changeling’s unsanitary intervention into her death, but that was about it.

  Her chest heaved a moment later, and then Katya rolled to her side and vomited out a great deal of water, the Changeling pounding unhelpfully on her back. Katya pushed her away and curled into a ball, laying on the stone until her head stopped pounding. Eerie wrapped herself in her discarded jacket as Katya pushed herself slowly up from the rock. She glanced at Eerie, and then shook her head.

  “Was that…?” Katya’s voice failed her. “Was that poison?”

  “Was what?”

  “Did you poison the water? Was that what took out Alistair? I think I got a little taste of it, myself.”

  Eerie wrapped her jacket tighter around her dripping torso.

  “I didn’t mean to,” Eerie whispered. “I didn’t even try! It’s…just a thing my body does, when…”

  “Eerie…”

  “That was scary! I can’t help it, if…if something happened!”

  “I get it,” Katya said urgently. “I’m not mad. I’m proud of you. I need to know what you did, though, and more importantly, how long it will last.”

  “He’s dead,” Eerie said, looking away. “What do you mean how long…?”

  “I don’t think you can poison or drown one of the Anathema. They die on purpose, you know?”

  Katya began stripping off her wet outer layer, laying out on the rocks.

  “Katya?” Eerie gave her a blank look. “What are you…?”

  “Hush now,” Katya said, grimacing as she waded into the pool in her underwear, moving alongside Alistair’s floating body. “I’m working.”

  It took a few minutes and a tremendous amount of effort for Katya to pull Alistair to the rocks that lined the cistern. Rolling him up over the rocks took another couple of minutes, and Katya cut the sole of her foot open in the process. Eerie sobbed over Derrida’s waterlogged body, while Katya ignored the blood swirling around in the cold water of the cistern, one shoulder wedged beneath the center of Alistair’s back, forcing the weight up and over, feet slipping on the cistern ledge.

  With one final shove, Katya managed to get him on to the rock, face up and motionless, to her evident satisfaction. Katya turned away and hunted along the shore of the quarry.

  “Katya? What are you…?”

  “Hush.”

  She paused a few meters away from Alistair and bent over. She prized a rock the size and shape of a watermelon out of the pile by the water, arms straining and knees bent with effort.

  Katya lifted the rock over her head, back wavering and arms shaking violently. Then she stepped aside, allowing gravity to do the work, the stone landing on Alistair’s head with the sound of a well-hit softball. Her struggle to bring the rock up the second time was greater, and the impact was wetter, pink matter splattering Katya’s arms and face. The third lift was truly precarious, the blood-slick stone nearly slipping from Katya’s hands before she could drop it on Alistair’s deformed skull.

  Katya exhaled, spat on the mess, and then went to clean her hands in the cistern.

  “Are you okay, Eerie?” Katya picked up discarded clothing and handed it to the shivering Changeling. “Did he hurt you?”

  Eerie nodded, indicating her bleeding forehead and mangled arm.

  “No,” Katya said, blinking in disbelief. “I mean…do you know what I mean?”

  Eerie shook her head slowly.

  “Thank God for that,” Katya muttered, wiping her face clean. “Hurry up and get dressed. Alistair probably won’t stay dead, and I don’t want to be here when he puts himself back together.”

  “O-oh,” Eerie stammered. “Is that normal?”

  “Here it is. I guess.”

  They were just finished collecting their gear when Katya heard the footsteps. She grabbed a handful of needles, not letting the pain show when one sunk deep into the palm of her hand, and spun around to confront the interloper.

  “My dear,” Lord Thule murmured, regarding the scene with obvious regret. “This is all rather dreadful.”

  Twenty-Three

  Nero started to move the moment that Renton’s sunglasses splintered against the basement floor. He charged at the soldier to Lóa’s left, arms pumping like a sprinter. Renton felt Nero’s protocol all around him, a charged sensation singing through his body, like everything in the room was saturated with static electricity.

  The bottles and glassware shattered, spilling a wave of booze across the back of the bar. The interior walls tore themselves to pieces, slivers of concrete shaking loose from water-damaged areas. Renton ducked his head in time to avoid a barstool that ripped itself free of its mooring bolts and went sailing across the room. It was followed by serving utensils, shards of glass, long splinters of wood from the disintegrating bar, sections of pipe, and a cloud of grit and stinging dust. Nero was a wideband telekinetic, capable of gross manipulation, and his protocol weaponized everything in the room.

  The Thule soldiers scrambled for cover as one of the tables went flipping across the room, slamming into the wall above their heads with terrific force, splinters of wood joining the raging telekinetic chaos. A fragment of cinderblock drew blood from the back of Renton’s hand, while one of Lóa’s soldiers came out of cover only to find herself impaled by a ragged two-by-four, entering below her lifted right arm and then protruding out of her neck, while another knocked her to the ground to bleed out.

  Lóa seemed to sit calmly through it all, unperturbed by the debris whipping wildly about her.

  Renton drew his gun and activated his protocol.

  Nero dragged the Hegemony soldier from out of cover, knocking the gun from his hand, flying stone and glass battering and shredding him in Nero’s grip.

  The table where Lóa had sat a moment before was empty. Renton spun and extended his telepathic net, trying to locate the Thule assassin before…

  There was a slight buzz in his telepathic awareness, like the fan on an old refrigerator. The blade felt wet and foreign entering his side, but not painful. Renton gasped as coldness radiated out from the point of impact, Lóa’s breath hot on the back of his neck.

  “Too slow,” she chided. “Try again?”

  Renton closed his eyes and spun around, snapping off shots from his Ruger, trusting in his telepathy to send the bullets home. Lóa’s telepathic image was like a graphical glitch in a videogame, flitting across his awareness in a transitory, abrupt procession of ghostly afterimages. Even as he emptied the magazine, Renton knew he was firing at a memory, the lingering awareness of where Lóa was just a moment before.

  A sound like the near passage of an insect, and then this time her blade found his forearm, numbing his hand and sending his Ruger tumbling to the gr
ound. Renton saw the blur of her passage and lunged, his fingers brushing the fur hem of the hood of her jacket, but closing on nothing. She left the knife in his arm, tanto blade running straight through the meat.

  Renton telepathically numbed his arm, and then tore the blade out and tossed it aside, mind racing.

  There was something.

  A sound that was not a sound, but rather interference in his telepathically augmented perception. Lóa cut him again, the new knife small and sharp, cutting neatly across the small of his back as he pivoted and counterstruck, again too slow. This time, Renton paid attention to the distortion, the grating telepathic whine that accompanied Lóa’s proximity.

  It all clicked. The strange telepathic buzz, the reports he had read out of the Hegemony conference…

  Lóa Thule’s protocol interfered with nearby telepathy.

  Renton pulled the Beretta from his ankle holster and charged it.

  ***

  “We need to talk.”

  Alice paused briefly to glance at him, knife in hand, intent on cutting a damaged panel from the tight bulletproof rig that protected her abdomen, wrapped in one towel and sitting on another, her lips pressed together and colorless.

  “Can we not?” She sighed heavily. “We deploy in like three hours…”

  “That’s why we need to talk,” Michael repeated gently, still wet from the shower and very casually naked. “It won’t take long.”

  Alice muttered under her breath as she tossed the armor to the side, not far from where clothing and tactical webbing spilled out from her locker in a nightmarish tangle.

  “Okay, Mikey,” Alice said. “Let’s hear it.”

  Michael sat down on the bench across from her, in front of his own neat and organized locker, and then put a hand on her bare knee.

  “The kids,” Michael explained. “We need to go after them.”

  “What? This isn’t…I assumed that this would be…about us.”

  “No.”

  “But…”

  “I’m not asking any uncomfortable questions,” Michael said firmly. “Not yet, anyway.”

  Alice stared at Michael, the corner of her mouth twitching.

  “The kids? You mean Alex and Katya? What the fuck, Mikey? Katya bailed on us, and you know the deal with Alex…”

  “I know.” He nodded. “We can’t leave him, or her, though. Not in the Outer Dark. They are Auditors, Alice.”

  “They aren’t!” Alice pushed his hand away and stood, peeling off the towel she wore and wrapping it around her hair. “They were being evaluated for Audits. They both failed.”

  “Alex didn’t fail,” Michael reminded her. “He took on Alistair singlehanded.”

  “And lost.”

  “And lost.”

  Alice grumbled to herself as she pulled an Emperor t-shirt on.

  “Look, Mikey, I get that you feel bad…”

  “We can’t leave them, Alice,” Michael repeated. “That’s not an option.”

  “Don’t get all sentimental with me, okay? What do you want? A raid on the Outer Dark? You know we can’t do that shit.”

  “This has nothing to do with sentiment. It’s a question of morale,” Michael assured her. “The new Auditors have no confidence in us, or in the institution. We can’t leave people behind, Alice.”

  “Dammit, Mikey! You know very well we didn’t leave anyone…”

  “Same thing,” Michael insisted calmly, “as far as the new kids are concerned. The same goes for Alex and Katya.”

  Alice threw her hands into the air in exasperation.

  “That’s all great,” she groused, “but what the hell are we supposed to do about it? We don’t have a clue where Alex or Katya are…”

  “Ah, well. That’s not entirely true,” Michael admitted. “I just discovered as much.”

  “What?” Alice looked stunned. “What the hell is going on?”

  “It turns out that Eerie, Katya, and Vivik hatched a scheme to rescue Alex,” Michael said, with a small smile on his face that could have been – in other circumstances – interpreted as proud. “Hayley had a hand in it, too. She sent one of her dogs along with them, and has been keeping track...”

  “The fuck?” Alice dropped the towel she had been using to dry her hair. “She did?”

  “…in secret, yes. I just…”

  “How?”

  “She sent Derrida, one of her dogs, along with…”

  “Not that, dummy. How did you find out?”

  “Oh. Hayley told me.”

  “What? Why?”

  “She’s worried about them.”

  “They are in the Outer Dark. She’s fucking right to be worried!”

  “Yes, but…well, it complicated. At this point, Hayley thinks that Alistair is about to scoop them all up, for reasons of his own.”

  “About to? You mean they haven’t been discovered already? Shit, Mikey, I thought you were gonna tell me they were all dead!”

  “Not if we are lucky. Hayley says that they are all intact, at least for the time being. And…”

  “Christ. There’s more?”

  “There is. Hayley says that Alex is keeping interesting company these days – as a prisoner or a friend or what, I cannot tell you – namely Emily Muir and Marcus Bay-Davies.”

  “The fuck does that mean?”

  “Nothing good. We obviously can’t let it go on. You know how much potential Alexander Warner has…or his protocol has, at any rate. We had assumed that he already belonged to the Anathema, or was dead. Now we know that neither is currently true.”

  “Have you read the briefing? What Rebecca got out of Emily Muir? You must have. You know the deal. The archive, Alistair, all that. We have to deal with Vegas.”

  “Okay. Vegas first. Then after…”

  “Yeah, yeah. Go to the Outer Dark. Save the kids. I get it, Mikey.” Alice smirked and pushed him back against the locker, straddling his thighs. “Now persuade me.”

  ***

  Renton was slashed deeply on his shoulder and shallow above his ear as he moved, but it hardly bothered him. Ana was going to be upset, however, when she saw all the blood he got on the new suit she had just gotten tailored for him.

  The Hegemony technician watching from the corner of the room had got Renton thinking about traffic, clogging telepathic channels and soaking up all the Network bandwidth to transmit a live feed to her Thule superiors. The reports from the Hegemony peace conference, and the complaints of the monitors when Lóa Thule showed up, that was the next piece. After that, it was just a matter of knowing where to look.

  You okay, sir?

  Nero tossed aside the hapless Thule soldier, battered and sliced beyond recognition by the debris, and then dove behind one of the basement’s support columns to avoid fire from a Thule Cartel solider wearing goggles and camo-print ballistic armor.

  She isn’t fast, Nero. Bitch is as slow as you are.

  What, sir? You mean the Thule…?

  Yeah. Lóa Thule. She isn’t fast.

  I’m not sure I follow you, sir.

  That’s fine. Keep the others down, okay?

  Yes, sir.

  Renton dropped his fruitless attempts to track Lóa Thule, instead hunting in the base signal, the universal telepathic broadcast that the Network took advantage of, looking for extra traffic.

  Lóa closed again, but Renton managed to avoid her swipe by blind luck.

  He was taken with admiration for the elegance of her protocol, the way it interacted directly with the autonomic systems, bypassing defenses as background telepathic noise, making one subtle and very specific change to local perception.

  Lóa Thule was a telepath who broadcast one unavoidable thought to all in her direct vicinity – that she was moving impossibly fast. Renton laughed as she stuck him just above the kidney in his back, deep this time, the chill making him shiver, his jacket heavy with spilled blood.

  Taking a small adhesive patch from an interior pocket of his jacket, Renton slapped
it on his forearm.

  ***

  Arrivals were carefully orchestrated to minimize notice. There was no hope of avoidance; the eyes of every player in the game were focused on Las Vegas.

  One pair of Auditors apported directly to a disused suite in the forlorn middle floors of Circus Circus, while another arrived at the airport on a twice-delayed commuter flight out of Tucson. An arriving coach from a budget bus service discharged an Auditor rolling large wheeled luggage into the illuminated bowels of downtown, while another made the drive from Los Angeles in an old panel truck plastered with graffiti, white-knuckling the wheel for the entirety of the trip down Highway 15. The last of the Auditors arrived in a rented silver Forester, wearing Porsche sunglasses, tight black denim, and three millimeters of woven Aramid, and then immediately began a screaming match with a family of tourists over valet parking.

  One by one, the Auditors arrived in Las Vegas, coordinated by a secured telepathic channel and implanted intelligence, locating weapons caches and safehouses. One waited patiently at the airport for the small private plane carrying two sedated dogs and a vast array of implements illegal in any municipality, while another amused himself at penny slots nearby and kept watch.

  At the Bellagio, Alice Gallow found time for a quick swim, emerging from the pool with damp hair and reddened eyes to a hot wind and the desert sunset, grinning in anticipation.

  ***

  Jittery and strained from repeated telepathic stimulation, the rush hit Renton’s neurochemical-saturated brain like brush fire through dry fields. It took an effort of will to control his protocol, his telepathic abilities supercharged and only just barely under his control.

  Renton rode the surge when he realized he could not dampen it, flaying one of the Hegemony soldier’s defenses and gutting his autonomic nervous system, spontaneously disrupting all unconscious physical activity. The soldier tripped and fell on inoperable legs, tore off his gasmask in a vain attempt to breath, drowning on dry land.