The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Good start,” Alice said approvingly, standing to pace the length of the cartel’s formal reception hall. “Honesty is the best policy.”

  “Two months ago, we were approached by representatives of the Anathema,” Mei explained, amazed at the steadiness of her own voice. “They knew of our cartel’s poor fortune in recent years, our absorption by the Hegemony. They were also aware that we did not suffer any loses in the raid on Central, having no representation in Central of our own. They made an offer to the leaders of our cartel.”

  “Interesting. The Anathema have rather good intelligence,” Alice Gallow mused, pausing to inspect an ancient porcelain vase, a funerary relic from one of the clan’s ancestors, tapping it with her fingernail and admiring the sound it made. “What did they offer?”

  “Status, in the new order they claimed was coming,” Mei said, her back straight, her face composed. “A return to prosperity, a claim to territories and interests, both old and new.”

  “Uh-huh,” Alice said, nodding as she pushed the vase from its carved platform to shatter on the hardwood floor with a beautiful and sad sound. “And what did they want?”

  “Our services in the war on Central,” Mei responded, her tone measured and level. “Our children, to be indoctrinated in the forbidden ways of the Anathema. Our loyalty, to the Outer Dark.”

  Alice resumed her pacing.

  “And you said?”

  “We refused. Recent years may not have favored the Jiang Cartel, but we are not traitors. We would not turn our backs on Central to advance our position or to free ourselves from the grip of the Hegemony.”

  “Refreshing,” Alice remarked, pausing in front of the small shrine to the ancestors they maintained in the proper corner of the hall, bending over to inspect the contents. “How did they take the news?”

  “With civility,” Mei responded pointedly, earning an amused glance from the Auditor. “They expressed regret at our decision and then they departed. We assumed that there would be consequences, but as the weeks passed and nothing happened, we began to relax our guard.”

  Alice Gallow dragged the business end of her assault shotgun across the main shelf of the altar, scattering and destroying the dishes, ceramics, and keepsakes.

  “But you didn’t inform Central. Why?”

  “Because,” Mei said, allowing the venom she felt to be reflected in her voice, “we knew that they would send you.”

  “Aha!” Alice Gallow strode across the room with her shotgun resting across her broad shoulders, coming to a halt directly in front of where Mei sat. “You are a spirited one, aren’t you? Pretty, too. I like that. Anyhow, since I am here now, why don’t you tell me what happened next?”

  Mei faced Alice Gallow without the need for aid from her protocol, which was good, because she was forced to expend much of her protocol’s energy supporting her wavering cartel. For herself, however, she felt no fear – whatever the Auditor intended, she decided, she would face it with her pride intact.

  “Last week, we awoke to find eleven members of our cartel, including my uncle Liu, the current head of the cartel, absent. There were no signs of struggle, nothing left behind to explain their disappearance. In one case, a wife vanished from her husband’s side without waking him. Similarly, two children departed without waking their parents who slept in the next room.”

  “Spooky. Makes you think, don’t it?” The Auditor squatted down, so that she was eye to eye with Mei. “Could be any one of us. Here one moment, gone the next.”

  “Indeed,” Mei agreed.

  ***

  He wanted to hug her as soon as he saw her, but she barely moved, and her expression didn’t change at all, so instead, he ended up patting her arm like a moron. She clutched the handles of her knitting basket in front of her patterned skirt, black tights matching her wide-necked, form-fitting black top. She had dyed her hair again since he saw her week before last – dark blue with interwoven streaks of blonde. She smelled like sandalwood and freshly cut grass, and when she looked at him with her painfully dilated eyes, he suddenly forgot everything he had planned to say.

  “Hi,” Alex said, furiously embarrassed. “Um. Hi.”

  For some reason, Eerie nodded, and he found himself nodding back, as if they were agreeing on something. Around them, the returning Program students embraced significant others, traded jokes with friends, or sneaked cigarettes while they waited for their bags to be unloaded from the old diesel bus.

  “Hey. It’s, um, good to see you.”

  “Is it?”

  From anyone else, the question would have been loaded with sarcasm. Eerie, however, appeared genuinely curious.

  “Yeah,” Alex said, scratching his head and wishing he had enough courage to simply embrace her. “Yeah, it is. Really.”

  “Oh,” Eerie said, brushing a stray lock of hair away from her eyes. “That’s good.”

  Alex decided to count that as progress and plunged ahead.

  “I missed you. At the Far Shores, it was…I was lonely.”

  Eerie nodded gravely.

  “I really missed you.”

  “You said that already.”

  Just the barest upturn at the corner of her pale lips?

  “What? Oh. Oh yeah. Well…”

  Katya stepped from behind him, holding a partially unwrapped a candy bar.

  “Hey, Eerie. You comin’ to Circle tomorrow?”

  She broke off a piece of the candy bar and offered it to Eerie while she bit into the remainder. Eerie refused it with a somber shake of her head.

  “Yes. I am presenting.”

  “I know. Circular knitting, right? I’m looking forward to it. Okay, I’ll leave you guys to it,” Katya said agreeably. “See you there, okay?”

  Eerie nodded. Katya sauntered away, elbowing Alex in the side as she went and knocking his backpack off.

  “Oh! Oops. Sorry ’bout that…”

  They both scrambled to pick it up. Katya leaned close and whispered as she handed the bag to him.

  “Don’t be such a wuss,” she hissed. “Do it already.”

  It happened so fast, Alex wasn’t sure that he heard her. Katya winked at him as she walked off, munching on her candy bar, waving to Eerie over her shoulder without looking back.

  “Right,” Alex muttered to himself.

  “What?”

  Alex waved his hand pointlessly.

  “Nothing! I mean…no. Wait. There is something.”

  Eerie waited patiently. He got the feeling that she would stand there for hours, without blinking, until he forced the words out in some sort of functional manner. He took a deep breath and steeled himself as if he were about to jump into a cold pool.

  “Eerie, can I ask you something?”

  She nodded with her typical gravity.

  “I think I should have probably asked you a long time ago. No, wait. I definitely should have asked you. Because it was pretty much all I thought about while I was at the Far Shores – particularly since you weren’t around last week…”

  Eerie’s hands twisted nervously on the handle of her basket.

  “I was busy. At Processing. I had to work, and then the boys I work with wanted to celebrate a programming milestone, so I had to go…”

  Alex cut her off without intending to do so. He just felt compelled – he was overcome with a certainty that if he let the moment get away from him this time, then he always would. It would set a pattern, and he would watch a thousand other moments slip away, afraid of losing something that his inaction would certainly cost him.

  “I know. I don’t – I don’t care. Wait. That isn’t it. I do care. Because I need you not to be too busy. For me. It’s just that…”

  Eerie was pointing at something behind him, though her mad eyes never left his face.

  “Your bag.”

  “What?”

  “Alex. Your bag is here.”

  Alex took her by the shoulders, reminding himself to be gentle. The fabric of her shirt felt syntheti
c, like the stuff he wore to work out, and the heat of her skin radiated from beneath it.

  “Forget the bag. Forget…just forget everything,” he said, more forcefully than he intended. He realized that a few people around them were starting to stare, and the bus driver had called his name more than once, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t, not right then.

  “Eerie. I’m sorry. I’m sorry that I haven’t been as good to you as you’ve been to me. And I want to fix that. I want you to give me the chance to fix it. I want you…”

  He took a deep breath, the air infused with her scent, sandalwood and herbs. His vision swam for a moment, and he thought of the butterflies, delicate orange wings battered by coastal headwinds, framed against the blue of an ocean that he had hardly ever seen.

  “Eerie, will you go out with me? Will you be my girlfriend?”

  “Yes,” Eerie said instantly, the moment he finished the question, as if she had been waiting patiently for that very question. And maybe she had. She answered melodically, without a trace of inflection, but just the hint of a smile. “Alex is stupid. Of course. Go get your bag.”

  He didn’t do that, though. He kissed her instead.

  ***

  “Are you sure this fits me? It feels too tight, and the pants are kind of high…”

  “Of course,” Anastasia scolded, dragging a comb through his moistened hair while he sat in front of her, watching both of them in the mirror. “You simply are not accustomed to clothes that fit properly.”

  Renton watched her eyes, but she didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything other than his hair.

  “Do I look good in this?”

  He moved one hand to indicate the expensive, tailored suit that had arrived the day before. He knew it was from New York, because the Persian tailor who had done the fitting two weeks earlier had a New York accent, but he had told him that the cloth came from Italy. There was a pattern – a tight mesh of dark brown and a subtle grey, but that was only noticeable when he looked very closely. At a casual glance, it appeared to be the color of new leather or old wood, three buttons with a matching waistcoat and burnished brass cufflinks. The whole outfit was one of several he had received, all personally selected by Anastasia, who had fussed over every stage of the entire process, clearly enjoying herself as she dithered over fabrics and buttons, cuts and colors with the equally enthusiastic tailor.

  Anastasia straightened his head in the mirror before continuing to coax his unruly hair into a semblance of order.

  “Acceptable,” she said grudgingly, with a small nod.

  Renton felt a warm glow of approval that overwhelmed the sheer agony of the way she tore at his scalp with the comb.

  “I’m nervous,” he admitted, licking his lips. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  Anastasia gave his hair one last tug, then leaned over his shoulder to adjust the knot of his gunmetal tie. The knot was called a Windsor, and Anastasia had forced him to practice it until he felt he could produce one in his sleep. Not that he minded. It was worth it, for the attention. The entire time she spent planning his outfit and rehearsing his role, he was acutely aware that his days of being by her side were rapidly coming to a close.

  “Of course,” Anastasia snapped, glaring at him in the mirror while she fussed with the handkerchief in his pocket. “Am I ever wrong?”

  “No, Ana. But, still, I’m not sure that I’m cut out for politics…”

  Anastasia put her hands on her hips and glared, only able to look down on him because he was seated. She was wearing the iridescent white dress that Timor liked, which caused Renton another pang of jealousy. He wondered if she ever considered his preferences when choosing her outfit – and then discarded the idea as patently ridiculous.

  “Being nervous is understandable,” she said, wagging one finger in his face. “But doubting my judgment is not. Regardless of your apprehensions, you will excel in your new role – because I would not have selected you, had I any doubt in your abilities.”

  He blushed, and then was embarrassed by the reaction, cursing the mirror in his head, but unwilling to stand, because then he might have to leave.

  “You have experienced years of politics – my life, as you well know, is nothing but. Your worries are akin to a fish worrying over its ability to breathe water. I am certain that you will find yourself to be a master among journeymen. The Committee-at-Large, I assure you, will never know what hit them.”

  She turned away, sparing him the indignity of witnessing his gratitude. Renton felt the loss of Anastasia’s presence in his life acutely, but pride in the confidence she placed in him mitigated that to a degree.

  “If you say so, then it must be that way.”

  “Naturally,” Anastasia agreed, sitting down behind her just-slightly-lowered antique desk, in her oh-so-subtly elevated chair, still managing to look like a little girl playing with her father’s things. Even if the truth was closer to the opposite. “I do not make mistakes, Renton.”

  He stood and examined himself in the mirror; unbuttoned his jacket, turned to the side, put his hands in the pockets of his waistcoat, tried out a smile and found it wanting. He paused briefly to adjust the equally immaculately tailored holster at the small of his back, which held a Smith & Wesson .357, snub nosed and hammerless to prevent snagging on clothing. A second holster concealed a Beretta snugly beneath his left arm, imperceptible even to trained eyes. Not that he expected to need either in a glorified conference room, but he would have felt strange and vulnerable without them.

  “Right. Yes, of course. Still, Ana…I just wish…”

  Anastasia’s blazing eyes caused him to fall silent.

  “I am aware of your feelings,” she said coldly. “And I find them distasteful.”

  He looked away. The sense of loss was very sharp at that particular moment.

  Renton was an orphan, in the Central sense of the word. In the more traditional sense, his parents had been upwardly mobile, distant, and indulgent in a detached way. When the Black Sun’s scouting program had located him in his early teens, he hadn’t required persuasion to sign on. He had been activated at fourteen, but it was three or four years later when his apparent aged had fixed – something he might have in common with Anastasia, assuming she wasn’t simply a late bloomer. He spent three years training as a bodyguard after the Black Sun adopted him, and the rest of his semi-adult life had been devoted to the services of the heir of the cartel. When he first met her, she was still a child, but her mind was already incredibly devious. At first, he was simply fascinated by her, thrilled to be close to someone so obviously destined for greatness. He wasn’t entirely sure when his feelings had deepened, but they had been an unacknowledged part of his reality since Ana had arrived at the Academy.

  Losing his place beside her hurt more than losing his family, the life he had known before the Black Sun. It threatened his understanding of himself, deprived him of the swagger that had carried him through so many trials, at the exact moment when he needed it most. Renton despised weakness, in himself most of all, but despite his best efforts, he could not will away his sense of abandonment.

  “I have already explained this to you,” Anastasia said, sighing as she inspected her flawlessly manicured nails. “This is a promotion, not an exile. I need someone capable and cunning to represent me in the Committee, and I no longer have the time to manage my affairs there, not with the current demands on my time and attention. The position must be delegated to someone who can act decisively and of their own accord, someone who knows my interests well enough to protect them in my absence.” Anastasia glanced at him and frowned. “It must be someone I trust, Renton, you fool – and there is no else that I trust so completely. Do you understand?”

  It would be a lie to say that her speech somehow made him whole. But it did make him feel better, and Renton quickly pulled himself together, determined to at least appear to be the man she needed. If this was the only way she needed him – for now – then he resolv
ed to be exactly what she needed.

  The rest, he assured himself, would come later. Eventually, Anastasia would come around to his way of thinking. He knew that with a certainty that defied all logic. In any case, they had a plan, one that couldn’t be spoken of, one that he had telepathically erased from his own mind until the appropriate time. He didn’t know exactly why, but he knew that it was important that he go through with this. Renton stood up straight, brought his shoulders back, pushed out his chest.

  “Of course, Ana,” he said smoothly. “Whatever you need.”

  ***

  Rebecca muted the television when she heard Alice’s perfunctory knock, but she didn’t bother to call out. She already knew Alice would simply let herself in, the way she had been doing for years. It wasn’t really a problem, anyway – Big Brother was terrible this year, and Rebecca was dying to hear all the gossip from Audits that she wouldn’t let herself listen in on. She figured it was cheating, since she had officially retired from that side of things, to be a school councilor and supportive big sister to several hundred confused students at the Academy.

  “Hey, ’Becca,” Alice said, stomping in and throwing her leather jacket on a convenient chair before collapsing face-forward on Rebecca’s duvet near the foot of her bed. “How’s it going on the home front?”

  “Not bad,” Rebecca admitted, grinding out the butt of her most recent cigarette in her ugly ceramic ashtray. “Little slow. How’s the doing-horrible-things-to-people business?”

  “Ugh. I swear, sometimes I feel like a bad person,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the floral comforter her face was planted in. “Seriously.”

  “Oh, sweetie, no,” Rebecca said, patting Alice on her bare shoulder. “Don’t think like that. You are so much worse than bad.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Prove me wrong,” Rebecca challenged. “What did you do today?”

  “Went to visit the Jiang Cartel.”

  “Why?” Rebecca kept her tone playful, checking the pack of cigarettes and finding it empty. “What did they do?”