Alex nodded.
“I know. But it doesn’t feel that way.”
Rebecca had a whole host of questions that would need to be answered, but Alex wasn’t the person she needed to ask. She directed the conversation in a slightly different direction.
“What about Vivik? You haven’t mentioned him at all.”
Alex’s expression turned sour.
“That’s because I haven’t seen him at all,” he said, looking a bit hurt. “The guy’s always busy. Don’t ask me with what.”
***
Run.
That was the only thing left in his mind, burned clean by the fire that even now consumed his family estate, a distant orange glow against the deep purple of South Carolina hills giving way reluctantly to the night behind him. The ground he ran across, remnants of ravaged Appalachian second-growth forest, were as familiar to him as the gardens surrounding his home, gardens that were now little more than flame and ash, but he could not keep his footing. Every tree root seemed determined to trip him, every patch of mud impossibly slick. Tree branches tore his face and shredded the linen clothes he had worn to the ball.
The Planters Ball had been a tradition in the Hegemony for almost two centuries, continuing after the southern families who had begun the practice gradually lost power and influence as a result of the Civil War and the Reconstruction that followed. Of the four major American Hegemonic cartels – the Morgan Cartel, the Roth-Levy Cartel, the Pall-Norst, and his own, the Linfield Cartel – three still had major holdings in the southeastern United States. After his cartel had absorbed the holdings of the Raleigh Cartel in New Orleans and Mobile last month, Paul Linfield had been consolidating two side-by-side shipping operations into something less unwieldy, his first real assignment since leaving the Academy. He hadn’t even been back home since May, except for tonight.
There was a great cracking, booming sound behind him – another explosion, maybe, or the last of his home collapsing. Paul had no intentions of stopping to find out. He hit the old dirt track that he had followed into the foothills with his dogs to go deer and coon hunting as a child, then turned along the river, heading for the nearby highway.
If he could make it that far, Paul figured, clambering down a muddy slope toward the swollen creek, then he could use his protocol, grab a ride in the fastest car he could find, get as far from here as possible.
One of Paul’s ankles rolled on the soft dirt. He reacted just in time to spare himself a headfirst dive into the cold waters of the creek, burbling cheerfully as if the night weren’t stained red. He brushed the mud from his hands onto his ruined shirt and struggled back upright, making the best progress he could on the treacherous ground at the edge of the creek.
The dogs had been barking for so long that it took him a moment to place what had changed, why the silence struck him as new and frightening. He wondered what that could have meant. Many of the dogs had been kenneled on neighboring properties. Paul had seen enough horror that evening to feel genuine pity for them.
He trudged along in the mud, sinking to his shins with every third step, then extricating himself to begin the process again. His mind screamed at him to run, to flee, but no matter how he tried, he couldn’t move any faster. Paul started to wonder whether it had been a mistake to leave the path in favor of the creek bed. Were they even looking for him? Did they know he had survived?
Paul shook his head and forced his way onward through the poison ivy, scrub oak, and kudzu that choked the gully. Too many questions, he thought grimly, and this wasn’t the time or place to try and discover an answer. He didn’t know why his cartel had been attacked, or with what intent. He wasn’t even sure he was being pursued – he just had to assume as much, until a successful escape proved otherwise.
He shuddered at all-too-recent memories and forced his way through a thorn bush, greedily tearing away strips of his tattered coat. By the time he emerged from the other side of the thicket, the skin on his arms was scratched and bleeding, but Paul scarcely noticed, plunging into the next tangle of nettles recklessly.
Halfway through, he froze, not even moving to brush the thorn scratching the inside of his ear. Paul’s eyes rolled back in his head.
Someone was searching the area for stray thoughts and fugitives from the massacre, conducting a wideband telepathic sweep. Paul’s chances of escaping detection were dependent on being the superior telepath. Tense moments passed, blood and sweat that he could not acknowledge crawling tortuously down his skin. He muted every aspect of his being, built a wall around himself, an opaque barrier that he concealed himself behind, his mind as quiet as he was capable of making it. He heard nothing but the pervasive humming, the sound that his protocol had created since he was a child, the sound that only he could hear.
Nothing happened for a long time.
Paul Linfield could only guess when to stop hiding. It wasn’t an easy decision – move too soon and he would fall prey to seeking telepaths, wait too long and he might be physically hunted down where he stood. He debated for what he thought was a half-hour, but was actually no more than ten minutes, before gingerly extracting himself from the brambles. The sky remained cloudy and starless, free from any evident threat.
He made his way along the river, forging through the brush where he could, wading carefully through the cold water and the smooth stones beneath when he had no other choice. It was slow going and the sense of pursuit was maddening, but his exhaustion and the difficult terrain precluded the possibility of a more rapid flight.
Twice he paused. The first time he thought that he felt the faint stirrings of a distant telepathic search, from a different source than the first. While it could well have been a Hegemonic rescue, or the Auditors responding to the massacre, Paul couldn’t risk being found. On the second occasion, he was overcome by the memory of watching his father, both arms hideously broken, falling like a rag doll from one of the cornices of their home, crashing through the tea table that his mother and sister had vacated only moments earlier. When he finally moved on, his pace had slowed considerably.
Paul picked his way through the dark, cold water, his soaked trousers clinging to his legs, and wondered numbly at what happened, as if anesthetized. What could have brought them to his home, that night? What had the Linfield Cartel, a sleepy and complacent operation if there ever was one, done to deserve such violent retribution? Why had this happened to him, to his family?
The owl’s screech reminded him of the way his sister had screamed. Paul used telepathy to prevent himself from reliving the scene.
He didn’t wonder who had done it. He’d seen one of them, plain as day. Paul Linfield was fairly sure that she’d wanted him to. Because he was certain that if Lóa Thule had wanted to go unseen, she would have. But he had watched her push the ruined body of his father from the roof of his house.
The crackling leaves beneath his shoes reminded him of the sound of his house burning, when the screaming finally stopped. He turned it off like flipping a switch.
The Thule Cartel had been in exile for decades. True, the Linfield Cartel had been part of the vote that sent them into exile, but so had dozens of other cartels, and they hardly could have been called instrumental to the effort. His cartel hadn’t made a move to expand their territory or holdings in more than twenty years, and thus enjoyed relatively warm relations with the majority of the Hegemony. Even the Black Sun had asked them to serve as mediators when they negotiated restitution for the actions of Katya Zharova. No one that he was aware of had a grudge that could explain such violence.
The creek running over the rocks sounded as if it were whimpering, like the crying he had heard while crawling to safety beneath the floorboards. Paul muted it and walked on.
There was only one thing he could think of. The Linfield Cartel was among the Ten Families. Not so much the traditional leadership of the Hegemony, since it couldn’t really be said to have any, but rather the king-makers – though such traditions were, at best, nostalgically
remembered relics of a time long past. The Hegemony had last been unified almost a century earlier, and the effort had required the official support of the Ten Families. These days, it would have been considered an afterthought, little more than a formality, after political and military control had been exerted over the Hegemony. Maybe the Thule Cartel were the traditional sort? But how would they gain the Linfield Cartel’s support, if there was no cartel left?
The wind in the trees reminded him…well, it didn’t really matter, did it? He blocked it out.
Paul suspected that he was not alone, but the voice from behind him startled him badly nonetheless.
“Or maybe we really hate tradition. Did you consider that? Maybe we don’t want you to do something for us as much as we don’t want you to be able to do it for anyone. You follow? Sometimes people have trouble keeping up with me. How’s he doing, Mateo?”
Paul spun around and studied the greenery around him for his enemies, who proved to be simultaneously obvious and obscure.
“He’s not following you,” a bored male voice answered. “He’s not following anything at the moment.”
“Oh, right,” the woman said thoughtfully. “Your illusion protocol. What’s he seeing right now, anyway?”
Paul could have asked the question himself. The first speaker, the one who talked too fast with squeaky, feminine voice, appeared to be a low thorn bush just up the slope from him, while the second speaker, whom he was just certain wore glasses, appeared to be coming from the creek itself. Intellectually, he knew they must have been employing telepathic disguises – after all, shrubs and brooks were not known to be talkative – but his conventional senses insisted otherwise.
“Nonsense. Sometimes I get weird interactions, when my target is using a telepathic protocol. And he was doing something rather…odd.”
The bush looked intrigued. Paul panicked as his legs wobbled and then collapsed beneath him, pitching him into the mud beside the river, his hands in the cold water, but he seemed paralyzed to take action.
Neural override, Paul thought blearily. Control of his body had been hijacked from the outside. As silent as snowfall, a secondary nervous system, one composed entirely of telepathic relays, begin to activate itself within him.
“He was shutting off sensory input, piece by piece, because it was reminding him of what just happened,” the creek said clinically. “I think he has PTSD or something.”
“I don’t blame him,” the bush observed sympathetically. “But that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, right?”
He felt his fingertips tingle, the aching of his cold hand, the dirt and rocks pressing against his cheek. Only echoes, of course, telepathic simulations of nervous input. The hate, though, was as real as anything he had ever felt, and he sharpened it into a point, though he didn’t bother to try and stand.
“Aren’t we supposed to kill him?”
“Oh yeah,” the bush admitted. “I guess it won’t make you stronger after all. Tough luck.”
The telepath might have sensed his intentions a split-second before Paul took action. The dusky-skinned man with stooped shoulders certainly appeared alarmed behind the lenses of his glasses. Paul didn’t give him any more time than that.
He followed the first rule of combat – neutralize the telepath.
If it was possible for a telepathic attack to be aimed below the belt, then this one was. Paul had refined the edge of the attack until it was as fine and sharp as any knife, then drove it home in the mind of the man with glasses where it would do the most damage. He had defenses, of course, but he was unprepared for the sheer force of the rage behind Paul’s attack. Paul remembered his sister screaming and projected his anger straight through the man’s head, impaling his autonomic nervous system.
The glasses fell into the creek with a splash, followed a few seconds later by the body that had worn them. He landed face down, but that made no difference, as Paul had crippled his ability to breathe. As Paul pushed further into his mind, burning everything around him like a Vandal in Rome, the man’s hands clenched and unclenched, his bowels let go, his stomach tried to expel its contents. Paul extracted himself from the man’s vile mind as he choked on river water and his own tongue.
The small bush had become a smiling woman with fantastically curly hair, black-frame glasses, and a jacket fringed with silver fur.
“Did you just try to kill Mateo?” She asked the question the way he might have asked the time, without rancor, just a point of information. “Didn’t work, I’m afraid. He’s impossible to target, even telepathically. You killed an illusion. But, Paul Linfield, you didn’t do half bad. Unfortunately, you should have started your attack the other way around.”
Paul’s nervous system had resumed functioning enough to allow him shakily to his feet. The girl talked so fast that it was hard to make out the individual words, but that didn’t matter. True to her words, the Hispanic man stood beside her with an expression of amusement. Paul ignored him and reached instead for Lóa Thule’s mind, brilliant like cut glass, across the space between them.
He missed.
That wasn’t, of course, possible. Telepathy is instantaneous, or so close to it that Academy scientists had been unable to measure the interval in between thought and action. Another telepath might have been able to block or divert his attack, but certainly no one could hope to dodge it. Paul thought, and it was.
Except that the woman wasn’t standing in front of him anymore. She was sitting in the lower branches of a gnarled oak tree, above him and to his right.
“All of you guys – telepaths I mean – you always make the same face,” she laughed, self-assured. “If only the physicists knew, right? Telepathy isn’t instant. It’s almost instant. There’s just a little bit of lost time between thought and action. And that’s a big difference, when time is the medium you work with.”
Paul Linfield’s shoulders slumped in resignation, while he sent out tentative, secret feelers, trying to touch her mind without startling her.
“I feel bad for you, I really do. I’m sympathetic. I wish I could take you back with me. You obviously have talent. But you’d be broken. And I can’t do that to someone as nice as you. It’s too cruel.”
He could see sadness in her face, but couldn’t understand and didn’t care to. Paul found the lever in her mind that he was looking for and he triggered it, cutting off access to her protocol.
Except he didn’t.
The woman touched him softly on his back, suddenly standing beside him in the river, a compact nickel-plated revolver pressed to his temple.
“You’re really very good. Forgive me, Paul Linfield. Know that I do this in kindness.”
He could actually feel the bullet, hot and foreign, in his brain, just for a moment.
***
Mr. Windsor’s classroom seemed slightly unfamiliar. Only two weeks had elapsed since he was here last, but Alex felt almost giddy at his return to the lecture hall. The familiar tangle of cords and the slightly outdated projector humming away next to the podium, the genial chatter of his classmates, the carpet that almost – but didn’t quite – match the color of the walls, were as he remembered. Alex glanced at the spot where he sat for the entirety of the last term, and that was when the reality of the changes really hit him. Emily was gone, and Vivik must have been late, because he wasn’t there yet. Margot Feld’s seat remained conspicuously empty, and Alex suspected that it would remain that way until a new class of recruits took the space over.
Not everything had changed – Anastasia Martynova still commanded the center of the room in a black silk dress with silver stockings and matching highlights, completely flouting the school dress code. Timor flanked her at a discreet distance, as always making the uniform look like a stylish fashion decision, and Katya sat a couple rows back with a croissant and a cup of coffee. Grigori sat on the far right side, along with Hope and Chandi and the rest of the Hegemony kids. In the front, on the sparsely populated left side of the r
oom, a girl with blue hair stared off into space, the entire row surrounding her empty.
For the first time since he had joined the class, Alex slid into the vacant seat beside her, offering his best smile when she looked up in what he had to assume was her expressionless version of surprise. Until recently, Alex had worried that openly associating with Eerie would encourage the cartels to turn their attention on her – or that’s what he told himself. It’s possible that he had simply wanted to avoid commitment. Whatever the truth of his motivations, though, Alex had resolved to do better, starting immediately. If they were dating, then he intended to start acting like it.
As usual, Eerie seemed to have simply disregarded the school dress code, wearing a loose-necked sweater striped blue and grey, matching knee socks, and a jean skirt. The plastic headband that held her hair back was covered with cartoon renditions of bees and butterflies, while her notebooks were covered with scribbles and shorthand from her coding work at Processing.
“Alex?”
“Good morning, Eerie,” he said, trying to be nonchalant. “How are you?”
“Um, good. I think...yes. Probably good.”
“Huh. Well, that’s...that’s good, then. I almost hate to admit it, but it’s nice to be back in class. The Far Shores is so lonely I’ve even started to miss school.”
Eerie nodded evenly. He waited for a response, but when it became obvious that none was forthcoming, he forged ahead.
“Hey, where’s Vivik? I don’t see him anywhere...”
Alex glanced around the room to confirm it. Anastasia ignored him, while Grigori glowered in his direction. Katya smirked and gave him an entirely unsubtle thumbs-up, which he had to work very hard to ignore.
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 18
