The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Anastasia’s throbbing throat and bone-dry mouth would permit her no answer. Instead, she raised an eyebrow, intending it to serve as an invitation to elucidate the other option.

  “Should you choose otherwise,” Brennan Thule said, “then I would have to consider more extreme methods to coerce your cooperation, or alternatively effect your demise – either would serve my purposes. What you have endured thus far is simply a foretaste of what we might do; rather, what I might have done to you, as such activities are beneath a man of my fundamentally gentle nature. I would prefer to offer you a drink – you must be terribly thirsty, after all – and see you released from your unfortunate circumstances.”

  He placed the glass on the table roughly, so that some of the water spilled on the palm of her immobilized hand, the droplets sparkling in her drug-addled vision.

  “In that eventuality, I would be forced to turn your well-being over to various underlings, who I am afraid would respect neither your dignity nor the integrity of your body,” Brennan Thule explained, with an ugly leer at her vulnerable position. “You would be made to suffer until your spirit or your body broke under the strain. This would be a regrettable conclusion to our brief association, and an appalling waste of talent that might be turned to other, more profitable uses. While I understand that it is not in your nature to subjugate yourself to the will of another, surely you can understand that it is preferable to do so with your health and honor intact, rather than to be forced in the absence of either. I assume that the decision before you has been made sufficiently clear?”

  Anger gave Anastasia the strength to smile, and to find her voice despite the agony, the skin-against-sandpaper sensation it caused in her throat.

  “Of course,” she said politely, smiling at the man with the crooked teeth. “But you must be thirsty after such a lengthy and tiresome speech. Won’t you have something to drink?”

  ***

  Alice didn’t watch a lot of television. She certainly didn’t bother with the news. Nonetheless, the last few years had provided enough background imagery of destruction, sectarian strife, and general mayhem to profoundly color her expectations of Iraq. On some level, she was actually looking forward to it. According to her diaries, some of the happiest times in her exceptionally long life had taken place in war zones.

  The pink stucco building that she stood in front of, while vaguely Middle Eastern in general form, was both a contradiction to her expectations and a bit of a disappointment. She was in the Left Coast of Mosul, in the Al-Andalus Quarter, not far from the highway and within walking distance of the University of Mosul and the historic Nineveh ruins. The neighborhood was surprisingly mundane and residential, with none of the security checkpoints, ethnic militias, or burka-clad women she secretly hoped for. Alice wondered whether her telepathic disguise was even really necessary. The telepath who provided it had assured her that she would appear as a “proper Sunni Muslim woman,” but despite the relatively crowded streets she walked on her way from the university, she hadn’t seen anyone who fit her mental picture of what that was. Most of the woman had looked more or less like women anywhere, with the minor addition of head scarves.

  Alice tried to shrug it off as she walked up the concrete sidewalk toward the building’s entrance, verifying the unit number against a telepathic implant, but she couldn’t totally escape a feeling of being cheated. She had packed extra guns and everything.

  It was hot, though. In that way, at least, Mosul did not defy her expectations. And it was definitely arid, with a general lack of greenery, apart from the sparse landscaping that leaned heavily toward a variety of hearty shrubs with waxy leaves and brittle-looking branches. If it hadn’t been for the Arab and Kurdish populace, Mosul could have passed for some place in Arizona. It wasn’t nearly as Lawrence of Arabia as Alice had been led to believe.

  “What the fuck ever,” Alice muttered, checking the brass numbers irregularly nailed to the complex doors. “Life is full of disappointment.”

  She struck out on the ground floor, but found the unit she wanted not far from the stairwell on the second. The brass numbers had either fallen off or been removed, but years of unrelenting sun leached the stain from the door, so the imprint of the number was visible in an afterimage of darker wood. Alice knocked on the door, wondering idly if there was some other Arab custom of which she was unaware that replaced knocking.

  “It’s open.”

  The telepath had provided her with a telepathic implant that covered five different languages particular to the Mosul area, including modern Arabic, but the speaker rendered all of that unnecessary by using slightly German-accented English. Alice sighed as she pushed the flimsy door open. So much preparation wasted.

  “Hello, Karim Sabir,” Alice said, mentally deactivating the telepathic disguise the moment the door closed behind her. She had worn her tightest jeans and a tank top that didn’t cover her bra straps in a juvenile sort of rebellion against local culture, but judging from the smile on Karim’s face, her attire was appreciated, as opposed to being reviled. “Remember me?”

  “I do,” Karim said, offering a chair at the table that constituted the room’s only furnishing, aside from the bedroll in the opposite corner. Karim was slim, light skinned, and fine featured, with curly black hair and startling blue eyes, wearing khakis that had a vaguely paramilitary look about them. The table was mostly occupied by the disassembled pieces of a Lapua sniper rifle, the alloy barrel oiled and neatly aligned with the dark earth-colored nylon housing. “I would be surprised, Miss Gallow, if you recall me.”

  “Bits and pieces,” Alice admitted, taking the chair he offered and then putting her boots up on the edge of the table. “I take notes.”

  “As I recall,” Karim replied gracefully, walking to the small tiled kitchenette and putting a brass kettle on the single gas burner. “It is good to see you, by the way. You remain exactly as beautiful as I remember.”

  “I like to think so,” Alice said, grinning. “How’re things on the home front?”

  “Less dreadful than before the invasion; in Kurdistan, at least. Here in Mosul, things are not so good.” Karim shrugged and gave her a tight-lipped smile that reminded her of something she could not fully recall. “Which means business has been very good for me.”

  “Still working in the same line, then?” Alice picked up the muzzle break and toyed with it idly. “Taking heads for the highest bidder?”

  “I enjoy my work,” Karim said, wiping two thin ceramic cups from beside the sink with a brightly patterned cloth. “Demand for my services is high. I have no complaints.”

  “Now, Karim – we both know that isn’t true.”

  He laughed, tossing back his head as he did so. It was a surprisingly boisterous laugh for such a quiet, neat man, and Alice found it appealing. Karim was Kurdish, but could have easily passed for a Turk. As her diaries had promised, he was handsome, and appeared fit beneath the creased lines of his khakis.

  “Straight to the heart of the matter as always, Miss Gallow? It is good to know that some things do not change.”

  “I’ll die first,” she agreed, with a smile. “And call me Alice.”

  “An odd thing, having a friendly conversation with an Auditor,” Karim observed, taking the kettle from the burner and then adding tea to an infuser basket and setting it aside to steep. “Our previous interactions were always fraught with a certain amount of tension, given the uncertain climate for contractors in Central.”

  “Hazard of the trade.”

  “Indeed.” Karim returned to the table with the empty cups and the kettle, and sat opposite to Alice. With long, restless fingers he took an envelope of tobacco from his breast pocket, along with a packet of rolling papers and a wax paper–wrapped nugget of fragrant hashish. “Do you smoke?”

  “That’s up for debate.”

  He laughed again.

  “I see. And which way do you lean at the moment?”

  “I’ll pass.”

  “Do
you mind if I do?”

  “Oh, it’s your house,” Alice said, folding her hands behind her head and leaning back on the rear legs of the chair. “Just act like I’m not here.”

  “I find that impossible,” he said, adding a generous pinch of dried tobacco to a folded paper. “As I would assume most would.”

  “Can’t imagine why.”

  “Surely. Tell me – how has Central fared since my exile?”

  “We’ve held things together somehow. Never seem to lack for excitement, I’ll say that much. When the cartels aren’t at each other’s throats, we have Witches and Anathema to cope with. Keeps life interesting.”

  “All the more so,” Karim observed, heating a piece of hashish with a disposable lighter and then breaking it into a number of small pieces by crushing it between his thumb and forefinger, carefully sprinkling the fragments onto the tobacco, “from the perspective of an Auditor. I have heard of your promotion, by the way. Congratulations.”

  “Thanks. That dovetails rather nicely into what I intended to discuss with you, as a matter of fact – a change in perspective. Tired of watching things from the outside?”

  Karim laughed, but the humor was gone. He licked one side of the paper, then deftly tucked the other edge of the paper beneath and completed the rolling of the cigarette with one quick movement. Then he set it aside and poured tea into both of the cups, pushing one across the table to Alice. He lit the cigarette, sipped his tea, and gave Alice a rather lingering look up and down. She let it slide. From Karim, it didn’t bother her one bit. If it hadn’t been for Mikey’s easily hurt feelings...ah, but better not to think about it. They had been down that road before, and it ended in heartbreak.

  “Tired of living in a desert, shooting bandits and jihadists for pitiful bounties? Tired of living amongst Muslims, tired of the heat? How could one ever grow tired of such things?”

  “Ouch. C’mon, Karim, that’s no way to talk about your country. Besides, aren’t you Muslim yourself?”

  “Your diaries are not as thorough as I imagined, or you did not know me as well as I had hoped,” Karim said, with a sly grin and a mouthful of smoke. “My parents were Yazidi, before they died, and I am grateful to be nothing at all, thanks to a secular education and the corrupting influences of television and Western music. And this is hardly my country. We moved to Germany when I was a child. But to answer your question,” he said, pausing to sip at the weak black tea, “I miss Central profoundly. Every single day. I have often contemplated whether it might have been kinder to simply kill me, rather than restricting my protocol and exiling me to wander this mundane world. I feel as though I am a blind man with distant memories of sight, living amongst those blind from birth.”

  “Then I think you will be very pleased to hear what I’ve come to say.”

  “Either you have come to kill me, or to tell me that my punishment has been remitted, and I am allowed to return. Either would please me, Alice.”

  “Oh, I can do better than that, Karim.” Alice said, leaning forward to pick up her tea with a grin. “How’d you like to try being The Man?”

  ***

  Eerie proved adept at seizing his hand when no one was looking, while always managing to let go before Dr. Graaf or Rebecca Levy noticed. After the first few times, he stopped worrying, wrote it off as another oddity of dating a Changeling, and focused on the way her small hand felt entangled in his own.

  Katya noticed, of course – he got the feeling that she never really stopped watching him – but she didn’t do anything besides making faces and the occasional discreet gagging noise.

  The tour was dull and circumspect, but for Alex it passed in a blur of sensation and contact, punctuated with meaningful glances into the twin reflective moons that served Eerie as eyes, wondering if there were golden motes swirling invisibly somewhere in that darkness. Watching Eerie walk carefully, each step deliberate and measured to combat her internal turmoil, Alex wondered when she would become the woman he had met briefly at the tail end of their recent date, if she would still like him when that happened, if she would still evoke this elation in him with something as subtle as a look or a gesture. He felt dazed and enchanted, as if his feet weren’t quite touching the ground, embarrassingly sweaty, giddy with a defocused sort of excitement.

  Residential buildings, laboratories, research facilities, and vast analog libraries passed him by without notice or context. Occasionally he caught Rebecca glaring at him from behind her perpetual cigarette, but he decided not to let that worry him. Alex felt that he achieved a sort of détente with Rebecca during their recent sessions, and as long as she was content to allow him a reasonable amount of discretion, then he was comfortable with an equally reasonable amount of cautious observation. He wouldn’t have trusted himself in her shoes, after all.

  Dr. Graaf had a rapt audience in Vivik, who peppered him with questions about matters either too arcane or mundane to interest Alex in the slightest. He felt – not for the first time – that perhaps they should have switched places – his Sikh friend was far better suited to take advantage of the academic and philosophical resources available at the Far Shores, and Alex was pretty sure that he could have gotten with Eerie by now if he was at the Academy more often. As usual, however, no one seemed interested in soliciting his opinion.

  Eerie seemed equally disinterested in the facilities of the Far Shores, though it was always a little hard to tell with her. She would brush blue hair from her eyes and stare at what Dr. Graaf pointed at with the same blank expression that she offered to virtually everything, blinking with such rarity that Alex’s eyes ached in sympathy. After the first half hour of agreeable follow-the-leader across the campus of the Far Shores, Alex started to suspect that Dr. Graaf – while perfectly ready to engage with Vivik’s enthusiasm – was primarily curious as to the Changeling’s reactions. Alex moved closer to her by reflex, an action Eerie interpreted as affectionate, rather than defensive. He wasn’t exactly creeped out by the attention Dr. Graaf paid to Eerie, but Alex felt a vague sense of unease when the Belgian doctor’s gaze rested on her a moment too long.

  Her indifference was universal, until Dr. Graaf led them out a back door from the Meteorology building and onto the beach, not far from the spot where Katya and Alex had disturbed the arcane night experiments conducted at the Far Shores. Alex didn’t notice the change immediately, as his attention was turned to the welfare of his relatively new Adidas, which sank in the gritty, wet sand that threatened to mar the perfection of their suede exterior. He winced and tried to figure out a way to walk that would spare his sneakers any possible disfigurement, taking several steps before he noticed that Eerie had stopped directly outside the door and stood stock still, trapping Rebecca and Katya in the building. Her eyes dilated to the point that only millimeters of white showed around the edges, and her posture went rigid, her mouth forming words but emitting no sound. Alex hurried back to her, ignoring the puzzled women behind her and the equally baffled stares from Vivik and Dr. Graaf, and took one of her stiff hands in his own.

  “Eerie, are you okay? Is something wrong?”

  Her head made the most minimal possible gesture of negation.

  “Wrong? No. It’s…beautiful.”

  Alex glanced out at the beach and the sea of Ether beyond it, wondering if something had changed since the last time he had been here. It was the same as he remembered – grey sand beneath a dull sky, matching the null color of the Ether so closely that it was difficult to pick out the horizon line. He turned back to Eerie, struck by the contrast between the landscape and her own colorful knitted sweater, blue hair, and striped blue-and-green knee socks, and wondered what appeal she found in such a monochrome vista.

  Dr. Graaf approached quietly, hovering a meter back from Alex, as he slowly coaxed Eerie away from the door, allowing a concerned Rebecca and miffed Katya to follow them out.

  “Is this the first time you have seen it, Miss…?” Dr. Graaf’s voice was gently interrogative.

>   “Eerie,” she replied softly. “Not Miss. Just Eerie.”

  “As you wish,” Dr. Graaf agreed, gesturing at the grey panorama behind him. “Is this your first time seeing the sea of Ether?”

  Eerie’s eyes never wavered from the horizon, and if Alex hadn’t been there to hold her hand and aid her progress, he got the feeling that she might have fallen to the sand.

  “I am not sure.” Her reply was a musical whisper, barely audible above the renewed fury of the wind. “I do not think so.”

  “Ah, is that so?” Dr. Graaf seemed to find nothing unusual in her response. “It’s vastness is startling, though, is it not? Today it appears rather still, though our research confirms that the currents beneath the surface remain more or less constant. The Ether’s appearance seems to fluctuate, though on what basis we remain uncertain.”

  Eerie took one hesitant step toward the shoreline, then another. Alex was startled to notice that she left behind no visible imprint on the sand, in stark contrast to the indentions he left behind, centimeters deep and already filling with water that welled up from beneath the sand.

  “I feel it.” Eerie spoke so quietly that Alex wasn’t sure any of the others heard, though Dr. Graaf hovered close enough to make it a possibility. “Can’t you? It’s almost as if…as if it recognizes me.”

  “Eerie…”

  “You are not the first to make that observation,” Dr. Graaf interjected in a hushed voice, as if he feared waking the Changeling from sleep. “Though not in those words. There are empaths at the Far Shores that insist that the Ether is, in some sense, alive.”