“Amazing,” Miss Aoki snapped. “Now, shut up, please.”
Alex escorted her another slushy, cold block. The architecture of central Kiev was a mess, with crumbling Soviet tenements set beside modern office buildings, and the overall effect was haphazard. There were few trees, and the closer they got to downtown and the central square known as the Maidan, the greater the density of competing anarchist and fascist graffiti. Though the disorders had quieted as the action had moved to Crimea, the air still smelled of the tire fires that smoldered nearby and filled the air with heavy black ash. On some of the roads they passed, the debris from the recently moved barricades and the melted asphalt from the fires was obvious, and in many places the roads were missing cobbles that had been torn up to use as projectiles. A few buildings were completely burned out, and more were damaged. Most of the stores and offices seemed to have resumed business, but cautiously, with steel gates ready to close at a moment’s notice.
It was hard to judge the mood of the place. There were police on the street, and armed men who looked like soldiers, but no one seemed particularly concerned with them, nor did they evidence any interest in the people around them. Parts of the Maidan were still occupied by the pro-Western protestors who had recently toppled the Russian-backed presidency, and the mixture of leftists and Nazi soccer hooligans was a tense one. Alex didn’t see any fighting or arguing, but the atmosphere seemed charged and tense to him, as if some malignant energy lingered in Kiev, searching for an outlet.
No one had been shot in the last few days, a fact that seemed to offer the locals a small measure of optimism.
From the briefing, it seemed as if things had been very much worse just a few weeks before, with fighting and gunfire on the streets, but the state of the city was still awfully grim. Alex wondered if the Ukraine had a past to be nostalgic for, something beyond his faint understanding of a twentieth century spent lurching from one atrocity to another. Far from imagining better times, Alex had trouble picturing the city when the sun was out.
Wasn’t this where Katya and Timor were from, or at least their family, their cartel? No wonder they were happy to be shipped off to the Black Sun. Anastasia probably never made them spend time in places like this.
Their outfits drew some attention downtown, but as they moved toward one of the wealthier suburbs, the attention began to peter out.
His clothes were uncomfortable, but that was no surprise. They had, after all, been tailored for someone else; someone slightly shorter and with a narrower neck and shoulders, apparently. That was the downside, he supposed, with being a last-minute addition to the scouting team. Apparently, the planning for this particular operation had not extended as far as providing him with a wardrobe.
Miss Aoki’s dress, on the other hand, had to have been made to her exact dimensions, because Alex could see no other possible way that she could have fit into the shimmering, silvery thing that accentuated every curve and contour. In fact, looking at it made him more than a little bit uncomfortable, even with a fur coat over the dress, despite the constant danger that she would stumble and drag both of them to the ground. This was a teacher, he reminded himself, not an elegant, desirable woman. Her black hair was not beautiful in contrast to the snow, nor did he notice the fullness of her red-painted lips.
It was worth a try.
“Still seems weird,” Alex muttered.
Miss Aoki sighed.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Alex stammered, suddenly wishing he had taken the hint the first time. “Seems weird to be all dressed up in a city that just had a revolution. Something like that.”
She seemed to think it over. Or she could have simply been watching for something, scanning their surroundings. Alex always found her hard to read.
“That isn’t a bad point, Alex. I’ll give you credit for noticing. Now, tell me – did it ever occur to you that we wanted to attract attention?”
“Well, um, no...”
Miss Aoki shook her head.
“You’ve become more capable of late,” Miss Aoki admitted, to Alex’s surprise and secret pride. “You are still walking around with your eyes closed, however, Alex. You need to learn to notice trouble before it gets its teeth in your throat.”
Alex didn’t think she was being fair, but he was grudgingly sympathetic to her point of view. He did have a history of failing to notice what was directly in front of him.
“I have noted some increased confidence on your part,” Miss Aoki continued. “This is a promising development, in your case. I have harbored suspicions that you might content yourself with moping and second-guessing yourself for the rest of your life. I am pleased to find them unfounded.”
“I’m glad to hear you say that,” Alex said gratefully. “You have no idea how much it means...”
“Your former obliviousness was not endearing.” Her tone was firm, but not hostile. It occurred to Alex that this was perhaps the most normal conversation he had ever had with Miss Aoki. “You were not accepted as a candidate for Audits based solely on the strength of your protocol, or your own willingness to volunteer. You were selected because there are people who believe that you have worth, that you could make a contribution of value as an Auditor. A lack of confidence is unbecoming, in the face of such advocacy.”
Alex shook his head again. The icy street and the dull buildings around him were little more than a blur, his mind somewhere else entirely.
“I had no idea,” he admitted. “I thought it was because of the catalyst effect, or whatever...”
“The value of a soldier is not in their weapon, but in their willingness to employ it, and their capability to do so with skill and discretion. If you listened to the lectures in the Program, then you would have heard me say this any number of times.”
Actually, Alex had heard it. The words were immediately familiar. But he hadn’t applied the rationale to himself, because he never would have suspected that anyone else would have applied it to him. Realization dawned belatedly on him.
“Miss Aoki, do you,” he paused, licking his lips and considering his words, “that is – did you advocate for me?”
“Of course,” Miss Aoki said, sounding surprised, adjusting the shoulder strap of her dress beneath her fur. “Goddamn this thing...”
“Um. Thanks. But...but I have to ask. Why?”
“Do you remember my battle with the silver Weir in San Francisco?”
“You mean Mr. Blue-Tie?”
Mitsuru blinked and hesitated, uncertain.
“What?”
“Never mind. Yes, of course I do.”
“Then is it safe to assume,” Miss Aoki continued, tugging at the hem of her skirt with a frown, “that you remember how that encounter ended?”
“Sure,” Alex responded, puzzled. “You killed Mr. Blue – the Weir. You killed the Weir.”
“Yes.” Miss Aoki nodded, with an expression that Alex couldn’t read. “With your assistance.”
“But that was no big deal. I mean, if Anastasia hadn’t told me to...”
“But you did,” Miss Aoki countered, surprisingly gently. “And when Central fell to the Anathema – surely you remember your actions?”
“Well, yeah,” Alex mumbled, looking away at the monotonously rectangular building beside them. “I had Katya with me, though. And I only did what anyone would have done.”
“You fought your way to the Academy, killing several rogue Operators and Weir in the process,” Miss Aoki reminded him, taking a firmer hold on his arm as they crossed a patch of half-melted ice on the irregular sidewalk. “You fought Alistair on your own and didn’t die, which is no small feat. And you woke Rebecca, when no one else could.”
“You make it sound better than it was,” Alex protested. “Anastasia talked me into going back to Central, and I mostly did it because I was worried about Eerie.”
“You know how to take orders, and you have something you want to protect,” Miss Aoki countered. “These are both positiv
e qualities. You are aware that I was on a mission, under official orders, on the night we met, correct?”
He had to concede the point, if not the argument.
“Even so. I had help. Without Katya, Mr. Windsor, Michael, and Rebecca, I probably wouldn’t have been able to do anything...”
“Which is why Auditors rarely work alone, and even when we do, it is with the remote assistance of a large support team. The lone hero who saves the world is a comic-book myth, Alexander, not an ideal to aspire toward.”
Mercifully, Miss Aoki fell silent as they walked through the grim suburb. Alex felt that she was wrong – he was certain of it – but at the same time, it bothered him that he could not think of a retort that didn’t sound ridiculous.
“I get what you’re saying, and appreciate you telling me.” Alex meant to say it to himself, but his whisper carried on the empty street. “I owe you a lot, Miss Aoki, and...”
“Stop!” Miss Aoki barked at him, and Alex’s mouth snapped shut of its own accord. “Be quiet.”
Alex bit his tongue and waited for the lecture, but nothing was forthcoming. They crossed a moderately busy street that seemed entirely lacking in traffic lights, which was a rather thrilling process, then continued on to another block that was virtually identical to the last, aside from a fringe of largely dead grass that surrounded the unpainted concrete building.
“Um, I’m sorry about...”
“Will you please shut up?” Miss Aoki shook her head. “Central picked up something nearby. I’m getting the details.”
Alex wondered why he wasn’t included in the briefing while he helped Miss Aoki navigate around a sizable pool of muddy water and half-melted ice that had partially flooded the uneven pavement. He understood that he wasn’t a full Auditor, and there were things that Central couldn’t – or wouldn’t – tell him, but it still made him nervous.
“We are fortunate,” Miss Aoki said finally, with a small smile. “There is activity in our area.”
“Great,” Alex said, in a voice devoid of enthusiasm. “But if there’s going to be fighting, I still don’t get why you brought me...”
“First off, we are a bit short on male Auditors, and Xia or Michael would stand out in Kiev,” Mitsuru explained wearily. “We suspect that the Anathema have a large number of Weir, and possibly Witches, with them. They must allow them to feed from the general populace, or they would starve. We are trying to trip up hunting Weir or Witches by appearing to be attractive prey. We are supposed to look like a couple, and we cannot simply rely on telepathic disguises. Besides that, you are in the Program, which means doing the occasional field op for experience – and this will be part of your evaluation for Audits, incidentally. Primarily, though, you were selected because you constantly emit Etheric energy.”
“I what now?”
“See? That’s what I’m talking about. Is that even English?” Mitsuru shook her lovely head. “The catalyst effect, Alex. Remember all those tests Vladimir ran on you? You were required to stand in the glass chamber for an hour or so?”
Alex remembered. It had been like being in a human-sized test tube, and Vladimir’s constant muttering to himself and occasional cackles of spontaneous laughter did nothing to reassure him. He kept reminding Alex of the mad scientist in those old Frankenstein movies, the black-and-white ones. The entire memory was panicky and claustrophobic.
“He was determining the amount of Etheric energy you radiate. All Operators give off a certain amount – that’s what we call the Etheric Signature – something else that has been repeatedly discussed in various classes. But, in this as in everything else, you are both an exception and a giant pain in the ass. You siphon raw energy from the Ether to create the catalyst effect. Assuming you don’t infuse another operator with it, it doesn’t just disappear.” Mitsuru sounded bored with the explanation, but Alex figured she was just concentrating on walking. “It dissipates gradually into the atmosphere around you. Every Operator does it to some extent, burning unused energy that would otherwise power their protocol, but they are a slow burn while you are a forest fire. Makes you great bait.”
Alex stopped suddenly, almost sending them both spilling into the icy gutter, and earning glares and what he assumed were curses from nearby pedestrians.“I could have sworn,” Alex said, self-preservation forcing his legs back into action, “that you just said I was bait.”
“That’s right,” Mitsuru said sharply. “And if you don’t quit messing about, I might let them nibble on you a little.”
Alex was more careful with Miss Aoki’s arm, and gave her another block to calm down. That was the nice thing about Miss Aoki, if there was one – she didn’t stay angry long. Unless, he figured, you really pissed her off, something Alex made every effort not to do.
Miss Gallow, on the other hand, never got mad about anything. After spending an hour with her, you started to wish she would, just so she would stop smiling. Mitsuru, despite her temper and harsh tongue, was infinitely preferable.
“Nibble? It’s Weir, then?”
Mitsuru nodded.
“Yeah. Vladimir thinks that’s why the Witches use Weir in the first place – as a method of population control, preemptive culling of potential Operators before we can find them. Weir hunt all the time, of course, but they target people with a natural affinity for the Ether in particular. Vlad thinks they might have even been engineered specifically for that purpose, rather than evolved.”
Alex mulled it over, while his new black matte shoes crunched through the grey, old snow.
“Who would have engineered them? The Witches?”
“Maybe,” Mitsuru said, shrugging indifferently. “But we’ve never found any evidence that they do things like that. So who knows? Maybe whoever built Central in the first place? Anyway, try not to worry about it. We’ve picked up a tail.”
Alex fought down the urge to look behind him, to spin around, to create distance between him and the pursuit he could only imagine. Of course, nothing that was following him, even a werewolf, was nearly as scary as Miss Aoki, so he did none of those things. Instead, he did his best impression of taking calm, measured steps.
“Where?” He hissed. “Behind us?”
“Yes, of course they are behind us,” Mitsuru said, guiding him by subtle nudges toward the mouth of an alley that led down into the darkness between two crumbling, Soviet-era concrete tenements. “They picked us up three blocks ago. Two of them. Now come on.”
She practically dragged Alex down the length of the garbage-strewn alley, the grey ice periodically turned to slush by vented steam coming up from grates in the sidewalk. About halfway to the chain-link fence that terminated the alley, she stopped, leaned against the cold concrete wall, and pulled him close to her, one arm on his back, the other on the nape of his neck.
“Miss Aoki?” Alex asked, alarmed. “What are you, um…”
“Shut up, Alex,” she whispered, pulling his head down until her mouth was beside his ear. “They are watching. Make it look believable.”
***
The chamber was a labyrinth, like a carnival maze of mirrors, fluctuating and malleable, manipulated by unseen forces, just as she currently was.
That, above all indignities, required restitution.
It was a constant balancing act, the weight of her fierce and aching thirst on one end of the scale, and the terrible visions, muscle spasms, and abdominal cramps that the drugs within the water brought. Anastasia did her best to measure her body’s dehydration against the necessity of maintaining a marginally clear head, but the drug distorted time in unpredictable ways, and her suffering made demands that even she was powerless to deny endlessly.
She lost track of the hours spent in that porcelain hell, blood and mucus leaking from her eyes and bent at the middle with horrible pains, one hand against a wall that shifted and shuddered against her cracked and bleeding skin. There were no shadows, and the omnipresent light pierced her skull and flayed her brain, denying her sleep and blurring
her vision. The periods of unconsciousness that overtook her were unpredictable and uncertain in their duration; she would simply come to with her face and knees bloodied, her cheek resting on the strangely warm stone of the chamber floor.
Paths wound along paths and then back unto themselves, and even when she thought she had carefully counted her turns, she always arrived back at that fountain, the yellow trumpet vine flowers floating across the disturbed surface of the metallic-tasting water. Her extremities were racked with tremors and her mouth felt as if it were packed with cotton. Her chest hurt with every breath, and when she exhaled, she could not help but whimper at the pain it caused her parched throat. Sometimes she discovered that she was speaking, in the endless brilliance of the winding passages, asking questions of the things she could see only from the corners of her eyes, things that evoked a childish and primal horror in her. When she could stand no longer, she lay curled in a ball near the fountain, the maddening sound of the water burbling causing her to flinch and shudder.
All in all, Anastasia figured, it could have been worse.
Days. It must have been days, but she had no idea how many. She became aware of tiny changes in the quality of light or in the composition of the air, things she felt with her hypersensitive skin as much as she tasted them when she breathed. There were voices that swelled and faded along with the sound of the water, the slow cellular death of her being by dehydration, the sound of her skin sloughed off against the stone. There were names hidden in the pervasive luminescence, names for the things that lacked form or definition. She cried out, in delight or horror, the two were indistinguishable, and then clutched her raw throat in pain. Anastasia wept and felt nothing, exhausted by the vastness of emotion that her skin was stretched across, brittle and translucent like parchment held to the light of a candle.
Of her ten fingers, nine had been bitten until the skin broke. Only her index remained, which meant that she had come to the end of what she could endure.
Voices. There were definitely voices, and a subtle change in the air, gun oil and spoiled grapes, the sound of a radio as the station slowly faded out, the color of the sky when the sun had descended behind the hills, leaving behind only the memory of daylight in the punctured sky.
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 38
