“Truly, the rumors do your madness no justice,” Anastasia said, with a small smile. “Your derangement is far worse than I could have anticipated.”
“Perhaps,” Brennan Thule agreed, laughing as he kissed her hand again. “You may be right. But you, milady, are no different. Already your protocol is warping inside of you, Deviant though it may be, into something irrational. Nearly as much as I am eager for your answer, I am consumed with curiosity to see what has become of it…”
“Are you certain that I am so changed? Let’s answer two questions at once, then, shall we?”
Anastasia leapt to her feet and lunged forward, her hand passing effortlessly through his arms and directly into the center of his chest. There was no resistance, no blood, no parting of flesh or even a hint of contact. Brennan Thule’s eyes bulged as his expression twisted in horror.
Anastasia smiled, her outstretched hand buried beneath his sternum.
“Would you like to know a secret?” Anastasia asked sweetly, her arm disappearing into his chest at the wrist. “It’s true. I am a Deviant, as is my Reign Protocol. Quantum tunneling, the scientists call it, this particular manifestation of my abilities. I know you were curious – you were rather boorish on the topic, honestly. You should know I cannot simply share all of my tricks with you. Nevertheless, as you were such a generous host, I feel compelled to share something with you. This is rather the least I can do, but an odd sensation regardless, is it not?”
Brennan Thule’s mouth opened, then closed again, without making any sound. He swayed uncertainly, his breath ragged and labored.
“I would not move, if I were you. Our current position is rather delicate.” Anastasia smiled benevolently. “You were eager for some sort of intimacy with me, were you not? Oh, but you look confused, poor thing. The principle is not difficult to understand – if you were to run directly at a wall, you would either bounce off of it or break it down, yes? Both you and the wall are solid, after all. Quantum theory, however, treats everything in the universe as waves and particles, matter and energy alike. Which means there exists some probability that the particles within yourself and the barrier could be precisely arranged in just such a manner as to allow you to pass directly through the wall without ever truly making contact. Fascinating to consider the implications, is it not?”
“I…I – I don’t…”
“Hush,” Anastasia scolded. “Don’t spoil the moment. I took an antidote, you see, before I immersed myself in your poison fountain, and I am afraid that while it protected me from your maddening drug, it left me a bit shaky. Since you have been so forthcoming with me, I thought it only fair that I share another peculiarity of my Reign Protocol. You see, if I deactivate it while I am in the process of passing through something solid, my mass will displace whatever is occupying the same space. The material involved is irrelevant – a phenomenon that no one has ever been able to explain. A miracle of the technology we are infused with, you might say. One of those things that humankind was not meant to know. Although,” Anastasia said, cocking her head to one side and looking at him speculatively, “it can be experienced, if not understood. Would you care to?”
Brennan Thule opened his mouth, but whatever he intended to say, he did not get the opportunity. Anastasia whipped her hand sideways, tossing a handful of wet red flesh to the side, while he fell to the ground. She stood in front of him for a moment, red to the elbow, then bent and carefully wiped her arm clean on the back of his jacket, leaving behind a smear of gore.
“What an unpleasant man,” she observed.
“I could not agree more,” the guard responded levelly, advancing on her. “That scene was very difficult to witness.”
“All the more so to take part in,” Anastasia agreed. “What took you so long, Renton?”
“Nothing important,” Renton assured her, casting aside his mask and sweeping her from her feet in one fluid gesture, then lifting her and carrying her as if she were a bride. “I simply didn’t wish to interrupt you when you seemed to be enjoying yourself.”
“You are an impudent servant, Renton,” Anastasia observed, leaning her head against his chest and closing her eyes.
“True.”
“However, given the circumstances, just the once…I will allow it.”
Renton stepped casually over Brennan Thule’s body, and carried Anastasia carefully from the chamber.
***
“Miss Aoki…”
It was honestly hard to decide if the situation was incredible or terrifying. Maybe, Alex thought dizzily, it was both.
“I am quite serious. Shut up,” Mitsuru commanded in a hushed voice. They were uncomfortably close, so that any casual observer would assume that they were locked in a passionate embrace, her back pressed to the wall. “They are making a phone call. We might have done a lot better than a couple of Weir.”
“Okay,” Alex said, Mitsuru’s face so close to his own that their lips were almost touching. “And that’s a good thing, right?”
“Very good,” Mitsuru said happily. “I’m glad I brought you, Alex.”
“Because I’m good bait?”
“Well, there is that,” Mitsuru admitted. Alex was starting to react to his proximity to Miss Aoki, a complicated mesh of fear, excitement, and guilt. The only thing that allowed him to hold it together was the rigidly professional expression on her face. “But I was specifically referring to the effect you have on me.”
Alex’s hands were planted against the cold brick wall, on either side of her shoulders, careful not to touch. Not that Miss Aoki wasn’t beautiful – she was, despite the collection of scars on her arms – but she was even more frightening.
“I’m not sure what you mean, Miss Aoki.”
He was careful to make his voice as devoid of implication as possible.
“The catalyst effect,” she said, bloodshot eyes fixed on whatever was happening behind him, in the mouth of the alley. “Rebecca told me all about it. She said that what I experienced after limited contact with you was just the tip of the iceberg. You are aware that my Black Protocol is still difficult for me to access?”
Alex wished that he could back away for a moment, to clear his head. He was aware that their proximity was an operational necessity, that their embrace was feigned, but his body stubbornly insisted otherwise. He really hoped that Katya wouldn’t see this. And not just because she would never let him hear the end of it.
After all, who knew what she and Eerie talked about when he wasn’t around?
“But I thought you could do that on your own now,” Alex objected, staying as close as possible while averting his eyes. “Katya said as much.”
Mitsuru laughed mirthlessly, her eyes darting back and forth, tracking whatever movement was happening behind his back, something that was making him feel even more vulnerable. The situation was tense and unpleasant, and his whole body shivered, expecting something to sneak up or strike him from behind.
“Katya should mind her own business,” Mitsuru said softly. “She is only half-right. My ability to activate it is sporadic, and even when I can achieve activation, maintaining it long enough to be useful presents another challenge entirely. The control I have over it at the moment is well below the level it needs to be operationally useful. So do me a favor…”
She paused, and then pulled him close to her, moving so fast he had no time to react. Her head rested against the side of his nick, her body pressed briefly against his own. Alex’s breath caught in his throat, and his hands clutched at the wall behind her for support. He could feel the transfer of energy between them, an echo of the euphoric feedback cycle that Rebecca had induced during their sessions. Just as abruptly, Miss Aoki pushed him aside with a casual disdain while her eyes turned sparkling jet-black, blacker than her silken hair.
“…and keep this our little secret, okay?”
“Is there a blackmail class at the Academy that everyone takes but me?”
Alex leaned against the wall with his outs
tretched arms, palms resting on the chilled brick. It took a minute of deep breathing and staring at his shoes to compose himself. By the time he dared to turn around, he found himself alone in the alley.
Well, relatively speaking.
There were four people walking down the alley toward him, with a businesslike purposefulness to their stride that hinted at their confidence in the situation. The two in front were Weir, no doubt about it – the excessive body hair, unibrows, and elongated canine teeth gave them away. The women behind them looked more or less like normal people – impossibly beautiful people wearing clothes that even Alex could tell were expensive. One wore a red dress that seemed to change hue as she moved and the light shifted, while the other wore a pale, loose blouse and grey pants, accessorized with a belt buckle that was nickel-plated and approximately the size of Alex’s head.
“Oh shit,” Alex whispered, talking a couple furtive steps back. “Witches.”
The Witch in red reminded Alex vaguely of a news anchor whose name he couldn’t remember, with her relentlessly cheerful voice and platinum-blonde hair.
“Boy,” she called out, in lilting Russian (or Ukrainian, probably, since Alex could understand her), “would you mind terribly coming with us?”
“Gee, thanks, but...how ’bout no?”
Alex reached for the Black Door, but didn’t open it. Those were his instructions, and when the source of the instructions was Alice Gallow, Alex felt that it was imperative to obey them to the letter.
The other Witch, a brunette with too much gold jewelry, and high heels nearly as ridiculous as those Miss Aoki had worn, smirked and put her hands on her hips.
“What do you plan to do, child? Do you think yourself capable of resisting?”
“Me? Oh, no. I’m kind of a pushover. But I didn’t come alone…”
“Yes,” the blonde Witch agreed, turning about to glance around the alley at irregularly placed dumpsters and bags of refuse. “Where did she run off to? Have you been abandoned to the wolves, child?”
Miss Aoki stepped out of thin air in the midst of them, bleeding the black, viscous goo from her forearms that Alex knew was a concentrated mass of nanite disassemblers – tiny robots that took things apart at the molecular level and used the raw materials to replicate. The end of the world, running inside the veins of a petite half-Japanese woman with blood-red eyes, who had somehow found the time to change into fatigues with the arms cut off, so she could bleed freely. The black blood reflected the weak sun like an oil slick, coating both of her arms from her elbows to the tips of her fingers. The Weir snarled, the Witches recoiled and reached for weapons or began workings, while Miss Aoki started her attack.
It wasn’t pretty. Alex would have rather looked away, but he didn’t want to be reprimanded. He had a job, keeping the Black Door almost open, something he had learned to do only recently. Miss Gallow’s plan did not call for him to use his protocol, but it did call for him to act as a reserve, in case their lure pulled in something bigger than Miss Aoki could safely neutralize.
The Black Door existed as a nexus of pressure in the cavity of his skull, a cold enormity behind his eyes. It was a difficult state to maintain, not quite open, not fully closed, but it allowed him to use his protocol immediately and to great effect. It would have been even more difficult for Alex to explain exactly how it was done. Like many of the things he had learned from Rebecca Levy, the ability had been implanted on such a fundamental level that using it was instinctual, practically like breathing. Extremely labored breathing.
One Weir was bright enough to dive away. The other tried to spin around to face its opponent. A ligature of black blood ran between Mitsuru’s hands like wire as she reached over the head of the Weir in mid-spin. While Alex was still trying to puzzle out her intention, she drew the cord across its throat, severing the Weir’s head from its body with no visible resistance, and Alex suddenly understood what was happening. A garrote. A garrote on the molecular level.
As it turned out, that Weir was fortunate.
The second Weir spun around and pounced over the corpse of its companion with claws bared, in mid-transformation. Mitsuru watched its advance impassively until it was frighteningly close, then she whipped both arms through the air, droplets cascading on the Weir’s clothes, fur, and exposed skin. Everything the black blood touched boiled and vaporized, so neatly that it was impossible to think of the process as violent. It bordered on clinical – particularly the “olden-days” kind of clinic, where there was lots of screaming. The Weir stumbled just short of Miss Aoki, falling to the ground and rolling away from her. It touched the places that were being eaten away, a reflexive gesture that allowed the black blood to crawl to its fingers.
Alex was sort of worried that he was going to be sick, once the disassemblers started their work on the Weir’s face and eyes. Miss Aoki had already moved on, however, with the ludicrous speed of the alacrity protocol she employed. He could see the Etheric Signature created by her implant like a great flare mounted in her skull, and wondered if it hurt.
The short-haired Witch threw something at Miss Aoki – Alex couldn’t identify it before it exploded, but it didn’t look like typical ordnance. Whatever it was, it detonated with enough force that Alex felt it five meters away, almost knocking him to the ground, but there was no shrapnel, or he probably wouldn’t have survived. Mitsuru was sent sprawling back, colliding with one of the alley walls with a sickening impact and then falling limply to the sidewalk.
Alex didn’t wait to see if she got up. He triggered the routine which activate the Absolute Protocol and braced himself for the cold. The world around him was abruptly infused with a glowing framework of energy, Miss Aoki and the Witches were represented as dense congregations of tiny and brilliant thermal constellations. The Ether pressed in on everything with a subtle tension as universal and unnoticed as gravity. He concentrated, poking five equidistant pinholes in an array centered around the head of the short-haired Witch.
The Witches must have been sensitive to the activation of his protocol, because they turned toward him in a disturbing act of unison before he could activate it. The Witch in the red dress began a complex sequence of ritualistic hand gestures, while the other sprinted in his direction, darting away from the rents into the Ether that would have caused her death a fraction of a second later. Even that small exposure would have been damaging to a human, but it had no obvious impact on the Witch’s alien physiology.
The short-haired Witch scuttled down the alley, crossing half the distance between them in a heartbeat. There was no time to consider reaching for the Glock tucked in the holster nestled in the small of his back. Alex assumed a basic defensive stance, left leg forward, up on the balls of his feet, one arm extended and the other high, and started the process of resetting his protocol.
There was fear, but there was no opportunity to acknowledge it. Alex took a single deep breath, and then she was on him.
In the second before they would have collided, the Witch leapt, throwing a handful of dust that sparkled in the weak sunlight, a pink cloud of gleaming crystal which reminded him of table salt and enveloped his head. Alex closed his eyes, but not quickly enough, and he felt searing agony and fought the desperate urge to clutch at his eyes. Across the exposed skin of his face and hands, there was an initial sensation of wetness, followed by a terrible burning as if he had been set afire. Alex wanted to scream, but the fear of inhaling whatever burned his skin and eyes held him back.
Blinded, he was unable to block the Witch’s strike. He knew from lectures in the Program that Witches practiced their own unique style of hand-to-hand combat, involving quick and shallow strikes designed to incapacitate, but he had never experienced it, so he had no idea what to expect. He anticipated a crushing blow from above, and crossed his arms in front of his head to absorb it, but instead the tip of her foot caught him in his left side, below his ribs. It was a sharp and precise strike to the liver, and it bent him double. Alex fell forward, aiming t
o elude the cloud of burning crystals and entangle himself in the Witch’s legs, but clutched blindly at air instead. He hit the ground with his elbows, the impact running up his arms and jarring his shoulders; then a moment later, a heel slammed down on the back of his head, driving his jaw into the ground. The pain was such that he was certain that his bones were broken, but there was no time to linger on the details of his beating.
Alex rolled to the right, the Witch’s shin colliding with his shoulder, tearing open the back of his neck in the process. He wrapped his arms blindly around the Witch, linking his arms around her waist and driving his shoulder into the side of her knee. He forced his eyes to open despite the pain, his vision reduced to a weepy blur, but it was better than fighting blind. The Witch lashed out again, her rigid fingers aimed at his throat, but Alex ducked his head, taking the impact on the forehead instead. The tips of her fingers gouged into his forehead, opening a wound that immediately began pouring blood. Alex lunged forward and torqued sideways, twisting the Witch to the right and driving his shoulder into her hip. She fell to the ground with him on top and then there was a long moment of flux, the Witch striving to wriggle free while Alex released his hold around her waist and scrambled, planting his knees on her hip and back while he grasped for her neck, but came away instead with a handful of hair.
It was enough. The air from beyond the Black Door chilled him to the bone as he tore six minute holes to the Ether in a halo around her cranium.
“You can feel it, right?” Alex gasped, pushing his weight down on her hip and spine while he pulled her head back toward him. “Don’t move. Or I will freeze the blood in your brain solid.”
The Witch quieted beneath him, and Alex relaxed slightly, struggling to blink the burning material out of his eyes.
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 40
