The Far Shores (The Central Series)

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Haley emerged from the wall, holding one insubstantial finger to her lips as she drifted toward the soldier’s head. Alex saw Katya’s hand tense around her needles, and he readied himself to operate his protocol. The wispy ghost-image of Haley invaded the soldier’s head, like watching video of a smoker exhaling in reverse.

  The Anathema’s movements were clumsy, but no one paid him any attention as he turned to his left and oriented his sights on the soldier beside him. Then the room was filled with the deafening sound of high-velocity automatic fire. The soldier nearest was cut down before he could react. The technician froze in place, staring at the soldier beside her in horror while he pivoted to target the Anathema on the opposite side of the room. Alistair looked bemused, and opened his mouth as if to object. Katya moved in his direction, and Alex followed her cue, employing the Absolute Protocol to punch a cluster of tiny holes to the Ether, localized entirely inside the head of the soldier hovering near the door.

  Moving slowly and with an expression out of a nightmare, the soldier that Haley possessed raked the room with gunfire. Alistair ducked while the rest of the Anathema scrambled. The soldier Alex targeted stumbled, tearing the bulletproof helmet from his head in a panic, whining like a beaten dog. Across the room, one of the Anathema troops was struck several times by the bursts fired by the possessed Anathema, but his companion had the wherewithal to return fire. Alex knocked Katya down with a lunging tackle, covering her without thinking while bullets passed overhead and ricocheted off the metal walls of the chamber.

  The possessed soldier was struck in the chest with a round from an enemy carbine, wounding him grievously. Haley was already gone, darting across the room and diving into the head of the remaining soldier guarding the door, forcing his aim up and wide, so that the shots he intended for Alex and Katya went wide. Alex activated his protocol, and a nearby soldier writhed and convulsed as the blood in his brain flash-froze. The soldier Haley had possessed turned and expended the rest of his rifle’s magazine, but her control of the man’s movements were too crude to achieve accuracy, firing wildly in the general direction of her target, who was crouched behind a large steam pipe for cover.

  Alistair disintegrated into a cloud of spinning embers and ash, Katya’s needles clattering to the floor and bullets passing harmlessly through. The cloud quickly coalesced into the form of a man, Alistair’s features gradually reforming out of the swirling soot. The last of the Anathema fired several rounds from his carbine at the soldier Haley had possessed, wounding and knocking him to the ground. Haley forced him to toss aside the rifle and charge his assailant, ignoring bullets that embedded in his Kevlar vest and punched through his arms, leg, and neck. The possessed soldier opened his mouth in a soundless scream, blood pouring from numerous wounds, and then leapt across the pipe the Anathema used for cover, knocking his carbine aside and pummeling him with the one arm that was still intact enough to move. His momentum carried both to the ground, where they struggled briefly, while Alex and Katya cautiously returned to their feet. There were three quick shots, muffled by the bulk of a lifeless body; then the Anathema pushed the corpse aside and rose, sidearm aimed at Alex.

  Katya was faster, needles disappearing from her hand and reappearing embedded in his hand, arm, and neck. The soldier cried out and dropped his gun from his punctured and immobile hand, grabbing at the needle that punctured his windpipe in horror. It was a relief for Alex when Katya finished him off with a second set of needles, his body crumpling to the ground while Haley floated above, like a cartoon ghost departing a body. Alex turned his attention to Alistair, meaning to activate his protocol, but found himself staring at Alistair’s pleasant smile, unable to trigger the hypnotically implanted routine that opened the Black Door.

  Haley shrieked as her glowing form shattered like dropped porcelain, the fragments disappearing before they could hit the ground. Katya’s eyes rolled back in her head, and Alex grabbed her shoulders before she could tumble, her body in the throes of a grand mal seizure, bloody foam leaking from between her gritted teeth.

  “Back to work,” Alistair snapped at Talia, who was huddled behind the intact server racks. He strode purposefully across the room, snatching Katya’s rigid body from Alex and casting her aside to collide with a nearby wall with a dull thud, then grabbed a handful of Alex’s hair and dragged him to his feet.

  “You brats are such a pain in my ass,” Alistair said, punching Alex in the stomach so that he doubled up and dropped to his knees, retching. “I have had about enough of that. What do you say we resolve this thing,” he suggested evilly, taking a machete from a sheath attached to the body of a nearby Anathema soldier, “just the two of us.”

  ***

  One theory concerning the manifestation of protocols suggested that their presentation was influenced by the subconscious preferences of the Operator. Vivik was personally inclined to agree with the idea, if only because his own remote-viewing ability, the Vigil Protocol, manifested as an array of malleable windows – not unlike a multitude of computer displays – that surrounded him in a series of orbiting rings, rotating to match the demands of his desires. At the moment, six different views hovered front and center, offering a stunningly comprehensive overview of the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine and at the Far Shores.

  “I’ve been a fool, haven’t I?” Vivik shook his head. “An utter idiot.”

  “Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Anastasia said gently. “Boys are generally hopeless in these matters.”

  “That doesn’t…”

  “I don’t blame you at all, myself,” Renton offered, watching over Anastasia’s shoulder. “Emily’s hot, Anathema or no.”

  “That isn’t what…”

  “We all make mistakes, Vivik,” Timor said, clapping him on the shoulder. “It happens.”

  “I appreciate it, but you guys don’t understand,” Vivik said bitterly, one of the displays shifting to show a woman with facial tattoos approaching Eerie, while Alex cautiously circled away from Alistair in the background. “I knew what Emily was doing. I just thought I could change her mind. I hoped that she still wanted to come back, if someone would open the door for her. That was my mistake.”

  “The heart of a woman scorned is treacherous and savage,” Anastasia intoned solemnly, watching Alice Gallow wobble and stagger her way across the chemical factory floor. “Your intentions were good, Vivik. It is time to put that aside, however, and focus on remedying the situation.”

  Vivik nodded, and the screens blurred and reshuffled, a view of Gaul sorting the contents of a recently emptied file cabinet coming to the center.

  “You’re right, of course. I’m not sure how I can help, though, unless all you needed was a remote viewer.”

  Anastasia laughed quietly. Behind her, a servant shooed Renton to the side so that she could resume her efforts to style Anastasia’s hair.

  “Hardly. Should I require the services of a remote viewer, my cartel’s resources would prove sufficient, I assure you. Though, I must add, your own talents have grown prodigious. I do not remember the Vigil Protocol being so comprehensive.”

  “It wasn’t. That is a recent development. One that I suspect might have something to do with emotional proximity to Alex. Am I right?”

  Anastasia smiled cryptically.

  “I cannot discount the possibility. Tell me, Vivik – are you certain that you wish to enter the service of Central upon your graduation? I would welcome you in the Black Sun…”

  “Thanks, Anastasia, but the answer’s still no. I don’t believe in the cartel system.” Vivik glanced away from the Vigil Protocol’s myriad views briefly to glance at the diminutive girl beside him, partially obscured by the servant applying curlers to her hair. “As much as I respect you personally, of course.”

  “Naturally.”

  “If you didn’t need a remote viewer, though, then why I am here? Since we are in Berlin, I assume that you mean to intervene in the Ukraine…though given how dire the circumstances have be
come,” Vivik added, nervously bringing a view of Michael and Xia suffocating to the fore, “you don’t have much time left…”

  “Not necessarily.” Anastasia lowered her head in cooperation with her hairdresser’s efforts. “I have no particular interest in rescuing the Auditors from the results of their own folly.”

  Vivik’s eyes flicked from one view to the other, the displays alternating and reorienting and he scanned them.

  “Your intent escapes me,” Vivik admitted with a sigh.

  “Of course,” Anastasia agreed amiably, the hairdresser tilting her head to one side before switching to a comb and scissors. “While I think highly of your intelligence and perception, Vivik, I would be very concerned if you were capable of divining my intentions. My position may be hereditary, but I assure you that it is not unmerited.”

  “I never meant to imply…”

  “She’s teasing you, Vivik,” Timor advised. “Ana, just tell him what you want, okay?”

  Anastasia glanced at Timor and pursed her lips.

  “You are no fun, Timor.” She sighed while contemplating the ongoing battle between Mitsuru and a number of Anathema, both living and dead. “Very well. I am about to take action, Vivik, as you must have guessed. And this particular action is one that I wish to make public. Therefore, I request that you observe what happens – from a safe remove, as befits your talents.”

  Vivik turned to her in confusion, the displays around him flickering as if losing signal.

  “I don’t understand. What do you have in mind?”

  “Renton will remain here, to assist you,” Anastasia explained, clearly amused by Vivik’s bewilderment and Renton’s annoyance. “You will observe my actions. Renton will broadcast them, making sure that the relevant parties are aware of today’s events.”

  Vivik shook his head.

  “But why?”

  “Oh, my dear, sweet-and-oblivious Vivik,” Anastasia exclaimed. “What good is there in saving the day, if no one is watching?”

  ***

  Everything was uncertain.

  The laughter, for example. Michael was almost sure that he could hear Nick Marsh’s flat and hollow laughter while he crawled aimlessly on the wreckage-strewn factory floor, but it was impossible to be certain, because of the clamor the mass death of his brain cells created. The sound was like metal pipes clashing, like the rotors of some vast propeller. It did not make thought impossible; rather, it made it impossible to take any of his thoughts seriously – their import was severed, each floating freely through his head, without the tedious weight of context.

  Equally uncertain: His distance from Xia, who hadn’t moved in what might have been quite a while, or possibly no time at all. Occasionally, black dots would swallow up his vision, passing across his field of view like opaque steam, and Michael was plunged into a darkness filled with the sound of leaden bells clanging and a sweet and vaguely metallic taste in the back of his throat, his wounds aching with the acuteness of a rotten tooth, but without causing him the slightest distress. He would wait out this periodic blindness, then resume his crawl when it receded. Either he wasn’t making any progress, or he had lost his ability to judge distances.

  Truthfully, it didn’t matter. Michael could not remember what he had intended to do once he reached Xia. Perhaps he meant to flee the hallucinatory atmosphere that the Anathema had created? Then again, what made him sure there was a perimeter to the effects, or that it could be reached? And even if he could have, there were more of them, he was fairly sure – Anathema soldiers with assault rifles and machine pistols, the discharge of protocols illustrating unfamiliar features. They were surrounded, Michael thought groggily, like the heroes in one of those awful colorized old cowboy movies, cowering behind an archetypal pioneer wagon while Indians in war paint rode around them in menacing and incomprehensible circles.

  There was further confusion, regarding the matter of holding his breath. Michael was unsure if he had been holding it in the first place, or if he had given up and began breathing freely, reasoning that holding in a lungful of whatever was poisoning him so gently was no better than gasping like a fish out of water, so he alternated between the two, depending on what seemed more likely during his protracted and staggered moments of clarity. The situation was only exacerbated by his inability to remember what he decided previously, making any decision he made fundamentally moot.

  Sometimes, he wanted to laugh, though none of it struck him as particularly funny. In fact, there were all sorts of strange impulses that would possess his dying brain with a brief and frightening intensity, only to pass on and be forgotten in what felt like seconds, or minutes, or years. Not that it mattered. Michael waited for his vision to clear, then he continued to crawl toward Xia’s static form, stretched on the ground, faint trails of smoke extending from the burnt edges of the gloves that still covered most of his fingers.

  He remembered things at random; like a computer, he thought giddily, maybe suppressing his desire to cackle, random access memory. They were entirely visual, his other senses held at a strange remove, as if they had been displaced by centimeters, crawling beside him through the wreckage like the doubled images in a pair of unfocused binoculars.

  Alice had extremely fine hair, Michael remembered, and there had been a particular feel to the way it had felt, running a strand through his fingers – but all that was left to him now was the look of the action, the cognitive portion of the memory absent the sensory. The bed had been warm, he knew, and the sheets were flannel to ward off the chill of what must have been winter. She was illuminated by a reading light, flipping through one of her leather-bound diaries with an air of profound concentration, occasionally frowning or sounding out words with lips bruised from an altercation in the field a week earlier, the front swell of the lower lip bisected by a perfectly linear scab. Michael had been half-asleep, woken in the middle of the night to find her struggling with insomnia, tormented by dreams of things that she could not remember, could not be certain had been pieces of her perpetually diminishing past. Watching her read, he had felt a peculiar mixture of affection and sympathy, something that he would never be able to express accurately to her, and never be invited to try.

  Michael rolled over and let his eyes drift closed.

  That was when the visions began, when he was forced awake by sound and motion, irritable to be shaken from the sleep that he urgently required, to see a multitude of impossible things, rendered silent by the terrible ringing in his head that receded to nothing the moment he forgot about it.

  There was a woman with curly hair who flickered like candlelight. Michael tracked her movements as a series of still impressions, like a slideshow of an athlete in motion – burying a knife in the throat of one shadowy figure, then knocking the legs out from beneath another, then gone, departed from his limited point of view, only to return again in the periphery, locking a man with a scarred face and Mediterranean features he did not recognize in a choke hold. Before he could focus his eyes, she was gone, and instead he saw the muzzle flash of a nearby shotgun as it tore pieces from a man’s torso.

  The room had gone dark – not the natural half-light of mostly blocked daylight and distant halogen lamps, but the pitch darkness of the underground or childhood nightmares, the kind of darkness the encourages the eyes to make things from it; sinuous and alien monsters writhing just below the point of perception, the reflection of light off scales and reptilian eyes, the subtle aura of ghosts and the disturbance of the air that implied motion where nothing moved. Michael recoiled, or he would have, if such a thing were still possible, if he had not been separated from his body, as if his relationship to it had been changed to something he was confined inside of, rather than the form he inhabited.

  The darkness was broken by the vivid and stark gleaming of energetic protocols, by the certainty of screams in the absence of sound, by the implication of claws and teeth and frightening, alien eyes. The air around him was warm though he could not feel it, and th
e ground beneath him shuddered, though he was unaware. He caught occasional glimpses of the Anathema, fighting things neither he nor they could see, but frightened both of them nonetheless, until they were silenced or taken, one by one, by violence, or worse – by extensions of living darkness, by things like tiny and malformed hands that consumed them, piece by piece, as if they were clusters of invisible and voracious mouths.

  And then, perhaps because of his memory, the feel of Alice’s unbound hair tickling his face, the taste of blood and lip gloss as her mouth pressed to his – but this had to be a lie, another hallucination, like the terrible pain in his chest, the awful sensation of compression. Michael tried to close his eyes, to return to the rational safety of sleep, to peaceful and breathless quiet, but something insisted otherwise. He could not remember if he was holding his breath, but something would not let him, and the air that was forced into and out of his lungs lacked the sweetness of the poison to which he had become accustomed.

  Alice’s face, too close to his own, a ridiculous point of view, like opening his eyes in the midst of passionate kiss. Tears rolled from her cheeks to drip onto his face, and he felt the wetness across his entire body, as if the liquid somehow resonated along the whole of his skin. The thunderous ringing resolved itself into the cries of the wounded, Alice gasping for air, the sound of his own labored breathing. The black moss that had grown across his vision died away, to be replaced with the lightning-flash clarity of the pain of a broken rib.

  Michael rolled on his side, coughing, despite the fact that it hurt. The pain came back to him like the end of a rolling blackout, lights flickering on in sequence. Last of all was a headache, slightly removed but insistent, the beginnings of a hangover that he had premonitions would be horrible, the worst of his life.