The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Timor let the dogs flush the attacker out from the hillock that concealed him, not too far from the gravel pathway. He simply pointed; he did not need to tell the Weir what to do. Donner and Blitzen were as smart as a reasonably stupid human, after all, or staggeringly brilliant wolves. They came at the target from both sides, almost simultaneously. If they had been trying to kill him, they would have gone for the throat, but instead they worried the assassin, clamping on to a leg and a forearm and tearing out healthy chunks. The man tumbled backwards, screaming as he fell into open space. Timor shot him coolly in the head with a suppressed pistol, far enough back to avoid any errant splatter.

  The next attacker knew Timor was coming, and took better cover, behind a section of wooden fencing bordered by a raised berm that the pistol could not hope to penetrate. Timor fumbled in his coat pocket for a moment, dismissing the Weir with a wave of his other hand. Donner and Blitzen looked disappointed for a moment, and then they lowered their heads and disappeared together into the trees. Timor pulled a grenade from his pocket, set the timer and removed the safety, and then closed his eyes. He didn’t bother to open them before he tossed the grenade. His timing was so perfect that it never hit the ground; instead, there was an airburst directly above the concealed gunman, invisible from where Timor currently stood. The explosion tore the man to pieces.

  Timor stepped out in full view of the sniper’s field of vision to stalk the third, clearly no longer concerned about that possibility of being shot from afar. The sniper team must have been so busy angling for a shot at either Timor or the target presumed to be fleeing the burning building that they had ignored Katya slinking up the hill behind them. She needed little more than line of sight before she could port the needles she carried somewhere instantly and dramatically fatal. Anastasia was pleased. Eliminating the sniper meant Timor’s task of taking the last attacker alive would be much easier.

  “Well, that that leaves only you, hiding in the woods behind me. Are you ready to come out, yet? Because all of your friends are dead,” Anastasia said, with satisfaction. “If you had a move in mind, this would be the time to make it.”

  The isolation field descended from the heavens like inverted thunder, abrupt and total, parting Anastasia from the scene in front of her like a pane of glass, perfectly polished and inset as to be virtually invisible. She could yell for help, she knew, and no one except the person who had been sneaking up behind her for the last few minutes would ever hear her. Not, of course, that she would ever give anyone the satisfaction.

  “Anastasia Martynova,” the man said, from behind her. “You are a fool. It may have cost my entire team, but it will be worth it to eliminate you.”

  “Eliminate me?” Anastasia said coyly, glancing over her shoulder at the man behind her. “Please. If you were a professional, you would not have bothered talking. Who are you, anyway?”

  Anastasia did not recognize him, but she knew the facial paint he wore. He was from the Taos Cartel, a cadet branch of the Black Sun, and obviously one of their top operators if he had drawn the opportunity to take a shot at her. Anastasia found herself in a rare struggle with her temper. She had heard rumors of dissention in the ranks of the Black Sun, but at the same time, there were always rumors.

  “It’s William Steed, Miss Martynova, but you can call me Bill, in light of the fact that I’ll be killing you,” he said, his grin revealing bad teeth. He wore the same blue and dark grey camouflage that the rest of his team had worn, his features partially obscured with cartel smudge paint, his head shaved down to stubble. “Unless you planned on trying to bargain with me?”

  “Why, whatever for?” Anastasia asked, amused and letting it show. “Do your worst, Bill.”

  He licked his lips and glanced around furtively. When he turned back to her, she decided she did not like the expression on his face much at all.

  “Your bodyguards won’t hear you scream. They won’t even notice anything is wrong until long after I’m done with you,” William said with obvious relish. “I suggest you rethink cooperating with me.”

  “Didn’t you say that you were here to kill me? Why in the world would I cooperate with that? Or are you suggesting that you could be persuaded not to kill me?”

  William Steed looked nervous and excited at the same time, pulling an almost comically large and serrated knife from a belt sheath and pointing at her with it.

  “Such a stuck up little bitch,” he sneered. “I remember you, Anastasia Martynova. You were sitting next to your daddy three years ago, when our cartel was disciplined and humiliated by the Black Sun. Do you even remember it? Or is that sort of thing routine for you? I remember your arrogant face, exactly like your bastard father. I’ve wanted to take you down a few pegs ever since,” he said, excitedly spraying spit as he talked. “I might like you better as a hostage, come to think of it.”

  Anastasia laughed because that was what was expected of her, but honestly, she felt tired. Treachery, she thought bitterly, was simply exhausting to deal with.

  “I don’t think so,” she said distastefully, leaning her head on her knee. “I doubt very much that anything like that will happen.”

  “I can make you do what I want you to,” he suggested, his voice taking on resonance and authority. “You will make an excellent bargaining piece, Miss Martynova. I’d like it if you would come with me.”

  “I am certain that you would,” Anastasia agreed, covering her mouth and stifling a yawn. “That was a telepathic protocol you just attempted, wasn’t it? Well,” she said, stretching out her back and then standing up slowly and turning to face him, “I suppose that it is quite impressive under different circumstances.”

  He took one step toward Anastasia, and then another. William Steed intended to be bold and menacing, but the hesitation in his gait betrayed his uncertainty. Anastasia could see the concentration and the effort he put into his protocol, his face reddening and his eyes twitching with strain.

  “Are you starting to understand?” Anastasia asked, her voice full of liberated, cruel laughter. “I can feel you trying to use that silly little protocol, William. Are things going the way you planned?”

  He took a small step back, then looked at the knife in his hand and seem to draw some confidence from it, and stood his ground, holding it out toward Anastasia like a ward, like she would simply walk straight into it chest first, saving him the trouble of stabbing her. Perhaps that was the suggestion he was trying to feed her now. Anastasia could not be sure, and she did not care to be.

  “Thank you for the isolation field, by the way,” Anastasia said, walking calmly toward him. “As much as I would like to make an example out of you, I simply cannot have anyone seeing this. It is an awfully big secret, after all.”

  William Steed was right about one thing. Nobody heard the screams.

  * * *

  “You’re serious?”

  Alice looked at her with an eyebrow raised.

  “I’m pretty sure he’s serious.”

  Mitsuru put her hand on Rebecca’s shoulder.

  “I am also sure that he is serious. The… gravity of the situation cannot have escaped him,” Mitsuru said delicately. “Now, Rebecca, we need some of them to not scratch out their eyes and choke on their own tongues, so please, please, please calm down.”

  “Yeah,” Alice chimed in. “It was funny at first, but we’re running out of bad guys.”

  “They attacked my school. They came for my kids at my school, according to what this piece of shit of told us. You want survivors? Fuck that. Alistair can interrogate his corpse.”

  “It’s a lot easier if some of them are still alive,” Alistair said, from the doorway, inspecting the damaged remains of the dormitory common room, where Rebecca and Alice had caught with the attackers. “I passed Margot Feld on the way in. She’s already reconstituted most of her torso.” He paused thoughtfully. “Somebody might want to get her some new clothes. Anyway, Rebecca, I need you to back down here…”

  “Do
n’t try and be funny,” Rebecca snarled, turning away briefly from the three remaining assassins, who crawled and whimpered on the ground in front of her. “Nothing about this is funny. Brittney Abbot is dead. Chris Ross is dead. Cy So is –”

  “Actually, we got to him in time,” Alistair offered hopefully. “Cy will be okay.”

  “Don’t you dare interrupt me!” Rebecca shouted, causing everyone except Alice to take one careful step backwards. “These are my kids! And this is my home… and this is not happening again.”

  Alistair looked at her for a long time. Long enough for him to know that a ghost had woken today for Rebecca. A ghost from a trip long ago home to Venezuela to visit her family, one that had changed everything for her. All he could feel from her mind was the heat of the blast, the smell of gunpowder and burning plastic, and the awful familiarity of the voices crying out for help, years old, but as fresh as the wound in Cy So’s stomach.

  “Five minutes,” Alistair pleaded. “Give me five minutes to ransack their brains for anything useful, then, if you still feel this way...”

  “I can do that,” Rebecca said, and the light that came pouring out from inside her was a coppery red, a hard flat light that poisoned the eyes and skin of the men whimpering below her. “They don’t have to live so that can happen.”

  Eventually they stopped screaming. Sleep would not come easy for any of the Auditors who watched, except for Alice Gallow, who slept like a baby every night. One of the men had been successful in ending his life. Alice did it for the other two, and she must have been feeling a little out of sorts, because it was quick and quiet. For Alice Gallow, it was practically mercy.

  Rebecca knelt in the center of the room and wept like a baby. Alistair waited as long as he felt polite before he came forward, collected her in his arms, and urged her to her feet.

  “We should go, Rebecca…”

  “To Gaul,” she said, her voice thick and hesitant. “Take me to Gaul. He needs to know what I know.”

  “Right,” Alistair said firmly, slinging her arm over his shoulder. “Alice, Mitsuru, you are on cleanup. Sweep the whole compound, no stone unturned. I want to know it’s clear before we have the kids running around.”

  Alice hesitated for a moment, her eyes lingering on Rebecca, and then she shrugged and headed out, followed by Mitsuru. Alistair waited until they were gone before he lay Rebecca carefully back down on the floor.

  “What are you doing?” Rebecca slurred, her eyes half-closed. “I need to tell Gaul…”

  “I’m sure you do,” Alistair said, with good humor. “Let me ask you a question – how powerful of a telepath have you become, lately? Because tearing information out of someone’s mind, well, that’s not something I remember you being able to do.”

  “It’s nothing special,” Rebecca muttered.

  “It’s impressive,” Alistair said, disagreeing. “You’ve always been a peerless empath, but with your expanded telepathic ability, you are starting to get downright dangerous, Rebecca. I bet you need time to organize all that information you downloaded, right? Three men’s lives. That is a great deal to comprehend, much less sift through all of it for one fact. If I was going to guess, I would bet that these men made you aware of some kind of treachery, a plot to topple the Academy from the very top, right?”

  Rebecca’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked at Alistair with obvious confusion. He gave her his most reassuring smile.

  “And that is important information,” Alistair continued jovially, “but what would be even more important would be the name of traitor. Do you know that name, Rebecca?”

  “Alistair,” Rebecca mumbled, shaking her head like someone trying feebly to wake from a nightmare. “Alistair, what are you saying?”

  “You always worried me, much more than the other Auditors,” Alistair said, sitting down on the floor beside her, and putting his hand on her forehead as if he was checking her for a fever. Rebecca barely had the energy to struggle. “You were probably the only one who could have stopped us, so I always thought we’d have to get you out of the way before things got going. Once you started tearing answers out of people’s brains, tough, that got a little scary. I had hoped to wipe the pertinent details from those fools’ minds, but you had to go and do it yourself, and as it turns out, that works even better for me. I am sorry, but I really can’t let you tell Gaul about this, or about me, or about that word, the one that is bothering you – ‘Rosicrucian’, right? Don’t think so hard, it won’t mean anything to you. But it would a great deal to Gaul, if he heard it.”

  Rebecca moaned when she wanted to scream. Alistair already had his hooks too far into her mind for her to manage anything more, and even that much struggle was agonizing, barbs tearing at the fabric of her identity.

  “Now, now,” he chided gently, “it’s a little late for that, dear. With Alice, I managed to wipe everything relevant when I restored her memory, but dear Alice is so suggestible in that way. It’s a shame that you won’t be able to see how that resolves itself. I think you would have been very surprised.”

  Rebecca managed to force her eyes open for a moment, but she could barely see despite that. Alistair was little more than a blurry form leaning over her.

  “Don’t look at me like that,” Alistair said, his voice smug and filled with laughter. “I’m not going to kill you. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, thanks to your protocol. I doubt anyone could, even your worst enemy. Instead, I’m afraid I’m going to have to make it impossible for you to interfere for a short time, until things are finished here. Don’t worry, though,” he said, closing her eyes gently with the palm of his hand, “by the time you learn to speak and move again, it will all be over.”

  17.

  The roof was dead quiet, but as soon as Alex had that thought, he regretted the description. He could still see the shattered façade of the nearby dormitory building in the back of his mind, though they had taken away the bodies and cleaned up the broken glass hours ago. When Katya had walked with him back home from Eerie’s, there was still blood on the concrete and frightened students crying, though that also seemed to have died down as the night descended.

  “I can’t believe they got Rebecca,” Alex said, taking a sip of his beer and making a face at the bitterness. Renton liked IPAs, and since he was the only one who seemed to be able to get beer, Alex had to drink them, but he hadn’t learned to enjoy it. “How could that even happen? Margot said she’s an Auditor, right?”

  “Yeah,” Renton said grimly, from where he slumped next to an HVAC unit, in one of the old classroom chairs they had dragged up here. He had bandages all the way down one arm, an ankle wrap, and a crutch that he seemed to barely use. “She is. One of the best. Alistair said they rigged the assassins with some sort of psychic trap, a parasitic protocol that disguised itself as a memory and then attacked her mind from inside, once it was past her defenses. I still have trouble believing it myself.”

  “Will she… be okay?”

  “Of course,” Vivik said immediately. Renton just shrugged, while Li looked away.

  “Who were they after, do you think?”

  Alex only felt okay asking the question because, for once, it didn’t seem to be him. One group had attacked Anastasia’s home, while a second had gone for one of the Administration buildings, meeting Alice Gallow and Rebecca Levy by chance. It hadn’t taken long to deal with either attack, but a third undetected group had made it as far as the dormitories in the meantime. A few kids he didn’t know were killed in the attack, and a couple more were in the hospital, including Li’s friend and Alex’s occasional training partner, Cy So. He wouldn’t have admitted it, but he felt a profound relief, not being responsible for this. After all, they hadn’t even attacked his dorm.

  “Hard to say,” Renton said thoughtfully. “Maybe it was Rebecca from the start. Who knows? They sure couldn’t have taken away anyone we need more right now. Half the primary school kids saw that happen. They’re probably all traumatized.”
<
br />   “It’s worse than that, and you know it. Rebecca’s a lot more important than you are giving her credit for,” Vivik said moodily. The boy had been drinking more than the other three over the past hour, to no visible effect, but causing some worry on Alex’s part. He understood, of course. Alistair had to intervene personally in order to prevent Alex from visiting Rebecca’s bedside a few hours before, dragging him down the hall while quietly explaining the need for her to recuperate in peace. “The Committee, the cartels, the Academy, it all holds together because Rebecca can always rally support, or smooth things over. Without her, Gaul might be brilliant, but I don’t think he can do much to keep control.”

  “How do you know all this stuff?” Li asked. “I’ve been here three years longer than you and I don’t know any of this…”

  For some reason, Vivik looked embarrassed to Alex, but maybe it only seemed that way. Maybe he was just drunk.

  “I’ve been studying political theory and history lately,” Vivik said dreamily. “I’ve been having these ideas…”

  “What I want to know,” Li cut-in, turning to Renton with a smirk, “is what you were doing over here, old man. Why weren’t you right by Anastasia’s side?”

  “I was watching out for Alex…” Renton began uncomfortably.

  “Bullshit! We all know where Alex was,” he said, turning and giving Alex a big grin that made him supremely uncomfortable, “so Anastasia knew, too, right? So what’s up with that?”

  Renton finished his beer before he said anything.

  “I think that maybe I got ditched. She’s been tight with Timor ever since they were both kids. I think she wanted to hang out with him without me around. It’s not a big deal.”