The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  The ashes and sparks whirled around in a tight knot, defying the wind to collect on the other side of the plaza, coalescing into something that looked like Alistair, but reminded Alex of the ash bodies at Mount Vesuvius. Fire crackled and glowed where the eyes and mouth should have been.

  “Not bad, Alex,” Alistair said, his voice emerging from the cloud of sparks. “I underestimated you.”

  “No fair,” Alex said, pulling himself up out of the frozen mud. “I had you.”

  “You didn’t, actually, but you are better than I expected. I hadn’t planned on showing my new form off so soon. I’d like to make sure you never tell anyone about it. But I’m afraid that I’m needed elsewhere at the moment. Bye for now, Alexander. Don’t think I will forget...”

  Like that, where Alistair’s voice had been, there was nothing more than a few flakes of ash carried away by the wind.

  “Well, I sure didn’t see that coming,” Katya said, helping Alex’s to his feet. “That was a good idea, though, freezing the ground underneath him. You might actually have some promise after all...”

  “What was that he turned into? What is going on with these people?”

  “One thing at a time, alright?” Katya said, taking him by the shoulders and leading him gently to the infirmary’s side entrance. “That’s the key to surviving, Alex. One thing at a time.”

  * * *

  Katya had to lead him by hand to the elevator, and he was halfway up before he could see anything other than purple dots. He still needed her help when they got to third floor.

  “Man, you are a hassle,” Katya complained, not sounding particularly upset. “You know, in a couple of minutes you are going to have a really big problem.”

  “Yeah?” Alex asked, wishing he didn’t have to hold on to her hand to keep from walking into the walls, but in the dim hallway, lit only by the red emergency strip lighting running along the wallboard, he couldn’t see anything at all. “What’s that?”

  “Well, we’ll be finished in a minute,” Katya said cheerfully. “That means that shortly you are going to have to either back up all that big talk about going to find Eerie, or you’re going to have to swallow the lot of it. You could maybe just say you were going to, and then go hide somewhere in the woods until it’s all over, instead, but the telepaths would figure it out eventually…”

  “Katya, seriously, shut up,” Alex said sternly. “I keep telling you, I’m going to do it. But…”

  Katya stopped for a minute to glance over her shoulder. He could just about make out her face now, through the floating colors. He was sure she was smiling at him.

  “But, what?”

  “But,” Alex said, looking away for some reason, even though he couldn’t really see her, “it would probably work a whole lot better if you came with me. That’s all.”

  “Really?” Katya asked, giggling. “You think so, huh?”

  “Come on,” Alex urged. “Aren’t you supposed to be my bodyguard?”

  Katya laughed and started down the hall, tugging him along with her.

  “First of all, I thought you didn’t need a bodyguard. Haven’t you been accusing me of stalking you since I started? Second, my job is keeping you from being killed. It would be much easier to knock you out and stuff you into a closet somewhere until this is over, rather than trying to protect you on some insane quest to preserve your rapidly dwindling Summer Dance options,” Katya said pleasantly. “Third, what’s up with asking me to help you rescue your backup girlfriend? Why would I want to do that?”

  “Why not?” Alex demanded. “Why wouldn’t you want to help her?”

  Katya sighed and reached for the doorknob with her free hand.

  “Maybe because I don’t think helping you get to her actually qualifies as helping her,” Katya said resignedly, letting go of his hand. “You know, Anastasia warned me, but it is really remarkable how fucking dense you can be. You really don’t get girls at all, do you?”

  Katya opened the door, and then something very strange happened. Someone spoke from inside, not with Rebecca’s voice.

  “He doesn’t actually. He really doesn’t.”

  Alex’s vision had cleared most of the way, so when Katya went flying past him, colliding with wall with a sickening thud as her head slammed against it, and then slumped down on the floor, unmoving, soaking wet and collapsed in an expanding pool of water, he was able to make out enough to watch helplessly. Alex looked up from her and into Rebecca’s room. Rebecca was still there, on one of the beds, as composed as Sleeping Beauty waiting for a prince to force his affections on her. Sitting on the edge of a trundle bed set up in front of Rebecca, Emily sat, her folded legs and a casually wrapped hospital sheet the only things preserving what little modesty there was to be preserved. She was working on her nails with an emery board, but she stopped and looked up when he stuck his head in.

  “Hi, Alex,” she said, her smile long and slow and ambiguous, her eyes half-lidded and amused. “Come on inside. Let’s try this again.”

  * * *

  Alice touched her head softly, as if reassuring herself that it was still intact. She could see herself reflected in the blue-tinted lenses of Xia’s goggles. They were very close, both pressed up against the stone wall of an alcove as the group walked by them. Xia smelled like sterile rubber and burnt cloth with an undertone of incense, the last scent incongruous but somehow familiar. It was nerve-wracking, watching her enemies walk right by her, but Gaul’s concealment protocol was as good as promised. They noticed nothing.

  She watched and counted. A short procession of what seemed to be lumbering corpses. Four Anathema, and then the girl Chris had called Leigh, followed by the vampire in the powdered-sugar suit. Alice felt Xia pat her awkwardly on the back with one gloved hand, and she smiled at him, knowing what the clumsy gesture cost him.

  “Don’t worry,” Alice said, smiling in a way that no one else could have found reassuring. “I’m fine.”

  The Anathema walked right by them, hearing nothing. They stopped at one of the entrances to the ruins of one of the old buildings, the intact subterranean structure that the Science building had been constructed on top of, a concealed and secret warren of cold stone tunnels that she didn’t remember having ever seen personally. The door had been sealed and cemented over, but their telekinetic, a pretty, dark-haired woman, tore it out and threw it aside with a gesture. They entered the dark space with obvious trepidation.

  Alice smiled to herself.

  “C’mon, baby, let’s go show them how Auditors settle accounts,” she said cheerfully, Xia falling in next to her. “It’s the least we can do, isn’t it, Xia? After all, we owe them something for their trouble.”

  26.

  “Oh, come on,” Emily said, patting the soaked mattress next to her. “Sit down with me. We never really got a chance to talk.”

  “Right, because your new friends attacked the house we were in,” Alex said, trying to find a happy medium between averting his eyes and keeping his eyes on her so she didn’t kill him. “So, um, what happened to your clothes?”

  “I came up the drain pipe,” Emily said, as if that were a completely normal thing to say. “I couldn’t exactly bring my overnight bag.”

  “I guess that makes sense,” Alex said grudgingly. “I’m going to check on Katya. Could you put something on while I do that? Because otherwise I’m not going to be able to listen to a word that you say.”

  Emily grumbled but after he left the room, he heard cupboards banging and thumping, so he figured that was as good as he was going to get, and hurried over to see if Katya was alive. He couldn’t find her pulse, and started to panic, but then he realized that she was still breathing, and wrote it off to lack of basic first aid aptitude on his part. She had a nasty knock on the back of her head that was welling blood, and she was soaked and ice-cold, but she looked okay to him. Alex propped her up against the junction of the wall and a nearby doorframe, where she would be at least partially out of the water that was
gradually covering the floor. Then he went back to face Emily. She was still sitting on the empty trundle bed, but now she was wearing the top half of a set of surgical scrubs, so huge that it hung down almost to her knees and really didn’t do much to cover her shoulders and chest.

  “Best I could find,” she said sweetly. “Now come sit down and talk to me.”

  The mattress of the trundle bed squelched when he sat down on it. He tried to sit down a safe distance away, but she shifted over to sit next to him, the wheels on the mount squeaking with her movement. The water that seeped through his jeans was frigid.

  “I wanted to tell you about it,” she said frankly. “But Therese said I had to keep it quiet. I’m sorry about that part. It must have been a hell of a surprise.”

  Alex looked at her in shock at the mention of Therese’s name. His attention seemed bizarrely drawn to minutiae. He noticed that Emily’s ears were no longer pierced, then realized that when she turned to water, the earrings must have been left behind, like her clothes. And that made him almost intolerably sad.

  “I’m sorry if I was what drove you to this,” he said, turning away before he got openly emotional with a girl that he had to remind himself was probably here to kill him. “I can’t believe Therese would let them do something like this to you.”

  “I was really scared,” Emily said quietly. “Until I walked out of the water and saw my body back there, floating in the pool. It was almost sad, sad and pretty. But this was all my decision, Alex. Not Therese. And now,” she said, grabbing his shoulders and turning him forcefully to face her open, sincere eyes, “now I am so glad that I did.”

  “What is the Outer Dark?” Alex said, licking his lips nervously. He tried to pull away but Emily’s grip was implacable and surprisingly strong, her hands wet and cold. “I thought I had a pretty decent scorecard going, but this is all…”

  “Frightening, right? I understand,” she said, as sympathetic as always. “The Outer Dark is… a place, like Central. A strange place, isolated in the sea of the Ether. The Anathema found it Alex, and they found… things there, too. Old things, things not built by men, not only buildings – language and machines and ideas. The Anathema studied them, and learned things, and the things they learned changed them.”

  “Okay, who are the Anathema?”

  “They were Operators, once,” Emily said laconically. “Exiled for proscribed experimentation and technology when Gaul engineered his takeover of Central. Driven out into the world and scattered, eventually they found a home in the southern desert of Egypt. They took Central’s name for them – the Anathema – and made it their own. And then they disappeared for the latter half of the twentieth century.”

  “God, this is exactly like being in class, and it’s fucking Spring Break,” Alex complained, and then he had a thought that made him sad all over again. Alex couldn’t understand what was happening – he was in danger of bursting into tears, and he wasn’t even sure why.

  “Now we can’t sit next to each other in homeroom, Emily.”

  Maybe it got to her like it did him. He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.

  “I don’t think I’m getting the important part across,” Emily said gently. “I need you to understand that I did this myself, for my own reasons, and that it turned out better than I had hoped. If I had stayed in Central, I would’ve ended up a slave, a pawn for one side or another, until boredom or despair overwhelmed me, or I was sacrificed in the name of a larger goal. And if you stay, Alex, the same thing is going to happen to you.”

  Alex shook his head.

  “Wait, so this is another recruitment speech? You want me to join with the people who are out there right now, killing people I care about?”

  “And why do you care about them?” Emily persisted, putting one cold hand on Alex’s knee. “What have they ever done but use you and lie to you? What about the Program, Alex, and what they tried to do to you? Who is it you’re feeling bad for? Rebecca? Gaul? Anastasia? They would throw you away in a second, any one of them, if they thought they could get something for it. Or is it,” Emily said, digging her blue-green nails into his thigh, “her? Are you sitting here with me and thinking about her again? Why are you so fascinated with that changeling?”

  “Maybe I like that she doesn’t need me for anything,” Alex said, crossing his arms over his chest in an attempt to preserve a little bit of warmth.

  Emily’s laugh was loud and filled with contempt. It made him feel rather small and foolish, as if he had just admitted to still believing in Santa Claus.

  “You honestly think that? Did you ever ask her? Because I tell you, whatever you think of me, she’s twice the monster I am. Besides, there’s no point in worrying about her anymore.”

  Alex started, and turned to face Emily, his face contorted.

  “What did you say?” His fingernails were digging, unheeded, into the skin of his own upper arms. “Did you do something to her?”

  Emily sighed, and then put one clammy hand on his forehead. His thoughts broke like a wave against a rock, and he tried desperately to hold onto the thread of what he had been saying, something that he knew was important, but couldn’t recall at all. He sank back onto the wet mattress gradually, as the tension and strength in his body dissipated.

  “Emily, why?” Alex asked, surprised at the desperation in his voice. “Why did you do this to yourself?”

  “You seem cold, poor thing. I’m sorry. I don’t even feel it anymore, not really,” Emily said softly, pushing him down on the soaked mattress. “I was keeping the water near freezing in case we had company, but no one is coming to interfere with us. Let me warm you up.”

  She lay down on top of him, and he felt increasingly powerless to do anything about it. Not like the last time, where he had been paralyzed by lust, guilt, and indecision. There was something a little bit frightening about it this time, something heart-rending about her affections, but he felt all of it distantly, as if it was happening to someone else. At the very least, she was good to her word, and her body and the water soaking the mattress beneath them warmed considerably.

  “Emily,” Alex asked slowly, through numb lips, “are you dead? Because I keep thinking that you are dead...”

  Emily looked at him tenderly, then took his hand and placed it on the slick surface of her own chest.

  “Can you feel my heart beat? Do I seem dead?”

  Alex found it difficult to speak at that moment, so he settled for shaking his head. They stayed that way for a while, Alex dimly unsure whether he couldn’t pull away or didn’t want to.

  “Are you still the girl I knew? How much of you is still Emily?”

  “There have been some changes, I know,” Emily said calmly. “But I’m the same person I always was. All that’s different is my perspective, my motivations, and my abilities. I am still Emily Muir. I am still your friend, Alex. Have I ever done anything to hurt you?”

  “No,” he admitted. “I wish you’d stop kicking Katya’s ass, though.”

  “I’ll try,” she promised, laughing while she kissed his cheek. “Alex, are you glad to see me?”

  “I am, but the circumstances are really terrible. What about Sara, or Li, or Vivik, huh? Some of them are could have been killed, Emily. Maybe all of them. I saw… bodies. On the way here.”

  “I know, I think it’s terrible, too,” Emily said, running wet hands through his hair. “But you need to understand that they were going to be sacrificed by Central, one way or the other. Where possible, they will be offered the same choice I was, the same chance I am offering you. Besides, this was done when the Academy wasn’t in session specifically to limit casualties. It will all be over soon, and then there won’t be any need for anymore killing. We aren’t evil, Alex. We aren’t monsters. The Outer Dark isn’t frightening, it is… it’s indescribable. Beautiful. When this is done, we’ll go there and see it together, Alex, you and I.”

  Alex stared up helplessly at the ceiling while
his body twitched and responded to her every movement. It would have made him feel a bit better to say that it was unpleasant, but that wasn’t true. His urgency, his worry, his memory and his intent were all disappearing – like someone had pulled a stopper from his head, and now they were all draining out into the water that pooled around the trundle bed.

  “I know what you are doing,” he said in a very small voice. “I can feel you tearing down the walls in my mind.”

  “But you can’t even say that you want me to stop,” Emily pointed out, kissing him lightly on the lips and then giving him a satisfied and mischievous smile. If she were dead, it would have made him sad, but she was so clearly, immediately vital, that grief seemed absurd. “You know, Alex, I never understood what you saw in Eerie. However, I’m starting to think that being all nice and sweet was the wrong way to go about things. Maybe I read you wrong from the very start; maybe you like girls who are bad for you. Am I right?”

  Alex reply was something on the order of an incoherent moan, as his thoughts broke and floundered, coming apart like a kite in the wind. He could feel her, inside his head, working her fingers into the cracks, shifting and rearranging. It didn’t hurt. It felt amazing.

  “You know, it’s funny,” she said, caressing him with one hand, smiling at him benevolently. “I did this because I wanted to make my own decisions, without having to please you or my family or the Academy or whoever. I wanted out of the trap I’d been born into. And now that I can make my own decisions? It turns out that I still want you.” Emily laughed, running her fingers lightly across his chest. “It’s stupid, right? But it’s still what I want. And this time, I’m not going to be so nice about it.”

  Alex put up his hands to push her away, but instead he found himself touching her wet hair, the contours of her damp skin. He could barely remember where he was. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly. Every sensation, every point of contact was magnified.

  “This is why Rebecca kept you so close,” Emily said wonderingly, laying her head on his chest. “She must have loved it. Your catalyst effect really is amazing, isn’t it, Alex? And the feedback loop, when an empath uses your abilities to boost their own... How long have you and Rebecca been doing this? I bet Eerie wouldn’t like it much,” Emily scolded, her eyes twinkling, “if she knew what it felt like, right?”