The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  Renton nodded his agreement. He looked about as battered as she had ever seen him, with his suit in tatters, and cuts and bruises distributed liberally about his face, chest and arms, but that made sense. He had, after all, been very busy.

  “But, Renton, it’s important that you understand something. This was a position you put me in. A situation that you created,” Anastasia said sternly. “Because you have worked for me for so many years, I am going to make myself extra clear. Do you understand what the problem is?”

  “I suppose,” Renton said, scuffing his shoe on the ground. “What can I say? I can’t help how I feel.”

  “You can, trust me,” Anastasia assured him bitterly. “It’s inappropriate and unnecessary, Renton. It was one thing when you had the good sense to keep it private. Now that you’ve started making it public, people are noticing, and talking, and you know perfectly well I can’t have that. You know who I am and why this is important. I shouldn’t have to explain it to you.”

  “No, you don’t, it’s just that…”

  “Believe me, Renton; I’m not confused about what you are thinking. Would it help at all if I told you that I was a lesbian?”

  Renton’s jaw didn’t drop, but he did miss a beat.

  “…are you?”

  Anastasia shook her head.

  “Not even slightly,” she admitted. “I just thought it might make you feel better about things.”

  “I appreciate the gesture.”

  “Anyway, you know as well as I do that any match I make would be political,” Anastasia said, making sure she sounded matter-of-fact, and not resigned. “The good of the Black Sun comes first, Renton.”

  “You don’t have to let the precognitive pool decide this for you!” Renton shouted, gesturing angrily. “Come on, Ana! You never let anyone tell you what to do.”

  “I don’t. I also understand that I wasn’t simply born into power and wealth. I was born to rule. I have never had a life of my own, Renton, and I never will. The power and the wealth, this is my compensation for putting the good of the cartel before my own. Leading the Black Sun requires excellence and total devotion, even my poor father understands that. Why can’t you?”

  “I do understand,” Renton said sullenly. “I just love you anyway.”

  Anastasia’s expression was icy.

  “Did you think I would be happy to hear that? Maybe feel sorry for you?” Anastasia demanded, clearly furious. “Look, I need to know this is dealt with. I need you to understand that, even if I had a choice in the matter, I still wouldn’t pick you.”

  Renton laughed sharply.

  “I hate to say it, but Alex is right,” Renton said glibly. “You are brutally frank.”

  “If it helps, I am sorry,” Anastasia said, shrugging. “It is what it is. Find someone your own age. At least how old you look. It’s not as if you ever hurt for attention. If Svetlana hadn’t passed out from overwork, poor girl, she’d probably be following you around right now.”

  “I know, but I want…”

  “Forget about it,” Anastasia commanded, frustration evident in her expression and her voice. “My priority will always be the Black Sun, Renton, and you know what that means. I don’t waste people, though, and I would never simply throw you away. I’m not getting rid of you, I’m promoting you, silly boy, to where you can do me the most good. I don’t expect that we will need to have this conversation again. Have I made myself understood?”

  Renton nodded. He still had a smile fixed firmly on his face, but it was puzzled.

  “Okay. I have gotten used to having you around, after all,” Anastasia added charitably. “It won’t be easy for me to adjust, either, once you are in your new position. Now, can we discuss this later, at a more appropriate time?”

  “Sure, Ana,” Renton said, without a trace of obvious ill will or bitterness, though he could not have been happy. “There are a bunch of Black Sun guys back at the house, or, well, what’s left of the house, waiting for you. Apparently your father is still trying to decide what to do.”

  “Of course he is, the old fool. Very well,” she said calmly, heading back up the path that he had just come down. “Then let’s go, Renton. We have a great deal of work left to do today. After all, we still have to retake Central.”

  Renton watched her for a while in silence, his expression impossible to read, and then he followed her up the path.

  * * *

  Margot picked herself up gingerly, waiting for her tailbone and hipbone to knit and reform, shattered where she had landed on the stone floor. It didn’t take very long; actually, she felt like she might be healing even faster lately. It still wasn’t fast enough.

  Leigh moved with speed that Margot couldn’t hope to match. She was strong, too, maybe not as strong as Margot, but strong enough to throw her further than anyone ever had, without looking like it was much of a strain. She was not, however, disciplined or seasoned in actual combat yet, whatever was hardwired into her, and her instincts were not sharp. Margot’s claws, on the other hand, were.

  She started where novices always start – Leigh tried to take Margot’s head off with a single strike. Her claws came on fast, with all her momentum behind them, but she had telegraphed the movement, and even with the speed difference between them, Margot had little trouble ducking in time. Margot reached forward with her fingers rigid, plunging them into the girl’s abdomen, through whatever served her as a skin substitute, and then dragged them both outward, in opposing directions, attempting to gut her.

  In Margot’s defense, if the girl had guts in the first place, then she probably would have been eviscerated. Instead, her claws tore a huge gouge in the silicone-fiber membrane that wrapped Leigh’s body like skin, exposing the silicon-based compression bands that had replaced the musculature beneath. Margot had a moment to wonder if one day she would look like that inside, all white and uniform, with a strange pink fluid that was not blood seeping out around what used to be organs. Then Leigh threw a left body kick that sent her skidding backwards and shattered two ribs so completely that Margot was certain they had turned to powder.

  Leigh’s stance change might have been ridiculously fast, but the reality of it was that she shouldn’t have needed to change stances at all to attempt a straight kick, since she could have continued forward with a less elaborate strike and gotten up close. Margot surmised that she preferred to keep things at a comfortable distance, and decided to make it ugly instead. She sidestepped the kick and stepped inside, landed a kick on Leigh’s supporting left leg, then grabbed her around the back of the neck in a Thai plum and drove her right knee into her stomach. Leigh made a coughing noise and struggled, clawing ineffectually at Margot’s face and shoulders while Margot repeated the knee strikes, alternating sides. Sometimes, Leigh managed to get her arm in the way, but several strikes made it through.

  Margot wasn’t sure what Leigh was made out of, but she was sure that she was slowing down. If she could be hurt, then she could be killed. And if she could be killed, then Margot meant to have a go at it.

  Margot bashed her in the ear repeatedly with her forearm, until she shifted her guard. She timed her jump perfectly, her knee passing through the girl’s arms and connecting with her face, all of Margot’s weight hanging on the girl’s neck; she could feel Leigh’s jaw give way and her teeth slam together. Leigh fell down, stunned, and Margot followed it up immediately with a soccer kick to the side of the head that landed on Leigh’s right ear, but she managed to roll over and put up an arm. Margot threw another to the other side and Leigh did nothing but twitch in response. She went with it a third time, and Leigh just took it. She fell on the prostrate girl with a grim satisfaction, driving both knees into her upper back, just below the neck, to a symphony of fracturing bone and damaged tissue. She wrapped her arms around Leigh’s neck, cinched her legs around her midsection in a body triangle, and pulled her forearm across her throat, until the girl stopped struggling, until she was sure that her trachea had collapsed under
the pressure. Then she held it a while longer, just to be safe.

  She waited until there was no sound at all but her own labored breathing and the distant echoes of the combat occurring on the other side of the chamber, and then she released Leigh’s limp body and stood up unsteadily. She made it maybe three steps.

  “Not bad,” Leigh croaked, grabbing her wrist and elbow. Margot tried to react but the girl’s judo was absurdly fast. Leigh stepped neatly to the side and then threw Margot, spinning her over and planting her, headfirst, into the stone floor. “Not good enough, though.”

  Margot didn’t exactly black out, but there was a brief moment where nothing hurt and she wasn’t entirely sure where she was, or why the ground was pressed up against her face. Leigh, who landed an axe kick right in the middle of Margot’s back, breaking another rib and bowing her spine, cut that time brutally short, however. Margot rolled and tried to get to her feet; she had made it up on one knee when Leigh kicked her in the face with her heel, driving through it as if she hoped to score points. Margot went sprawling head over heels; only coming to a halt when she bumped up against the curved wall of the room. Her vision was blurry, but she saw motion well enough to move her head, avoiding a punch that dislodged a whole chunk of the wall away, just beside her. Margot didn’t bother to try standing up; instead, she entangled her legs with Leigh’s, tripping her up while she was still moving to strike, sending them both to the ground in a pile.

  Margot scrambled to the top, by virtue of superior strength, and tried to keep her in a body lock, her arms wrapped around Leigh’s elbows, her face in her chest, but she just couldn’t keep her controlled. She bucked and flailed underneath her, and every time she got an arm free, she hit Margot with punches and elbows that were no less damaging for being short distance strikes. The third time it happened, Leigh hit her underneath her arm, right where her ribs were still mending. Margot’s whole side seized up, and Leigh was able to break free of her hold and scramble to her feet, while Margot barely managed to get her hands out to stop from falling flat on her face, her side shrieking at her.

  This is not going well, she thought, and wondered why it didn’t bother her more. Her vision cleared enough that she could see a strange white object on the stone floor in front of her, so close to her face she was almost touching it. It took a moment longer before she identified it as one of her teeth.

  “Funny to think that you are, more or less, what I started out as,” Leigh said snidely. She kicked at Margot’s injured side, and Margot whined involuntarily and rolled over, away from her. “Which makes me the beautiful butterfly,” she said, grabbing Margot’s arm and twisting it behind her back, forcing her to her feet. Margot heard herself gasp, but she felt no pain, just raw shame at the vulnerability the noise expressed. “And you, I suppose are the caterpillar. Seems about right, doesn’t it?”

  Margot had to assume the question was rhetorical, because Leigh had grabbed the back of her head, and then driven it into the wall. She couldn’t be sure whether it was the stone that broke or her skull. She was fairly certain it was her head that broke from the enormity of the sound, though the dust and rocks that tumbled down onto her shoulders and chest when Leigh released her said otherwise. She slumped to the floor and then tumbled over, unable to move anything. She wondered for a brief, traumatic moment if she was paralyzed, if the nanites would be able to fix nerve damage on that order, but then the pain hit her, from her neck, her shoulder, her side, her arm, and that was sort of reassuring.

  Thinking, for some reason, about having breakfast with Eerie, eating granola and berries and plain yogurt while Eerie ate honey straight out of the jar, licking it from her fingers between excited bursts of chatter, Margot watched Leigh batter her body objectively, with clinical separation, a sense of remove that she wore like armor. She recognized the hideousness of what was happening to her, as she was kicked and cruelly slashed by Leigh’s claws, and she felt pain and slight sadness at her body’s violation, but none of it really connected with her a meaningful way. She remembered mixing tap water and Kool-Aid powder for Eerie in a tall blue glass, the cherry flavor she liked best, waiting for her own black tea to steep in its ceramic mug, and that felt much more real than the vampire who was beating her. She wondered if she would die here, and it still didn’t sting, so she stopped worrying.

  Margot didn’t recognize Mitsuru when she first arrived, her eyes were so badly swollen.

  “I’m glad I found you here,” Mitsuru said shakily, dragging her knife slowly down the inside of her arm with her red eyes locked onto Leigh. “It’s going to be much harder for you to run away this time.”

  * * *

  “My family has always been Methodist – actually, the whole of the Raleigh Cartel is, really. It always seemed a little strange to me, given our circumstances, the Ether, Central, the protocols – I never understood how they could reconcile it with the Son of God, the New Testament, and that stuff, but they never seemed to have any problem with it. Which I say by way of explanation, so you know that I don’t go in for religious-mystical crap, okay? But the Outer Dark, that is something else. Something else entirely…”

  Alex moved his lips, or he thought that he did. He wasn’t certain if he spoke. If he spoke, there was no way to be certain what he would say. His thoughts were muddied and uncertain, slow and contented, but there was something underneath that now. Moreover, that something knew that his thoughts were not entirely his own.

  “I met this guy there, everyone calls him the Rosicrucian, except when I actually met him, he said his name was John Parson. He’s a little like Gaul, actually – I think he sort of runs the place. He’s nice, in a weird, intense sort of way. He’s a telepath, or something like a telepath – he must be, because he knew things about me, things he couldn’t possibly know any other way. You’ll get to meet him, too, when we go there. He’s the one who explained it all to me. How it happened. How he found the Outer Dark, and how it saved him. And how it could save all of us, if we’d just let it.”

  Alex followed along with the story agreeably enough, on one level. On another, he couldn’t stop asking questions. Where was he? Why had he come here? And what was so important that he had forgotten?

  “He said it started from an accident – he watched a vampire awaken. It started him thinking about the nanites, about the way they worked, about where they came from. Parson said he was bothered by the diversity, by the unpredictability of all of it. They are machines; after all, we all know that. They had to have a maker, right? And a purpose, too. Instead, we get chaos, biologically incompatibility, death and weird mutations. Then he watched the experiments that made Gaul and Mitsuru – hey, did you know that? That Mitsuru, Gaul, and Alistair are all pretty much the same age? They did something to Mitsuru, though, after she went nuts using some Black Protocol that killed her partner. She spent years suspended, somehow, not sleeping, not aging, not anything. Some kind of punishment they invented just for her. Gaul hates her, you know? Because of whomever she killed. I bet everyone in Central knows that but you. You know, it’s kind of fun… being able to talk to you this way. Being able to say whatever I want. Not having to worry about the consequences. That’s what life’s like, now.”

  Alex had to admit that it was interesting, and he was supremely aware of Emily touching him, of her body lying on top of his. Still, something seemed… off, wrong in a way that he didn’t have words for right now, but he had the feeling that normally he would.

  “Anyway, John Parson, he started to wonder why the only things in Central left over from whoever built it were the nanites and the buildings themselves. It didn’t make sense. He started to wonder if there hadn’t been more when they first found Central, back in the days of the Founder and the first Board. Then he started to ask questions – difficult questions, that no one, least of all the Board, seemed to want to answer. Eventually, the disagreements escalated into a feud between the cartels, and then into violence. In the end, John Parson was exiled from Central, along
with those who agreed with him. They called themselves The Anathema. I don’t know how, but eventually, he managed to start wandering within the Ether, the same way the Founder did when he discovered Central. Eventually, John Parson found somewhere too. The Outer Dark.”

  There was nothing but the girl.

  There was something else. Alex was sure of it. Something was wrong, even though he felt calm and secure. He had an intention, he was certain of it. He had done… things. Things that he was not entirely proud of, in order to do something. For… for someone?

  “It was just like he had expected. There was more stuff there, more things built by whoever built Central, not just buildings but the remnants of a society – language, science, and cultural artifacts; the same things he had suspected had been removed from Central by the Founder and the first Board and hidden. They did nothing but study it, all of it. They translated the language over a matter of decades. It’s all very… different. Reading it changes you, Alex. It gets inside of you. The words hurt, going in, and then they take root – they live inside your mind. They aren’t words the way we understand them. They are living things, multi-dimensional concepts, artifacts and even weapons. They don’t describe reality. They define and reshape it. Only John Parson was able to comprehend the whole alphabet and remain sane. He was the one who first understood the significance of the lesson of that first vampire, Alex. John Parson was the one who discovered that you have to die for the nanites inside you to realize their true potential. I know this isn’t making much sense to you right now. But once you hear it from him for the first time, you’ll understand.”

  Water. Why did he hear the sound of water running? And so much of it. Wasn’t he inside? Was this some kind of strange dream?