The Anathema

by Rawlins, Zachary

  “Don’t be a fool,” John said, laughing. “Only young Leigh was one of my creations. And if Mitsuru Aoki is your queen, old friend, then she just stalemated with one of my pawns. Unless you have a better piece hidden somewhere, just waiting for the right moment to place it on the board, hmm?”

  “Maybe,” Gaul said, shrugging.

  “Tell me then,” John encouraged. “Who would you have stand against me? Your chief Auditor is mine, Rebecca Levy is paralyzed until I say otherwise, and whatever promise Mitsuru Aoki showed decades ago, you have squandered it. Whom else would you look to? Surely not to that abomination the Martynova clan has produced, Anastasia? You know as well as I do that whatever the secret of her protocol, that it is deviant. She belongs with us, not you. Or, perhaps, your hopes rest on the narrow shoulders of one Alexander Warner?”

  “You ask a lot of questions, John. You always did.”

  “You can’t really expect to make an Auditor of the boy before I return,” John said forcefully, “and who is to say, old friend, that I won’t be able to take him from you before then?”

  “Leigh is impressive,” Gaul admitted, still bent over the well. “Are you sure you wouldn’t prefer to leave her at the Academy for proper instruction?”

  John’s robust laughter echoed through the small stone room.

  “Perhaps not this time. When I return, though, we can talk again, once some changes are made to Central and to the Academy. Besides, are you really so eager to harbor your enemies? How can you continue to allow Alice Gallow to remain an Auditor, when you know how badly I have compromised her? Would you like to know the truth about her, Gaul? What she really is?”

  “Here,” Gaul said curtly, shoving the bottle in his direction. “I know. I’ve always known. But Alice belongs here.”

  “If you say so,” John said, clutching the bottle eagerly. “Though I personally try not to clasp adders to my bosom.”

  John walked out of the doorway, staring at the bottle, and Gaul followed him closely.

  “Now for your part,” Gaul said stiffly. “Give the command. Pull your people out of Central, and release mine.”

  John disappeared the bottle into the folds of his robe, and then turned to grin at Gaul.

  “Are you even precognitive anymore, Gaul? Why would I do something like that? I will be taking your people back to the Outer Dark. We need test subjects. Surely, you must have suspected something like this would happen.”

  “Of course,” Gaul said sourly. “But I had to play for time, until Rebecca was ready.”

  The worry on John’s face disappeared quickly, but for Gaul, it made the whole day a little bit more worthwhile.

  29.

  Alex stood in the hallway for quite a while, hoping that she would hear him shifting his feet and clearing his throat, and invite him inside, or at least open the door. She didn’t do any of that. Eventually, he resorted to knocking.

  “Come in,” she said, so fast that he became certain that she had known he was standing there. He steeled himself, wiped the sweat from his palms on his jeans, and then opened the door and went inside.

  “Sorry,” she said, barely looking up from the computer she slouched in front of. “I would have cleaned if I had known you were coming.”

  Alex glanced around the room, finding it the same as the last time he had seen it. Piles of electronics, discarded packaging, and loose pieces of paper mixed with wrinkled t-shirts and balled up knee socks. One narrow path leading from the door to the computers stacked on her desk, and a second, even thinner path leading to her bed. He stood just inside the door, while Eerie continued to tap away at her keyboard. She didn’t make an effort to acknowledge him.

  “So… uh, are you… are you okay?” Alex asked, desperate to break the silence.

  “Yes,” Eerie hummed to herself, “and you?”

  “Up and down,” Alex said helplessly. “Um. Did you see that thing, outside?”

  “Oh, you mean your fight with my eight-year old housemate, Sebastian? I did see that.”

  “Yeah,” Alex said, scratching his arm and shifting uncomfortably. “So, is he going to be… okay?”

  “I think so,” Eerie said, frowning at her display. “He’s not used to being punched by people twice his size, that’s all.”

  “Hey, he started it.”

  Eerie didn’t say anything.

  “He tried to set me on fire!” Alex pleaded, holding the arms of his scorched sweatshirt for examination. Eerie remained silent, keying commands into the keyboard in her lap, never even looking up at him while he fidgeted. Her display, from Alex’s angle, appeared to show nothing but fields of scrolling numbers.

  “I wasn’t trying to hurt him or anything. It’s just that people have been trying to kill me all day, and I sort of thought that I was still being attacked by them, and…”

  “Alex,” Eerie interrupted, “what are you doing here?”

  “Damn it, Eerie,” Alex swore softly, “I came to make sure you were okay.”

  “Oh?” Eerie asked, still glued to her display.

  “Yeah,” Alex affirmed, slumping down against the wall and crouching there. “I figured that if I showed up and saved you from the bad guys all cool-like that you might, I don’t know, forgive me.”

  “For what?”

  “For all the shit I pulled,” Alex said, surprised how angry he was with himself. “With Emily, over Break, the stuff that I said before it. All of it.”

  “And you came to save me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I see,” Eerie said, finally turning to face him, her expression blank. “But I don’t need saving.”

  “Yeah, clearly,” Alex said, shrugging. “I was worried about you, though.”

  “I see,” she repeated flatly.

  The silence stretched out while Alex squirmed.

  “Eerie. Can I do anything to make this better?”

  Eerie finally put down the keyboard and turned so that she was facing him, her hands sitting neatly on her long grey skirt. She’d changed her hair again, he noticed – the blond streaks were gone, replaced with a varying blue tint. It looked good, he thought, but he didn’t think this was the time to point it out.

  “Tell the truth,” Eerie suggested. “Alex, are you here because you lost Emily?”

  He thought about it for a minute. He figured she deserved that much.

  “No,” he said finally. “I’m here because I am afraid that I’ve lost you.”

  Eerie sat still for a moment, and then she looked away, her face, as always, unreadable.

  “You are upset with me,” Alex said, sighing and standing up. “I’ll go. Just let me know if you change…”

  “Alex,” Eerie said softly, cutting him off. “Why do you think I’m upset?”

  Alex considered this for a moment, frozen in the act of standing, wondering if it was some kind of trick question.

  “Because of Emily,” he said hesitantly. “Because I went on break with her…”

  Eerie shook her head emphatically.

  “No?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Okay,” he said, spreading his hands, “then why?”

  “Alex is stupid,” Eerie muttered. “You really don’t get it?”

  Alex shook his head. He was genuinely puzzled. All he could think was that Anastasia or Katya had gone back on their word, and told Eerie the whole story of the events of the break.

  “No,” Alex said, trying to purge his mind of the memory of the weight of Emily on top of him.

  “Do you know what I have to do tomorrow? Did you think about that at all?”

  Alex shook his head again, his eyes on the floor, unable to face Eerie. He could feel his cheeks burning. He hadn’t so much forgotten about Margot’s impending funeral as much as he had deliberately forgotten about it, unable to fully comprehend the idea. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment how callous he was being.

  “Do you even care?”

  Alex kept his eyes on th
e disarray on the floor. He fought down an insane urge to start crying, out of exhaustion, out of self-pity, in the hopes that it might make Eerie feel guilty and relent. However, he didn’t want to embarrass himself like that, and anyway, Eerie deserved better after everything that he had done.

  “I’m sorry,” Alex said, his hands balled into fists. “I’m broken up about Margot, too. This is all new to me. Really, I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. He worked up his courage, remembering Windsor’s odd reaction, the night of the attack, and asked the question. “Eerie… did – did something happen over break? To you, I mean. Something bad?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s cool, I don’t want to make you or anything, but I was really worried, the whole time, and if you hadn’t made me this thing, this cushion thing, I think I’d probably be dead right now, and as soon as I could, I came here to…”

  He trailed off when he realized she had started typing again.

  “I’m sorry, Eerie,” he said quietly, cursing himself.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said, staring again at her display. “I understand.”

  “No, you got it all wrong. I came here to tell you…”

  Eerie shook her head.

  “Not right now, Alex,” she insisted. “I have things to think about. And I think you should go.”

  Alex felt cold. Suddenly, unaccountably cold. He managed to nod at the back of her head, and for some reason, he was smiling while he did it, some sort of automatic social reflex. His whole mind had gone numb on him, as if he had an injection of Lidocaine.

  “Okay. Alright, I will go,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “But when you get it figured out, please give me another chance. Because, I promise you Eerie, my mind is made up.”

  The pillow she threw missed by a mile, but it still made him jump. When he turned back to face her, there were tears running down her cheeks, and her eyes blazed with an anger he had never seen before.

  “It’s not all about you!” She howled, her voice catching.

  “Eerie…”

  “Just go! Just… just go away.”

  He stood there, looking contrite, hoping she would take pity on him, and hoping she would forgive him. Eventually, he realized that she wasn’t going to, and he bowed his head, sighed, and then he let himself out quietly. She kept herself in front of her computer, pounding out code so fast that she was sure she would have to redo all of it later, until well after she heard the front door close behind him, until she was sure that she wouldn’t go to the window to see if he was still out there.

  “Stupid,” Eerie muttered, aware that she was crying but refusing to acknowledge it. She slid her headphones over her ears, bent over her keyboard, and stayed that way until she could only stumble, half-blind with sleep, to her bed, falling asleep with her clothes still on, her face still streaked with tears.

  * * *

  There were many funerals that week, and though he was not expected to attend all of them, he felt that it was his responsibility to do so. He’d known about many of the death were coming, after all, long before they’d happened, and he’d thought himself resigned to it. The future that he had steered them toward, he knew, was the brightest and best that he could manage. Nevertheless, faced with the physical reality of the carnage it was built on, Gaul felt part of himself recoil. Therefore, he forced himself to face it, one grieving family after the other; seven days of watching the ground swallow coffins. Margot’s funeral was the most painful by far.

  In general, the student’s funerals were more difficult, because he couldn’t help but take it personally. Steve Taylor and Charles Brant nagged at him even though he hadn’t thought much of either boy. But there were many different kinds of unpleasantness for him to experience. Certainly, he had not enjoyed facing the Raleigh’s, who were burying one daughter and dealing with consequences of their other daughter defecting. Knowing that their daughter’s most likely killer was standing across from him, right now, on the other side of Margot’s coffin, in a tasteful black mourning dress, that was a bit hard to swallow. She’d been justified, certainly; but he didn’t think that she’d needed to go as far as killing her. There was no way, of course, for him to confront her openly. The Hegemony would use it as a pretext for war.

  And things on that score were very fragile at the moment. A final tally was still being made, but the numerical losses were heavily weighted against the Black Sun, with four cartels defecting on top of significant casualties during the fighting. Their previous dominance was reduced to a rough parity with the wounded Hegemony. The losses the Hegemony had suffered were less severe, but whereas the entire Martynova clan had survived, much of the Hegemony’s leadership had been destroyed in a single attack, and many cartels were in disorder while matters of succession were handled. Still, the balance had shifted, and if the Black Sun’s ascendance was still overwhelmingly likely, it had at least been postponed.

  Gaul looked at the faces arrayed around him, and he updated his list. There was always more to do, after all. They had not just lost the dead, after all. There were all sorts of casualties.

  Rebecca stood at the head of the coffin, reading poetry that he couldn’t be bothered to identify, looking like she was about to be sick. It wouldn’t have mattered to Margot, anyway, who had no family to mourn her in the first place. Instead, she had a weeping, blue-haired changeling, Anastasia and an honor guard from the Black Sun, and a few members from the staff at the Academy who had raised her. Doubtless, Rebecca was the most grief-stricken of all of them. The empath suffered greatly during the funerals, unable to shield herself from the full weight and gravity of the grief that surrounded her.

  Michael sat beside her, looking as somber as Gaul had ever seen him. He was close to the students, and their loss had wounded him more than Gaul would have expected. Part of him took a vindictive and petty satisfaction in it, as Michael’s moral objections to Gaul’s plans from years ago still stung him. However, it was unnerving to see the big, powerful man gritting his teeth as he watched the coffin lower into the uneven ground of the cemetery, out in the rolling hills of the Fringe, underneath the eternal fog at the outskirts of Central. Vladimir watched from a distance, a nurse standing behind his wheelchair. The bandages on his head shone white against the grey sky.

  Gaul wondered if the second time Margot had died was any better than the first. He wondered if she would have blamed him; he wondered how much of the blame genuinely belonged to him. He knew he was hardly innocent.

  He was surprised to see Alex there. He had been asleep for most of the week, since the attack, attached to an IV in the hospital. It was funny, how mercurial young people could be – the last time Warner had been in a coma, he’d had a rotating cast of visitors at every hour that infirmary staff would permit. This time, he had been left alone, except for the nurses who tended to him. Even Katya had contented herself with mounting a camera in his room so she could monitor him remotely. Now, he noticed, Eerie was being led with great care around Alex by Gerald Windsor, while the boy watched helplessly, obviously desperate to talk to her. Vivik put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, whispering to him, restraining him. Gaul remembered Therese Muir’s funeral, remembered the orders he had signed for the dissolution of the Raleigh cartel, and decided he didn’t feel bad for him at all.

  Rebecca, clearly uncomfortable and having trouble walking in heels and a dress, seized Gaul’s arm for support and pulled him along as the funeral broke up.

  “You need to try and be subtle,” she warned, pausing for a moment to light a cigarette, and then grabbing his arm again. “Everyone sees you evaluating them, and it makes people nervous.”

  “You are right,” Gaul said, surprised at how moody he sounded. “When you were in the hospital, I actually thought that this place might fall apart.”

  “That’s almost a compliment. The funny thing is, while I was in the hospital, when I wasn’t fantasizing about murdering Alistair, I was worrying ab
out you falling apart,” Rebecca said, smiling while she led him on a rambling walk through the headstones, away from the new additions and back toward the older, less emotionally loaded graves. “How are you holding up, by the way?”

  “I should be asking you that,” Gaul said, the dew from the grass soaking unpleasantly through the legs of his slacks. “But I’m worried, since you asked. The cartels are depleted and in disarray. The Hegemony is trying to decide whether to lick its wounds or to attack the Black Sun now, while they are at their weakest. John Parson is alive, somewhere out in the Ether, he has a supply of nanites that he can use to make living weapons, and one day soon, he will come back here. No one feels safe in Central anymore. And the Auditors have never been weaker…”

  Rebecca nodded sympathetically. Gaul could tell from the way she hugged his arm that she had bad news for him, bad news that he had already anticipated, so he braced himself and waited while she stared off at the sun peaking over the sea of fog that surrounded the Academy, working up her courage.

  “About that. I know that Margot was your most promising candidate. I heard that Grigori turned down the invitation to join the department as well. Mitsuru isn’t at her most stable; frankly, neither is Alice. But I’m afraid you are going to lose one more Auditor, Gaul.”

  Gaul had seen it coming, but it still shook him to hear her say it. He was grateful that she hadn’t mentioned Alistair, because he didn’t want to think about his Chief Auditor, or the way he’d looked, before Parson and the rest of them ported from the underground chamber that held the Source Well. Still, he didn’t like thinking about the Auditors without Rebecca Levy.

  It hadn’t been her alone who had turned the tide, of course. Alex had provided the power for the whole operation. Actually, it had been frightening how much power Alex had expended, acting as a catalyst for Rebecca’s abilities, but at the end of it he didn’t seem tired, or even aware of how remarkable what he had done was. Rebecca knew exactly, of course, but she was too modest to say. Privately, though, Gaul knew that she was just as aware as he was that what she had done, with Alex’s help, was perhaps the greatest feat of empathy in recorded history.