“Not at all! Some of my best friends are Auditors.”
“What about Central?” Mitsuru’s red eyes were fixed on Emily’s face. “What do you intend there?”
“Saving it from certain doom and seeing a power structure put in place that guarantees my own independence. I am done with cartel games and politics. I will not be anyone’s minion or pawn.”
“That’s a bold stance,” Mitsuru said. “How can you possibly hope to accomplish that?”
“I’ve already taken the Far Shores. I turned Alistair’s vampire, Ms. Gallow’s most promising young Auditor, and Anastasia Martynova’s assassin to my cause. I’ve escaped the Outer Dark and stood against the Auditors all by myself. I arranged the death of a World Tree and defied Gaul Thule and John Parson both. The Changeling that everyone is desperate to control? She came to me of her own free will. I’ve honest-to-God raised the dead,” Emily said, offended. “What makes you think I cannot do a little thing like deciding the course of a war?”
***
Her consciousness obliterated, Katya’s diminished mind ran automatically through the lessons implanted during her training as an assassin, while she waited for her target to arrive.
Much of the training she had received from the Black Sun trainers was mental and physical conditioning, the kind of thing that was commonly taught at the Academy.
The difference between the training she had received as an assassin and that offered at the Academy boiled down to points of emphasis.
That, Katya supposed, and also the practice of allowing, or even encouraging relations between faculty and students at assassin school. There was no way that the Academy would have allowed that sort of thing to go on. Seduction was a necessary tool for an assassin, and the staff seemed to take delight in delivering direct instruction to students on its finer points.
She felt a little let down with the Academy in that regard.
Mr. Windsor seemed like just the right kind of nice guy.
The Black Sun had been training assassins for generations, based on teachings inherited from the Triad that constituted one-half of its ancestry. It had begun as a service for hire in the era of the Warring States, gradually honed into an organized program of extortion and influence against the British in Hong Kong and Shanghai. This continued with the French in Vietnam, the Japanese in Manchuria, and eventually became an essential element of the struggle in Central against the Hegemony. Centuries of covert action informed practices carefully passed down to each new generation of assassins.
These were not protocols, but rather techniques that could be taught and learned. Tricks of the trade for the very worst kind of magician.
The kind that specialized in making people disappear.
The most useful of the lessons concerned emptiness.
It was delivered to Katya in a remote camp in Mauritania by a French woman who wore her hair in a tight bun, who never once wore shoes in the two years that she studied beneath her. She taught a cultivated absence, deployed at will by the practitioner to submerge personality and conscious thought.
An assassin could be as fast and fit as they liked, but when it came to targets with telepathic and precognitive protocols, traditional methods were useless.
The mundane responsibility of the assassin was to work without detection, but in Central, it was essential that even the assassin did not know what they were up to. Unconscious operations, in which a sleeper assassin was placed near the target, unaware of their true identity until awakened by an outside signal, were the most common, but there were other methods.
The lesser assassins were forced to allow Black Sun telepaths to wipe their minds virtually clean, implanting cover identities as deemed operationally necessary. They were like overgrown children outside of work, naïve and detached, with little in the way of a persona aside from a disproportionate appetite for food and pleasure.
Katya had the good fortune to possess talent and a powerful patron, and therefore her personality was left largely intact. She suffered through a series of surgeries, physical and psychic, that diminished her sense of identity and rounded out the rough edges of her personality. Her emotions were constrained, her eyes were replaced, and a sense of professional detachment was grafted in place of the passions and fears she had once had.
Substance abuse and impulsive behavior often filled the void left behind by the procedures, but that was deemed to be an acceptable consequence. Most assassins died long before that sort of behavior became a problem, and they were all replaceable.
The Black Sun was renowned for its prowess in battle, but open warfare was eschewed in all but the most desperate circumstances. The cartel favored diplomacy above all other solutions and considered the subtle art of threatened and actual assassination to be part of its diplomatic arsenal.
“Better one dies than one thousand,” her wizened instructor had told Katya, on her first day of training, speaking with a pronounced Indonesian accent. She had nodded, sweat already soaking through her clothes in the muggy Donbass summer, but she had not truly agreed.
One was just the same as one thousand as one million.
Casualties never made much difference to Katya.
She became unfamiliar, a stranger to herself.
Her affinities, her anxieties, and her sexuality were sculpted and reshaped on demand, a continual process of adaptation dictated by operational requirements. She spent six months as a Disney-obsessed raver in the San Fernando Valley, attending community college and eating pizza with the LGBT club. She would eventually kill three of its members. Katya stayed for several weeks on a little island on the Atlantic coast of Spain, speaking Dutch-accented English and working tables in a rundown nightclub, wearily ignoring the British tourists who groped and catcalled, only to be recalled without ever contacting her target. She sunned herself on the deck of a private yacht moored off the Azores for weeks, working as a scuba instructor for a rich man and his spoiled children, her body operating underwater as confidentially as any machine on implanted telepathic knowledge, before she sabotaged a tank and drowned the yacht’s owner among the reefs and the seaweed. She spent eight weeks working as a grip on a Hollywood production in Prague, following a consultant who someone else would kill before she had the chance. She studied Cultural Anthropology at Wisconsin for a semester, incidentally sleeping with a professor she would later discover to be her target.
She shed personas like a snake molting, leaving them behind to rot in the sun.
Katya quickly accepted that she was no one in particular.
She learned to do without thinking, to perform assassinations by rote and muscle memory. She learned to fill her mind with appropriate and banal chatter, exactly the sort of thing a suspicious telepath might expect to find in the mind of a vacuous young woman. She learned to look, but not see, to hear and respond without listening.
All sorts of invisibility were made available to her, along with a thousand tricks to the art of murder, both intimate and impersonal. Her instructor in poisons and pharmaceuticals, a charming Belarusian with a gleaming bald head, called it ‘black medicine’.
Katya proved an apt pupil.
The most closely guarded secrets were those regarding clairvoyants. It was difficult enough to contend with targets who read minds. A target who saw the future was practically impossible to surprise. Charm, deceit, and seduction, the most used tools of the assassin, were all worthless.
A precognitive did not perceive the future, they perceived probabilities. Precogs identified people and situations by their consequences.
The trick came down to becoming no one of consequence.
Some she could do on her own, with the appropriate drugs and meditation. It was much easier and more reliable to have a telepath and empath handy.
Submitting to a telepathic implant from Emily was a devil’s bargain, but Katya felt weirdly comfortable making it. She felt as if she were dead already, like she had realized she was dreaming without waking up.
&nbs
p; The process had been fast. Less than an hour after they got to work in the living room of Emily’s townhouse, she was in a trance. She did not remember Emily leading her by the hand, Katya stumbling like a sleepwalker, through the Ether, to emerge in an unfamiliar desert landscape, not far from a freeway.
She was led to a small room and shut inside of it.
Katya did not object when the door was shut behind her.
She sat in a suffocating hot closet, barren save for a large bottle of mineral water and a pristine shelving unit, and knew and felt nothing save occasional thirst.
Training and the surgeries had prepared her. She felt no alarm, no curiosity about where she was, or for what purpose. Katya sat cross-legged on the carpet and waited for something to happen.
She moved only when she needed water. She drank sparingly, not even enough to replace the fluids that leaked out of her pores to drip on the carpet around her. The closet smelled like dust and new paint and was illuminated only by the light shining through the crack beneath the door.
Katya waited.
There were voices, hushed and worried. A man and a woman. Then, briefly, another woman.
Their conversations were brief.
Not long after, Katya heard a struggle. She took another drink from her nearly empty bottle and resumed her vigil.
The fight, if that was what it was, did not last. Another conversation followed, and then she heard furniture being moved across the floor. Something was haphazardly dragged down the stairs.
The floor settled. The house quieted. Evening came, but the stifling heat did not diminish.
She finished her water, and an hour or so later was obliged to relieve herself in the opposite corner of the closet. She felt discomfort from her aching legs and back, and a headache from dehydration, but she felt no corresponding distress, no desire to rectify any of it. Katya leaned her head against the closet door and waited, sweat smeared across the wood.
Another several hours. The air inside the closet was hot and foul.
She heard footsteps, and then the sound of a chair scraping along the floor.
There was nothing for several minutes, and then a brief statement from the new arrival, followed by a shout. Both voices were male.
Katya listened, but did not hear.
“…certain you won’t cooperate?”
The final word roused her from her detachment like an alarm waking a sleeper from deep slumber. Katya found herself paying attention to the conversation. There was something…
“Very well,” the speaker said. “Have it your way.”
Katya’s eyes widened.
No thought was required. It barely even took an effort.
She opened the closet door slowly, peering out from behind the door.
A boy sat at the dining room table with an expression of profound distress, but he did not matter. The man behind him with his fingers in the boy’s hair, he was the only one who meant anything.
Katya measured the distance between herself and the man at a glance.
Inhale slow, long exhale. And in the space between breaths…
Katya reached into the man’s head, using a protocol she was surprised to discover that she possessed, and transported a tiny portion of tissue from his head into the palm of her hand. It was pink and white and grey, like raw hamburger left out a little too long, and it wobbled like Jell-O when she moved.
There was a loud noise from the dining room, as if something had fallen to the floor.
All at once, Katya Zharova was herself once more.
She tried to stand and toppled over on the carpet. She made it back up to her knees just in time for the nausea to kick in. She managed to confine her vomiting to the closet she had spent the better part of a day in.
After the last of the heaves passed, she wiped her mouth and brushed her hair out of her face. She realized that she was still holding the gelatinous tissue extracted from Gaul Thule’s head, and was nearly sick again when she snuck a glance at it.
She tossed it in the closet and shut the door firmly, resolving to make sure that no one looked in there.
She went to make sure that her target was dead, moving slowly and a bit unsteadily.
Katya felt as if she had a headache, but that wasn’t quite right. It did not hurt. She felt washed out and soft, like paper immersed in water, slowly returning to pulp, but there was hardly time to worry about it.
The only sounds in the dining room were those of Gaul Thule quietly dying. Katya was mildly surprised to see that Alex was collapsed not far away, his forehead resting on the table.
Emotion overrode training.
She went to check on Alex, first holding moist fingers in front of his mouth to be certain that he was breathing. He seemed fine aside from a nosebleed, his pulse steady and strong, his eyes wide open but unseeing.
“Are you okay?” Katya lifted his chin so she could look into his eyes. “Come on. Please. Are you still with us?”
His eyes were bright and empty.
“Can you hear me? Are you still in there?”
Katya eased him back into the chair, and then turned her attention to Gaul Thule.
He was sprawled across the floor, bleeding from the nose and the corners of his eyes. His breathing was loud and irregular, and his skin was deathly pale, but his gaze tracked Katya as she approached, and when she knelt beside him, she could see his mouth move. She obliged him, bending over and putting her ear to his lips.
“…didn’t…see you…coming…how?”
“I’m not a secret relative or anything,” Katya said. “It’s a question of technique. I’m an assassin. You aren’t supposed to see us coming.”
The dying man might have smiled.
It could have been pain or needle-induced neurological damage, but Katya preferred to think that he smiled.
His lips moved again. Katya bent to listen.
“…the Church…you’ve ruined everything. You don’t…”
“I don’t understand? That’s probably true,” Katya said. “That’s not a requirement in my line of work, Lord Thule. I don’t understand you at all, and yet here we are, waiting for you to get it over with. That’s the thing about killing Lords and Ladies – you’re all so sure you’re crucial, and you all die with the same shocked look in your stupid faces. You just can’t imagine the world will get along without you, can you?”
She smiled at him and took his trembling hand.
“It hurts, doesn’t it? I’m sorry. It usually does. Go ahead and die, Lord Thule. Whatever part you thought you were to play in our future, I’m afraid it ends here.”
His mouth moved for a minute or two longer, but Katya did not bother to listen.
She waited until she could no longer feel the faint pulse at his wrist, and then she went back to check on Alex.
He was staring at the far wall, wide-eyed and delirious, drool leaking from the corners of his mouth.
“Alex, pull it together,” Katya said, grabbing him by the shoulders and shaking him vigorously. “We have a problem…oh, who I am kidding? We have so many problems. I’d really appreciate it if you could let me know you aren’t brain dead. Please?”
Alex blinked.
“That’s a start,” Katya said, hugging him. “That was a start, right Alex?”
Fifteen
Day Three
Things happened very quickly after that, or it seemed that way to Alex.
He blinked his eyes a third time, and the fire that had been consuming his mind was gone, only the afterimages of the brilliance littered across his retinas, and singed and burnt bits at the edges of his consciousness.
“Oh, no,” Alex whimpered. “Did I fall asleep?”
Katya stopped shaking him.
“Thank God! You’re awake!” Katya hugged him, her hands wet and sticky on his neck, and then hurried off. “I’m going to need a minute,” she yelled, trying doors until she found the bathroom. “Keep an eye on Gaul for me, in case he isn’t dead.”
Alex looked across the table at Gaul, collapsed on the floor, a small amount of blood smeared beneath his nose, and his glasses badly cracked. His pink eyes were open, if unmoving, and Alex felt entirely unsure as to whether he was still alive.
“What…uh…what do I do if he’s…?”
“I don’t know,” Katya said, shouting over the sound of running water. “Freeze his head?”
After a short hesitation, Alex went to check on Gaul.
He had no pulse, and his body was already starting to cool.
“I’m pretty sure he’s dead,” Alex yelled, walking over to the bathroom door. “He’s not breathing or…”
“Okay, fine, good,” Katya shouted. “I just need a minute.”
Alex waited impatiently, sitting at the table one moment, the next wandering through the living room, feeling elongated and ghastly as dawn slowly brightened the windows.
The toilet flushed, and he hurried over to the bathroom door expectantly.
The shower started to run.
Alex cursed and went back to check on Emily and Mitsuru. They were both lying where he had left them, sleeping in apparent peace.
He went back to the kitchen and filled a glass from the tap.
He drank the whole glass, wincing at the metallic taste of the water.
He refilled the glass, and then fished the prescription bottle out of his pocket, shaking a blue pill into his hand, and then adding another after a moment’s consideration. He washed them down with the rest of the water, and then went to refill his glass again.
Alex glanced over at the dining room table and froze.
The glass slipped from his hands to shatter in the white stone sink.
He hurried to the dining room, his heart fluttering.
It was empty. Alex looked beneath the table, opened the closet doors, searched the living room.
There was no body. No Gaul Thule.
He ran down the hall.
The front door was open.
Alex stuck his head out the door, looked down the street both ways. There were already lights on in some of the neighboring houses, and the freeway was humming along in the distance.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 37
