It seemed as likely to work as anything.
“I know you haven’t thought this through, but I bet Vivik did,” Hayley said, hugging her pillow as she considered it. “He had to know you would tell me everything.”
“I sure hope he does,” Alex said. “I’m pretty much depending on it.”
“You are one-hundred percent relying on it,” Hayley corrected. “You don’t see it, do you? You are talking about neutralizing Gaul Thule, on the eve of a giant war, civil and otherwise, predicated entirely on him. That would change everything, not just things for Eerie.”
“I know that,” Alex said. “Of course.”
“Do you really? Do you know what it would mean for me?”
“You already said you weren’t going to help. I get it.”
“That’s not…I work for the Hegemony, Alex.”
“I thought you were an Auditor.”
“I’m that, too,” Hayley said. “I grew up in the Hegemony, and until I was recruited to Audits, I worked as an Operator for my cartel. Walking away isn’t that easy, even if I wanted to. The Hegemony didn’t want that, anyway – they wanted Hegemonic Auditors. That was the whole idea.”
“Like Katya, with the Black Sun. Right?”
“Yeah, like that, but less murdery. I’m an Operator, not an assassin. I’m sure Grigori is doing the same thing, but we’ve never talked about it. My family and his don’t really interact much.”
“Being an Operator isn’t so different from being an assassin. We both kill people, right?” Alex shrugged. “Same difference.”
“It is not at all the same,” Hayley retorted. “I hope you don’t have to learn how wrong you are.”
“Whatever. Can I go?”
“Not now! God, you are dense,” Hayley groused. “I’ve been reporting to my parents this entire time. The previous Lord Thule – Gaul’s brother – was my godfather, you know.”
“Oh shit,” Alex said. “Shit.”
“Yeah. Gaul Thule is a big problem for a lot of people, you know, not just you and your friends. Doing something like what you are thinking about has all sorts of repercussions.”
“We’re just gonna ask him a couple questions,” Alex said. “How is that a problem?”
“You are doing this with Katya, right? She’s a Black Sun assassin. Gaul Thule just had Josef Martynova assassinated. Remember?”
“Yeah.” Alex grimaced. “I should have thought of that.”
“Here’s another thing you should have thought about,” Hayley said. “I assume that Emily means to tag along? I don’t know if you’ve forgotten this, or if you just never noticed because you don’t care about anyone except yourself…”
“Hey! Where do you get off saying that about me?”
“I’m a telepath. I know way more about you than I would like to,” Hayley said. “Gaul Thule killed her parents. What do you think she has in mind for him?”
“They’re gonna kill him, aren’t they?” Alex rubbed his numb eye. “That’s the idea.”
“Vivik knows all of this, I’m sure, because he pays attention to what other people say and think and feel,” Hayley said. “Unlike some people. He must also know what sort of conclusions I would come to, and the position that would put me in.”
“I’m lost. Is that good or bad for me?”
“See? There you go again. You’re such a narcissist.”
“Are you gonna help us or not, Hayley?”
“I’m obligated to do something,” Hayley said, putting her tablet on top of a pile of books and grabbing for her jacket. “Lord North has declared open season on Gaul Thule, and so has the Director. I can’t possibly just ignore what you have planned.”
Alex perked up.
“You’ll help us, then?”
“No, I’m not going to help you, dumbass,” Hayley said, picking up her phone. “I’m gonna call my dad. I told you, I’m a Hegemony spy. Vivik must have figured I’d do this exact thing, though I can’t imagine why. I’ll tell my dad everything. He’ll probably report it all to Lord North. Whether he decides to help you or not is up to him.”
“Oh.” Alex thought about it. “Good?”
“Not necessarily.”
***
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure? You seem down.”
“Maybe a little.” She shifted in his arms. “There’s not much time left.”
“Don’t talk like that. We’re going to fix it tomorrow, for sure, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do you believe me?”
“I believe in you.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No.”
“Listen, about that the thing on the beach today, with John Parson.”
“Yes?”
“That wasn’t an accident, was it?”
She rolled away from him, as far as the tiny dorm bed would allow.
“Maybe.”
“It wasn’t a coincidence, was it? You went to meet him there. The walk with Katya was just a cover, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe.”
“You were gonna go to the Church with him, weren’t you?”
“Would you be mad, if I was?”
“Yeah,” he said, holding her tighter. “Very.”
“Then I wasn’t,” she said. “I wouldn’t do that.”
***
Vivik woke to find a woman shaking him violently by the shoulders, and assumed that it was Leigh, who had been lying beside him when he fell asleep. Then his eyes cleared, and he discovered that it was Hayley, who was sobbing hysterically as she pulled on his shoulders.
“You knew, didn’t you?” Hayley demanded. “You knew!”
“I knew,” Vivik said, pushing her away indelicately. “Get off me.”
Hayley tumbled to the floor on her knees. She stayed there, weeping into her hands, while Vivik sat up and swung his legs out of bed, wincing when he put his bare feet on the cold floor.
“My mom! My mom and my dad and my brothers…” Hayley choked back a sob, snot dripping from the end of her nose. “Why didn’t you have Alex tell me they were dead?”
“He didn’t know. Would you really have preferred to hear it from him?” Vivik said, slipping on his turban and rubbing his eyes. “It was better for you to find out yourself from sources you trust. You would have gone to them to confirm it if we told you, regardless, so what is the difference?”
“You’re cold,” Hayley murmured. “You don’t care at all, do you?”
“I feel bad for you, but I also hardly know you. I cared enough to make sure you found out, didn’t I?”
“I was planning to check in with them as soon as the Ether calmed down a bit more,” Hayley said. “You just hurried me along.”
“I did what I could. What do you want from me?”
“My whole family was murdered,” Hayley said, shuddering as she spoke. “Tell me who did it.”
“You must already know,” Vivik said, yawning. “Lord North had it done, though his sons that pulled the trigger.”
“North,” Hayley said, grimacing as if the word tasted bad. “Did you say ‘sons’? Because he only has the one.”
“He plans to let Nathan Drava marry into the family. That was the deal,” Vivik explained. “Lord North takes over Central, his son Kevin gets the North Cartel, and Nathan gets to marry North’s daughter, Madison. He had them kill your family to seal the deal.”
“Why? Why would he—?”
“You know why already. Your parents have opposed Lord North for years,” Vivik said. “North was opposed by the Thule Cartel, your family, and the Muir and Ricci families. He conspired to eliminate the Muir family already, so when Thule split with the Hegemony, he only had to deal with your family and the Riccis.”
“Sara’s parents, too?”
“Yeah. It’s been very grim.”
“I shared a tutor with Nathan for two years,” Hayley said, shivering on the floor. “Why would he do this?�
�
“I watched him murder his own father and brother in cold blood,” Vivik said. “I think there’s something very wrong with Nathan Drava.”
Hayley started to say something, but her voice died away before the first word finished.
Vivik looked away politely while she wept.
When he judged her at least somewhat composed, he handed her a box of tissues.
She turned away from him, and then loudly blew her nose. She wiped her eyes and cheeks with a second tissue.
“You wanted me to know,” Hayley said. “You must have had a reason. What do you want from me, Vivik?”
“Nothing,” he said. “I just thought you should know.”
“Bullshit,” Hayley said. “You work for Emily. Even if you don’t want something, she does.”
“It is funny you mention that,” Vivik said. “She did ask me to send you her way. She said she would be waiting up, so you can go over now, if you are up for it.”
Hayley stood up, and then lingered, staring at him with her lips curled into the beginning of a snarl.
He got the feeling she was looking for words, so he waited, making sure the strain on his patience showed on his face.
“Bastard,” Hayley said finally. “You should have told me.”
“Why? You wouldn’t have believed me.”
“No, I wouldn’t,” Hayley said. “But I might have at least thought you cared.”
She marched out of the room.
Vivik sat at the edge of his bed until he heard the front door slam, and Hayley crunching through the gravel out front.
He yawned, and then lay back on the bed, summoning the windows into existence above him, a private galaxy of glimmering points of view.
The window that settled in front of him, dominating his view, was the default for his protocol.
Emily sat in her living room in a china-pattern dress, a steaming mug of tea in one hand, the other twirling a lock of her hair.
She locked eyes with him, though his surveillance was imperceptible even to the most accomplished telepaths, and then she smiled, exposing a narrow strip of white between her pink lips.
Vivik returned her smile, though she could not see him, and then propped his head with pillows and settled in to watch.
He was awake already, and in no mood to go back to sleep, Vivik thought, his hand straying to the depression in the mattress cover beside him, the only evidence of Leigh’s former presence in his bed.
Her scent never lingered on the pillow, and he never found any of her straw-blonde hair on his bedding. Her synthetic cells neither grew nor died off, and her cool and immaculate body harbored no bacteria. Her skin never flushed, and she did not sweat. Leigh was sterile until he touched her, and she left nothing of herself behind when she departed.
It did not feel like a romance, Vivik decided, or even an affair.
It felt more like a haunting, albeit an extremely desirable one.
***
“Are you awake?”
She knew he was not, of course.
He only woke up in the mornings because she wanted him to so badly, and that was a temporary condition. The impending reality of his long sleep filled her with a sense of desperate and unfulfillable urgency, her heart fluttering uncomfortably and cold sweat beading on her skin. The sheets were damp and sticky, and Alex had stolen more than his share. He was pressed against her, warm and snoring, nearly crushing her against the dorm wall.
It would already be so long. Could she bear even longer?
There was no need to wait for the apport station, truly. If she wanted, she could have simply willed herself there, to the Thule estate, and asked Gaul directly. She had invented dozens of reasons for not doing that, but alone in the middle of the night, the truth was unavoidable.
She was afraid.
She was frightened of what Gaul might tell her, and even more frightened, because she knew that she would do it. Whatever it was.
There were so many paths forward, but there was only one that she would take. She did not question that, in the anxious clarity of the early morning.
She only wondered if she could live with it.
Eerie gently pushed Alex away and rolled to her back.
The room was dark, and the air hinted at mildew. Eerie did not need light to see the scars that Alex bore already. The nanites repaired tissue and sinew, so there was little trace of the damage on his skin, but she could feel the frigidity of his false eye and fingertips from where she lay, and the trauma etched into his violated brain spilled into the atmosphere as he slept.
She knew his sleeping face like the back of her hand. How much time had they already spent, just like this, he asleep and she awake, lying side by side?
How much more could she bear?
Eerie clutched her arms to her chest, and considered what Alistair had done, and what Samnang had done to the young man beside her, eyes closed and mouth wide open. She thought about the Program, and the years of incarceration, and the Weir that he called Mr. Blue-Tie in the privacy of his recurring nightmares.
Was it already too much? Had she broken him irrevocably?
She knew immediately that was wrong. She was far past that sort of consideration.
She had conspired to take his family and his life away, and then replaced it with years of confinement and isolation. She made herself the sole bright point in his existence, the entirety of whatever happiness he knew, but it was only like that because she had deprived him of every other possible joy.
Could she really ask him for even more?
If he gave it, could she live with that?
Alex rolled over in his sleep, his arm flopping uncomfortably across her chest.
“I wish you were awake,” Eerie said. “I would tell you everything, if you would only wake up on your own, just once.”
Alex opened his mouth and drew breath, and for a moment she was sure he was about to speak.
Then he snored, and Eerie smiled in the temperate dark and nestled closer to him.
She was asking the wrong questions, she thought, drifting slowly toward sleep.
Eerie knew that she would try to save herself, because she could do nothing else, despite her best efforts.
That was a selfish thing to do, but she was selfish.
She would try to save Alex for the same reason.
Eerie knew what a good person would have done, and she also knew that she was not a good person.
She would ask for his help, because she always did. He would try to save her, because he always did.
She would do whatever she could, to continue being. It was a source of some small satisfaction to her, that despite her alien nature, she was no different than any other animal in a trap.
Alex would fight, because that was what he had been taught.
All of that was the way it always was, is, and would be.
The only question, really, was how she would live with it, and how she would try to make amends. Lying beside the young man she thrilled to think of as her boyfriend, her lover, Eerie felt very selfish indeed.
Selfish enough, she wondered, to do what she knew she would do?
Of course. That was never in question.
The rest was apologies and regrets, atrocities and funerals and whole oceans of bitter loneliness.
As it was.
As it is.
As it would be.
Eerie drifted toward sleep, hating her own exhaustion, hating the wasted time and the imposition. Every time she closed her eyes to rest, Eerie reasoned, that was a surrender, another kind of return to the Church.
***
Emily opened the door before Hayley could knock.
Hayley’s hair was wild and her face streaked with tears. Emily was composed and unsurprised, still wearing makeup and heels despite the hour.
“You told Vivik to…inform me. About what happened to my family. You want something from me, and I have no desire to remain in your debt,” Hayley said, her face contorted wi
th the intensity of her emotions. “What is it?”
“I’m so glad you asked. It is extremely fortuitous timing, because I have to admit, I never learned how to drive,” Emily said, with a welcoming smile. “Won’t you come inside?”
Twenty-Seven
Day Six
Hvolsvöllur was barely a town, but traffic was heavy, and Hayley was an absurdly cautious driver, so Alex had ample time to study the neat houses and small farms they passed. The green of their immediate surroundings was in sharp contrast to the snow-covered slopes of the mountains that loomed behind it, and the black and angry sea to the south.
Alex was wedged into the middle seat in the back of the car between Eerie and Leigh. Eerie had her face glued to the window, regularly shouting discoveries, while Leigh stared straight ahead and looked bored. Emily sat in the passenger seat, occasionally providing directions to Hayley. Alex was cramped and uncomfortable on the raised seat but was also afforded an excellent view out the windshield between Hayley and Emily, the latter of whom barely looked up from her phone during the interminable drive from Reykjavik. A direct apport had been ruled out, in the hopes of achieving some level of surprise, but to Alex, the whole process of renting the car and then crawling along the highway for an hour seemed an unnecessary risk, but even more of a waste of time.
That was natural, he supposed. He and Eerie were on the clock.
He was tense until they left the city.
Then, as they pulled on to Route One, Iceland’s famous ring road, choked with traffic due to an accident they never actually saw, Eerie put her arm around Alex, and he breathed deeply of her cinnamon and aloe scent as he nestled against her side. She stroked his head gently, running her fingers through his hair, and he was nearly lulled to sleep.
Eventually they left the congested highway for a narrow asphalt lane. They followed in the direction of one of the white mountains for a few minutes, then turned on to a dirt road that meandered in the direction of the sea. The road bounced and tossed them about the cabin for a few minutes before settling into a steady vibration that made Alex a little queasy.
The Church of Sleep (Central Series Book 5) Page 69
