The Academy tc-1

by Zachary Rawlins

  Alex wondered again about the candy. For some reason, he found himself thinking about the cloud of monarch butterflies from his dream, orange wings against a blue sky, somewhere he couldn’t remember visiting, somewhere he could hear the ocean. There was sadness in the memory, a sweet kind of sadness that he wasn’t exactly adverse to.

  He managed to extricate himself when they reached the dance floor, batting her away gently and making excuses, eventually making his way alone to one arm of the speaker array, sitting down on top of the vibrating pile of speakers, next to an intertwined couple and a passed-out teenager in drag. They all seemed very young, somehow, Alex thought, though he wasn’t sure that he was actually older than they were. He wasn’t certain, but he thought he might have actually been more embarrassed sitting there then he would have been staying on the dance floor.

  Eerie pouted briefly, tapping her foot and glaring at him. Then she shrugged, and turned away from him, gliding to the center of the humid floor, and then spinning around in a slow circle, her eyes closed. Alex sat with his legs dangling off a column of stacked woofers, the surface beneath him pulsating with the music, his skull reverberating with the bass beat, and he watched Eerie dance.

  Later, he would not be able to describe it, although he would remember it clearly. She was not, he would say haltingly, an amazing dancer, not exactly. Not that he would know, having never danced in his life. But, he didn’t think it was entirely whatever she had given him, though he felt an exhilarating combination of calm and elation that he could only attribute to drugs. No, he would try and explain, there was something special about Eerie dancing.

  Margot would tell him much later about other nights the same thing had happened; at retro-styled swing clubs in Los Angeles or hip-hop clubs in Baltimore, in the parking lot of a Phish show outside Phoenix, minutes before closing at a basement club in London, where a small crowd of puzzled transvestites had watched her dance to electro. Eerie, she would tell him, simply liked to dance.

  Also, Margot would add, frowning, she has a thing for fucked up people.

  But he found out those things later, after he had watched her dance, after he had fallen for her a little bit, in that intense and irrevocably irrational way that even he knew was a hallmark of total naivety. Still, that knowledge didn’t change anything for Alex. Watching Eerie dance, knowing that eventually she would come back to sit next to him, that was the first truly good thing that had happened to him since his home had burned to the ground. Maybe before that, too. He couldn’t remember that well.

  She spun and twirled and the light around her had the quality of honey, warm and amber-toned, ambient and soothing. She was not athletic, not flashy, and not dramatic. Her hair hung down in front of her eyes, her sweatshirt slipped down to expose the gentle slope of shoulders, the rise of her collarbone above her tight black top. She moved with a self-assurance and grace he had never seen in her, not in any previous circumstance, but he found himself wondering how it was that he hadn’t always seen it.

  People should have stared. They must have seen the sparkling girl, making slow revolutions through the dance floor like she was alone on it, in the midst of the press of bodies but never actually touching anyone. She was vibrant, gleaming with an inner radiance, a honey light. They must have seen her.

  Alex couldn’t see anyone or anything else. He stared, his head pleasantly spinning, his heart filled with a benign euphoria, a mild intoxication. The world around him softened, became universally warm and gentle. The light around Eerie seemed to pass right through him, like a current of warm water, or the sound of a summer wind brushing over long brown grass. He tried to hold up his hands to the light, and he could not, or he did not want to. There was no way to be certain. He sat and watched Eerie dance.

  And eventually, she came back to him, smiling and breathing hard, her face flushed, soaked with sweat. Alex reached for her without thinking, watching it happen without a trace of panic or anxiety, and she took his hand and squeezed it with her own for a moment, before letting go with a smile.

  “What…” Alex croaked, pausing to drink greedily from the bottle of water that she offered him. “What was in the candy you gave me?”

  Eerie laughed and patted him on the head. Her smile was benign, tolerant and amused. She beamed at him indulgently, like a favored child.

  “Bubble gum, Alex.” She paused, then her expression turned suspicious. “You didn’t swallow it, did you?”

  “What? No,” Alex shook his head, confused. He found himself wondering what he had done with the gum, anyway. All he had in his mouth was a soggy paper stick. “I didn’t mean that. What made me all fucked up?”

  “Oh,” Eerie said with concern, sitting down next to him on the speaker. “Is it bad?”

  She peered into his eyes, concerned, and Alex couldn’t help but grin at her until she smiled back.

  “No, not at all,” he said earnestly. “I was wondering, you know, because I don’t really have a lot of experience with this sort of thing.”

  Eerie looked at her hands shyly.

  “It’s just me, Alex.” She smiled at him hesitantly. “Because I… because it was in my mouth, you see? Because my whole body is like a drug, Alex.”

  “No shit?”

  At the time, anyway, it sounded reasonable enough.

  “Uh-huh,” Eerie said, nodding. “For normal people, anyway. That’s how the Fey communicate with each other, chemically. Pheromones and particular compounds in… you know,” she said, clearly embarrassed. “Sweat. Saliva. That sort of thing.”

  Eerie blushed, and Alex wished he could think of something cool to say to change the mood. Alex snuck a look at her out of the corner of his eye. Her small round face was earnest, and it was easy to see how nervous she was. His eyes drifted down to her lap, to the strip of thigh that showed between the hem of her skirt and the top of her black knee socks, and for a moment, his train of thought disintegrated. Then he caught himself, and quickly looked back up at Eerie’s face, but she did not appear to have noticed anything. She was staring off at the still-packed dance floor, the crowd increasingly disheveled, energetic and sweaty.

  “Is this like empathy?” Alex asked doubtfully. It didn’t feel anything like what Rebecca did — he had no special awareness of Eerie, her thoughts, or her feelings; rather, a general sense of well-being, a fading physical high, and a strange, benign fuzziness.

  Eerie shook her head emphatically.

  “No, not at all. It’s all chemistry. I like being around parties. They make me happy. When I’m happy, the people who, you know, come into contact with me, they are too.”

  Alex sat next to her, and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything at all to talk about. Eerie sat restlessly beside him, kicking her legs against the speaker they hung off of, watching the people dance with obvious desire to rejoin them. He wished he could have thought of a good reason to make her stay there, beside him.

  Eventually, she climbed back up to her feet, brushing off the back of her black skirt where she’d sat down, and smiled coyly at Alex.

  “I’m going to go dance now. Will you come this time?”

  She held out one hand, offering him help up.

  Alex shook his head, smiling weakly.

  “You’ll regret it, you know,” Eerie admonished him, obviously disappointed. “You will wish you had, Alex.”

  She walked off to the dance floor without looking back at him.

  I already do, Alex thought bitterly, brushing his hair away from his eyes and feeling bitter. I already do.

  Twenty Five

  “I haven’t seen you in some time, Alice. How have you been?”

  Alice’s smile reminded Chris of the Cheshire Cat. Except much more frightening.

  “A busy girl is a happy girl. But I’m certain that you’ve heard,” Alice cooed, sitting down across from him at the cafe table. “Unless you’ve lost your touch for these things?”

  “Hardly,” Chris said, smiling back at her tiredly. “I�
��m afraid that there is still very little that goes on in our sordid underworld that I am not eventually made aware of. Word is that you’ve been working quite a bit these last few weeks. Saigon, Los Angeles, Manila, Paris… all operations targeting the Terrie Cartel, if I’m not mistaken.”

  The waiter was clearly unnerved by Alice, and delivered the coffees Chris had already ordered in a hurried manner that made it abundantly clear that they would not be seeing the boy again. Alice seemed vaguely amused by this.

  Chris had to admire their waiter’s keen sense of self preservation. Not everyone was so quick to spot Alice for what she was.

  He’d first met Alice in Berlin, during the strange and exciting years after the First World War, not long before she’d started working as an Auditor. She didn’t appear to have changed much since — her hair was dyed black, now, and a faint white scar was etched along one cheekbone, but she didn’t seem to have aged at all. Even her clothes weren’t much different from the first time he’d met her, at a friend’s party in a flat in Fredericksburg, in a slinky black dress and high-laced shoes with pointed toes, though she’d ditched the dress and shoes in favor of tight black jeans and motorcycle boots. The coat she hung over the seatback was too heavy and long for the weather, so it had to be armor.

  Chris liked to flatter himself by thinking that he looked much the same himself, except that his hair had faded to white a few decades ago. He dyed it for several years, before he’d lost interest in the pretense. Otherwise, like Alice, the body he inhabited appeared to be somewhere in its early thirties. Even the fantastically expensive cream-colored suit that he wore was fundamentally similar to the things he’d worn in the heady days of the Weimar Republic, though tailors had been better back then. One of the tragedies of the modern world.

  “You aren’t mistaken, Chris.” Alice blew on her coffee, then set the cup back down, apparently deciding it was too hot. “But it’s more than the Terrie Cartel that I am dealing with. Witches, and Weir, and who knows what else.”

  “I heard about some of that,” Chris said, idly stirring the coffee he’d ordered out of politeness. “Even for me, that’s a bit hard to swallow — Operators working with Witches. I thought your people were conditioned to make that kind of thing impossible?”

  “We thought so, too.” Alice shrugged. “Not the first time Analytics has been wrong, you know.”

  Chris nodded uncertainly, brushing an imaginary crumb from the front of his immaculate white blazer.

  “Quite. Still, such a thing has never happened before. I would not have believed it to be possible, under normal circumstances.”

  Alice shot Chris an inquisitive look.

  “What, exactly, makes the current circumstances abnormal?” The question sounded innocent enough, but Chris knew better than to think that Alice would ask for anything. Alice took. It was what she did. “We’ve had rogue cartels before, after all. The Terrie Cartel is probably the biggest we’ve ever had to sanction, but it’s hardly a unique situation.”

  Chris spread his hands innocently and put on the face that had sold more stories than he could count.

  “I’m afraid that we’ll need to come to some sort of accommodation before we can discuss that any further,” he said, as if he regretted the necessity. “Of course, if it were up to me, I’d tell you gratis, but that would be bad for business, you understand.”

  “I do, actually.” Alice blew on her coffee and sipped at it cautiously, then set the cup carefully back down in the chipped white saucer. “I appreciate your position. But, I wonder if you appreciate the significance of mine.”

  Chris looked at Alice thoughtfully for a moment, and then gave her a tired smile.

  “Believe me, I know that if you want to, you can force the information out of me,” Chris admitted. “I’m something of a coward when it comes to pain, after all, and I do intend on living a long, long time. While you do have a certain amount of leverage, give some thought to this, Alice — won’t you have questions you need answered, in the future? Who will you turn to, once you’ve used me up? Who else would talk to an Auditor?”

  Alice sipped her coffee again, and then grinned at him over the cup.

  “Don’t worry about it, Chris. For reasons I don’t understand, I have a certain misplaced affection for you. What is it going to cost me?”

  “Well,” Chris hedged, “what do you need to know, exactly?”

  “Everything,” Alice answered flatly. “I need to know everything that the Terrie Cartel has been doing for the past several years, what the Witches have to do with it, the Weir, everything. Gaul says that the store is open on this one.”

  “He wants it that bad?” Chris asked, too stunned to hide his surprise. Gaul was notorious for his cheapness.

  “He has a hard on for this like you wouldn’t believe,” Alice said glumly, setting her coffee aside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so worked up. I need to know anything I might need to know, alright? So, tell me what it is that you want.”

  “Two things.” Chris considered his coffee, and then decided against it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t drink the stuff, but the last time he had, it had given him heartburn for days. “I want a favor from Central, and I want a favor from you.”

  “Oh, Chris,” Alice said, putting one hand on her chest, and fluttering her eyelashes. “I’m here in a professional capacity…”

  Chris did his best to look appalled, rather than hurt and saddened. He didn’t like to make Alice aware of the times when her memory failed her, even if it wounded him that she had forgotten the nights they’d been together; at the Russian embassy in Prague, on the porch outside a tiny cottage near Hamburg they had rented one balmy weekend in June, in a hotel in Copenhagen so expensive that they never even saw the employees — fresh towels and meals simply appeared, as if by some kind of domestic magic. Chris couldn’t imagine forgetting all of it, but that had always been the score with Alice.

  “I’d never try and blackmail you into it, my dear,” he said with a pained grin. “I’m certain that eventually you’ll succumb to my charms. No, I think you’ll find that what I want you to do is more along your usual line.”

  Alice shook her head in mock resignation.

  “Your loss. But I can’t offer anything, until I know the particulars.”

  “I want Central to assume total responsibility for Margot’s education and upbringing,” Chris said abruptly, moodily pushing his coffee away. “I did make promises to provide her with mentorship and financial support, but it has become quite a burden.”

  Alice smiled at him.

  “Times are hard all around then, Christopher?” Alice pursed her lips briefly. Chris knew from experience that meant she’d agree — reluctantly, of course. He’d seen that face during that bad business in Moscow in the ‘53, and then again, decades later in Serbia. Alice was extremely concerned about something, and he had a pretty good idea about what. “You’re gonna break that little vampire’s heart, if she finds out you are shifting the responsibility. And what do you want from me?”

  Chris folded his hands in front of his face as if in prayer, and tried his best to look beneficent and thoughtful. Not that he could hope to fool Alice, who knew him well enough to spot an act, even without using the Inquisition Protocol she had access to as an Auditor. It was a habit that helped him feel more confident in his presentation.

  “It will probably get heavy,” he admitted. “But, you know I wouldn’t bother you for anything that wasn’t.”

  “I’d probably get bored with anything else,” Alice said, gradually shredding a discarded sugar packet into dull pink ribbons. “Get to the point, please, Chris.”

  “I need you to watch my back on a job,” Chris said plainly. “It’s something personal, it isn’t Society business. I can’t use my normal channels to handle this thing.”

  Alice leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the most open confusion he’d ever seen her express, already starting to morph into anger.

 
“And now I am supposed to say ‘Just like old times’, or something, right? I’m an Auditor, Chris, not a hired dog. I don’t do favors. I certainly don’t help you deal with your ‘personal business’.”

  Chris held up his hands pleadingly.

  “Credit me with a bit more intelligence than that, Alice. I know perfectly well who I’m talking to. I wouldn’t have bothered to make the request, but the fact is…”

  Chris hesitated for a moment, then. It was like looking down off of a height, right before he jumped. It didn’t change anything, other than reminding him to be terrified. He still had no options other than a leap of faith.

  “The fact is that this job pertains to your Audit, Alice, and I think you’ll be very interested in it.”

  “I already am,” Alice said grimly, her smile suddenly gone. Chris wondered how he’d forgotten how much scarier she was without it. “Have you done something ill-advised, Chris?”

  Chris shook his head and sighed.

  “I wasn’t planning on trying to hide it,” he said guiltily. “We don’t have nice jobs, Alice, and they aren’t easy, either. I’ve made a mistake.”

  Alice leaned forward even further, taking his ice-cold hand in her own. It was a friendly gesture, but with an underlying firmness. He knew better than to flinch from her touch.

  “What did you do for the Terrie Cartel, Chris?”

  He heard the edge in her voice, and knew that it could go either way, but Chris faced it down with the nerves of a life-long gambler.

  “Remember, when I took the job, they were still a cartel in good standing!” Chris protested. “The suspension only came down a few weeks ago. This all started almost three years ago.”

  When he realized that no reaction from Alice was forthcoming, Chris sighed again, more out of habit than anything.

  “The Terrie Cartel approached us, the Society, wanting to buy all kinds of intelligence — anything at all on the Witch cults, those Anathema freaks in the Outer Dark, the movements of the Weir tribes and population estimates, that sort of thing.” Chris shook his head, and wished that he could take his hand out from under Alice’s. “It’s obvious to me, now, they were interested in how much we knew, and by extension, how much Central was likely to know, rather than the information itself.”