The Anathema
( The Central - 2 )
Zachary Rawlins
Zachary Rawlins
The Anathema
Prologue
Emily had just finished tying a bow on the present she’d selected for her father, a tie-pin he probably wouldn’t like that she had bought in an antique store during a visit to Taos, when she pushed the curtain aside to see if it was snowing, and it officially became her worst Christmas ever. This was, in all fairness, saying something when it came to Emily Muir.
Not because her father would not like the tiepin. George Muir, after all, was not high on Emily’s list of favorite people, expressing disappointment in Emily so consistently that she had resigned herself to it. Instead, it was the two people strolling through the quad, holding hands, who were ruining the holiday season for her. She did not recognize either of them at first, but then she saw the hat the taller one was wearing, and that she knew immediately. She had seen it take shape, after all; stuffed in the knitting basket Eerie arrived and left with when she visited Alex at the hospital.
Numb with surprise, Emily let the curtain drop back down, numb and a little queasy. She had been preparing herself to go to Alex’s bedside — normally; Eerie would be leaving right about now, so if Emily timed her arrival right, she could avoid bumping into her in the lobby on the way out. Emily wanted to be happy that Alex had woken up; if anyone had asked her, she would have said that she was very happy, and perhaps a part of her was. Nevertheless, most of her was too busy wishing all sorts of terrible deaths on the blue-haired girl, who had somehow morphed from someone she pitied to her archrival, her nemesis, her adversary for the heart of a boy that she was not completely certain that she actually liked.
Of course, she did not have the luxury of such considerations. Her place in the Raleigh Cartel, her entire future, in a matter of months, had come to rest on the whims of a boy two months her junior. A boy who let his hair grow too long, who always wore headphones and didn’t always take them out when he talked to you, a boy too nervous to even try and kiss her when she’d gone out with him. It was not a happy development, but Emily was used to that. She had braced herself years ago for much worse things.
She pulled the curtain aside again, just a few inches, and peered back out through the frosted windowpane. Two people wandering aimlessly through the snow below the dorm buildings, breathing steam and looking at each other with flushed faces. Emily tried to push the turmoil and panic out of her head long enough to take a good look, trying to see their halos: the smoky, multicolored rings of light that hovered just above their heads. She could barely see his, and then only with a great deal of effort. Eerie’s halo, on the other hand, was entirely absent.
This was the crux of the problem. Emily was an empath, and every empath perceived the emotions around them in a different way — for Emily, it was halos, for others it was an aura, a melody, or even a fragrance. Most empaths swam in a sea of such impressions; many of them were taught to block much of it out, so they could function normally. Emily had the bad luck to be born with only a shred of power, the least one could have and still claim to have any at all, and that meant that on her best day, she could only tell how someone felt. Her power was too weak to make her of use to the cartel as a diplomat, a leader, a negotiator, or a spy, meaning that her most probable future was that of a glorified homemaker, given away in a political marriage. Nevertheless, Emily had just enough power to realize that Alex was already starting to nurture a crush on the girl he was holding hands with; his halo was all soft, optimistic pinks with livid white strands of excitement and streamers of deep red lust interwoven.
Emily hefted the present experimentally, considering tossing it against the wall, but she was too sensible for that, and too angry to cry. Therefore, she settled for putting the present carefully down on the table and then pacing across the room, swearing to herself and cursing whatever fate had made it possible for Alex to wake up when Eerie was at his bedside, and not her.
“That bitch,” Emily muttered, clenching her fists while she walked from one end of the small room to the other, one side too warm from the ancient heater, the other frigid thanks to ventilation problems in the old dormitory buildings. “That selfish… bitch,” she finished lamely, having already exhausted her small store of pejoratives.
The funny thing was that Emily liked Eerie — or rather, she had felt sorry for Eerie, who seemed to be a favorite target for bullying in her class. Eerie was a changeling, meaning that one of her parents was Fey, while the other was human, leaving their daughter an outcast of two worlds, raised at the Academy since she was a child. Emily had a certain sympathy for that, given her own difficult position in her family and in her cartel; anyway, Emily didn’t like to see people mistreated. She had always done her best to look out for Eerie, not that the strange girl had ever shown any appreciation for her efforts. Now, Emily thought, fluffing up with righteous indignation, they were enemies.
The target of her anger fluctuated between Eerie and Alex. Emily cut him more slack — Alex was, after all, just a boy, and therefore helpless in the face of Eerie’s dubious charms. Nevertheless, he had made a promise… well, more of an agreement, to pretend that they were dating, at least in public, for the sake of convincing Emily’s handlers that she was making progress in her assignment to seduce and acquire the boy for the Raleigh Cartel. Emily was, by this point, so well conditioned to accept being pitied that she didn’t even resent the situation that much. Moreover, she had been making progress, real progress. If Eerie hadn’t intervened a few weeks ago, dragging Alex off to San Francisco on some sort of bizarre date that ended up leaving both Alex and Miss Aoki hospitalized, and poor Edward dead, then Emily would almost definitely, she thought, have replaced their agreement with an actual relationship.
Where was the justice in that? Eerie had gotten Alex hurt, and another student killed, playing her little games, and yet there she was, holding hands with the boy as if she had a right to him. Emily paced and stewed inside her dormitory room, dressed up for a hospital visit she was never going to make, her blond hair done in painstaking curls that he wouldn’t see. All this because she had been too nice.
Emily paced, stomping her foot occasionally against the cold stone floor to emphasize her frustration. She wondered if they had kissed already. She wondered if they had slept together when they had gone to San Francisco — she had heard they checked into a hotel together, before Anastasia found them, and she heard all kinds of stories about Eerie. She didn’t think that they had done anything yet, but with that girl, it was impossible to be sure. She wondered, stewed, swore, and got so wrapped up in jealousy that eventually she had to sit back down again, all flustered and dizzy. Emily stole another glance out the window, telling herself that she didn’t really care; but they were gone, and that worried her, too.
She wondered what Eerie was doing with him right now, what she was letting him to do to her, and she hated herself for it. Emily stayed like that for a while, staring out at the falling snow, her mind a blur of vindictiveness and recriminations and self-pity. Then, with an effort, she put a stop to it, gathered herself, and considered her options.
Confronting Alex directly was out. She was afraid she would come off as possessive and controlling — after all, she wasn’t even really his girlfriend. Confronting Eerie was probably equally pointless, though it sounded much more satisfying. Going to the cartel or the Hegemony for help was obviously out of the question. They would probably pull her from the Academy and send some other girl, or girls, in her place. However, that did not mean Emily was going to keep playing nice, either.
Emily thought it over for a while, but she knew right from the start she only had one real option.
&nbs
p; She felt a little bit better, having come to a decision. She changed clothes, the blue floral-pattern skirt and soft wool sweater she had worn for her hospital visit put aside for a different time. She dressed in her normal clothes, and then combed the curls from her hair, taking a perverse pleasure in ruining her hard work.
She looked at herself in the mirror, and managed to summon up a smile. She decided it looked brittle and gave up on it. Then Emily went to find the only person in the world who she trusted to help her.
1
Todd Martinique spent sixteen years planted behind a desk. There was nothing about being behind that desk, sitting on the terrible flat wooden chair, which he did not know. He had gotten the job as a young man, with gelled brown hair and a body that he felt some justifiable pride in, having devoted much of his spare time to the gym. They warned him during the interview that the position was a dead end, a clerking job rather than a security position; a day spent checking badges against names on a list, watching pixilated security camera footage, and making a handful of routine reports via email, with no hope for advancement. He hadn’t been concerned at the time, because he hadn’t planned on staying; he intended this job to be a stopgap measure, a small step on the road on his way to better things elsewhere.
It did not turn out that way. Instead, he stayed and read the same names off the same cheap, thin printouts that spooled out of the fax fresh every morning, watched his belly grow and everything else sag and spread out, and felt a tolerable level of malaise. If it wasn’t for the fringe benefits, he might not have stayed.
Todd was doing what he usually did, around three o’clock, when the afternoon stretched out endlessly toward the close of business. Todd was occupied with the feed for camera six, the one that was supposed to focus on, of all things, the employee parking lot. It was almost two years ago that one of the techs had cut in a satellite feed, and now camera six’s monitor never showed anything except muted ESPN. Normally, there were no visitors if there were no names listed, and today, there were no names; so Todd was watching some feature about the US Open, bored out of his mind when the security door opened.
If visitors were rare, then civilians were an abnormality of the highest degree. Yet every inch of this woman, from her faded blue jeans to the chestnut hair that fell haphazardly onto the shoulders of her grey sweatshirt imprinted with the halo of the Anaheim Angel’s logo, screamed civilian. Todd had to admit that she looked all right, even through a half-inch of bulletproof glass. She had warm brown eyes, and when she smiled, he was bizarrely reminded of Mrs. Franklin, a young teacher that he had nursed a crush on all the way through junior high. He did not feel good about the circumstances, though, as she definitely was not on the list, because no one at all was.
“Can I help you, ma’am?”
Todd straightened up quickly, put down his clipboard and did his best to look officious.
“I bet you can,” the woman responded cheerfully, leaning her elbows on the little platform that jutted out in front of the security station. “I need to know if you’re holding someone here.”
“Uh, I’m sorry, ma’am, but can I see your identification, please? This is a secure area…”
“My name is Rebecca Levy,” she said ingratiatingly, “and I don’t have identification, but you don’t need to worry about that.”
Todd felt tremendous relief on hearing this. He had already been envisioning some kind of bureaucratic slipup, and the tiresome paperwork it would generate. It was not how he had planned to spend his evening, and he was happy to avoid the trouble. That this woman, Rebecca, did not need ID made his whole day a lot easier, and he appreciated it. He resolved himself to help her in any way that he could. He felt strongly that it was the least he could do.
“Right,” Todd said, giving the woman his best smile in return. “What can I do for you today, ma’am?”
“I need to know if you’re holding a prisoner here that I’m supposed to collect. A tall woman with black hair; big tattoo with a tree and a Hebrew script all around it on her back. She may have been injured when she arrived, or unconscious, or in an amnesiac state. Sound like anyone you have here?”
Todd started nodding before she even finished her sentence. He had seen what she did to Miguel’s arm, after all, before they carted him off to the hospital, and that hadn’t been easy to forget.
“8B.”
Rebecca frowned shortly.
“Excuse me,” she said, leaning forward, her forehead pressed against the glass so she could see his nametag, “Mr. Martinique.”
“Todd,” he cut-in.
“Todd,” she said, smiling broadly. “Of course. What is ‘8B’?”
“The prisoner you mentioned. The woman with the tree tattoo. We don’t have a name for her, so we use the cell ID number. Let me call the back, and I will have them send you an escort…”
Rebecca shook her head, and Todd’s hand froze on the phone’s keypad.
“That’s okay. I’d really prefer if you took me there yourself.”
Something in the firmness in her tone, the confidence in her sparkling brown eyes, tore him between his eagerness to please and the nagging feeling that something about this was entirely wrong. Technically, he wasn’t allowed in the back, though after a few years smoking cigarettes on break with the guys who worked back there, they had invited him down, strictly off the clock. They would certainly go ape-shit if they saw him back there on shift, and obviously, he couldn’t leave the desk unmanned; beside that, since when did they send civilians to pick up prisoners?
“Ma’am, I’m afraid that’s impossible. Now, if you’ll let me call…”
“Todd,” the woman said, a palm pressed against the bulletproof plastic. “Why don’t you come around and open the door for me? We can’t talk through the glass like this.”
He hesitated for a moment, then her brown eyes caught him, and he couldn’t remember why he had been troubled. What was there to worry about? It was hard to talk through the glass. He could trust Rebecca, and anyway, he knew what he was doing. There was no one who knew more about being behind that desk than Todd did. This meant opening the door so that Rebecca could explain the situation. He felt the utmost confidence that they would be able to work things out face-to-face.
The magnetic locks gave way with their usual reluctance, snapping to the side and allowing him to swing the steel reinforced door open. Rebecca gave him an appreciative nod and then walked in, looking around the little cubby that was his station with a vague air of distaste, before eventually settling herself on the edge of his rather precarious desk.
“Do you smoke, Todd?”
Todd nodded in the affirmative.
“Good,” she said, pulling a pack from her sweatshirt pocket, along with a red plastic lighter. “You don’t mind, right?”
Todd shook his head, not reaching for his own cigarettes because, of course, it was against the rules to smoke. They had fired one of the other security guys, one who worked the parking lots, for sneaking off to a bathroom for a cigarette. However, he was sure that it was okay for Rebecca.
She lit up, inhaled, and then breathed out with a sigh of relief. Then she made a face and urged him to step closer.
“Come here, Todd. Come over so I can reach you.”
Todd almost fell over himself in his attempt to cross the tiny room, to stand in front of the woman with his hands twitching. She was beautiful, he had decided, with those bewitching brown eyes, and he wanted her with the same urgency that he wanted Mrs. Franklin, back in junior high; he was desperate for her to touch him…
“Ew,” she said, frowning. “Tone it down a little there, big guy.”
His desire disintegrated like smoke in the wind, here and then gone, leaving behind only a small, confused memory. He still adored Rebecca, but now there was something almost familial about it, like she was his mother, or his sister. When she reached for his forehead he closed his eyes automatically, instantly soothed by the feel of her cool hand on his brow.
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br /> “Okay. Here’s how it’s going to go. I want to go back to cell 8B, Todd, and you want to take me there. Now, now — don’t get worried. If anybody stops us, I’ll explain things to them, and then they’ll understand. Like you understand me. Okay?”
Todd nodded his agreement, pleased that Rebecca would take responsibility for the situation. He always felt better when somebody else was holding the bag.
“This is important, Todd. This is a big deal to you. On the way, I might need you to do things. I also have some questions for you, and I want you to answer them quickly and honestly. Can you do that for me?”
Again, Todd nodded, as content as a clam in its shell, his eyes closed, waiting for instructions. The part of his mind that was still thinking wondered when he had last felt this secure or confident.
“Alright, then. Lean the way, Todd.”
Todd opened his eyes, smiled at her, and then led her to the sole door that provided entrance to the facility for people who did not have bags tied over their heads. He used his own entrance code, something he almost never did. When he went back, in the evenings, he always used the dummy code that the techs had doped up years ago, so that it would not go on record. He knew that the system would log him opening the door in violation of procedure, but he was certain that Rebecca could fix that, too. He just needed to remember to ask her about it before she left. First, he knew, his priority was to get Rebecca to the cell as efficiently as possible. She was obviously important, and who knew, maybe there was the possibility of a promotion in all of this, even for someone as unimportant as himself, if he was helpful enough. He led her down the short hallway to the elevator, walking purposefully, trying to act as if he did this every day, hoping to make a good impression.
“Hey, Todd?” Rebecca asked, dropping her cigarette casually on the floor and then grinding it out with the toe of her sneaker. “How come you know about the tattoo? You don’t check the prisoners in, right?”
The Anathema tc-2 Page 1
