The Anathema tc-2

by Zachary Rawlins

  “I’m sorry, guilty as charged,” Rebecca admitted, wiping her eyes. “I got a swelled head. Started messing around in Alistair’s backyard. No need to ask, boss, I swear off unauthorized telepathy in the future.”

  “Did you really think I would let it drop that easily? I see patterns, Rebecca, the overall fabric of events; you know that. Do I need to spell things out for you? How many times have you had individual sessions with Alex?”

  “Once a week for the last couple months,” Rebecca said, fidgeting and tapping her cigarette against the desk more than was necessary. “Once a week, when he first came here. The kid is all kinds of fucked up, Gaul. Keeping him functioning is half of my job around here.”

  “Then the scope of your responsibilities has diminished greatly. How often do you use his catalytic abilities? How often is the feedback effect part of the therapy?”

  “Every time,” Rebecca admitted hollowly, then added in an even quieter voice. “Pretty much.”

  “Then I think it is safe to assume your protocols have grown more powerful with each session. You were always an amazing empath, Rebecca, but you were never much of a telepath. Disappearing? Probing a Changeling? Tampering with your boss’s mind, when your boss is a precognitive, and knew about your plan a week before you decided to put into action? None of that is normal behavior for you. The increase in your abilities doesn’t completely fade when you break contact, does it?”

  Rebecca smoked quietly for a moment, assessing.

  “The immediate boost drops off pretty fast. However, a subtle, lasting effect persists for days. At first, I didn’t even really notice it. And there is… something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “I figured it out a week or two after the first time we did a session. The more I operate a protocol under Alex’s influence, even one beyond the normal limits of my ability, the greater chance that I will be able to use it later, on my own,” Rebecca admitted with the air of one confessing a sin. “I wanted to tell you. But…”

  “I understand the telepathy, now,” Gaul said dryly. “But you were right. This needs to be kept quiet. From Mitsuru Aoki above all. You are clear on this, right?”

  Rebecca nodded, obviously feeling guilty. Gaul pushed aside his malaise with effort.

  “How many times have they come into contact?”

  “Only once, on that first night. They’ve interacted since, of course, because she’s running Alex through the Program, but his protocol hasn’t been involved.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m fairly sure,” Rebecca hedged, biting her lip.

  “I want to be certain. Have Mitsuru in for a session as soon as possible. Pull her from the Program, and try to limit her contact with Alex Warner. Have Alistair shift her back into the field rotation, full-time, and monitor Mitsuru yourself for any changes in behavior or ability, anything to indicate that she might have been affected.”

  “We are short-handed already,” Rebecca protested. “Who’s going to run the Program? Me? Alex won’t ever trust me again if I even show my face near that building. Michael? You know he objects to the entire idea on,” Rebecca gestured, making a vague, indecipherable figure in the air with her cigarette, “moral grounds, or whatever. Moreover, Alice is still up there in her diary room. You don’t even have enough field agents.”

  Gaul tried to imagine how she had possibly drawn something resembling ‘moral grounds’ in the air, but the idea made his head hurt, so he stopped trying. He turned his mind back to more practical matters.

  “I’m promoting Margot Feld to provisional status. She’ll be an Auditor in three months, maybe less. Her combat potential is staggering.”

  Rebecca started swearing, and he briefly worried that she was going to kick his file cabinets again, but she restrained herself this time.

  “Gaul, Margot hasn’t even completed the Academy yet…”

  “A formality. Michael is already using her as a student teacher. The rest she can pick up as she goes.”

  “A lot of people get killed out there, before they can figure it out. Nevertheless, it’s your call. Are you sure you can get the votes from the Committee?”

  Gaul nodded, feeling a twinge of discomfort.

  “I’m certain of it. Anastasia Martynova will support her promotion. She will bring the Black Sun in line. Her candidacy should pass easily.”

  “I bet Anastasia will support her — you know she’s had her hooks in Margot for years now. That vampire is as close as you can get to recruiting a Black Sun member in good standing into the Auditors. But you know that, so I’m going to assume you also know what you are doing.”

  “Don’t I always?”

  “Sometimes. What about the Program? We’ll need a new instructor.”

  “We can have Alice do it, at least for the time being. She needs something to do. And she could run the Program in her sleep.”

  “Gaul! She’s barely even recovered physically! I’m not sure she’s ready for this sort of thing yet…”

  “We don’t have the luxury of waiting for Alice to feel better. We need to accelerate the process. Working with the students will help her. Nothing like a return to where she started to jog the memory, eh?”

  “Cut the crap. You don’t know where Alice started anymore than I do. Moreover, you know she’s unstable right now. So, why do this?”

  Gaul tossed his pen down in frustration, and then they both froze and stared at it, the only concrete evidence of him losing his temper. He didn’t really know what to make of it, except that it had been an exceptionally long day, in what seemed like a whole lifetime of long days.

  “Manpower, Rebecca, what do you think? On a good day, I have three Auditors available for fieldwork, since I need you here. The job was difficult enough when I had six,” he said, speaking deliberately. For some reason, it felt important that Rebecca understand him. “I need the bodies, Rebecca. I need soldiers.”

  “And you still think I should be here?”

  “I think you are the only reason this school doesn’t fall apart. Moreover, I need Alex Warner combat-ready as soon as possible, and I need him to turn out like Alice Gallow, not like Mitsuru Aoki. I’ve already arranged for the appropriate training for Alex, but I need him to stay in one piece during the process. In lieu of better options, you are the woman for the job,” Gaul explained, seeing no use in sugarcoating. “Though I have to admit that it was interesting, watching you in the field again. Time and working with children have done nothing to mellow you, I see.”

  “Triage is bloody work,” Rebecca said, stubbing out her cigarette. “To the issue at hand. What about Eerie?”

  “Well, I was thinking of suspending her, but since she lives at the Academy, I suppose that field study would be a more appropriate — what? What is it?”

  Rebecca looked at him, eyes wide.

  “I’m serious… what about Eerie? Where is she?”

  “I sent her outside to wait with Mrs. Bennett. What do you mean?”

  Rebecca opened the door to the outer office, spoke a few cheerful, urgent words to his secretary (who, for no reason he could understand, took Rebecca’s side in everything), then thanked her, and returned, looking glum.

  “Eerie told her we were finished, and that she had to go back to class,” Rebecca said, clearly exasperated. “She left as soon as we sent her out there. Obviously, she figured out what was going on. You, on the other hand, are a terrible precognitive.”

  “Why would she do that? And where would she go?”

  “I don’t know. Use that fancy computer in your brain,” Rebecca said without a trace of humor in her voice. “Check today’s lecture schedule. Where is Alex right now? And please tell me that he’s in class…”

  Gaul reached without moving, taking hold of the Etheric Uplink that followed him everywhere he went, a lattice of information, a psychic fishhook embedded in his brain. The data he wanted spilled out from the Academy servers like waking to a bright light, his mind flinching reflexively a
t the flood of data.

  “Alex used his keycard fifteen minutes ago at the main gym,” Gaul said woodenly, his voice simply another tool to be manipulated, rather than an organ operated by instinct. Speaking was always challenging when he was a node on the Etheric Network. “Conditioning, per his normal schedule. Michael should have finished his rounds two-and-a-half minutes ago.”

  “She probably knows where to find him,” Rebecca said, reaching for her black bomber jacket and shrugging it on. “That is probably where they started from. If Alex’s uses his card, think in my direction. Actually, do that if Vivik or Anastasia or… I don’t fucking know, you’re the genius. Tell me relevant things as you learn them.”

  “What is it that Eerie is doing?”

  “Seeing the future isn’t everything, I suppose. Sometimes it’s better to look back. Eerie is doing what I would have done in her situation, when I was about her age. She’s looking for the person that she knows we’re going to prevent her from seeing, for as long as she can get away with it,” Rebecca said, smoothing her hair back in the mirror he kept near the door as a courtesy. “Read my file if you don’t believe me. There is a disciplinary note. I pulled something like this my first year. I’m going to find her before she manages to do… well, pretty much anything she tries.”

  Uncharacteristically, curiosity got the better of him.

  “What did you do back then?”

  Rebecca paused, made another vague gesture, then blushed and looked away.

  “I’m going to do my job. Be ready to turn in a more credible performance as the Bad Cop when I bring them back, okay? Read the damn file if you really want to know.”

  Rebecca opened the door, stepped halfway into the hall.

  “And then don’t ever, ever mention it. To me or anyone else.”

  She slammed the door. Gaul turned off the lights in the office, so he could fully appreciate his headache. Already, in the back of the marvelous machine that his multitasking mind was, a new Bad Cop routine was formulating. His face muscles twitched, approximating a grimace, while he searched the Etheric Network for Rebecca Levy’s disciplinary file.

  7

  “That went well.”

  To Margot, they felt like the most genuine words she’d ever said, her hands sticky with blood. There were bodies all around, but none of them moved, none of them even breathed. They had been smart enough to post guards on the roof, but the guards clearly hadn’t expected to face off with two Auditors.

  “I’ve seen so many of the silver Weir in the last couple days that the novelty wearing off.”

  “If Godzilla showed up every day, he’d just be a big lizard that made it a pain to fly into Tokyo.”

  Mitsuru considered it from where she sat, crouched, watching the scene beneath them. Margot already regretted the words, but it was too late to stay quiet. It was nerves, pure and simple.

  “I’m not sure that I follow.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I get that a lot.”

  Mitsuru frowned, stood up from the side of the building where she crouched, giving Margot a quick appraisal before moving along the rooftop, trailing the figures far below, motioning for Margot to follow her.

  “You’re more talkative than I was lead to believe,” Mitsuru observed coolly.

  “I get that a lot, too. That’s because of the vampire thing. People have expectations. We have a mythos, you know?”

  Mitsuru’s expressionless face and red eyes held no hint of a response. Margot was glad when she decided to return to observing the Anathema below them.

  “I want to take them after they leave the building. This bunch can’t take us any further.” Mitsuru glanced again off the side of the building, the perspective dizzying and exhilarating. As it usually did when she was near the edge of something very high, a part of Margot exulted in the idea of jumping, of plunging into the open air. “I downloaded an apport protocol, earlier. We’ll wait for them to leave, and then we’ll eliminate all but two. I’ll see if I can’t get Alistair to do a remote scan for me so we know which ones are the most important, and then we’ll gut the little fish. Are you going to be alright watching my back? Or should I call for reinforcements?”

  Margot gave her a curt nod that disguised her pride, and then returned to her attempts to patch together her tattered clothing.

  “I’m good. However, I will need to sleep eventually. How many more jumps are you anticipating?”

  “The precognitive pool said three,” Mitsuru said, frowning. “But this is four already. We must be close. Alistair will be joining us shortly, and he can take of any fatigue issues. It’s a bit odd, but after the implant, you’ll feel as if you slept last night.”

  “He’s coming here? Then this must be the place…”

  “Yes, he should be coming with Xia and Chinwe, the backup transporter. Do you know him?”

  “Not really,” Margot said, frowning at her attempts to hide the gashes in the back of her shirt and jacket. “I met him at the orientation, when I got provisional status. We’ve never worked together.”

  “He’s nice enough. They promoted him to the support team about a month before you joined us. I think he said he was Nigerian. He is restricted to point-to-point transfer, but his range is incredible.” Mitsuru checked the time on the readout on her cell phone. “The Anathema are spending a great deal more time in this building than the last one.”

  “Seems that way,” Margot agreed. “Say, is there any way that Alistair could maybe bring some clothes with him? I’m afraid these are going to fall off of me, and I have this complex about fighting naked.”

  “You have a complex?” Mitsuru asked, staring. “Does that happen to you so often that you’ve developed a complex over it?”

  Margot sighed and sat down on one of the aluminum vent shafts that lined the roof of the building. Her hands went to check on her hair automatically, before she remember that she’d had Eerie cut it off, so it stopped at the nape of her neck and stayed well out of her eyes. It had been a sacrifice, because her hair hadn’t grown at all since she’d become a vampire, but Margot wasn’t taking any chances. She meant to be an Auditor.

  “I’m not much with protocols. None of us are. I’ve never met a vampire who operated a protocol of any kind. Eerie says it’s because our nanites are different, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that I heal rapidly from any injury, and that I am pretty strong, so I tend to fight up close,” Margot shook her head and looked unhappy. Mitsuru wondered privately about her definition of ‘pretty strong’ — earlier, she’d seen Margot lift a Weir and throw him, something she would have thought impossible. “But even if I can take a beating, my clothes, even body armor, can’t take the same abuse. I’ve had two unfortunate experiences with that. I’d rather not make tonight the third.”

  “How did it happen?”

  Margot didn’t appreciate this line of questioning, but as Mitsuru was her senior and the evaluator on this assignment, she responded as if it didn’t matter to her.

  “Did you know that Witches can manipulate fire?”

  “If they know the right working, sure. Why?”

  “No one told me,” Margot said humorlessly. “That was the first time.”

  “And the second?”

  “I got ambushed and overrun by Ghouls in Serbian cemetery — it was a dog pile, basically. I was actually buried underneath them at one point. They were tearing each other apart in desperation, trying to get out. God, those things are stupid.” Margot’s eyes looked distant. “You have no idea how bad it stank. I fought my way out, but they bite and scratch. I was fairly intact when I extracted myself, but my clothes, not so much.”

  “That is truly disgusting,” Mitsuru said, shaking her head.

  “I don’t know,” Alistair said, his hair standing on end, and the air around him crackling from the apport. “A naked woman is a naked woman, even if she is covered in goo from the insides of corpse-eating monsters. I, for one, refuse to remember it badly.”
/>   Alistair was wearing armor that had seen better days himself, one of his hands was wrapped as if he had broken it. His hair was matted and greasy, and his skin was covered in a sheen of rapidly drying sweat. Mitsuru felt herself perk up the moment he arrived, even though she had promised herself that she would stop doing that now that she was officially an Auditor, and Alistair was her direct superior. Xia stood off to the side, silent and masked, and Chinwe flanked him on the other, the transporter looking every bit as tired as Margot felt, his normally bright eyes dimmed with exhaustion. Clearly, his skills had been in high demand for this operation.

  “You’re a pig, Alistair,” Margot said, glaring at him.

  “What, I’m supposed to forget the first time I met you?” Alistair asked, with what sounded to Mitsuru like forced good humor. He tossed her a small, wrapped package. “Gaul said to bring this. Sometimes I’m not at all sure that precognition is a sensible ability.”

  “You try fighting wearing nothing and then tell me that,” Margot retorted, disappearing behind one of the whining HVAC units, presumably to change.

  “Anything new?” Mitsuru asked hopefully, walking over to stand near Alistair, but not too near. Their unfortunate history was too public for her to be anything other than prudent.

  “Not particularly,” Alistair said, bending down to tie a bootlace that had come undone. “I’ve been running this down for months now, and there’s no doubt — whatever is left of the Terrie Cartel moved here before the shit hit the fan. Now we get here and find the place overrun with Anathema…”

  “What about the local cartel? Shin-Tsen, right? I haven’t seen any of them in any of the patrol groups…”

  Alistair shook his head, looking grim.

  “Nobody home, no answer to communications, no nothing,” Alistair said sourly. “The popular theory of the moment is that they’ve been killed by the Anathema, or joined up themselves. The Hegemony doesn’t seem to know anything about it.”

  “Then, that’s what the Terrie Cartel did. They’ve turned traitor…” Mitsuru mused.