“Maybe,” Alistair said, glancing off the side of the building himself, then retreating swiftly back to a safer vantage. “We’ll find out soon enough.”
Chinwe’s eyes widened in shock.
“I think we may have a problem…” Chinwe said softly, his face creased with concern and effort, staring into his own faint shadow as if it held a secret only he could see.
Right about then, the bomb went off.
Alice gave them space to be sick. Mass apports weren’t easy on anyone, and this hadn’t been one of her prettier efforts. There had been little time to work with, and Alice wasn’t exactly feeling her best this evening. If Chinwe hadn’t been there to help, Alice doubted that she could have handled the crowd. She leaned against a conveniently placed chimney while she caught her breath, waiting until they had a chance to reorient themselves.
“Hey, boss,” Alice said, behind the smile that was her calling card. Even she could remember that. “Long time, no see. I hope I didn’t interrupt anything important?”
Alistair smiled thinly in return, his legs still shaking underneath him. Part of his mind was in shock, reeling from the concussive blast and the stink of cordite and burning plastic, but here, wherever here was, the air was fresh and cold.
“Alice Gallow,” Alistair said, yawning to pop his plugged ears. “I have rarely been happier to see anyone.”
“It’s good to see you again,” Mitsuru said shyly, offering Alice a small half-bow. She was still intimidated by her, even after being elevated to the Audits Department. Mitsuru had heard so many stories about Alice Gallow that she was still like a mythological figure to her, even after working with her. “I was worried.”
“Mitzi!” Alice yelled, grabbing the shorter woman and wrapping her in a bear hug. “Gaul told me — I knew you’d make it to the big leagues. How do you like the top of the food chain?”
“Catch up later,” Alistair commanded, wiping blood from his nose. “We don’t have time right now. Who else made it out?”
“I grabbed you and Mitzi. Chinwe got Margot. He can only do point to point apports, so they must be back in Central. We’re about a quarter-mile northeast from where we started,” Alice said, spinning around until she found what she was looking for, and then pointing to indicate a burning building a few blocks away. “The whole breach team is gone, not sure about the surveillance crews. The Anathema came out of the woodwork, and hit everybody simultaneously, right after they tried to blow you up.”
“How did you know?” Alistair asked, watching the orange glow emanating from the top of the building that he had been standing on a moment before. “Not that I’m complaining.”
“Gaul, natch,” Alice said, shrugging. She hadn’t had time to get kitted out before she left, so she was just wearing a tank top and worn blue jeans and shivered every time the wind blew in off the water. “He saw it coming a few minutes before it happened, and had me scrambling all over Shanghai to find everybody and pull them out in time. I found Rebecca’s team first, then Forrest and that Chinese girl, over by the river. I’d started to worry that I wasn’t going to find you, honestly.”
“Alright,” Alistair said, rubbing ash from his forehead. “Give me a minute to pull myself together, then…”
“No,” Alice said, shaking her head. “You give me a minute to catch my breath, boss, then we’re off to Central. Gaul wants everybody back for some major confab. He’s even inviting reps from the Hegemony and the Black Sun. This operation is concluded per Director’s orders.”
“But what about the rest of them?” Alistair demanded. “We had four teams in the field here, and you’ve only accounted for three of them…”
“Do a scan, Alistair, then see if you still feel like arguing,” Alice said, shrugging.
Alistair did that. It only took a moment, but when he opened his eyes again, they were horrified.
“Shocking, isn’t it?” Alice commiserated. “We didn’t even know the Anathema had enough personnel for an operation of this scale. This was probably a trap from the very start, rigged to pull in as many Auditors as they could lure out. The Anathema will already be dogging any of our survivors, hoping to draw the rest of us out of Central. They’re probably already on their way here now. It was a clumsy apport. There’s a trail, if they care to follow it.”
“How did everything go so wrong?” Alistair asked, looking out to the city lights in utter exhaustion. “How could this happen?”
Alice patted him on the back comfortingly.
“I don’t know, but if I were you, I’d start trying to come up with an answer, Mister Chief Auditor. Because Gaul asked me the same thing right before I came here, and he didn’t look too happy about it.”
8
“What are you thinking about?”
“Nothing.”
“You always look as if you’re thinking about something, but every time I ask, that’s what you say,” Eerie scolded, crouching down so her mad eyes were level with his own. Alex was currently confined in the uncomfortable grasp of an intricate Japanese exercise machine. “What is it that you keep inside that head?”
“Nothing. Seriously. So, I, uh, don’t think I’ve ever seen you here before. The gym, I mean.”
“Alex is a jerk,” Eerie proclaimed, folding her arms, more agitated than he could remember seeing her. She was talking fast and loud, and didn’t seem to realize it, her cheeks flushed with emotion. “I swim every morning, two hours before you wake up.”
“You know when I wake up?” Alex asked, alarmed.
Eerie nodded hesitantly, and then wandered off to a neighboring machine, while Alex took the opportunity to extract himself gratefully from his own. He grabbed his towel and dried off hurriedly; wishing Eerie could have picked a different, less public time to arrive. Sara excused herself from the machine nearby them, pausing to give him a pointed look, assuring him that Emily would soon find out about this.
“Of course. Are you busy?”
“I’m not sure how to answer,” Alex said, waving his arm in the direction of the gym behind him. “I was doing something, but it can wait if you need me…”
“That is good, because I definitely need you,” Eerie said, sounding reassured, squeezing the handle of her knitting basket.
“Okay,” Alex said hesitantly, feeling as he always did when talking to Eerie; slightly over his head, as if he had agreed to something he didn’t understand, and now could only hope that it would turn out for the best. “I’d really like to take a shower before I go anywhere, though. We aren’t going to San Francisco this time, right?”
Eerie poked his chest experimentally, causing him to start back involuntarily and yelp, and then wish, immediately and wholeheartedly, that he hadn’t done any of that. At this point, pretty much everyone in the gym had stopped what they were doing and were staring at them. In the free weight section, a number of early morning lifters watched and laughed openly.
“You aren’t that sweaty. Can you please just change and come with me? I don’t have a lot of time.”
“Are you in some kind of trouble, Eerie?” Alex asked, toweling off the back of his neck.
“Because if you are, I can try and help you…”
“Good,” Eerie said, smiling at him and urging him toward the locker room. “Because I am in trouble.”
Alex couldn’t get anything more out of her no matter how he asked, and she seemed very nervous and eager to leave, so he settled for a quick rinse in the shower. He put his clothes back on, wishing he’d worn something a little nicer than the track pants and sweatshirt that he was wearing. He did his best to ignore the guys who were staring at him.
Eerie was in the lobby when he came out of the locker room, so nervous that she was literally hopping from one foot to the other in a little shuffling dance while she stared out the window, clutching her knitting basket as if she were afraid someone would try to take it from her. For all he knew, that was exactly what she was worried about. She wasn’t aware of it, but almost everyone
in the gym had stopped making even a pretense of working out, they were so absorbed by Eerie’s bizarre performance. He was feeling raw about the situation until she saw him, but then she smiled as if she were truly happy to see him, and his resentment evaporated. Eerie latched onto his arm and practically dragged him from the gym, relaxing only when they were out of sight of the building, heading away from the dorms, toward the crest of the hill the Academy sat on.
“Eerie, what’s going on?” Alex asked, wondering how a girl so much shorter than him could set such a demanding pace. “Are you okay?”
“I am in trouble,” Eerie repeated, as if she was describing the weather outside as sunny. “I am okay,” she said, taking a deep breath and then launching into a breathless tirade. “But Rebecca is mean, and Gaul is mean, and they are mad at me! They are mad even though they told me to make friends! And I am trying to make friends! And Rebecca tried to make me do things, but I said ‘no’, and then Gaul looked all scary, and then they said they would stop but that I had to wait outside, and when I was waiting outside they were talking about suspending me and I don’t want to be suspended and I don’t want to be in trouble and it isn’t fair because I didn’t do anything wrong…”
“Uh, Eerie? You’re talking too fast. I’m not sure what you are trying to tell me. Are you in trouble with Gaul and Rebecca?”
Eerie nodded, her eyes moist with frustration.
“Is it because of San Francisco? Because of, you know, what happened to Edward?” Alex was certain that he already knew the answer. He had been waiting for weeks to hear the inevitable consequences of their unauthorized trip.
Eerie nodded again, and Alex got angry. He suddenly realized that they intended to punish Eerie but not him, probably because they didn’t want to upset him. Because he was valuable and, though he didn’t like admitting it, because he was fragile. The unfairness of it all made him puff up with indignation. Not that he wanted to volunteer to be punished or anything, but still…
“What are you thinking about?” Eerie asked him again, making him realize that they had been walking up the hill in silence for an indeterminate period while he was lost in thought.
“You.”
Eerie looked at him sharply, checking if he was joking. He wasn’t, but he found himself unable to meet her strange eyes, anyway.
“That is a good answer,” she said, clutching his arm tightly.
“It’s true,” he said, shrugging, trying to play it off as if it was no big deal. “What did they say they were going to do?”
Eerie let her hand drift down, until it came to rest inside of his own. He took it automatically, and intertwining her cool fingers with his own. His clammy palms embarrassed him, but she didn’t notice or didn’t mind and he felt obscurely grateful to her.
“I left before they told me,” Eerie admitted. “But, they are going to send me away, I’m sure of it.”
“But where would they send you, Eerie? Isn’t the Academy your home?”
Eerie hesitated so long before answering that he wasn’t sure that she intended to. When she finally spoke, her voice was so small that he had to lean close to hear her.
“Away from you.”
“What?”
Eerie stopped and looked at him oddly. He wondered, as he often did, what she saw through her dilated, teary eyes.
“They are going to send me away because they don’t want me to be near you,” Eerie blurted out, looking distressed and anxious. “They are afraid of you, Alex, and they get more frightened when I am with you.”
Alex followed along as she led him away from the path, into the gnarled oak trees that lined it, Eerie’s hand in his own, and he tried very hard not to get angry. He remembered his talk with Rebecca after he’d woken in the hospital, after his protocol had put him to sleep for more than a month, and her bizarre offer to extend his sleep, her concern about him associating with Eerie. He stilled had his doubts that Rebecca would actually send her away. He was so engrossed in his thoughts that he hardly noticed at first when stopped beneath a particularly craggy and ancient oak tree.
He squeezed Eerie’s hand and smiled at her until she was able to smile back at him. Alex was going to say something, but then he thought better of it. The mood seemed good, and Eerie was standing right in front of him, looking as if she wanted to be comforted. He put his hand on her shoulder and she slid forward so that she was standing up against him, one of his hands on her waist, the other resting behind her neck. She went up on her tiptoes, eyes closed, and he did what seemed like the right thing to do.
After a minute of mashing their lips together, she extracted herself.
“Uh, Alex,” Eerie said, pushing him away gently, “that kind of… hurts. You’ve never done this before, right?”
Alex was too embarrassed to look at Eerie. He managed a nod.
“Well, then, let me teach you.”
This time he let her take the lead, responding gently to her swollen lips instead of crushing them to him. The mouth that pressed against his own was warm and impossibly soft, and Alex knew nothing but the sensation and his own sweet, laconic response. She kissed him harder, nibbling his lower lip, and he tasted raspberries and honey. He wasn’t sure what to do, but to his relief, she moved slowly and seemed to expect very little from him. Without realizing it, he knotted the back of her blue hair around his fingers, but she didn’t seem to mind. When he bent to kiss her, he breathed in the scent of sandalwood, aromatic and pervasive, and it made him slightly dizzy. His skin tingled, pins and needles along his bare arms and all the way down his back. His other hand crept gradually down from her waist to run along her skirt and the soft curvature beneath it, hesitantly at first, and then more forcefully when she responded.
They found their way to the ground by stages, the logistics of which he was only barely aware, the grass crushing down beneath his back and poking him through his t-shirt. Eerie lay on top of him, her legs intertwined with his, her breasts pressing against his chest, her strange, wet eyes sparkling above his face as she smiled, brushed a blue lock behind her ears, and then bent to kiss him again. His hands wandered across her back, her skin warm through the thin cotton of her tank top. His hands lingered on her legs and the immaculately smooth skin of her thighs. The world swam pleasantly before him, a swirl of colors and impressions and golden motes that caught the light in fascinating ways; but it was the tactile, the rush of sensation from his fingertips and lips that captured him, rooted to the ground like he’d grown out of it, underneath the girl as if he belonged there.
“Alex,” Eerie whispered in her strange, melodic voice, one small hand pressing against his chest, “I like you. I like you so much.”
She squirmed on top of him, nestling closer, kissing along his neck, and Alex sighed involuntarily, his vision blurred and his hands trembling while he ran his fingers down the length of her spine.
“I–I like you too,” Alex managed, his voice catching in his throat.
She yielded when he grabbed her shoulders and pressed her to the ground, misunderstanding his intent when he rolled on top of her. She looked confused when he threw himself on top of top of her like a football tackle, sending both of them tumbling, then she saw what was on the other side of the clearing and froze in place, a deer in illogical and utterly unexpected headlights. The air crackled with static discharge, and the air was thick with the smell of scorched grass. The spot beneath the old tree where they had lain a moment before was blackened and smoldering, a black scar that exposed the soil.
Alex managed to speak first.
“Edward?”
“Edward Krylov? But, he’s dead! We confirmed it. He’s Etheric Signature went out. How can he be in Central?”
“I have no idea. But someone used his key card fifteen minutes ago to access Alex’s dormitory building, and then at the main academic building a few minutes after that.”
“Shouldn’t that card be deactivated?”
“I have never been able to bring myself to disabl
e a deceased student’s account. It is a personal failing.”
“Getting sentimental in your old age, Gaul?”
“Getting tired of burying children.”
Somehow, Gaul managed to sound grim even through the unemotional, machine-assisted telepathic uplink. It was a gift, Rebecca decided.
“Alright,” Rebecca said gritting her teeth. “No more fucking around.”
She came to a halt gratefully on the sidewalk, not too far from the gym she had just finished searching, and paused long enough to stop wheezing. Then she closed her eyes and reached out to the world around her.
Empathy normally requires line of sight to work, at the very least, and touch is necessary for all but the most basic operations. However, Rebecca was in a place that was familiar to her, and surrounded by students and faculty who had all done sessions with her, so she knew each individual Etheric Signature. Together, they made a web of signposts and waypoints, empathic telemetry radiating out from where she stood, a map of an invisible country that she was intimately familiar with. She was looking for one of the few emotions that stood out with the intensity of burning magnesium, radiant as white phosphorous. Distance was not an issue. Lust, particularly teenage lust, was the emotional equivalent of wildfire, and Alex and Eerie shone like beacons from a clearing not too far from her.
She could barely see the thing in poor Edward’s body that was approaching them. It radiated only the faintest traces of emotion, far less than anything else she had ever encountered. Even the savage Ghouls, who were barely sentient on an individual level, had a greater degree of consciousness and autonomy then this abomination.
There was no two ways about it. Whatever it was, it was dead. Dead and walking.
That gave Rebecca all sorts of unpleasant ideas.
Rebecca did something that she reserved for emergencies. She ran.
Alex helped Eerie back up to her feet, trying to keep himself between her and what could not possibly be Edward, while simultaneously keeping an eye on it, whatever it was. He managed, but it probably could have gone better. Still, there was a smoking hole in the ground next to them, rather than through them, so he didn’t figure on many complaints.
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