“Maybe I just have an open mind,” Renton suggested.
That provoked howls of laughter.
“How much of this did you see coming?” Vladimir asked, hobbling around the room, still on crutches from most recent knee surgery. Gaul wished sincerely that he would sit down, but he knew Vlad was too agitated.
“All of it, but only right before it happened,” Gaul admitted. “They did such a good job disguising the possibility that I might not have noticed at all, had I not been looking for something of precisely that nature.”
Alistair looked up from the table, covered in equal parts documentation and Indian take-out. He had a probability matrix spread out in front of him, and he was making arcane scribbles on it with a black marker.
“This isn’t like the last time, the night where we found the Warner kid,” Alistair said, leaning his head against his hand. “The manipulation isn’t crude, it’s surgical. I don’t think I would have seen it without you telling me where to look, and I really hate admitting that. Whoever did this knew exactly what they wanted, and they planned far enough in advance to cover all the angles. It’s kind of impressive.”
“Except that the attack failed,” Rebecca said, from behind her cigarette, sulking in the corner of the room. “The night we found Alex, the manipulation was clumsy, but almost completely successful. This time, the manipulation was sophisticated, but we lost what, four Operators in Shanghai?”
Alistair looked over with wounded eyes.
“I know, I’m sorry, it’s terrible,” Rebecca added hurriedly. “But think about it. How many Weir did they lose tonight? How many Operators? What kind of resources did they have to put in Shanghai to make this all work? You can’t tell me they did all of this to wound us. You guys,” she said, nodding toward Alistair and Mitsuru, “were supposed to die in the blast, right?”
“They didn’t know that Alice was back in circulation,” Alistair said, shrugging. “It’s not that surprising. I didn’t know either until she saved my ass. They miscalculated.”
Rebecca pitched her lit cigarette out the window, ignoring a glare from Gaul.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “They captured Alice in the first place, right? At least that’s what we think happened. Since they left her alive, we have to assume that they knew her return was a possibility.”
“What about Edward?” Vladimir asked, finally levering himself into one of the available seats, to Gaul’s obvious relief. The last thing they needed was for him to take another tumble before he’d finished healing from the last one. “That wasn’t a Wight. He wasn’t forced from his body while he was alive, that was a dead body being animated by… something. Someone. An Operator, I think. Someone who can activate the nanites inside a dead body.”
“I doubt it,” Alistair countered. “I’ve never heard of a protocol like that.”
“They managed to breach the barrier a second time,” Gaul pointed out tersely, “by using the body of a student. We are going to have to reconfigure the barrier or we’ll have all of our casualties coming back to haunt us. All this to get at Alex.”
“Again, unsuccessfully.” Rebecca said, clicking her lighter. “Because they’re being too cute about it. Why not have Edward shoot Alex in the head, and be done with it? Why the predilection for the exotic threats?”
Gaul made a noise, as if he was about to say something, then shook his head.
“What?” Vladimir demanded.
“Nothing. I just had a bad thought,” Gaul admitted. “What if they aren’t trying to kill Alex at all? What if they are trying to get him to use his protocol?”
“Why?” Vladimir asked, his voice a little too loud. “Is there something special about it?”
“I don’t know,” Gaul said reluctantly. “I’m not sure. The Absolute Protocol isn’t completely unknown, but we haven’t had an Operator use it since we started keeping records. Certainly, none of the previous information links the Absolute Protocol to any kind of catalyst effect.”
“Perhaps there is more than one protocol?”
“The thought has occurred to me,” Gaul admitted.
“Are we totally certain,” Vladimir questioned, his browed furrowed, “that Alex wasn’t activated when we found him?”
Everyone took turns avoiding Vladimir’s look.
“Pretty sure,” Rebecca said softly, rubbing her head.
“Well…” Alistair trailed off when he realized everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare at him. “What? I was just thinking that Mitzi encountered the catalyst effect before he was activated.”
“Oh, crap. That’ right. But he had so much unreleased potential; we thought he was only partially activated…”
“Wonderful,” Vladimir said, ruefully shaking his head. “For all we know, Alex Warner has had two separate nanite injections. And, if that is the case, we have no idea what it might have done to him.”
“But who would have introduced nanites into Alex’s system?” Rebecca asked, rubbing her temples. “And where did they get nanotechnology in the first place?”
Everyone turned to Gaul expectantly.
“Don’t ask me,” he grumbled. “You all know we have a monopoly on nanites. If Alex Warner arrived here already activated, then I’m as far in the dark as the rest of you as to how that could happen.”
“It does seem unlikely…”
“It is more than unlikely. It is impossible, unless someone in this room is aware of a source of nanites that is a mystery to me,” Gaul said defensively. “This is nothing but speculation, and we have enough problems as it is. We can worry about it another day.”
“I’m not sure we know anything for sure about what happened today,” Alistair said, shrugging. “We don’t have enough information to do any kind of analysis.”
“I’m certain that Alex would have died today if Katya hadn’t been skulking around. That’s the other pattern I’ve noticed,” Rebecca said moodily, gesturing at the probability matrix in front of Alistair with her cigarette. “Anastasia bailed him out again. She has been the one putting people at the right place and the right time lately.”
“You think she has something to do with this?” Alistair asked, munching on a cold pakora while he studied the matrix. “You think this is a Black Sun operation? Could be.”
“I suspect that little monster of being involved in everything that happens around here,” Rebecca snapped. “You can’t underestimate her.”
“Nonetheless,” Gaul said forcefully. “We have been lured into a trap twice now. The first time netted Alice for unknown purposes, the second time nearly managing to assassinate all of the Auditors in the field. Two carefully planned and orchestrated traps, but neither achieved a clear goal. Then we have four attacks on Alex in the last six months; on the night we found him, once in San Francisco, and twice at The Academy. All of these operations involved significant expenditures of time and resources, and most of them entailed absorbing casualties as well. There must be a pattern in this somewhere.”
“Or multiple patterns,” Rebecca pointed out. “I think the first incident is different, at least.”
“Go on,” Gaul said gruffly.
“The manipulation on that first attack in the park more primitive, but the intent of the attack seems different too. They didn’t fuck around that time — those Weir really were trying to kill Alex, and without Mitsuru’s intervention, they would have been successful.”
“You think they weren’t trying to kill him in San Francisco?” Alistair asked doubtfully.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “They had the chance, but they seemed more interested in hurting him and asking him questions. Why in the hell would they interrogate Alex? That kid spends his free time staring at a wall. He’s been here half a year. What did they think he would know?”
“He said they were looking for Eerie,” Gaul said woodenly, lost in the consultation of the vast, cold uniformity of the Etheric archives.
“I don’t understand
that either. Why would they care about finding her? The Weir were after Alex. Moreover, they found him fast, faster than we could get there. That doesn’t work unless they were waiting damn close to where he showed up. So you find your target, which is a high enough priority to have an entire pack of Weir just sitting around California, waiting for him to come back, and you capture him without incident, in private.” Rebecca stared around the room challengingly. “Which one of you would then begin a field interrogation because you lost an inconsequential companion who wasn’t on the target list? Would you risk killing your primary or discovery for that?”
“They are Weir,” Alistair countered, shaking his head. “What do you expect? They are always unnecessarily cruel. You ever see the aftermath of a Weir attack? Sometimes they even do shit to the corpses…”
“Of course I have,” Rebecca snapped, glaring at him fiercely enough that Alistair quailed a bit, and held up his hands to mollify her. “But that still doesn’t wash for me, not here. They had succeeded in their mission already, and they had to know that we’d be coming, that someone would be coming. If they wanted to be thorough, they could have left a team behind to find Eerie. All they had to do was take Alex down one of their holes and then they could have done whatever they wanted to him, and we never would have found him again.”
“Not necessarily,” Alistair objected. “You found Alice Gallow.”
“Right, and why?” Rebecca demanded. “We don’t even know exactly how that happened. She was hunting Witches and ends up imprisoned by rogue Operators? We are missing something, there. Then they throw her in some kind of clandestine interrogation center the Terrie Cartel runs, and keep her on ice till I showed up to collect her? That is all wrong.”
“I thought you said they…” Gaul said, frowning.
“That was the guards,” Rebecca said hurriedly, frowning. “They were doing that for fun. It wasn’t official policy.”
“That’s a fascinating list of questions.” Vladimir snapped. “Are you going somewhere with all of this?”
“Yeah,” Rebecca said sourly. “I’m not sure that we are fighting who we think we are fighting. I know they use Weir, and there are some Witches involved, but this isn’t their normal M.O. We can’t fight them effectively because we don’t know who our enemy is.”
“Then let’s put it to the test,” Gaul said firmly. “We’ve been in defensive mode, reacting to their moves for too long anyway. Instead of responding, let’s try out some moves of our own, and see how they deal with that. Rebecca, I want you to go light a fire under the Committee-at-Large, get them to authorize new Auditors. When you are done with that, go put Alice Gallow back together enough so that she can get out there again. I want a full complement of Auditors, as soon as I can have them. I’ll talk to Michael about accelerating field training for all of our current candidates.”
“Alice might take some work,” Rebecca said hesitantly. “And I still need to deal with Alex and Eerie…”
“So you will be busy,” Gaul snapped. “Borrow people from Operations, if you need them.”
“Aren’t I supposed to be in charge of this stuff?” Alistair asked, and then caught Gaul’s stony expression. “Never mind, never mind — what is it you want me to do?”
“Set up a hit team,” Gaul said, lifting one of the files on his desk and handing it to his Chief Auditor. “Whoever you want to use, except Rebecca. This is the largest coven that we are currently aware of. We’ve been letting it continue for surveillance purposes, but no more. I want a full Audit, an accounting, and prisoners.”
“Right,” Alistair said, glancing at the file’s contents.
“So get to it, then,” Gaul said, urging them out of his office. Rebecca grumbled and protested, but Alistair was already so absorbed in the details of the file that he barely looked up as he left the room. Vladimir stayed silent until they were gone.
“You are worried about the barrier,” Vladimir observed.
“I am worried about the barrier,” Gaul agreed. “Vlad, if Central isn’t safe, if the Academy isn’t safe, then we have nowhere to retreat to, and we’ll lose a critical psychological advantage. My people feel safe here. They need to feel safe here. So I need to know…”
“Yes?” Vladimir prompted.
“I need to know whether our enemies are finding ways around it, or whether it is getting weaker over time,” Gaul said slowly, wishing that he didn’t have to say a word of it, didn’t have to ask the question in the first place, not to the only person that he honestly considered something of a friend. “I read the doctor’s reports, Vlad. You’re getting worse. I need to know how much longer you can keep protecting us.”
“What do the doctors know?” he said contemptuously. “Didn’t they say I’d be gone last spring? I’m fine, Gaul. I wish I could tell you that it was just me losing a beat, a step or two in my ‘old age’. They are clever bastards, that’s all. I’ll revise the barrier; try to close some of these loopholes. I never anticipated the dead attacking us, you know.”
“Vlad…” Gaul insisted, feeling bad.
“Don’t worry so much, Gaul,” Vladimir said comfortingly. “I’ll keep all of you safe until I’m dead, I promise. It's about all I can do these days. And I’ll try and give you two week’s notice before I kick, so you can put out an ad for a new barrier.”
Gaul smiled, but he didn’t feel like smiling. The cancer that was slowly eating away at Vladimir’s mind was a constant weight on Gaul’s shoulders; it nagged at him every time he saw him, weaker and sicker than the last. Gaul hated very few things. Nevertheless, as irrational as it was, he hated those rioting cells in Vlad’s poor brain more than anything else he could think of. He didn’t say anything else as Vladimir made his slow, clumsy way out of the office. Anything he would have said would only have embarrassed both of them even more.
10
The heavy bag was obstinate, despite Alex’s best efforts to move it. He punched from his legs, from the motion in his hips, he put all of his weight behind it, but nothing worked. He had lost count of the attempts when he hit it wrong, aggravating his injured forearm, causing him to grab the arm and holler, partially from pain, partially from frustration.
“You are never going to be a boxer,” Michael observed, from the other side of the bag. He glanced dispassionately at his arm.
“There go all my hopes and dreams,” Alex replied, shaking his arm out in a vain attempt to stop it from hurting. “I’d be happier if I never had to fight anybody again.”
“We’d all be happier, son, but that isn’t the kind of world we live in,” Michael said, with surprising melancholy. “All we can do is the best we can do. The rest is in God’s hands.”
Alex got suddenly, dramatically uncomfortable — the same way he felt every time someone he respected unexpectedly turned out to have religious convictions. Not that he had anything against it, exactly; it was more like he hadn’t ever really considered any of it as a possibility. After all, what would any of the major religions have to say about him, about what he’d done? Better just to hope for nothing at all.
“I’m not really sure if I believe in God,” Alex said cautiously, wary of offending him.
“Then you don’t have to worry about whose hands it’s in, right? Now get ready to punch the damn bag…”
The bag was punched many times, but never to Michael’s satisfaction. After, there were weights, and then a heavy leather ball that they threw back and forth, then finally and worst of all, outside for hurdles in sets, across one hundred agonizing meters. It would be wrong to say Michael allowed him to stop at that point. Rather, Michael acknowledged the inevitability of stopping once Alex couldn’t get up anymore.
He lay on the grass, under a sun that had not yet grown hot but was starting to hint around at it, while his muscles twitched and jerked and complained. Michael sat down behind him and drank some water from a plastic squeeze bottle, seemingly content to be working out.
“How much trouble is Eerie in, any
way?”
“Technically, you’re in trouble too,” Michael advised him cheerfully.
“But with you,” Alex pointed out.
“Right.”
Alex rolled over on his stomach and reached for his own water bottle.
“So I’m in ‘extra laps’ kind of trouble. What kind of trouble is she in?”
“She’s in ‘embarrassed Rebecca in front of Gaul’ trouble.” Michael said, shaking his head ruefully. “The worst possible kind.”
“Really?” Alex asked, pausing to squirt water in his mouth.
“No,” Michael said, laughing. “For most people, though, that would be a very bad thing. When Rebecca came to the States when she was a kid, she still had an accent, so she had a hard time at first. She’s still sensitive about being embarrassed. However, Eerie grew up here at the Academy, and believe it or not, Rebecca loves that girl as a surrogate daughter. Eerie will be alright.”
“Oh, good.”
“Eventually.”
“Oh.”
“Now,” Michael said, standing up and stretching out his shoulders. “About those extra laps you owe me…”
Rebecca sat on the couch, legs tucked against her chest and her chin resting on her knees, a cigarette dangling from her left hand. The ashtray sat precariously on a couch cushion in front of her, while Eerie sat just behind Rebecca, patiently braiding her hair.
“What was all that about, Eerie? Why’d you run? You know I wouldn’t let Gaul do anything bad to you…”
“I don’t know,” Eerie said quietly, in a small voice that sounded almost like she was humming to herself. “I thought you would decide it was dangerous for Alex to be around me. Everyone kept saying I would get kicked out of the Academy.”
“Who is everyone?”
“You know, everyone,” Eerie shrugged, patiently plaiting a lock of Rebecca’s chestnut brown hair into a fine, even braid. “The other kids. And you can be scary when you want to. You did that thing to me, and I could feel you poking around in my head.”
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