“So the sun never breaks through,” Eerie said, nodding. “Much of what disappeared into the Ether is lost. Central is special, but not unique. An anomaly. Do you see?”
“Not even slightly. Look, can we get the fuck off this mountain?” Katya asked irritably. “I feel like shit, and I’m hungry.”
“She’s right,” Vivik agreed. “We need to rest. Is there some place we can camp? Somewhere lower?”
“Probably! I mean, there has to be, somewhere.” Eerie pirouetted about like death wasn’t centimeters to either side of the path. “Onward and downwards!”
***
“Not what I was expecting,” Katya said, her expression migrating from wariness to grudging appreciation. “Not bad, either. Like strawberry, but…a little spicy? What is it?”
“A fruit? Except, it’s kinda of like a nut, too. It’s lumpy on the outside, you know, but on the inside it’s all green and wet...”
“Sorry I asked! Don’t say anything else until I’ve finished eating it, okay?”
Eerie nodded, poking aimlessly at the campfire with a stick.
“I thought you said you’d never been here before,” Vivik said, holding his hands close to the fire. “How did you know the fruit was edible?”
“I just...knew? As soon as I saw it, I remembered. I think that’s probably it.”
Vivik made a face, then shrugged and let it go. Closely questioning Eerie ran the risk of upsetting her, so he turned his attention elsewhere.
“Katya?”
Katya glanced at him and made an interrogative noise, her mouth stained forest green by the strange fruit. In the purple-tinted half-light beneath the spindly and fibrous trees, Katya’s eyes had a peculiar reflective quality, not unlike those of a cat. Whether the sheen was the result of a chemical treatment or mechanical adulteration, Katya operated as confidently as Derrida in low light.
Of course, Derrida was a dog, so that, at least, was consistent with Vivik’s expectations.
“You never finished your story,” he reminded her, adding another handful of twigs to the fire. “Back at the Academy. You were telling us about the Rostov Cartel, for reasons that I still don’t understand.”
The wind picked up briefly, rattling the heavy dry seed pods that hung from most of the branches of the weird trees they camped beneath, creating a sound like the rattling of numerous dice in a ceramic cup. The trees had velveteen violet bark and leafless branches that twisted like roots. The wind was cool, and Vivik and Katya edged closer to the fire. Eerie remained at a small distance, jabbing at the flames with the blackened end of a stick, unaware or indifferent to the chill. Derrida curled beside her, snoring loudly.
“You sure you wanna know?” Katya scowled. “You’re better off not hearing it, believe me.”
“Too late for that,” Eerie called out cheerfully, waving her stick frantically back and forth to put out the flame that threatened to consume it. “We all decided already. Right, Derrida?”
Derrida sleepily announced his agreement, a disconcerting habit he and Eerie had been showcasing all day.
“Eerie is right. We’re already in this together.”
Katya laughed humorlessly.
“Not even close,” she said, sighing. “If you had any idea...never mind. Sure. Your funeral. Course, I don’t exactly remember where I left off.”
Vivik gave her a moment while Katya dug a flask out of her frame backpack and took a short, sharp hit off the bottle, wincing as she swallowed.
“You said something,” Vivik prodded gently, “about a survivor.”
***
“I called in a favor. No, that isn’t right – I begged Ana for help, when she didn’t owe me a thing. The opposite, really. What can I say? Leila was my friend. I didn’t want her to have to die for her family’s ambitions. I was so naïve that it never even occurred to me that those might be her ambitions, too.”
Katya tossed a twig into the fire, watching it curl and then burn.
“It was a big thing to me, at that point, to have a friend at all. You see, even before I was Activated, and my joke of a protocol become public knowledge, the Black Sun already had violent designs for me. Aptitude and personality, you know?”
Katya laughed shortly, then slowly extracted a single dehydrated peach slice from a foil packet, chewing thoughtfully and swallowing before she continued.
“It was no kind of secret that I was gonna be some sort of goon when I grew up. The other kids tended to shy away, because I might be called upon to harm them or their families someday. Leila Rostov, though, she didn’t give a shit about anything; even at thirteen, she was a total badass. She was tall and scrawny, like Alex, and pretty – same eyelashes, you know? – and popular, too, among the Black Sun. She would have been a total diva if she had gone to the Academy, but they held her back to do finishing school and she never made it. Leila could light up a room, though.”
Katya sighed heavily, then produced a framed photo from her bag, the kind of thing someone might put on their desk at work. She handed it to Vivik without a word. While he studied the photo, he was vaguely aware of Eerie standing behind him, peering over his shoulder.
The photo was a low-resolution relic of the early cell phone era. It showed two teen girls doing their best moody expressions, complete with skate t-shirts and Japanese denim. The girl on the right wore a biker jacket with Cyrillic text on the arms and an endearingly goofy combination of a toothy smile and freckles. She had her arm wrapped around the girl beside her in a sisterly way, her other hand throwing up a peace sign at the camera. The girl beneath her arm was a young Katya, sporting a pixie cut, enormous hoop earrings, and unclouded brown eyes.
This created a sort of dissonance that occupied Vivik’s remarkable visual memory for several moments, while he confirmed that Katya’s eyes were, in fact, a fetching shade of green.
“Katya, your eyes...”
“A girl can’t make a change?” Katya shook her head ruefully, holding her hands closer to the fire. “It’s not such a big thing.”
“Contacts, then? I’ve never seen you take them out, though, or use drops, or…”
“Yeah.” Katya frowned. “Not contacts.”
“So, what, then?” Vivik asked. “Eye color doesn’t just change.”
“Mine do,” Eerie interjected helpfully. “All the time!”
“Right.” Vivik sighed loudly. “That means it’s definitely not normal. No offense, Eerie.”
“Huh? I don’t…”
“There was a thing, okay?” Katya’s tone was reticent and tinged with resentment, her face set in firm, unhappy lines. “A long time ago. I had some surgeries. Some of them were on my eyes. I’d really rather not talk...”
“Katya.” Vivik said her name with quiet authority, like it was a magic word by which he might command her. Eerie watched with obvious concern, a trail of smoke coming from the blackened end of the stick she held. “Are those your real eyes?”
“They are now.” Katya’s voice was flat, without a trace of hostility, but Vivik could feel the implicit threat buried beneath her mask of disaffection. “Why the fuck is any of this your business?”
Under normal circumstances, this would have been a good time to reevaluate his intentions and back off. These, however, were not normal circumstances.
“Just wanted to know who was watching.”
Katya frowned, sifting the soft ash at the edge of the campfire between her fingers.
“You have some fucking nerve, Vivik. When did that happen? I used to think of you as one of the nice ones.”
“Maybe you misjudged me.” Vivik shrugged wearily. “Go ahead. Finish your story. I won’t interrupt again.”
“So you say.” Katya settled back against the decaying bulk of the mossy fallen tree that constituted one-third of the boundaries of their campsite. “I went to Ana and begged. Even cried! Eventually she relented. It wasn’t a little thing – she wasn’t indulging me. She wasn’t even involved with the effort to wipe out the Ros
tov Cartel. It was all her dad, back when he still had balls. Ana moved heaven and earth to make this happen for me, and I fell so far into her debt that I will never be free of it. I didn’t think that much of it at the time, I was so wrapped in the idea of saving Leila, but I came close to getting Ana in trouble, the kind of trouble that could have cost her rank and title. It was treason, and I asked for it without a thought to what that would entail for her. I was a dumb kid.”
Katya grimaced at the fire, her face twisted with regret and shame.
“Of course, Ana figured it all out for me. It took god-only-knows what kind of influence, but we had a plan to save Leila. Anastasia organized the operation personally, and wrangled most of the outside help…”
Eerie nodded seriously.
“I remember that. She was scary.”
Vivik studied the Changeling in confusion.
“I don’t understand. Why do you know anything about this, Eerie?”
“Not now,” Katya snapped, glaring at both in turn. Vivik could not help but pay extra attention to her green eyes. “Let me finish. Then you go, Eerie. Okay? Just shut the fuck up for five seconds.”
“Sorry.” Eerie looked genuinely remorseful.
“Sorry,” Vivik echoed falsely.
“Just be quiet,” Katya said firmly, setting her chin on her balled fists, elbows resting on her knees. “My job was to maneuver Leila into the right place at the right time. That was tricky to pull off, because Leila wasn’t dumb, and I couldn’t be explicit and risk exposing the plan to attack her cartel. Who knows? Maybe she knew what her cartel had planned, and that might have made her wary. I persuaded her to rent a dacha – like a vacation cabin, okay? – in Crimea for a weekend. She was meant to arrive on Thursday evening, and I told her I would arrive later that night, but not to wait up. Ana’s unit would scrub her security, grab Leila, and bundle her off to a safehouse in Oregon until the bad shit was over. That was the idea.”
Vivik had all sorts of questions. He wanted to know how the Black Sun had intended to explain away the death of the Rostov Cartel to Leila, how Anastasia intended to ensure the loyalty of someone who would likely blame her for the death of her parents. He wondered how Katya prevailed successfully upon Anastasia, and why Anastasia would risk exposing a critical cartel action to appease her less-capable cousin. He wondered if he was being told the truth. He kept his mouth shut, however, because Vivik could not risk making Katya any angrier.
“Leila must have seen it coming,” Katya said dully. “I wasn’t combat capable, so I had to sit around and wait for Ana to tell me what happened. The Rostov Cartel put up more of a fight than expected, and it took the better part of a day before she had time to make a phone call. She gave me the address of a temporary safe house in Poland.”
Vivik fed the fire, which was again ebbing to coals.
“When I got there, the operators Ana assigned were in a panic.” Katya smiled to herself, but the expression was poisonously bitter. “They thought Ana would punish them for failing.”
“They didn’t save your friend?”
Eerie looked genuinely concerned.
“No.” Katya shrugged off the interruption. “Oh, they saved someone, you understand. They broke into the dacha in the middle of the night, grabbed the person sleeping in the guest bedroom, bagged ‘em and dragged ‘em off. It wasn’t until they were on the road that they realized they didn’t have Leila.” Katya shrugged. “They had her little brother.”
There was a brief silence, while Vivik connected the dots.
“That was Alex?”
Katya nodded, her face composed and unreadable.
“Yeah. Leila must have figured it out for herself. My best guess is that she decided to pull a switch, sending her brother to safety with me while she stayed back in Moscow with her cartel and fought.” Katya’s expression was stoic, but she wrung her hands as she talked. “Judging by the hard time the Rostov Cartel gave Ana that night, Leila must’ve figured out enough to warn her family. She knew there was something wrong with how hard I pushed her to join me in Crimea. She sent her brother Alexei, with a note saying she forgave me, and that she would follow in the morning if she could. The whole thing was supposed to be quiet, you know? The Rostov Cartel was meant to die in a night, quick and quiet, a reminder that the Martynova family had no rivals. Instead, it got loud and ugly, and Josef had to get involved to make sure things didn’t spill over.”
“Oh,” Eerie said quietly. “Dear.”
“Exactly. Anastasia was humiliated and furious,” Katya said. “I lost my shit, too. If the Rostov Cartel hadn’t been extinguished completely, I don’t know what would have happened, but Josef put them down, fucking fortunately. After that was finished, though, Ana and I had an eleven-year-old boy to deal with in secret, and a whole bunch of plans intended for Leila. The cover we designed, the new life we built, the transit arrangements – everything. All useless. Worse…”
Katya swallowed hard.
“I didn’t want him.” Katya bowed her head. “He wasn’t my friend. He was my friend’s little brother, an annoying cousin who would never leave us alone, who followed us everywhere and wanted to be involved in everything we did. That wasn’t the plan. It wasn’t worth the risk.”
He sensed that Katya needed a moment, so Vivik went to the nearby pile of wood they had collected before dusk, selecting two good-sized branches to add to the flames, Derrida tagging along forlornly. Eerie was focused on the reddening tip of the stick she had plunged into the depths of the fire, while Katya was lost in contemplation of a past she did not want to remember.
He had never been on a camping trip before, but Vivik still thought that this one was going particularly badly.
Vivik returned to his seat as Katya took her sleeping bag out of her backpack and laid it out too close to the fire for his tastes.
“I’m tired,” Katya stated, her face nearly invisible in the advancing gloom of the night. “That’s probably more than I should have said, anyway. You two can tell your stories tomorrow.”
It wasn’t that much, Vivik thought, in a sort of a daze. Only a hidden chapter in the war between the cartels, and the revelation that his friend was the sole survivor of an exterminated cartel, as well as a one-time threat to Anastasia’s succession, saved by none other than Anastasia herself.
Then there were his questions about Katya’s eyes. Where they had been acquired, for example, and who exactly might be watching them through those eyes.
He need some time to take it all in.
“Sure,” Vivik agreed, faking a yawn that no one else noticed. “Good night.”
He laid out his bag, brushed his teeth, and relieved himself in the woods. When he finally closed his eyes, resting his head on a pillow made from his spare laundry wadded into a pillow case, the last thing he saw was Eerie holding her burning stick, watching the flame with the rapt fascination of a child.
***
His first thought was that the stars had come out. And that they were very bright, even with his eyes closed, and therefore making it hard to sleep. They seemed to be very close, for stars...
Vivik woke with a start and kicked himself free of his sleeping bag, the nylon exterior damp with condensation accrued during the night. Somewhere to his right, just beyond the dying fire, he could hear muffled curses and the rustle of clothing. He needed a moment to locate his hiking boots, still unpleasantly humid from the day’s efforts, and another to loop the laces around his ankles, then he scrambled across their makeshift camp toward the lights that had woken him.
Derrida met him halfway. It took several seconds before it registered, but Vivik was startled by the awareness that, though he could see Derrida bark, he heard nothing but a sound like a powerful wind through dry branches. Vivik rushed past the panicked dog, patting his head in a distracted and largely-unheeded manner. He had no comfort to offer, in any case. Vivik broke through the brush into an expansive clearing, and then froze.
Eerie stood in the center o
f the meadow, intertwining rings of golden light radiating from a point somewhere within her. She held one hand straight up in the air, and that arm was coated with a golden liquid that dripped like candle wax. Above her, a trio of Horrors clustered, looming like amorphous and malevolent storm clouds; too many eyes at the confluence of a wriggling mass of dull-colored tentacles, a thousand arms stretching toward the Changeling. There was a sound like the ringing of a chorus of discordant bells, intertwined with the death-struggles of a vast aquatic beast. The air was rank with the smells of ammonia and burnt carbon, with puzzling hints of sandalwood and cut-grass beneath it. The weeds around Eerie’s feet bent and withered in a widening and perfectly concentric circle, while bits of char and ash settled on the waxen skin of her upturned face and inside of her open mouth.
The Horrors wailed like misshapen banshees, but beneath the clamor and discordance, Vivik thought he could hear the slightest melody.
“What the hell?”
Vivik spoke without prior thought, uncertain of what he might be asking, or of whom. It wasn’t so much a lack of understanding, he knew, as a refusal to accept. There must have been something he should have done – some assistance to render, a harm he could minimize – but instead Vivik stood, rooted to the dusty ground, blinking at the pulsating light which obscured the imminent dawn.
The wail of the Horrors threatened to tear his head apart, to carry important parts of himself away, forever lost to the night. Beneath that auditory weight, however, Vivik was faintly aware of a melody that he could almost recognize.
Something dark snaked out of the bulbous clutch of Horrors overhead, crude and unformed and very, very fast. Vivik was briefly aware of a tentacle coiling about his neck, the texture and wetness reminding him of the scales of a recently caught fish, and then he was suddenly torn from his feet and pulled upward, breath and blood flow obstructed by the tremendous force exerted upon his neck. His throat made a noise like the gurgling of an obstructed pipe, and when he opened his mouth, a surreal amount of saliva poured out. Vivik clutched at the tentacle around his throat, digging fingernails into the scaly flesh and attempting to peel it from his skin, as rough and inflexible as an old tree branch. He felt pressure building behind his eyes, like they were bulging from his head, and his vision began to flicker.
The Outer Dark (Central Series Book 4) Page 9
