The Far Shores (The Central Series) (10 page)

“Oh my God.”

“Yeah.”

“That is...what the hell
was he thinking?”

“I don’t know,” Haley
said, shrugging helplessly. “We haven’t even really talked or anything. I
barely even know anything about him. I don’t know if I did something to give
him the idea, but it was super-embarrassing.”

Alex didn’t know Neal
very well either, except that he had been one of the many objects of Emily
Muir’s pity. The telepath was deeply socially awkward, and had a painful and
alienating tendency to blurt out the private contents of other people’s
thoughts, particularly when he noticed them lying. He seemed to think that this
was helpful, or at least morally upright, behavior. That was half of the
equation.

Haley Weathers was the
other half. Alex knew her vaguely, through her friendship with Sarah – who had
only recently forgiven him for his role in Emily Muir’s defection – but he had
the same opinion of her that everyone else did: Haley Weathers was incredibly
nice. Pretty, as well, in a sort of hybrid hippie-surfer fashion that reminded
Alex vaguely of experiences in high school and didn’t really do much for him.
Despite that, he had to admit that she was endearing in her apparently genuine
desire to look after the well-being and happiness of the people around her.
This sort of disposition, to a certain kind of lonely and socially maladjusted
guy, could appear flirtatious. And Neal Blum was very much that sort of guy. It
was a train wreck waiting to happen, and apparently it just had.

“Ugh. I bet.”

“Not that he’s a bad person
or anything,” Haley added hurriedly. “It’s just that, well, he’s not exactly my
type. And it was a really bad time.”

That went without
saying. Haley’s body remained at headquarters when she employed her Astral
Protocol, her ephemeral form accompanying the Auditors on the mission. Alex had
witnessed her waking up from her trance state a few times during the Program,
and prolonged sessions seemed to leave her profoundly disoriented.

“No kidding. What an
asshole,” Katya exclaimed, rolling her eyes. “Doing that shit when you’re on
the clock. You should complain to Rebecca.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s
necessary,” Haley said, obviously flustered. “I don’t want to get anyone in
trouble.”

“Of course you don’t,”
Katya grumbled. “And that’s the whole problem.”

Alex was inclined to
agree. Haley and Sarah, along with a girl named Rachel that he barely knew, constituted
the female block of the stoner scene at the Academy – complete with an
affection for beaded jewelry, vintage clothes, and dubstep. Her disposition
seemed uniquely at odds with an assignment to Audits, but Alex figured she had
her reasons.

Of course, if Haley
hadn’t possessed a maintenance worker several days earlier and engineered the
equipment failure during their operation at the Anathema base in China, then
the whole mission would have failed, so Alex had no complaints. Whatever else
the girl might be, she was capable.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you’re a
pushover, girl,” Katya said, slurping up a noodle. “Why not just tell him off
and get it over with?”

“That’s…”

“What?”

“Not nice. I’m sure Neal
means well.”

Katya arched an eyebrow,
clearly amused.

“Think so? Hey, Alex?”

Alex turned his
attention pointedly to his plate.

“Leave me out of this,
Katya.”

“Oh, come on. Do you
think Neal had good intentions, or was he just being pushy? Be honest.”

He hesitated for a
moment, but Alex knew perfectly well that Katya was implacable.

“I think Neal assumes
that any girl who is nice enough to talk to him is hitting on him,” he
admitted, shrugging. “He’s pretty much the opposite of an empath. That’s why
most girls don’t talk to him at all.”

“Naturally,” Katya said,
picking up her bowl. “I’m going back. You need anything, oppa?”

Min-jun shook his head.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

“You gonna ask anyone
else?” Alex demanded, holding out an empty cup.

“Wasn’t planning on it,”
Katya said, crossing her arms.

“Oh, come on!”

“Ask nice or save my
life. Those are the rules.”

Min-jun appeared just
slightly embarrassed, quietly slicing his chicken into several neatly
equivalent pieces.

“Pretty please,” Alex
sighed. “Sugar on top. Okay?”

“What do you want?”

Katya snatched the
plastic cup from his hand.

“Orange juice.”

Katya snorted and headed
off to the beverage machine.

“What do you think, Min-jun?”
Alex asked leaning close and speaking with a low voice. “Sorta seems like
Katya’s into you.”

Min-jun blushed into his
plate.

“I doubt that very much.
Mutual respect, I would say,” Min-jun said, his diction crisp and perfect. Alex
often suspected the South Korean spoke English better than he did. “Katya is
also friends with my fiancée, so I would imagine that is a part of it.”

Alex almost dropped his
fork into his rice.

“Really? I had no idea
you were...well, going to be married, I guess. Does she go to the Academy?”

Min-jun’s mouth was
full, but Haley answered for him.

“Yes. One year below
you, Alex. Her name is Hae Rung. She’s quite beautiful, Min-jun. You are very
lucky,” Haley observed, and Min-jun solemnly nodded in agreement. “I would have
thought you might already know her, Alex. She is a member of your girlfriend’s
club – the Academy Sewing Circle.”

“My girl – oh. You mean
Eerie.”

Katya practically
dropped his cup on to the table in front of him, splashing juice onto the edge
of her tray.

“That’s Alex,” Katya
said coldly, taking her seat. “A romantic at heart.”

The three
arrived sequentially, but their manifestations were unique and individual.

A swirl of ash, though there was no wind, a miniature whirlwind of
cinders and charred human remains that gradually coalesced into a human form,
ash solidifying around a core of smoldering embers.

A lingering wave, a portion of the waters of high tide that stubbornly
refused to recede. Instead, the water rose in defiance of natural laws and
logic, forming a column and then sculpting itself into the shimmering image of
a girl.

One of the least mangled of the corpses on the beach extracted itself
from the grave, sand falling from reanimated limbs, a crab scurrying from the
cavity of one consumed eye.

The Anathema arrived,
and the world recoiled from their presence. Water and ash transmuted into bone
and flesh, hair and clothes, an act of conscious alchemy, while a dead man
walked to join them with all the grace of a badly misused marionette.

Alistair toyed with the
burned fragments of a skull with the toe of his desert-tone camouflage boots. The
bone was scorched and blackened, but it was still possible to see the unusual
hinging that allowed the jaw to dislocate, and one of the unnaturally large
canines was still intact. He rolled the skull on the charred ground in front of
him like he was toying with a soccer ball, his head bowed in thought.

 “So much for the
Society’s part of the harvest,” Emily observed, adjusting the hood of her heavy
coat to keep out the wind coming in off the water. “That’s nearly the whole
operation – the two sites in the Caucasus, Jakarta, everything we had scattered
around Malaysia, and all three Chinese locations. How do you think they
discovered the entirety of the operation? Do you think they turned someone? An
informant?”

Alistair shrugged and
rubbed the three days worth of stubble on his chin.

“I’m not certain, but it
seems likely. We distributed the harvest knowing full well that it would
increase the chances that Central would notice something – but higher
visibility seemed like a worthwhile trade-off to limit potential losses should
they get wise to a single location. We anticipated losing a facility or two.
Not the entire operation in less than twenty-four hours. It’s clear that Xia
was involved in this particular raid – and if Xia was here, that means Alice
Gallow led this attack personally.”

“Interesting,” Emily
mused, crouching down to examine the half-melted remains of what had been a
submachine gun. “And your sources within Central?”

“Nothing. Yours?”

“Not a peep. I thought
the Auditors were still testing out potential new members.”

“They are. I’d imagine
this was part of the test,” Alistair said, holding out his hand above the ash
and closing his eyes. “There are residues from a number of different Etheric
Signatures. Not all of them are from the current roster of Auditors.”

Emily stood up and
dusted off her hands.

“Like who?”

“Your little friend Alex,
for one,” Alistair said, laughing. “And the killer that the Black Sun set to
watch over him.”

“Oh. I see.”

Alistair glanced over at
Emily, her features hidden by the encompassing hood of her woolen coat.

“Surprised?”

Emily hesitated momentarily.

“A little, I suppose.
Alex is somewhat...apathetic. I had hoped that he would be more reluctant to
become actively involved with the Auditors. It was obvious from the start that
they would make a play for his services, even to me, but his disposition seemed
to all but disqualify him from combat duty.”

“Alice Gallow must have
found something that Alex can do well enough, because she wouldn’t bring him
along out of sympathy. I can sense the residual energies from the damage his
Black Protocol caused. Song Li, tell me – what do the dead remember?”

The dead man closed his
clouded eyes, and the corpses half-buried in the sand briefly shuddered in a concert
of postmortem sympathy.

“They saw three of them.
I have composed a mental image.”

Alistair pulled it from
the necrotic brain of her unwilling host with all the compassion of a prison
dentist extracting a tooth.

“As I thought. Alex
Warner, Katya Zharova…and Kim Min-jun, back from field study.”

“They engaged with the
guards on the beach and killed them, but they were not responsible for the
majority of the damage. The guards received reports of attacks at multiple
points, all three of the access points.”

“A distraction,”
Alistair agreed. “The main force would have been elsewhere.”

“The vampires focused
their counterattack here, believing this group of attackers to be the most
vulnerable. It was almost successful. The Operators were forced to cluster
behind a barrier.”

“Planned from the start,
in all probability,” Alistair remarked. “Alice Gallow would not risk her future
generation of Auditors so casually.”

“There was significant
confusion.” Song Li’s voice was grotesque, decayed vocal cords humming in a
jarring combination of masculine physiology and feminine mannerisms. “It is
difficult to determine exactly what happened next. Somehow, the Etheric
interference generator failed, allowing apports into the facility. Alice Gallow
ported into the heart of the facility...”

“And I’m sure we can all
guess what happened from there,” Alistair cut in, glancing at the slanted,
half-collapsed entrance to the facility. “Did they discover the cargo?”

“Yes,” Song Li responded
dully, dark fluid dribbling from the sides of her mouth as she spoke. “And
removed it before the facility was destroyed.”

“I see,” Alistair said,
kicking the skull down the beach, fragments flying as it rolled. “Then this
portion of the harvest is a total loss. We cannot hope to begin again without
attracting Central’s attention – not using the same methods, at least. The
Outer Dark will have to make do with what we brought in already.”

“There is...something
else. An oddity,” Song Li reported, a vile gurgling in the back of her throat.
“One of the vampires had a clear shot at the back of the Black Sun assassin.
His attack landed, but appeared to do very little damage, not even enough to
penetrate her armor.”

“How can that be? A
vampire’s strength should be more than sufficient to rend Kevlar. Are the
Auditors using some new form of armor?”

“That’s not it,” Song Li
said, shaking her head at a strange angle, due to cracked vertebrae in the
neck. “This was something else. An atypical barrier, perhaps? I sense profound
confusion on the part of the vampire...”

“Interesting. Something
to consider. Now, Emily, if you would,” Alistair requested, gesturing toward
the ruins, “please survey the wreckage. Confirm the absence of the cargo, and
assay the damage to the Etheric interference generator. If anything of use can
be salvaged, I will have apport technicians remove it to the Ukraine. We could
at least recoup some of our investment...”

Emily nodded, and her
form wavered, as if she were surrounded by a heat mirage. Then the appearance
of humanity disappeared, leaving nothing behind but water, which drained with
unnatural rapidity into the rubble at the entrance of the facility.

“You fear treachery,”
Song Li observed, supporting her lolling head with a hand that was missing
several fingers.

“I do.”

“From Emily Muir?”

“No,” Alistair said,
shaking his head. “She is manifestly one of us. But something is not right. The
Auditors have been unaware of our actions for years, even before I joined the
cause. For a short time in the wake of the raid on Central, we continued to
operate under their radar. But the last few months have been quite different.
They not only shut down our operations, but they do so at exactly the worst
possible time, when we have already invested resources in the endeavor, but
before we can reap any benefit.”

“We have absorbed
several renegade cartels from Central, not to mention disgruntled operators,
recently,” Song Li rasped. “Any of them could potentially be a double-agent.”

“I am not a fool, Song
Li,” Alistair said with a thin smile. “We limit defectors’ access and
involvement in operations until they can be telepathically cleared, often until
they are fully transmuted Anathema. Harvest operations are extremely sensitive,
and knowledge is restricted to a necessary few. Even fewer are privy to the
details of multiple operations – we do our best to compartmentalize our
endeavors. The list of individuals with access to the information involved is
extremely limited. Honestly, I would be the prime suspect, if I were not
myself.”

Water bubbled up through
the ash and sand of the beach, rising up in a geyser-like column that gradually
took on the features of Emily Muir, wrapped in a winter jacket and tight jeans.

“Wouldn’t that make you
a triple-agent, Alistair?” Emily laughed at her own joke, brushing ash from her
shoulders. “It is as Song Li described. The children were removed before the
facility’s destruction. The machinery was very neatly sabotaged – they didn’t
use anything as crude as explosives. I would guess it was a software attack, a
virus that caused critical shorts and overheating in the system.”

“Odd,” Alistair said,
rubbing his chin. “The majority of the facility was kept permanently offline to
prevent such a thing.”

“Must have been locally
introduced,” Emily said, shrugging. “No chance of salvage. The central control
unit and the system memory appear to have been removed. The explosives that
brought down the facility’s lower level caused multiple fractures in the
foundation, and falling debris damaged much of the remaining machinery.”

Alistair glanced up at
the sky, his expression unreadable, then shook his head.

“Very well. We have
learned all that we can here. Song Li, return to the Outer Dark for new
orders.”

Song Li nodded, then the
corpse abruptly toppled back to the earth, like a puppet with the strings cut.
Emily wrinkled her nose at the strong smell of decay that filled the air.

“What about me,
Alistair?”

Alistair smiled and put
his arm fondly around Emily.

“I have a task in mind
for you, Miss Muir, for which you are uniquely qualified. Central hurt us with
this attack, but we have learned something important – an operation of this
scope would be impossible without an inside source within our organization. I
need you to go back to Central. Find out what they know, and if possible, how
they know it. You still have friends there, correct?”

“Oh, yes,” Emily assured
him, shrugging off his arm. “Good friends.”

“Prove your worth to the
Anathema, then.”

Emily smiled with
obvious satisfaction.

“It’s about time.”

***

“I am so bored.”

Mountain Pose. Spreading
toes, rooting himself into the mat.

“Glad to hear you enjoy
my company.”

Forward Fold, struggling
to keep his knees straight and his hands on the mat.

“Not what I meant.”

Half Lift, creating
distance between thighs and navel.

“Yoga is boring, then? I
like it.”

“Not it either.”

The second sequence of Sun
Salutations, matching breath to movement.

Or he would be, anyway,
if Katya would quit bugging him.

“Then what? You’ve been
moping all week.”

Arms up and extended,
palms inward. Back bend.

“This place. The Far
Shores. There’s fucking nothing to do.”

Down into the invisible
furniture of Chair Pose, arms out in a strange sort of salute.

“That’s because they are
still setting things up. We will have classes starting next week, and we go
back to the Academy on Friday. This isn’t exactly a school, you know.”

Wrapping one arm around
the other, elbows at chest level, rooting into his right foot while lifting his
left knee to hip level. Eagle Pose.

“No, I don’t know. I
think Vivik mentioned it a couple times, but they sent me here without telling
me anything. It’s a research group, right?”

“Sort of. Let me finish,
okay?”

They followed the
routine that Michael had led almost daily at the Academy, the only one Alex
knew by heart. Secretly, Alex envied her graceful transitions, but then again,
he had never attended any of the optional Yoga classes, only doing the bare
minimum required by the Program. He had improved his strength and balance, but
the flow that more-practiced students like Katya (or Emily, as his mind
insisted on reminding him) achieved eluded him.

Alex watched sweat drop
on the mat below his face, back and legs rigid to achieve Downward-Facing Dog,
and tried to remember Eerie’s Wednesday schedule. Homeroom was over, so she was
probably in one of her math courses, the classes that even Vivik found
demanding. Alex was so bored he even wondered what Vivik was doing – he was
that lonely. The Far Shores campus had appeared large when he arrived, but he
had spent the last few days sequestered to the hulking Audits building, supposedly
while the Far Shores Cartel prepared facilities for their not-wholly-unexpected
guests.