The Far Shores (The Central Series) (25 page)

“Hey, Katya, wait up!”

Katya paused, holding
the door for him.

“What’s up, Alex?
Hungry?”

“I guess,” he said,
ducking into the air-conditioned vastness of the mostly empty dining hall and
dumping his books on available table. “Wanted to check in with you.”

He followed Katya to the
cafeteria line and took a tray and a place in line.

“About what?”

Katya looked over the
entrees with a seriousness that she seemed to reserve solely for food, before
selecting some sort of spinach wrap and a dish of sweet potato fries.

“About tonight,” Alex
said, leaning close so he could lower his voice. “You know.”

He grabbed a ham
sandwich on wheat without much thought, then added a green salad liberally
supplemented with croutons and green olives.

“Oh yeah,” Katya said,
taking a piece of a pound cake from the dessert counter, and then, after a
short deliberation, a small dish of chocolate-dipped biscotti. “That thing.”

Alex skipped desert but
grabbed coffee, then followed Katya to their table.

“Yeah. Kind of a big
deal to me, you know.” He took the seat beside her, so he wouldn’t need to
raise his voice. That attracted curious glances from the various students in
the dining hall, but he ignored them. Gossip was inevitable in a closed
environment like the Academy, and Alex had learned not to let it bother him.
Katya was largely indifferent to outside opinion, and presently more concerned
with lunch than her reputation. “Is everything still good? This is still gonna
happen, right?”

“Yeah,” Katya said,
talking around her wrap. “Good to go. Ana set it all up.”

She finished her bite,
wiped her mouth with a napkin, then bent to fish through her book bag. She slid
an old-fashioned brass key along the table to him, along with a folded piece of
notebook paper, further titillating their nosey onlookers. Alex silenced them
with a glare, taking advantage of the newfound reputation that entering the
Program provided. He figured he might as well get some sort of benefit from his
time in the combat track. He had suffered enough for it, after all.

“What’s this?”

Alex unfolded the paper
and scanned the neatly penned, all-caps text inside.

“Directions and a key to
the front door,” Katya explained, returning to her lunch. “For your little
date. That shit was hard to come by. Remember, you owe us for this, okay? This is
no small favor.”

“No,” Alex said,
refolding the paper and pocketing it, along with the key. “I owe you, Katya. I
don’t owe the Black Sun anything – and if they disagree, I’m happy to have them
try to collect on it. You, on the other hand, have been a good friend, and I
appreciate it.”

Katya glanced up from her
fries, which she always ate with a fork and knife. She looked surprised and
maybe a little embarrassed.

“Don’t act all grown up
and mature with me,” she muttered, chewing. “Ana might not see it quite the
same way, you know.”

“I don’t care,” Alex
said, almost giddy at the prospect of the evening. “You’re sure that no one
will be there, right?”

Katya nodded.

“Yeah. Nobody even knows
about it but Rebecca, and she’s going to be busy this evening. There’s big
meeting over at Administration. Don’t know what it’s about, but all the players
are going to be there – Anastasia included. You are free and clear till
midnight. Just make sure to clean up after yourselves. Don’t leave anything
behind that will tip Rebecca off that someone was there, okay? And lock the
door behind you.”

“I will,” Alex said,
forcing himself to take a bite of the sandwich that he was too excited to have
any interest in. “How did you find out about this place, anyway?”

“Back when Rebecca was
out of commission,” Katya said, shrugging as if it weren’t important, “Ana
figured out all sorts of things she was keeping secret. Don’t ask me how, ’cause
I don’t know. Anastasia liked the idea of the place herself – she’s into that
Japanese shit, you know – and she wrangled a copy of the key. Not sure how.
Perk of being at the top of the food chain, I suppose.”

“I guess so. Hey, Katya?
You talk to Vivik recently?”

“What? No,” Katya said,
rolling her eyes while she finished the end of her wrap. “Why would I? It’s not
as if we are friends…”

“Yeah,” Alex said
moodily, pushing the salad around with his fork. “I know the feeling.”

***

William Tran wasn’t sure what to make
of it, when he first saw the woman in the road.

He had insisted on
driving his own car home from the wedding, as was his usual practice. He didn’t
have to, of course. In fact, his security probably would have preferred it if he
had not. But Tran was not in the business of making security guards happy. He
was in the business of running the Nebel Cartel, one of the older satellite cartels
firmly in the orbit of the Black Sun, and that meant he could drive his own
damn car.

He hadn’t wanted to
attend the wedding in the first place, and had only done so as a favor to the
CEO of VEL Industries, the largest of the corporations under the cartel’s
control. Bringing Cynthia and the kids had seemed like a good way to kill two
birds with one stone – she had been complaining lately that he wasn’t spending
enough time with the family, and she relished the opportunity to wear a pair of
the expensive shoes that she bought at depressingly regular intervals. It
wasn’t the intolerable affair he had expected – the champagne was good, the
live band had played jazz standards, including a healthy dose of Ella
Fitzgerald, and the presumably happy couple had the good sense to provide a
separate and supervised space with catering for the children.

Mildly buzzed, but
definitely not inebriated, William Tran could only question his sanity when the
woman in the hooded jacket appeared in the freeway in front of him in her
patent leather shoes and fur-lined coat. She was standing in the fast lane of Interstate
405 in Santa Ana, in the midst of moderately heavy evening traffic. He blinked
hard, half-expecting the world to right itself by the time he opened his eyes. Then
his wife screamed, and William hit the brakes hard, knowing perfectly well that
he would come up short, throwing an arm out to protect his wife from the
impact.

The car skidded partway
onto the paved area beside the center divider, but it did not roll. There was
no impact, no body to go under the car or in through the windshield. Behind
him, he could hear his children screaming, but that was out of fear, not pain.
He turned around to check on them anyway.

The woman was sitting in
his backseat, between his two-year-old daughter and his six-year-old son, her
arms thrown casually around both of them. Her chestnut hair hung in tight
curls, disappearing into the hood of her jacket, which was lined with silver
fur.

“What is this? Who are
you?”

“Not important, though
this might have been slightly more satisfying had you recognized me.” The woman’s
tone was distasteful, her hands running over his daughter’s sparse hair, speaking
so rapidly that it was difficult to make out the words. He caught a flash of
the ring she wore on her middle finger, a rose gold band with a dull stone that
looked a bit like amber, and for some reason, it seemed familiar, but he
couldn’t place it. “You always ask the wrong questions. And now it’s too late.
Always the same, so many years away and it never changes. Why would my name
matter? I am not important. What is important is how you die.”

“Tell me, then,” Tran
said, through gritted teeth, his hands sparkling with kinetic energy. “Tell me
how it is that I die.”

“Badly,” she said,
frowning and seizing his son’s arm, twisting it so that he cried out and
struggled futilely in her grip. “You always die badly. Did you know that? Perhaps
I told you this already?”

“I have never met you,” Tran
said carefully, weighing his options and playing for time, eyeing the
headlights in the rearview mirror, “so this is the first I have heard of it.”

“Sorry. I’ve been so
busy lately, I’m starting to lose track,” she said, silencing the boy with her
finger to his lips. “You are the head of the Nebel Cartel, are you not? The
survivor of many attempts on your life, as I understand.”

William Tran winced and
activated his emergency blinkers, while drivers honked and traffic snarled.

“I have been fortunate,”
he responded tersely. “These things do happen.”

“Don’t they just? I
admire your poise and confidence, even if it is feigned. For the sake of your
children, I imagine?”

William shook his head,
wondering if his protocol would be enough, where the car full of guards that
followed him everywhere was, and why they hadn’t responded.

“In that sense,” she
said, taking a stainless steel revolver from inside of her coat and laying it
flat in her lap, his son shrinking away as far as the car would allow, “I think
you are quite fortunate.”

He spared a look out of
the window to his left. Traffic crawled by, and the driver of the Toyota truck
that passed him gave him the finger, though they couldn’t see anything through
his the deeply tinted windows of his armored Mercedes. There was no sign of his
security.

“Tell me,” he said
softly, sparing a glance at his wife, white-faced but features composed,
waiting for him to give the signal. “How am I lucky?”

“Your death will throw
your cartel into disarray, and cause years of infighting and retribution. At
least you don’t have to worry about something happening to your little ones.”

All of a sudden, a
memory came back to him. The ring. He had seen a similar one before, in the
Great Hall, on the hand of David Thule.

He risked a glance out
the window, hoping to see the similarly armored Mercedes that should have been
trailing his own – or even the police, for God’s sake – but all he saw were
blinking turn signals and angry drivers. The woman followed his gaze and
smiled.

“Your guards? Dead.
Already dead. Eliminated by Brennan Thule, my cousin – surely you remember him?
He can do fascinating things with cars these days, thanks to all the computer-controlled
elements.”

A glimmer of hope. The
longer he kept her talking, the better his chances were.

“Is there anything I can
offer, in exchange for my life?”

“Oh, I’m fine, thank you,”
the woman said, laughing, her words coming rapid-fire, one on the heels of the
next. “It’s kind of you to offer, though.”

“Surely there must be an
alternative?”

Draw her out. Keep her
talking. The Black Sun would rescue him, even if his security was eliminated,
as the woman claimed. But he had to give them time. And he was willing to
stretch the conversation out, as long as her hands stayed away from the gun…

“You could kill yourself
now,” the woman suggested idly, giving his terrified son a pleasant smile. “It
would save me the trouble, and for the Thule Cartel’s purposes, the result
would be the same. I give you my word that I would let them live. What do you
think, Mr. Tran?”

Beneath his Caraceni
bespoke suit and his tailored shirt, he could feel cold sweat, and his mind
raced. The woman’s offer was absurd, of course, but her confidence unnerved
him. He racked his brain, trying to remember the files on the Thule Cartel, the
members who would have been children at the time of their exile. What kind of
protocol did she operate, that made her so certain that she could take both his
wife and him in close quarters?

“I’d rather not,” he
said, trying out the chilly smile that he found so effective during politely
hostile business meetings. “Do you have any other offers? I am a rich man,
Miss…”

The woman laughed again,
a high-pitched, grating sound.

“You still don’t know
who I am? I must admit that bothers me, just a little. I thought you would have
remembered by now. Still, no matter – I’m afraid that your wealth won’t be able
to buy you out of this situation, Mr. Tran.”

“I am not simply
wealthy,” William said, turning more fully to face the woman, so he would have
a less awkward angle when the time came. He was glad that he had ignored his
wife’s nagging to wear his seatbelt. “Perhaps there is some advantage I can
provide for you, personally, or a service I could render to the Thule Cartel? I
am close to Josef Martynova, and I have access to the highest levels of power
within the Black Sun.”

The woman cocked her
head to the side, the tight curls of her hair bouncing with the movement, as if
she were thinking his offer over. With his left hand, held carefully out of the
woman’s view, he gave his wife a small sign, warning her to be ready.

“Not that I can think
of, so sorry. I’m just killing time, honestly, until our telepath is ready to
wipe the children’s memories.”

His wife made a small
noise in the back of her throat, but she held herself together the way she
always did, waiting for him to give the word, so that she could employ her
protocol against the girl. He decided they had no more time, and focused the
energy he had collected at the tips of his fingers.