The Far Shores (The Central Series) (26 page)

“What a pity.”

“No other offers?”

“I’m afraid not.”

 “It seems our time
together is coming to an end, Mr. Tran. I’ve enjoyed our little chat, though.
Take comfort in the thought that your children will suffer nothing worse than
amnesia.”

He held up his right
hand in a mollifying gesture.

“One question, first?”

He gave his wife the
signal, a simple hand movement that had been prearranged years before. Cynthia
Tran was a capable telepath, and she had killed before, in defense of her
family and cartel. He had little doubt between the two of them that they could handle
the woman – Cynthia would immobilize her, tamper with the activation sequence
for her protocol, while he delivered the killing blow.

“Why do you talk so damn
fast?”

The air sizzled with the
potential energy of activating protocols, but he moved with the syrupy lethargy
of a nightmare.

“No,” the woman said, as
his wife tumbled forward, lifeless, to bleed on the dashboard. There was a hole
in the seatback, where the bullet had passed through, and smoke trailing from
the end of the woman’s revolver, but he couldn’t recall hearing a shot. “Why do
you think so damn slow?”

***

Alex faced the mirror in the dorm bathroom
wearing a black T-shirt and a clean pair of jeans, his hair still damp from the
shower, brushing his teeth absentmindedly while he reviewed his appearance. He
had gotten a haircut that afternoon, so his unruly brown hair was at least
marginally under control, and had shaved the stubble that had grown during his
stay at the Far Shores. There were bags under his eyes due to an
uncharacteristic lack of sleep. His headache had been particularly bad the
night before, and he had remained awake until the early morning. Alex washed
toothpaste down the drain, ran a comb through his hair one last time, and
decided that it would have to be good enough.

He exchanged nods with a
couple other students on their way to Central or hurrying to depart for field study
or a vacation in the real world. The door slammed behind the last of them, and
he was alone in the institutional-sized bathroom – which was cleaner and better
outfitted than those he had used during his time locked up, but it still
brought back memories he would have rather forgotten. The empty bathroom seemed
very quiet, with every noise prone to echo. He decided to return to his room
and wait for the pickup.

He had just grabbed the
bag with his swimsuit and various other personal effects, when a girl in a modest
black-and-grey-patterned dress appeared behind him, causing him to emit a very
unmanly squeak. Svetlana, in turn was startled.

“I’m sorry,” she murmured,
after opening and closing her mouth soundlessly. “The telepath didn’t mention
where you were, he just gave me telemetry.”

“Shit!” He hid his
shaking hands. “You scared the hell out of me, Svetlana.”

“I, well...just come
here, okay?”

And without any further
preamble, Svetlana grabbed his arm the way someone might grab a pan from a
stove they thought might still be hot, gingerly and with an air of reluctance,
and then, abruptly, they were somewhere else.

The bathhouse smelled pleasantly of damp
cedar and dried lavender.
Svetlana had taken him directly to Eerie’s room, to avoid using the card
scanners and alert Administration. Eerie had been waiting for them in a pair of
jean shorts and a T-shirt printed with a graffiti character that looked quite a
bit like an ice cream cone. Katya’s preparations must have included informing
Eerie as to what to bring, because she had been carrying a bag and a towel.
Svetlana had been almost as abrupt in taking hold of Eerie, and then depositing
them both inside the narrow entryway to the bathhouse, apparently so they wouldn’t
know the location. The quiet apport technician promised to return in three
hours, bid them a good evening, and then disappeared, blushing furiously all
the while.

“Hey,” Alex said
nervously, pushing aside the patterned hanging to glance at the bubbling tub
set in the middle of the small wooden room. “How’s it going?”

“Fine,” Eerie affirmed,
following him into the main room, and setting her bag and towel down on one
corner of the bench that ran around the room’s perimeter. “The water looks hot.”

“Yeah,” Alex agreed,
setting his own stuff down in the opposite corner and crouching to dip his hand
in the small pool, which was rather oddly square, and big enough for several
people. “It’s not bad. Pretty nice, actually.”

“Uh-huh,” Eerie said,
biting her lip as she glanced around. “Are you sure this is okay?”

Alex shrugged.

“Anastasia set this up,
and I doubt she would make a mistake, you know? It’s not in her character.”
Alex immediately regretted sharing that information. “Oh, shit. Does that make
this weird? That I had to ask for help to take you on a date?”

Eerie shook her head.

“No. I kinda guessed
when Svetlana brought us here. It’s alright. I needed their help to get us to
San Francisco, remember?”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“It’s okay, Alex,” Eerie
said, touching his arm with a small smile. “You don’t have to be nervous. I’m
glad you asked me.”

Alex looked away, his
face warmer than the steam in the room.

“Um. Cool.”

Eerie removed her flip-flops
carefully, and then set them beside her bag.

“Well, let’s not waste
the time we have.”

She turned her back to
him, and then, without preamble, pulled her shirt over her head. Alex looked
quickly away, searching for some sort of changing room. It probably would have
made a lot more sense, he thought belatedly, to have put his board shorts on
underneath his clothes, rather than in a bag.

Eerie finished changing
while he was still looking around fruitlessly, turning to face him in a two-piece
with a pattern of horizontal rainbow stripes. Alex knew that he was staring,
but he couldn’t help it. It was the most he had seen of Eerie, and the bikini
was a very pleasant surprise. He had half-suspected that she would wear the
blue swimsuit she used to do laps at the gym pool.

“What are you waiting
for?” Eerie asked guilelessly, dipping her big toe gingerly in the steaming water,
her toenails painted bright green. “Didn’t you bring a suit?”

“Yeah, but, um, I need
to change...”

Alex glanced back at the
anteroom. The hangings did a poor job of blocking off the space, but it would
have to do.

“Go ahead and change,”
Eerie said softly, lowering herself into the water. “I don’t mind. I won’t
look.”

He hesitated a moment
longer, then sat down on the bench and kicked off his sneakers. Eerie sank down
to her shoulders in the water, careful to keep her hair dry, sighing loudly.
Then she leaned the back of her head against the porcelain lip of the tub and,
true to her word, shut her eyes.

Alex scrambled to change
out of his clothes and into his board shorts, feeling more embarrassed than he
would have simply changing in front of her. He wondered why Eerie made him so
nervous, why he always got so shy when they were alone, started acting like a
little kid. He wished he had half the confidence he had felt dealing with Emily
– but then again, maybe that was just empathy.

Alex changed as fast as
possible, then sat at the edge of the tub, dangling his feet in the hot water.

“You can open your eyes
now,” he said, shy and furious at himself for it.

Eerie opened her eyes
and looked at him blankly. This was probably the first time she had seen him
any way other than fully dressed. They had kissed and fooled around a bit, of
course, but that had always been in the dark. Just thinking about it, however,
made him even more self-conscious, so he slid abruptly into the tub, splashing
water out of the sides in his haste. The water wasn’t overly hot, but the
transition momentarily took his breath away.

They sat at opposite
ends of the tub, and Alex tried to find something to stare at in the relatively
featureless room other than Eerie. Every time he glanced at her, he smiled
awkwardly and then averted his eyes, not exactly sure what he was ashamed of.

Then Eerie splashed him,
and the mood was broken.

“Ah…sorry about that. I
just,” Alex said, casting about for a topic, “haven’t seen you in a while.”

Eerie nodded.

“Do you like the Far
Shores?”

“It’s okay,” Alex said
thoughtfully, pausing to duck his head under the bubbling water and wet his
hair. “Quiet. A little bit like living in an empty office building. Seriously,
I hardly ever see the people who work there, but the place is almost as big as
the Academy. It doesn’t really make sense.”

“Hmm. Are there other
kids?”

“Outside of Audits? Not
that I’ve seen. It’s even smaller than the Program, because they dropped all
the cartel kids, except Haley and Katya.”

“Oh yeah. At least you
have Katya…”

“Yeah. It would be even lonelier
without her, but she isn’t exactly the greatest company in the world.”

Eerie blinked in what he
assumed was surprise, though her expression hardly changed.

“Really? The two of you
seem like really good friends these days.”

Alex considered his
answer carefully, aware that he was treading on delicate ground. Katya and
Eerie knew each other to some extent, and there was a decent chance anything he
said about Katya would get back to her. Also, he didn’t want Eerie to get the
wrong idea. He was determined not to screw things up again.

“We get along. Katya’s
cool, but she’s a Black Sun assassin before she’s anything else. Don’t get me
wrong – I’ve learned a lot from her, and I trust her to watch out for me –
hell, she’s saved my life a couple times now. But it’s hard to be friends with
a trained killer.”

Eerie glanced away
briefly.

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“Really?”

“It’s not that I’m
jealous. I trust you. And I don’t care if you do become an Auditor, or what you
do when you are out in the field, as long as you always come back. But I don’t
want you to be like one of them. Like Miss Gallow or Miss Aoki, or even Katya.”

Alex laughed.

“I don’t think there’s
much chance of that.”

“Good,” Eerie said, wading
across the tub toward him. “’Cause that isn’t the Alex that I like.”

She was close, and his
arms went around her waist automatically.

“Can I ask you a
question, Eerie?”

Her arms resting on his
shoulders, expressionless face flushed and close, dilated eyes looking into his
own.

“Of course.”

He licked his lips,
pleasantly lightheaded, from the heat and her proximity.

“Why do you like me?”

Eerie cocked her head to
the side.

“What?”

“Well, I don’t know, I
was just wondering…”

“Alex is different,”
Eerie said thoughtfully. “And you never cared that I was different, too.”

It wasn’t what he
expected to hear, but then again, he wasn’t sure what he expected. She made him
sound better than he was – after all, Eerie’s not-entirely-human nature had
caused him more than a few moments of doubt. She wasn’t interested in his
protocol, the catalyst effect, cartel politics, or any of that nonsense,
though, and Alex was fairly certain that was the important part.

“That’s…um. Thank you.”

Eerie nodded.

He was going to say something
else, something about why he liked her, something complimentary. But at that
moment, the top half of Eerie’s bikini came bubbling to the surface of the
water, two rainbow triangles floating beside them.

“Oops,” Eerie remarked
gravely, moving closer. “How embarrassing.”

***

“You are certain?”

“I am.”

“Completely?”

“Of course. What did I
just tell you?”

“Because if you are
wrong about this…”

“I am
not
wrong.
And you will never find a husband with such a sour disposition.”

“…then you will have to explain
it to Alice Gallow.”

The small man in the
embroidered kippah rolled his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, drew
from it, exhaled, and shrugged.

“I am certain.”

“Very well.” Mitsuru
watched the farmhouse through a powerfully magnified POSP lens mounted to a
black polymer Dragunov sniper rifle. The sun hadn’t quite cleared the hills to
the east, and she couldn’t make out much in the low light, but there were
definitely men loitering around the only approach, a winding dirt track that
just barely constituted a road. The men carried weapons that had the classic
profile of the Kalashnikov, and now and again she could make out the red coal
at the tip of their cigarettes. “Are there always guards?”

“Always?” Davit’s brow
furrowed. “I cannot speak to always. We have only been watching the property
for the last few days.” She held her tongue, knowing that the Georgian
delighted in goading her. “In the time we have watched, however, there have
been at least three – two at the entrance, and another wandering the grounds.”

Mitsuru panned the scope
across the property a few times, but if there was a third man, then he was out
of her view in her current position – almost a thousand meters distant, the
rifle protruding from a glassless window in the ruins of an abandoned barn. It
was the nearest structure to the farmhouse, and the best cover. Behind them,
there was a small propane stove with a teakettle setting atop, a pair of dusty
sleeping bags, a couple of kit bags, and a fair amount of moldering straw.
Mitsuru and Davit had slept the previous night in the barn, surrounded by the
smells of long-departed animals and rotting wood, and she was not eager to
spend another. Nonetheless, months of research and weeks worth of legwork would
be spoiled if she moved rashly.

“Who has seen the women
inside?”

Davit pinched tobacco
fibers that had escaped his unfiltered cigarette from his mouth and tossed them
aside, regarding her critically.

“We have already
discussed this.”

She ignored him,
focusing her attention on the view through the scope.

“Who?”

Davit sighed for affect.
He was middle-aged, at the beginning of the transition from fit to round, with
deeply tanned skin, dull brown eyes, and a neatly trimmed beard. Very nearly as
short as Mitsuru, he was gruff and mildly abrasive, alternating between smoking
hand-rolled cigarettes and cracking the knuckles of his blunt, scarred fingers.
An Operator for the Lionidze Cartel with twenty-five years field experience, he
had a perpetually pessimistic outlook, a tendency to criticize, and a sharp
tongue.

They got along, more or
less.

“Two of our Operators
were conducting a review of our interests in the area.” Mitsuru didn’t ask,
because she didn’t want to know. The Lionidze Cartel had famously ugly revenue
sources, and the only resources of note in this barren rural area were the
lovely peasant girls, the cartel’s most lucrative export. “During the course of
their review, they noticed that the property had been purchased and renovated
by foreigners, mostly women, who seemed to have a large amount of money to
spend. This is more than unusual – we don’t see foreigners in this area at all,
not since the fighting with the Russians. They also noticed a significant armed
presence for what was purportedly a vacation home and organic farm. We notified
Central, as we had been instructed. They sent field agents, then they sent you,
Auditor.”

“You didn’t answer my
question.”

Davit sighed again.

“None of our people have
seen them directly. Informants have seen them directing the repairs of the home,
procuring supplies, hiring contractors, even once or twice at the local market.
In the last few months, however, they come and go in an SUV with tinted
windows, or they don’t leave the house at all. All descriptions are secondhand.”