The Anathema (47 page)

There was no such time. She was only feet away, and moving so fast that all Mitsuru could hope to do was get her arms in the way of the kick that otherwise might literally take her head off. Then, at the last possible moment, her implant hummed into impossible life, a protocol downloading and activating without any input from her. She watched in amazement as viral command text scrolled down the side of her vision in alien, golden letters.

Leigh’s kick landed. Then it bounced off, without even touching Mitsuru’s already broken arm, sparks trailing the girl’s leg from where it had impacted against the localized barrier that somehow shielded Mitsuru’s arms.

Um, hello, Miss Aoki.

Leigh was looking at her in shock. Mitsuru took the opportunity to open fire. While bullets might not have been able to kill the vampire, they must still have hurt, because she ran, moving for nearby cover. Mitsuru couldn’t place the voice in her head at first.

Eerie?

Yes?

Mitsuru continued firing one pistol while she slid the clip out of the other, pulling another from her belt and loading it against her thigh.

When did you become a telepath?

I’m not. I mean, I didn’t. I’m using the network, Miss Aoki. I’m using your implant as a relay. Sorry I had to take control like that, but, well, I think maybe that girl is trying to kill you.

Leigh rounded the corner faster than she thought possible, weaving and accelerating so that Mitsuru couldn’t get a decent shot off. She threw the guns aside in disgust and reached for her knife.

Never mind that. Can you do it again?

Sure! I wrote the protocol myself, you know. I call it Point-Barrier, and…

Mitsuru saw Leigh’s punch coming and crossed her arms in front of her face, figuring that Eerie was too caught up in describing the wonders of her protocol to activate it, but she was wrong. The vampire’s punch was no more effective than her first strike, glancing off the golden barrier that separated them, trailing sparks in the wake of her arm. Figuring that was about as certain as she could expect to be, Mitsuru leapt for Leigh, knife in hand.

Can you keep defending me long enough for me to put her down?

Well, I can try, but it’s hard, you know, and anyway…

She didn’t have time for the rest of Eerie’s warning. She was already up close. She kicked Leigh in the leg, right in the ankle she was pivoting on, and it wasn’t quite kicking stone, but it was close. It must have hurt on her end, too, because she tripped and fell. Mitsuru followed her down, the knife gripped in both hands, aimed for the upper back, below the shoulder blade. Leigh rolled, but Mitsuru had anticipated that, and made sure that her elbow fell right where Leigh’s face was. Again, Mitsuru wasn’t sure whom it hurt more, but on the other hand, it definitely hurt Leigh. Mitsuru snaked her legs around Leigh’s middle for grip and leverage, and then swung the knife for her throat.

Leigh’s punch was stopped by the point-barrier, but apparently she had gotten tired of that happening, because she allowed the knife to sink into the meat of her shoulder so that she could get a grip on Mitsuru’s shoulder and right arm. Mitsuru tried to shift, tried to lock her legs for better purchase, but the girl was too strong. She peeled Mitsuru off her like gum off the sidewalk and then hurled her, casually, into a wall almost thirty feet away, Mitsuru’s shoulder separating painfully on impact. If it hadn’t been for Eerie’s barrier, Mitsuru suspected the impact might have killed her. Judging from the information her ballistics protocol was feeding her, she had a few seconds before Leigh arrived, and made that a certainty.

Miss Aoki? I don’t think it’s enough… she’s getting stronger or something. Her next shot might actually get through. However, there is… something else I can do.

Do it.

There was hesitation, and in that time, Leigh eliminated half the distance between them.

Miss Aoki, are you sure? Because there is no going back if I do this. You see, your Black Protocol isn’t truly active yet. It’s still restrained. There is more. But if I do it…

There’s no time! Do it now!

Mitsuru wasn’t sure whether Eerie did something or whether Leigh hit her. Either way, she hit the ground, hard. So did, Leigh, crashing into a wall that rapidly became little more than debris. Mitsuru wasn’t entirely sure that she would be able to stand again, but at least Leigh didn’t come popping back up, either. The pain was immense. It threatened to overwhelm her.

Desperate times. Desperate measures.

Mitsuru slid a knife from her belt, a small one, balanced for throwing. Despite the intent of its manufacture, despite all the work she had done balancing and trimming it for optimum flight, she had never thrown it in anger. She’d only tried it a few times, in drunken contests carried out behind the Academy firing range with a much younger Alistair. As a matter of fact, she had never used it to hurt anyone other than herself.

After all, that wouldn’t be sanitary.

* * *

Drake and Michelle had just arrived when things lurched sideways underneath Chris, right when he had started to think that he was wrong, and unlike every other time Alice Gallow had shown up in his life unexpected, this day might actually end well. After all, she was still clutching what was most likely a cracked skull, a broken nose and a concussion. That alone should have qualified today as a good day. He said hello as they approached, but he didn’t think that much about it when they didn’t respond. Then he looked up at them, and saw Drake’s colorless face.

“Hey, Chris?” Drake said, looking concerned. Concern looked odd on him: two-hundred pounds of muscle and extra twenty or so of flab, a beard that he braided, and an insane scrawl of multi-colored tattoo work all over his body, excepting only the insides of his hands and the majority of his face. “I thought you said they were down already…”

The crash happened before Chris could turn all the way around. But it was definitely Leigh, perfect, invulnerable Leigh, who was picking herself up from the wreckage of the wall she had collided with. Where she had been seconds before, one of the Auditors was standing, the young one, and the Japanese girl woman red eyes. Mitsuru Aoki, if he remembered correctly. It was obvious, even at a distance, that it required a tremendous effort for her to stand. Typically, he would have assumed that was because of all the blood. Leigh’s claws, after all, could make a terrible mess.

However, this girl’s blood was black. And everything it touched, it consumed.

“What the hell is that?” Chris asked, backing slowly away.

“Nanite dissemblers,” Michelle said hesitantly, trembling at whatever her remote viewing protocol was showing her. “Her blood is saturated with them. What is this woman, Chris? How can she live with those things inside of her?”

Leigh moved cautiously from the wall she collided with, and the Auditor turned toward the movement. Her eyes were fire engine red; they made Chris’s eyes hurt in sympathy. The black blood crawled across her skin in rivulets, each drop falling silently to the ground and then eating away at it. She took one slow step, and then another, and even her footprints were corrosive. Everywhere she stepped, the black liquid expanded outward like rot.

“The dissemblers are self-perpetuating, and they are reproducing rapidly,” Michelle said, horrified, her normally slight French accent becoming pronounced. “Chris, that girl is a monster. If this continues, I don’t know where the damage will stop…”

Chris understood her fright. It was a nightmare idea that he heard described hypothetically, a favorite doomsday scenario among the physicists at the Academy – an Operator who could generate nanites that did nothing but build more of themselves and take everything else apart, functioning unchecked, their mass growing exponentially. The whole planet would be consumed in a matter of weeks. Of course, the scenario had been kicked around because it was widely assumed to be impossible – nanites of this variety had never actually been encountered, to the best of his knowledge. Nothing in the information they’d been given on the Auditors had mentioned Mitsuru Aoki as having such an ability – so Alistair had either withheld the information, or he hadn’t known himself.

 “Do we have to do something about this?” Drake asked urgently.

Chris actually begin to explain that with Leigh doing the fighting, they had nothing to worry about. The plan had always hinged on her, after all. She had spent a decade and more in stasis, embedded in the flesh pits, her skin crawling with blasphemous workings and forbidden technologies, asleep and growing strong in the Outer Dark. They had slaughtered a dozen vampires, elders of the European Syndicate, to provide her with the nanites used in the procedure; the Witches that the Anathema held in thrall had sacrificed century’s of collected power. Selecting Leigh for the process had been the offer that brought Chris over to the Anathema. He’d been forced to allow himself to be implanted with a false persona, and to fake his own death, for the purposes of collecting Alice Gallow. But he had never doubted his decision, ever since Leigh had emerged from her bath of blood and nanotechnology like Lady Bathory; naked, perfect, and invulnerable.

Except for the places that the red-eyed woman’s blood landed on Leigh’s waxen skin. Because there was nothing left there except a boiling, slowly-expanding black mass. The ground beneath Mitsuru’s feet fared no better, as she left craters behind her in the asphalt. Even her clothing and weapons were consumed. Only her skin and the knife in her hand were ignored by the ravenous nanites.

Chris said nothing; he stood and watched as Leigh snarled and threw herself at Mitsuru.

Even if she didn’t know exactly why, Leigh had clearly already decided that making her opponent bleed was a bad idea, so she had sheathed her claws before she struck, molding her hands back into fists. Thin, rotating tendrils of black blood surrounded Mitsuru, hanging in midair in frank disregard for gravity, drifting gently with the wind like seaweed, consuming even the moisture from the air around them. Leigh’s timing was exquisite.  She jumped one branch like a hurdler, and ducked under another, landed in a crouch and then sprang back up with blinding speed. Truly, she was a marvel to Chris’s eyes.

Mitsuru laughed, and hurled a handful of blood collected from her wounded arm, hanging crooked from Leigh’s kick. Leigh put her arms up to block reflexively, and the blood splashed along her forearms and past, splattering across her chest. A tiny drop hit her immaculate cheek and it started the hissing, fizzing conversion. She tried to step away, and one of the ribbons sliced through on her, neatly severing her left arm at the elbow. The limb was already coated with black, viscous goo by the time it stopped rolling.

Leigh did not feel pain. She did not scream. She retreated, absorbing a glancing blow to the calf as she fled. She was beside them, a moment later, and the black spots had expanded. Her right arm was almost totally lost, and spreading puddles of it were consuming her chest and neck.

“Get rid of it,” Chris commanded Michelle. “The black blood and all the skin touching it. Now.”

“What?” Michelle said, gaping. “I don’t want to…”

“You can’t hurt her,” Chris said impatiently. “But whatever it is that bitch is bleeding all over the place, it’s breaking her down faster than she can rebuild herself. Leigh will die if you don’t do it.”

Michelle hesitated for another infuriating moment, before nodding to herself, closing her eyes, and exercising the other half of what made the petite girl from Normandy such a valuable asset, first to her family and the infamous Terrie Cartel, and then to the Anathema. Michelle was a skilled remote-viewer, but more important, she was an exceptional telekinetic, capable of gross and small manipulations. Leigh’s flesh was neatly incised everywhere the nanites had spread, and she gasped in shock, but that was all. There was no blood. She showed no signs of pain.

Mitsuru shrieked as she turned toward them, all reason gone from her red eyes, while Alice Gallow stumbled to her feet, still clutching her head.

“Fuck this,” Chris snarled. “Let Alice Gallow deal with it. Drake, get us out of here. Start stage two, now.”