The Far Shores (The Central Series) (16 page)

“Forget the bag.
Forget…just forget everything,” he said, more forcefully than he intended. He
realized that a few people around them were starting to stare, and the bus
driver had called his name more than once, but it didn’t matter. It couldn’t,
not right then.

“Eerie. I’m sorry. I’m
sorry that I haven’t been as good to you as you’ve been to me. And I want to
fix that. I want you to give me the chance to fix it. I want you…”

He took a deep breath,
the air infused with her scent, sandalwood and herbs. His vision swam for a
moment, and he thought of the butterflies, delicate orange wings battered by
coastal headwinds, framed against the blue of an ocean that he had hardly ever
seen.

“Eerie, will you go out
with me? Will you be my girlfriend?”

“Yes,” Eerie said
instantly, the moment he finished the question, as if she had been waiting
patiently for that very question. And maybe she had. She answered melodically,
without a trace of inflection, but just the hint of a smile. “Alex is stupid.
Of course. Go get your bag.”

He didn’t do that,
though. He kissed her instead.

***

“Are you sure this fits me? It feels
too tight, and the pants are kind of high…”

“Of course,” Anastasia
scolded, dragging a comb through his moistened hair while he sat in front of
her, watching both of them in the mirror. “You simply are not accustomed to
clothes that fit properly.”

Renton watched her eyes,
but she didn’t seem to be paying attention to anything other than his hair.

“Do I look good in this?”

He moved one hand to
indicate the expensive, tailored suit that had arrived the day before. He knew
it was from New York, because the Persian tailor who had done the fitting two
weeks earlier had a New York accent, but he had told him that the cloth came
from Italy. There was a pattern – a tight mesh of dark brown and a subtle grey,
but that was only noticeable when he looked very closely. At a casual glance,
it appeared to be the color of new leather or old wood, three buttons with a
matching waistcoat and burnished brass cufflinks. The whole outfit was one of
several he had received, all personally selected by Anastasia, who had fussed
over every stage of the entire process, clearly enjoying herself as she
dithered over fabrics and buttons, cuts and colors with the equally
enthusiastic tailor.

Anastasia straightened
his head in the mirror before continuing to coax his unruly hair into a
semblance of order.

“Acceptable,” she said
grudgingly, with a small nod.

Renton felt a warm glow
of approval that overwhelmed the sheer agony of the way she tore at his scalp
with the comb.

“I’m nervous,” he
admitted, licking his lips. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Anastasia gave his hair
one last tug, then leaned over his shoulder to adjust the knot of his gunmetal
tie. The knot was called a Windsor, and Anastasia had forced him to practice it
until he felt he could produce one in his sleep. Not that he minded. It was
worth it, for the attention. The entire time she spent planning his outfit and
rehearsing his role, he was acutely aware that his days of being by her side
were rapidly coming to a close.

“Of course,” Anastasia
snapped, glaring at him in the mirror while she fussed with the handkerchief in
his pocket. “Am I ever wrong?”

“No, Ana. But, still,
I’m not sure that I’m cut out for politics…”

Anastasia put her hands
on her hips and glared, only able to look down on him because he was seated.
She was wearing the iridescent white dress that Timor liked, which caused
Renton another pang of jealousy. He wondered if she ever considered his preferences
when choosing her outfit – and then discarded the idea as patently ridiculous.

“Being nervous is
understandable,” she said, wagging one finger in his face. “But doubting my
judgment is not. Regardless of your apprehensions, you will excel in your new
role – because I would not have selected you, had I any doubt in your
abilities.”

He blushed, and then was
embarrassed by the reaction, cursing the mirror in his head, but unwilling to
stand, because then he might have to leave.

“You have experienced
years of politics – my life, as you well know, is nothing but. Your worries are
akin to a fish worrying over its ability to breathe water. I am certain that
you will find yourself to be a master among journeymen. The Committee-at-Large,
I assure you, will never know what hit them.”

She turned away, sparing
him the indignity of witnessing his gratitude. Renton felt the loss of
Anastasia’s presence in his life acutely, but pride in the confidence she
placed in him mitigated that to a degree.

“If you say so, then it
must be that way.”

“Naturally,” Anastasia agreed,
sitting down behind her just-slightly-lowered antique desk, in her oh-so-subtly
elevated chair, still managing to look like a little girl playing with her
father’s things. Even if the truth was closer to the opposite. “I do not make
mistakes, Renton.”

He stood and examined
himself in the mirror; unbuttoned his jacket, turned to the side, put his hands
in the pockets of his waistcoat, tried out a smile and found it wanting. He
paused briefly to adjust the equally immaculately tailored holster at the small
of his back, which held a Smith & Wesson .357, snub nosed and hammerless to
prevent snagging on clothing. A second holster concealed a Beretta snugly beneath
his left arm, imperceptible even to trained eyes. Not that he expected to need
either in a glorified conference room, but he would have felt strange and
vulnerable without them.

“Right. Yes, of course.
Still, Ana…I just wish…”

Anastasia’s blazing eyes
caused him to fall silent.

“I am aware of your
feelings,” she said coldly. “And I find them distasteful.”

He looked away. The
sense of loss was very sharp at that particular moment.

Renton was an orphan, in
the Central sense of the word. In the more traditional sense, his parents had
been upwardly mobile, distant, and indulgent in a detached way. When the Black
Sun’s scouting program had located him in his early teens, he hadn’t required
persuasion to sign on. He had been activated at fourteen, but it was three or
four years later when his apparent aged had fixed – something he might have in
common with Anastasia, assuming she wasn’t simply a late bloomer. He spent
three years training as a bodyguard after the Black Sun adopted him, and the
rest of his semi-adult life had been devoted to the services of the heir of the
cartel. When he first met her, she was still a child, but her mind was already
incredibly devious. At first, he was simply fascinated by her, thrilled to be
close to someone so obviously destined for greatness. He wasn’t entirely sure
when his feelings had deepened, but they had been an unacknowledged part of his
reality since Ana had arrived at the Academy.

Losing his place beside
her hurt more than losing his family, the life he had known before the Black
Sun. It threatened his understanding of himself, deprived him of the swagger
that had carried him through so many trials, at the exact moment when he needed
it most. Renton despised weakness, in himself most of all, but despite his best
efforts, he could not will away his sense of abandonment.

“I have already explained
this to you,” Anastasia said, sighing as she inspected her flawlessly manicured
nails. “This is a promotion, not an exile. I need someone capable and cunning
to represent me in the Committee, and I no longer have the time to manage my
affairs there, not with the current demands on my time and attention. The
position must be delegated to someone who can act decisively and of their own
accord, someone who knows my interests well enough to protect them in my
absence.” Anastasia glanced at him and frowned. “It must be someone I trust,
Renton, you fool – and there is no else that I trust so completely. Do you
understand?”

It would be a lie to say
that her speech somehow made him whole. But it did make him feel better, and
Renton quickly pulled himself together, determined to at least appear to be the
man she needed. If this was the only way she needed him – for now – then he
resolved to be exactly what she needed.

The rest, he assured
himself, would come later. Eventually, Anastasia would come around to his way
of thinking. He knew that with a certainty that defied all logic. In any case,
they had a plan, one that couldn’t be spoken of, one that he had telepathically
erased from his own mind until the appropriate time. He didn’t know exactly
why, but he knew that it was important that he go through with this. Renton
stood up straight, brought his shoulders back, pushed out his chest.

“Of course, Ana,” he said
smoothly. “Whatever you need.”

***

Rebecca muted the television when she
heard Alice’s perfunctory knock, but she didn’t bother to call out. She already
knew Alice would simply let herself in, the way she had been doing for years.
It wasn’t really a problem, anyway –
Big Brother
was terrible this year,
and Rebecca was dying to hear all the gossip from Audits that she wouldn’t let
herself listen in on. She figured it was cheating, since she had officially
retired from that side of things, to be a school councilor and supportive big
sister to several hundred confused students at the Academy.

“Hey, ’Becca,” Alice
said, stomping in and throwing her leather jacket on a convenient chair before
collapsing face-forward on Rebecca’s duvet near the foot of her bed. “How’s it
going on the home front?”

“Not bad,” Rebecca
admitted, grinding out the butt of her most recent cigarette in her ugly
ceramic ashtray. “Little slow. How’s the doing-horrible-things-to-people
business?”

“Ugh. I swear, sometimes
I feel like a bad person,” Alice said, her voice muffled by the floral
comforter her face was planted in. “Seriously.”

“Oh, sweetie, no,”
Rebecca said, patting Alice on her bare shoulder. “Don’t think like that. You
are so much worse than bad.”

“Thanks.”

“Prove me wrong,”
Rebecca challenged. “What did you do today?”

“Went to visit the Jiang
Cartel.”

“Why?” Rebecca kept her
tone playful, checking the pack of cigarettes and finding it empty. “What did
they do?”

“That’s the hell of it,”
Alice said, rolling onto her back and frowning at the ceiling. The tank top she
was wearing proved to have an indecipherable logo from one of those awful metal
bands she loved. “I have no idea. We raided an Anathema complex in southern
China a few days ago. Still cleaning up that whole child-harvest mess, another
gift from Gaul’s fountain of stunningly good intel.”

Rebecca took another
pack from a drawer in her bedside table, tore it open, and lit up. She worried about
Gaul’s sudden and consistent insight into their normally inscrutable enemy. For
years Central hadn’t even been able to locate the Anathema’s current
whereabouts; the Outer Dark was considered by many to be a myth. Then, a month and
change after the attack on Central, Gaul starting producing detailed
intelligence on the Anathema at regular intervals – the kind of material that
most intelligence agents would kill for, the kind that only came from an inside
source. As far as anyone knew, though, there was no inside source in the
Anathema – Rebecca didn’t even have a clue how such a thing could be possible.
And it bothered her that Gaul was stubbornly silent as to how he procured the
information, along with empathic twinges of guilt she felt from him during
unguarded moments.

It wouldn’t be the first
time Gaul had done something terrible, after all.

“We figured on moderate
resistance, but instead we found open doors and empty rooms on the first couple
floors. Down deeper, there was abandoned computer equipment and corpses, not
one of them Anathema. Some from three cartels who hadn’t even shown up on our
radar yet, and some civilian, all relatively local, if you consider within
several hundred kilometers to be local. I have Mitzi working another angle, and
Xia isn’t much for interrogations, so I figured I would tackle the Jiang Cartel
myself.”

Rebecca smoked and
waited for Alice to continue, wondering at her abnormally gloomy state. She
thought about tweaking her emotions, cheering her up a little, but decided to
wait and see what the cause of her malaise was, first. The Chief Auditor, after
all, was due a little self-recrimination by definition.

“Except they didn’t know
anything. I’m almost sure of it,” Alice said, running her fingers through her
coal-black hair. “A third of their cartel left in the middle of the night, about
half kids. Then most of them – all of the adults – turned up dead in an
Anathema base three days later. The rest were just waiting and hoping they’d come
back.”

Rebecca took a moment to
think it over, but nothing came of her consideration.

“Okay, so what did you
do to the rest of them?”

“Who?”

“The Jiang Cartel.”

“Oh,” Alice responded
hollowly. “Them.”