The Far Shores (The Central Series) (22 page)

He made his way along
the river, forging through the brush where he could, wading carefully through
the cold water and the smooth stones beneath when he had no other choice. It
was slow going and the sense of pursuit was maddening, but his exhaustion and the
difficult terrain precluded the possibility of a more rapid flight.

Twice he paused. The
first time he thought that he felt the faint stirrings of a distant telepathic
search, from a different source than the first. While it could well have been a
Hegemonic rescue, or the Auditors responding to the massacre, Paul couldn’t
risk being found. On the second occasion, he was overcome by the memory of
watching his father, both arms hideously broken, falling like a rag doll from
one of the cornices of their home, crashing through the tea table that his
mother and sister had vacated only moments earlier. When he finally moved on, his
pace had slowed considerably.

Paul picked his way
through the dark, cold water, his soaked trousers clinging to his legs, and
wondered numbly at what happened, as if anesthetized. What could have brought
them to his home, that night? What had the Linfield Cartel, a sleepy and
complacent operation if there ever was one, done to deserve such violent
retribution? Why had this happened to him, to his family?

The owl’s screech
reminded him of the way his sister had screamed. Paul used telepathy to prevent
himself from reliving the scene.

He didn’t wonder who had
done it. He’d seen one of them, plain as day. Paul Linfield was fairly sure
that she’d wanted him to. Because he was certain that if Lóa Thule had wanted
to go unseen, she would have. But he had watched her push the ruined body of his
father from the roof of his house.

The crackling leaves
beneath his shoes reminded him of the sound of his house burning, when the
screaming finally stopped. He turned it off like flipping a switch.

The Thule Cartel had been
in exile for decades. True, the Linfield Cartel had been part of the vote that
sent them into exile, but so had dozens of other cartels, and they hardly could
have been called instrumental to the effort. His cartel hadn’t made a move to
expand their territory or holdings in more than twenty years, and thus enjoyed
relatively warm relations with the majority of the Hegemony. Even the Black Sun
had asked them to serve as mediators when they negotiated restitution for the
actions of Katya Zharova. No one that he was aware of had a grudge that could
explain such violence.

The creek running over
the rocks sounded as if it were whimpering, like the crying he had heard while
crawling to safety beneath the floorboards. Paul muted it and walked on.

There was only one thing
he could think of. The Linfield Cartel was among the Ten Families. Not so much
the traditional leadership of the Hegemony, since it couldn’t really be said to
have any, but rather the king-makers – though such traditions were, at best,
nostalgically remembered relics of a time long past. The Hegemony had last been
unified almost a century earlier, and the effort had required the official
support of the Ten Families. These days, it would have been considered an
afterthought, little more than a formality, after political and military
control had been exerted over the Hegemony. Maybe the Thule Cartel were the
traditional sort? But how would they gain the Linfield Cartel’s support, if
there was no cartel left?

The wind in the trees
reminded him…well, it didn’t really matter, did it? He blocked it out.

Paul suspected that he
was not alone, but the voice from behind him startled him badly nonetheless.

“Or maybe we really
hate
tradition. Did you consider that? Maybe we don’t want you to do something for us
as much as we don’t want you to be able to do it for
anyone
. You follow?
Sometimes people have trouble keeping up with me. How’s he doing, Mateo?”

Paul spun around and
studied the greenery around him for his enemies, who proved to be
simultaneously obvious and obscure.

“He’s not following you,”
a bored male voice answered. “He’s not following anything at the moment.”

“Oh, right,” the woman
said thoughtfully. “Your illusion protocol. What’s he seeing right now, anyway?”

Paul could have asked
the question himself. The first speaker, the one who talked too fast with
squeaky, feminine voice, appeared to be a low thorn bush just up the slope from
him, while the second speaker, whom he was just
certain
wore glasses,
appeared to be coming from the creek itself. Intellectually, he knew they must
have been employing telepathic disguises – after all, shrubs and brooks were
not known to be talkative – but his conventional senses insisted otherwise.

“Nonsense. Sometimes I
get weird interactions, when my target is using a telepathic protocol. And he
was doing something rather…odd.”

The bush looked
intrigued. Paul panicked as his legs wobbled and then collapsed beneath him,
pitching him into the mud beside the river, his hands in the cold water, but he
seemed paralyzed to take action.

Neural override, Paul thought
blearily. Control of his body had been hijacked from the outside. As silent as
snowfall, a secondary nervous system, one composed entirely of telepathic
relays, begin to activate itself within him.

“He was shutting off
sensory input, piece by piece, because it was reminding him of what just
happened,” the creek said clinically. “I think he has PTSD or something.”

“I don’t blame him,” the
bush observed sympathetically. “But that which doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,
right?”

He felt his fingertips
tingle, the aching of his cold hand, the dirt and rocks pressing against his
cheek. Only echoes, of course, telepathic simulations of nervous input. The
hate, though, was as real as anything he had ever felt, and he sharpened it
into a point, though he didn’t bother to try and stand.

“Aren’t we supposed to
kill him?”

“Oh yeah,” the bush
admitted. “I guess it won’t make you stronger after all. Tough luck.”

The telepath might have
sensed his intentions a split-second before Paul took action. The dusky-skinned
man with stooped shoulders certainly appeared alarmed behind the lenses of his
glasses. Paul didn’t give him any more time than that.

He followed the first
rule of combat – neutralize the telepath.

If it was possible for a
telepathic attack to be aimed below the belt, then this one was. Paul had
refined the edge of the attack until it was as fine and sharp as any knife,
then drove it home in the mind of the man with glasses where it would do the
most damage. He had defenses, of course, but he was unprepared for the sheer
force of the rage behind Paul’s attack. Paul remembered his sister screaming
and projected his anger straight through the man’s head, impaling his autonomic
nervous system.

The glasses fell into
the creek with a splash, followed a few seconds later by the body that had worn
them. He landed face down, but that made no difference, as Paul had crippled
his ability to breathe. As Paul pushed further into his mind, burning
everything around him like a Vandal in Rome, the man’s hands clenched and
unclenched, his bowels let go, his stomach tried to expel its contents. Paul
extracted himself from the man’s vile mind as he choked on river water and his
own tongue.

The small bush had
become a smiling woman with fantastically curly hair, black-frame glasses, and
a jacket fringed with silver fur.

“Did you just try to kill
Mateo?” She asked the question the way he might have asked the time, without
rancor, just a point of information. “Didn’t work, I’m afraid. He’s impossible
to target, even telepathically. You killed an illusion. But, Paul Linfield, you
didn’t do half bad. Unfortunately, you should have started your attack the
other way around.”

Paul’s nervous system had
resumed functioning enough to allow him shakily to his feet. The girl talked so
fast that it was hard to make out the individual words, but that didn’t matter.
True to her words, the Hispanic man stood beside her with an expression of
amusement. Paul ignored him and reached instead for Lóa Thule’s mind, brilliant
like cut glass, across the space between them.

He missed.

That wasn’t, of course,
possible. Telepathy is instantaneous, or so close to it that Academy scientists
had been unable to measure the interval in between thought and action. Another
telepath might have been able to block or divert his attack, but certainly no
one could hope to dodge it. Paul thought, and it was.

Except that the woman
wasn’t standing in front of him anymore. She was sitting in the lower branches
of a gnarled oak tree, above him and to his right.

“All of you guys –
telepaths I mean – you always make the same face,” she laughed, self-assured. “If
only the physicists knew, right? Telepathy isn’t instant. It’s
almost
instant.
There’s just a little bit of lost time between thought and action. And that’s a
big difference, when time is the medium you work with.”

Paul Linfield’s
shoulders slumped in resignation, while he sent out tentative, secret feelers,
trying to touch her mind without startling her.

“I feel bad for you, I really
do. I’m sympathetic. I wish I could take you back with me. You obviously have
talent. But you’d be broken. And I can’t do that to someone as nice as you.
It’s too cruel.”

He could see sadness in
her face, but couldn’t understand and didn’t care to. Paul found the lever in
her mind that he was looking for and he triggered it, cutting off access to her
protocol.

Except he didn’t.

The woman touched him softly
on his back, suddenly standing beside him in the river, a compact nickel-plated
revolver pressed to his temple.

“You’re really very
good. Forgive me, Paul Linfield. Know that I do this in kindness.”

He could actually feel
the bullet, hot and foreign, in his brain, just for a moment.

***

Mr. Windsor’s classroom seemed slightly
unfamiliar. Only two weeks had elapsed since he was here last, but Alex felt
almost giddy at his return to the lecture hall. The familiar tangle of cords
and the slightly outdated projector humming away next to the podium, the genial
chatter of his classmates, the carpet that almost – but didn’t quite – match
the color of the walls, were as he remembered. Alex glanced at the spot where
he sat for the entirety of the last term, and that was when the reality of the
changes really hit him. Emily was gone, and Vivik must have been late, because
he wasn’t there yet. Margot Feld’s seat remained conspicuously empty, and Alex
suspected that it would remain that way until a new class of recruits took the
space over.

Not everything had
changed – Anastasia Martynova still commanded the center of the room in a black
silk dress with silver stockings and matching highlights, completely flouting the
school dress code. Timor flanked her at a discreet distance, as always making
the uniform look like a stylish fashion decision, and Katya sat a couple rows
back with a croissant and a cup of coffee. Grigori sat on the far right side,
along with Hope and Chandi and the rest of the Hegemony kids. In the front, on
the sparsely populated left side of the room, a girl with blue hair stared off
into space, the entire row surrounding her empty.

For the first time since
he had joined the class, Alex slid into the vacant seat beside her, offering
his best smile when she looked up in what he had to assume was her
expressionless version of surprise. Until recently, Alex had worried that
openly associating with Eerie would encourage the cartels to turn their
attention on her – or that’s what he told himself. It’s possible that he had
simply wanted to avoid commitment. Whatever the truth of his motivations, though,
Alex had resolved to do better, starting immediately. If they were dating, then
he intended to start acting like it.

As usual, Eerie seemed
to have simply disregarded the school dress code, wearing a loose-necked
sweater striped blue and grey, matching knee socks, and a jean skirt. The
plastic headband that held her hair back was covered with cartoon renditions of
bees and butterflies, while her notebooks were covered with scribbles and
shorthand from her coding work at Processing.

“Alex?”

“Good morning, Eerie,”
he said, trying to be nonchalant. “How are you?”

“Um, good. I
think...yes. Probably good.”

“Huh. Well,
that’s...that’s good, then. I almost hate to admit it, but it’s nice to be back
in class. The Far Shores is so lonely I’ve even started to miss school.”

Eerie nodded evenly. He
waited for a response, but when it became obvious that none was forthcoming, he
forged ahead.

“Hey, where’s Vivik? I
don’t see him anywhere...”

Alex glanced around the
room to confirm it. Anastasia ignored him, while Grigori glowered in his
direction. Katya smirked and gave him an entirely unsubtle thumbs-up, which he
had to work very hard to ignore.

“Vivik is late. He has
been coming in late every day for a couple weeks now. Mr. Windsor is confused.
He even made him stay late to talk about it after class last week.”