The Far Shores (The Central Series) (28 page)

“Are you certain won’t
have tea?” The Witch’s beautiful face oozed congeniality. “I could make coffee
instead, if you prefer.”

Mitsuru shook her head.

“Very well. I would
assume that you know them better than I,” the Witch said, with a smile that in
any other circumstances could have easily been called bewitching. “I believe
you call them the Anathema.”

Mitsuru tried to absorb
the information without reacting, without giving the Witch anything to work
with. She had no idea what Yaga’s intentions were, no way to judge her
truthfulness; but Mitsuru had no intention of letting her guard down, even if
she was utterly benevolent.

“What do you mean?”

“The Anathema,” the
Witch said pleasantly, sipping her tea. “The Operators who reside in the Outer
Dark. Their leader is John Parson, formerly among your ranks.”

While she was hesitant
to believe anything a Witch told her, it did make sense. There had been Witches
and Weir among the Anathema troops when they attacked Central. The running
theory was that some form of alliance had been made between the two factions,
in the light of their mutual interest in harming Central. If this was not the
case, then much of the work Analytics had done since the attack was based on
false assumptions.

“It seems to me,”
Mitsuru offered cautiously, aware that she was on dangerous ground, “that your
interests and those of the Anathema would frequently align.”

“I hope you will not
think me rude when I say that this simply shows how poorly you understand our
interests,” the Witch said, her perfect lips formed into a gentle smile.
“Humans have an expression, ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’, yes? Well, we
do not subscribe to this notion. However dramatic the differences between
yourselves and the Anathema may be from your perspective, from our own, they
are insignificant. We view you as largely one and the same.”

“Then why are we having
this conversation?”

“I am something of an
anomaly among my peers,” the Witch explained. “That is one reason. The other is
a trifle more embarrassing to admit. I have recently conducted a review of our
affairs across the globe, and discovered that the Anathema have subverted a
vast number of my sisters, far more than I suspected. Our situation has become
unexpectedly dire, so I find myself considering the possibilities of new and
radical strategies.”

“Such as, ‘The enemy of
my enemy’...”

“My kind is not capable
of friendship,” the Witch assured her. “Do at least try the scones. The honey
is locally produced, and quite excellent.”

“Again, why are we
having this conversation?”

“While an alliance is
impossible, the notion of having one of our enemies serve us is not. Your war
with the Anathema is fundamentally a civil war, one that weakens you regardless
of the outcome. Moreover, it appears that we have a vested interest in seeing
one side prevail, as we find ourselves in an untenable position. Offering aid
to you in an endeavor that will inevitably weaken you, while potentially
eliminating an existential threat, is a very viable possibility.”

Mitsuru felt anger and
suppressed it. She would not be goaded into revealing any more to this creature
than was strictly necessary – nor would she pass up the opportunity to extract
whatever information was available.

“I believe I understand
your position,” Mitsuru said flatly. “What ‘aid’ can you offer?”

The Witch clapped her
hands with what looked like joy, and Mitsuru had to remind herself that Rebecca
believed their race to be incapable of true emotion. What she was watching was
a display of copied mannerisms learned through decades of human interaction,
designed to put her at ease and create a false sense of familiarity.

Mitsuru very much hoped
that Rebecca was correct.

“The Witches that you
are seeking fled the area several weeks ago. Whether in advance of my arrival,
or of your own, I am unsure. You understand from interrogating my captured
Witches that we share a certain level of consciousness, yes? The renegades
amongst us, those subverted by the Anathema, have been severed from this
coexistence, to a degree. The degree of separation, however, is less than they
believe it to be.” The Witch wiped her thin fingers and exquisitely maintained
nails with the cloth napkin, then reached into a concealed pocket in the
patterned dress she wore. She slid a folded piece of handmade paper partway
across the table, leaving it within easy reach for Mitsuru. “This is where they
have relocated. It is in Kiev, at a location we believe to be an Anathema
stronghold. You may do what you wish with this information.”

Mitsuru pocketed the
paper without examining it. That was a job for Analytics.

“And?”

The Witch smiled again.

“As I said, you are free
to do what you like. If, however, you choose to eliminate our wayward sisters,
we will know it. Should you choose to embark on this course of action – and I
must emphasize that this means their deaths, not their captivity – then I will
find you. I will provide you with further information. Additional locations,
Anathema operations, and strategies – information that will provide you with an
advantage in your conflict. Should you decide to do otherwise, if you return to
this house, you will find it abandoned. I will disappear, and no further offers
of aid will be forthcoming. Now, then, before you go,” the Witch said, leaning
forward solicitously, “are you certain that you won’t have some tea?”

***

“I don’t understand.”

“Do you need to?”

Alex hesitated,
entranced by the honey-light, by the metallic flicker in the depths of her
pupils.

“I need to learn how to
be good to you.”

She sighed, the sound of
leaves falling on the water.

“It’s hard to argue with
you when you say all the right things. But we don’t have much time, and I miss
you so much...”

“But I’m right here. And
you...are you here, Eerie? Is this you?”

Her hand on his neck,
like the warmth of the sun on his skin after an interminably long winter, like
rain on cracked earth. His nerves sang when they touched, in a language that he
responded to on a fundamental level that did not require understanding.

“In a sense. It is
difficult to explain. Words do no justice to the depth of our relationship. We
are alike and distinct. We share almost everything, but she is not aware of me
yet. When she comes to know me, there will be no distinction between us.”

Not a seduction, but an
appreciation of their entanglement. Not hallucination, but the clarity of
synesthesia, a juxtaposed lexicon of sensation and response. The vocabulary of
two bodies and their intermingling.

“I’m confused. Are you
Eerie?”

Her smile was not
Eerie’s shy half-smile. It was like the cold of predawn receding as the sun
rose, lemon juice and sugar, the smell of old books, and the soft ash of burnt
incense.

“I chose that name
because that is what you call me.”

“You aren’t making
sense.”

“Don’t worry about it,
Alex,” she said softly, stroking his arm. “Just be here with me, in this
moment.”

He was torn, stricken
with indecision, the fear of making another mistake. It was almost funny – with
Emily, he had known it was wrong, but he did it anyway, because he wanted to,
because he knew what he wanted. Here and now, Alex was afraid to do anything,
because he didn’t know what would be right.

Their lips met, and she
tasted the same, sweet and exotic. Her body remained soft and yielding to his
touch. But the eyes, the light...

“Can’t you explain it to
me? I don’t understand what is happening.”

She smiled again, the
expression that was hers and was not, the face that was familiar but moved in
unfamiliar ways. He pulled away, sat up, tried to clear his head, but she
followed him.

“You are right,” she
whispered, her breath tickling his ear; the taste of honey, the sound of the
waves breaking in this distance, the moment before sleep. “I cannot take what
should be hers to discover. You are both still learning, and I do not have the
right to cheat myself. But I miss you, Alex, every day. Will you just hold me,
until our time is over?”

She melted into his
arms, and time stretched out, dilated, shrank away from him. There was never
enough, he realized, and felt the aching grief of memory, the refined sadness
of the transience of things.

“Given the chance,” she
may have said, before her eyes fluttered closed, before the honey-light
dissipated, “I believe that you could save each other.”

***

“I have news.”

“I should hope so. Are
they dead? Did you take any prisoners?”

“No. There were
complications.”

“Fucking hell. Aren’t
there always. What did you get for me?”

“I’m not completely
certain,” Mitsuru said, looking across Alistair’s old desk at Alice Gallow and
producing the sheet of folded paper, “but I think we may not be the only ones
fighting a civil war.”

***

“This is a little…”

Eerie twisted her hands
in a ball.

“Did I…did I do anything
weird? I did something weird, didn’t I?”

“No. Well, okay,” Alex
admitted. “It was a little bit weird. Not bad weird, just…”

Eerie looked over at
him, clearly upset. Despite the situation, he couldn’t help thinking that she
still looked cute, wearing nothing but his T-shirt and the bottom half of her rainbow
striped bikini.

“I don’t remember,” she
said, drops of water flying from the ends of her blue hair when she shook her
head. “I don’t remember anything. Did I embarrass myself, Alex? Do you hate me
now?”

Alex embraced her. She
fit comfortably into his arms, even in distress.

“No,” he said, trying to
be reassuring. “You didn’t do anything…well, that is to say, nothing you did
upset me or freaked me out. No need to worry.”

Eerie studied his face
closely.

“So I did do something,”
she softly, her arms tight around his middle. “Was it something bad?”

“N-no! I mean, of course
not. It wasn’t bad. You were just, you know…cryptic. And affectionate. I’m a
little confused, but there’s nothing to be upset over.”

Eerie squeezed him and
pressed her face against his shoulder, and Alex was afraid that she would start
crying. Then she pulled herself together and relaxed her grip, looking up at
him with eyes that were entirely her own.

“You want to try it
again? This time, I promise that I won’t forget anything.”

The limo was a Cadillac,
because that was the only brand on
the market which carried the necessary armor and communications equipment. In
any other circumstance, Anastasia wouldn’t have been caught dead in an American
car.

The car, like many
things in Anastasia’s life, was primarily for appearances, because it was
expected for someone of her station. If she had used anything less, then her
enemies might have suspected something, and Anastasia preferred to discourage
speculation on subjects that she kept genuinely mysterious. A bulletproof car,
with a shielded engine, run-flat tires, and a blood bank stocked with Type O
negative blood in the trunk wasn’t really entirely necessary – though she had
to admit that the powerful communications hub was rather convenient,
particularly in areas that lacked reasonable information infrastructure – but it
was expected.

Not that an attempt on
her life while she traveled was out of the question – she had in fact already
survived three; four, if the bombing in Madrid that was actually intended for
her father was included. But the likelihood that anything so crude would be
attempted on a New York State highway was extraordinarily small, particularly
on the relatively short trip to the airport for her flight to Reykjavik. The
Thule Cartel had refused to allow her to apport to their compound – in order to
protect the secrecy of the location – or to provide her with an apport
technician of their own, so she was reduced to the clunky inconvenience of air
travel.

As good as her private
intelligence service was, there was no particular reason for Anastasia to be
aware of the Arleigh Burke–class destroyer that was currently more than a
hundred kilometers offshore, only recently out of dry dock for repairs, headed
to deployment in the eastern Mediterranean, patrolling the waters off Lebanon
and Cyprus. While her security forces routinely monitored a variety of
communication channels relevant to her current position, they did not include
the encrypted U.S. Naval frequency that was frantically relaying information
regarding a sudden and inexplicable malfunction in the ship’s vertical-launching
system, which had resulted in the hot-launch of a fully armed Block IV Tomahawk
cruise missile. She was therefore equally unaware of the simultaneous failure
of a number of fail-safe and anti-missile countermeasure systems that should
have prevented the weapon from entering U.S. airspace.

When Anastasia arrived
in Reykjavik, she would be met be an enhanced security detail, and the route to
her meeting with the Thule Cartel leadership would have been cleared in
advance, including the deployment of decoy and trail vehicles, fixed position
snipers, and even hijacked satellite reconnaissance. Far less was deemed
necessary for a drive less than an hour long through the relative security of
the continental United States, however, so there were no Black Sun personnel in
place to observe Brennan Thule using a powerful set of Zeiss field glasses to
observe her limo from the crest of a nearby hill, recently clear-cut and
conveniently free from visual obstruction.

The Tomahawk cruise
missile was capable of subsonic speeds above eight hundred kilometers an hour,
which meant it took a little more than seven minutes for the warhead to reach
its target. This was enough time to trip the various virtualized monitoring
systems that the Black Sun Cartel had distributed throughout any number of
military and civilian networks, including a number that were attempting to
track or disable the missile that had mysteriously taken flight and armed of
its own accord. Despite the enhanced and hardened communication system in the
limo, none of this data was relayed to Anastasia or her minimal security
detail.

Anastasia Martynova
typically traveled with both a precognitive bodyguard and an apport technician,
as was standard procedure for securing the presumed heir to the Black Sun. Just
lately, however, the heir to the Black Sun had been capricious and impulsive,
travelling with minimal security details and taking unplanned journeys. At the
moment, Martynova’s apport technician and her bodyguard were occupied with
clearing the airport and vetting the crew of a waiting plane, leaving her
security for the short drive to a pair of trained Operators, veteran security
personnel from the Black Sun Cartel. They were capable in their own right, but neither
were precognitive. Brennan Thule had thoroughly researched all of this before
he decided on the current plan of action.

Anastasia Martynova had
a record of surviving assassination attempts that was almost unrivaled, and a
rumored immunity to combat protocols – no doubt a function of her unknown
Deviant Protocol – so the means needed to be indirect. Accordingly, no protocol
was deployed against her. Brennan’s technopath ability was employed only to
arrange the Tomahawk’s launch, to control its guidance and arming systems, and
to prevent critical information from reaching Martynova’s limousine before
effective defensive measures could be taken.

When the limo, and the
road around it for tens of meters in every direction, was reduced to a smoking
crater by the deployed warhead, Brennan Thule had every reason to believe that
Anastasia Martynova was dead.

Naturally, none of that
stopped him from dispatching a kill-team to make certain.

***

“And?”

“And what?”

“You can’t just leave it
there.”

“Can and did. I answered
your question. You asked why you found me and Eerie in your secret bathhouse. I
explained.”

Rebecca leaned forward,
brushing the hair from her face.

“I am going to put this
cigarette out on your eye,” she grumbled. “You know what I’m talking about,
boy. What did she say before the two of you started making out? The other, I
mean – the one who lives inside Eerie?”

Alex’s eyes widened, but
just a little. He had clearly nursed a suspicion that Rebecca knew more than
she had initially let on.

“Eerie told you?”

“She didn’t have to. I
felt it when that one showed up. That’s why I came looking.”

“You already knew about…her.”

“Yes. Sort of. More like
I’ve encountered her before.”

“Yeah? And what did you
think?”

“Let’s leave that for
the moment, though I will share my thoughts with you. I want to know what
you
thought, first.”

He considered. Alex
Warner, Rebecca thought cynically, would make a terrible poker player. She
didn’t need any of her substantial empathic abilities to know exactly what was
going on in his semi-vacant head. Then again, teenage boys rarely had
surprising motivations.

“I think she was sad,” Alex
said finally. “She was crying for some reason. She kept saying she was happy to
see me, that she missed me. And she was so much like Eerie, on one level there
was hardly any difference. But the way she talked, and her eyes...”

Rebecca nodded when she
was sure that he didn’t intend to continue. She knew what he meant, anyway. There
were genuine physiological changes involved – she had witnessed them herself. When
Eerie had one of her episodes, it was as if she were possessed. Worse, Rebecca
wondered if whatever possessed her was there all along, watching from the
background.

“It made me feel like I
don’t know her at all at first. But maybe that’s why she likes me. I don’t know
what’s going on in my own head half the time. Maybe it isn’t that different for
her, even if she is schizo, or whatever.”

Rebecca cooled off her
own anger automatically. He didn’t know what he was talking about, she reminded
herself. Conversations with Alex often required an extra dose of tolerance.

“She reminded me of
Eerie, and I liked her because of that,” Alex continued on, oblivious as always
to the people around him. “That’s got to mean something, right?”

She softened.

“Eerie isn’t
schizophrenic, Alex. She doesn’t have multiple personalities, or any psychological
problems at all, by the standards of what she is. As far as I can tell, Eerie
is a completely normal and healthy Changeling. What is normal for her, in other
words, might be very abnormal from a human perspective.”

“I see what you mean,”
Alex said, nodding. “Kinda. What happened, though?”

“You’d better not laugh.”
Rebecca got a cigarette going, then realized she already had one smoldering in
the ashtray, and stubbed it out sadly. It was too much to hope Alex hadn’t
noticed, but he was kind – or self-absorbed – enough not to mention it. “The
only person I’ve ever told this was the Director, and he laughed until I left
the room.”

“I’m not going to laugh,”
Alex said earnestly. “I can’t even imagine the Director laughing.”

“Don’t. You ever think
much about time, Alex?”

“Oh God,” Alex said,
shaking his head. “Whenever I ask a question about anything, the answer begins
with the goddamn origins of the universe.”

Rebecca glared until
Alex took the hint and shut up.

“Ask Vivik sometime. He
can wrap your head up like a pretzel. What’s significant in this case is fairly
easy to explain – time isn’t sequential, Alex. Time isn’t a bunch of events
that happen in chronological order. That’s just the way we perceive time,”
Rebecca said, pausing to let it sink in. “You with me?”

“If time isn’t
chronological, then what is it?”

She took his furrowed
brow as a genuine attempt at understanding, or as close as Alex would come to
one.

“I’m no good at this
shit. It depends on what flavor of physics you subscribe to; a lot like
religion. Some people think it’s a wave, other people think everything happens
simultaneously. I’ve heard people argue that the universe replicates and
divides with every decision, theories of a super- and substructure for the
universe…”

“Pretend I didn’t ask.”

“I know. If you let
them, physicists and philosophers will start waving all sorts of math in your
direction, trying to prove their point. But the important bit is this – time
only seems linear because that’s the way we experience it. The Fey aren’t like
us, though. Maybe you’ve gotten so used to hearing it that you’ve forgotten
what it means – but Eerie isn’t human. She is profoundly different from you and
me.”

Alex thought it over,
scratching his head. Rebecca ached to use empathy to urge him along – it was
almost second nature – but she had promised not to do that, and Rebecca honored
her promises, to the extent that it was possible.

“Then you think Eerie
doesn’t experience time the way we do?”

She gestured vaguely,
her hand waving between them.

“Sort of. I think she
forces herself to see things our way, or at least tries to. I think that’s part
of what makes Eerie the way she is. I don’t think that Eerie’s actually crazy,
Alex – I think reconciling her Fey half and her human half skews her
perceptions.”

Alex rubbed his jaw
thoughtfully.

“Okay, so, when this all
happened, I was talking to…”

Rebecca ground out her
cigarette in the ashtray, her mouth suddenly filled with a foul taste.

“I think you were
talking to Eerie.” Rebecca watched Alex closely to see how he would react. “Eerie
from some point in the future, when she has developed a different perspective
on time, in line with her Fey ancestry. Eerie looking backwards, as it were,
remembering – except memory works differently when time isn’t sequential.
Theoretically, everything happens all at once. I think she was reliving a
memory, Alex, while experiencing it for the first time.”

“I was talking to future
Eerie? But, not really?” Alex said uncertainly. “Wow. That is all truly fucking
weird. How’d you figure all this out, Rebecca?”

She tried to laugh it
off.

“I didn’t really,” she
admitted. “This is mostly speculation. We don’t really know much about the Fey.”

Alex’s mouth fell open.

“Wait a minute,” he
said, clearly annoyed. “You don’t know at all. You’re just guessing.”

Rebecca shrugged. There
was no point in arguing.

“I’d like to call it an
educated guess.”

“None of you people,”
Alex said shakily, standing up, “know shit. You just make guesses and then we
die when you are wrong.”

Perhaps her compassion
was curtailed slightly by knowing Alex, by her awareness of his own
self-centered nature. It could have been that she spent too much energy curbing
her natural instinct to comfort him, empathically, or that she had simply
witnessed this same scene too often.

“Alex, it isn’t like
that.”

His eyes offered a
challenge. He was still undecided, but he was also looking for an excuse to
leave, a
casus belli
to storm out and feel self-righteous.

“No? Then explain it to
me.”

Rebecca reached for
another cigarette automatically, even though she still had the terrible taste
in her mouth from the last one, but to her amazement, Alex reached out and
knocked the pack off of her desk.