The Far Shores (The Central Series) (32 page)

“No need,” Emily said
softly. “I believe they have found us.”

A moment later, Michael
Lacroix emerged from the shadows of the breezeway, shaking his head when he saw
Emily, sending his dreadlocks bouncing.

“Emily, words truly
cannot describe my disappointment,” he said, his expression tight and sad. “How
badly we have failed you, child.”

“What?” Emily was truly
taken aback. She struggled to see Michael’s halo, but he was an utterly blank
slate, immaculate psychic defense.

“What the hell is he
talking about?”

Colin gave her a
condescending look, or maybe that was simply his default expression. Not that
it mattered.

“Take him,” Emily said,
pointing at Michael. “He’s a telekinetic, but he’s only got one shot, assuming
he hasn’t used it already.”

“Too easy,” Colin
snorted, advancing to meet Michael, cracking his knuckles and looking every bit
a macho jerk. “You sure you wanna do this, man? You could still run. I might
let you.”

Michael shook his head
and continued forward, eyes fixed on Emily, not acknowledging Colin’s presence.

“I feel that we owe you
an apology, Emily…”

Colin took a step
between them, his skin crawling with liquid fire, starting at the crown of his
head, and gradually expanding to turn him into a literal burning man.

“You might wanna pay
attention to the business at hand.”

Michael’s eyes continued
to bore into her, brown tinged with dull red, as if he hadn’t slept.

“…though your actions
have been deplorable.”

Colin lunged for
Michael. Technically, he was an energy projector, but he couldn’t project more
than a few centimeters beyond his own skin. He was still a Class-E pyrokine,
however, and the fire that coated his skin was like napalm, long-burning and
adhesive. Even proximity to his protocol was painful and disfiguring, whereas
prolonged contact was lethal.

Emily expected Michael
to use his own devastating telekinetic protocol to obliterate Colin, which
would have left him more or less helpless by the time he reached her. But that
didn’t happen.

Instead, Michael let
Colin come, then took firm hold of him by a shoulder and upper arm, then
stepped behind his leg and performed a traditional leg-sweep takedown. Michael
landed atop Colin as if he weren’t burning, brushing aside his flaming hands
with no obvious consternation. Emily could see a purple-hued distortion
surrounding Michael, hugging close to his body like a second skin, and wondered
who could have been projecting the barrier around him. The barrier was unusual,
as well – the flames that licked it were rapidly consumed and extinguished, the
defensive field growing brighter as a result.

Colin struck Michael in
the side of the head no to obvious effect. Michael caught his arm at the
forearm and wrist, and twisted, snapping the bone with casual efficiency. Colin
yelled inarticulately and struggled beneath Michael’s weight, battering him in
the back and neck with his other arm, but Michael shrugged the blows off, and
Colin’s flame failed to spread. Calm and deliberate, Michael grabbed Colin by
the face, pulled his head up, then drove it into the ground with a sound like a
hammer against wood. Colin groaned and flailed ineffectually, while Michael
leaned into his hold, closing his eyes.

Emily recognized the
telltale Etheric ripples of the buildup of an energy projection protocol. The
burst of electricity was violent and powerful, accompanied by a brilliant light
and a loud snapping sound.

Colin jerked and
twitched as he was electrocuted.

It should have been
impossible. Michael couldn’t operate a barrier protocol, and the energy he
projected was telekinetic – and even that could only be used once in a day. The
she noticed his painfully red eyes, and the pieces started to come together.

Implantation technology
might have been proscribed by Central, but no such restrictions were imposed by
the Anathema. The bloodshot eyes that marked Mitsuru Aoki and the Director
alike were not an infrequent sight among long-term Anathema who had refused
full conversion. No one on the site team had an implant that she was aware of,
but Emily encountered them sporadically in the Outer Dark. While considered
less devoted to the cause than a fully converted Anathema like herself, they
were still powerful and respected.

As little as she liked
the thought, Emily became quickly sure that she was right, and that he must
have risked implantation despite the mortality rate. She wondered what had
driven him to such extremes, why he would want so badly to be out in the field
– and if his reasons were anything like her own. Emily pushed those thoughts to
the back of her mind.

Tactical concerns,
naturally, took precedence.

Michael stood, leaving
Colin to finishing dying on the concrete. That, at least, she was happy about.
He wiped blood and spittle from his hands onto his fatigues and continued
toward her, red eyes sad when he looked at her.

Emily ran through a
mental checklist of what Michael had done, comparing it to everything she knew
about Mitsuru and the Director’s implants, and found it inconsistent. Local
interference would have prevented him from downloading protocols via the
Etheric Network, and downloaded protocols wouldn’t explain his abilities to
shrug off pyrokinesis. It seemed likely that whatever had been assembled in his
mind with a custom-grown nanomachinery culture was entirely novel.

That was pretty
exciting.

“It’s strange to see you
here, Michael. I always thought you weren’t the type to get your hands dirty.”

“I could say the same,”
Michael observed wearily. “I am disappointed in you, Emily. In myself as well,
for failing to intervene on your behalf, for not recognizing how truly
desperate and wayward you had become.”

Emily faked a laugh.

“And what about you,
Michael? Seems that I’m not the only who decided that desperate times called for
desperate measures.”

He nodded, continuing
his slow and steady advance toward her.

“True. Nothing I have
done, however, betrayed my family, my home, or my ideals.”

“Are you sure?” Emily
challenged, her voice haughty. “We are more alike, the two of us, than you are
with the others in Central, now. Aren’t such implants forbidden?”

He shook his head, which
seemed oddly streamlined to her, with his hair tied back.

“Not when the Director
himself performs them.”

“And the Chief Auditor
gives her approval,” Alice Gallow added, stepping out of Emily’s shadow. “Don’t
forget about that. Oh, and Emily,” she added, putting her shotgun to Emily’s
temple, “I don’t feel bad for you at all.”

The sound of the gun
going off was tremendous.

It was an exotic and
disconcerting sensation, feeling the lead slug tear through her skull, the wet
exit of the shattered bone and brain matter from the other side of her head as
the shell passed through. Emily stumbled, fell to her knees, her form wavering
briefly.

Then she laughed and rose
back up to face the Auditors.

“You don’t learn very
well for people who claim to be teachers,” she taunted, water flowing into the
breach the shell left behind and filling in the void with a sloshing sound. “I
am Anathema now. Bullets won’t do the trick.”

Alice shrugged and set
the shotgun aside, while Michael moved to flank Emily, cutting off her main
avenue of escape – assuming she planned on walking away.

“Fine by me,” Alice said
cheerfully. “How ’bout we figure out what does?”

Emily backed away, simulating
a bit of a fear response within herself, for realism’s sake. Alistair had told
her to make it believable. She knew it was critical the Auditors believe – as
Colin had – that this was an important Anathema operation they were taking
down, rather than a meticulously prepared honeypot. It was equally important
that the Auditors learn as little as possible about the true extent of her
abilities – and by extension, those of the other fully transformed Anathema. If
she could divine the extent of Michael’s newfound augmentation, then that would
be icing on the cake.

Alice pulled the same
trick again, disappearing and then stepping from Emily’s shadow, wrapping her
arms around Emily’s neck and pulling a forearm across her throat. Emily
struggled ineffectually for a moment, doing her best to feign choking, until
Michael drew close, then she flowed around Alice’s arms, retaining enough
cohesion to remain a unified mass, but in the shape of a vertical puddle. She
heard Alice gasp and watched Michael recoil, and knew that Alex hadn’t shared
all the particulars of their encounter, as she suspected he might.

That pleased her in an
obscure way she preferred not to reflect upon.

She flowed across the
space between her and Michael faster than she could have run, regaining her
form as she moved. The warehouse was large, so even with the valve all the way
open, the water around their feet was little more than a puddle, but she didn’t
really need more than that. Michael attempted to contain her within a
telekinetic bubble, his hands describing the boundaries of the containment, but
she simply abandoned her current position, so that he captured nothing but the
water she left behind.

“What the hell?”

They both stared at the
puddle for a few seconds. Alice looked up, glanced around the warehouse, and
took a tentative step forward. It wasn’t much, but it gave Emily the time she
needed to collect herself. She rose quietly out of water gathered into a small
pool a few meters behind Michael, in the shadows of the warehouse door. Michael
released the globe of water that floated in midair and stumbled briefly,
clearly exhausted by the strain of using the unfamiliar implant. Emily took the
opening.

The thing that lashed
out of the darkness behind him when he stumbled was like a tentacle composed of
water. Alice didn’t have time to warn him. It smacked wetly into his head,
briefly forming a perfect sphere, before it dissipated into a thousand droplets
that fell to the ground along with him. Michael grabbed his throat and tried in
vain to cry out.

It took Alice a moment
to understand what had happened – the water had filled his lungs. She moved
toward him in a series of short apports, struggling to think of a viable
option, a strategy for the situation. There was no time to query Analytics, or
call on Haley, who remained in reserve, providing a telepathic link and a
remote overview. Alice had to trust her instincts.

Alice dove beneath
another tendril of water that whipped across the warehouse at head level,
shattering glass and knocking over abandoned furniture behind her. She slid and
scampered across the wet floor, grabbing on to him and apporting across the
room.

They emerged from the
shadow of the warehouse on the opposite side of the building. Alice couldn’t
port only Michael and leave the water behind, so she had to hope that Emily’s
control over the water had some sort of functional range. She spent a dreadful
moment, watching Michael drown in her arms, his lips turning pale and his
fingernails digging into her arms. Then he was racked with a fit of something
between coughing and vomiting, while she pounded him on the back, hoping to
assist in clearing his lungs.

She felt relief that
bordered on gratitude when he took his first, labored breath.

I’m alright. Going to
need a minute. Don’t worry about me, Alice. Go get her. Be careful.

Alice Gallow didn’t need
to be told. She was a professional.

Stepping through her
shadow and out of another in the rafters of the building, Alice emerged
directly above the spot they had fled. Alice took a moment to align her feet
with the narrow steel beam, making certain of her balance, then dropped her
gaze to search the warehouse for her opponent.

She saw nothing but a
gently rippling shallow pool of water that covered nearly the entire warehouse
floor.

“Ugh. This is the worst. Not only are
we stuck here, but now we have classes too.”

“For once I’m actually
inclined to agree with you,” Katya sighed, resting her chin on her crossed
arms. “This is the worst.”

“Definitely the worst,”
Alex said, glancing around the small classroom, which appeared brand new and
totally unused, down to the pristine whiteboard and the fresh roll carpet. “Oh,
never got a chance to ask. How was your weekend?”

Katya made a strange
face. Alex wasn’t at all sure what emotion, or combination of emotions, her
expression represented.

“Could have been worse,”
she decided. “Also could have been a lot better.”

“Huh. Wanna talk about
it?”

“Not even slightly,
thanks. Hey, that reminds me – how was the date?”

Alex blushed and became
abruptly very involved in removing supplies from his book bag and piling them
on the table he and Katya sat behind.

“Uhm…”

“You went on a date,
Alex?” Haley leaned across their table, bringing with her faint scents of
patchouli and cannabis. She was wearing a blue tie-dye with a Dia de los
Muertos print on it and a ruffled skirt, her hair pinned up with a pair of
plastic flower barrettes. “I wanna hear all about it!”

“Why not?” Katya smirked
and poked him in the side. “Do tell, Alex. Did you and Eerie have fun?”

“Ah, yeah,” Alex
stammered. “Yeah. It was, you know. Fun.”

“C’mon,” Haley chided
gleefully. “Details, details!”

Min-jun entered the
classroom with a tray and walked over to distribute foam cups that he had
brought from the cafeteria.

“What are you guys
talking about?” Min-jun asked, shaking a sugar packet before ripping it open
and dumping the contents in his coffee. “Did I miss something?”

“Yeah,” Haley said,
sipping from what Alex knew from experience was some sort of non-caffeinated
herbal tea – as Haley seemed to take a rather strong stance against all drugs,
excepting the one that she smoked habitually. “Alex is dating Eerie.”

“I knew that,” Min-jun
said defensively. “Katya told me.”

“Yeah, oppa, but this
weekend he actually took her on a date,” Katya pointed out smugly, biting the
end of a croissant. “Big difference.”

“Where did you go?”
Haley asked, taking a seat at the adjoining table.

“Uh, well,” Alex glanced
at Katya for help, but she just grinned and watched him flail, “we went to a…a
hot spring. I guess.”

“You guess?”

Alex tried to hide
behind his coffee, certain he was unsuccessful.

“Yeah. I’m pretty sure.”

“Where?” Min-jun took
the seat next to Haley. “You’re from California, right? Somewhere you knew of before
you came to the Academy?”

Alex shook his head.

“No. It was…”

“We set it up,” Katya
cut in, mercifully. “The Black Sun. As a favor.”

“Wow,” Haley said,
clearly taken aback. “How is it that the Black Sun does you favors, Alex? I
thought you were nonpartisan.”

“I am, I am,” Alex
insisted, shaking his head. “Katya helped me out.”

“Why would you do that,
Katya?”

“Out of the goodness of
my heart, naturally,” Katya said magnanimously, mouth half full. “As I am both
kind and helpful. Isn’t that right, Alex?”

Alex nodded. What choice
did he have?

“Hmm.” Haley looked
suspicious, as he would have expected of the Hegemony’s candidate for Audits. “Well,
whatever. Get to the good part.”

“Yeah, Alex,” Katya
chimed in. “We want details.”

“I don’t,” Min-jun
pointed out.

He was clearly outvoted.

“We had fun. It was a
nice place. I don’t know. What do you want me to say?”

“Look at him blush,”
Haley crowed. “You guys must be so fucking cute.”

“They aren’t,” Katya
assured her. “Trust me. It’s like two junior-high kids dating.”

“You’re just jaded,”
Haley countered. “I think it’s sweet.”

“Hey…I don’t know if you
guys are making fun of me, or what, but would you cut it out?” Alex didn’t hold
out much hope. He didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to him that accepting
Katya’s help meant that she would share the fact with everyone, but it
definitely should have. “Can we talk about somebody else’s weekend?”

“I had to work the first
half. Then I got high and watched movies with Sarah,” Haley said with a shrug. “Nothing
exciting. What about you, Katya?”

“Ugh. Didn’t work out
the way I hoped. You do anything interesting, oppa?”

“No,” Min-jun said distantly.
“Went home. Saw the family.”

“Okay,” Haley said,
clapping her hands together. “That’s us, then. Now back to Alex!”

“Hey…”

Katya opened her big
mouth to speak, while Alex scrambled for something to defuse the situation. He
was saved by the arrival of Dr. Graaf.

“Good morning,” he
offered cheerfully, in his ambiguously European accent. “I hope you all had an
enjoyable weekend?”

***

“How long did you remain in the rafters?”

“Five minutes, maybe. However
long it took Mikey to recover, and Haley to raise a connection with Central.”

“Yes,” Gaul said,
consulting his entirely archaic paper record of the event. “Analytics performed
a remote scan of the vicinity, searching for the Etheric Signature associated
with Emily Muir. Nothing was located.”

“Right. So I came down
and secured the location. We found a truck and a bunch of boxes with labels in
half a dozen different languages. Looked like they were loading up after an Eastern
European shopping spree.” Alice paused for a moment, the uncharacteristic
hesitation catching Gaul’s attention. “That implant you put in Michael – it’s
really something, you know.”

“Yes,” Gaul said,
responding to the question that hadn’t been asked, but implied. “I never
stopped working on the procedure and the implant technology, even when I banned
further human implantation. The process has been considerably refined, and the
implant itself is several generations removed from the technology inside Mitsuru
and myself. The nanites are capable of absorbing energy in his vicinity, as
well as efficiently distributing the power of his own protocol into a more
utilitarian form, allowing him to project other types of energy multiple times,
even to form barriers.”

“Was a good thing, too,”
Alice said, shaking her head. “We probably would’ve been dead, otherwise. They
rigged the truck with more explosives than there was actual cargo. Without
Mikey’s telekinetic shield, you would’ve had to scrape us from the walls. I’m
inclined to think that the operation was a dodge from the start.”

Gaul gave her a sharp
look.

“Are you certain? The
materials losses they incurred appear fairly extensive, not to mention the
personnel.”

“Yeah, but we wouldn’t
have gone for it if it didn’t feel real,” Alice countered. “None of the guards
were fully transformed Anathema. Only Emily Muir, and she bailed. I’m sure
losing that gear hurt, but not so bad that it wouldn’t be worth it to take a
couple Auditors out. They didn’t know about Michael’s protocol – that was the
only reason it didn’t work.”

“You may be right,” Gaul
allowed, remembering playing chess against John Parson when they were still
students at the Academy. “The Anathema are certainly willing to make sacrifices
in order to achieve their goals.”

He still wondered,
though. It seemed to him that the Anathema had gone out of their way not to
kill Alice Gallow when they had the opportunity, and he had a pretty good idea
as to why. If they had truly planned on killing her with the explosives in the
rigged truck, then that would mean either their priorities had changed when she
became Chief Auditor, or her relative importance to them had shifted, for
reasons unknown.

Gaul hated reasons
unknown.

“What’re you thinkin’,
boss?”

“That this is something
of a setback. This operation was the culmination of a month’s worth of raids
and investigative work. If, as you suspect, this was an elaborate ploy to draw
the Auditors into a vulnerable position, then we have wasted valuable time
following leads provided for us by our enemy.”

“What about that inside
source you’ve been running?” Alice asked innocently, her eyes putting a lie to her
tone. “No more huge revelations to drop in my lap?”

“That is not something I
care to discuss,” Gaul said shortly. “But, since you asked – no. I have nothing
new to offer on that front.”

“You know, boss, me and
you are gonna need to have a conversation about some real awkward topics, and
that whole deal will be a part of my line of questioning. You know that I have
an Audit to complete, and your conduct is part of it. I don’t like how close
you are playing this to the vest. You‘re allowed your secrets, of course, but
it seems to me that you’ve been classifying everything lately...”

Gaul shrugged.

“Be that as it may. We
will cross that bridge when we come to it.” He gave her a thin smile of his
own. “Unfortunately, my staff is still preparing the required records for the
interview you requested, so that is a conversation for the future.”

Alice shrugged, but her
smile flickered briefly.

“Your call, boss. I just
hope you know what you’re doing.”

“I do. And, as it
happens, I know what you are doing next, also. I need you to turn your
attention to the Ukraine...”

Alice pursed her lips in
annoyance.

“You really wanna follow
up on intel that the Witches handed us of their own free will?”

“We play the cards we
are dealt, Chief Auditor. Until other options present themselves, I will not
sit idly by.”

“Are you buying that
line the Witch fed Mitzi, about the Anathema taking over part of their
organization? It seems a bit convenient, and we just walked into one trap...”

“It will surely not be
the last, either,” Gaul said indifferently. “Such is the nature of our
occupation. Better to enter a trap forewarned, with our eyes open, than to be caught
unawares.”

“Maybe,” Alice grinned. “Alright,
boss. Let’s hear it.”

***

“First, allow me to apologize for the
informal nature of our lessons for the week. As I am not a teacher, and our
facility is not educational in nature, we have had to scramble a bit to come up
with a lesson plan and structure,” Dr. Graaf explained apologetically. “The
experience may not be up to the standards to which you have become accustomed.
We do have some unique capabilities, however, and I do think that you will find
what we have to offer novel, if nothing else.”

He paused as if he
expected a response, but none of his four students were so inclined. If they
felt anything like Alex did, they were pretty confused.

“I would also like to
thank Miss Haley Weathers for sacrificing a good portion of her break to work
here with us, in preparation for today’s demonstration,” Dr. Graaf said,
beaming at Haley, who blushed and nodded modestly. “I trust that the results we
have achieved will prove worth the sacrifice.”

Alex looked over at
Katya, but she just shrugged. He felt a little better, as he was apparently not
the only one who was out of the loop this time.

“As you are certainly
aware, the Far Shores is an institution devoted to the study of the Ether, the
nanites, Central itself – all of the unique subjects that our unusual existence
has provided. Our goal is to create a fostering ground for unique perspectives
and radical rethinking of conventional process, for the advancement of
knowledge in realms beyond mundane human experience.” Dr. Graaf said it all
with a straight face, but to Alex, something about his demeanor made him seem a
bit comical, as if he didn’t take himself, or the Far Shores, nearly as
seriously as he claimed. “Until recently, we have been isolated of our own accord,
politically neutral and uninvolved in the affairs of Central or the cartels.
This policy was softened a few years ago for financial and technical reasons,
resulting in the building of the power plant and the secured facility that
Audits currently operates from – but these projects were undertaken as
experiments, with the intent of preserving our overall independence. This
position, however, recently proved untenable. You are probably unaware of this,
but our campus and faculty suffered greatly during the recent Anathema
incursion in Central.”

Alex snuck another
glance at Katya, but she looked as surprised as he felt.

“During the attack, we
lost a number of valued staff members, and the majority of our facilities were
razed. Initially, we suspected that we were attacked due to the reserve
Auditors facility – which had not, at that point, seen any use – or due to the
relatively new power plant. In the wake of the attack, it was immediately
apparent that both structures were among the few that were entirely spared from
destruction. The surviving faculty of the Far Shores held a common meeting, and
devised a new course of action. Shortly after, we signed a formal declaration
of alignment with the Academy, while remaining nonpartisan in the cartel
conflict. The hope is that the work of the Far Shores might benefit the people
of Central as a whole, without showing favor to any particular party – similar,
I might add, to the position of the Academy itself – and in turn, serve as
bastion of public good and a potential impetus to increased peaceful
cooperation.”