The Academy (54 page)

“But, how? It takes weeks of analysis to read probability threads that broad and vague, and that’s assuming you even know where to look, and there was no time to track every apport,” Rebecca said accusatorily. “Did you know about this in advance, Gaul?”

“I am a precognitive,” Gaul said, mildly offended, scratching away at the next document. “I had the analytical pool on this possibility two days after Alex got here, along with a dozen other likely ways things could go wrong. Over the last two weeks, I’ve arranged circumstances that have removed all of Anastasia’s transporters from Central, except for Svetlana Rostoff. We knew that she wouldn’t do anything herself, not directly, in order to have deniability. Edward is still too new, so that meant she would have her lieutenant, Renton Hall set it up. Svetlana and Renton only cross paths rarely, so it was easy enough to alert Alistair and have him monitor for when that happened.”

“Wow,” Rebecca said, sitting back down on the corner of the desk.

“While I’m being frank, I should mention that Mitsuru has been in San Francisco since this morning, arranging a new exit, should that become necessary,” Gaul said, frowning. “I would have preferred it to be Alice, but she and Xia are needed elsewhere right now, keeping the Witches off-balance and settling matters with the remnants of the Terrie cartel. Mitsuru was the best I could do without anyone noticing.”

“Okay, I feel stupid,” Rebecca acknowledged, pinching out her cigarette and tossing it into the trash can. “So, why didn’t you stop all this from happening?”

Gaul stopped again and for a moment, Rebecca could have sworn she saw the slightest indications of embarrassment.

“Putting aside the disturbing implications from his past, Alex Warner has been alone his entire life, and that degree of isolation worries me. I don’t need another dysfunctional Operator on my staff. Therefore, if he had found someone he felt socially comfortable with, it didn’t seem advisable for me to interfere. I will admit, however, that I wish it wasn’t Eerie.”

“Are you saying in the most obtuse possible manner,” Rebecca said, eyebrows raised, “that you thought it might be a good idea if Alex got laid?”

Rebecca continued to stare at Gaul for a moment, then started laughing, her face turning red, till she doubled over at the waist.

“I’m sorry, it’s just that,” she said, her body shaking uncontrollably as she laughed, “I keep underestimating you…”

“Please get out of my office,” he said, shaking his head sadly, and reaching for the next document in the stack.

--

Maybe there were signs, and Alex didn’t notice them. He was tired, after the party, still buzzing, but very much into a tired afterglow, a long gentle come down. Beyond that, Eerie leaned against Alex on the taxi ride home and then feel asleep, her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, her hand resting lightly next to his thigh, and he hadn’t been able to focus on much of anything else from then on. He was too busy building up his courage for when they got back to the room.

It could have been that there were scratches on the lock. Maybe his key didn’t swipe quite right the first time, perhaps the door was already ajar when they got there. He couldn’t say for certain.

Alex took two steps into the darkened room, still chattering nervously at the silent girl behind him, when he heard breathing. He paused briefly, listening, straining at a noise that he wasn’t entirely sure he had heard, and in that moment, something rushed at him from inside the room, grabbing him by the throat and propelling him backwards. The hand was huge and powerful, and when Alex tore at it to try and free himself, one of his hands was cut open by a talon fixed to the index finger. He almost had time to say it before his head and neck collided with the room’s far wall, hard enough to leave a noticeable indent.

Weir.

When Alex could breathe again enough to open his eyes, one of them must have turned the lights on, and another shut the door behind them. There were five in all, all wearing identical, badly tailored suits. Changing to human form had done nothing for the smell – they all emitted the scents of mud and decay like a perfume. Four of the Weir had identical red ties, but one of them had a silk blue tie, the one who had planted Alex’s head in the wall. He looked vaguely familiar to Alex, with his silver hair, and he had a pretty good idea as to why. He was fairly certain that he’d met Mr. Blue-Tie before.

But, all of these were things that he noticed after he realized that, somehow, Eerie was not in the room with them.

Then Mr. Blue-Tie leaned in close, all weathered skin, halitosis, and nose hair, his yellow teeth gritted and his hands balled into fists, and grabbed Alex by the shirt, hauling him partway to his feet.

“Where is the girl?”

He shook Alex like a rag-doll, as if he weighed nothing at all, his head whipping back and forth painfully.

“What?”

Alex gasped for air, trying futilely to free himself from the elongated, bestial hands.

“The girl,” Mr. Blue-Tie hissed, picking Alex up by his hair and throat, so that is his toes dangled on the ground. “The one you came in the building with. She didn’t get off the elevator with you. Where is she?”

Alex belatedly realized that Eerie had indeed been very quiet on the way to the room, and to think ‘Good for you, Eerie’. Then the Weir released his hold on Alex’s throat and hair, and grabbed him instead by the ears. Alex pounded futilely on his wrists and forearms, but it stung his hands like he was striking wood. Mr. Blue-Tie grinned, and then shook Alex head violently back and forth, until blood gushed from his nose, until he was thoroughly disoriented and crumpled, gasping on the floor. He curled into a ball and lay there, unable to stop the world from spinning or cope with the rushing sound in his head, while the Weir muttered incoherently somewhere above him. Improbably, he heard the sound of someone running a bath. Alex had little time to wonder what was going to happen to him.

At that point, he felt no fear whatsoever.

Mr. Blue-Tie came back from wherever he had gone, and kicked Alex savagely in the midsection, leaving Alex wheezing and cursing. The other Weir must have come up behind him while he was still blind with pain, because they managed to get a canvas bag over Alex’s head before he even realized what was going on. The burlap wrapped around his head stunk of fear and old vomit. He tried to struggle free, to pull the bag from his head, but this also turned out to be futile. Without much trouble, they wrench his arms behind his back, and then handcuffed his wrists together.

“I’m sure you remember me, right? You know what I’m capable of. I’m going to ask once more, nicely,” Mr. Blue-Tie said, delivering another devastating kick to Alex’s stomach. It was only through an act of tremendous self control that he avoided throwing up inside the bag his head was trapped in. Instead, he wretched involuntarily and tried to curl up tighter, half-crazy with claustrophobia and panic. “Then things are going to get ugly real fast. Where is the girl?”

Alex was glad, very glad that he didn’t know. Because he couldn’t be sure about himself in this situation. He was very afraid; on a fundamental level he was absolutely terrified about what he knew was going to happen to him. It made him physically ill he was so frightened. But at least he didn’t have to worry that he would betray Eerie under whatever torture they had planned for him, because he didn’t know. That made things a bit easier.

“I have no idea,” Alex said honestly, pressing his knees as tight to his chin as he could manage. Even thinking the word ‘torture’ had started him shivering uncontrollably.

“Okay then,” Mr. Blue-Tie said with obvious relish. “But, don’t say I didn’t warn you, shithead.”

Two of the Weir grabbed Alex and carried him forcibly into the bathroom, banging his head into what seemed like every available surface on the way. In the suffocating confines of the bag, Alex couldn’t anticipate the impacts, which made the whole experience that much worse. Eventually, they got him wrapped around one side of the bathtub, one Weir standing on either side of him, with their feet on the backs of his knees, his thighs pressed up against the cold of the tub wall.

“Now, to refresh your memory,” said Mr. Blue-Tie, his voice made resonant by the small bathroom’s acoustics. “The question of the moment is: where is that little bitch we saw you with, earlier? No need to answer right away, I’ll give you a minute to think about it.”

When Alex felt the hand on the back of his head, he stiffened his neck against the pressure, but it was hopeless. Whichever of the Weir crowded into the hotel bathroom it was that pushed him under, he had all the leverage he needed. The water was ice-cold, and the shock of hitting it almost made Alex gasp involuntarily as he his head went under. The fabric of the bag soaked through immediately, and the rough burlap clung to his face, increasing the feeling of suffocation. Alex could see nothing at all, even when he opened his eyes, and he could feel nothing except the water around his head, the unyielding force of the hand on the back of his head, and the dull sound of his own legs pounding desperately against the side of the bathtub. He wondered how long they would hold him under, and the question repeated itself in his mind, became obsessive, and made him acutely aware of the agonizing passage of time.

Inside the bag, under the water, Alex’s existence was defined by a consuming panic, an increasingly urgent need to breathe, and his eroding self-control. As Alex tried to count the seconds ticking by in his head, the dull pain in his chest grew sharper, more intense, his lungs seeming to contract, to collapse in on themselves. More than he could remember wanting anything, ever, more even then he wanted to breathe, Alex wanted the bag off of his head. Drowning didn’t seem as bad, without the stifling confines of the sack.

The seconds crept along imperceptibly, and Alex started to wonder if they were going to kill him, after all. His chest was on fire, and his throat had started to make convulsive motions. He held his mouth closed, unsure if he could stop himself from breathing in if it were open. It was impossible, he decided. Maybe Eerie had shown up at the door, maybe she’d stopped by reception or the ice machine or something, and now they had her, and they didn’t need Alex anymore, so he would die here, drowned in a stinking bag in some hotel bathroom.

Then they pulled his head back out of the water, and his chest convulsed, trying to force air through the water-logged fabric that had worked its way inside of his mouth and clung to his eyes and nostrils. The pain in his chest was soon matched by one radiating out from somewhere behind his eyes, and through the bag, the lights of the bathroom were dim and strange. He spat and coughed and squirmed helplessly on the hotel tile, frantic to pull the wet, suffocating fabric from his face.

“We aren’t too good at counting, Alex,” said the snarling voice of Mr. Blue-Tie, his breath tickling Alex’s ear like that of a lover. He could barely hear him over the sound of his own labored gasping. “We almost lost you there. You feel like telling us anything, yet, or do you want to try testing our math again?”

Alex wondered, even as he twitched against the bathroom floor like a fish out of water, his chest so tight that he couldn’t seem to breathe any better now than when he had been underwater, how it was that Mr. Blue-Tie knew his name. He finally drew in a long, shuddering breath, gagging as the bag worked its way still more deeply into his mouth.

“Nothing, huh? Well, that’s great, as far as I’m concerned. You see,” Mr. Blue-Tie confided, pulling Alex up by his shoulders, and leaning him against the side of the bath tub, “we don’t actually need you to tell us anything. We’ve got this area locked down, and your girlfriend isn’t going anywhere, not without running into us. And when we do,” he hissed, grinding his crotch against Alex obscenely, “well, maybe we’ll start with you, so you don’t have wonder what we are going to do to her.”

Alex felt the stiffness pressing against him and felt a horrible sickness, a level of panic and dread that had somehow opened beneath him, impossibly worse than the prospect of being drowned in an anonymous hotel bathtub. He wanted to say something, anything; Alex knew in his heart that, if he had someone to sell out, he very well might have, that he wouldn’t have been able to help himself, and it hurt him to know that. But he had nothing to say, and no breathe to say it with.

Abruptly, his head was underwater again, and it happened so fast that he was still gasping when he hit, water flooding his mouth and nose, burning his sinuses. Without thinking, he panicked and blew out the little air in his lungs. The heavy fabric and the cold water beyond it pressed in on him again. Then, with an almost surreal horror, he felt fingers hooking inside his belt, tearing his pants down and away from his waist. He tried to buck, to shake the Weir from his back, but the feet on his knees and the hand on the back of his head remained intractable.