The Anathema (16 page)

“Now you’ve got Katya following you around wherever you go?”

“I guess so,” Alex said, sipping from the bottle, making a face at the taste, and then handing it along to Vivik. “I barely ever see her, but I assume she’s around. I can’t blame her, really. Anastasia told her to do it.”

“Nothing you can do about that,” Renton said his voice full of sympathy. “She’s probably watching us from the bushes right now.”

“Look at the bright side,” Li offered, lighting a cigarette. “She could have assigned Renton to follow you around.
That
would be creepy.”

They all laughed, and Vivik handed the half-full bottle back to Renton. He took a long pull from it, drinking bad whiskey without even wincing.

“Shit,” Renton said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve got no idea.”

Everyone laughed again, but this time, it was more tentative and uncomfortable.

“Speaking of which, Renton,” Vivik chimed in. “Are you going to fail again this year?”

“Absolutely,” Renton said, nodding.

“What?” Alex asked, looking from one to the other in confusion.

“Renton and I are both in the final class,” Li explained mischievously, “but Renton’s already been there for three years. He knows all the material, but he deliberately fails the tests so that he has to repeat, instead of graduating.”

“Why would you do that?”

“I work for Anastasia, remember?” Renton said, clearly annoyed with the question. Alex was surprised; Renton was usually unflappable. “I can’t do much to protect her if I’m not close to her. I won’t leave the Academy until she does.”

“So, you just fail over and over again?”

“Yeah,” Renton said, eyes narrowing. “You have a better idea?”

Li snatched the bottle from his hand, already half-drunk. Alex huddled deeper in the coat he’d thrown over his sweatshirt, rubbing his cold hands together, wishing he owned gloves, wondering if he could convince Eerie to knit him a pair.

“Man,” Alex complained. “It is fucking freezing out here.”

They were on the roof of the gym, sitting on plastic chairs that someone had dragged up here years ago. They were pocked marked with cigarette burns, and the one Alex was sitting in had a leg that was shorter than the others so that it rocked whenever he shifted his weight. They weren’t up that high, but the gym building was off by itself, set back from the rest of campus on a little-used path, and Renton assured them that no one came by there late night. By unspoken agreement, they never went back to the dormitory roof after what happened there during Alex’s welcome party.

“Drink up,” Li advised, handing over the bottle. “I don’t feel cold at all. Say, Renton, you ever wish the Black Sun would assign you to someone besides Anastasia?”

Even Alex thought the question was a bad idea, and he was notoriously dense. Renton’s relationship with Anastasia was… intense. It wasn’t a subject that anyone in their right mind would have broached. However, Li was boisterous when he was drunk, as Alex had learned in the last few months, and he liked to ask uncomfortable questions.

“I’m not sure I follow you,” Renton said reasonably. “She’s the future head of the Black Sun Cartel. Why would I want a different assignment?”

“You know. Somebody hotter. Maybe somebody who actually has tits,” Li said, stopping to laugh at his own joke. Alex and Vivik didn’t dare make a sound for fear of what might happen, but they also couldn’t look away.

“I like Anastasia just fine the way she is,” Renton said stiffly.

“That’s a little weird, man. Doesn’t that make you a pedophile? Even if she isn’t one, she sure looks like a twelve-year old. And you are what, twenty? Twenty-five?”

“I don’t mean it that way,” Renton said, pursing his lips distastefully.

“Sure,” Li said, laughing. “Because you have such a reputation for being ‘friends’ with the girls here.”

“Really? No way.”

“It’s true,” Vivik nodded, sipping gingerly and then making an even more unhappy face. “Renton gets around.”

“I do okay,” Renton said, with a grin that was anything but modest.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t put Anastasia past you,” Li said cheerfully, clearly lacking any sense of self-preservation. “I saw you hit on Margot one time, and that’s definitely… definitely, uh, what’s the word I want here, Vivik?”

“Probably necrophilia?”

“Right, that’s it!” Li agreed. “If it had worked, that would have been necrophilia. You like the weird ones.”

“Maybe I just have an open mind,” Renton suggested.

That provoked howls of laughter.

* * *

“How much of this did you see coming?” Vladimir asked, hobbling around the room, still on crutches from most recent knee surgery. Gaul wished sincerely that he would sit down, but he knew Vlad was too agitated.

“All of it, but only right before it happened,” Gaul admitted. “They did such a good job disguising the possibility that I might not have noticed at all, had I not been looking for something of precisely that nature.”

Alistair looked up from the table, covered in equal parts documentation and Indian take-out. He had a probability matrix spread out in front of him, and he was making arcane scribbles on it with a black marker.

“This isn’t like the last time, the night where we found the Warner kid,” Alistair said, leaning his head against his hand. “The manipulation isn’t crude, it’s surgical. I don’t think I would have seen it without you telling me where to look, and I really hate admitting that. Whoever did this knew exactly what they wanted, and they planned far enough in advance to cover all the angles. It’s kind of impressive.”

“Except that the attack failed,” Rebecca said, from behind her cigarette, sulking in the corner of the room. “The night we found Alex, the manipulation was clumsy, but almost completely successful. This time, the manipulation was sophisticated, but we lost what, four Operators in Shanghai?”

Alistair looked over with wounded eyes.

“I know, I’m sorry, it’s terrible,” Rebecca added hurriedly. “But think about it. How many Weir did they lose tonight? How many Operators? What kind of resources did they have to put in Shanghai to make this all work? You can’t tell me they did all of this to wound us. You guys,” she said, nodding toward Alistair and Mitsuru, “were supposed to die in the blast, right?”

“They didn’t know that Alice was back in circulation,” Alistair said, shrugging. “It’s not that surprising. I didn’t know either until she saved my ass. They miscalculated.”

Rebecca pitched her lit cigarette out the window, ignoring a glare from Gaul.

“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “They captured Alice in the first place, right? At least that’s what we think happened. Since they left her alive, we have to assume that they knew her return was a possibility.”

“What about Edward?” Vladimir asked, finally levering himself into one of the available seats, to Gaul’s obvious relief. The last thing they needed was for him to take another tumble before he’d finished healing from the last one. “That wasn’t a Wight. He wasn’t forced from his body while he was alive, that was a dead body being animated by… something. Someone. An Operator, I think. Someone who can activate the nanites inside a dead body.”

“I doubt it,” Alistair countered. “I’ve never heard of a protocol like that.”

“They managed to breach the barrier a second time,” Gaul pointed out tersely, “by using the body of a student. We are going to have to reconfigure the barrier or we’ll have all of our casualties coming back to haunt us. All this to get at Alex.”

“Again, unsuccessfully.” Rebecca said, clicking her lighter. “Because they’re being too cute about it. Why not have Edward shoot Alex in the head, and be done with it? Why the predilection for the exotic threats?”

Gaul made a noise, as if he was about to say something, then shook his head.

“What?” Vladimir demanded.

“Nothing. I just had a bad thought,” Gaul admitted. “What if they aren’t trying to kill Alex at all? What if they are trying to get him to use his protocol?”

“Why?” Vladimir asked, his voice a little too loud. “Is there something special about it?”

“I don’t know,” Gaul said reluctantly. “I’m not sure. The Absolute Protocol isn’t completely unknown, but we haven’t had an Operator use it since we started keeping records. Certainly, none of the previous information links the Absolute Protocol to any kind of catalyst effect.”

“Perhaps there is more than one protocol?”

“The thought has occurred to me,” Gaul admitted.

“Are we totally certain,” Vladimir questioned, his browed furrowed, “that Alex wasn’t activated when we found him?”

Everyone took turns avoiding Vladimir’s look.

“Pretty sure,” Rebecca said softly, rubbing her head.

“Well...” Alistair trailed off when he realized everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare at him. “What? I was just thinking that Mitzi encountered the catalyst effect before he was activated.”

“Oh, crap. That’ right. But he had so much unreleased potential; we thought he was only partially activated...”

“Wonderful,” Vladimir said, ruefully shaking his head. “For all we know, Alex Warner has had two separate nanite injections. And, if that is the case, we have no idea what it might have done to him.”

“But who would have introduced nanites into Alex’s system?” Rebecca asked, rubbing her temples. “And where did they get nanotechnology in the first place?”

Everyone turned to Gaul expectantly.

“Don’t ask me,” he grumbled. “You all know we have a monopoly on nanites. If Alex Warner arrived here already activated, then I’m as far in the dark as the rest of you as to how that could happen.”

“It does seem unlikely...”

“It is more than unlikely. It is impossible, unless someone in this room is aware of a source of nanites that is a mystery to me,” Gaul said defensively. “This is nothing but speculation, and we have enough problems as it is. We can worry about it another day.”

“I’m not sure we know anything for sure about what happened today,” Alistair said, shrugging. “We don’t have enough information to do any kind of analysis.”

“I’m certain that Alex would have died today if Katya hadn’t been skulking around. That’s the other pattern I’ve noticed,” Rebecca said moodily, gesturing at the probability matrix in front of Alistair with her cigarette. “Anastasia bailed him out again. She has been the one putting people at the right place and the right time lately.”

“You think she has something to do with this?” Alistair asked, munching on a cold pakora while he studied the matrix. “You think this is a Black Sun operation? Could be.”

“I suspect that little monster of being involved in everything that happens around here,” Rebecca snapped. “You can’t underestimate her.”

“Nonetheless,” Gaul said forcefully. “We have been lured into a trap twice now. The first time netted Alice for unknown purposes, the second time nearly managing to assassinate all of the Auditors in the field. Two carefully planned and orchestrated traps, but neither achieved a clear goal. Then we have four attacks on Alex in the last six months; on the night we found him, once in San Francisco, and twice at The Academy. All of these operations involved significant expenditures of time and resources, and most of them entailed absorbing casualties as well. There must be a pattern in this somewhere.”