The Anathema (26 page)

He had come to see her several times since that day, treating her, helping her reconstruct her memories into some sort of order, and he was unfailingly polite. She respect him as a boss, it was obvious, and the diaries were replete with stories of his prowess and brilliant improvisations in the field, but she didn’t like having him in her head. Actually, she had to take a long, hot shower after every one of his visits. Her diaries had made this relationship all the more problematic.

Many of her diaries had asides, notes written directly to herself, on the assumption that she would forget eventually. Most of them were not particularly significant, though a few of them had been helpful. The one that concerned her was brief, but it had been underlined several times for emphasis.

‘Something is wrong with Alistair,’ it read, her normally neat block letters slanted with agitation.

There was nothing else in the diary that helped her understand the note, but it fed her own growing distrust of her supervisor, and she wasn’t entirely sure that she’d have been able to hide that from a telepath of Alistair’s ability, during their little reconstruction sessions. She didn’t know why she wasn’t supposed to trust him. She wasn’t even sure how much she trusted the diaries, or the woman who’d written them. However, she had to lean on something, and the disjointed, verbose diaries seemed like the most solid thing available to her.

The first weeks had been the worst, when she felt the entire time as if she was trying to scramble up a gravelly hill, sliding backwards further with every step she took forward. She could see pity in the eyes of everyone she met, when she couldn’t remember their names or who they were, and more often than not, she protected herself by responding with hostility and the cruel smile that her face settled in almost automatically. That, at least, she felt comfortable with; that she knew was her own. Lately it was a little better. It had been days since she had met someone and not known who they were, or made a colossal misstep in conversation. She’d been reluctant, when Gaul had approached her and offered her a temporary teaching position, running the Program, because she thought she didn’t remember how to do it. But when she’d actually gone out there, to the shooting range and the cavernous room with the tile floor dotted with tiny, irreversible bloodstains and the rough painted circle, it all came flooding back, and she’d thrown herself into the work. It helped her to center herself, and she knew instinctively that she had looked to violence for that in the past as well.

It didn’t hurt that Alex Warner turned out to be almost as fun to pick on as Mitsuru was.

Alice wrote until her hand cramped up, until she was certain that she’d written down everything important, all of her conclusions and suspicions, the whole of the day’s events in as concise a manner as possible. Then she went back to reading, one of the diaries she’d pulled from the wall earlier, a recent one. The things she’d been doing right before she disappeared.

She was so engrossed in the diary, and the knock at the door was so quiet, that at first Alice wasn’t sure that she had heard it. She crept up to the door out of habit, light on the balls of her feet, then remembered that there was no peephole, and reluctantly opened it a crack instead. She looked outside, sighed for effect, and then opened the door to let Rebecca in.

“Finally. I could feel you standing on the other side of the door, you know. What a fucking day, let me tell you,” Rebecca said, breezing past her, her brown hair tied back in a bun with something that looked like a chopstick sticking through it. She wore a tight blue t-shirt with the UCLA logo and worn, comfortable-looking jeans, a lit cigarette in her right hand. “I swear these kids spend their free time plotting ways to make my life miserable. When Gaul pulled me from the field I thought I was getting a reward. A vacation, or at least a desk job with weekends off. I thought that life would get easier when no one was shooting at me.”

Rebecca glanced around the room, then perched herself precariously on the corner of Alice’s desk, nudging the trashcan with toe of her shoe, so she could knock the ash from her cigarette into it. Alice barely managed to avoid laughing aloud. She’d already known Rebecca would refuse any chair in the room – without needing her diary to remind her, she knew that.

“Since when did you ever give anyone the chance to shoot at you?” Alice asked fondly, sitting back down in front of her desk, and closing the diary she had been reading.

Rebecca winked at her with a wry grin.

“Somebody has been doing their homework on the old days, I see,” Rebecca said, smiling. “Been reading about our many adventures? Have you read about the thing in Greece yet? The one with those two amazing Algerian cousins?”

A piece of Alice’s memory fell out of the sky, whole and vibrant, just like that. It was a good thing. She felt warm and her skin tingled, thinking about that night, lying on the beach on a very small island with the wind off the Mediterranean cooling the sweat on her naked back.

 “Yeah,” Rebecca sighed. “That was back when I used to get laid occasionally.”

Rebecca snuffed out her cigarette and dropped it into the trashcan, then hopped back up and started wandering the room. She crouched over the laptop and switched the music over to Minor Threat. Alice let it pass. She had learned that Rebecca hated black metal earlier in the day, from her diaries.

“Why don’t you, then, if you miss it?” Alice asked mischievously. “It’s not that hard to arrange.”

Rebecca snorted and resumed her position on the exposed corner of the desk. It looked uncomfortable to Alice, but whatever.

“I’m not like the rest of you people,” Rebecca said, taking a hard-shell plastic case from one of her pants pockets and opening it. “I don’t want to have to go to work the next day with the person I just slept with. It’s... icky. Uncomfortable. Besides, my job practically requires me to be all of these kids’ big sister. That’s a very fragile notion. I have to try and stay as perfect as possible in their eyes.”

Alice laughed at the idea of Rebecca keeping up the appearance of virtue – Rebecca, who chronically smoked, swore, and littered with a haphazard apathy. Of course, thanks to her empathic gifts, no one held any of that against her. It just wasn’t possible.

“Besides,” Rebecca continued blithely, pulling a neatly rolled joint from out of the plastic case, “I’m not even remotely attracted to anyone here. Not my type.”

Rebecca lit the joint and inhaled, coughed briefly, then, with her eyes red and watering, offered it to Alice. Alice wondered if she did stuff like that, and couldn’t remember. She refused, just to be safe, and Rebecca shrugged.

“Remind me,” Alice said, trying to sound casual. “What is your type?”

“That reminds me of a story, actually,” Rebecca said mischievously, pausing occasionally to pull at the smoldering joint. “We did a job together in Venezuela one time, out in the jungle – FARC country, you know? Anyway, we’re slogging along through the brush and the trees, and it had been raining for
days.
It was terrible, my hair smelled like mildew, and this purported guerrilla group we are supposed to check out aren’t anywhere. Finally, after three days, we drag ourselves into this little village, way the fuck out there, expecting nothing but Indians. Instead, it turns out that there’s this whole group of graduate students from the University of Ohio at the same village, anthropologists, and they end up offering us dinner. So we’re hanging out, getting drunk on this awful moonshine they distill themselves out there in a tin boiler, and waiting for them to finish cooking some sort of stew, when you tap me on the shoulder, and you point out this guy to me, one of the students…”

Alice kept smiling expectantly for a moment. Rebecca remained silent and motionless so long that she got worried.

“And? Rebecca? Hello?”

“Did you feel that?” Rebecca asked, her eyes filled with worry.

“What?”

“Alice,” Rebecca said, dropping the joint, still burning, into the trashcan, and taking her gently by the shoulders. “Did someone just apport into the Academy?”

Alice closed her eyes and looked for the silver veins running through the Ether that marked passage, the roiling of the endless fog. They were there, as obvious and temporary as contrails.

“Yeah. Multiple ports, actually. Why?”

“Because they are all angry, angry and scared,” Rebecca said, heading for the door and pulling Alice behind her. “Come on.”

“Where are we going?” Alice asked, grabbing for the shotgun and bandolier that sat next to the door, blunt, mean, and reassuring.

“Wherever they’re going,” Rebecca said grimly.

“Where is that?”

“I don’t know,” Rebecca snapped, pulling her along. “I haven’t figured out who they are here to kill yet.”

* * *

It seemed to Alex like he waited on the steps for a long time. It wasn’t unpleasant, though; he was sore and battered from Michael’s class, and it felt good to be out, watching the sun sink behind the sea of fog below the Academy. There was a certain pleasant tension, torn between eagerness and anxiety at what would happen with Eerie. Alex hit play on his mp3 player,  and it brought him something new, something odd and electronic, something he’d never heard before. That meant that Eerie had put it there, when she plugged his player into her laptop last week. The singer’s voice had been pitched-shifted into a frantic, sexless thing, the desperation of a late night nervous breakdown over a long-distance call.

He decided it didn’t fit his mood, and skipped ahead until he hit something more innocuous, a hip-hop group from Hong Kong called Lazy Motherfuckers. He only had a different sweatshirt and jeans to change into, but they were his
nicest
sweatshirt and jeans. Stretched out on the warm grey stone, lying there thinking about nothing in particular, until he felt Margot looking down on him, even though he’d never heard her approach.

“Come on,” she urged, helping him up with one cool hand.

“Did I ever tell you that I like your hair like this?”

Margot mumbled something and turned away.

“Let’s go,” she said roughly, over her shoulder, “I don’t want anyone to see us. We have a pretty narrow window of time when this is possible.”

“Aren’t you over-thinking it? Can’t I just hop a fence or something?”

“Are you kidding? Eerie’s in trouble with Rebecca. Rebecca’s not to be messed around with,” Margot said seriously. “Even if she is a softie when it comes to Eerie, she’s still an Auditor…”

“What?” Alex stopped in his tracks, dazed. “What did you just say?”

Margot stopped at the edge of the trees and looked back at him as if he was insane.

“Rebecca is an Auditor, you fool.” Margot’s mouth was a barely visible contemptuous line, her eyes gleaming with an internal radiance that shown through the dusk. “You actually didn’t know that? Then she must not have wanted you to find out. Well, that’s life, right? You can’t take anyone at face value. I work with them now, Alex,” Margot said, sounding a bit like she was laughing, “The current Auditors. Alistair, Alice Gallow, Mitsuru Aoki, Xia, and, of course, Rebecca Levy. Though I’ve never seen her out in the field. I hear she’s terrifying.”

“Really?” Alex was dumbfounded, walking blindly behind Margot while his mind was very much elsewhere. “She just seems so... I don’t know. Nice, I guess. I’m having trouble imagining it.”

“You are a soldier Alex, as is everyone you know,” Margot said casually, but with a terrible coldness. “At some point, you are going to have accept that.”

Stunned as he was, Alex knew that Margot was right. He had been fooling himself, after all. If she was in charge of him, what else could Rebecca be? And why did he feel so surprised by it? It wasn’t as if Michael had always been a teacher, and he’d known that Alice and Mitsuru worked in the field, killing people, but Rebecca… it wasn’t only that she hadn’t told him, though that was a part of it. Seeing her as an Auditor was so profoundly at odds with the woman he thought he knew that he had difficulty reconciling the two images. He was felt anger and betrayal, and he was surprised to have such a strong reaction. He hadn't realized the degree to which he trusted Rebecca, until that moment, when he started to questioned her.