The Far Shores (The Central Series) (2 page)

“Nice night,” Alex
offered, wishing he had bothered to change out of his flannel pajama bottoms
and ratty T-shirt.

“Matter of opinion.”

Alex wondered how often
she was up here, but didn’t really want to ask. He had no idea why Katya would
choose to spend her time this way – or, more likely, why Anastasia Martynova had
assigned one of her most talented assassins to such a random and menial task.
Particularly since he was in the heart of the most secure part of Central.
Arguably, if Alex wasn’t safe at the Academy, then he wasn’t safe anywhere.
Which led to all sorts of unsettling implications.

“You seem grumpy.”

 “Yeah? Sorry. I’m
bored, and my butt hurts. There really is no comfortable way to sit up here.”

Of course it was
uncomfortable – the roofing tile was rounded, sharp-edged, and uneven. The
designers had never intended it as functional space, in contrast to many of the
other buildings at the Academy, which had flat roofs.

“You mind company?”

“No. Like I said, I’m
bored. Amuse me.”

“Easier said than done.
I kinda figured I’d be alone up here, so I didn’t prepare any interesting
topics for conversation.”

“As if you ever do,”
Katya said, using the straw as a makeshift spoon to transport ice cream to her
mouth. “You aren’t nearly as charming as you think.”

Alex smiled despite
himself. He didn’t really mind Katya giving him shit. Actually, it felt weirdly
familiar. Of course, he clamped down on any thoughts of that nature.

Because he kept getting
headaches. Bad headaches, accompanied by a maddening sense of something almost
remembered – something so close that he almost had a name for it, a shape on
the horizon he could almost make out – but they never seemed to leave him anywhere
except a dark room with a washcloth over his eyes, wondering why he kept
remembering a huge Christmas tree in a hall large enough to make it look
appropriate, among dark polished wood and massive antique furnishings. There
was no context to the memory, and he couldn’t associate the place or the time
with anything he had ever done.

But trying to remember
gave him a headache. So Alex tried to avoid the nagging sense of déjà vu, even
when it seemed like he heard Katya say certain things a hundred times before.

“Maybe you think that,
but I’m actually quite popular.”

“True, but I don’t think
it’s because of your engaging personality.”

There was no arguing it.
Alex had been the center of a great deal of attention since he came to Central,
but the intentions behind it had been unabashedly mercenary. One of the many
perils of being an M-Class Operator of a Black Protocol, in addition to
creating some sort of empowering catalyst effect that the majority of the
cartels in Central seemed to covet. Still, he supposed that being popular for
the wrong sort of reasons was still better than being completely despised for
entirely rational reasons. He’d been both, and the former was much more
interesting than the latter, if also more dangerous.

“You nervous about
tomorrow?”

Katya raised an eyebrow
in surprise.

“Not particularly. It’s
not my first dance, Alex.”

“But it’s our first
field op with the Auditors...”

“Killing people is
killing people. You get used to it. Trust me.”

Alex was jittery, trust
in Katya aside. It was rare for him to be unable to sleep – as a side effect of
the particular nature of his Black Protocol, he often slept more than any
healthy human being reasonably should have. Sometimes it was more like being in
a coma than sleeping. He had lost whole months that way. But he had been
tossing and turning since he went to bed tonight.

“I’m guessing you are?”

“What?”

“Nervous. About
tomorrow.”

He shook his head. That
wasn’t quite right – though he was nervous. It was hard to put words to, and
Alex was reluctant to even try. In many ways, he was inclined to keep the
nature of the ghosts that haunted him private. At one point, he might have
discussed this sort of thing with Rebecca, but their relationship had been
damaged by her strategic omissions, and while he still felt a degree of
affection for her, he doubted that he would ever be able to put a significant
degree of trust in her again.

“Not exactly. It’s not
about going out into the field or anything.”

“Yeah? Morality bugging
you, then? The necessity of violence, and all that shit? You talk to Vivik too
much, you know. Don’t let him fill your head with all those pacifist ideals
he’s always spouting. That stuff’s nice in an academic setting, but in the
field it will only get you killed. Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it too much.
Anybody we end up tangling with probably had it coming.”

Katya made a loud effort
with her straw to suck up the last of her milkshake.

“No. That’s not it,
either. I mean, sometimes that stuff does bother me, but not so much that it
keeps me awake at night, you know?” It was a small lie, an act of bravado that
insulated him from the potential contempt of his peers – most of whom, quite
frankly, were professional killers in some capacity, regardless of how they
dressed it up. “No. It’s nothing big. Probably just nerves, you know.”

Katya set her empty cup
aside.

“Not very believable,”
she observed, looking out onto the layer of fog as if she expected something to
emerge from it. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I don’t really
care either way. But I get the feeling that you have something you want to talk
about.”

“Not really...”

Katya smirked at him,
then shook her head.

“Quit being so coy,” she
said, leaning back on her hands and studying the unfamiliar constellations that
shone faintly above. “Spill it. Tell your Auntie Kat everything.”

He hesitated. Alex knew
that he probably really did want to talk about it – he would have just issued a
flat denial when Katya asked, otherwise, or told a believable lie about pre-mission
nerves. And it wasn’t as if he could talk to Vivik about this, or Michael. They
wouldn’t understand, even if they wanted to be sympathetic. He even trusted
Katya’s discretion, more or less. She probably had to file regular reports with
the Black Sun on his activities, and who knew exactly how detailed those were,
but nothing he had ever told her or done in her presence had ever come back to
him from another source, and she had never held anything over him – even what
he had gotten up to on Anastasia’s island over Spring Break with Emily. It was
possible that every word he said was relayed to Anastasia, but then again, she
would probably find out whether or not he shared the information with Katya.
The heiress of the Black Sun had a frightening acumen for finding the truth of
the matter, among other terrifying traits. Anyway, she had been a direct
witness to the aftermath of what was bothering him, so he could hardly assume
that Anastasia wasn’t already privy to what he would rather remain private.

Alex took a deep breath,
then another. Katya waited with either patience or disinterest. Neither would
have surprised him.

“What do you know about
me and Eerie’s trip to San Francisco?”

Katya glanced at him,
raised an eyebrow.

“If this is about your
sex life, then I already know more than I would like.”

“No. It isn’t...”

Katya sighed.

“The two of you went to
SF on some half-baked date. Got a hotel. Did some shopping. Went dancing, from
what I hear – though frankly I can’t imagine you dancing.”

That was fair. Alex
couldn’t either. He had watched Eerie dance from a safe, cowardly distance.

“Some Weir ambushed you
in your hotel room. The two of you got out of it somehow, and then Ana and
company collected you. She looked after you until Miss Aoki could arrange an
extraction. There was a fight on the way out. Edward Krylov was killed. You
actually stopped moping long enough to be somewhat useful. Sound about right?”

Alex nodded.

“Yeah. That’s it, pretty
much. Except...”

He mulled it over.

“Yes?” Katya was staring
at the sky again, looking bored. “The suspense is killing me.”

“The Weir,” Alex said,
with difficulty. “At the hotel. They were waiting for us, when we came back.
Captured me before I even knew what was going on. Eerie got away long enough to
figure out how to rescue me. But before that...”

Katya was quiet. Alex
wasn’t certain, but it seemed as if her expression changed, softened. Either
way, she waited patiently for him to speak.

“They wanted to know
stuff. Where Eerie was,” Alex admitted, the information rushing out of him
before he realized that he had decided to share it. “They...you know. Hurt me.
Held my head under water. Tortured me, I guess. It was sort of funny,” Alex
said, laughing weakly. “I couldn’t have answered their questions if I wanted
to. Which was probably a good thing. I probably would have told them everything,
otherwise.”

“Pain will do that,”
Katya said softly. “That’s why everyone is so damn fond of it, I suppose.”

“It wasn’t...wasn’t just
that.” Alex felt his face burning with shame. He couldn’t look at Katya directly,
instead focusing his gaze on a street lamp on the far side of the quad that lit
the entry to the adjoining dormitory. “One of the Weir...he tried to...well, I
mean, I’m not sure how to say it, but it was...”

Katya shifted beside
him, her arm resting across his shoulders.

“I get it.” Her voice
was uncharacteristically gentle. “You don’t have to explain. I know what you
mean.”

Alex tried to pull away,
but she held firmly. For a moment, he resisted, then he turned and buried his
face in her shoulder, sobbing, his own hot tears compounding the shame of his
admission, his weakness. Katya didn’t say anything; she held him, stroked his
back, and waited until he was done.

After a time, he pulled
himself together, turned away, and wiped his face clean with his shirt sleeve.
The damp splotch on Katya’s T-shirt made him feel ashamed all over again, but
her expression was soft, reflective. They sat in silence, watching the stars
make their slow progression across the night sky.

“Tell you a story,”
Katya offered suddenly, her voice even, ignoring Alex’s curious look. “From a
long time ago. I’d only been in assassination training for a couple years; I
was still a kid. The way the Black Sun trains its assassins is sort of like the
Program, but more regimented, and less forgiving. Fewer simulations and more
casualties. They’ve got more recruits than they need, so they don’t mind much
if they lose a couple in the process. Gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet,
you know?”

Alex briefly
contemplated the idea of an educational system more brutal than what he had
been subjected to in the Program, and found it difficult to believe. The idea
of something worse than the savagery he had endured in the process of becoming
an Operator was repulsive, and he felt immediate sympathy for Katya.

“They aren’t big on
telepathic training. Instead, they prefer supervised field assignments and
training missions. Bring-Your-Junior-Assassin-to-Work Day, kinda. You get
matched up with working teams to tag along on relatively low-risk missions,
provide assistance, observe the trade firsthand, that sort of thing. Supposedly
they pick operations that are unlikely to end badly for the trainee, but things
do happen from time to time. A couple kids didn’t come back first semester, so
we were always on our toes when our turn came. It was just a sample of the real
thing, but that was still enough to kill you.”

The idea that Alex had
been fortunate to end up at the Academy wasn’t entirely foreign, but the
comparison had never seemed so stark.

“Anyway, I got sent on a
minor retribution thing with a couple full-timers, aiming to take out the head
of a satellite cartel over some sort of dispute or insult – the standard
tit-for-tat stuff that goes on all the time. Low-level background violence. A walk
in the park, they told me. I didn’t even have to do anything, just tag along
and stay quiet and learn. Thought I got lucky, as far as that went.”

Katya hugged her legs to
her chest as she spoke, her eyes fixed on the horizon where the sun would
eventually put in an appearance. There was a faint smile on her face, her tone
jovial, but her body language was tense, her fingers whitening around the sides
of her knees.

“Target holed up in a
big country house in Scotland, some sort of family estate. Security was heavier
than the briefing suggested; dogs, cameras and screamers, guards with night-vision
gear and automatic weapons – but we went ahead with it anyway. Consequences of
backing out of an assignment can be worse than failure, sometimes, and I think
we all wanted the kudos that would come with taking the situation in stride.
Took a couple hours to get to the house, ‘cause the grounds were locked down tight,
but we made it. Figured we were undetected. Set up on the roof, aiming to come
in through his bedroom window and poison him in his sleep, make it look like a
heart attack.”