The Far Shores (The Central Series) (29 page)

“Would you fucking stop
it,” Alex yelled, his face red with frustration. “Just explain it to me,
Rebecca, so that I can understand. No bullshit.”

She looked at where her
cigarettes had just been and felt sorry for herself. What other staff member
suffered such indignities? Who else would put up with this kind of crap? Who
would want to?

“What do you want me to
say? There’s no precedent for anything we do here,” Rebecca said quietly,
reigning herself in. “We’ve never had a catalyst like you before, Alex. The
girl you are dating is a Changeling, about whom we know next to nothing. Your
relationship is interspecies, which is the very definition of new ground. I’ve
been over the records for the entire history of the Academy – and it’s never
happened before. No student has ever had a romantic relationship with a
nonhuman. But, hey, if you are tired of being a pioneer, it’s as easy as
breaking her heart...”

Alex made a face like
she hurt him. Maybe he had a right to it.

“That’s not fair. You’re
supposed to help.”

“And you are supposed to
obey the rules,” Rebecca snapped. “Hasn’t slowed you down much. You think
obligations only matter for other people?”

“What’s that supposed to
mean?”

“You wanna be reckless,
don’t come whining to me over the consequences, that’s what. We can’t keep you
safe if you won’t participate in the process. This is the second time you and
Eerie have gone out of bounds. After what happened the first time, I’m stunned
that you would do it again.”

“This isn’t the same!”
Alex was yelling, getting in her face. “We didn’t leave campus. And don’t act
like this is all my fault – I didn’t ask to come here, and I didn’t ask to be
whatever it is you people made me.”

“You think everyone in
life is a volunteer?”

“No,” Alex said, shaking
his head sadly, performing one of those sudden, infuriating emotional swerves
that were a teenager’s stock in trade. “We all have a part to play. I
understand that. I went out for Audits by my own free will. I’d just like to know
what it is that’s going on.”

Rebecca sighed, spared a
glance at her cigarettes, then sat down on the corner of her desk.

“I’ll tell you whatever
I can,” she said, resignedly. “But you won’t like what you hear. I don’t have
all the answers, Alex.”

He rolled his eyes and
started for the door.

“Not this bullshit
again…”

It was her temper that
did it. Her promise broke like glass. She spoke with Authority, her head
burning with the fury of the protocol.

“Listen to me, you
little bastard,” she said, rooting him in place; not quite fear, not quite awe,
but damn sure he was taking her seriously. “The problem is the same, with
Eerie, with everything in your life. You act like you can just disappear as
soon as things get difficult. As if there wouldn’t be any consequences. As if
no one would be hurt and no one cares about you. Tell me, is that the way you
really feel?”

Alex hung his head.

“No,” he muttered, “it’s
just...”

“Even if we gave you a
bus ticket and a farewell party, what makes you think our enemies would let you
walk away? Do you remember the Weir who captured you, back in San Francisco?”

Alex nodded miserably.

“Sometimes they don’t
kill Operators for days,” she said, hating herself for saying it – wishing she
didn’t have to say it. “And sometimes, Alex, sometimes we find very unlucky
ones that have been held for
years
. We put them to sleep, painlessly,
because it’s the only mercy we can offer them. And that’s the best-case
scenario. Worse, you fall into the Anathema’s hands. And God only knows what
they would make of you. And you know what? It isn’t just you, kid. It’s every
single one of us. Do you understand?”

She let him feel a
little bit of what it was like. A quick sequence of images, like the pitter-patter
of rain on a thin roof – walking deeper into a cul-de-sac off Sepulveda in the
still early morning, aware of the two men following her but not yet panicking;
her car failing to start one morning outside school and the bomb she discovered
wired to the engine just as neatly as if it had come stock; the kindly old
nurse in the hospital in Chicago who injected her with a veterinary
tranquilizer in an attempt to poison her, miscalculated a fatal dose and abandoned
her to hallucinate for thirty-six agonizing hours. She empathized with his
fear, his distrust, and shared a small part of her own. The enormity, she knew,
would paralyze him.

“We only have each
other, Alex, the time that we carve out, and the space that we make for
ourselves. We hold on to that by sacrificing little pieces of ourselves. You
can continue pretending you’re alone, if you want. Eerie won’t wake you if you
don’t want to wake up for her. One day, though, you will lose something, and by
that absence you will come to understand everything you took for granted. Your
life will take on the shape of things that have departed.” Rebecca wasn’t sure
whether she was talking to Alex, or if she was reminding herself. “That won’t
necessarily make you bitter. You will be haunted, though, by nostalgia for
things you never experienced, time that you let pass by, people you let slip
away because you thought they would always be there. You can lose things
because they were taken from you, or from inaction, or despite your best
efforts. It’s all your choice. Some people might think worse of you, but
everyone will understand.”

“Rebecca…”

“Do you know, Alex,” she
asked gently, leading him back to the couch and sitting down beside him, “how
it is I sleep at night? Why I’m not afraid all the time?”

He leaned his head on
her shoulder, and she wrapped her arms around him as if he were a much smaller
child.

“Every night,” she said
quietly, holding him. “Every night, I tell myself, ‘The Director knows what he
is doing.’”

And you had better,
Gaul, you old bastard, she added mentally, or I will never forgive you for what
you have made me make these children believe.

***

She took the seat across the wrought-iron
table, set her bag down by the metal chair legs. She refused the offer of a
menu from an overly solicitous and starry-eyed teenage waiter, ordering from
memory instead.

Made sense. She had
chosen the place, after all.

They didn’t say anything.
It wasn’t hot, but the sun was pervasive, brightness trickling around his
sunglasses, saturating the old marble and acid-etched limestone of the plaza.
In the spring, the marketplace smelled like freshly cut wild greens, seafood,
bread fried in olive oil.

They had been to Greece
once before, under circumstances so different that they could have belonged to
a different lifetime, or to different people. In his memory, they were
carefree, though it couldn’t have actually been like that. She was never young,
after all, and even then there was enough blood between them to stain the white
stone road.

The waiter brought her
coffee in a tiny cup and the flakey pastry that she liked, the kind with white
goat cheese folded in layers of golden Phyllo, which she covered in honey and
ate hot. She took a bite, flashing perfect white teeth, then mopped excess
honey from lips painted burgundy to offset black hair, sipped the bitter coffee
from the porcelain cup, and then set it gently back down in the matching
saucer. He admired the economy of her movements, the subtle threat of her
awareness that never fully receded.

“You’re quiet today.”

He saw no need for a
response. Apparently, she didn’t expect one. She watched the people in the
plaza doing their early-afternoon shopping, circling the roundabout on polished
vintage scooters that would have brought big money in New York or San
Francisco. Kids played in the fountain, while slightly older children flirted
with each other and tried on the pretensions of an adulthood they had not yet
reached. Her eyes fell on him only occasionally, then flitted away, but he
could feel the heat behind them, and a response stirring within himself, and
treasured a small hope that they might find some small time for themselves,
between the ugly realities of business.

As if reading his mind,
she put on the smile she wore as naturally as a Tokyo businessman wore a
conservative grey suit. All business. He knew what she looked like when she was
happy, and when she was, she did not wear this smile.

“They’ve started killing
each other, you know?”

“Who?”

He asked only because he
knew that she wanted to tell him.

“Those Thule nutjobs.
There’s no proof, obviously, but rumor is the Linfield Cartel got scrubbed out
entirely, along with a couple other Hegemony cartels. The Black Sun’s in crisis
mode, too, but nobody’s talking. Whatever happened, they are practicing total
information sequester, so it must have been bad.”

“History repeats itself,”
he offered, lifting his empty coffee cup to get a refill from their waiter. He
didn’t think the kid much cared for having a black man in his café, but it was
too nice of a day to let that bother him. “No big surprise.”

“The surprise is that
Gaul brought them back at all. Just to win a vote in the Committee. Hope he thinks
it’s worth Hell breaking loose.”

“He must’ve seen it
coming.”

“I suppose. I’ll find
out tomorrow. Got a meeting, and he isn’t gonna like it.”

“Yes. I heard about
that. I’d imagine it’s going to be fun for all involved.”

They both paused while
the waiter replaced their empty cups with fresh ones. Michael sipped the
bitter, thick coffee, while Alice stirred brown sugar crystals into hers.

“How’s things in the old
country?”

“Uneasy. Nothing I can
put my finger on, but the cartels all seem on edge. What about you? I haven’t
seen you for more than a week, even before I was deployed to calm the natives. What
have you been up to, Miss Chief Auditor?”

“The usual. Paperwork.
Chasing my own tail, probably. You know an investigation is fucked when the
chief investigator starts reading her own diary for clues.”

“I wanted to talk to you
about that,” he said, weirdly anxious, for reasons he didn’t care to think
about. “Rebecca told me about your new remit. I heard that the Board meeting
was more than a little tense, and not just because of all the new faces.”

“Yeah,” Alice agreed. “You
oughta be glad they kicked us out. I sure won’t be going back unless I’m
required. It’s not really Gaul’s clubhouse anymore.”

He didn’t really know
how to feel about that. The Committee-at-Large had voted to purge the Board
immediately after the war powers vote, largely out of displaced anger that
could not be aimed at the Director personally. All of the current seat holders
were dismissed, and then promptly replaced with an even split of Hegemony and
Black Sun stalwarts, in the promptest voting he had ever witnessed from the
Committee. To a degree, he was sympathetically with their ideals – the body had
served to do little more than rubber-stamp Gaul’s motions in recent years, and
was admittedly packed with members who were either disinterested or personally
loyal to the Director – but he suspected that the new arrangement would prove
to be ineffectual and partisan. He wanted oversight of the Director and his
actions, but he didn’t trust the Committee to provide it.

“Is that a good thing?”

“It’s a
loud
thing, that’s for sure,” Alice said, wincing at the memory. “Beyond that, I
couldn’t say. I always hated that political nonsense.”

He nodded. The role had
always fit her poorly.

“Anyway. Glad to have my
marching orders and be done with it.”

“Rebecca told me that
the scope of this particular Audit has expanded considerably. I’m told that you
aren’t just looking into externals anymore.”

“Mikey…”

“Specifically, I heard
that you are looking into Gaul’s actions, before and after the attack on
Central, and the general fitness of this Administration.”

Alice’s brow creased
with frustration.

“Yeah, look, I know,
that you and him are tight, and I respect that. But you have to understand,
baby, it’s my responsibility to…”

“Hush,” Michael said. “Let
me finish, please. I need you to understand that this calls some things into
question for me.”

Alice winced and shook
her head. He couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses, but he knew that they
had narrowed, the way they always did in the old days, when they had their
arguments about things that must have been trivial, because he couldn’t even
remember the topics. Time had smoothed out all those rough edges.

“Oh, come on,” she
protested. “Not this again…”

“One of the things it
calls into question,” Michael plowed on, putting his hand over hers, “is my
lack of faith in you, in your character, in who you are and who you’ve become.
Hell, maybe this is who you always were and I just didn’t see it. Alice, I’m
impressed. I couldn’t be more impressed.”

She smiled – not the
normal, toothy affair, but something quieter, maybe more honest, and then she
turned so that her hair fell across her face.