The Far Shores (The Central Series) (47 page)

Alex stopped suddenly,
almost sending them both spilling into the icy gutter, and earning glares and
what he assumed were curses from nearby pedestrians.“I could have sworn,” Alex
said, self-preservation forcing his legs back into action, “that you just said
I was bait.”

“That’s right,” Mitsuru
said sharply. “And if you don’t quit messing about, I might let them nibble on
you a little.”

Alex was more careful
with Miss Aoki’s arm, and gave her another block to calm down. That was the
nice thing about Miss Aoki, if there was one – she didn’t stay angry long.
Unless, he figured, you really pissed her off, something Alex made every effort
not to do.

Miss Gallow, on the
other hand, never got mad about anything. After spending an hour with her, you
started to wish she would, just so she would stop smiling. Mitsuru, despite her
temper and harsh tongue, was infinitely preferable.

“Nibble? It’s Weir,
then?”

Mitsuru nodded.

“Yeah. Vladimir thinks
that’s why the Witches use Weir in the first place – as a method of population
control, preemptive culling of potential Operators before we can find them.
Weir hunt all the time, of course, but they target people with a natural
affinity for the Ether in particular. Vlad thinks they might have even been
engineered specifically for that purpose, rather than evolved.”

Alex mulled it over,
while his new black matte shoes crunched through the grey, old snow.

“Who would have
engineered them? The Witches?”

“Maybe,” Mitsuru said,
shrugging indifferently. “But we’ve never found any evidence that they do
things like that. So who knows? Maybe whoever built Central in the first place?
Anyway, try not to worry about it. We’ve picked up a tail.”

Alex fought down the
urge to look behind him, to spin around, to create distance between him and the
pursuit he could only imagine. Of course, nothing that was following him, even
a werewolf, was nearly as scary as Miss Aoki, so he did none of those things.
Instead, he did his best impression of taking calm, measured steps.

“Where?” He hissed. “Behind
us?”

“Yes, of course they are
behind us,” Mitsuru said, guiding him by subtle nudges toward the mouth of an
alley that led down into the darkness between two crumbling, Soviet-era
concrete tenements. “They picked us up three blocks ago. Two of them. Now come
on.”

She practically dragged
Alex down the length of the garbage-strewn alley, the grey ice periodically
turned to slush by vented steam coming up from grates in the sidewalk. About
halfway to the chain-link fence that terminated the alley, she stopped, leaned
against the cold concrete wall, and pulled him close to her, one arm on his
back, the other on the nape of his neck.

“Miss Aoki?” Alex asked,
alarmed. “What are you, um…”

“Shut up, Alex,” she
whispered, pulling his head down until her mouth was beside his ear. “They are
watching. Make it look believable.”

***

The chamber was a labyrinth, like a
carnival maze of mirrors, fluctuating and malleable, manipulated by unseen
forces, just as she currently was.

That, above all
indignities, required restitution.

It was a constant
balancing act, the weight of her fierce and aching thirst on one end of the
scale, and the terrible visions, muscle spasms, and abdominal cramps that the
drugs within the water brought. Anastasia did her best to measure her body’s
dehydration against the necessity of maintaining a marginally clear head, but
the drug distorted time in unpredictable ways, and her suffering made demands
that even she was powerless to deny endlessly.

She lost track of the
hours spent in that porcelain hell, blood and mucus leaking from her eyes and
bent at the middle with horrible pains, one hand against a wall that shifted
and shuddered against her cracked and bleeding skin. There were no shadows, and
the omnipresent light pierced her skull and flayed her brain, denying her sleep
and blurring her vision. The periods of unconsciousness that overtook her were
unpredictable and uncertain in their duration; she would simply come to with
her face and knees bloodied, her cheek resting on the strangely warm stone of
the chamber floor.

Paths wound along paths
and then back unto themselves, and even when she thought she had carefully
counted her turns, she always arrived back at that fountain, the yellow trumpet
vine flowers floating across the disturbed surface of the metallic-tasting
water. Her extremities were racked with tremors and her mouth felt as if it
were packed with cotton. Her chest hurt with every breath, and when she
exhaled, she could not help but whimper at the pain it caused her parched
throat. Sometimes she discovered that she was speaking, in the endless
brilliance of the winding passages, asking questions of the things she could
see only from the corners of her eyes, things that evoked a childish and primal
horror in her. When she could stand no longer, she lay curled in a ball near
the fountain, the maddening sound of the water burbling causing her to flinch
and shudder.

All in all, Anastasia
figured, it could have been worse.

Days. It must have been
days, but she had no idea how many. She became aware of tiny changes in the
quality of light or in the composition of the air, things she felt with her
hypersensitive skin as much as she tasted them when she breathed. There were
voices that swelled and faded along with the sound of the water, the slow
cellular death of her being by dehydration, the sound of her skin sloughed off
against the stone. There were names hidden in the pervasive luminescence, names
for the things that lacked form or definition. She cried out, in delight or
horror, the two were indistinguishable, and then clutched her raw throat in
pain. Anastasia wept and felt nothing, exhausted by the vastness of emotion
that her skin was stretched across, brittle and translucent like parchment held
to the light of a candle.

Of her ten fingers, nine
had been bitten until the skin broke. Only her index remained, which meant that
she had come to the end of what she could endure.

Voices. There were
definitely voices, and a subtle change in the air, gun oil and spoiled grapes,
the sound of a radio as the station slowly faded out, the color of the sky when
the sun had descended behind the hills, leaving behind only the memory of daylight
in the punctured sky.

Anastasia put her index
finger in her mouth, the one she had reserved for the final part of her ordeal,
then bit down until she tasted copper, her blood thick and sluggish. The pain
woke her sleeping mind like a burst of thunder. She did not stop until she
tasted the bitter synthetic flavor of the subcutaneous drug packet that had
been implanted behind the first joint in her finger. She waited as long as she
could, until the sensation of the fluid creeping slowly down the withered
passage of her throat threatened to make her sick, then she washed it down with
a long drink from the fountain, trusting in the superior pharmacokinetics of
the Black Sun’s product. Stepping carefully, she immersed herself in the
shallow pool, lying down so that she floated on her back, her matted hair
swirling around her face. She bathed as best as she could in the tainted water,
and felt the better for it, despite the risk.

She did not have to wait
long. The drug brought a degree of clarity, and that much was inordinately
painful. The world gelled around her into a moderately recognizable hell. Synesthesia
receded like the tide, leaving behind what the storm had broken in her mind.
Anastasia put aside the damage and focused on what was happening.

Not voices. A voice.

The journey to her feet
was endless, an exercise in vanity; still, she would not face her enemy lying
down. When Brennan Thule emerged from one of the curving passages of the
illuminated labyrinth flanked by masked servants, he found Anastasia naked, weakened,
and sick, but standing with all the composure she could muster. There was
satisfaction to be found in his momentary flinch, before he manufactured a
smile and regained his aura of superiority.

“Miss Martynova. I am
pleased to see you looking so well,” he offered, his voice dripping with
sincerity. “You must possess resources beyond even what I imagined.”

“I am not concerned with
your imagination,” Anastasia responded haughtily. It took all of her will not
to show the pain speaking caused her. “I am concerned with obtaining clothing.”

“Of course,” Brennan
Thule agreed smoothly, but not before a moment of hesitation that was so slight
that Anastasia could not be fully certain she saw it. The countertoxin she had
taken was beginning to affect Anastasia, her core temperature dropping at an
alarming rate. The Thule Cartel personnel most likely assumed that she wrapped
her arms around herself in a gesture of modesty, but it was actually to minimize
shivering. “I will send someone immediately. A chair would be welcome as well,
I presume? And perhaps something to drink?”

“Perhaps,” Anastasia
allowed, while one of the servants scurried off. “Something without
hallucinogenic properties, if it at all possible.”

Brennan Thule displayed
his crooked teeth.

“I apologize for that.
An unfortunate side effect of an otherwise useful compound, I assure you.”

“You are awfully polite,
all of a sudden,” Anastasia observed, barely able to keep her teeth from
chattering, hoping they would think to bring something warm. “Why the change in
attitude?”

“You probably assume
that we have been torturing you,” Brennan Thule said, as if the assumption
would have saddened him. “Nothing could be further from the truth, milady.”

“Really? I seem to
remember electrodes and suffocation, but perhaps that is simply your
interpretation of hospitality. Innovative, then, but far from what it is
considered traditional.”

“I can understand your
perspective...”

“...can you? It has been
rather
altered
of late.”

“Believe me, I can.”
Anastasia could find no reason to doubt the sincerity in his voice, though she
certainly had the inclination. “You understand the limitations of power as well
as I do, I am sure, Miss Martynova. My authority brings with it expectations,
responsibilities that relate more to the appearance of leadership than to its
reality.”

Anastasia clenched her
teeth to prevent them from chattering. She hoped the shivers that ran
uncontrollably through her body would be written off as an aftereffect of the
drugs.

“To be frank, I was expected
to interrogate you. To do otherwise would have invited suspicion, created an
opening for questions and doubts in the minds of my servants and peers. I knew
you wouldn’t break under such limited, though regrettable, brutality, so I
played to expectations. It was all I could do to prevent further, grimmer
outrages from being perpetrated upon you.”

A servant in a featureless
mask arrived with a pair of wooden chairs, one of which had a terry cloth
bathrobe and a woolen blanket atop the seat. Anastasia noted a certain
familiarity to the color of the servant’s eyes, while she accepted his help in
putting on the robe and then wrapping herself in the blanket. Thule took a seat
not far from the chair the masked servant helped her into, near the center of
the chamber where she had combated madness and dehydration. The chair was of
typical size, which meant her feet didn’t even scrape the ground, an attribute
that she despised. The second man, whom she had mistaken for a servant, she
noted, was actually a masked guard, likely a Thule Cartel member. He stood as
if posted at the entrance to the room, clearly if subtly armed. If Brennan
Thule had meant that to be a reminder of his power over her, then his gambit
failed.

The only concern in her
mind was to whether he would recognize the effects the countertoxin was having
on her system. Happily, Thule seemed to be in a chatty mood, and likely
ascribed her twitching and cramps to the results of her prolonged confinement.

“I can understand why
this may not seem like an act of benevolence, but I assure you, it was meant as
such – a gesture of friendliness, even. You see, I believe that you and I are
very much alike, Miss Martynova.” Brennan Thule paused as a servant arrived
with a low table, which he set beside her chair. The table was set with a fine
porcelain cup filled with steaming green tea, a goblet of deep red wine, and
two sealed glass bottles of water. She took the mug in her shaking hands and
nodded at the green bottle, which the servant cracked open and then returned to
the table. At a nod from Thule, the servant departed, leaving them alone with
the silent guard. “Perhaps even more so now. There are so few of us, after all,
who were born into power, who know the weight of expectations of greatness from
birth. You are the heir to one great cartel, and I the heir to another.”

“I have an elder
brother,” Anastasia countered, sipping the tea gratefully, though the sensation
of the warm liquid on her throat made her eyes water. “Succession is not yet
decided.”

“And I have an uncle,”
Brennan Thule observed mildly. “That is beside the point. The members of our
respective cartels look to us for leadership, as they have since we were
children.”