The Far Shores (The Central Series) (68 page)

“Are you Anathema?”

“No.” She shook her
head, as if to emphasize her denial. “I am not even human.”

She crumpled abruptly to
the ground, and then Katya was beside him, taking a firm hold on his arm and
tugging him along as if he were a child, almost pulling him off balance. Alex
stumbled along beside her, taking one last look at the strange girl who was
contorted on the factory floor.

“What the fuck was
that?”

“Who knows?” Katya
grimaced every time she put her left foot down. “I perforated her cerebellum,
just to be sure. We don’t have time for this shit, Alex.”

“Right,” he agreed,
throwing Katya’s arm over his shoulder so he could support her weak leg.

“Mitsuru can’t buy us
infinite time.”

“I know, I know. I’m
moving.”

It was true. Mitsuru was
fighting desperately against several corpses. Her knife severed any limb that drew
close, but Mitsuru was running out of space and gradually being overwhelmed by
their relentless advance.

“Are those
things...zombies?”

“No. And stop asking.”
Katya winced as they stepped across a fallen technician, her ankle swollen to
almost twice its usual size and bright red beneath her torn fatigues. “There
are no zombies, okay? That’s Song Li. Remember the briefing?”

He did, but only at
Katya’s prompting. An Anathema who could control the nanites inside others,
most effectively in the dead. She had used Edward Krylov’s body to attack him
once before, in the forest outside the Academy, and had taken part in the raid
on Central using a female Korean body that was assumed to be her own. Her
dossier noted hopefully that she was believed to have been killed by Alice
Gallow during the raid. Apparently that data was overly optimistic.

“Doesn’t look Asian to
me,” Alex muttered, helping Katya around a bank of machinery. The closer they
got to the World Tree, the more the sound seemed to rattle and vibrate the hard
parts of his body, his bones and teeth.

“Must be using a dead
body,” Katya explained, gritting her teeth to deal with what must have been
significant pain. “After Alice wasted the original one.”

“That’s gross.”

“Shut up and hurry,
okay?”

Alex shut up and hurried.
Mitsuru was obscured by a tight crowd of shambling, grasping corpses. The outer
edge of the energy field that the World Tree generated was only a meter
distant.

“Going further would be
a bad idea,” Samnang advised, from where she crouched on top of a nearby
cluster of piping.

“Oh, fuck!”

Alex yelled, half
pulling Katya, half falling as he dove for the energy field. When they hit it,
there was a brief moment of dislocation, their visual afterimage lingering
momentarily, frozen in time and static like a hologram, before that, too,
disappeared.

“How troublesome,”
Samnang observed.

***

Mitsuru waited until Alex and Katya departed
into the World Tree’s glowing aura, for better or worse, fighting a losing
battle against animated dead who were attempting to literally tear her to
pieces. She cut and parried, buying herself time and space rather than hoping
to do any real damage to the lumbering corpses that Song Li drove at her. Once
she was certain that the kids were gone, Mitsuru finally activated the Black
Protocol that had been steadily consuming her thoughts since Alex had helped
her power it, before she began her attack. It was almost comical, that holding
back the partially activated protocol had somehow been one of the most
difficult things she had ever done, considering all the years she had spent
struggling to operate it at all.

There was no need for
Mitsuru to cut herself. There was plenty of blood already.

***

The Anathema soldier emitted light
from one end of the visual spectrum to the other, dipping into ultraviolet and
soaring into the infrared, changing frequency by the millisecond, alternating
between tightly focused pulses and wideband emission – attempting to blind, to
burn, to cut his way free of Michael. The capacitors beneath his tattooed skin
worked exactly as Gaul had advertised. The energy manipulator died slowly, with
Michael’s thumbs pressed deeply into the veins in his neck, feeding on his
protocol in an act that had troublingly vampiric connotations. It wasn’t the
first time that Michael had been disturbed by the alterations in his nature,
thanks to the implant, but it was the most profound.

Michael’s existential
struggle was nothing compared to the Anathema’s desperate and spirited campaign
to continue existing, but it was just as fruitless. The weaponized light went
out gradually, his protocol dimming along with the light behind his eyes.
Michael waited until he could no longer feel the Anathema’s pulse in his hands,
long after the end of any struggle, long enough that it felt like a violation
of their intimacy when he cast aside his broken body. The tightly
interconnected weave of technology that had colonized his skin was rejuvenated,
tiny batteries charged and humming in his epidermis, a dead man’s energy stored
away to be expelled in some future act of violence, but Michael could not help
but feel as if he had lost something in the course of the battle, something
vague and wordless but precious to him nonetheless.

Alice always said he was
too soft for the field. Despite his victory, Michael could not help but give
her words a certain amount of credence.

Xia was brilliant, a
proverbial candle burning at both ends. Even at a distance of tens of meters,
Michael could feel the heat, and was aware of and slightly disappointed by the
eagerness with which the nanite mesh in his skin absorbed even this ambient
energy. As Xia incinerated the Anathema in the vicinity, bathing his skin in
liquid fire that clung like napalm, Michael wondered what he had become, what
he had made himself, though he spared himself the narcissistic pleasure of
questioning his motivations. That would have felt too much like a betrayal, a
trivialization of the Anathema energy manipulator’s struggle to continue
living.

Perhaps his heart was
too soft to comprehend the work of his hands, but the introspection felt
perverse and wrongheaded, when his feet still carried him obediently toward
further battle, when his course did not change, when the questions produced
answers that made him uncomfortable but did nothing to alter his intentions.

Michael moved toward Xia
without the truly feeling the resolve that he projected. Instead, he was
motivated by something like acquiescence, fearing that if he stopped, he would
be forced to call into question the acts that he had tossed aside, like the broken
body of the Anathema he had killed. He told himself that it was simple, as
Alice described it – kill or be killed, fight or be haplessly consumed by the
violence that he had failed to counter with still more violence. No one was
truly left untainted, and there was no nobility in his previous neutrality. It
was impossible to stand apart, to carve out a moral high ground, when the
security to contemplate such philosophical luxuries was bought with the blood
of others.

It almost helped.

The fire had died down
by the time he made his way through the wreckage, to find Xia staring at the
embers and glowing hot metal with polarized lenses, searching for signs of life
in the fused and smoldering ruins.

“We should find Alice
and Mitsuru,” Michael suggested, fighting back the urge to put a hand on Xia’s
shoulder, well aware of the Auditor’s horror at physical contact, even with the
remove of his armored and fire-proofed coat. “I think this is finished.”

“Not until I say it is,”
the Anathema countered, his voice dripping with good humor, as he strode
through the heat and torn metal, hair and clothing burned away by the fury of
Xia’s attack, skin reflecting the dull red glow of the partially liquefied
metal. “I’m not done with the two of you yet.”

Xia’s protocol activated,
the air molecules around his hands excited to the point of ignition, a swirl of
flame crackling across the distance and lashing against the metallic skin of
the Anathema. There was no result. The Anathema laughed and continued forward.

“You still don’t
understand, do you?”

Michael was not in the
mood for explanations. He raised his hand, palm out, as if he were a crossing
guard ordering a stop to traffic. The energies he had absorbed from the light
manipulator collected beneath the skin of his hand, transferred from one set of
specialized nanites to another, from those dedicated to the collection of
energy to those equally committed to its expulsion.

Form was just a question
of will, an alteration of wavelength and rate of agitation. Light seemed inadvisable,
given the way the residual flames from Xia’s attack reflected off the
Anathema’s skin, and heat had already failed, so Michael chose what came most
naturally – pure telekinetic force, a beam of raw physical energy passing
through the air between them so suddenly as to seem instantaneous, sending up a
cloud of dust and debris in its way, as if a particularly localized and focused
gust of wind had blown through that small section of the factory floor. He felt
nothing but a slight tingling at the skin of his palm. At the other end, he
knew, he had delivered several tons of kinetic force, honed to a fine point and
distributed over a total area of something less than a centimeter. The beam
would have punched through a meter of concrete with ease, or punctured nearly a
third as much hardened steel with enough left over to pulverize whatever was
unwise or unlucky enough to shelter behind it. Whatever the properties of the
Anathema’s reflective skin, it would be enough.

Except, as the cloud of
agitated dust and volatized metals cleared, he was still advancing, the same
modest grin on the reflective surface of his face.

“As I was saying, you
don’t understand.” The Anathema did not bother to walk around a fallen girder
from the collapsed catwalk; instead, he plowed through it, the metal bending
and fracturing beneath his feet as if under tremendous pressure. “You are both
quite impressive, I assure you. But I am afraid that, your protocols and
alterations notwithstanding, you are entirely outclassed. My name is Nick
Marsh, and I truly regret what is about to happen.”

“Xia,” Michael hissed,
struck with a sudden and unbecoming fear at the Anathema’s steady and
undeviating advance. “We need to hit him together. On three, alright?”

“Don’t bother,” the
Anathema advised, tossing aside an enormous section of concrete that obstructed
his path. “It won’t make any difference.”

Michael counted down to
three. Xia’s ignited the air around the Anathema, depriving him of oxygen and
covering him with a cloak of flames, while Michael expended the remainder of
the energy he had absorbed in the form of electricity, a miniature lightning
bolt arching toward the Anathema with a deafening clap. Despite the distortion
of the wreath of flame that surrounded the Anathema, this time Michael saw it
clearly – the bolt of electricity connected with the Anathema, then passed
directly through, to discharge its energies on the metal wreckage some distance
beyond. The fire shimmered and then died as Nick Marsh passed through it, his
reflective skin disappearing.

Where the lightning and
fire touched, the Anathema’s form was briefly absent, nothing more than a swirl
of discolored gas and luminous vapor. Then it coalesced, returning to an
outline resembling that of a naked man, composed entirely of what appeared to
be condensed smog, carbon-heavy gas carrying a heavy burden of ash and
impurity. With a delicacy that was almost exquisite, the gas took on the
contours of a face, even the expression of a self-effacing smile.

“You cannot hope to
injure me, unless I should allow for it. And even if I did, the effects would
be only temporary.” The Anathema passed effortlessly through a meter of tangled
steel and crushed aluminum sheeting, distorting briefly only to reform on the
other side. “I control the composition of my body. Any volume of gas, of any
type or density that I require, assuming that I can gather sufficient mass. Do
you understand?”

Nick Marsh reached out
his hand, and his arm continued extending, crossing fifteen meters to reach
Michael’s head as if he had thrown something. Michael tried to gasp in shock,
and found no sustenance in the air he breathed, his lungs simultaneously full
and screaming for oxygen in the throes of the Anathema’s grip. What passed
through his lips tasted sweet and vaguely metallic, and a high, ringing sound
filled Michael’s head as he dropped to his knees, hopelessly dizzy. Beside him,
he could see Xia struggling similarly, though he could make no sense of it, the
coherence of his thought further impaired with every desperate breath. He tried
to make himself stop breathing, not to inhale any more of the miasma that
surrounded him, to crawl free of it, but his body failed him, and he crashed to
the ground in a clumsy and painless impact.

“Nitrous oxide. If you
use your pyrokinesis, I warn you that you will only succeed in burning
yourselves alive,” Nick Marsh advised, nearing them with an expression that
bordered on sympathetic. “Meant to be anesthetic. There’ll be no pain, just a
bit of confusion, some euphoria, and then a quick, kind death. A measure of
respect for your station, Auditors. My gift to you.”