The Far Shores (The Central Series) (9 page)

Renton placed his head on
Anastasia’s shoulder, which he was just low enough to do, while kneeling. She
rolled her eyes and then patted the back of his neck, clearly uncomfortable.

“Ana…please let me watch
over you. Just like before.”

They were both surprised
at the feeling in his voice.

“I cannot,” she said,
freeing herself gently. “The precognitives assure me that we must presume the
worst. Still, if you truly believe I am in danger, then you must believe someone
plays this game better than I, Renton. Is that what you think?”

Renton shook his head
vigorously, too choked up to speak.

“Then focus on what you
must do,” she said, urging him toward the door. “It is not the place of a
servant to question his duties.”

Renton paused at the
door, not quite gripping the door frame.

“Ana…could I just
please…”

Anastasia pushed him
firmly into the hall.

“You most certainly
cannot,” she scolded, then continued on in a softer voice. “You are my
failsafe, Renton. My last resort, should all else fail. You should be proud.”

He stood in the hallway,
stiff as a board, trying to find words.

“Renton,” Anastasia
said, exasperated. “Stop looking at me like that. I will be fine.”

Renton smiled slowly.

“That would be a lot
easier to accept,” he said, pointing at her feet, “if you weren’t wearing
those.”

Anastasia glanced down
at her plush, brown Domo slippers, then gave him a ferocious glare and slammed
the door in his face.

That, at least, made
Renton feel a little better.

***

There were so many people in the
garage facility of the Audits building that even the huge space seemed crowded,
a hundred different conversations echoing of stained concrete walls, a
confusing muddle of languages and emotions, tears and hysterical laughter.
There were groups and individuals, dressed in everything from street clothes to
rags, and between them, the white-clad triage teams shuttled, providing first
aid and empathic intervention.

It took a moment before
Alex realized that the vast majority were children.

“What the fuck is – err.
Sorry, Miss Gallow.”

“No need to be sorry,
Alex. That’s the appropriate reaction.”

They were mostly
Chinese, near as Alex could tell, but given the diversity of builds and
features, he didn’t think they were all local to the coast of the Yellow Sea.
Both sexes were present in a roughly equal ratio, and the ages ranged from
grade school to upper-teens. Most of them were thin, and some were emaciated. A
large majority appeared to be injured – Alex could see blood, infected wounds,
recent fractures, and badly set breaks. The smell in the garage was even more
nauseating than what he saw.

“You wanted a reason,
right? Well, maybe this will be a salve to your bleeding heart. You remember
the operation briefing, right?”

Alex nodded slowly,
remembering sitting near Katya in the comfortably padded chairs of briefing
room, listening to Miss Aoki and Haley Weathers present a series of maps,
photographs, and mission perimeters, supplemented by a telepathic information
dump. He had felt a combination of excitement and detachment, at the time –
simultaneously eager at the prospect of his first official operation, and bored
by the overwhelming amount of unnecessary data he was provided, given his own
minor role.

“We told you that the mainland
branch of the Society had something we wanted in the facility we just hit, an
asset we couldn’t allow them to have. This is the asset,” Miss Gallow
explained, gesturing broadly to take in the bedlam in the garage. “This is what
the Society was trying to hide from us.”

Alex realized that his
hands were trembling, and shoved them in the pockets of his jeans to hide it.

“But – what? And why? I
mean, they’re kids!”

“I noticed that,” Miss
Gallow said dryly. “We don’t know for certain yet, not until our telepaths have
time to debrief the crowd, but we think the leeches were collecting them as raw
material. For the Anathema.”

There was a sudden
hollowness in his chest, and a memory of Emily turning to water, pouring
through his arms.

“We’ve only had a chance
for a random sampling at this point, but every kid we’ve tested so far had
potential. None of them have been activated, but potentially they all could
be.”

He shook his head and
struggled to find words for the slowly growing dread that he felt.

“Why would the Anathema
want them? I thought they...transformed – or whatever – Operators. You know.
People who were already activated. Not regular kids...”

Miss Gallow smirked, but
Alex was starting to see variations in her smile. In this particular variant,
he saw contempt, but no actual joy. She put her arm around him and leaned close
– the only woman he knew so tall that she had to bend down slightly to speak to
him – and spoke in a lowered voice.

“Keep in mind that this
shit is classified. You blab what I’m about to tell you, even to your
Changeling girlfriend, and I’ll have you mind-wiped so thoroughly you won’t be
able to remember your own middle name.”

Alex was only mildly
distracted by the sudden realization that he had no idea if he even
had
a middle name. Normally, this would have been a distressing revelation, but he
wasn’t about to chance losing his focus when the homicidal Miss Gallow was this
close.

“That Anathema raid
wasn’t just meant to hurt us. They gained access to the Source Well, and captured
a supply of nanites for themselves. They can perform their own activations,
now.”

He was no tactical
genius, but even Alex knew that was bad news. Still, he was relieved when Miss
Gallow released her hold on his shoulders and started forward, beckoning him
along toward the crowd of children.

“You know we run
programs worldwide to find children with potential, right? School ear exams,
free physicals, vaccination campaigns, all that noise. Well, it ain’t nearly
enough. There are a whole lot more potential Operators out there that we never
find. Some of them, the Witches get to first – whether to deny us the
opportunity, or because they take some special joy from feeding on children
with potential, we don’t know. Always been the case. Lately, though...”

Miss Gallow stepped
deftly around two medics who were attaching an IV to the arm of a boy who was
hardly more than skin and bones. His chest and arms were covered in ulcerated
sores, and Alex hurriedly looked away.

“We’ve been missing
more,” Alice said, a scowl briefly passing across her face. “Analytics couldn’t
figure why, but they knew the numbers were way off. Naturally, we suspected the
Anathema, but those fuckers went dark after they left Central, and we haven’t
been able to get a fix on them since. We were stumbling around blind, until Analytics
turned up something interesting, trawling the NSA feeds.”

The babble of different
languages, the fearful eyes, the combined odors of sweat, feces, and vomit –
all of it combined to make Alex dizzy. He followed Miss Gallow in a daze while
she took a winding path through the huddle of human misery. Some of the
children looked at him with obvious dread, while others spoke to him with
hopeful or inquisitive tones. He could only shrug apologetically, overwhelmed
by the sheer horror.

“They get their filthy
electronic fingers into everything these days. Saves us a lot of trouble. They
were tracking an activist group researching organ transplants in China. Seems
that a bunch of foreigners have been coming to the mainland for transplants –
corneas, kidneys, and the like – for a while now. Quite the booming industry
these days. Government claims that the organs are harvested from executed criminals,
which are never in short supply in China – but these activists claimed they
were being taken from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners. They had turned up
some surgeons who admitted as much after emigrating, and some secondary
evidence from hospitals. Ugly shit, but not our business. The activists had
been keeping tabs on the industry for a few years, but recently they noticed
something that caught our attention.”

Between what Miss Gallow
was saying and the frequent signs of starvation and untreated injury that Alex
could see on many of the children they walked among, Alex thought that he might
pass out or throw up. Only desperation to keep his composure in front of the
Chief Auditor held him together.

“Even with harvesting
from prisoners, political or otherwise, organs were still at a premium, and
some were harder to find than others. A few months ago, that all changed. The
market was flooded periodically, mass harvests that overwhelmed the surgical
centers’ ability to process them, to find patients. Half of ’em probably rotted
on ice. But the activists couldn’t figure out the source. Falun Gong was pretty
much wiped out in China years ago, and there hadn’t been any mass arrests or
dissident suppression to explain the sudden uptick. They figured the government
was up to its usual shenanigans, but Analytics thought otherwise.”

There was a girl with
defiant eyes, no more than sixteen, holding tightly to what was obviously her
younger brother, maybe old enough for kindergarten – and even more obviously
dead. Alex tried to avert his eyes, but wherever he looked, it was just as bad.
Eventually, he settled for focusing on Miss Gallow’s back, the monochrome
tattoo of the Tree of Life rippling as the muscles in her back moved.

“There is a similar
industry in the Caucasus – Chechnya, parts of occupied Georgia, and the like.
We sent Mitzi – Miss Aoki – to investigate. What she turned up, plus another
field investigation in Malaysia and Indonesia, was enough for Analytics to
corroborate our suspicions.”

They made it to the
stairs, which led to the ground floor of the Audits building, out of the
atrocities in the garage. Alex was filled with gratitude the moment his foot
touched the first step.

“It was the Society, the
Asian franchise of the global vampire club. We still aren’t sure how they were
identifying the children, but they were conducting a widespread harvest of
potential Operators, for unknown reasons. The way we figure it, they were
getting them for the Anathema, and the kids they couldn’t use ended up on the
black market, harvested for organs. Could’ve sold ’em as slaves, of course, but
then they might have told somebody about what happened to them. Can never be
too careful. Stories tend to get around, you know, even stories told by teenage
prostitutes. You following all this, Alex? You’re a little quiet back there.”

Alex nodded, then
realized that Miss Gallow wasn’t looking at him.

“I follow,” he said, his
voice thin and weak.

“Good. Because this is
the important part,” Alice said, stopping at the top of the stairs, in front of
the door that led into the central lobby of the Audits building. “We are
Auditors, Alex – and maybe one day you will be one, too – and our business is
reconciliation. We find errors and we rectify them. We make sure debts are
paid, that the right parties get what’s coming to them. And nobody likes having
their mistakes pointed out.”

Alice turned toward him,
wearing her mirthless smile.

“That makes us
unpopular. Makes our business ugly. But the alternative – letting sleeping dogs
lie, allowing accounts to go unbalanced – that’s even uglier. Never forget
that. No matter how bad it gets in the field, no matter what you have to do –
there is always a worse alternative, and all we need to do to make it happen is
nothing.”

Alice leaned in and
pressed her finger into his sternum.

“You got it, Alex? You understand?”

He swallowed with
difficulty, then nodded.

“Good. I’m glad we had
this little talk. Now,” Alice said, her smile widening, “how ’bout some lunch?”

***

Lunch, at first glance, seemed
impossible. Just looking at the spaghetti with meatballs made the bile rise in
the back of his throat. Alex forced himself to assemble a plate consisting
primarily of fried rice, salad, and sliced apple, and then found his way to his
normal table, sitting beside Katya, Haley, and Min-jun – only to discover that
he was ravenous despite his distress. He blamed the nanites for his callous
appetite.

“Good to see you in one piece,”
Katya remarked brightly, twirling her fork in a plate of chow mein. “I got a
little nervous when Alice Gallow decided to take you for a walk.”

“You and me both,” Alex
admitted. “I’ve had more pleasant experiences.”

“Anything you survive,
right?” Katya returned her attention to whatever she and Haley had been
discussing before his arrival. “So, Neal really asked you out? Like, right
there, in the control room?”

Haley blushed and
nodded, politely finishing a forkful of string beans before she answered.

“Yes. Like two minutes
after I recovered from my trance. There were at least ten other people in the
room, all experienced support staff. I’m sure they all heard it, too.”