The Far Shores (The Central Series) (15 page)

“I’ll be working for the
Hegemony, obviously. Family business and all that.”

“Really?” Vivik’s fork
stopped halfway to his mouth. “I always figured you would work at the Academy
after graduation.”

“Oh, come on, Vivik,”
Sarah laughed. “I’m just as obligated to my cartel as anyone else.”

“Of course,” Vivik said
darkly, returning his attention to his meal.

“You may have heard certain rumors. I
wish to assure you that they are mistaken,”
Alice Gallow informed the worried gathering of the
Jiang Cartel. “I am not a monster. A monster would not bother with a civilized
dialogue like the one we are currently enjoying.”

“Of course.”

Mei Jiang licked her
lips nervously, unable to find any more words. Only years of instilled
discipline and liberal use of her protocol kept her hands still and her voice
from quavering.

“Otherwise, I would not
bother to ask for your cooperation, no? If the stories about me were true, then
in all likelihood I would subjugate your cartel by force. Or even call down the
rest of the Auditors and expunge all of you from existence, to be certain that
the infection has been contained, that the Anathema in our ranks have been well
and truly purged. Don’t you think that would be simpler than having a chat and
a cup of tea?”

Mei nodded her head,
quietly weaving an empathic shield around her cartel, granting them the
emotional fortitude to contend with the rigors of the Audit without faltering
or openly panicking. It was all she could do to protect her people in the face
of the dreaded Chief Auditor.

“Speaking of which,”
Alice said lightly, her eyes settling on each member of the assembly in turn, “this
is excellent tea. I always enjoy my visits to your plantations, I must admit.”

“Would you care for...”

Alice waved her off,
tossing the hundred-year-old china cup to the side to shatter on the stone with
a smile.

“I’m fine, thank you. As
I was saying,” Alice said, crossing her legs and toying casually with the end
of one of her high boot laces, “the rumors are incorrect. This is simply an
informational visit, and I am nothing more than a servant of the law we all
follow.”

Mei nodded her frantic
agreement.

“But if I were a
monster...”

Alice trailed off,
training her awful gaze on Mei in particular. The crazed joy of her smile was
at complete odds with her cold and calculating eyes.

“If I were,” Alice
mused, one hand trailing idly across the oiled surface of the shotgun on her
lap, “I’d be a damn good one.”

The room was silent save
for the rustling of cloth and the occasional soft noises the children made –
and even they were subdued, whether by the blanket effects of Mei’s empathic
soothing, or by some innate understanding of the gravity of the situation. She
could feel the quiet desperation in the occasional glances that various members
of the cartel risked, and understood the rationale – Mei Jiang was the only
officer of the cartel present, even if she was the most junior in the cartel
hierarchy, and in the absence of the rest of their leadership, the
responsibility for dealing with the Auditor fell upon her shoulders.

“Forgive me for
presuming,” Mei began modestly, her eyes downcast. “But I assume that you are
here, Auditor Gallow, in regard to our missing cartel members?”

“Yes and no,” Alice
said, turning the full force of her manic grin on Mei. “Yes, that is why I am
here. And no, they aren’t missing. They are dead.”

Mei Jiang quelled the
shocked murmuring in the room with an exercise of empathic will. There would be
time to mourn the loss of spouses and children later. Now that her worst fears
had been realized, all that remained was the possibility of preserving some
portion of her hereditary cartel.

“I see,” Mei said,
forcing the image of her uncle from her mind’s eye. His strength could not
avail her from beyond the grave. “That is most unfortunate news, of which we
have heard nothing. Might we be permitted to know more?”

Alice Gallow nodded
approvingly, putting her boots up on a four-hundred-year-old mahogany table.

“Tough cookie, aren’t
you? That’s good. And you have a right to know, I suppose – when we found them,
they were already dead. In a compound beside the Fuxian Lake, in Yunnan, which
we had under observation as an Anathema outpost.” Alice Gallow toyed with one
of her hair bindings, which appeared to be a fluted, carved piece of yellowed
bone. “We visited it yesterday, expecting to find Anathema doing Anathemic
things. Instead, we found corpses from three separate cartels, as well as a
number of seemingly unrelated civilian groups. This, you understand, is a bit
of a puzzle. Now,” Alice said, sitting up and slapping her thighs excitedly, “I
got the ball rolling. Story time. What the hell is going on?”

“I do not know, exactly,”
Mei Jiang answered truthfully, pushing aside grief, fear, and confusion, for
the sake of her cartel – and, assuming she could navigate their way through
this crisis, the cartel would very much be hers. “What I do know, I will share
with you.”

“Good start,” Alice said
approvingly, standing to pace the length of the cartel’s formal reception hall.
“Honesty is the best policy.”

“Two months ago, we were
approached by representatives of the Anathema,” Mei explained, amazed at the
steadiness of her own voice. “They knew of our cartel’s poor fortune in recent
years, our absorption by the Hegemony. They were also aware that we did not
suffer any loses in the raid on Central, having no representation in Central of
our own. They made an offer to the leaders of our cartel.”

“Interesting. The
Anathema have rather good intelligence,” Alice Gallow mused, pausing to inspect
an ancient porcelain vase, a funerary relic from one of the clan’s ancestors,
tapping it with her fingernail and admiring the sound it made. “What did they
offer?”

“Status, in the new
order they claimed was coming,” Mei said, her back straight, her face composed.
“A return to prosperity, a claim to territories and interests, both old and
new.”

“Uh-huh,” Alice said,
nodding as she pushed the vase from its carved platform to shatter on the hardwood
floor with a beautiful and sad sound. “And what did they want?”

“Our services in the war
on Central,” Mei responded, her tone measured and level. “Our children, to be
indoctrinated in the forbidden ways of the Anathema. Our loyalty, to the Outer
Dark.”

Alice resumed her
pacing.

“And you said?”

“We refused. Recent
years may not have favored the Jiang Cartel, but we are not traitors. We would
not turn our backs on Central to advance our position or to free ourselves from
the grip of the Hegemony.”

“Refreshing,” Alice
remarked, pausing in front of the small shrine to the ancestors they maintained
in the proper corner of the hall, bending over to inspect the contents. “How
did they take the news?”

“With civility,” Mei
responded pointedly, earning an amused glance from the Auditor. “They expressed
regret at our decision and then they departed. We assumed that there would be
consequences, but as the weeks passed and nothing happened, we began to relax
our guard.”

Alice Gallow dragged the
business end of her assault shotgun across the main shelf of the altar, scattering
and destroying the dishes, ceramics, and keepsakes.

“But you didn’t inform
Central. Why?”

“Because,” Mei said,
allowing the venom she felt to be reflected in her voice, “we knew that they
would send you.”

“Aha!” Alice Gallow
strode across the room with her shotgun resting across her broad shoulders,
coming to a halt directly in front of where Mei sat. “You are a spirited one,
aren’t you? Pretty, too. I like that. Anyhow, since I am here now, why don’t
you tell me what happened next?”

Mei faced Alice Gallow without
the need for aid from her protocol, which was good, because she was forced to
expend much of her protocol’s energy supporting her wavering cartel. For
herself, however, she felt no fear – whatever the Auditor intended, she
decided, she would face it with her pride intact.

“Last week, we awoke to
find eleven members of our cartel, including my uncle Liu, the current head of
the cartel, absent. There were no signs of struggle, nothing left behind to
explain their disappearance. In one case, a wife vanished from her husband’s
side without waking him. Similarly, two children departed without waking their
parents who slept in the next room.”

“Spooky. Makes you
think, don’t it?” The Auditor squatted down, so that she was eye to eye with
Mei. “Could be any one of us. Here one moment, gone the next.”

“Indeed,” Mei agreed.

***

He wanted to hug her as soon as he
saw her, but she barely moved, and her expression didn’t change at all, so
instead, he ended up patting her arm like a moron. She clutched the handles of
her knitting basket in front of her patterned skirt, black tights matching her
wide-necked, form-fitting black top. She had dyed her hair again since he saw
her week before last – dark blue with interwoven streaks of blonde. She smelled
like sandalwood and freshly cut grass, and when she looked at him with her
painfully dilated eyes, he suddenly forgot everything he had planned to say.

“Hi,” Alex said,
furiously embarrassed. “Um. Hi.”

For some reason, Eerie nodded,
and he found himself nodding back, as if they were agreeing on something.
Around them, the returning Program students embraced significant others, traded
jokes with friends, or sneaked cigarettes while they waited for their bags to
be unloaded from the old diesel bus.

“Hey. It’s, um, good to
see you.”

“Is it?”

From anyone else, the
question would have been loaded with sarcasm. Eerie, however, appeared
genuinely curious.

“Yeah,” Alex said,
scratching his head and wishing he had enough courage to simply embrace her. “Yeah,
it is. Really.”

“Oh,” Eerie said,
brushing a stray lock of hair away from her eyes. “That’s good.”

Alex decided to count
that as progress and plunged ahead.

“I missed you. At the
Far Shores, it was…I was lonely.”

Eerie nodded gravely.

“I really missed you.”

“You said that already.”

Just the barest upturn
at the corner of her pale lips?

“What? Oh. Oh yeah.
Well…”

Katya stepped from
behind him, holding a partially unwrapped a candy bar.

“Hey, Eerie. You comin’
to Circle tomorrow?”

She broke off a piece of
the candy bar and offered it to Eerie while she bit into the remainder. Eerie refused
it with a somber shake of her head.

“Yes. I am presenting.”

“I know. Circular
knitting, right? I’m looking forward to it. Okay, I’ll leave you guys to it,”
Katya said agreeably. “See you there, okay?”

Eerie nodded. Katya
sauntered away, elbowing Alex in the side as she went and knocking his backpack
off.

“Oh! Oops. Sorry ’bout
that…”

They both scrambled to
pick it up. Katya leaned close and whispered as she handed the bag to him.

“Don’t be such a wuss,”
she hissed. “Do it already.”

It happened so fast,
Alex wasn’t sure that he heard her. Katya winked at him as she walked off,
munching on her candy bar, waving to Eerie over her shoulder without looking
back.

“Right,” Alex muttered
to himself.

“What?”

Alex waved his hand
pointlessly.

“Nothing! I mean…no. Wait.
There is something.”

Eerie waited patiently.
He got the feeling that she would stand there for hours, without blinking,
until he forced the words out in some sort of functional manner. He took a deep
breath and steeled himself as if he were about to jump into a cold pool.

“Eerie, can I ask you
something?”

She nodded with her
typical gravity.

“I think I should have
probably asked you a long time ago. No, wait. I
definitely
should have asked
you. Because it was pretty much all I thought about while I was at the Far
Shores – particularly since you weren’t around last week…”

Eerie’s hands twisted
nervously on the handle of her basket.

“I was busy. At
Processing. I had to work, and then the boys I work with wanted to celebrate a
programming milestone, so I had to go…”

Alex cut her off without
intending to do so. He just felt compelled – he was overcome with a certainty
that if he let the moment get away from him this time, then he always would. It
would set a pattern, and he would watch a thousand other moments slip away,
afraid of losing something that his inaction would certainly cost him.

“I know. I don’t – I
don’t care. Wait. That isn’t it. I do care. Because I need you not to be too
busy. For me. It’s just that…”

Eerie was pointing at
something behind him, though her mad eyes never left his face.

“Your bag.”

“What?”

“Alex. Your bag is here.”

Alex took her by the
shoulders, reminding himself to be gentle. The fabric of her shirt felt synthetic,
like the stuff he wore to work out, and the heat of her skin radiated from
beneath it.