The Far Shores (The Central Series) (41 page)

“Yes.”

“Yeah. I thought it
would. It’s weird for me too, by the way. This isn’t my idea, okay? I want you
to know that.”

“Okay.”

“The information is
legit, though. I checked some of it out myself. I’ve been here for weeks, and
this place is weird. And I saw that nut standing out on the beach last night
myself. I’m not just sharing the cartel’s suspicions. I don’t trust these
freaks either. I don’t know whether they are aiming for you or for him, but I’m
sure their intentions aren’t good. You know what I’m saying?”

“Yes.”

“I’m for real on this,
you know. This is serious shit. I need to know that – are you taking this
seriously? I can’t tell. Are you?”

“Yes.”

“Okay. Because this
comes down from on high. You know who I mean. I know that you and her have
cooperated before, on more than one occasion. And we’ve done the two of you additional
favors as a show of good faith. After the last deal, you told her to lay off,
and we’ve respected that, but she felt it was important to make sure that you
know that you aren’t alone in this. Well, you don’t have to be, anyway. These
people you are dealing with – I’m really not sure what makes them tick, but
they are weird as fuck. You don’t want to take them lightly. There’s been some
strange stuff happening around here, and they have connections – to Central and
the Director himself. They have resources, and they are protected like you
wouldn’t believe. You must understand that the Black Sun is risking a great deal
by approaching you.”

“Yes.”

Katya sighed and kicked
a small rock off the hill, out toward the rolling hills and sparse scrub brush
that surrounded the Far Shores. The only light came from behind, the glow of
the ambient light of the compound reflected on the solid vast grey of the cloud
cover. The Changeling stood beside her, diminutive and indifferent, watching
the blank sky as if the clouds were no obstacle to her strange eyes.

According to the dossier
the Black Sun maintained on Eerie, this was a distinct possibility.

Katya wished there was
more light, but doing this anywhere in the vicinity of the Far Shores and its
pervasive surveillance was far too risky. She wondered if Eerie’s lack of
concern was feigned, genuine, or a product of the vast gulf that separated the
two of them. Interspecies communication was entirely too difficult. This was
the kind of thing that was best left to the experts. Katya was an assassin,
after all. She would have felt more comfortable dealing with the numerous
unknowns that the Changeling presented in the context of killing her. She toyed
with that idea while Eerie considered the offer, or at least appeared to do so;
murdering Eerie with a handful of the coarse sand they stood on, then hiding
her body in the tangled blackberry bushes and poison oak that filled the bottom
of the ravine at the base of the hill, for the birds and the raccoons to nibble
on until they found her.

There was no malice
behind the speculation. It was just how Katya passed the time.

She wondered how long
Eerie was going to let her stand there. She wondered what she saw when she
looked up at the clouded night sky. She wondered if Eerie and Alex had fucked
yet, and if he was as bad as she suspected. Katya stood and looked out at
nothing, wishing she had worn jeans instead of a skirt, regretting her failure
to snag dessert on her way out of the dining hall, speculating on what stupid
shit Vivik and Alex were chatting about while she and Eerie stood in silence.
Katya waited until her impatience, tired feet, and grumbling stomach got the
better of her.

“Well? What do you
think?”

“Hmm?”

Katya stomped her foot,
clenched her fists, and raised her voice.

“What the hell? The
offer, Eerie! What do you think about all of this?”

Eerie turned her head
slowly to regard her. Katya took half a step backward, and her hand brushed the
needles embedded carefully in the lining of her skirt reflexively.

There was something
wrong with Eerie’s eyes. And it must have been an optical illusion, a result of
spending too much time in relative darkness, but Katya could have sworn that
there were tiny golden flecks in the air, spinning and then disappearing, orbiting
the Changeling.

“What do I think?” Eerie
mused, her voice different, sounding amused and aloof, lacking its usual music.
“I’ll tell you. I think that a silly little girl who murders people for a
self-important girl that likes to play dress-up should have better things to do
than interrupting my time alone with my boyfriend, particularly when all she
has to offer is babbling and half-baked warnings. I think that the Black Sun’s
help always comes at a price, and that price is entirely too high. I think that
I am more than capable of taking care of myself without Anastasia Martynova’s
assistance, thank you very much.”

Katya’s breath caught,
torn between bewilderment, anger, and a creeping sense of apprehension. Eerie
took a single step toward Katya and put her hand on her shoulder, and it was
all Katya could do not to flinch.

“Most of all,” Eerie
said, leaning close, so that Katya could see eyes in which little golden sparks
danced, “I think you are worried about all the wrong things.”

Katya’s jaw dropped.
Eerie spun neatly around on the balls of her feet and walked away, back toward
where they had left the two boys chatting.

Eerie completed all of a
dozen steps before she stumbled, her momentary grace, like the golden motes, a
memory that Katya couldn’t be certain of.

***

It was a balancing act. Torn between
imperatives, Anastasia could only strive for a paradoxical middle way.

There was no way to know
how long it had been. Since she had been taken, she had seen neither day nor
the night, and her own internal clock had been hopelessly scrambled by drugging
and telepathic tampering. The former was unavoidable; the latter she allowed
because it was crucial to her plan. Anastasia had no intentions of dying, so if
that meant suffering the indignities of crude telepathic interrogation, then
that was exactly what she would do. It wasn’t even as bad as she had expected.

Her psyche was indomitable,
forged in the crucible of the training and conditioning that every member of
the Martynova family who aspired to leadership subjected themselves to, of
their own free will, from the moment they were old enough to exercise that
will. The assumption behind it was simple: any vulnerability would eventually
be discovered and exploited. There was no certain method to protect against
this eventuality, just various means to buy time. Rather than bowing to the
inevitable, her family had designed their own version of the Program, intended
to expose their vulnerabilities for the purpose of expunging them. Anastasia
had endured irresistible psychic torment over telepathically simulated years,
starting on her sixth birthday, and ending shortly before her eleventh, when
she finally found a way to turn the simulation on the telepaths.

Their deaths had been
regrettable if satisfying collateral damage.

The physical harm she
had suffered thus far was negligible. The precognitive pool had actually warned
her of much worse. Even her fingernails were still intact, though her most
recent manicure was ruined. They had not even gone as far as cutting off her
hair, a standard tactic to degrade female prisoners. Clearly, the Thule Cartel
feared the consequences of using even the least physically invasive means of
breaking her. But that did not mean her current state was anything like ideal.

Thirst.

She could not remember
the last time she drank, probably because the water was drugged. Regardless of
when she had last tasted water, her throat ached and every breath burned, as
her insides shriveled and her blood thickened. Her pulse was ragged, her mind
an endless cycle of banishing thoughts of her terrible thirst, only for her attention
to wander back to her body’s overwhelming need moments later. The worst was
swallowing, as she was unable to entirely suppress the reflex. It triggered
coughing fits that felt as if they were tearing her sinuses apart from the
inside. The dull throbbing in her head drove every consideration from her mind
other than thirst, and conspired with the drugs to prevent her from holding on
to any semblance of awareness of the passage of time. Maintaining the
regularity of the intervals between sips from the tainted pool was crucial to
her survival. If she had been able to judge the slow death of her desiccated
body dispassionately, Anastasia would have had sufficient will to force herself
to drink only the bare minimum necessary to survive, but the hallucinations
made that impossible.

Had it been one hour, a
day, a handful of minutes? She could not judge by the sluggish pulsating of her
heart or the ragged ebb and flow of her fractured thoughts. There was no change
in lighting, no pattern of sounds, no movement to observe. Only the uniformity
of her surroundings, the maddening music of water from the fountain trickling
into the pool, the occasional drop that landed on her bare skin only to
disappear like rain on parched earth.

When they first placed
her in her prison, naked and without resources, it had been utterly dark, a
sealed room with fluted stone walls carved in gentle curves, with adjoining
rounded passages and alcoves along the perimeter. Anastasia attempted to walk
the boundaries of the room, and estimated it to be large, tens of meters in
either direction, but there were interior walls and long, subtle curves that
made a true measurement impossible. There may have been a sequence of
interlocking chambers, or it could simply have been a trick of the
architecture, but whatever the case, any path she took, guided by placing one
hand on the shifting wall, she inevitably found herself back at the pool. It
was shallow, inset in the floor, carved from something that felt like
soapstone. There was a delicate fountain in the pool, shaped like a column and
inlayed with a metal filigree that was frightfully cold to the touch. The stone
and the fountain were engraved with intricate designs that followed grotesque
and indecipherable contours. The fountain alternated between a spray of heavy
droplets and a fine mist that brought a pleasant coolness to the air. The
carved spout was taller than she could reach and was set in the center of the shallow
pool.

She was not sure how
long they had tormented her, in that medical room, but it had been days, at the
very least, and her thirst was already monstrous. She suspected the waters of
the pool at once, and assumed that they were most likely poisoned, but there
was no possibility of allowing herself to die of thirst beside it. She debated
for what seemed like hours, licking cracked lips with a dry tongue and tasting
blood every time she swallowed, before she relented and drank a very small
amount, little more than a mouthful. Then Anastasia sat back against the
furthest wall she could find from the pool, rested her head on her knees, and
waited for pain or death.

It is possible that she
slept. There was no way to be certain in the unwavering blackness. When she
woke the air was warm and humid, and the dark around her was occupied with the
sounds of rushing, blood-red ghosts, the echoes of some quick and sinister
thing. Her abdomen was twisted into an agonizing knot, and tremors migrated
along the course of her spine, her skin caressed with the ceaseless movements
of innumerable insects that eluded her hands but never let her be. It was
possible that she cried out, possible that she held congress with the ghosts in
the darkness and the things that writhed just beneath her flesh, but even in
that extreme, her discipline held, and no secrets passed her lips. If she was
observed, then her observers gained nothing but the satisfaction of viewing her
distress.

There might have been
sleep, or unconsciousness, or simply a lapse of memory, time lost to horror and
unfathomable anxiety. The next time she remembered to open her eyes, the room
was so bright that she had to bury her head beneath her arms to keep the
horrible stark white from purging her mind of everything from which she was
composed. In minutes or hours her eyes adjusted, and she began to make out the
dimensions of her prison – white halls carved from a stone that was like coarse
marble, spiraling and overlapping in an organic and inverted design.

Not content with
polluting her mind with the hallucinations that came and went with a casual
concreteness to which she inevitably succumbed, the drug deprived Anastasia of
her ability to see detail. From across the room, the walls appeared to be
carved with details and frescoes describing fantastic and crawling shapes, one
melting into the next, implying tales of such inspired grief and beauty and
madness that she was nearly moved to the personal failings of tears or prayer.
When she tried to inspect these designs from up close, however, she saw nothing
but a brilliant white blur from which things emerged to torment her – names of
the dead and sharp-edged memories, dull suffocation and colorless amnesia.

From time to time, she
returned to the pool to drink, driven to desperation by her thirst. She forced
herself to drink sparingly, to limit the frequency of her trips, but the drug
dilated time and dislocated her from her sense of self, so it was impossible to
say whether she succeeded. Sometimes, the darkness returned, while at others
she was tormented by a uniform light so brilliant that she could feel the
layers of her mind peeling away beneath its radiance. Despite her best efforts,
she was never aware of the moment of transition.