The Far Shores (The Central Series) (61 page)

The Weir leaned forward,
all of its weight sagging onto Alex and crushing his torso, impaling its own
head on his knife. It took a moment before he realized that it had stopped fighting,
the savage eyes gone suddenly dull. Katya helped roll the Weir off of him,
shoving the body aside so he could scramble free.

“Are you okay?” Katya
asked urgently, taking inventory of his injuries. “Where are you hurt?”

“I think I’m fine,” Alex
said, inspecting the puncture wounds on the inside of his arm. “Mostly. Did you
get it?”

“I finished it off,”
Katya admitted modestly. “You did most of the hard work.”

Alex extracted the Glock
from its holster on his side with his good arm and chambered a round.

“Are there more?”

Katya’s nodded, both
hands balled into fists, needles protruding from between her fingers.

“You ready?”

“Yeah,” Alex said, aware
that he actually meant it. “Let’s do it.”

Katya moved, and he
followed close behind, clearing the wrecked car, staying low and dashing to
cover. Alex fired a handful of shots before he realized what was happening.

The warehouse was little
more than smoldering wreckage. The remaining Weir were not charging as much as
they were crawling aimlessly, howling as they burned. From the midst of the
burning wreckage, Xia strode calmly out, the light of the fire reflecting from
the treated surface of his goggles.

***

Emily pulled the Changeling behind
her as she ran through the hallways, following the map she memorized, that
Vivik had inadvertently obtained for her weeks before. Every few meters, Eerie
stumbled, but Emily tugged her onward mercilessly, forcing her back to her feet
if she didn’t care to be dragged on her knees. Whatever injection Eerie had
received continued to ravage her system, and she moved with all the grace and self-possession
of a rag doll.

Despite herself, Emily
felt a passing pang of sympathy.

The Far Shores personnel
they passed simply watched with wide, terrified eyes, or fled at the sight.
Either was fine with Emily. She had killed a number of security personnel on her
way in, trapping them in flooded corridors or blasting them with pressurized
jets of water, and then done the same to another group she had encountered
while searching for Eerie. If she didn’t have to fight any more of them, that
would save her some hassle.

Despite the incident
with the dog, Emily basically felt good about the operation. The plan hinged on
timing, and by her internal clock Emily was running a few minutes early.

She found the right hallway
on her third try, determined not to get lost in the winding interior of the
laboratories secreted in the subterranean heart of the power plant. Fortunately
this portion of the facility was built directly below the massive cooling
tanks, so it was little trouble for Emily to create enough pressure to punch a
hole in the ceiling and bore through a half-meter of concrete to access the
enormous supply of water. She allowed Eerie to rest sprawled out against the
side of the hall while Emily stood beneath the steady flow of water her breach had
created as if she were standing in the shower, waiting for sufficient volume to
accumulate to tear open the laboratory security door.

“Catch your breath,”
Emily advised. “We have a minute.”

Eerie looked dazed and dismayed
– but then again, her eyes were strange under normal circumstances, so
interpreting her expression was never much more than guesswork.

“Why would you help me?”

Eerie’s voice was
shrill, her throat tight with fear and confusion. Emily would have paid good
money for a picture of the way Eerie held her head in her hands, as if her
whole world had come tumbling down. That was a certain measure of revenge, in
and of itself.

Not enough, of course.
Not nearly.

“I’m not helping you,”
Emily snapped, stepping out of the steadily increasing stream of water to
crouch beside the Changeling. “That’s not what this is about.”

“What is it about, then?”

“Putting them in their
place,” Emily explained, jerking her thumb back to indicate the laboratory they
had fled. “The Far Shores.”

“Why?”

“They had an opportunity
to cooperate with the Anathema. They passed on said opportunity, and now they
are experiencing the consequences.” Emily smiled at Eerie, who was shifting
along the wall to avoid the growing pool of water. “You’ll understand soon
enough.”

Eerie shook her head.

“I don’t believe you,”
the Changeling said firmly, her misplaced confidence rattling Emily slightly.

“What do you mean?”
Emily tried to laugh, but it came off wrong – the sound was hollow and
unconvincing. “Don’t act like you know things, okay? You couldn’t possibly
understand what it is that’s happening right now.”

“I’m not so sure,” Eerie
stood up slowly, one hand against the wall for support. “I’m not stupid, you
know.”

“As a matter of fact, I
do,” Emily admitted. “So what?”

“Emily, do you hate me?”

Emily studied the
Changeling closely, hunting for any sign of mockery or superiority, but she
learned nothing at all from her impassive face.

“Not anymore. Maybe a
little, at first.”

Eerie tucked her knees
to her chest, and leaned her head back to rest against the wall. Her skin was
flushed red, and her thyroid gland was visibly swollen.

“What do you want me to
do?”

Again with the
infuriating sincerity that forced Emily to curb her desire to lash out. She
wished the water flow would increase faster.

“What do you mean?”
Emily asked contemptuously.

“So you won’t be angry
with me,” Eerie explained, looking ill, with her eyes half closed. “We always
used to get along. You were one of the nice ones.”

“I think we are a bit
passed all that,” Emily said, laughing nervously. “You must have noticed by now
that I tried to remove you.”

“You mean the fake email
during the Anathema attack? Steve and Charles at the old PE building? I thought
maybe that was an accident or something, a mistake on your part. They really
wanted to hurt me, you know.”

“That
was
the
general idea, actually.”

“Why?”

Emily didn’t want to be
annoyed. It messed with the feeling of superiority she was trying to cultivate.
She had moved beyond the Academy, embracing her new role and her life in the
Outer Dark. Her time in Central had not been happy, she reminded herself, and
the Changeling had been a key part of that misery. It was important to remember
that she had been justified – after all, they had taken every other option away
from her.

“Because you remind me
of being weak,” Emily said bitterly. “I know I never told you this, Eerie, but
by now even you should understand – I don’t like you. I don’t care what happens
to you at all – actually, I hoped that Steve and Charles would take care of you
for me. It wasn’t hard to persuade them, you know. Nobody likes you.”

“Not true,” Eerie said,
biting her lip. “Alex likes me. And that’s why you’re angry.”

“No. Don’t be stupid.
This is hardly just about some boy,” Emily snapped. “That’s why I didn’t like
you back then. Now I have a whole new set of reasons.”

“Then why did you help
me?”

Emily sighed,
frustrated. She checked the time and the water pressure, but it would still be
another couple of minutes before she could break down the door and start doing
what she had come here to do.

“I have a new job, these
days.” Emily’s mood was buoyed just by the mention of her current importance. “I’m
not the pathetic, lonely girl that you remember. I’m not weak like you. I have
responsibilities now – and little as I might like it, saving you was one of
them. Don’t worry, though – your safety is a temporary condition. Central is
doomed, you know.”

Eerie blinked in
confusion.

“Of course,” she agreed,
stunning Emily. “It’s inevitable.”

“If you know that,”
Emily said, aimlessly kicking water against a nearby wall, “then why do you
stay? We both know you could leave anytime. Actually, what I hear is that you
aren’t even supposed to be here anymore. You should have moved on. Why are you
still in Central?”

“Because I’m not done,”
Eerie said, shrugging. “Why don’t you like me?”

“Why would I?” Emily
retorted angrily. “You don’t have any friends, you know, not really. The
Director, Rebecca, Alex – they just feel sorry for you, that’s all. They don’t
care about you, they pity you.”

“Sometimes,” Eerie
agreed softly. “But not always.”

Emily checked on the
breach. Nearly there.

“I met someone who is
looking for you,” Emily said, crouching close to Eerie so she could whisper.
The Changeling’s neck was damp with sweat, and her breath was shallow. “Do you
know who I’m talking about?”

Eerie’s eyes swung over
to study Emily, but her face hardly moved at all.

“I don’t think we have
any friends in common.”

“Suit yourself. You’ll
find out about that soon enough anyway without my help.”

Eerie put a feverish
hand on Emily’s leg as she tried to walk away.

“Emily, don’t you want
to make up?” Eerie asked hopefully, staring earnestly up at her. “I don’t want
to fight with you.”

“Don’t give me that
nonsense.” Emily pushed past her, a pool of water following obediently behind
her like a loyal pet. “Stop pretending this is something personal. I came here
because I was told to, because John Parson wants some of what the Far Shores
has. That’s all there is to it.”

“Maybe,” Eerie allowed,
frowning slightly. “But I’d hate to think you were mad at me.”

Eerie stumbled
hesitantly after her, apparently unsure of where else to go. Emily felt a
limited sympathy for that particular situation.

“If it matters to you so
much, I’m not,” Emily said lightly. “You did what you had to do to get what you
wanted. I did the same.”

“That’s not true.”
Eerie’s voice was so soft, Emily could hardly hear it. There wasn’t much room
left in her head for things like that, anyway – it was consumed with the
vastness of the water reservoir above them, and the pressure she created,
focusing it onto a singular point, tearing the hinges of the security door free
of their fastenings. The hallway echoed with the groans of stressed and
fatigued metal. “I’m not the same as you. I really like Alex. I’m not using
him.”

“Are you sure?” Emily
glanced back at Eerie with glee. The top hinge of the door gave way with a
sound like a massive violin string snapping. “You can run away, if you want. I
won’t try to stop you. If you are clever, you might dodge those freaks from the
Far Shores. You could go back to whatever is left of your life in Central,
until we come to take that away. Of course, you’ll have to make do without a
certain someone...”

Eerie looked at her with
obvious concern on her normally placid face.

“What do you mean? Are
you doing something to Alex?”

“Me personally?” Emily
laughed. “No. But the Outer Dark has a long reach, Eerie. I wouldn’t bet on him
making it through the day. Or any of the other Auditors, either. In fact,
things will probably go very poorly for Central for the foreseeable future,
until we finish consolidating our power. You should run,” Emily suggested
lightly, feeling amused and superior, “while you still can.”

Eerie shook her head.

“I will see this
through,” Eerie said softly. “I won’t let you hurt Alex.”

“You won’t be able to
stop us.”

“I might.”

The door warped as the
metal cried out under the strain.

“Why are you so obsessed
with that boy, anyway?”

Eerie shrugged.

“I like him. That’s all.”

Emily laughed at her.

“There’s no point in
lying to me. I know what you really are.”

The door gave way all of
a sudden, smashing against the wall and then falling flat on the wet floor of
the corridor. Water rushed out from the flooded laboratory room, the hallway
channeling a surge about a meter in height past them. Eerie shivered as it hit,
crossing her arms across her chest and forcing her way forward after Emily,
against the current.

“No,” Eerie whispered,
her musical voice pitched too low to be heard over the rushing of the water. “You
would run away, if you knew.”

“What now?”

“Well, we’ve made our
introductions, and seen to the help. Why don’t we go and have a little heart to
heart with the owners of the place?” Alice swept her eyes across the charred
rubble and scattered corpses where the surrounding warehouses had been. In
front of them, the massive bulk of the former chemical plant loomed large. “I
have one or two issues that I want to raise with them.”

“Agreed,” Mitsuru said,
nodding as she loaded fresh bullets into a magazine. “What do you want me to
do?”

“Report to Central. Give
them a full update. I’ll go check in with Michael, see how the kids are holding
up.”

Alice left Xia and
Mitsuru to watch the perimeter, glancing up at Haley’s wispy form hovering
overhead like their own dedicated little angel – illuminated because she was
implanting visual information in Alice’s field of view, rather than actually
being visible – comforted by the knowledge that Karim and Chike were on
overwatch, ready to put an armor-piercing round through anything foolish enough
to move in their direction.

She felt a certain
amount of satisfaction at the preliminaries. The ambush had confirmed her
suspicions as to the Anathema location. As casual as the Anathema could be
about throwing their servants into a meat grinder, even they didn’t have the
sort of numbers to suffer almost one hundred casualties in a feint. The remote
viewers were unable to scan the abandoned chemical plant that was the suspected
Anathema compound, but the info one of Haley’s dogs had turned up during a
sweep of the perimeter increased Alice’s confidence. The technology the
Anathema had developed to shield themselves from both remote viewing and
unwanted apports was both bulky and expensive, so the likelihood of two
locations in the same city being similarly fortified was slim.

Of course, now the
Anathema knew the Auditors were there, if they hadn’t had advance notice. Making
the best of the situation, Gaul had dispatched teams of Operators to assist in
establishing a cordon, and tasked all of Central’s remote viewers with watching
the area for any signs of movement, conventional or otherwise. If the Anathema
chose to flee, the Auditors could pursue at their leisure and discover whatever
safe houses the Anathema had prepared. Should they decide to attack the
Auditors in the open, the Anathema would forfeit the advantage of any defenses
they had prepared within the structure. The more methodical and confident the
approach the Auditors made, the greater the psychological pressure on whomever
was bunkered inside. Gaul had given Alice only a few hours to play with, but
she meant to make the most of them. She wanted to assess the physical status
and morale of her team before they made a move, in any case. The kids had done
remarkably well under fire, but they were kids nonetheless.

“Hey, Haley?” Alice
called out. “You doin’ okay?”

Haley dropped several
meters, to levitate just above Alice. Her luminous form looked distressed, as if
experiencing signal interference, and she looked distracted.

“I’m alright, Miss
Gallow,” Haley said quietly, eyes absorbed with something that Alice couldn’t
see. “I’m just worried about Derrida. I haven’t heard from him again, since
that distress call...”

“What about the Far
Shores?” Alice suggested. “Could you have someone there find him, and make sure
everything is okay?”

“I asked,” Haley
confirmed, looking doubtful. “They said everything was fine, but they sent
someone to check. I’m still worried, though.”

“I don’t like it either,
kiddo,” Alice admitted. “But we have too much going on to divide our forces. I
need you to deal with the situation here right now, okay? Just stick with me
until I get us all home. If Derrida hasn’t shown up by then, I’ll help you find
him. Deal?”

Haley nodded, and after
a moment’s hesitation, ascended again to keep watch. Alice checked one item off
her list and kept moving.

Michael had established
a mini-triage area behind the ruins of one of the scorched warehouse buildings,
carefully chosen to be shielded from observation or fire from within the former
chemical factory. The support team had apported a couple of med techs in, one
of whom was using a portable X-ray scanner on Alex’s arm, while another applied
bandages to a flesh wound in Min-jun’s leg. Alice made sure her approach was
casual and cheerful, radiating the confidence that her inexperienced troops
required from their leader in such unknown and precarious circumstances.

“Alexander, how you’ve
grown,” Alice teased, ruffling his unruly brown hair while the med tech
scurried aside. “How’s the arm?”

“Not that bad,” Alex
said, with as much of a shrug as he was capable of without pulling his arm out
of the X-ray. Alice was mildly surprised by his stoic affectation, but then she
saw Katya hovering protectively nearby, fiddling with the wrap on her injured
hand, and decided that he was probably showing off for her benefit. Typical
boy, Alice thought, with a smirk. “Same arm as last time, though. Never really
healed from the first bite. Weir aren’t driven to bite someone in the same
place over and over again, are they?”

“Not that I know of.
Maybe you’re just lucky.”

“Yeah,” Alex said
distantly. “Lucky.”

“Cheer up, kiddo. At
least they aren’t attracted to your head.”

Alex nodded, but Alice
got the distinct feeling that his mind was elsewhere, and that they were
talking about two different things. Not that it mattered – as long as he got
his head back in the game before they moved on the factory, Alex could be as
moody as he wanted. If Alice couldn’t expect Mitsuru to fully contain her
angst, then it seemed unrealistic to expect more of a kid that probably should
have been worrying about prom dates and college admission. She moved to the
next table, where the other tech was poking at Min-jun’s knee.

“What’s the deal with
your knee?” Alice leaned over the tech’s shoulder to see what he was doing. “I
thought you got tagged in the calf.”

“I was. This injury is unrelated.”
Min-jun turned away, looking embarrassed. “While assisting Xia with the mop-up
of the remaining Ghouls, I slipped on something. I appear to have injured my
knee in the fall, though I assure you, it is nothing major...”

“A torn ligament,” the
tech reported. Alice recognized him – Tyler, a remote viewer whose unique
talents made him the equivalent of a living MRI. He had assisted in the triage
after the Anathema raid on Central, and had been a peripheral part of her own
recovery. She knew that any diagnosis he made regarding soft tissue damage was
almost certainly accurate. “It’s minor now, but if he continues to walk – well,
limp – on it, the results could be severe.”

“I’m quite serious,”
Min-jun said, freeing himself from Tyler’s grasp and sliding off the table.
Despite his best efforts to mask it, the steps he took were marked by a slight
limp and obvious pain. “I can handle it, Miss Gallow.”

“Tyler – can he continue
on with the operation?”

“Well...”

“I need him,” Alice
admitted. “This is a big one. If his leg isn’t going to fall off halfway
through, then I want him cleared.”

“I’m fine,” Min-jun
insisted, his statement ignored by Alice and the med tech alike.

Tyler considered it
momentarily.

“I suppose,” he said
reluctantly, rubbing his chin. “With the understanding that there may be
lasting consequences. Nanite repair is not a panacea. This injury could linger
if not treated properly.”

Alice turned to consider
Min-jun, who was clearly masking the pain when he walked.

“It’s your call,
Min-jun.” Alice knew what he would say, and she wouldn’t have pulled him,
regardless. Min-jun was her only barrier tech, and along with Katya, the only
one of the kids with genuine combat experience. But if he decided to stand on
his own, then she was certain he would stay on his feet. She didn’t need a
trainee Auditor to second-guess himself. “You up to finishing this?”

Min-jun just nodded.

“Good man,” Alice said
approvingly, clapping him briefly on the arm. “See what you can do to stabilize
it, Tyler, and give him something for the pain.”

“Yes ma’am.”

Alice went to check on
Michael, who was standing over the relatively intact body of a Ghoul and
staring intently, as if he had never seen one before.

“Friend of yours?”

“Very funny,” Michael
said, not looking up from the corpse. “You have much experience with these
things?”

“Too much,” Alice said
truthfully. Of course, she couldn’t remember a great deal of it, but that was
neither here nor there. Her diaries made extensive mention of her history with
Ghouls, all of it grotesque. “What’s bothering you?”

“You ever see one this
well fed?”

Alice took a second look
at the partial body at Michael’s feet. The Ghoul did look inordinately large
and round. Ghouls, as far as Alice’s research and memory went, were generally
emaciated, with every rib visible and their hip bones jutting out prominently.
This particularly specimen, while missing a great deal of one leg and the
entirety of the side of its face, sported a build that bordered on portly.

“That is odd.”

“So is this.” Michael
passed her the touchscreen that had been absorbing his attention. The display showed
a high-definition, multicolor rendering of something that looked like an
instructional animation for a cellular biology class. “What do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” Alice
said, turning the screen on its side. “What am I looking at?”

“Blood sample,” Michael
groused, snatching the tablet back and zooming in on one particularly area,
where a number of indented, roundish red objects and a similar group of ridged
greenish structures loitered near something that looked like a tiny space
probe. “Took it from this bastard a few minutes ago. Most of the cellular
content is what you’d expect – hemoglobin and fungal cells, mainly – but the
rest is anomalous.”

“Those aren’t…?”

“Yeah,” Michael
affirmed. “Nanites.”

“Oh, shit,” Alice said,
horrified. “They are introducing nanites into Ghouls? Why the fuck would they
do that?”

“That’s not it. These
nanites are dead and undifferentiated. I just sent the results to Vlad – he
says it’s more or less what he would expect to see in a sample taken from the
body of a potential Operator whose introduction proved fatal. One surge of
inactive nanites that proves toxic to the system, then no further activity.”

Alice frowned and poked
absently at the image on the tablet.

“Wait. So this Ghoul was
a failed Operator?”

“Yes.”

“Lovely.”

“It gets worse,” Michael
said, gesturing at the numerous scorched Ghoul corpses nearby. “I’ve sampled
four of them so far, with the same damn result.”

Alice put a hand to her
forehead.

“Look, Mikey, I’m in the
middle of an Op, and I don’t have the patience. You wanna just tell me what’s
got you rattled?”

“Assuming Vlad is right
– and he usually is – then these Ghouls were manufactured from the dead bodies
of failed attempts to create Operators. Judging from the numbers, it was
probably the result of a mass introduction.” Michael glanced over at Alice, and
she noticed for the first time that he didn’t look worried, as much as he
looked repulsed, even ill. “I think I found our missing kids, Alice. All those
potential recruits that the Anathema smuggled before we tripped over their
scheme? Well, I’m pretty sure this is what happened to the failures. And, given
the Anathema’s extremely sick methods of introduction and penchant for multiple
injections, it’s probably safe to assume that the fatality rates would be high.”

Alice joined him in his
solemn survey of the carnage that surrounded them.

“That’s a lot of bodies.”

“Yeah.”

“A lot of kids.”

He didn’t say anything.

“They don’t look like
kids…”

“I asked Vlad about
that.” Michael’s voice was utterly void of emotion, which was an aberration,
coming from him. “He said it’s a side effect of the fungal bloom. Apparently
all Ghouls look more or less alike.”

“Then why are these ones
fat?”

“Because they aren’t
starving.”

Alice poked the Ghoul’s
bloated stomach with the toe of her boot gingerly, vaguely worried that it
might burst and spray her with something disgusting.

“I don’t think I like
the implication of that.”

“Me either.”

“Wait a minute. I
thought the Ghoul thing was a fungal event – some sort of sporadic infection
that just occurs from time to time, with no particular rhyme or reason. I
thought Ghouls were wild, and the outbreaks were unpredictable. Isn’t that
right?”

“That’s right. Or it
was.”

“You mean…”

Michael shrugged, then
threw the tablet into the burning wreckage of the warehouse in one furious
movement.