The Far Shores (The Central Series) (71 page)

“Naturally.”

“If you didn’t need a
remote viewer, though, then why I am here? Since we are in Berlin, I assume
that you mean to intervene in the Ukraine…though given how dire the
circumstances have become,” Vivik added, nervously bringing a view of Michael
and Xia suffocating to the fore, “you don’t have much time left…”

“Not necessarily.”
Anastasia lowered her head in cooperation with her hairdresser’s efforts. “I
have no particular interest in rescuing the Auditors from the results of their
own folly.”

Vivik’s eyes flicked
from one view to the other, the displays alternating and reorienting and he
scanned them.

“Your intent escapes
me,” Vivik admitted with a sigh.

“Of course,” Anastasia
agreed amiably, the hairdresser tilting her head to one side before switching
to a comb and scissors. “While I think highly of your intelligence and
perception, Vivik, I would be very concerned if you were capable of divining my
intentions. My position may be hereditary, but I assure you that it is not
unmerited.”

“I never meant to
imply…”

“She’s teasing you,
Vivik,” Timor advised. “Ana, just tell him what you want, okay?”

Anastasia glanced at
Timor and pursed her lips.

“You are no fun, Timor.”
She sighed while contemplating the ongoing battle between Mitsuru and a number
of Anathema, both living and dead. “Very well. I am about to take action,
Vivik, as you must have guessed. And this particular action is one that I wish
to make public. Therefore, I request that you observe what happens – from a
safe remove, as befits your talents.”

Vivik turned to her in
confusion, the displays around him flickering as if losing signal.

“I don’t understand.
What do you have in mind?”

“Renton will remain
here, to assist you,” Anastasia explained, clearly amused by Vivik’s
bewilderment and Renton’s annoyance. “You will observe my actions. Renton will
broadcast them, making sure that the relevant parties are aware of today’s
events.”

Vivik shook his head.

“But why?”

“Oh, my dear,
sweet-and-oblivious Vivik,” Anastasia exclaimed. “What good is there in saving
the day, if no one is watching?”

***

Everything was uncertain.

The laughter, for
example. Michael was almost sure that he could hear Nick Marsh’s flat and
hollow laughter while he crawled aimlessly on the wreckage-strewn factory
floor, but it was impossible to be certain, because of the clamor the mass
death of his brain cells created. The sound was like metal pipes clashing, like
the rotors of some vast propeller. It did not make thought impossible; rather,
it made it impossible to take any of his thoughts seriously – their import was
severed, each floating freely through his head, without the tedious weight of
context.

Equally uncertain: His
distance from Xia, who hadn’t moved in what might have been quite a while, or
possibly no time at all. Occasionally, black dots would swallow up his vision,
passing across his field of view like opaque steam, and Michael was plunged
into a darkness filled with the sound of leaden bells clanging and a sweet and
vaguely metallic taste in the back of his throat, his wounds aching with the
acuteness of a rotten tooth, but without causing him the slightest distress. He
would wait out this periodic blindness, then resume his crawl when it receded.
Either he wasn’t making any progress, or he had lost his ability to judge
distances.

Truthfully, it didn’t
matter. Michael could not remember what he had intended to do once he reached
Xia. Perhaps he meant to flee the hallucinatory atmosphere that the Anathema
had created? Then again, what made him sure there was a perimeter to the
effects, or that it could be reached? And even if he could have, there were
more of them, he was fairly sure – Anathema soldiers with assault rifles and
machine pistols, the discharge of protocols illustrating unfamiliar features.
They were surrounded, Michael thought groggily, like the heroes in one of those
awful colorized old cowboy movies, cowering behind an archetypal pioneer wagon
while Indians in war paint rode around them in menacing and incomprehensible
circles.

There was further
confusion, regarding the matter of holding his breath. Michael was unsure if he
had been holding it in the first place, or if he had given up and began
breathing freely, reasoning that holding in a lungful of whatever was poisoning
him so gently was no better than gasping like a fish out of water, so he
alternated between the two, depending on what seemed more likely during his
protracted and staggered moments of clarity. The situation was only exacerbated
by his inability to remember what he decided previously, making any decision he
made fundamentally moot.

Sometimes, he wanted to
laugh, though none of it struck him as particularly funny. In fact, there were
all sorts of strange impulses that would possess his dying brain with a brief
and frightening intensity, only to pass on and be forgotten in what felt like
seconds, or minutes, or years. Not that it mattered. Michael waited for his
vision to clear, then he continued to crawl toward Xia’s static form, stretched
on the ground, faint trails of smoke extending from the burnt edges of the
gloves that still covered most of his fingers.

He remembered things at
random; like a computer, he thought giddily, maybe suppressing his desire to
cackle, random access memory. They were entirely visual, his other senses held
at a strange remove, as if they had been displaced by centimeters, crawling
beside him through the wreckage like the doubled images in a pair of unfocused
binoculars.

Alice had extremely fine
hair, Michael remembered, and there had been a particular feel to the way it
had felt, running a strand through his fingers – but all that was left to him
now was the look of the action, the cognitive portion of the memory absent the
sensory. The bed had been warm, he knew, and the sheets were flannel to ward
off the chill of what must have been winter. She was illuminated by a reading
light, flipping through one of her leather-bound diaries with an air of profound
concentration, occasionally frowning or sounding out words with lips bruised
from an altercation in the field a week earlier, the front swell of the lower
lip bisected by a perfectly linear scab. Michael had been half-asleep, woken in
the middle of the night to find her struggling with insomnia, tormented by
dreams of things that she could not remember, could not be certain had been
pieces of her perpetually diminishing past. Watching her read, he had felt a
peculiar mixture of affection and sympathy, something that he would never be
able to express accurately to her, and never be invited to try.

Michael rolled over and
let his eyes drift closed.

That was when the
visions began, when he was forced awake by sound and motion, irritable to be
shaken from the sleep that he urgently required, to see a multitude of
impossible things, rendered silent by the terrible ringing in his head that
receded to nothing the moment he forgot about it.

There was a woman with
curly hair who flickered like candlelight. Michael tracked her movements as a
series of still impressions, like a slideshow of an athlete in motion – burying
a knife in the throat of one shadowy figure, then knocking the legs out from
beneath another, then gone, departed from his limited point of view, only to
return again in the periphery, locking a man with a scarred face and
Mediterranean features he did not recognize in a choke hold. Before he could
focus his eyes, she was gone, and instead he saw the muzzle flash of a nearby
shotgun as it tore pieces from a man’s torso.

The room had gone dark –
not the natural half-light of mostly blocked daylight and distant halogen
lamps, but the pitch darkness of the underground or childhood nightmares, the
kind of darkness the encourages the eyes to make things from it; sinuous and
alien monsters writhing just below the point of perception, the reflection of
light off scales and reptilian eyes, the subtle aura of ghosts and the
disturbance of the air that implied motion where nothing moved. Michael
recoiled, or he would have, if such a thing were still possible, if he had not
been separated from his body, as if his relationship to it had been changed to
something he was confined inside of, rather than the form he inhabited.

The darkness was broken
by the vivid and stark gleaming of energetic protocols, by the certainty of
screams in the absence of sound, by the implication of claws and teeth and
frightening, alien eyes. The air around him was warm though he could not feel
it, and the ground beneath him shuddered, though he was unaware. He caught
occasional glimpses of the Anathema, fighting things neither he nor they could
see, but frightened both of them nonetheless, until they were silenced or
taken, one by one, by violence, or worse – by extensions of living darkness, by
things like tiny and malformed hands that consumed them, piece by piece, as if
they were clusters of invisible and voracious mouths.

And then, perhaps
because of his memory, the feel of Alice’s unbound hair tickling his face, the
taste of blood and lip gloss as her mouth pressed to his – but this had to be a
lie, another hallucination, like the terrible pain in his chest, the awful
sensation of compression. Michael tried to close his eyes, to return to the
rational safety of sleep, to peaceful and breathless quiet, but something
insisted otherwise. He could not remember if he was holding his breath, but
something would not let him, and the air that was forced into and out of his
lungs lacked the sweetness of the poison to which he had become accustomed.

Alice’s face, too close
to his own, a ridiculous point of view, like opening his eyes in the midst of
passionate kiss. Tears rolled from her cheeks to drip onto his face, and he
felt the wetness across his entire body, as if the liquid somehow resonated
along the whole of his skin. The thunderous ringing resolved itself into the
cries of the wounded, Alice gasping for air, the sound of his own labored
breathing. The black moss that had grown across his vision died away, to be
replaced with the lightning-flash clarity of the pain of a broken rib.

Michael rolled on his
side, coughing, despite the fact that it hurt. The pain came back to him like
the end of a rolling blackout, lights flickering on in sequence. Last of all
was a headache, slightly removed but insistent, the beginnings of a hangover
that he had premonitions would be horrible, the worst of his life.

His senses slowly
reordered themselves, and that hurt, too.

“Mikey. Shit, I don’t
know. I can’t tell. He’s breathing, anyway. Are you hearing me, Michael? Hey,
c’mon, wake up...”

Alice. A coughing fit
that almost choked him, his diaphragm pressing against the broken glass, the
sensation of fractured bone grinding.

“Alice.”

“Yeah, Mikey. I hear
you. It’s okay. He’s okay.”

The dull sensory
confusion rolled back like a wave after breaking on the shore. Michael almost
missed the numbness.

“What about Xia? Really?
Clever bastard.”

He wanted to ask. About
Xia. About Alice. Whether his dream had brought them here, or...but that didn’t
make sense. He hadn’t been lying on the concrete in his dream, the ground
beneath him discolored by some ancient industrial spill, hadn’t had a chest
full of fractured ribs, breathing air tainted by the smells of waste oil and
burning latex.

Alice rolled him onto
his back. She looked horrible, like someone had beaten the shit out of her.
Michael tried to feel anger over it, but nothing came. He was incapable of
feeling, he thought, a remnant of the numbness that had somehow paralyzed his
heart, lodged like a splinter of ice. Not his real heart – he could feel it
with every beat, thanks to the broken ribs – but the figurative heart, the seat
of emotion. Lost to him forever, he was certain. He would have been sad, had he
been capable.

Alice smiled at him, not
the terrible expression she wore for business, but the one she reserved for
their private times. His awareness flooded back, along with a tide of
conflicting emotion. He coughed again, then doubled up in agony.

That was good, though,
in a way. Better than crying.

Alice waited until he
had uncurled himself.

“You gonna live, Mikey?”

He nodded, considered
words, and found them. It was a relief.

“What...what about Xia?”

Alice glanced to her
right, seemingly reassured by whatever she saw there.

“He’s gonna be fine. At
least, that’s what they say. Found him face down. Turns out he must have had
some sort of gas mask or something in his kit, a filter or some shit. Kept him
alive. He’s not as bad off as you, anyway.”

“Who...?”

Alice shook her head,
then, annoyed by the hair that had gotten in her eyes, pulled it back with her
hands, and started to search for a hair tie in one of the little bags attached
to her belt.

“Reinforcements,” Alice
said, pausing to put a rubber band in her mouth while she gathered her hair. A
moment later, she had it tied back in a clumsy and somewhat off-center
ponytail. “They showed up outside, and then convinced Chike to bring them in.
Thule Cartel, I guess. They said that Gaul sent them to bail us out, and as
embarrassing as it is, I suppose we have to be grateful. This might have gone a
lot worse if they hadn’t shown up. I don’t know how much of that you were awake
for...”