“I heard that you and Eerie went on a date.”
“I’m not sure that it was a date. Exactly.”
“But you did go dancing with her.”
“Did Eerie tell you all this stuff? It was more like she went dancing, and I sat there and watched.”
“Huh. Very smooth. Quite the lady-killer.”
“Shut up, Margot. Why do we have to walk halfway across town to make a phone call, anyway?” Alex complained, hurrying after the vampire, who set a rapid pace. “There were phones back at the hotel. Cars, too, if we absolutely had to leave the room.”
“I need a pay phone, and it has to be far enough away from where we are staying that they won’t find us if they trace it. Besides, these days, it’s pretty hard to find one in the first place.” Margot threaded through the crowded street, talking without looking back at Alex, sounding bored with the whole thing. “I figured you could use the walk, to clear your head.”
“Really? Pardon me for doubting your concern for my well-being, but…”
Margot stopped at closed-down strip mall, glanced around for cameras, and then strolled over to a bank of phones so deep in the shadow cast by the flickering streetlight that Alex hadn’t even seen them. She inspected the phones from a distance with obvious distaste, and then pulled a set of latex gloves from her pocket and began sliding them on.
“Okay, okay,” Margot said, looking at the phones reluctantly. “Renton had an errand to run, and procedure demands that none of us be alone, until we are out of the field. Edward went with him, and Anastasia hates to walk, so I got you. Lucky me, right?”
“I don’t understand why this is such a big deal,” Alex complained. “I mean, Eerie already killed those Weir,” he said, immediately regretting having brought it up. “We are good, right?”
“Are you kidding me?” Margot stared at him in disbelief, and Alex felt very small indeed. “There have to be more. And anyway, I doubt that the silver one was dead.”
Margot shook her head, as if he had saddened her.
“I knew that was him,” Alex said with conviction. “I knew I had seen that bastard somewhere before. But, he sure looked dead…”
“Bet he did after Mitsuru was done with him, too,” Margot said, “and look how that worked out. I’ve never actually seen a silver one before, Alex, but they are supposedly very hard to kill.”
“Do we need, like, silver bullets, or something?”
Margot shook her head dismissively.
“More like a train to hit him with,” she said grimly, “or a cruise missile. Or,” she added, reaching for the handset, “Mitsuru, assuming you plan on letting me make this phone call.”
“Where did Renton go? And the cute one who never talks?”
“Edward?”
“Right. Him. Where did they go?”
Anastasia continued to stare at the television, the evening news turned on, with the volume turned off. The information was so dated already, she could hardly believe anyone watched the news channels.
“I sent them on an errand,” Anastasia said, glancing over at the changeling lying on the plush, queen-sized bed opposite her own, and then flipping the TV off. “There was something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway.”
Anastasia sat up and turned to face Eerie, smoothing the wrinkles from her black silk dress. Eerie looked over at Anastasia, propping her head up on her elbow, appearing genuinely surprised.
“Really? Because if this is about the cartel thing, then it’s very nice of you to offer, but…”
Anastasia waved her off, looking a bit distracted.
“No, Eerie, nothing like that,” Anastasia said, “I am not trying to recruit you.” Anastasia paused, then smiled at her. “At least not at the moment.”
Eerie stared at her blankly. Anastasia sighed, and shook her head.
“I will be direct, then,” Anastasia said unhappily, her hands folded in her lap in front of her, her posture rigid, her eyes boring into Eerie. “What is there between you and Alex?”
Eerie turned an immediate bright red, and hurriedly looked away. Anastasia had to stifle a laugh. They were two easy, Alex and Eerie both. She almost couldn’t help herself.
“N-nothing,” Eerie sputtered, still looking conspicuously away from Anastasia with all the guile of a guilty child. “Well, just friends. I mean, we only met recently, and…”
“Why did you ask Svetlana to send the two of you to San Francisco, then?” Anastasia asked patiently. “That is out of the ordinary, even for you, Eerie.”
Anastasia waited, her eyes fixed on Eerie. The impasse was not long. Eerie hung her head in resignation.
“You’re scary, Anastasia,” Eerie hummed quietly. “I am helping Alex. I didn’t do anything bad.”
Anastasia sat up, and reached over to pat Eerie on the knee. She noticed that Eerie had found time to buy cute patterned pajamas. She wondered what kind of underwear she had bought, with an internal smirk.
“Why Alex, though? Why are you interested in helping him?”
Eerie got flustered again, but this time, she didn’t look away.
“Well, he helped me,” Eerie said reluctantly. “And he is… interesting. Don’t you think so, Anastasia?”
“Very.”
“And also,” Eerie continued, quietly, almost as if she were talking to herself, “he seems nice, don’t you think?”
Anastasia felt pity for Eerie, momentarily, and then squashed it. Now was not the time to be sentimental, she reminded herself. She decided to risk pushing a little harder.
“No, Eriu, I don’t think so,” Anastasia said casually. “But, if you do, then shouldn’t you consider what getting close to you could do to that ‘nice’ boy? It doesn’t end well for humans who get involved with changelings, you know. Or have you forgotten your family history?”
Anastasia waited for a response, and when she didn’t get one, looked over at Eerie. Later, she would applaud her own composure, masking the surprise she’d felt, keeping her face impassive. In the moment, however, she was too stunned for self-congratulation.
Eerie was staring at her, sitting up at the edge of the bed, her posture rigid and her expression stormy, her eyes as clear and cold as the stream near Anastasia’s childhood home. And also, Anastasia realized, Eerie was emitting a subtle, shifting radiance; as she watched, Eerie’s irises ran the gamut between bright blue and murky hazel, one shade blending into the next. Around her, tiny motes of light spun and danced, making periodic lazy half-revolutions about her, leaving behind brilliant, multi-colored trails, each particle part of a golden cloud, a shifting, fluid expanse of light that radiated out from where Eerie sat.
Anastasia thought that maybe her ploy had worked a little too well.
“Mistress of the Black Sun or no, be careful what you call me,” Eerie warned, her voice cool and subtly menacing. The musical quality her voice normally had was entirely absent, replaced with a composed iciness. “I cooperated with you because our interests in this matter aligned. That does not make us allies, Anastasia.”
Anastasia smiled, her suspicions confirmed.
“Finally, you come out to play, Eriu.” Anastasia looked impressed. “I had an inkling, of course, but it was too hard to be sure. Tell me, then, what do you have planned for little Eerie? And what about Alex? I never would have imagined you were the romantic type.”
Eerie’s eyes narrowed, her irises changing color like an oil slick in the sun, her skin translucent and permeated with an amber luminescence.
“I will not answer your questions. I am not one of your servants, and I do not care how long your shadow has grown.”
The changeling’s face contorted into an inhumanly rigid sneer, so different from Eerie’s normal expression that Anastasia could barely see the resemblance. Anastasia felt a little bit bad for Alex, despite himself.
“Take my warning to heart, whelp. You have been compensated in full for your part in this. I am under no obligation to share my designs with you, regardless of our previous collaboration. I advise you not to interfere in my affairs, with the boy, or anything else. We will not speak again.”
“Fine,” Anastasia said airily. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”
After a moment, the light around Eerie dissipated and her eyes slowly refocused. She sat back on the bed, looking self-conscious, and then turned her attention back to the mute TV screen and the crawl of numbers that represented an abstraction of the world economy. After a little while, Anastasia also resumed watching the silent television.
“So, you do like him,” Anastasia remarked cheerfully a few moments later.
She managed to keep the smile off her face until she heard Eerie stomp off to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Like children, she thought. All too easy.
Alex looked at the streets around him, confused, and then over at Margot.
“Hey, Margot? Is this the way back to the hotel?”
Margot seemed to find something in the buildings across the street that required her urgent attention.
“Round about,” Margot said finally, still avoiding eye-contact. “Wanted to check and see if we picked up any company, before we took it back with us. And,” Margot added, reluctantly, “there was something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway. She isn’t what you think she is, you know. Eerie, I mean.”
Alex sighed, and looked over at Margot. The bar behind her made heavy use of blue and pink neon, and she was weirdly illuminated by it as she walked underneath the signs, almost otherworldly. Literally otherworldly, Alex corrected himself.
“Are we still talking about this? Did Anastasia put you up to it?”
Margot looked perturbed, stepping neatly around the blankets and cardboard boxes of a homeless encampment, which extended out from the alcove of a gated electronics store to encompass the inner half of the sidewalk. Alex looked away from the eyes he saw there, shining in the darkness, feeling an obscure and fleeting shame.
“I’ve known Eerie since she was little. We’ve been neighbors, since we arrived at the Academy, and because no one else would talk to us, we ended up spending a lot of time together.” Margot frowned, momentarily, and then continued on. “I am working for the Black Sun right now, Alex. But, it is a temporary arrangement. I’m not one of Anastasia’s creatures. I’m somebody who helps out, in return for an appropriate fee.”
“I’ve always wanted to ask,” Alex said, with more malice than he’d intended, “why didn’t you do something about Steve, that day in the cafeteria? You were right next to her, after all.”
Margot was silent for a while after that, and Alex started to wonder if he’d gone too far with his last comment. Somewhere in the city around them, not too far, a woman or a child screamed, the sound starting high and piercing, like a siren, and then slowly modulating down, and then trailing away to nothing. The silence that followed was more disturbing than the scream.
“We aren’t friends Alex, she’s just someone I’ve known for a long time,” Margot said curtly. “My profession doesn’t allow for much in the way of personal relationships. And I’m not about to start compensating for Eerie’s social inadequacies. If Steve was a real threat, I would have stopped him. He is a petty bully. Not my concern.”
Alex laughed and looked up at the moon, jaundiced and huge, like that first night, with the Weir, the night that the world opened up to reveal another world inside of it, like one of those little Russian dolls. It seemed wrong that the moon should still look the same, when everything else felt so different to him.
“Are you sure? Because it doesn’t really look that way, to me.”
Margot shook her head. Alex had gotten used to her pigtails, and she looked a bit strange to him with her hair down.
“Are you any different, Alex? We are all mercenaries, if you think about it. The lucky ones get to negotiate their own terms of sale. That’s all there is to it. Don’t think they won’t find a way to buy you. You’re lucky they are even interested.”
Alex shrugged and gave her a half-hearted smile to cover his confusion. They walked along in silence for a short time, passing through a block crowded with small restaurants and bars, each spilling patrons and cooking smells out onto the sidewalk.
“Alex, do you know what vampires are?”
Margot’s eyes were cold as she looked at him. Alex laughed, the sound carried away by a rush of passing traffic. He’d been in Central so long, it felt strange and crowded here.
“Oh, what my life has become,” he said, smirking. “Please, go ahead and tell me.”
Margot eyed him coldly.
“Remember the nanomachines that they injected you with, when you first got to the Academy? The ones that saved your life?” Margot’s eyes narrowed as she spoke, but her tone remained cold and flat. “Well, they ended mine.”
Alex looked at Margot blankly.
“Oh, didn’t they tell you? Those nanites kill a third of the people they introduce them into.”
Alex shook his head, feeling a bit ill. Michael had mentioned that there was a mortality rate, of course, and he’d even said that it was high — but Alex had never suspected anything along those lines. He fought a bizarre desire to scratch at the now invisible spot on his upper arm where the IV had plugged in.
“That’s why the Hegemony objects so much to the Black Sun’s philosophy of mass-introduction to the populace at large,” Margot said with a shrug. “They are imagining a few billion corpses.”
Alex failed to keep the horror off his face, and Margot seemed amused by it.
“Obviously, to Anastasia’s crowd, that kind of thing goes with the territory,” Margot said, shrugging. “Anyway, if your body rejects the nanomachines, cardiac and respiratory arrest starts almost immediately, followed by total brain death. Fast and irreversible. But they can’t just bag the body and call the morgue, at least, not right away.”
Pausing for effect, Margot seemed to soak up the curiosity and repulsion she could see on Alex’s face.
“They trundle the bodies on down to the basement of the medical building, where the only vampire on staff works, an old guy named Jorge, who’s had the job for decades now. I don’t blame him for not giving it up; after all, it seems pretty damn easy, as long as you aren’t squeamish, and don’t mind the hours.”
She deftly maneuvered her way through a crowd of smokers outside of a packed, faux Irish-themed pub, carving a path through the drunks and the underdressed girls who lined the sidewalk, raising her voice so that Alex could hear her while they walked.
“Jorge keeps an eye on the bodies, Alex. Weird guy. For three days, twenty-four hours a day, for everyone who rejects the nanites. And most of the time, that’s his whole job — staring at corpses.”
Margot turned back and looked over her shoulder, giving Alex an almost feral grin. For the first time, he noticed that she did in fact have fangs — or rather, a pair of subtly elongated canine teeth, the points of which peaked out from underneath her pale lips when she smiled.
“He gets a lot of reading done. Except, of course, when one of them sits up and starts screaming.”
“How often does that happen?” Alex asked, morbidly curious.
“Not that often,” Margot said, slowing her pace as the sidewalk cleared, so that Alex could walk more easily alongside her. “In the time I’ve been at the Academy, it’s only happened twice.”
“You woke up needing to drink blood after a three day coma? That seems a little unlikely.”
Margot laughed dismissively.
“Hardly. There was no coma. I died, Alex. I died, and then three days later, the nanites woke me up. They’d repaired the damage to my body, and made a few other small changes while they were at it.”
Margot took obvious satisfaction from the horror she saw in his face.
“Are you… you know,” Alex asked hesitantly, looking at her with a certain amount of trepidation, “dead? You don’t seem like it.”
“It’s hard to say,” Margot admitted. “I don’t feel dead. My heart beats, I need to breathe, I get hungry — I even have hay fever in the spring. But that isn’t everything. Something is… wrong.”
Margot shook her head and looked up at the night sky. Maybe her eyes were different from Alex’s, but he couldn’t see anything besides a dull humidity that reflected the city’s ambient light back, a moist grey blanket hovering over the bay, and the fat yellow moon behind it.
“The last thing I remember is agreeing to the introduction,” Margot said, quiet enough that Alex had to walk closer to her to hear. “I remember that it burned, in my arm, where they put the IV in. I could tell from the look on the doctor’s face that was something was wrong, I remember Michael yelling something. Then there was a terrible pain in my chest, and then after that, nothing at all…”
Margot trailed off for a moment, frowning.
“When I woke up, my chest didn’t hurt anymore,” Margot said, shrugging. “And nothing else has much, since then.”
“Wow. That’s all kinds of fucked up. I mean, I tend to think that they shit that’s happened to me is pretty damn bad, but that’s really a whole lot worse…”
“Thanks. I think.”
“I still don’t really understand…”
Margot sighed, as she stepped deftly around an assortment of broken glass and sleeping transients. The sidewalk here was stained brownish-red, for reasons Alex preferred not to think about.
“The nanites inside you,” Margot said, pointing at Alex. “Help repair and maintain your body, right? If you get hurt, they help you heal, if you get sick, they help fight the disease. Did you know that you’re more-or-less immune to cancer? I think the administration started playing that part down, lately, to try and discourage smoking.”
Margot smiled slightly at this, then hooked a thumb at herself.
“Those same nanites malfunction inside me, Alex. And not only when they killed me. When they brought me back, too. Your body is permeated with nanites, true, but mine is contaminated with them,” Margot said grimly. “Among other little changes they made, the nanites purged all the marrow from my bones and replaced them with a mass of nanoassemblers. No bone marrow, no hemoglobin.”
“But why can’t the nanites make hemoglobin for you? Michael said they can manufacture tissue and stuff, even bone.”
“Yours can,” Margot said, bitterly. “Mine can’t. Mine can’t produce any kind of living tissue. Nothing biological.”
Alex had a whole series of alarming thoughts.
“So what happens when you get hurt? If your body can’t heal, and the nanomachines can’t repair damage, then…”
“Synthetic replacements.”
The vampire held up one arm in the sickly yellow light of a flickering street light, looking at it wistfully, the way people look at childhood photos.
“Two years ago, I was working a field op in Tbilisi, clearing out a Witch coven. One night, while we were purging the old cemetery, a Ghoul managed to take a big chunk out of my arm.”
“What the hell is a Ghoul?”
Margot paused to glare at him for the interruption, then continued.
“I probably would have bled to death, without the nanites. When I woke up the next morning, my arm was already rebuilt — entirely from synthetic materials, doped with nanites. I can’t feel anything with it, anymore. The lab says it’s mostly silicon.”
They walked in silence for a moment, then Alex shrugged.
“Okay, so all of that sucks,” Alex said, more callously than he meant to, “but why are you telling me all this?”
Margot spun around so fast Alex didn’t even have time to get his hands up between them, her long black coat flaring out as she spun, poking one finger firmly into the center of his chest, her face contorted with barely suppressed anger.
“What I am trying to tell you,” Margot said, with a quiet intensity, “is that I am a reanimated corpse, one filled with tiny machines that are gradually displacing everything organic in my body. And as strange and frightening as that makes me, Alex, that is nothing compared to how strange Eerie is. At least I was human being, at one point.”
Margot stood that way for a moment more, glaring at him, the point of her fingernail digging into his sternum. Then she shook her head, brushed her hands absently against her coat like she had touched something dirty, and started to walk again.
“You might want to do a little reading on the subject,” Margot suggested evilly. “Find out what happens to people who get involved with a changeling, before it happens to you, too.”
Margot moved fast, leaving Alex standing by the side of the road, his mouth hanging open. She was a considerable way down the street when he finally caught back up to her.
“I thought you might want to think about that, before you try and get too cozy to something that isn’t even human,” Margot said, her voice casual, her pace steady and unhurried. “So, are you coming, or what?”
“I have never seen so many hipsters in one place.”
Anastasia snorted contemptuously.
“You should go to Brooklyn sometime,” she said, smirking. “It’s like this, but the size of an entire city.”
Alex looked at her to see if she was kidding.
“Sounds a little bit scary,” he said. Anastasia looked up from the office window for a moment, solemnly nodded her agreement, and then went back to observing the park spread out below them. The space they occupied was probably intended to be offices for the store below it, though it was being gutted at the moment, part of what seemed to be ongoing renovations throughout the building.
“Hey Anastasia,” Alex blurted. “Can I ask you something?”
Anastasia looked up from the window again, and arched one eyebrow curiously.
“So, the Black Sun thing, the ideology — you want to introduce nanites into everyone, right?”
Alex blurted it all out at once, without totally thinking it through, and was immediately worried that he should not have. But Anastasia nodded civilly and waited for him to continue.
“Well,” Alex said nervously, “what about all the people who would be killed? I heard that, like, a third of the people who get injected with them die.”
Anastasia appeared to consider this for a moment.
“Do you know what a cartel is, Alex?”
“Don’t ask me,” Alex complained, rubbing the back of his neck and looking petulant. “You’re in one, right?”
“A cartel is an agreement, between competing parties to control or manipulate a specific concern, for mutual benefit,” Anastasia said, ignoring Alex’s eye-roll. “An open conspiracy, if you like. We are all inherently competitors in the same business, all of the cartels. We have simply agreed to try and limit competition from the outside. Flowery rhetoric aside, the Hegemony is no different from any other cartel. Did Margot tell you what the Hegemony’s alternative to mass nanite introduction is?”
Alex shook his head, not at all surprised that she knew the details of his conversation with Margot from the night before. He was starting to adjust to the idea that Anastasia always seemed to know what was going on, even the things she wasn’t there for.
“The Hegemony wants to come to an accommodation with the Witches,” Anastasia said acidly, her voice dripping with contempt. “They are willing to consign a percentage of humanity — that would be the majority, if you are curious — to serve as livestock for the Witches, in perpetuity, as long as they agree to Hegemony rule in Central and the cartel-controlled areas.”
Anastasia saw the disgust in Alex’s face, and seemed satisfied by it.
“What price for peace, no?”
Alex rubbed his jaw absently, staring off at a point above Anastasia’s shoulder, trying to digest it all. The Hegemony seemed more benign than the Black Sun on the face of it, and to be truthful, Anastasia’s demeanor didn’t help matters. At the same time, it would be mistake, he knew, to confuse the messenger and the message, no matter how pretty Emily was.
“That makes more sense,” Alex allowed, reluctantly. “But, still…”
Anastasia waved him off, pressing her face close to the glass, reminding him of a child entranced by the view. Alex looked down as well, but saw nothing other than the same mass of picnickers, dogs, umbrellas and coolers that had crowded the hilly green patch, since they had taken their perch in the disused office space, more than an hour before. On the table beside Anastasia, her cell phone buzzed discretely. She punched the speaker button.
“Hey boss?”
The connection was bad, tinny sounding, and it was hard to make out the voice. But the wording made it obvious that it was Renton. No one else addressed Anastasia so informally.
“You see what I see?”
Anastasia continued peering through the window at something Alex couldn’t find for himself, much to his frustration.
“Yes. What do you want me to do?”
Anastasia seemed to Alex to hesitate for a moment before she responded.
“Stay where you are. I’m going to go collect Mitsuru.”
Alex continued to look out the window for whatever had attracted their attention, seeing nothing but a crowded city park in the late afternoon.
Whatever had been planned had been planned without him — Anastasia, Margot, Renton, and Edward had left him and Eerie to watch TV, while they held a hushed conference in the hall outside the room. Alex had resented it; actually, he was still resenting it. But, on another level, he did kind of understand. He was virtually defenseless, after all, and Eerie was bat-shit crazy. It had irked him a bit, though.
Eerie hadn’t seemed slighted by being left out, but she’d been weirdly reticent all morning, hardly speaking at all, and going out of her way to avoid him. Admittedly, lodging in Anastasia’s suite for the afternoon had been awkward despite its spaciousness, but that still didn’t explain it.
On the cab ride here, Eerie had made it obvious that she was trying not to sit near him, practically insisting that Renton take the back seat instead, resulting in near-constant knowing glances from him for the whole drive. Even now, she wandered around on the other side of the vacant office, walking aimlessly from room to room, occasionally pausing to examine where the walls had been crudely torn open to allow wire stripping, or to rummage half-heartedly through the personal effects and scraps of paper that remained, abandoned in the ruins of the office furniture deemed too worthless to sell. She’d hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up, and Alex was pretty sure that it wasn’t Anastasia that she was avoiding — or, rather, that it wasn’t just Anastasia that Eerie wanted to avoid.
Alex tried to follow her stare through the glass, hoping to pick out which part of the park she was looking at. He didn’t like that Anastasia had sent him out with Margot to make that phone call last night; he hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but when he’d come back, he’d found Renton and Edward bringing a bunch of heavy duffel bags up to the room, so he knew that Anastasia had worked things out to be alone with Eerie. Whatever had happened between them, Eerie didn’t seem to want to talk to him anymore.
He snuck a look at Anastasia out of the corner of his eye — she was sort of pretty, he had to admit, in a rigid sort of way, her hair pulled tightly back in a bun, her black dress excessively formal for the occasion, frilly and fringed with ribbon. Her sober demeanor and her childish appearance were constantly at odds. When she was focused on something else, like she was now, the cell phone in the palm of her hand as she waited for a response, her gaze fixed on something below, he could pretend she was a regular teenager — a bit spoiled, maybe, and probably awkward around people, the kind of bookish girl that he usually felt a little sorry for.
Something about the idea of pitying Anastasia struck him as amusing, and he found himself grinning. Anastasia caught it in the reflection, and shot him a look that combined curiosity with annoyance, but Alex didn’t care. Lately, he’d been feeling that he was spending too much time worrying about what Anastasia thought.
It was funny, in a way. He’d always thought of himself as independent, maybe even a bit headstrong, but then things got scary. And then, all of a sudden, it became very easy to take orders, when the person giving them sounded like they knew what to do. If they were good at it, like Anastasia was, Alex worried that he might not even notice himself obeying.
“Alright.” Renton’s voice crackled through the hiss of static. “She’s parked herself. As far as I can see, we’re all clear.”
Anastasia pursed her lips for a moment, looking out the window. This time, Alex was able to follow her gaze, to a figure shaking out a red picnic blanket, not far from the near edge of the park. Mitsuru, in trainers and a white t-shirt, her eyes hidden behind overly-large sunglasses, the kind they sell in the drugstore, looking uncomfortable amidst the sun and crowds.
“Boss? You sure you want to be the one to meet her? Ed says that he’s closer…”
“No,” Anastasia said curtly into the radio. “No, I’m going.”
“But, what if this is…”
Anastasia looked angrily at the radio, as if it could convey her glare.
“If it is,” she said firmly, “then we already discussed how to deal with that. Follow the plan, Renton. Everything will be fine.”
Anastasia put the radio down on the desk top, and then sat up, brushing off her dress and looking mildly perturbed.
“Very well,” she said, gathering herself with an effort, and dispelling any trace of nervousness. “I shouldn’t be long. If things go poorly, take her,” she said, pointing at Eerie, who was still sulking at the far end of the office, “and run. Get out of the state, to a city, somewhere big. Check into a hotel, and call Alistair. He’ll bail you out.”
“Right,” Alex said, nodding.
“No, ‘What about you guys?’ No worrying over your friends, or wanting to play the hero? We are here to rescue you, after all.”
“Friends? No,” Alex said firmly. “I can’t imagine there’s anything out there more dangerous than you, Anastasia. And if there is, you can be sure that I’m not going to try and fight it.”
Anastasia shook her head, as if she had tired of tolerating his foolishness.
“What, haven’t you met Mitsuru? Don’t be so dramatic, Alex. They come worse than me, I assure you.”
Alex waited until the door shut behind her before he went back to looking out the window. Despite the big talk, he did feel nervous, and yes, a tad bit guilty. It wasn’t that he had some particular desire to risk his life, in fact, he was still scared after his last encounter with the Weir. But, the idea of watching people that he knew fighting and dying in front of him, even if he couldn’t exactly call them his friends, well, that made him very uncomfortable.
Not that he wouldn’t run, though, if things looked bad. He’d worry about feeling guilty over it later.
Alex turned his attention back to the window. He knew that Renton was on the roof with some sort of scoped rifle. Edward had gone up with him initially, probably to help with the bags, and then had come down a bit later, alone and empty handed. He wasn’t sure where Edward had gone after that, but it couldn’t have been far. Alex got the impression that it was rare for Anastasia to not be under the watchful eye of at least one of her guards. There was no way, he knew, that they were letting her walk out alone and unprotected, no matter how it looked to him.
Alex had to admit, however, that was exactly how it appeared, at the moment.
Anastasia seemed a bit tentative when she stepped outside, before squaring her shoulders and crossing the street, marching firmly through the throng on the sidewalk at the edge of the park, ignoring comments from a group of teenagers clustered near a fire hydrant. Alex couldn’t decide whether she was actually worried, or whether it was an act, for the benefit of their unseen observers.
“Anastasia looks jumpy,” Eerie observed, causing Alex to start and glare at her resentfully. She was standing next to him with her fingers pressed up against the glass, staring down below them. “She’s not into being out in public.”
“Go figure. I thought you weren’t talking to me?”
Eerie looked surprised, and then a bit sad.
“Not talking to Alex? No,” she said, shaking her head emphatically, “I talked to you this morning at breakfast.”
Alex turned to her and stared in frustration.
“You asked me for the salt,” Alex objected. “That doesn’t count as talking to me, damn it!”
Eerie glanced over at him and raised an eyebrow.
“Picky. Alex is so sensitive.”
Alex winced without meaning too. He wanted to yell, but he bit his tongue, and forced himself to calm down. He’d been getting angry too easily lately, and he had the feeling that he was being played every time he did. At a certain point, it became difficult to say who was doing the manipulating, but Alex couldn’t discount the notion that there was someone who preferred him angry and impulsive.
“Whatever,” he said, shaking his head irritably. “What did Anastasia say to you last night, anyway?”
Eerie pointed at something outside the window.
“Anastasia and Mitsuru are coming back this way,” she said, nodding at the window. “Aren’t you supposed to be watching this?”
Alex shrugged.
“My only job was to run away with you, assuming everything went south,” Alex said wryly, sitting back down on the desk, his back to the window. “Given the lack of screaming and dying, I think it’s safe to say it won’t come to that.”
Eerie stared at him, her expression unreadable. After a moment, Alex looked away, feeling unaccountably embarrassed.
“Run away with me?” Eerie said, wonderingly. “Alex gets all the good jobs.”
Alex stared for a moment, until Eerie finally cracked a smile, and then started giggling. Alex had to laugh himself, partly out of relief, and partly out of shock that Eerie had made something resembling a joke.
“What’s so funny?” Anastasia demanded crossly, leading Mitsuru into the vacant office, Edward trailing a few feet behind them, smiling affably.
“Nothing,” Alex said, waving her off. “It’s good to see you, Miss Aoki.”
Mitsuru looked up from where she had dumped her bags on a vacant, dangerously listing desk, clearly a bit surprised.
“Right,” she said, shrugging and opening a bag that, to Alex’s eyes, appeared to be filled entirely with guns. “Let’s talk about how we get you kids home.”