“Hello!” Alex yelled over the near deafening music, waving like a total idiot, and then shoving his hands in his pockets, so they couldn’t embarrass him any further.
Eerie blinked, looking briefly confused.
“Hi…”
Alex stood in the doorway.
“What — uh, what are you listening to?” Alex asked, over the thunderous, robotic bass.
“The Glitch Mob,” Eerie responded seriously, after glancing at her laptop. “Do you like it?”
Alex shrugged, at first trying to figure out if that was the artist or the song title for, then deciding it didn’t matter. Eerie put music on his mp3 player all the time without him even realizing it, since he hit shuffle every morning when he put his headphones on. Because he’d asked about it, he was pretty sure he would hear the song again eventually.
“You won’t believe this,” Eerie said softly, from where she sat stretched across a small couch in the corner of the room, her tongue stained as blue as her hair from Pixie Stix, “but I actually tried to clean up.”
If she had, he couldn’t imagine what it had looked like before. There were two narrow paths through the clutter that led to the small couch on one side of the room, and the unmade bed on the other. The rest of the floor was covered in a layer of software cases, DVDs, and articles of discarded clothing. The desk in the corner groaned under the weight of several different computers and displays, and the wall behind it was at rat’s nest of cords and black boxes with green blinking lights. The monitor's glow provided the room's primary source of lighting.
“Thanks for inviting me,” Alex said lamely, shrugging out of his sweatshirt and then casting about for a place to put it, while she changed something on her computer that turned the sound down. He settled for tossing it on the bed, and then moved to sit down next to it.
“No,” Eerie said, holding out her hands. “Come here, silly.”
“O-okay,” Alex stammered, picking his way careful across the floor littered with things that looked like they might break if he stepped on one of them, stepping over the pile of discarded candy wrappers that surrounded the couch. Eerie waited for him, her expression blank and ambiguous.
She lay sideways across the cushions, with her head on one arm of the couch and her legs thrown across the other, her shoe dangling from one foot. She wore striped stockings that ran almost all the way to her wrinkled blue skirt, with only a sliver of white skin showing between. The tank-top she wore was blue, with the phrase ‘Fever Ray’ printed across it, which he assumed was a band. One of the her sleeves drooped down her arm, revealing her round, unblemished shoulder. Alex stopped at the edge of the couch, but she reached up and pulled him down onto the couch beside her, tangled up with her in the small space. Alex was so surprised and satisfied that he was afraid to say anything, for fear of messing the situation up somehow.
“Alex, could you move your arm a little bit?” Eerie asked, red-faced. “You are crushing my chest.”
“Sorry!” Alex said, straightening up as a reflex, almost falling off his precarious perch on the edge of the couch before she grabbed him and pulled him close again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to — I didn’t know where my hands were…”
“It’s okay,” Eerie said softly. “You’re allowed to touch. Just not crush, that’s all.”
“Oh,” Alex said, feeling his cheeks burn. “That’s, uh… I thought maybe you were mad at me.”
“Because you are being all cozy with Emily in class?” Eerie asked, her voice low and musical. “Or because you kissed me and then you didn’t talk to me again afterwards?”
“Well, both, I guess,” Alex said, rolling on to his side so that his head was facing hers, almost uncomfortably close. He could feel the air move when she breathed. “I feel bad about all of it, so I’m pretty sure it couldn’t have made you feel good.”
“No, it didn’t, really,” Eerie admitted. “But I didn’t bring you here to fight.”
“No?” Alex couldn’t keep his disbelief off his face. “Look, I need you to know, Emily is only my friend, whatever she thinks. I… I like you, Eerie.”
“That is good,” Eerie said, putting her finger to his lips. “Now show me how much.”
He tried. There was a long kiss, sometimes deep, sometimes with only their lips touching while Alex struggled to catch his breath. Eerie ran her fingertips under his shirt and down his spine, and it tingled and made him arch his back, pressing himself urgently against her. She kissed him again, pushing her small tongue into his mouth; the taste of blue-raspberry artificial flavoring, and seconds later a wave of euphoria, of disarming excitement and sensation across the broad palette of his senses, pleasure scrawled in neon letters on the walls of his mind. Eerie opened her eyes, and they were close enough that he could see his own reflection there, his own dazed and hungry face. For once, he didn’t have to wonder what she saw. The world spun and danced pleasantly as he lay beside Eerie, pressed together on the small space of the couch.
“Wow. That’s just…”
Eerie laughed, a sound like small glass bells breaking.
“That is how you make me feel,” she said, sounding satisfied. “That is how I know I like you. You can feel it now, too, can’t you?”
“I can,” he admitted, “but I’m not sure what to make of it. It isn’t like before, in San Francisco.”
“We aren’t like before,” Eerie said firmly. “You aren’t.”
Alex lay there, watching little multicolored motes of light consume the ceiling, filling his vision with self-devouring, brilliant fractals. He kissed her neck, and her sweat tasted like honey and the ocean, and her skin smelled of sandalwood. When he touched her thighs, her tights crackled with static electricity.
“Once I am back from field study, will you take me dancing again?” Eerie asked, clinging to him.
“Sure,” he said easily. He would have agreed to anything she asked.
“But this time you have to dance,” she ordered, her eyes sparkling playfully.
“How could I ignore you, Eerie?” He spoke softly, feeling as if the couch were floating on the surface of a gently rocking ocean, as if his hand was trailing along in blood-warm water beside them. “What is wrong with me?”
He wondered if the music was still playing. He felt like it was, but somehow he couldn’t be certain. Eerie sat up, brushing her hair back from her face and looking at him with obvious concern.
“Do you feel better now?”
Alex was about to be confused, about to ask what she meant, when he realized that he did feel better. The heaviness, the confusion, the fog that had been following him for days, so ubiquitous that he had stopped even noticing it, was gone as it quickly as it had come. His head was brilliantly, marvelously clear, washed clean by the euphoria of their contact.
“Holy shit! This is so weird. I must have been half-asleep for days. How could I have not seen it?”
“You didn’t want to,” Eerie said, shrugging, and then laying her head down on his chest. “I don’t blame you. She’s pretty, and you feel guilty every time you see her. That’s okay, but it makes you stupid and easy.”
He should have known. He did know. Of course. How could it have been any other way? Alex remembered Emily holding his hand under the dinner table and felt a little queasy. However, on Eerie’s couch, her head tucked comfortably beneath his chin, her chest moving against his when she breathed, there was no possibility of anger, and there was no implied criticism. He felt shame, but that was entirely his own. Alex realized with startling clarity that the only person he had been failing was himself.
“Oh, God,” he said dully, his lips numb. “Eerie… I told them that I would go on vacation to Anastasia’s place over the break. With Emily.”
“Yeah, I know. Margot told me,” Eerie said, with an unconvincing shrug that he could feel more than he could see. “That’s okay. I have to go do field study in Central anyway, for the whole break. We wouldn’t be able to hang out anyway, even if you stayed. Besides, I trust you…”
“Why?”
He asked the question before he thought about it, and then it hung there, out in the air, in the space that he had suddenly created between them.
“Because I don’t think that I trust myself,” Alex continued hurriedly. “I don’t know even know why I’ve done the things I’ve done recently, and now I find out that maybe they weren’t even my ideas to begin with. What if Emily… What if things get all weird again?”
“It isn’t like that,” Eerie said quietly. “Emily gave you a little nudge, that’s all. She made it easier for you to do what you already wanted to. She is not enough of an empath to make you do something that is actually against your will. Now that you know what she was doing, you should be able to avoid it in the future.”
“Really?” Alex buried his face in her hair. “So, I am an asshole.”
“Sometimes,” Eerie said, her lips brushing his neck. “I like you anyway.”
“Why would Emily try and manipulate my emotions this way? She had to know I’d find out eventually.”
Alex had no idea why he felt compelled to ask the question. Eerie shrugged in response.
“Rebecca might be able to tell you exactly what happened, you should ask her,” Eerie suggested. “Alex is interesting. I’m not the only one who thinks so.”
“But what do they want?” Alex asked, puzzled, his hands resting comfortably on the flat of Eerie’s back, warm skin through a thin layer of cotton. “Why interfere with… you know. This. Us.”
“You keep talking that way, and I’m going to get ideas,” Eerie said, smiling.
That shut Alex right up.
“They all want you for their own reasons,” Eerie said mischievously, levering herself upright so she was sitting across his lap. “I’m not that different, I guess.”
“I don’t understand,” Alex said softly, looking at the blue-haired girl, surrounded by a corona of soft, honey-colored light, everything gone thick, sweet, and slow. He reached for her without thinking and she melted into him, into his arms as naturally as if she had always been there. “I don’t understand anything.”
“Stop trying,” Eerie suggested, kissing him, nibbling on his lip.
They stayed like that for a while, pressed together on the couch, their hands and lips exploring each other tentatively. Eerie smiled at him, and she looked soft and lovely in the flickering orange light…
Orange light?
Alex sat up slightly, so that he could look out the bedroom window that had also caught Eerie’s attention. It took him a little while to processing what he was seeing.
“Ah, Eerie? This may sound dumb, but is Anastasia’s house on fire?”
“Brennan?”
“Yes, milady?”
“Is Renton still occupied?”
“Yes, milady. He is currently engaged in combat near the dormitory buildings. There are currently three separate engagements happening across campus that we are aware of, and I am afraid he is at the epicenter of the largest. Shall I send reinforcements?”
“I doubt he needs the help. Warn me if he comes back this way. And get Katya on the channel for me.”
It took a moment for Brennan to manage the switchover, with another delay while he relayed the instructions. Brennan was not half the telepath that Renton was, but she was going to have get used to doing without his prodigious talents in the near future. Such a shame, she thought, clucking her tongue. What a waste.
Anastasia smoothed the billowing skirts of her dress carefully before she sat down, perched on a moderately level rock, careful not to stain or tear the fabric. She had worn the white dress because she knew Timor liked it, but now she rather wished that she had not. She had a good view from here, at the edge of the trees, so that she could watch Timor work under the moonlight. It wasn’t often, after all, that one had the opportunity to see a combat precognitive in action. Given the rare nature of their abilities, precognitives worked almost exclusively in support pools, but Timor was an exception. A Class C Operator, Timor had enough precognitive ability to see a bare second or two into the future. That was surely the reason that his parents had tithed him to the Black Sun, and that Anastasia’s father had in turn pawned Timor off on her. Fortunately, Anastasia saw value in what other people discarded. In combat, after all, a single second was an eternity, and Timor had learned to use his foreknowledge ruthlessly. She had helped him become deadly long before anyone had realized their mistake in casting him aside.
She was not overly worried about the attack itself. She had already warned Brennan, Svetlana had spirited away the staff, and both the Black Sun’s critical documents and her own wardrobe were safely locked away in fireproof safes. Still, Anastasia had to admit that she hadn’t expected anything quite as uncouth or mundane as the Molotov cocktail they threw at the roof.
“Oh, no,” she said, burying her head in her hands. “All my things…”
“Milady?”
“Yes, Brennan?”
“Katya just reported in. She’s confirmed the secondary group in your area. They are attempting to establish a sniper’s nest. Do you want her to take care of it?”
“Yes. And warn Timor.”
“Of course, milady.”
The first three assassins fanned out, clearly waiting for the fire to flush their target out of the burning building. One of them was probably a pyrokine, judging from how fast the fire spread throughout the structure. They had to spread out rather far in order to cover all three sides of the building, while the other group set up on the ridge above the house; a spotter with a scope and a sniper armed with what appeared to be a small cannon. With limited personnel, it wasn’t the worst setup Anastasia could imagine, but she still felt a bit insulted. If they wanted to attack the future head of the Black Sun, they should have thrown everything they had into it. Splitting up their forces and attacking multiple targets across the Academy was either extraordinarily foolish, or a sign that the attack was little more than a feint.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Timor,” she said, eyeing the flames on the roof nervously. “Will you please hurry about it?”
Timor was faster getting into position than his sister was, probably because he had the dogs flanking him, so he could afford to be more confident. Katya was cautious by nature and the situation was likely to make her more so. That limited Timor’s options, as he had to avoid the sniper’s field of fire. In addition, Katya had to walk up the hill, a burden for which Anastasia felt a certain amount of sympathy.
Timor hopped the fence between the staff guesthouse adjoining her own in one fluid motion, utterly casual, without a hint of tension in his movements. When he moved on, half-crouched, he had a mammoth black CZ. 45 with a diminutive silencer held in both hands, held away from his body, pointed at the ground. Timor moved with utter self-assurance, and he never looked at the ground in front of him. She knew from experience that he didn’t have to. There was nothing there that could surprise him.
Timor and Katya, she mused, her cousins that no one had wanted, turned into such lovely and terrible flowers under her watch. Anastasia’s father had never really thought of them as anything other than an obligation, and he treated them accordingly. She had approached them early. They’d had a little trouble putting confidence in the plans and ambitions of a nine-year-old, but they’d come around quickly once they realized what she was capable of, and they had been among her most faithful followers since. They were both Class C Operators, and therefore chronically underestimated, frequently to their advantage. Katya was a transporter who could move only ounces, far less than her own weight, and Timor a precognitive who could barely see into the future. The Black Sun as a whole had not seen much value in either. Anastasia had seen tremendous potential in both of them, and in the years since her investment in the siblings had paid her back many times over.
Katya was erratic, vampy, obsessed with ridiculous gore films, and lethal within ten meters. Timor was polite, handsome, tragically her cousin and even more tragically gay, but equally as deadly in his own, slightly indirect way. Katya killed only on command, without passion or remorse. Timor killed effortlessly whenever he felt it necessary, preferring combat that didn’t upset his appearance. Both of them were devoted directly to Anastasia, rather than the Black Sun.
Timor let the dogs flush the attacker out from the hillock that concealed him, not too far from the gravel pathway. He simply pointed; he did not need to tell the Weir what to do. Donner and Blitzen were as smart as a reasonably stupid human, after all, or staggeringly brilliant wolves. They came at the target from both sides, almost simultaneously. If they had been trying to kill him, they would have gone for the throat, but instead they worried the assassin, clamping on to a leg and a forearm and tearing out healthy chunks. The man tumbled backwards, screaming as he fell into open space. Timor shot him coolly in the head with a suppressed pistol, far enough back to avoid any errant splatter.
The next attacker knew Timor was coming, and took better cover, behind a section of wooden fencing bordered by a raised berm that the pistol could not hope to penetrate. Timor fumbled in his coat pocket for a moment, dismissing the Weir with a wave of his other hand. Donner and Blitzen looked disappointed for a moment, and then they lowered their heads and disappeared together into the trees. Timor pulled a grenade from his pocket, set the timer and removed the safety, and then closed his eyes. He didn’t bother to open them before he tossed the grenade. His timing was so perfect that it never hit the ground; instead, there was an airburst directly above the concealed gunman, invisible from where Timor currently stood. The explosion tore the man to pieces.
Timor stepped out in full view of the sniper’s field of vision to stalk the third, clearly no longer concerned about that possibility of being shot from afar. The sniper team must have been so busy angling for a shot at either Timor or the target presumed to be fleeing the burning building that they had ignored Katya slinking up the hill behind them. She needed little more than line of sight before she could port the needles she carried somewhere instantly and dramatically fatal. Anastasia was pleased. Eliminating the sniper meant Timor’s task of taking the last attacker alive would be much easier.
“Well, that that leaves only you, hiding in the woods behind me. Are you ready to come out, yet? Because all of your friends are dead,” Anastasia said, with satisfaction. “If you had a move in mind, this would be the time to make it.”
The isolation field descended from the heavens like inverted thunder, abrupt and total, parting Anastasia from the scene in front of her like a pane of glass, perfectly polished and inset as to be virtually invisible. She could yell for help, she knew, and no one except the person who had been sneaking up behind her for the last few minutes would ever hear her. Not, of course, that she would ever give anyone the satisfaction.
“Anastasia Martynova,” the man said, from behind her. “You are a fool. It may have cost my entire team, but it will be worth it to eliminate you.”
“Eliminate me?” Anastasia said coyly, glancing over her shoulder at the man behind her. “Please. If you were a professional, you would not have bothered talking. Who are you, anyway?”
Anastasia did not recognize him, but she knew the facial paint he wore. He was from the Taos Cartel, a cadet branch of the Black Sun, and obviously one of their top operators if he had drawn the opportunity to take a shot at her. Anastasia found herself in a rare struggle with her temper. She had heard rumors of dissention in the ranks of the Black Sun, but at the same time, there were always rumors.
“It’s William Steed, Miss Martynova, but you can call me Bill, in light of the fact that I’ll be killing you,” he said, his grin revealing bad teeth. He wore the same blue and dark grey camouflage that the rest of his team had worn, his features partially obscured with cartel smudge paint, his head shaved down to stubble. “Unless you planned on trying to bargain with me?”
“Why, whatever for?” Anastasia asked, amused and letting it show. “Do your worst, Bill.”
He licked his lips and glanced around furtively. When he turned back to her, she decided she did not like the expression on his face much at all.
“Your bodyguards won’t hear you scream. They won’t even notice anything is wrong until long after I’m done with you,” William said with obvious relish. “I suggest you rethink cooperating with me.”
“Didn’t you say that you were here to kill me? Why in the world would I cooperate with that? Or are you suggesting that you could be persuaded not to kill me?”
William Steed looked nervous and excited at the same time, pulling an almost comically large and serrated knife from a belt sheath and pointing at her with it.
“Such a stuck up little bitch,” he sneered. “I remember you, Anastasia Martynova. You were sitting next to your daddy three years ago, when our cartel was disciplined and humiliated by the Black Sun. Do you even remember it? Or is that sort of thing routine for you? I remember your arrogant face, exactly like your bastard father. I’ve wanted to take you down a few pegs ever since,” he said, excitedly spraying spit as he talked. “I might like you better as a hostage, come to think of it.”
Anastasia laughed because that was what was expected of her, but honestly, she felt tired. Treachery, she thought bitterly, was simply exhausting to deal with.
“I don’t think so,” she said distastefully, leaning her head on her knee. “I doubt very much that anything like that will happen.”
“I can make you do what I want you to,” he suggested, his voice taking on resonance and authority. “You will make an excellent bargaining piece, Miss Martynova. I’d like it if you would come with me.”
“I am certain that you would,” Anastasia agreed, covering her mouth and stifling a yawn. “That was a telepathic protocol you just attempted, wasn’t it? Well,” she said, stretching out her back and then standing up slowly and turning to face him, “I suppose that it is quite impressive under different circumstances.”
He took one step toward Anastasia, and then another. William Steed intended to be bold and menacing, but the hesitation in his gait betrayed his uncertainty. Anastasia could see the concentration and the effort he put into his protocol, his face reddening and his eyes twitching with strain.
“Are you starting to understand?” Anastasia asked, her voice full of liberated, cruel laughter. “I can feel you trying to use that silly little protocol, William. Are things going the way you planned?”
He took a small step back, then looked at the knife in his hand and seem to draw some confidence from it, and stood his ground, holding it out toward Anastasia like a ward, like she would simply walk straight into it chest first, saving him the trouble of stabbing her. Perhaps that was the suggestion he was trying to feed her now. Anastasia could not be sure, and she did not care to be.
“Thank you for the isolation field, by the way,” Anastasia said, walking calmly toward him. “As much as I would like to make an example out of you, I simply cannot have anyone seeing this. It is an awfully big secret, after all.”
William Steed was right about one thing. Nobody heard the screams.
“You’re serious?”
Alice looked at her with an eyebrow raised.
“I’m pretty sure he’s serious.”
Mitsuru put her hand on Rebecca’s shoulder.
“I am also sure that he is serious. The… gravity of the situation cannot have escaped him,” Mitsuru said delicately. “Now, Rebecca, we need some of them to not scratch out their eyes and choke on their own tongues, so please, please, please calm down.”
“Yeah,” Alice chimed in. “It was funny at first, but we’re running out of bad guys.”
“They attacked my school. They came for my kids at my school, according to what this piece of shit of told us. You want survivors? Fuck that. Alistair can interrogate his corpse.”
“It’s a lot easier if some of them are still alive,” Alistair said, from the doorway, inspecting the damaged remains of the dormitory common room, where Rebecca and Alice had caught with the attackers. “I passed Margot Feld on the way in. She’s already reconstituted most of her torso.” He paused thoughtfully. “Somebody might want to get her some new clothes. Anyway, Rebecca, I need you to back down here…”
“Don’t try and be funny,” Rebecca snarled, turning away briefly from the three remaining assassins, who crawled and whimpered on the ground in front of her. “Nothing about this is funny. Brittney Abbot is dead. Chris Ross is dead. Cy So is — ”
“Actually, we got to him in time,” Alistair offered hopefully. “Cy will be okay.”
“Don’t you dare interrupt me!” Rebecca shouted, causing everyone except Alice to take one careful step backwards. “These are my kids! And this is my home… and this is not happening again.”
Alistair looked at her for a long time. Long enough for him to know that a ghost had woken today for Rebecca. A ghost from a trip long ago home to Venezuela to visit her family, one that had changed everything for her. All he could feel from her mind was the heat of the blast, the smell of gunpowder and burning plastic, and the awful familiarity of the voices crying out for help, years old, but as fresh as the wound in Cy So’s stomach.
“Five minutes,” Alistair pleaded. “Give me five minutes to ransack their brains for anything useful, then, if you still feel this way…”
“I can do that,” Rebecca said, and the light that came pouring out from inside her was a coppery red, a hard flat light that poisoned the eyes and skin of the men whimpering below her. “They don’t have to live so that can happen.”
Eventually they stopped screaming. Sleep would not come easy for any of the Auditors who watched, except for Alice Gallow, who slept like a baby every night. One of the men had been successful in ending his life. Alice did it for the other two, and she must have been feeling a little out of sorts, because it was quick and quiet. For Alice Gallow, it was practically mercy.
Rebecca knelt in the center of the room and wept like a baby. Alistair waited as long as he felt polite before he came forward, collected her in his arms, and urged her to her feet.
“We should go, Rebecca…”
“To Gaul,” she said, her voice thick and hesitant. “Take me to Gaul. He needs to know what I know.”
“Right,” Alistair said firmly, slinging her arm over his shoulder. “Alice, Mitsuru, you are on cleanup. Sweep the whole compound, no stone unturned. I want to know it’s clear before we have the kids running around.”
Alice hesitated for a moment, her eyes lingering on Rebecca, and then she shrugged and headed out, followed by Mitsuru. Alistair waited until they were gone before he lay Rebecca carefully back down on the floor.
“What are you doing?” Rebecca slurred, her eyes half-closed. “I need to tell Gaul…”
“I’m sure you do,” Alistair said, with good humor. “Let me ask you a question — how powerful of a telepath have you become, lately? Because tearing information out of someone’s mind, well, that’s not something I remember you being able to do.”
“It’s nothing special,” Rebecca muttered.
“It’s impressive,” Alistair said, disagreeing. “You’ve always been a peerless empath, but with your expanded telepathic ability, you are starting to get downright dangerous, Rebecca. I bet you need time to organize all that information you downloaded, right? Three men’s lives. That is a great deal to comprehend, much less sift through all of it for one fact. If I was going to guess, I would bet that these men made you aware of some kind of treachery, a plot to topple the Academy from the very top, right?”
Rebecca’s eyes fluttered open, and she looked at Alistair with obvious confusion. He gave her his most reassuring smile.
“And that is important information,” Alistair continued jovially, “but what would be even more important would be the name of traitor. Do you know that name, Rebecca?”
“Alistair,” Rebecca mumbled, shaking her head like someone trying feebly to wake from a nightmare. “Alistair, what are you saying?”
“You always worried me, much more than the other Auditors,” Alistair said, sitting down on the floor beside her, and putting his hand on her forehead as if he was checking her for a fever. Rebecca barely had the energy to struggle. “You were probably the only one who could have stopped us, so I always thought we’d have to get you out of the way before things got going. Once you started tearing answers out of people’s brains, tough, that got a little scary. I had hoped to wipe the pertinent details from those fools’ minds, but you had to go and do it yourself, and as it turns out, that works even better for me. I am sorry, but I really can’t let you tell Gaul about this, or about me, or about that word, the one that is bothering you — ‘Rosicrucian’, right? Don’t think so hard, it won’t mean anything to you. But it would a great deal to Gaul, if he heard it.”
Rebecca moaned when she wanted to scream. Alistair already had his hooks too far into her mind for her to manage anything more, and even that much struggle was agonizing, barbs tearing at the fabric of her identity.
“Now, now,” he chided gently, “it’s a little late for that, dear. With Alice, I managed to wipe everything relevant when I restored her memory, but dear Alice is so suggestible in that way. It’s a shame that you won’t be able to see how that resolves itself. I think you would have been very surprised.”
Rebecca managed to force her eyes open for a moment, but she could barely see despite that. Alistair was little more than a blurry form leaning over her.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Alistair said, his voice smug and filled with laughter. “I’m not going to kill you. I couldn’t bring myself to do that, thanks to your protocol. I doubt anyone could, even your worst enemy. Instead, I’m afraid I’m going to have to make it impossible for you to interfere for a short time, until things are finished here. Don’t worry, though,” he said, closing her eyes gently with the palm of his hand, “by the time you learn to speak and move again, it will all be over.”