“Oh, come on,” Emily said, patting the soaked mattress next to her. “Sit down with me. We never really got a chance to talk.”
“Right, because your new friends attacked the house we were in,” Alex said, trying to find a happy medium between averting his eyes and keeping his eyes on her so she didn’t kill him. “So, um, what happened to your clothes?”
“I came up the drain pipe,” Emily said, as if that were a completely normal thing to say. “I couldn’t exactly bring my overnight bag.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Alex said grudgingly. “I’m going to check on Katya. Could you put something on while I do that? Because otherwise I’m not going to be able to listen to a word that you say.”
Emily grumbled but after he left the room, he heard cupboards banging and thumping, so he figured that was as good as he was going to get, and hurried over to see if Katya was alive. He couldn’t find her pulse, and started to panic, but then he realized that she was still breathing, and wrote it off to lack of basic first aid aptitude on his part. She had a nasty knock on the back of her head that was welling blood, and she was soaked and ice-cold, but she looked okay to him. Alex propped her up against the junction of the wall and a nearby doorframe, where she would be at least partially out of the water that was gradually covering the floor. Then he went back to face Emily. She was still sitting on the empty trundle bed, but now she was wearing the top half of a set of surgical scrubs, so huge that it hung down almost to her knees and really didn’t do much to cover her shoulders and chest.
“Best I could find,” she said sweetly. “Now come sit down and talk to me.”
The mattress of the trundle bed squelched when he sat down on it. He tried to sit down a safe distance away, but she shifted over to sit next to him, the wheels on the mount squeaking with her movement. The water that seeped through his jeans was frigid.
“I wanted to tell you about it,” she said frankly. “But Therese said I had to keep it quiet. I’m sorry about that part. It must have been a hell of a surprise.”
Alex looked at her in shock at the mention of Therese’s name. His attention seemed bizarrely drawn to minutiae. He noticed that Emily’s ears were no longer pierced, then realized that when she turned to water, the earrings must have been left behind, like her clothes. And that made him almost intolerably sad.
“I’m sorry if I was what drove you to this,” he said, turning away before he got openly emotional with a girl that he had to remind himself was probably here to kill him. “I can’t believe Therese would let them do something like this to you.”
“I was really scared,” Emily said quietly. “Until I walked out of the water and saw my body back there, floating in the pool. It was almost sad, sad and pretty. But this was all my decision, Alex. Not Therese. And now,” she said, grabbing his shoulders and turning him forcefully to face her open, sincere eyes, “now I am so glad that I did.”
“What is the Outer Dark?” Alex said, licking his lips nervously. He tried to pull away but Emily’s grip was implacable and surprisingly strong, her hands wet and cold. “I thought I had a pretty decent scorecard going, but this is all…”
“Frightening, right? I understand,” she said, as sympathetic as always. “The Outer Dark is… a place, like Central. A strange place, isolated in the sea of the Ether. The Anathema found it Alex, and they found… things there, too. Old things, things not built by men, not only buildings — language and machines and ideas. The Anathema studied them, and learned things, and the things they learned changed them.”
“Okay, who are the Anathema?”
“They were Operators, once,” Emily said laconically. “Exiled for proscribed experimentation and technology when Gaul engineered his takeover of Central. Driven out into the world and scattered, eventually they found a home in the southern desert of Egypt. They took Central’s name for them — the Anathema — and made it their own. And then they disappeared for the latter half of the twentieth century.”
“God, this is exactly like being in class, and it’s fucking Spring Break,” Alex complained, and then he had a thought that made him sad all over again. Alex couldn’t understand what was happening — he was in danger of bursting into tears, and he wasn’t even sure why.
“Now we can’t sit next to each other in homeroom, Emily.”
Maybe it got to her like it did him. He couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t bring himself to look at her.
“I don’t think I’m getting the important part across,” Emily said gently. “I need you to understand that I did this myself, for my own reasons, and that it turned out better than I had hoped. If I had stayed in Central, I would’ve ended up a slave, a pawn for one side or another, until boredom or despair overwhelmed me, or I was sacrificed in the name of a larger goal. And if you stay, Alex, the same thing is going to happen to you.”
Alex shook his head.
“Wait, so this is another recruitment speech? You want me to join with the people who are out there right now, killing people I care about?”
“And why do you care about them?” Emily persisted, putting one cold hand on Alex’s knee. “What have they ever done but use you and lie to you? What about the Program, Alex, and what they tried to do to you? Who is it you’re feeling bad for? Rebecca? Gaul? Anastasia? They would throw you away in a second, any one of them, if they thought they could get something for it. Or is it,” Emily said, digging her blue-green nails into his thigh, “her? Are you sitting here with me and thinking about her again? Why are you so fascinated with that changeling?”
“Maybe I like that she doesn’t need me for anything,” Alex said, crossing his arms over his chest in an attempt to preserve a little bit of warmth.
Emily’s laugh was loud and filled with contempt. It made him feel rather small and foolish, as if he had just admitted to still believing in Santa Claus.
“You honestly think that? Did you ever ask her? Because I tell you, whatever you think of me, she’s twice the monster I am. Besides, there’s no point in worrying about her anymore.”
Alex started, and turned to face Emily, his face contorted.
“What did you say?” His fingernails were digging, unheeded, into the skin of his own upper arms. “Did you do something to her?”
Emily sighed, and then put one clammy hand on his forehead. His thoughts broke like a wave against a rock, and he tried desperately to hold onto the thread of what he had been saying, something that he knew was important, but couldn’t recall at all. He sank back onto the wet mattress gradually, as the tension and strength in his body dissipated.
“Emily, why?” Alex asked, surprised at the desperation in his voice. “Why did you do this to yourself?”
“You seem cold, poor thing. I’m sorry. I don’t even feel it anymore, not really,” Emily said softly, pushing him down on the soaked mattress. “I was keeping the water near freezing in case we had company, but no one is coming to interfere with us. Let me warm you up.”
She lay down on top of him, and he felt increasingly powerless to do anything about it. Not like the last time, where he had been paralyzed by lust, guilt, and indecision. There was something a little bit frightening about it this time, something heart-rending about her affections, but he felt all of it distantly, as if it was happening to someone else. At the very least, she was good to her word, and her body and the water soaking the mattress beneath them warmed considerably.
“Emily,” Alex asked slowly, through numb lips, “are you dead? Because I keep thinking that you are dead…”
Emily looked at him tenderly, then took his hand and placed it on the slick surface of her own chest.
“Can you feel my heart beat? Do I seem dead?”
Alex found it difficult to speak at that moment, so he settled for shaking his head. They stayed that way for a while, Alex dimly unsure whether he couldn’t pull away or didn’t want to.
“Are you still the girl I knew? How much of you is still Emily?”
“There have been some changes, I know,” Emily said calmly. “But I’m the same person I always was. All that’s different is my perspective, my motivations, and my abilities. I am still Emily Muir. I am still your friend, Alex. Have I ever done anything to hurt you?”
“No,” he admitted. “I wish you’d stop kicking Katya’s ass, though.”
“I’ll try,” she promised, laughing while she kissed his cheek. “Alex, are you glad to see me?”
“I am, but the circumstances are really terrible. What about Sara, or Li, or Vivik, huh? Some of them are could have been killed, Emily. Maybe all of them. I saw… bodies. On the way here.”
“I know, I think it’s terrible, too,” Emily said, running wet hands through his hair. “But you need to understand that they were going to be sacrificed by Central, one way or the other. Where possible, they will be offered the same choice I was, the same chance I am offering you. Besides, this was done when the Academy wasn’t in session specifically to limit casualties. It will all be over soon, and then there won’t be any need for anymore killing. We aren’t evil, Alex. We aren’t monsters. The Outer Dark isn’t frightening, it is… it’s indescribable. Beautiful. When this is done, we’ll go there and see it together, Alex, you and I.”
Alex stared up helplessly at the ceiling while his body twitched and responded to her every movement. It would have made him feel a bit better to say that it was unpleasant, but that wasn’t true. His urgency, his worry, his memory and his intent were all disappearing — like someone had pulled a stopper from his head, and now they were all draining out into the water that pooled around the trundle bed.
“I know what you are doing,” he said in a very small voice. “I can feel you tearing down the walls in my mind.”
“But you can’t even say that you want me to stop,” Emily pointed out, kissing him lightly on the lips and then giving him a satisfied and mischievous smile. If she were dead, it would have made him sad, but she was so clearly, immediately vital, that grief seemed absurd. “You know, Alex, I never understood what you saw in Eerie. However, I’m starting to think that being all nice and sweet was the wrong way to go about things. Maybe I read you wrong from the very start; maybe you like girls who are bad for you. Am I right?”
Alex reply was something on the order of an incoherent moan, as his thoughts broke and floundered, coming apart like a kite in the wind. He could feel her, inside his head, working her fingers into the cracks, shifting and rearranging. It didn’t hurt. It felt amazing.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said, caressing him with one hand, smiling at him benevolently. “I did this because I wanted to make my own decisions, without having to please you or my family or the Academy or whoever. I wanted out of the trap I’d been born into. And now that I can make my own decisions? It turns out that I still want you.” Emily laughed, running her fingers lightly across his chest. “It’s stupid, right? But it’s still what I want. And this time, I’m not going to be so nice about it.”
Alex put up his hands to push her away, but instead he found himself touching her wet hair, the contours of her damp skin. He could barely remember where he was. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly. Every sensation, every point of contact was magnified.
“This is why Rebecca kept you so close,” Emily said wonderingly, laying her head on his chest. “She must have loved it. Your catalyst effect really is amazing, isn’t it, Alex? And the feedback loop, when an empath uses your abilities to boost their own… How long have you and Rebecca been doing this? I bet Eerie wouldn’t like it much,” Emily scolded, her eyes twinkling, “if she knew what it felt like, right?”
“Eerie,” Alex managed. “I need to find out if she is okay…”
“Really,” Emily said crossly, “you are the least romantic boy. You don’t have to worry about her anymore. That’s all been taken care of.”
“What?” Alex said, trying and failing to sit up. “What did you…”
“Hush,” Emily commanded, one hand resting firmly on his chest as she shifted on the creaking trundle bed, moving to straddle him, discarding the wet scrubs in the process. Alex looked at her oddly for a moment, then he sank backwards on to the wet mattress and lay there, his eyes open wide, so overwhelmed with bliss and contentment that he couldn’t even began to think of the words for how he felt. “Do you understand? You finally belong to me, Alex.”
He had Michelle check first before Drake ported them in. He’d had more than enough surprises already that day, and Chris preferred to avoid anymore. Not that the remote viewer could explore the place with any certainty, not with the kind of interference they were experiencing, here in Central. He had Song Li send through a couple of her drones first, and then when nothing tried to kill them again, he and Song Li followed them over, with Leigh and Curtis in tow.
Bodies littered the hallway, most of them wearing the distinctive face-paint of the renegade cartels — Terrie, Taos, Mannheim and Western Rim all well represented in the slaughter. Song Li was standing above one of the bodies with her hand out, palm down, a soft, purple light emitting from her palm, a luminescent cone filled with swirling Korean characters. Chris waited until she acknowledged them. He wished that she would do something to cover the cauterized scars from where her eyes had been removed, but it never seemed to bother her. Maybe, when you spent a lot of time working with corpses, that sort of thing started to seem trivial. On the other hand, maybe that was simply in the nature of the gifts from the Outer Dark. Maybe you were better off, Chris thought with a shudder, without eyes. He was glad, very glad, that he had never had the opportunity to find out personally.
“There were guards, as was suspected,” she said dully, the light disappearing as she reported. “They were overcome fairly easily. Our soldiers made it as far as this room, where they encountered a man with red eyes. He used a variety of protocols in conjunction. They never stood a chance.”
“That’s Gaul,” Chris said, trying to keep the apprehension he felt under control and out of his voice. “So he’s still in here, somewhere, probably by the Source Well. However, he must be exhausted if he did all this by himself. This should be easy.”
Curtis was an empath, so the look he gave Chris was to be expected. He knew that Chris was nervous, even if the others weren’t sure. He was loyal, though, so he shrugged and followed along, his hobnailed boots making clicking sounds on the inset stone walkway. The building was huge, but the path in front of them continued to narrow. The hallway divided into a series of chambers, much longer than they were wide, roughly rectangular, with a high arch at the apex. Each chamber was slightly shorter and less wide than the one before it, and every step took them a little bit deeper, the grade almost imperceptible in the shadows of the hall. The further they went, the damper the air got, and the more ocher mold covered the stone walls. They passed through three of the chambers, each about thirty meters long, and found themselves in a hallway so narrow that they would have to walk single-file to go through it. By mutual, unspoken agreement, they all came to a halt in front of it.
“Can you see anything, Michelle?” Chris asked, peering cautiously down the darkened stone corridor. If this chamber was like all the others, then it should have ended right past where he could see, in the weak beam of his flashlight.
There was a pause. After a little while, Chris decided that he didn’t like the pause. He girded himself for bad news, and wished for the third time that they had thought to bring flares. The darkness in this place was oppressive, and the light from the flashlights they had brought seemed feeble.
“It’s empty, as far as I can see,” Michelle said slowly, her voice straining with effort, “and that isn’t very far. Something is hidden here, Chris. I’ve never felt such a strong aversion to anything before.”
“Christ, we knew all that,” Chris said morosely, looking at the gate and the impenetrable blackness past it. “Alright, Song, send your boys on down there.”
He’d worked with her for two years, and he’d seen it countless times, but Song’s drones, zombie-like reanimated corpses infected with her own peculiar nanites, still troubled him. He understood that it was the dead Operator’s nanites that Song activated, not actually the dead person, but it was still disturbing. Even to someone who remembered dying. Something about the way they moved like badly fashioned marionettes, the disturbing lack of respiration, expression, humanity. Song sent all three of the Operators she had reanimated down the tunnel, shuffling along in the eerie absence of breath.
It didn’t last long. Song opened her eyes and shook her head, the yellowish green light around her head fading slowly away.
“I think they made it as far as Michelle could see,” Song said, with her bizarre North Korean accented English, that Chris always had to run back through in his head to achieve a complete understanding. “There is something in there that inhibits protocols.”
“This must be it,” Chris said, running a finger along one of the invisible joining lines between the stone blocks that made up the base of the arched ceiling. “Beneath the hill the Academy was built on, as we suspected.”
“This is stupid,” Leigh complained. “Just send me in, Chris. They can’t hurt me, whoever is in there.”
“Unless it’s Gaul,” he scoffed. “He’s got an implant, remember? He can download telepathic protocols that could probably neutralize you, by yourself. An innate resistance to that kind of thing only goes so far.”
“Are we just going to stand here?” Leigh demanded impatiently. “If you don’t want me to do it, then what are we going to do?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to do it, I said I didn’t want you to do it alone,” Chris said sternly. Leigh looked mildly chastised at the public rebuke, but he didn’t have much choice, if he wanted to retain the respect of the troops under his command. Leigh might be the future of his race, but he wasn’t about to start letting her tell him what to do. “Okay, we move on. Leigh goes first, as fast as possible, until the next chamber is clear. Song, you follow after that. Curtis, you stay a cautious distance behind her, keeping an eye on their mental shields. I will be right behind you, then Michelle. Be ready — if we ending up fighting, we’ll need a barrier. Drake, you stay back here, and be ready to pull us out if things go south. Clear?”
The nods were more reluctant than he would have liked, but he didn’t blame them much. The narrow tunnel in front of him was the kind of position a soldier hopes never to be put in — dark, tight, with only one way in and one way out, too small to maneuver or fight in, and nowhere to run but forward. Only Leigh looked pleased by the situation, but then again, she could see in the dark. He gave her a nod and she started forward. Her speed was, as always, blinding. Song went next, and then Curtis followed hesitantly, with Chris and Michelle right behind him, almost pushing him along.
The tunnel was exactly as awful as it had looked — musty, cramped, and filled with stale air; and, now, nervous people walking in single-file. The ceiling arch was still a full meter overhead, but the path was so narrow that occasionally the stone walls would brush against his shoulders. Chris wasn’t a claustrophobic normally, but in that tiny passage, almost treading on Curtis’s heels, with Michelle so close behind him that if he came to a sudden stop that she would probably have collided with him before she could react, he suddenly became acutely aware of the thousands of tons of rock and dirt overhead, held up by stone supports built centuries earlier, never reinforced or supplemented. He couldn’t shake the idea that he could actually feel the weight of it, pressing down overhead, invisible through the inky blackness that surrounded them but omnipresent. Even the beams of their flashlights seemed subject to the terrible pressure, flickering and receding the further they went. Chris could smell rank sweat coming off Curtis, and he knew that the Operator was even more frightened than he was, which, paradoxically, made Chris feel slightly better.
The attack was timed so well that, despite his excellent hearing, Chris couldn’t tell what happened first — Leigh hollering that she had reached the far end of the passage, her voice echoing in what sounded like a vast space, or the sound of flesh yielding to something harder and heavier. Then was another sound behind them, more difficult to place, but when he turned around, something about Drake looked a little off. Then his body tumbled into sections, legs and waist collapsing in one direction, torso falling backwards. His head leaked everywhere as it rolled away into the darkness.
From the shadows behind him, Alice Gallow, mortifyingly alive and upbeat, waved cheerily.
Chris shoved Curtis into the next chamber, yelling incoherently as he did so. If he could have, he would have shoved him out of the way. After all, if Alice was still alive, then that meant that Xia might be as well, and if Xia was alive…
On cue, the tunnel they were in lit up with reddish-orange light, and Chris felt a tremendous heat behind him, the stone walls groaning with the unexpected temperature change, having been held at a constant by its depth for centuries. Fortunately, Michelle had good reflexes, and her barrier protocol was ready, or they would have died right there. As it was, the heat just behind Michelle was intense. Michelle had ground into his back in a panicked attempt to run and had almost fallen over, so that he was practically dragging her along. A wall of flame licked the pinkish-purple barrier she’d erected across the tunnel, like looking at a forest fire through a soap bubble. The barrier stopped the flames, but Chris could feel his back blistering through his cream-colored jacket. He managed to drag Michelle with him, pushing Song and Curtis forcefully into the next chamber, where things were not a great deal better.
The space was so huge it was hard not to be awed by it. To Chris, it seemed very likely that the whole of the Administration building that was the heart of the Academy could have fit comfortably inside the massive space. A great domed ceiling and utterly flat floor, carved from the stone around them and seamless, with no obvious joinings or tool marks, dominated it. The ceiling was so far overhead that the center of it, where the dome reached its apex, was lost in darkness, despite the shafts of reflected sunlight that made the room dazzlingly bright, at least to Chris’s eyes. Even in this situation, Chris couldn’t help but wonder who could have carved such a place, and how they moved equipment and debris through such a narrow access tunnel, but then he had to turn to more immediate concerns.
Leigh was down on her hands and knees, no doubt incapacitated by the man in glasses near the center of the huge chamber. It had to be Gaul; though he had never actually met the Director of the Academy in person, the red eyes, visible even behind his glasses, were a dead giveaway. There was a shifting, strange aura around the Director, threads of interwoven red and blue light that twisted and crawled through the space around him, dim and ephemeral. The red-haired girl who was kicking Leigh in the ribs like she expected a reward for it was more familiar.
“Margot, that is no way to treat someone who is practically your sister.”
“What?” Margot asked, hesitating. “I thought you were dead, Christopher. I preferred that idea to what I’m seeing here.”
Chris shoved Curtis, who was still staring at the chamber around him like an overwhelmed tourist.
“Activate Leigh’s telepathic shields, you moron.”
Curtis closed his eyes briefly, and then followed that with a series of strange hand gestures. Chris had never bothered to ask what exactly his subordinate was doing with his hands when he used his protocol, because he genuinely didn’t care. Now, however, it struck him as particularly ridiculous.
“Christopher Feld,” Gaul said warningly, his voice echoing all throughout the huge space. “I have been led to believe that you are the kind of man who likes to know things. You should know, regardless of what happens, I cannot find a future in which you leave this room alive.”
Normally, he would have chalked that up to the standard prefight demoralization. However, coming from a precognitive, a renowned precognitive, that was bad news. Chris was considering his response when Leigh swung into action, her shields apparently restored by Curtis. She stood up and grabbed hold of Margot in one fluid motion, one hand on her shoulder and the other on her wrist, then threw her, overhand, so far that Chris couldn’t actually see her hit. He watched her body sail through the air, into the darkness, and then hit the stone with a sound like a bag of meat dropped on concrete.
“Finally,” Leigh said, rubbing her side where she had been kicked. “Can I kill them, Chris? Both of them?”
Chris nodded happily. He was overwhelmed with pride, but that was normal, right? He was her guardian, after all. And she had turned out to be such a good girl.
“It’s hard to describe,” Emily whispered, her lips so close to his ear that she barely needed to make any sound at all. “Whatever you think it is, it isn’t like that. The Outer Dark is beautiful, Alex.”
“If you say so,” Alex said agreeably. He had been bothered for a while by the nagging feeling that he had forgotten something important, but he was so comfortable here, so pleasantly drowsy with Emily in his arms, that it was starting to fade in importance. “What is it?”
“It’s a place… sort of. It’s an idea,” Emily said quietly, running her fingers down the length of his arm. “It’s like Central. It’s somewhere in the Ether, near the very edge — did you know it has edges? I didn’t, not until I saw it. But that’s what the Outer Dark is, Alex. It’s the place where the Ether ends and there is nothing above it but an empty sky. There are no stars, Alex,” she said, pausing to nip at his ear playfully. “There are no stars in the sky. The sun never rises. At first, it was frightening. But after they show you, after they help you to see, it isn’t frightening at all. It’s beautiful. We will go there together, Alex, you and me. Not long now. The fighting seems to have stopped, for the most part. Central belongs to us, you belong to me, all is right with the world, and, very soon, Alistair will come to finish things here and then we can go.”
“Alistair?” Alex asked, alarmed. “Why would Alistair come here?”
Emily laughed and patted him on the head affectionately.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said brightly. “Don’t worry about anything. Let’s talk about something else, alright?”
“Okay. Where’s Therese, anyway? I haven’t seen her at all since before everything got weird…”
Emily sighed, rested her chin on his chest, and looked pouty.
“I’m not sure that Therese is gonna be okay. She’s always been ambitious. This whole thing was her idea, obviously. Using me to turn you over to the Anathema — and doesn’t that embody everything that’s wrong with this place? My own sister decides to use me the exact same way the people she’s trying to protect me from were planning to, for my own good, no less. I guess even that isn’t enough for her. Not that I’m one to talk. But I know my limits, and Therese never has. They made her… special there, in the Outer Dark. Stronger. I think it may have gone to her head.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m not really sure what it is you are saying.”
“Therese stayed back at the island,” Emily said sadly. “She wanted to fight with Anastasia.”