“I’m good,” Margot said, nodding, deciding to hold on to the remains of the jacket, settling for tearing the tattered sleeves off, making it something of a vest. “Where are we going?”
“We were hoping to draw them out,” Mitsuru admitted, walking briskly for the street. “This attack was the break we were waiting for. I acted as a telepathic conduit for Alistair, and he cracked that Anathema woman wide open. Alistair is tracking her remotely, to see where she runs. Even if she suspects that we are following her, eventually, she will have to attempt to return to base. Central will send a team to clean things up here, make sure nobody remembers this.”
Margot nodded, following Mitsuru back out to the street. There was a definite satisfaction in knowing that she had been the one to flush the Anathema out. It had to be another gold star in a folder somewhere, wherever they kept the records on the candidates for Auditor. Margot knew it was possible. Mitsuru had been elevated barely two months ago, and with Alice Gallow out indefinitely and Rebecca only sporadically available, the Audits department was desperately shorthanded. Shorthanded enough that she’d been working for them more often in recent weeks. Margot’s feelings on this were more mixed than she ever would have admitted publically.
She missed the security of the Academy; she missed all the people, even if she didn’t like most of them. She missed listening to Eerie tell her about the crazy dreams she’d had the night before while she breakfasted on pink and green Pixie Sticks, Margot sticking with dry toast and black tea. She wondered if Alex was keeping his hands to himself. She wondered if Emily had worked up the nerve to be a bitch yet. She missed her room, even though she still slept there on occasion. Nevertheless, the only thing Margot knew how to do was keeping moving forward.
“You are stronger than you look,” Mitsuru observed neutrally. “You did well, in the alley.”
Margot nodded and kept moving forward, out into the exhaust, the neon, and the endless traffic of Shanghai, pulsating like a fiber-optic jewel on the coast, surrounded by choppy black seas. She moved through the motion and noise as if it were water, as if she was born to it. Margot’s head swam with impressions and hazy memories: half-understood appreciative shouts from the construction workers across the street, jetlag from the long flight from Vladivostok via Tokyo, twelve and a half lost hours, a series of plastic cups filled with ice water, a Russian novel she’d bought in the airport but couldn’t bring herself to read, turbulence over the China Sea. She could almost read the promises of the neon signs, the business cards jammed in the phone booths advertising hookers, the words of the Cantonese pop music that the wind carried. The breeze was still damp and fresh from wherever it had come, and she had to imagine it was a better place, one not so thoroughly poisoned with light.
She could have been any number of things, of course. Margot knew that as well as she knew her own name. However, her nature was what it was, and she couldn’t be sure if she had always been that way, or if it began the day that she woke up screaming on a slab in a morgue in the arms of a laughing old vampire. Margot would not pretend that she was doomed to the life she lived, though. Nothing had been inevitable. She had made each decision deliberately.
Most of her kind chose to join the Syndicate. The almost pervasive information gathering society managed to stay far enough ahead of everyone else to make a business out of it, and made the most natural employer for a vampire at large. Her guardian, a much older vampire named Christopher Feld, had approached her to make that very offer not long ago. She had rebuffed the offer angrily, without knowing exactly what had upset her. Margot had heard that the guardian relationship was supposed to be important amongst vampires, but apparently, Feld didn’t hold to that philosophy, because she had hardly ever seen him before. Still, when she heard of his death, she locked herself in her room and stared blankly at a wall, unable to recall precisely how he had looked.
Anastasia had knocked on her door that night and invited herself in to listen sympathetically. Then she made Margot the most extraordinary offer; one that seemed preposterous, even coming from Anastasia. The opportunity to be a new kind of Auditor, a sponsored representative of the Black Sun. To become part of the emerging inner circle of the most powerful cartel of all, something no vampire had ever achieved.
There had been no need to think it over. Margot knew exactly what she wanted to do. There were any number of things that she could have done. She could feel them falling away from her like dead leaves, possibilities she had shed and abandoned. It was exhilarating; at the same time, it was also terrifying.
The night flowed past her like water, light, code, and language and Margot moved through it with the brutal grace of a tiger shark, a grey shape flitting across the swirl of color that surrounded her; the promise of violence, an implication carried in the chill of the wind. Margot felt that if she ever stopped moving she would suffocate. The car arrived, a boxy van manufactured in one of the factory towns that had sprung up across the countryside; inside, holding the door open, she could make out the white of Xia’s mask, pulled tight around his mouth and nose, and the reflection of the city lights in the goggles he wore.
Margot continued forward, the only way she knew.
Sitting in Alice’s diary room, her legs folded neatly beneath her the way Mitsuru had taught her, Rebecca sat with her hands intertwined in Alice’s, and thought about stargazing.
Rebecca was sure that nobody else knew her secret, unless Alistair had done more digging around in her head than he would admit to. A sudden reminder of the question her first combat instructor had asked her, “What kind of idiot trusts a telepath not to read minds?” The impact of this statement was somewhat diminished by the fact that this same combat instructor was now sitting opposite her, Rebecca’s hands in her lap, with blank eyes and an equally vapid facial expression. The old Alice Gallow, the one Rebecca remembered from when she arrived at the Academy, had been a wolf just barely wedged into a woman’s clothing.
For most people, peace was a place, a physical location, and Rebecca was no exception. In moments like these, when she needed to generate a calm, a state of gentle fulfillment, she thought of a certain night, spent alone in the Swiss Alps, lying on wet grass in a meadow and staring at the stars. It was a private memory, a secret from everyone; she kept it sacrosanct, sharing only the way it made her feel, not the where and why of it. Rebecca had extended this feeling to Alice twenty minutes ago, and then nurtured it when she felt it take hold, like blowing on a coal to start a fire. She had the process going smoothly by the time Alistair arrived, cultivating peace into Alice and drawing strength from it herself, a feedback loop that Rebecca occasionally suspected could lead to Nirvana. She followed it so far and no farther (except once, accidentally, with the infinitely troublesome Alex Warner) because she was afraid she would not come back. As it was, Rebecca barely noticed when Alistair came in and sat down beside them, taking one of each of the women’s hands in his own.
Because they had agreed upon it, years ago, Alistair spoke with his voice instead of his mind. Alice claimed to trust his voice more, but Rebecca had mixed feelings.
“Hello, Alice. My name is Alistair, and I am a friend, an old friend and a student who is happy to see you. I am Rebecca’s friend as well, so you know you can trust me. Isn’t that right, Rebecca?”
Rebecca nodded and oozed trustworthiness. She had arrived two hours earlier and discreetly dyed Alice’s hair her usual matte black, and then washed her hair, amazed the entire time that Alice allowed the procedure without registering a protest. When she’d helped her shower, Alice’s body was as lovely and youthful as always, taut with perfect, unscarred skin, and Rebecca marveled over it, over the crisp black tattoos that crawled over her back and arms, as perfect as the day she’d gotten them. She couldn’t imagine Alice allowing anyone to touch her like this under normal circumstances, and while she felt an almost maternal satisfaction in caring for her, it was somehow troubling. Rebecca had clamp down on the emotion, to avoid infecting Alice with it. She hoped that Alistair wouldn’t notice the black dye that still stained parts of Alice’s scalp. Alice might have changed a lot since they first met, but she was still vain and sensitive about her age.