“Don’t think I’m ungrateful for your help. I’m… well, uh, I guess I’m not sure. I guess I’m ungrateful, actually.”
“Seems that way,” Katya confirmed. “I did save you, you know.”
“Are you sure he’s dead?” Alex asked, leaning against a nearby tree for support, his legs wobbly and unreliable. “I thought he was when the Weir dragged him off in San Francisco, but then he showed up here…”
“Oh, he’s dead,” Katya assured him. “Whatever possessed him, it had to use his automatic nervous system, right? And that is full of sewing needles.”
“Good to know,” Alex said, sickened at the thought.
“Would have been nice to know about five minutes ago, smart ass. Say, was that you, with the mild chill a minute ago? Was that some sort of attempt to defend yourself? Or were you just sitting there looking pretty?”
“No,” Alex said slowly. “No, that was me.”
“Very helpful,” Katya sniffed, tossing her hair. “What a useless protocol. You couldn’t fight your way out of a paper bag if they gave you the month lead-up you need to use that thing. No wonder Anastasia thinks you need a babysitter.”
Alex opened his mouth to reply, probably to say some more things he would end up regretting later. Instead, he found himself standing there with his mouth open, staring. It would have been embarrassing, and possibly have inspired another hostile observation from Katya, but she was doing the same thing. At the other end of the clearing, Rebecca stood, leaning on one of the trees, gasping, panting, and so red in the face that Alex wondered if she was having some sort of attack.
“Don’t tell me that I ran all this way,” Rebecca wheezed, “for nothing.”
9
“Now you’ve got Katya following you around wherever you go?”
“I guess so,” Alex said, sipping from the bottle, making a face at the taste, and then handing it along to Vivik. “I barely ever see her, but I assume she’s around. I can’t blame her, really. Anastasia told her to do it.”
“Nothing you can do about that,” Renton said his voice full of sympathy. “She’s probably watching us from the bushes right now.”
“Look at the bright side,” Li offered, lighting a cigarette. “She could have assigned Renton to follow you around. That would be creepy.”
They all laughed, and Vivik handed the half-full bottle back to Renton. He took a long pull from it, drinking bad whiskey without even wincing.
“Shit,” Renton said, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve got no idea.”
Everyone laughed again, but this time, it was more tentative and uncomfortable.
“Speaking of which, Renton,” Vivik chimed in. “Are you going to fail again this year?”
“Absolutely,” Renton said, nodding.
“What?” Alex asked, looking from one to the other in confusion.
“Renton and I are both in the final class,” Li explained mischievously, “but Renton’s already been there for three years. He knows all the material, but he deliberately fails the tests so that he has to repeat, instead of graduating.”
“Why would you do that?”
“I work for Anastasia, remember?” Renton said, clearly annoyed with the question. Alex was surprised; Renton was usually unflappable. “I can’t do much to protect her if I’m not close to her. I won’t leave the Academy until she does.”
“So, you just fail over and over again?”
“Yeah,” Renton said, eyes narrowing. “You have a better idea?”
Li snatched the bottle from his hand, already half-drunk. Alex huddled deeper in the coat he’d thrown over his sweatshirt, rubbing his cold hands together, wishing he owned gloves, wondering if he could convince Eerie to knit him a pair.
“Man,” Alex complained. “It is fucking freezing out here.”
They were on the roof of the gym, sitting on plastic chairs that someone had dragged up here years ago. They were pocked marked with cigarette burns, and the one Alex was sitting in had a leg that was shorter than the others so that it rocked whenever he shifted his weight. They weren’t up that high, but the gym building was off by itself, set back from the rest of campus on a little-used path, and Renton assured them that no one came by there late night. By unspoken agreement, they never went back to the dormitory roof after what happened there during Alex’s welcome party.
“Drink up,” Li advised, handing over the bottle. “I don’t feel cold at all. Say, Renton, you ever wish the Black Sun would assign you to someone besides Anastasia?”
Even Alex thought the question was a bad idea, and he was notoriously dense. Renton’s relationship with Anastasia was… intense. It wasn’t a subject that anyone in their right mind would have broached. However, Li was boisterous when he was drunk, as Alex had learned in the last few months, and he liked to ask uncomfortable questions.
“I’m not sure I follow you,” Renton said reasonably. “She’s the future head of the Black Sun Cartel. Why would I want a different assignment?”
“You know. Somebody hotter. Maybe somebody who actually has tits,” Li said, stopping to laugh at his own joke. Alex and Vivik didn’t dare make a sound for fear of what might happen, but they also couldn’t look away.
“I like Anastasia just fine the way she is,” Renton said stiffly.
“That’s a little weird, man. Doesn’t that make you a pedophile? Even if she isn’t one, she sure looks like a twelve-year old. And you are what, twenty? Twenty-five?”
“I don’t mean it that way,” Renton said, pursing his lips distastefully.
“Sure,” Li said, laughing. “Because you have such a reputation for being ‘friends’ with the girls here.”
“Really? No way.”
“It’s true,” Vivik nodded, sipping gingerly and then making an even more unhappy face. “Renton gets around.”
“I do okay,” Renton said, with a grin that was anything but modest.
“Yeah, but I wouldn’t put Anastasia past you,” Li said cheerfully, clearly lacking any sense of self-preservation. “I saw you hit on Margot one time, and that’s definitely… definitely, uh, what’s the word I want here, Vivik?”
“Probably necrophilia?”
“Right, that’s it!” Li agreed. “If it had worked, that would have been necrophilia. You like the weird ones.”
“Maybe I just have an open mind,” Renton suggested.
That provoked howls of laughter.
“How much of this did you see coming?” Vladimir asked, hobbling around the room, still on crutches from most recent knee surgery. Gaul wished sincerely that he would sit down, but he knew Vlad was too agitated.
“All of it, but only right before it happened,” Gaul admitted. “They did such a good job disguising the possibility that I might not have noticed at all, had I not been looking for something of precisely that nature.”
Alistair looked up from the table, covered in equal parts documentation and Indian take-out. He had a probability matrix spread out in front of him, and he was making arcane scribbles on it with a black marker.
“This isn’t like the last time, the night where we found the Warner kid,” Alistair said, leaning his head against his hand. “The manipulation isn’t crude, it’s surgical. I don’t think I would have seen it without you telling me where to look, and I really hate admitting that. Whoever did this knew exactly what they wanted, and they planned far enough in advance to cover all the angles. It’s kind of impressive.”
“Except that the attack failed,” Rebecca said, from behind her cigarette, sulking in the corner of the room. “The night we found Alex, the manipulation was clumsy, but almost completely successful. This time, the manipulation was sophisticated, but we lost what, four Operators in Shanghai?”
Alistair looked over with wounded eyes.
“I know, I’m sorry, it’s terrible,” Rebecca added hurriedly. “But think about it. How many Weir did they lose tonight? How many Operators? What kind of resources did they have to put in Shanghai to make this all work? You can’t tell me they did all of this to wound us. You guys,” she said, nodding toward Alistair and Mitsuru, “were supposed to die in the blast, right?”