“They didn’t know that Alice was back in circulation,” Alistair said, shrugging. “It’s not that surprising. I didn’t know either until she saved my ass. They miscalculated.”
Rebecca pitched her lit cigarette out the window, ignoring a glare from Gaul.
“I don’t know,” she said slowly. “They captured Alice in the first place, right? At least that’s what we think happened. Since they left her alive, we have to assume that they knew her return was a possibility.”
“What about Edward?” Vladimir asked, finally levering himself into one of the available seats, to Gaul’s obvious relief. The last thing they needed was for him to take another tumble before he’d finished healing from the last one. “That wasn’t a Wight. He wasn’t forced from his body while he was alive, that was a dead body being animated by… something. Someone. An Operator, I think. Someone who can activate the nanites inside a dead body.”
“I doubt it,” Alistair countered. “I’ve never heard of a protocol like that.”
“They managed to breach the barrier a second time,” Gaul pointed out tersely, “by using the body of a student. We are going to have to reconfigure the barrier or we’ll have all of our casualties coming back to haunt us. All this to get at Alex.”
“Again, unsuccessfully.” Rebecca said, clicking her lighter. “Because they’re being too cute about it. Why not have Edward shoot Alex in the head, and be done with it? Why the predilection for the exotic threats?”
Gaul made a noise, as if he was about to say something, then shook his head.
“What?” Vladimir demanded.
“Nothing. I just had a bad thought,” Gaul admitted. “What if they aren’t trying to kill Alex at all? What if they are trying to get him to use his protocol?”
“Why?” Vladimir asked, his voice a little too loud. “Is there something special about it?”
“I don’t know,” Gaul said reluctantly. “I’m not sure. The Absolute Protocol isn’t completely unknown, but we haven’t had an Operator use it since we started keeping records. Certainly, none of the previous information links the Absolute Protocol to any kind of catalyst effect.”
“Perhaps there is more than one protocol?”
“The thought has occurred to me,” Gaul admitted.
“Are we totally certain,” Vladimir questioned, his browed furrowed, “that Alex wasn’t activated when we found him?”
Everyone took turns avoiding Vladimir’s look.
“Pretty sure,” Rebecca said softly, rubbing her head.
“Well…” Alistair trailed off when he realized everyone had stopped what they were doing to stare at him. “What? I was just thinking that Mitzi encountered the catalyst effect before he was activated.”
“Oh, crap. That’ right. But he had so much unreleased potential; we thought he was only partially activated…”
“Wonderful,” Vladimir said, ruefully shaking his head. “For all we know, Alex Warner has had two separate nanite injections. And, if that is the case, we have no idea what it might have done to him.”
“But who would have introduced nanites into Alex’s system?” Rebecca asked, rubbing her temples. “And where did they get nanotechnology in the first place?”
Everyone turned to Gaul expectantly.
“Don’t ask me,” he grumbled. “You all know we have a monopoly on nanites. If Alex Warner arrived here already activated, then I’m as far in the dark as the rest of you as to how that could happen.”
“It does seem unlikely…”
“It is more than unlikely. It is impossible, unless someone in this room is aware of a source of nanites that is a mystery to me,” Gaul said defensively. “This is nothing but speculation, and we have enough problems as it is. We can worry about it another day.”
“I’m not sure we know anything for sure about what happened today,” Alistair said, shrugging. “We don’t have enough information to do any kind of analysis.”
“I’m certain that Alex would have died today if Katya hadn’t been skulking around. That’s the other pattern I’ve noticed,” Rebecca said moodily, gesturing at the probability matrix in front of Alistair with her cigarette. “Anastasia bailed him out again. She has been the one putting people at the right place and the right time lately.”
“You think she has something to do with this?” Alistair asked, munching on a cold pakora while he studied the matrix. “You think this is a Black Sun operation? Could be.”
“I suspect that little monster of being involved in everything that happens around here,” Rebecca snapped. “You can’t underestimate her.”
“Nonetheless,” Gaul said forcefully. “We have been lured into a trap twice now. The first time netted Alice for unknown purposes, the second time nearly managing to assassinate all of the Auditors in the field. Two carefully planned and orchestrated traps, but neither achieved a clear goal. Then we have four attacks on Alex in the last six months; on the night we found him, once in San Francisco, and twice at The Academy. All of these operations involved significant expenditures of time and resources, and most of them entailed absorbing casualties as well. There must be a pattern in this somewhere.”
“Or multiple patterns,” Rebecca pointed out. “I think the first incident is different, at least.”
“Go on,” Gaul said gruffly.
“The manipulation on that first attack in the park more primitive, but the intent of the attack seems different too. They didn’t fuck around that time — those Weir really were trying to kill Alex, and without Mitsuru’s intervention, they would have been successful.”
“You think they weren’t trying to kill him in San Francisco?” Alistair asked doubtfully.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Rebecca said, shrugging. “They had the chance, but they seemed more interested in hurting him and asking him questions. Why in the hell would they interrogate Alex? That kid spends his free time staring at a wall. He’s been here half a year. What did they think he would know?”
“He said they were looking for Eerie,” Gaul said woodenly, lost in the consultation of the vast, cold uniformity of the Etheric archives.
“I don’t understand that either. Why would they care about finding her? The Weir were after Alex. Moreover, they found him fast, faster than we could get there. That doesn’t work unless they were waiting damn close to where he showed up. So you find your target, which is a high enough priority to have an entire pack of Weir just sitting around California, waiting for him to come back, and you capture him without incident, in private.” Rebecca stared around the room challengingly. “Which one of you would then begin a field interrogation because you lost an inconsequential companion who wasn’t on the target list? Would you risk killing your primary or discovery for that?”
“They are Weir,” Alistair countered, shaking his head. “What do you expect? They are always unnecessarily cruel. You ever see the aftermath of a Weir attack? Sometimes they even do shit to the corpses…”
“Of course I have,” Rebecca snapped, glaring at him fiercely enough that Alistair quailed a bit, and held up his hands to mollify her. “But that still doesn’t wash for me, not here. They had succeeded in their mission already, and they had to know that we’d be coming, that someone would be coming. If they wanted to be thorough, they could have left a team behind to find Eerie. All they had to do was take Alex down one of their holes and then they could have done whatever they wanted to him, and we never would have found him again.”
“Not necessarily,” Alistair objected. “You found Alice Gallow.”
“Right, and why?” Rebecca demanded. “We don’t even know exactly how that happened. She was hunting Witches and ends up imprisoned by rogue Operators? We are missing something, there. Then they throw her in some kind of clandestine interrogation center the Terrie Cartel runs, and keep her on ice till I showed up to collect her? That is all wrong.”
“I thought you said they…” Gaul said, frowning.
“That was the guards,” Rebecca said hurriedly, frowning. “They were doing that for fun. It wasn’t official policy.”