Alex couldn’t hear anything, despite the fact that he knew the house was filled with people. He was afraid to walk on the lacquered wood of the floors in his shoes, so he stayed carefully on the patterned rugs instead. He sat on the bed for a while, staring out the window. He checked his laptop, confirming that he had internet access, but then he didn’t do anything with it. Restless, he changed into board shorts and his weird Israeli sandals, and then headed for the beach.
The halls of the house seemed deserted, though once he heard people talking somewhere nearby. He was worried that he might have to ask directions, but the first path that he took led directly to a cove, no more than a quarter-mile from the house, fifty meters long and flooded to the extent that only a sliver of white, dry sand remained, at the very edge of the dense rock that bordered the beach. He threw his things down and took off his shirt and sandals, realizing belatedly that he hadn’t thought to bring a towel. As there was nothing for it now, he jumped into the water, which was pleasantly warm, particularly in the shallows of the flooded beach. Gradually, he waded out further, to where the water was deeper and turned a darker shade of blue, and then swam in the freestyle stroke that Michael had taught him. He didn’t go far, instead making lazy circles around the cove, pausing every now and again to float on his back. He stared up at the sky as the sun diminished, licking the salt from his lips and brushing his wet hair back from his eyes. Alex wasn’t the most confident swimmer, having only started a few months ago in the Academy pool, but the bay was calm and he felt safe.
He was tired by the time he made his way back to shore. Alex was relieved to find that his fears had not been realized, and that the tide had in fact receded slightly, leaving his clothes dry and intact. He was less relieved to discover he had company.
“I thought I might find you here,” she said shyly. “Well, maybe not here. Actually, this was the second beach I came to. I brought you a towel.”
“Thanks,” Alex said, suddenly very self-conscious of his shirtless physique. Things had improved, thanks to Michael and the nanites, but he still felt pretty inadequate. “I forgot.”
“I thought you might,” Emily said, obviously pleased with herself. “Are you done swimming? Because I was sent to collect you. Dinner is happening soon. I don’t know why Anastasia has such a problem with her cook. He seems alright to me.”
“Maybe it’s because she doesn’t eat meat,” Alex said grumpily, running the towel through his hair. “Sorry for the trouble, by the way. I didn’t mean to stay out so long. I kind of freaked out once I got here, and I had to get out of that house for a little while.”
“Culture shock,” Emily said sympathetically. “Anastasia’s world will do that to you. I have no idea how rich she is personally, but it must be a substantial fortune,” Emily said, shaking her head and looking, to Alex’s eyes, more than a bit jealous. “Her family is considered the wealthiest and most powerful among all the cartels. She’s lived this way since she was a child. It gives you an idea how she became so comfortable giving orders.”
Alex nodded, and finished pulling his shirt over his head. He ran a hand through his hair, stepped into his sandals, and nodded at Emily. She started back down the path and he followed, drops of saltwater running down the back of his neck and tickling his ears.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you… Are you and Anastasia, like, friends now? Or is that part of some sort of deal you’re working, or what?”
Emily laughed, the sound dying in the brush around them.
“You are so not subtle, Alex. I like that about you,” she said, giggling. “Anastasia and I are for-real friends, at least on my part. We didn’t make any kind of deal. She did me the favor of inviting me and a few other people along on her spring vacation. If things work out the way I hope, then I won’t owe her anything more than a favor. And if they don’t, well, Anastasia wouldn’t be my first option for help.”
“No?” Alex said encouragingly. “You mean the Hegemony?”
Emily shook her head.
“No. It’s… become very complicated. But, let’s not waste our time talking about this,” she said, seizing his arm and clinging to it. “That isn’t important. Because I’m very confident that everything is going to work out for both of us.”
“For you, maybe. For me, I’m not even sure what that might entail,” Alex complained.
Emily poked him in the side, between his ribs, making him jump and cry out in surprise. He rubbed the spot and stared at her resentfully.
“You are the least romantic boy,” Emily chided.
“What do you think, Vlad? Has Alice brought me something I can use?”
“I think so,” Vladimir said slowly, chewing on the end of his pen. “It’s hard to work out the hierarchy, but there’s no doubt — the Witches are at the top. These two should be worth something to them, if we can figure out how to contact them and how to make the offer.”
Gaul adjusted his glasses, looking at the two figures, each in their own individual and mostly barren cells, one-way glass inset between them and their observers. Both were women, both wore bulky red jumpsuits with no pockets, and both were shaved smooth and bald. One still had splints on the fingers of both hands, and a healing bruise on the side of her jaw, while the other seemed in relatively good shape. Though wouldn’t have been apparent to the casual observer, neither of the prisoners were even remotely human.
“What do you suppose they would be worth?”
“That’s hard to say,” Vladimir said, fussing over the piece of machinery that he had been messing about with since Gaul arrived, something that looked quite a bit like a slide projector. “Since we started the operation, we’ve managed to kill six of them and capture two. That’s in contrast to the dozens of Weir and human causalities they’ve suffered during the same period. Clearly, they are willing to sacrifice their pawns in order to protect the Witches, so they must be valuable. But how valuable? That’s hard to say when we don’t know their priorities. What do you want to do with them?”
“One of the teams we lost in Shanghai,” Gaul said quietly, his voice terse. “They didn’t die; they simply disappeared from Alistair’s grid in mid-operation. The current theory is that they are alive, and are held somewhere. We have had similar incidents in the past few years. There could be as many as a dozen prisoners, assuming any of them are still alive. I want them back. Failing that, I want their bodies. After what happened with Edward, I don’t want any repeats.”
“Prisoner exchange, huh?” Vladimir said thoughtfully, as he extracted a lens from the device that he was working on, setting it down carefully on a sheet of wax paper. “That might work. Hard to say, when we don’t even know if they want their prisoners back. We don’t know if their culture puts any kind of priority on individual Witches. Maybe they write them off as soon as they are captured. Maybe this was prompted by us taking prisoners in the first place. They may as well be aliens. Who knows what they think?”
Gaul leaned up close to the one-way glass, peering through it at their longer-term captive, the less battered of the two Witches. She perched on the minimal cot she had been provided, staring at the featureless wall in front of her, her expression blank.
“Do they ever do anything? Every time I come down here, they are sitting there, staring into space…”
“They scream when Alice and Mark come to take them downstairs,” Vladimir said, shaking his head disapprovingly. “The new one, the one that Alice brought back from New York, she still spits and claws at anyone who comes into her cell. We have to restrain her just to hose the thing down every other week. The Witch we captured in San Diego was the same way until Alice got upset, and broke both her arms and her left knee. Since then she’s been more talkative. Her name is Evelyn, apparently — or at least, that’s what she calls herself. She’ll respond if you talk to her, she’ll answer if you ask her a question, though I don’t think they’ve gotten anything particularly useful out of her.”