“Well, I’d like to, baby, but how?” Alice said, obviously amused. “Bitch has gotta be long gone, if she saw any of what you did here.”
“Right, but I got some of my blood on her,” Mitsuru said, looking embarrassed. “The nanites inside will keep relaying information back to me for a few hours until they shut down. I can track her, wherever she goes, until that happens.”
“That’s a nice trick. But what are you doing here in the first place? What are you working?”
“Alistair gave me the lead,” Mitsuru said hurriedly. “On accident. He doesn’t know I followed up on it, that wasn’t his intention. But I’m angry. About Rebecca. These bastards have something to do with it. That’s what his personal files said, anyway.”
Alice grinned, stood up, and walked over to where Mitsuru sat. As always, Mitsuru was more than a little intimidated by the tall woman with her jet-black hair and her disturbing smile, but as usual, she seemed utterly benevolent where Mitsuru was concerned. She bent down and patted her head affectionately.
“Oh, Mitzi, I swear, I could just eat you up!” Alice said, revealing all together too many teeth for Mitsuru’s taste.
20
“Oh, hello,” Alex said, hesitating at the bottom of the crude stairs carved in the cliff face, leading to the cove. “I didn’t realize anybody was down here. I can find somewhere else, if you want…”
Katya looked at him over the top of her sunglasses. She was in a blue swimsuit with a translucent sarong, sitting on a towel on the narrow strip of white sand that wasn’t flooded by the late afternoon tide. Her hair and suit were both damp. She was shading her eyes with her paperback, and there was a plastic bottle packed with ice and pink liquid in the sand next to her leg.
“What? No, don’t worry about it,” Katya said, patting the patch of dry sand next to her. “It’s not like it’s my beach, or anything.”
“Oh. Cool,” Alex said half-heartedly, tossing his towel down as far away from Katya as he could get without sitting in the water, which was barely an arm’s length. “I sort of thought you would be, you know, still following me around.”
Katya laughed from behind her book.
“It isn’t like I do that for fun, you know,” she said, rattling the ice in the plastic bottle. “Besides, I don’t really have to keep too close an eye on you here. It is an island, after all. Even with your unique aptitude for getting in trouble, I doubt you could manage too much here.”
“Oh. Right.”
Alex sat down beside her and stared at the ocean. He was wearing his board shorts, but he had honestly intended on swimming as much as he intended to get away before Emily realized he was gone.
“How many movies did they make you watch, anyway?” Katya inquired, folding the top corner of the page she was currently on and setting her book aside. This naturally left Katya’s ample chest on display, which naturally meant that Alex couldn’t dare look at her directly, for fear of his eyes straying. He kept his eyes on the ocean. The ocean seemed safe.
“I’m not sure,” Alex said, shuddering at the memory. “After a while, I sort of lost count. It was sort of a blur of British accents, period costumes, and women crying endlessly over — actually, I’m not really sure what they were crying over, either. Life, I guess.”
“Just be glad you fell asleep early last night,” Katya said. “They watched Requiem for a Dream and Dancer in the Dark back-to-back. Emily must have used an entire package of tissues. Even Therese got all weepy.”
“I would swear that chick from the X-Files was in one of them,” Alex said uncertainly. “Why do girls like depressing movies so much?”
Katya shrugged, uncapped her plastic bottle, and took a long drink from it.
“Don’t ask me,” she said, wiping her mouth, and holding out the plastic bottle, waggling it in his direction. “I’m not into that stuff.”
Alex took the wide-mouthed bottle hesitantly. Whatever was in it smelled very fruity, though he couldn’t identify the fruit, with a strong alcoholic undercurrent.
“What kind of movies do you watch?” Alex asked, cautiously sipping from the wide-mouthed bottle. Katya was watching him while he drank, and burst out laughing when he made a face, forced himself to swallow and handed it, rather insistently, back to her. “And what the hell did I just drink?”
“Old black-and-white movies and artsy Asian horror flicks, mainly,” Katya said, laughing. “And rice vodka mixed with lychee and tamarind juices. It’s good.”
“I guess,” Alex said doubtfully. “Old movies? You mean like Psycho, or the Maltese Falcon? Stuff like that?”
“Sure,” Katya said, shrugging. “Not like it matters. I wasn’t planning to invite you over to watch movies any time soon. Hey,” she said, glancing over at him, either amused or curious, he couldn’t tell behind the sunglasses, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Alex said unenthusiastically, watching the ocean slowly recede back from the beach, each wave incrementally less dramatic than the one before it.
“What are you doing here?”
Alex broke his own rule, and looked over at Katya. She was crunching her way through an ice cube she had extracted from the bottle, waiting for his response.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Don’t get all pissy with me. I just don’t understand, that’s all. You came to an island on vacation with a girl who obviously has the hots for you — to the point that it’s more than a little bit embarrassing for those of us watching, by the way — a vacation that, as far as I can tell, you were invited to, rather than forced to go on. And yet I’ve seen Mormon girls who didn’t work as hard at not getting laid, honest to God.”
Alex had to laugh with her. There’d been a Mormon temple a few blocks from his high school, so he had a good idea what she meant. Katya handed him her bottle, so he tried the pink stuff again, and it still tasted weird, like orange juice gone slightly off, but not as bad as before.
“I’m not really sure,” Alex admitted, handing the bottle back to her. “I don’t know why I agreed to come, except that I didn’t really have anything else going on. I guess it seemed like a better idea at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s nice and everything, but I sort of wish that I’d stayed back at the Academy.”
Katya nodded. She must have been content with the answer, because she didn’t ask him anything else, but he was certain that he caught her glancing at him out of the corner of her eye a few times. He had the unpleasant sensation that he was being evaluated, gauged, weighed on a scale and then set aside, found wanting.
“Hey… question for you,” Alex said, watching the sun creep toward the water, growing redder as it descended. “You went to some sort of Black Sun school for assassins, right? What was that like?”
Katya frowned and then took a longer swig off the bottle. She didn’t seem too happy with the question, but at the very least, it seemed to have shifted her attention off him, for which he was grateful. She offered him the bottle again, and then dug it partway in the sand by her towel when he refused.
“It was a lot like the Program, but all of the time,” she said grimly. “How many Black Sun members do you know?”
“Well, uh,” Alex said, trying to count in his head. “You, Anastasia, Timor, Renton…”
“Right, so basically just Anastasia,” Katya said, pursing her lips. “Well, the people in the cartel are nothing like her. She’s at the top, you see, and she’s smart, so you can’t really tell how ambitious she is. But the people underneath her? Ambition runs through her followers like the plague. I was lucky, actually, because I had Timor with me. Otherwise, it would have been lonely. You can’t really trust or like anyone you meet there. It’s just… well; you must have some idea by now. Lots of killing, not all of it simulated. Lots of doing things you’d never want to do, until it doesn’t bother you anymore.”
As she spoke, Katya’s voice changed, from her usual cool flippancy to a lower, contemplative tone. She was staring out at the ocean, now blood red, as the sun sank slowly down into it, so rapt that Alex studied her without fear of her noticing. It was funny, now that he thought about it — Katya was kind of attractive, in her own way; but normally she carried herself with an air of hostility that obscured it. He didn’t feel it at all, now, and he wondered why, but he didn’t think to hard about it. He couldn’t exactly ask, after all.