Unfortunately, he looked to be doing quite a bit of moving around, at least from where Mitsuru lay.
“You are still with us, right, Alice?” Chris asked mockingly, though Mitsuru noted that he was careful to keep out of Alice’s reach, despite the fact that she was still clutching her bleeding head. “I’d hate for you to miss any of this. I’m sure you’ve guessed by now, but the whole wife thing was a total dodge. I really believed it at the time, though. Those personas the Witches build are amazing. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?”
Chris laughed as if it was the funniest thing he’d ever said. The blond girl he called Leigh stood next to him, looking vaguely bored. Two other men came up to join them, emerging from wherever they had been concealing themselves. One of them was tall and lanky, the other short and rail-thin. Both of them were dressed for combat, in contrast to Leigh, decked out in fatigues and body armor.
“Let me introduce you to the team,” Chris offered enthusiastically. “I put it together with you in mind, after all. This is Martin,” he said, gesturing at the tall, dusky-skinned man, who appeared to be somewhere in his thirties, “and technically, he would have telepathically neutralized you, if things had gone to script and you hadn’t shown up for another hour. And then, over here,” he said, patting the short, black-haired man on the shoulder, so painfully thin that even his very small clothes hung off him absurdly, “is Kim. Kim does a neat thing with basic forces manipulation that would have been really great for dealing with Xia.”
Chris threw his hands up in the air and shouted.
“And I am really quite disappointed! A great deal of thought and effort was put into this. Half of them aren’t even here! The Auditors,” Chris scoffed. “You were supposed to be the biggest obstacle that we had to face, more than the Committee or the Black Sun, more than Director himself. But here you are, all the remaining Auditors save Rebecca Levy, who we have already incapacitated. Leigh alone was enough to beat all of you! I expected more. Your reputation is completely unmerited.”
Mitsuru felt a certain relief at his monologue. He made no mention of Alistair. That could only mean that they had overlooked him, somehow, that the Chief Auditor was still alive, free, and capable of fighting. That reassured her tremendously. Alistair, she thought hopefully, would think of something.
Chris crouched down, and looked at Alice as she clutched her head with mock sympathy.
“Still, she is remarkable, isn’t she? How hard would you say you hit her, Leigh dear?”
“I went easy,” Leigh said flatly. “We aren’t supposed to kill her.”
“Right. She leveled you with one punch, Alice, before you could apport, before you could do anything. Your whole team, too,” Chris said, shaking his head. “Leigh’s a vampire, obviously, but instead of giving her over to your kind, to your Academy, she was given to the Witches, to the Outer Dark, and look what they have done, look what they did to my precious ward! She’s a full synthetic, Alice. Every part of her has been replaced, but she didn’t become inanimate like the others, she wasn’t consumed by it. She thinks and feels and acts, but her body is artificial, it rebuilds itself from surrounding materials. She has been made superior to all of my kind, Alice, she has been made whole, and she is only the first.”
“Enough of that,” Leigh snapped, eyeing Alice contemptuously. “Are you certain, Chris? This one was really her?”
“Yes,” Chris nodded. “You can’t see much of it through the implanted persona, but she’s down there, underneath it all.”
Mitsuru didn’t know what they were talking about, but she did know that she had to do something. They seemed preoccupied with Alice right now. She wasn’t sure what she could do against four of them, but she was obligated to try something. Mitsuru moved with all the patience she could manage, turning her head a few inches to look for Xia. He was embedded in a wall behind her, somehow, broken and bleeding. The readout on the remote viewing protocol she was operating told her that he was, at least, alive.
“Well, can we kill the others and be done with it?” Leigh asked, her eyes flicking over to Xia and then Mitsuru, who cancelled the protocol and froze in place, her heart beating frantically in her chest. “No matter how much you like to brag, they are dangerous. I would feel better if they were dealt with.”
“I’m not sure,” Chris said, frowning. “They weren’t supposed to arrive for another hour. I’m worried that if we kill them now, it might alert the Academy somehow, and throw off the rest of the plan.”
“I don’t think it matters now,” Leigh said, folding her arms. “They don’t have any combat personnel left worth speaking of. What could they possibly do to interfere?”
Chris stood back up and started to pace. Mitsuru started to move her hands toward her guns.
“Alistair oversold your people, Alice,” Chris said casually. “Alistair oversold all of you and the threat that you posed us. We were ready for war! Since you were his old outfit, and he did put all of you together, who can blame him for puffing up your reputations a bit? I suppose he got sentimental, thinking about fighting all his old friends…”
Mitsuru’s hands were frozen. It was like a nightmare. She told them to move and they wouldn’t. The very mention of his name had frozen her. Alistair. Not dead. Not captured. With them. Alistair.
“Still, have to give some credit to the information he handed us,” Chris gloated. “We knew everything about you people. All your weakness. All the protocols you can operate. Everything about you.”
Mitsuru’s hands were her own again. She felt a dull, cold space in her chest, but that could wait. Right now, the only thing that mattered was what she knew, and what they didn’t know. What Alistair hadn’t known, what she hadn’t said, on that last night, when they were together, lying across the worn and frayed sheets of his bed, the pillow she lay on smelling like his aftershave.
She held on to the pain of his betrayal like a lifeline, and reached for her knife.
22
Malbec, he thought drunkenly, staring blankly at the label sitting on the center of the table, his mind unspooling like coarse thread. Malbec was an interesting word. He didn’t think it was very good wine, but he wasn’t going to hold that against the varietal. He wasn’t even sure that he knew a good wine from a bad, but this one tasted too much like raisins for him to enjoy it much, though that hadn’t stopped him from drinking it. Was it a place, he wondered? A word in French? Somehow it didn’t sound very French, to him, but wasn’t that where all wine came from, originally?
The walk up the hill had been short, but it had taken them a long time to climb up and come back, with Emily walking so close to him, brushing her hand against his, holding on to his arm so that it pressed against her chest, smiling at him invitingly from the soft shadows beneath the tall, spindly trees that crowned the hill, her skin luminous in the radiant moonlight. His head had been spinning even before he had two glasses of wine.
Alex was leaning back against the couch, which had too many throw pillows on it to be comfortable, Emily tucked underneath his arm, holding her own wine glass. Across the coffee table, Anastasia, Katya and Timor were arrayed in overstuffed chairs, and even Anastasia appeared mildly tipsy. On the opposite side of the room, Therese sulked in a corner, while Anastasia’s two little sisters played some sort of complicated game involving a great deal of shouting and excited involvement on the part of Donner and Blitzen. Alex had lost track of Renton a while ago, and frankly, didn’t care very much — though he did notice that the fawning Svetlana wasn’t anywhere to be seen, either.