Alex reply was something on the order of an incoherent moan, as his thoughts broke and floundered, coming apart like a kite in the wind. He could feel her, inside his head, working her fingers into the cracks, shifting and rearranging. It didn’t hurt. It felt amazing.
“You know, it’s funny,” she said, caressing him with one hand, smiling at him benevolently. “I did this because I wanted to make my own decisions, without having to please you or my family or the Academy or whoever. I wanted out of the trap I’d been born into. And now that I can make my own decisions? It turns out that I still want you.” Emily laughed, running her fingers lightly across his chest. “It’s stupid, right? But it’s still what I want. And this time, I’m not going to be so nice about it.”
Alex put up his hands to push her away, but instead he found himself touching her wet hair, the contours of her damp skin. He could barely remember where he was. Everything seemed to be moving very slowly. Every sensation, every point of contact was magnified.
“This is why Rebecca kept you so close,” Emily said wonderingly, laying her head on his chest. “She must have loved it. Your catalyst effect really is amazing, isn’t it, Alex? And the feedback loop, when an empath uses your abilities to boost their own… How long have you and Rebecca been doing this? I bet Eerie wouldn’t like it much,” Emily scolded, her eyes twinkling, “if she knew what it felt like, right?”
“Eerie,” Alex managed. “I need to find out if she is okay…”
“Really,” Emily said crossly, “you are the least romantic boy. You don’t have to worry about her anymore. That’s all been taken care of.”
“What?” Alex said, trying and failing to sit up. “What did you…”
“Hush,” Emily commanded, one hand resting firmly on his chest as she shifted on the creaking trundle bed, moving to straddle him, discarding the wet scrubs in the process. Alex looked at her oddly for a moment, then he sank backwards on to the wet mattress and lay there, his eyes open wide, so overwhelmed with bliss and contentment that he couldn’t even began to think of the words for how he felt. “Do you understand? You finally belong to me, Alex.”
He had Michelle check first before Drake ported them in. He’d had more than enough surprises already that day, and Chris preferred to avoid anymore. Not that the remote viewer could explore the place with any certainty, not with the kind of interference they were experiencing, here in Central. He had Song Li send through a couple of her drones first, and then when nothing tried to kill them again, he and Song Li followed them over, with Leigh and Curtis in tow.
Bodies littered the hallway, most of them wearing the distinctive face-paint of the renegade cartels — Terrie, Taos, Mannheim and Western Rim all well represented in the slaughter. Song Li was standing above one of the bodies with her hand out, palm down, a soft, purple light emitting from her palm, a luminescent cone filled with swirling Korean characters. Chris waited until she acknowledged them. He wished that she would do something to cover the cauterized scars from where her eyes had been removed, but it never seemed to bother her. Maybe, when you spent a lot of time working with corpses, that sort of thing started to seem trivial. On the other hand, maybe that was simply in the nature of the gifts from the Outer Dark. Maybe you were better off, Chris thought with a shudder, without eyes. He was glad, very glad, that he had never had the opportunity to find out personally.
“There were guards, as was suspected,” she said dully, the light disappearing as she reported. “They were overcome fairly easily. Our soldiers made it as far as this room, where they encountered a man with red eyes. He used a variety of protocols in conjunction. They never stood a chance.”
“That’s Gaul,” Chris said, trying to keep the apprehension he felt under control and out of his voice. “So he’s still in here, somewhere, probably by the Source Well. However, he must be exhausted if he did all this by himself. This should be easy.”
Curtis was an empath, so the look he gave Chris was to be expected. He knew that Chris was nervous, even if the others weren’t sure. He was loyal, though, so he shrugged and followed along, his hobnailed boots making clicking sounds on the inset stone walkway. The building was huge, but the path in front of them continued to narrow. The hallway divided into a series of chambers, much longer than they were wide, roughly rectangular, with a high arch at the apex. Each chamber was slightly shorter and less wide than the one before it, and every step took them a little bit deeper, the grade almost imperceptible in the shadows of the hall. The further they went, the damper the air got, and the more ocher mold covered the stone walls. They passed through three of the chambers, each about thirty meters long, and found themselves in a hallway so narrow that they would have to walk single-file to go through it. By mutual, unspoken agreement, they all came to a halt in front of it.
“Can you see anything, Michelle?” Chris asked, peering cautiously down the darkened stone corridor. If this chamber was like all the others, then it should have ended right past where he could see, in the weak beam of his flashlight.
There was a pause. After a little while, Chris decided that he didn’t like the pause. He girded himself for bad news, and wished for the third time that they had thought to bring flares. The darkness in this place was oppressive, and the light from the flashlights they had brought seemed feeble.
“It’s empty, as far as I can see,” Michelle said slowly, her voice straining with effort, “and that isn’t very far. Something is hidden here, Chris. I’ve never felt such a strong aversion to anything before.”
“Christ, we knew all that,” Chris said morosely, looking at the gate and the impenetrable blackness past it. “Alright, Song, send your boys on down there.”
He’d worked with her for two years, and he’d seen it countless times, but Song’s drones, zombie-like reanimated corpses infected with her own peculiar nanites, still troubled him. He understood that it was the dead Operator’s nanites that Song activated, not actually the dead person, but it was still disturbing. Even to someone who remembered dying. Something about the way they moved like badly fashioned marionettes, the disturbing lack of respiration, expression, humanity. Song sent all three of the Operators she had reanimated down the tunnel, shuffling along in the eerie absence of breath.
It didn’t last long. Song opened her eyes and shook her head, the yellowish green light around her head fading slowly away.
“I think they made it as far as Michelle could see,” Song said, with her bizarre North Korean accented English, that Chris always had to run back through in his head to achieve a complete understanding. “There is something in there that inhibits protocols.”
“This must be it,” Chris said, running a finger along one of the invisible joining lines between the stone blocks that made up the base of the arched ceiling. “Beneath the hill the Academy was built on, as we suspected.”
“This is stupid,” Leigh complained. “Just send me in, Chris. They can’t hurt me, whoever is in there.”
“Unless it’s Gaul,” he scoffed. “He’s got an implant, remember? He can download telepathic protocols that could probably neutralize you, by yourself. An innate resistance to that kind of thing only goes so far.”
“Are we just going to stand here?” Leigh demanded impatiently. “If you don’t want me to do it, then what are we going to do?”
“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to do it, I said I didn’t want you to do it alone,” Chris said sternly. Leigh looked mildly chastised at the public rebuke, but he didn’t have much choice, if he wanted to retain the respect of the troops under his command. Leigh might be the future of his race, but he wasn’t about to start letting her tell him what to do. “Okay, we move on. Leigh goes first, as fast as possible, until the next chamber is clear. Song, you follow after that. Curtis, you stay a cautious distance behind her, keeping an eye on their mental shields. I will be right behind you, then Michelle. Be ready — if we ending up fighting, we’ll need a barrier. Drake, you stay back here, and be ready to pull us out if things go south. Clear?”