“For what?”
“For all the shit I pulled,” Alex said, surprised how angry he was with himself. “With Emily, over Break, the stuff that I said before it. All of it.”
“And you came to save me?”
“Yeah.”
“I see,” Eerie said, finally turning to face him, her expression blank. “But I don’t need saving.”
“Yeah, clearly,” Alex said, shrugging. “I was worried about you, though.”
“I see,” she repeated flatly.
The silence stretched out while Alex squirmed.
“Eerie. Can I do anything to make this better?”
Eerie finally put down the keyboard and turned so that she was facing him, her hands sitting neatly on her long grey skirt. She’d changed her hair again, he noticed — the blond streaks were gone, replaced with a varying blue tint. It looked good, he thought, but he didn’t think this was the time to point it out.
“Tell the truth,” Eerie suggested. “Alex, are you here because you lost Emily?”
He thought about it for a minute. He figured she deserved that much.
“No,” he said finally. “I’m here because I am afraid that I’ve lost you.”
Eerie sat still for a moment, and then she looked away, her face, as always, unreadable.
“You are upset with me,” Alex said, sighing and standing up. “I’ll go. Just let me know if you change…”
“Alex,” Eerie said softly, cutting him off. “Why do you think I’m upset?”
Alex considered this for a moment, frozen in the act of standing, wondering if it was some kind of trick question.
“Because of Emily,” he said hesitantly. “Because I went on break with her…”
Eerie shook her head emphatically.
“No?”
She shook her head again.
“Okay,” he said, spreading his hands, “then why?”
“Alex is stupid,” Eerie muttered. “You really don’t get it?”
Alex shook his head. He was genuinely puzzled. All he could think was that Anastasia or Katya had gone back on their word, and told Eerie the whole story of the events of the break.
“No,” Alex said, trying to purge his mind of the memory of the weight of Emily on top of him.
“Do you know what I have to do tomorrow? Did you think about that at all?”
Alex shook his head again, his eyes on the floor, unable to face Eerie. He could feel his cheeks burning. He hadn’t so much forgotten about Margot’s impending funeral as much as he had deliberately forgotten about it, unable to fully comprehend the idea. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment how callous he was being.
“Do you even care?”
Alex kept his eyes on the disarray on the floor. He fought down an insane urge to start crying, out of exhaustion, out of self-pity, in the hopes that it might make Eerie feel guilty and relent. However, he didn’t want to embarrass himself like that, and anyway, Eerie deserved better after everything that he had done.
“I’m sorry,” Alex said, his hands balled into fists. “I’m broken up about Margot, too. This is all new to me. Really, I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. He worked up his courage, remembering Windsor’s odd reaction, the night of the attack, and asked the question. “Eerie… did — did something happen over break? To you, I mean. Something bad?”
She didn’t answer.
“I mean, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s cool, I don’t want to make you or anything, but I was really worried, the whole time, and if you hadn’t made me this thing, this cushion thing, I think I’d probably be dead right now, and as soon as I could, I came here to…”
He trailed off when he realized she had started typing again.
“I’m sorry, Eerie,” he said quietly, cursing himself.
“No, it’s okay,” she said, staring again at her display. “I understand.”
“No, you got it all wrong. I came here to tell you…”
Eerie shook her head.
“Not right now, Alex,” she insisted. “I have things to think about. And I think you should go.”
Alex felt cold. Suddenly, unaccountably cold. He managed to nod at the back of her head, and for some reason, he was smiling while he did it, some sort of automatic social reflex. His whole mind had gone numb on him, as if he had an injection of Lidocaine.
“Okay. Alright, I will go,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “But when you get it figured out, please give me another chance. Because, I promise you Eerie, my mind is made up.”
The pillow she threw missed by a mile, but it still made him jump. When he turned back to face her, there were tears running down her cheeks, and her eyes blazed with an anger he had never seen before.
“It’s not all about you!” She howled, her voice catching.
“Eerie…”
“Just go! Just… just go away.”
He stood there, looking contrite, hoping she would take pity on him, and hoping she would forgive him. Eventually, he realized that she wasn’t going to, and he bowed his head, sighed, and then he let himself out quietly. She kept herself in front of her computer, pounding out code so fast that she was sure she would have to redo all of it later, until well after she heard the front door close behind him, until she was sure that she wouldn’t go to the window to see if he was still out there.
“Stupid,” Eerie muttered, aware that she was crying but refusing to acknowledge it. She slid her headphones over her ears, bent over her keyboard, and stayed that way until she could only stumble, half-blind with sleep, to her bed, falling asleep with her clothes still on, her face still streaked with tears.
There were many funerals that week, and though he was not expected to attend all of them, he felt that it was his responsibility to do so. He’d known about many of the death were coming, after all, long before they’d happened, and he’d thought himself resigned to it. The future that he had steered them toward, he knew, was the brightest and best that he could manage. Nevertheless, faced with the physical reality of the carnage it was built on, Gaul felt part of himself recoil. Therefore, he forced himself to face it, one grieving family after the other; seven days of watching the ground swallow coffins. Margot’s funeral was the most painful by far.
In general, the student’s funerals were more difficult, because he couldn’t help but take it personally. Steve Taylor and Charles Brant nagged at him even though he hadn’t thought much of either boy. But there were many different kinds of unpleasantness for him to experience. Certainly, he had not enjoyed facing the Raleigh’s, who were burying one daughter and dealing with consequences of their other daughter defecting. Knowing that their daughter’s most likely killer was standing across from him, right now, on the other side of Margot’s coffin, in a tasteful black mourning dress, that was a bit hard to swallow. She’d been justified, certainly; but he didn’t think that she’d needed to go as far as killing her. There was no way, of course, for him to confront her openly. The Hegemony would use it as a pretext for war.
And things on that score were very fragile at the moment. A final tally was still being made, but the numerical losses were heavily weighted against the Black Sun, with four cartels defecting on top of significant casualties during the fighting. Their previous dominance was reduced to a rough parity with the wounded Hegemony. The losses the Hegemony had suffered were less severe, but whereas the entire Martynova clan had survived, much of the Hegemony’s leadership had been destroyed in a single attack, and many cartels were in disorder while matters of succession were handled. Still, the balance had shifted, and if the Black Sun’s ascendance was still overwhelmingly likely, it had at least been postponed.
Gaul looked at the faces arrayed around him, and he updated his list. There was always more to do, after all. They had not just lost the dead, after all. There were all sorts of casualties.
Rebecca stood at the head of the coffin, reading poetry that he couldn’t be bothered to identify, looking like she was about to be sick. It wouldn’t have mattered to Margot, anyway, who had no family to mourn her in the first place. Instead, she had a weeping, blue-haired changeling, Anastasia and an honor guard from the Black Sun, and a few members from the staff at the Academy who had raised her. Doubtless, Rebecca was the most grief-stricken of all of them. The empath suffered greatly during the funerals, unable to shield herself from the full weight and gravity of the grief that surrounded her.