The Academy (57 page)

“When I woke up, my chest didn’t hurt anymore,” Margot said, shrugging. “And nothing else has much, since then.”

“Wow. That’s all kinds of fucked up. I mean, I tend to think that they shit that’s happened to me is pretty damn bad, but that’s really a whole lot worse…”

“Thanks. I think.”

“I still don’t really understand…”

Margot sighed, as she stepped deftly around an assortment of broken glass and sleeping transients. The sidewalk here was stained brownish-red, for reasons Alex preferred not to think about.

“The nanites inside you,” Margot said, pointing at Alex. “Help repair and maintain your body, right? If you get hurt, they help you heal, if you get sick, they help fight the disease. Did you know that you’re more-or-less immune to cancer? I think the administration started playing that part down, lately, to try and discourage smoking.”

Margot smiled slightly at this, then hooked a thumb at herself.

“Those same nanites malfunction inside me, Alex. And not only when they killed me. When they brought me back, too. Your body is permeated with nanites, true, but mine is
contaminated
with them,” Margot said grimly. “Among other little changes they made, the nanites purged all the marrow from my bones and replaced them with a mass of nanoassemblers. No bone marrow, no hemoglobin.”

“But why can’t the nanites make hemoglobin for you? Michael said they can manufacture tissue and stuff, even bone.”

“Yours can,” Margot said, bitterly. “Mine can’t. Mine can’t produce any kind of living tissue. Nothing biological.”

Alex had a whole series of alarming thoughts.

“So what happens when you get hurt? If your body can’t heal, and the nanomachines can’t repair damage, then…”

“Synthetic replacements.”

The vampire held up one arm in the sickly yellow light of a flickering street light, looking at it wistfully, the way people look at childhood photos.

“Two years ago, I was working a field op in Tbilisi, clearing out a Witch coven. One night, while we were purging the old cemetery, a Ghoul managed to take a big chunk out of my arm.”

“What the hell is a Ghoul?”

Margot paused to glare at him for the interruption, then continued.

“I probably would have bled to death, without the nanites. When I woke up the next morning, my arm was already rebuilt – entirely from synthetic materials, doped with nanites. I can’t feel anything with it, anymore. The lab says it’s mostly silicon.”

They walked in silence for a moment, then Alex shrugged.

“Okay, so all of that sucks,” Alex said, more callously than he meant to, “but why are you telling me all this?”

Margot spun around so fast Alex didn’t even have time to get his hands up between them, her long black coat flaring out as she spun, poking one finger firmly into the center of his chest, her face contorted with barely suppressed anger.

“What I am trying to tell you,” Margot said, with a quiet intensity, “is that I am a reanimated corpse, one filled with tiny machines that are gradually displacing everything organic in my body. And as strange and frightening as that makes me, Alex, that is
nothing
compared to how strange Eerie is. At least I was human being, at one point.”

Margot stood that way for a moment more, glaring at him, the point of her fingernail digging into his sternum. Then she shook her head, brushed her hands absently against her coat like she had touched something dirty, and started to walk again.

“You might want to do a little reading on the subject,” Margot suggested evilly. “Find out what happens to people who get involved with a changeling, before it happens to you, too.”

Margot moved fast, leaving Alex standing by the side of the road, his mouth hanging open. She was a considerable way down the street when he finally caught back up to her.

“I thought you might want to think about that, before you try and get too cozy to something that isn’t even human,” Margot said, her voice casual, her pace steady and unhurried. “So, are you coming, or what?”

--

“I have never seen so many hipsters in one place.”

Anastasia snorted contemptuously.

“You should go to Brooklyn sometime,” she said, smirking. “It’s like this, but the size of an entire city.”

Alex looked at her to see if she was kidding.

“Sounds a little bit scary,” he said. Anastasia looked up from the office window for a moment, solemnly nodded her agreement, and then went back to observing the park spread out below them. The space they occupied was probably intended to be offices for the store below it, though it was being gutted at the moment, part of what seemed to be ongoing renovations throughout the building.

“Hey Anastasia,” Alex blurted. “Can I ask you something?”

Anastasia looked up from the window again, and arched one eyebrow curiously.

“So, the Black Sun thing, the ideology – you want to introduce nanites into everyone, right?”

Alex blurted it all out at once, without totally thinking it through, and was immediately worried that he should not have. But Anastasia nodded civilly and waited for him to continue.

“Well,” Alex said nervously, “what about all the people who would be killed? I heard that, like, a third of the people who get injected with them die.”

Anastasia appeared to consider this for a moment.

“Do you know what a cartel is, Alex?”

“Don’t ask me,” Alex complained, rubbing the back of his neck and looking petulant. “You’re in one, right?”

“A cartel is an agreement, between competing parties to control or manipulate a specific concern, for mutual benefit,” Anastasia said, ignoring Alex’s eye-roll. “An open conspiracy, if you like. We are all inherently competitors in the same business, all of the cartels. We have simply agreed to try and limit competition from the outside. Flowery rhetoric aside, the Hegemony is no different from any other cartel. Did Margot tell you what the Hegemony’s alternative to mass nanite introduction is?”

Alex shook his head, not at all surprised that she knew the details of his conversation with Margot from the night before. He was starting to adjust to the idea that Anastasia always seemed to know what was going on, even the things she wasn’t there for.

“The Hegemony wants to come to an accommodation with the Witches,” Anastasia said acidly, her voice dripping with contempt. “They are willing to consign a percentage of humanity – that would be the majority, if you are curious – to serve as livestock for the Witches, in perpetuity, as long as they agree to Hegemony rule in Central and the cartel-controlled areas.”

Anastasia saw the disgust in Alex’s face, and seemed satisfied by it.

“What price for peace, no?”

Alex rubbed his jaw absently, staring off at a point above Anastasia’s shoulder, trying to digest it all. The Hegemony seemed more benign than the Black Sun on the face of it, and to be truthful, Anastasia’s demeanor didn’t help matters. At the same time, it would be mistake, he knew, to confuse the messenger and the message, no matter how pretty Emily was.

“That makes more sense,” Alex allowed, reluctantly. “But, still…”

Anastasia waved him off, pressing her face close to the glass, reminding him of a child entranced by the view. Alex looked down as well, but saw nothing other than the same mass of picnickers, dogs, umbrellas and coolers that had crowded the hilly green patch, since they had taken their perch in the disused office space, more than an hour before. On the table beside Anastasia, her cell phone buzzed discretely. She punched the speaker button.

“Hey boss?”

The connection was bad, tinny sounding, and it was hard to make out the voice. But the wording made it obvious that it was Renton. No one else addressed Anastasia so informally.

“You see what I see?”

Anastasia continued peering through the window at something Alex couldn’t find for himself, much to his frustration.

“Yes. What do you want me to do?”

Anastasia seemed to Alex to hesitate for a moment before she responded.

“Stay where you are. I’m going to go collect Mitsuru.”

Alex continued to look out the window for whatever had attracted their attention, seeing nothing but a crowded city park in the late afternoon.

Whatever had been planned had been planned without him – Anastasia, Margot, Renton, and Edward had left him and Eerie to watch TV, while they held a hushed conference in the hall outside the room. Alex had resented it; actually, he was still resenting it. But, on another level, he did kind of understand. He was virtually defenseless, after all, and Eerie was bat-shit crazy. It had irked him a bit, though.

Eerie hadn’t seemed slighted by being left out, but she’d been weirdly reticent all morning, hardly speaking at all, and going out of her way to avoid him. Admittedly, lodging in Anastasia’s suite for the afternoon had been awkward despite its spaciousness, but that still didn’t explain it.

On the cab ride here, Eerie had made it obvious that she was trying not to sit near him, practically insisting that Renton take the back seat instead, resulting in near-constant knowing glances from him for the whole drive. Even now, she wandered around on the other side of the vacant office, walking aimlessly from room to room, occasionally pausing to examine where the walls had been crudely torn open to allow wire stripping, or to rummage half-heartedly through the personal effects and scraps of paper that remained, abandoned in the ruins of the office furniture deemed too worthless to sell. She’d hadn’t spoken since they’d arrived, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up, and Alex was pretty sure that it wasn’t Anastasia that she was avoiding – or, rather, that it wasn’t
just
Anastasia that Eerie wanted to avoid.

Alex tried to follow her stare through the glass, hoping to pick out which part of the park she was looking at. He didn’t like that Anastasia had sent him out with Margot to make that phone call last night; he hadn’t given it any thought at the time, but when he’d come back, he’d found Renton and Edward bringing a bunch of heavy duffel bags up to the room, so he knew that Anastasia had worked things out to be alone with Eerie. Whatever had happened between them, Eerie didn’t seem to want to talk to him anymore.

He snuck a look at Anastasia out of the corner of his eye – she was sort of pretty, he had to admit, in a rigid sort of way, her hair pulled tightly back in a bun, her black dress excessively formal for the occasion, frilly and fringed with ribbon. Her sober demeanor and her childish appearance were constantly at odds. When she was focused on something else, like she was now, the cell phone in the palm of her hand as she waited for a response, her gaze fixed on something below, he could pretend she was a regular teenager – a bit spoiled, maybe, and probably awkward around people, the kind of bookish girl that he usually felt a little sorry for.

Something about the idea of pitying Anastasia struck him as amusing, and he found himself grinning. Anastasia caught it in the reflection, and shot him a look that combined curiosity with annoyance, but Alex didn’t care. Lately, he’d been feeling that he was spending too much time worrying about what Anastasia thought.

It was funny, in a way. He’d always thought of himself as independent, maybe even a bit headstrong, but then things got scary. And then, all of a sudden, it became very easy to take orders, when the person giving them sounded like they knew what to do. If they were good at it, like Anastasia was, Alex worried that he might not even notice himself obeying.

“Alright.” Renton’s voice crackled through the hiss of static. “She’s parked herself. As far as I can see, we’re all clear.”

Anastasia pursed her lips for a moment, looking out the window. This time, Alex was able to follow her gaze, to a figure shaking out a red picnic blanket, not far from the near edge of the park. Mitsuru, in trainers and a white t-shirt, her eyes hidden behind overly-large sunglasses, the kind they sell in the drugstore, looking uncomfortable amidst the sun and crowds.