headache and be bitchy all day.”
And I certainly don’t want that, Chris thought, following Alice out the door and into the chilly London afternoon.
Twenty Six
“Do not tell me that your entire plan consists of waiting for that little bitch to produce Alex and Eerie, Gaul. Tell me you’ve got something better than that.”
“I have something better than that.”
“Then what is it?” Rebecca demanded, throwing her hands in the air in frustration. “Tell me, dammit! I’m freaking out over here.”
Gaul sighed and shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to walk fast enough to avoid Rebecca’s pestering. It was always like this when she caught him in the hall — he was a half-foot taller than her, with long legs, and he still couldn’t manage to outdistance her when she’d decided that they were going to talk.
“Could this possibly wait until we’re in my office, Rebecca?”
Rebecca muttered something unintelligible, but she shut up, so Gaul decided that would have to be good enough. She managed to wait until they were in his office, door bolted behind them, and Gaul installed behind his desk before she starting badgering again. He felt better about it here, though — it was always easier, somehow, when he was behind the desk.
“That fucking little monster! She gets right under your skin, doesn’t she? I can’t believe the Black Sun saddled us with her. Such a fucking princess, you know? And she looks at you with those,” Rebecca threw her hands up and gestured vaguely, “eyes of hers, like she
“Apparently,” Gaul said dryly, reaching for his pen and opening the folder nearest to him. He wrote two words, and then his pen was jarred across the page by Rebecca hopping up onto the corner of his desk.
“How is it that we know nothing about what protocols the most dangerous student at the Academy operates, anyway?” Rebecca demanded, lighting a cigarette despite Gaul’s frown. “Even the precogs can’t seem to get a handle on her, you know. That’s bad news right there, if you ask me. Never happened before.”
“You are still referring to Martynova, I assume, and not Alex?”
“For fuck’s sake, Gaul,” Rebecca said, nudging his trashcan into place with her boot and then knocking the ash from her cigarette into it. “You know I’m talking about the ice queen that ran us around in circles. Alex might be a wild card, but he’s hardly the calculated menace that Anastasia Martynova represents. The Black Sun was already dangerous without her. With her?”
Rebecca blew a stream of smoke at the ceiling while he resignedly pushed the ashtray her way.
“With her, it gets dangerous for everybody, not only the Hegemony. Anastasia plays for keeps, I can tell that much, even if I’m not allowed to peak around in her head. She will put the whole detente at risk, it’s a fucking certainty. And I know you’ve heard — everybody says she operates a Deviant Protocol, and nobody knows what kind. She could be a precognitive, Gaul, for all we know. She worries me.”
“You honestly think that girl has one up on me?” Gaul asked, finishing the document with his compact, economical signature. “Is that your professional opinion?”
Rebecca’s eyes lit up, and she propped her chin up on her elbows, facing Gaul.
“I don’t know,” she said, obviously interested. “You gonna tell me I’m wrong?”
“Anastasia is no precognitive.”
“We don’t know anything about her!” Rebecca objected. “She could operate all sorts of protocols and we wouldn’t know a thing.”
“One precognitive recognizes another,” Gaul said dismissively. “Whatever Miss Martynova is, she isn’t a precognitive. She’s incredibly devious, no doubt, but I promise you she is not running a game on me. Whatever it is she thinks that she’s doing, you need to understand that it is all in our best interests, or I would have prevented it.”
“Eerie and Alex are gone, and we don’t know where,” Rebecca said irritably, in the grating voice that she always used when she wanted to complain. “The only way we can get them back is by letting Anastasia do it for us, letting her protect the Black Sun from any potential consequences while putting us in her debt. And all this is assuming that she actually does know where they are, that they are still alive, and that she decides to bring them back. Where are our best interests in all this?”
Gaul sighed and set his pen down.
“We need to get Alex into the field, sooner rather than later. If we are responsible for everything that must be done to him, in order to make him an Operator, there is an excellent chance that he will end up blaming us, blaming the Academy. If we’re lucky, he’ll end up blaming Anastasia or Eerie for this,” Gaul said, flicking his red eyes up at Rebecca, and then back down to the paperwork in front of him. “Anyway, Alex and Eerie are somewhere in San Francisco right now.”
Rebecca jumped off the desk and started pacing excitedly. Gaul sighed more deeply.
“But, how? It takes weeks of analysis to read probability threads that broad and vague, and that’s assuming you even know where to look, and there was no time to track every apport,” Rebecca said accusatorily. “Did you know about this in advance, Gaul?”
“I am a precognitive,” Gaul said, mildly offended, scratching away at the next document. “I had the analytical pool on this possibility two days after Alex got here, along with a dozen other likely ways things could go wrong. Over the last two weeks, I’ve arranged circumstances that have removed all of Anastasia’s transporters from Central, except for Svetlana Rostoff. We knew that she wouldn’t do anything herself, not directly, in order to have deniability. Edward is still too new, so that meant she would have her lieutenant, Renton Hall set it up. Svetlana and Renton only cross paths rarely, so it was easy enough to alert Alistair and have him monitor for when that happened.”
“Wow,” Rebecca said, sitting back down on the corner of the desk.
“While I’m being frank, I should mention that Mitsuru has been in San Francisco since this morning, arranging a new exit, should that become necessary,” Gaul said, frowning. “I would have preferred it to be Alice, but she and Xia are needed elsewhere right now, keeping the Witches off-balance and settling matters with the remnants of the Terrie cartel. Mitsuru was the best I could do without anyone noticing.”
“Okay, I feel stupid,” Rebecca acknowledged, pinching out her cigarette and tossing it into the trash can. “So, why didn’t you stop all this from happening?”
Gaul stopped again and for a moment, Rebecca could have sworn she saw the slightest indications of embarrassment.
“Putting aside the disturbing implications from his past, Alex Warner has been alone his entire life, and that degree of isolation worries me. I don’t need another dysfunctional Operator on my staff. Therefore, if he had found someone he felt socially comfortable with, it didn’t seem advisable for me to interfere. I will admit, however, that I wish it wasn’t Eerie.”
“Are you saying in the most obtuse possible manner,” Rebecca said, eyebrows raised, “that you thought it might be a good idea if Alex got laid?”
Rebecca continued to stare at Gaul for a moment, then started laughing, her face turning red, till she doubled over at the waist.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that,” she said, her body shaking uncontrollably as she laughed, “I keep underestimating you…”
“Please get out of my office,” he said, shaking his head sadly, and reaching for the next document in the stack.
Maybe there were signs, and Alex didn’t notice them. He was tired, after the party, still buzzing, but very much into a tired afterglow, a long gentle come down. Beyond that, Eerie leaned against Alex on the taxi ride home and then feel asleep, her head nestled in the hollow of his shoulder, her hand resting lightly next to his thigh, and he
