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
“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
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
