Already, in the back of the marvelous machine that his multitasking mind was, a new Bad Cop routine was formulating. His face muscles twitched, approximating a grimace, while he searched the Etheric Network for Rebecca Levy’s disciplinary file.
7
“That went well.”
To Margot, they felt like the most genuine words she’d ever said, her hands sticky with blood. There were bodies all around, but none of them moved, none of them even breathed. They had been smart enough to post guards on the roof, but the guards clearly hadn’t expected to face off with two Auditors.
“I’ve seen so many of the silver Weir in the last couple days that the novelty wearing off.”
“If Godzilla showed up every day, he’d just be a big lizard that made it a pain to fly into Tokyo.”
Mitsuru considered it from where she sat, crouched, watching the scene beneath them. Margot already regretted the words, but it was too late to stay quiet. It was nerves, pure and simple.
“I’m not sure that I follow.”
“Don’t worry about it. I get that a lot.”
Mitsuru frowned, stood up from the side of the building where she crouched, giving Margot a quick appraisal before moving along the rooftop, trailing the figures far below, motioning for Margot to follow her.
“You’re more talkative than I was lead to believe,” Mitsuru observed coolly.
“I get that a lot, too. That’s because of the vampire thing. People have expectations. We have a mythos, you know?”
Mitsuru’s expressionless face and red eyes held no hint of a response. Margot was glad when she decided to return to observing the Anathema below them.
“I want to take them after they leave the building. This bunch can’t take us any further.” Mitsuru glanced again off the side of the building, the perspective dizzying and exhilarating. As it usually did when she was near the edge of something very high, a part of Margot exulted in the idea of jumping, of plunging into the open air. “I downloaded an apport protocol, earlier. We’ll wait for them to leave, and then we’ll eliminate all but two. I’ll see if I can’t get Alistair to do a remote scan for me so we know which ones are the most important, and then we’ll gut the little fish. Are you going to be alright watching my back? Or should I call for reinforcements?”
Margot gave her a curt nod that disguised her pride, and then returned to her attempts to patch together her tattered clothing.
“I’m good. However, I will need to sleep eventually. How many more jumps are you anticipating?”
“The precognitive pool said three,” Mitsuru said, frowning. “But this is four already. We must be close. Alistair will be joining us shortly, and he can take of any fatigue issues. It’s a bit odd, but after the implant, you’ll feel as if you slept last night.”
“He’s coming here? Then this must be the place…”
“Yes, he should be coming with Xia and Chinwe, the backup transporter. Do you know him?”
“Not really,” Margot said, frowning at her attempts to hide the gashes in the back of her shirt and jacket. “I met him at the orientation, when I got provisional status. We’ve never worked together.”
“He’s nice enough. They promoted him to the support team about a month before you joined us. I think he said he was Nigerian. He is restricted to point-to-point transfer, but his range is incredible.” Mitsuru checked the time on the readout on her cell phone. “The Anathema are spending a great deal more time in this building than the last one.”
“Seems that way,” Margot agreed. “Say, is there any way that Alistair could maybe bring some clothes with him? I’m afraid these are going to fall off of me, and I have this complex about fighting naked.”
“You have a complex?” Mitsuru asked, staring. “Does that happen to you so often that you’ve developed a complex over it?”
Margot sighed and sat down on one of the aluminum vent shafts that lined the roof of the building. Her hands went to check on her hair automatically, before she remember that she’d had Eerie cut it off, so it stopped at the nape of her neck and stayed well out of her eyes. It had been a sacrifice, because her hair hadn’t grown at all since she’d become a vampire, but Margot wasn’t taking any chances. She meant to be an Auditor.
“I’m not much with protocols. None of us are. I’ve never met a vampire who operated a protocol of any kind. Eerie says it’s because our nanites are different, but I don’t know if that’s true. What I do know is that I heal rapidly from any injury, and that I am pretty strong, so I tend to fight up close,” Margot shook her head and looked unhappy. Mitsuru wondered privately about her definition of ‘pretty strong’ — earlier, she’d seen Margot lift a Weir and throw him, something she would have thought impossible. “But even if I can take a beating, my clothes, even body armor, can’t take the same abuse. I’ve had two unfortunate experiences with that. I’d rather not make tonight the third.”
“How did it happen?”
Margot didn’t appreciate this line of questioning, but as Mitsuru was her senior and the evaluator on this assignment, she responded as if it didn’t matter to her.
“Did you know that Witches can manipulate fire?”
“If they know the right working, sure. Why?”
“No one told me,” Margot said humorlessly. “That was the first time.”
“And the second?”
“I got ambushed and overrun by Ghouls in Serbian cemetery — it was a dog pile, basically. I was actually buried underneath them at one point. They were tearing each other apart in desperation, trying to get out. God, those things are stupid.” Margot’s eyes looked distant. “You have no idea how bad it stank. I fought my way out, but they bite and scratch. I was fairly intact when I extracted myself, but my clothes, not so much.”
“That is truly disgusting,” Mitsuru said, shaking her head.
“I don’t know,” Alistair said, his hair standing on end, and the air around him crackling from the apport. “A naked woman is a naked woman, even if she is covered in goo from the insides of corpse-eating monsters. I, for one, refuse to remember it badly.”
Alistair was wearing armor that had seen better days himself, one of his hands was wrapped as if he had broken it. His hair was matted and greasy, and his skin was covered in a sheen of rapidly drying sweat. Mitsuru felt herself perk up the moment he arrived, even though she had promised herself that she would stop doing that now that she was officially an Auditor, and Alistair was her direct superior. Xia stood off to the side, silent and masked, and Chinwe flanked him on the other, the transporter looking every bit as tired as Margot felt, his normally bright eyes dimmed with exhaustion. Clearly, his skills had been in high demand for this operation.
“You’re a pig, Alistair,” Margot said, glaring at him.
“What, I’m supposed to forget the first time I met you?” Alistair asked, with what sounded to Mitsuru like forced good humor. He tossed her a small, wrapped package. “Gaul said to bring this. Sometimes I’m not at all sure that precognition is a sensible ability.”
“You try fighting wearing nothing and then tell me that,” Margot retorted, disappearing behind one of the whining HVAC units, presumably to change.
“Anything new?” Mitsuru asked hopefully, walking over to stand near Alistair, but not too near. Their unfortunate history was too public for her to be anything other than prudent.
“Not particularly,” Alistair said, bending down to tie a bootlace that had come undone. “I’ve been running this down for months now, and there’s no doubt — whatever is left of the Terrie Cartel moved here before the shit hit the fan. Now we get here and find the place overrun with Anathema…”
“What about the local cartel? Shin-Tsen, right? I haven’t seen any of them in any of the patrol groups…”
Alistair shook his head, looking grim.
“Nobody home, no answer to communications, no nothing,” Alistair said sourly. “The popular theory of the moment is that they’ve been killed by the Anathema, or joined up themselves. The Hegemony doesn’t seem to know anything about it.”
“Then, that’s what the Terrie Cartel did. They’ve turned traitor…” Mitsuru mused.
“Maybe,” Alistair said, glancing off the side of the building himself, then retreating swiftly back to a safer
