shrugged.
“Remind me,” Alice said, trying to sound casual. “What is your type?”
“That reminds me of a story, actually,” Rebecca said mischievously, pausing occasionally to pull at the smoldering joint. “We did a job together in Venezuela one time, out in the jungle — FARC country, you know? Anyway, we’re slogging along through the brush and the trees, and it had been raining for days. It was terrible, my hair smelled like mildew, and this purported guerrilla group we are supposed to check out aren’t anywhere. Finally, after three days, we drag ourselves into this little village, way the fuck out there, expecting nothing but Indians. Instead, it turns out that there’s this whole group of graduate students from the University of Ohio at the same village, anthropologists, and they end up offering us dinner. So we’re hanging out, getting drunk on this awful moonshine they distill themselves out there in a tin boiler, and waiting for them to finish cooking some sort of stew, when you tap me on the shoulder, and you point out this guy to me, one of the students…”
Alice kept smiling expectantly for a moment. Rebecca remained silent and motionless so long that she got worried.
“And? Rebecca? Hello?”
“Did you feel that?” Rebecca asked, her eyes filled with worry.
“What?”
“Alice,” Rebecca said, dropping the joint, still burning, into the trashcan, and taking her gently by the shoulders. “Did someone just apport into the Academy?”
Alice closed her eyes and looked for the silver veins running through the Ether that marked passage, the roiling of the endless fog. They were there, as obvious and temporary as contrails.
“Yeah. Multiple ports, actually. Why?”
“Because they are all angry, angry and scared,” Rebecca said, heading for the door and pulling Alice behind her. “Come on.”
“Where are we going?” Alice asked, grabbing for the shotgun and bandolier that sat next to the door, blunt, mean, and reassuring.
“Wherever they’re going,” Rebecca said grimly.
“Where is that?”
“I don’t know,” Rebecca snapped, pulling her along. “I haven’t figured out who they are here to kill yet.”
It seemed to Alex like he waited on the steps for a long time. It wasn’t unpleasant, though; he was sore and battered from Michael’s class, and it felt good to be out, watching the sun sink behind the sea of fog below the Academy. There was a certain pleasant tension, torn between eagerness and anxiety at what would happen with Eerie. Alex hit play on his mp3 player, and it brought him something new, something odd and electronic, something he’d never heard before. That meant that Eerie had put it there, when she plugged his player into her laptop last week. The singer’s voice had been pitched-shifted into a frantic, sexless thing, the desperation of a late night nervous breakdown over a long-distance call.
He decided it didn’t fit his mood, and skipped ahead until he hit something more innocuous, a hip-hop group from Hong Kong called Lazy Motherfuckers. He only had a different sweatshirt and jeans to change into, but they were his nicest sweatshirt and jeans. Stretched out on the warm grey stone, lying there thinking about nothing in particular, until he felt Margot looking down on him, even though he’d never heard her approach.
“Come on,” she urged, helping him up with one cool hand.
“Did I ever tell you that I like your hair like this?”
Margot mumbled something and turned away.
“Let’s go,” she said roughly, over her shoulder, “I don’t want anyone to see us. We have a pretty narrow window of time when this is possible.”
“Aren’t you over-thinking it? Can’t I just hop a fence or something?”
“Are you kidding? Eerie’s in trouble with Rebecca. Rebecca’s not to be messed around with,” Margot said seriously. “Even if she is a softie when it comes to Eerie, she’s still an Auditor…”
“What?” Alex stopped in his tracks, dazed. “What did you just say?”
Margot stopped at the edge of the trees and looked back at him as if he was insane.
“Rebecca is an Auditor, you fool.” Margot’s mouth was a barely visible contemptuous line, her eyes gleaming with an internal radiance that shown through the dusk. “You actually didn’t know that? Then she must not have wanted you to find out. Well, that’s life, right? You can’t take anyone at face value. I work with them now, Alex,” Margot said, sounding a bit like she was laughing, “The current Auditors. Alistair, Alice Gallow, Mitsuru Aoki, Xia, and, of course, Rebecca Levy. Though I’ve never seen her out in the field. I hear she’s terrifying.”
“Really?” Alex was dumbfounded, walking blindly behind Margot while his mind was very much elsewhere. “She just seems so… I don’t know. Nice, I guess. I’m having trouble imagining it.”
“You are a soldier Alex, as is everyone you know,” Margot said casually, but with a terrible coldness. “At some point, you are going to have accept that.”
Stunned as he was, Alex knew that Margot was right. He had been fooling himself, after all. If she was in charge of him, what else could Rebecca be? And why did he feel so surprised by it? It wasn’t as if Michael had always been a teacher, and he’d known that Alice and Mitsuru worked in the field, killing people, but Rebecca… it wasn’t only that she hadn’t told him, though that was a part of it. Seeing her as an Auditor was so profoundly at odds with the woman he thought he knew that he had difficulty reconciling the two images. He was felt anger and betrayal, and he was surprised to have such a strong reaction. He hadn't realized the degree to which he trusted Rebecca, until that moment, when he started to questioned her.
God, he hated empathy.
He followed Margot through the wooded area behind the library; a cluster of willow trees hugging a milky, churning creek, surrounded by twisted oaks and deliberately spaced fruit trees. It was a popular area to hang out and study, during the day, when the weather was nice, and most of the students who smoked would sneak out here to do it. But in the evening half-light the ground was a treacherous tangle of roots and brambles, and Alex stumbled and muttered curses under his breath, periodically urged to hurry by Margot who was apparently untroubled by the darkness. Eventually, she seized his hand like a mother pulling along a difficult child.
“Quicker this way,” Margot snapped, scowling as she pulled him along, her cold fingers tight around his wrist. His arm hurt, but he was afraid to say anything.
They walked roughly parallel with the creek for a short time, eventually emerging behind a few low hills to the east of the monolithic Administration building. There was a cluster of homes surrounded by low fences in the small valley there, notched between the hillsides, one of which looked familiar. It took Alex a moment to place it. The wind must have been playing tricks with him, because more than once, he could sworn that he saw someone following them, a figure he couldn’t make out through the trees. Margot’s pace was too demanding for him to stop and take a good look, and he quickly forgot about it, focusing instead on not tripping over roots and tree trunks in the waning light.
“Isn’t that Anastasia’s house?”
“We are neighbors,” Margot acknowledged. “The little one on the end, that’s Eerie, Sebastian, and myself.”
“Who’s Sebastian?”
“He’s a pyrokine, like Xia, maybe more so. A bit touchy about strangers. Might try to burn you alive if he sees you skulking around. Fortunately, he’s only ten, and he’ll be so absorbed watching TV downstairs that he’ll never even notice you are here. He kinda latched on to Eerie a few years ago and he’s lived with us ever since,” Margot said, tossing her shoulders indifferently. “Don’t worry about it. You probably won’t get set on fire. Follow me.”
“I hate it when you say stuff like that, you know,” Alex complained, following her with a heavier heart than when he had started.
“I do.”
They wound around the buildings and the hillocks in an abstract path that seemed utterly haphazard at first. It wasn’t until they were almost halfway to the house that Alex realized she was intent on keeping them out of view of the bulk of the Administrative building. She stopped one house past Anastasia’s, just short of their destination.
“Here’s my ID card,” Margot said, handing him her pass card. “Give me yours.”
“Why?” Alex said, digging it out of his pocket.
