As the sun set behind the hill that sheltered the Academy, Gaul rested his feverish head on the cool expanse of his desk. His mind smoldered with the excess heat of simultaneous processing, buzzing with partial downloads and custom-built Etheric software. Rebecca would have known, he thought, in the corner of his mind that was not burning with possibilities, burdened with a thousand potential futures and borrowed protocols. She would have brought ice water and cold towels, and she wouldn’t have told him to stop, because she would have known that he would ignore her. Instead, she would have sat down on the corner of his desk, lit one of her forbidden cigarettes, and talked to him, making it impossible for him to multi-task, because a conversation with Rebecca was a titanic undertaking. Once she had grounded him, she would have walked him back to his little cottage behind the Administrative building, and she would have run him a cold bath before she left for her own tiny apartment in a disused wing above her own office. And she never would have told anyone about it. Because Rebecca was a master of keeping secrets.
He could almost see her sitting on the corner of his desk. He could almost smell her despised, habitual cigarette, he could almost hear her nagging at him, and he knew that all of this meant that he must be very sick indeed, that he must have been pushing himself far too hard for too long. He didn’t stop, though. Because no one was there to make him.
But Rebecca would have.
19
“What do you think, Alex?”
“I am sort of excited,” Alex admitted, taking in his uncharacteristically opulent surroundings. “This is my first time in a limo, after all. On the other hand, I’m still regretting some things that happened earlier, and wondering if I‘ve ruined my life by going along with this. I guess I’d say my feelings are mixed.”
“Don’t be like that,” Emily scolded. “We are on vacation. You have to try and have fun.”
“Right,” Alex said. “Besides, except for Timor, it’s me in a limo full of girls. That is definitely pretty cool.”
“Actually, Timor won’t be much competition for you,” Emily said, tipsy from three glasses of Champagne, patting his Alex’s affectionately. “He told me so.”
Timor blushed and muttered to himself. Katya laughed uproariously. Svetlana looked vaguely uncomfortable. Anastasia attempted to murder Emily with her eyes.
“Right, then,” Alex said lightly, hoping to change the subject. “So, uh, where are Renton and Therese?”
Anastasia gave Emily one last glower, clearly wishing she would move away from her cousin, then reluctantly turned to face Alex.
“They are taking the long way. Security procedures,” Anastasia said, sipping from the glass of mineral water she had taken, rather than the excellent sparkling wine that had been handed around when they got in. “Not my idea, Black Sun regulations. Therese had to be psychically blindfolded so she couldn’t find the island again. Renton’s taking care of that. Not that she won’t be able to figure it out the first time one of the fishing boats or the vendors come by. But I don’t make the rules,” Anastasia said ruefully. “At least, not yet.”
“Does that mean I shouldn’t ask where we are going? Because I definitely won’t figure it out.”
“Ha Long Bay,” Anastasia said, shrugging. “And before you ask, that is in northern Vietnam.”
“Oh, shit. Don’t they, like, hate Americans?” Alex asked curiously. “I saw Full Metal Jacket. I would hate us.”
“Actually, that doesn’t come up much,” Anastasia said, clearly taken aback by the reasonableness of the question. “Probably because my family isn’t American, but also because Vietnam is a pretty young place — not many people are old enough to remember the war, and most people are too busy trying to make money from tourists to worry about their country of origin. The government can be a bit passive-aggressive, and they have any number of rules about what foreigners can and cannot do, including owning land. Technically the island is held by a Vietnamese development group, and on paper, they run a small resort there. In reality, the resort is my vacation home, and the only guests are my family, but we pay taxes as if it were full year round, so no one objects. You will like it, I’m certain. It is beautiful, the weather should be nice if very warm, and there are beaches.”
“Wow,” Emily said, shifting over in her seat to be nearer to Alex. “This is so cool, Anastasia!”
“How come we didn’t just go straight there?” Alex asked, finishing off his own glass and setting it aside. “Couldn’t we have skipped the flight from Tokyo and the drive out and stuff? Couldn’t Svetlana port us directly?”
“Yes, but there are people in Central who can track apports,” Anastasia said, frowning at the thought. “We never go there directly. I had Svetlana take us to Narita Airport in Tokyo because it’s the regional transportation hub; all that tells anyone watching is that we went somewhere in Asia. The Black Sun has holdings throughout the region. They might know about the island, but they don’t know we are going there.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little bit paranoid? It’s only a vacation, right?”
Anastasia sneered at Alex.
“You are naive, boy. I was still in my mother’s womb the first time someone tried to kill me, an abortifacient slipped into her poached egg. The precognitives knew I was coming, so the cartels didn’t even wait for me to be born. That is the world we live in. You will learn this, eventually.”
“It seems like you are going a little far…”
“You think this was the extent of my subterfuge? You underestimate me,” Anastasia said haughtily. “At the marina on Ha Long Bay, we will be met by an old friend and employee of the family, Mr. Bao, who will handle both the payment and the telepathic memory wipe of the driver who took us here, and then after, the ferryman as well. Meanwhile, Renton, Therese, and a few others are on an overnight flight from London to Beijing, then to Hong Kong the next day. They won’t meet us in Ha Long Bay until Tuesday, at the earliest.”
“Anastasia! That’s mean,” Emily said. Her tone was chiding, but she seemed delighted.
“They never used to have limousines here,” Katya said, sounding a bit sad about it. She was still wearing an unnecessary windbreaker, despite the heat and humidity, and eating bright red battered shrimp she had bought from a vendor outside the airport. “Remember those Chinese jeeps that we used to have to take, Ana? I hated those things.”
Anastasia nodded, and then, to Alex’s absolute astonishment, she laughed.
“Timor got sick every year, do you remember?” Anastasia asked, laughing from behind her hand. “Poor child. Never could stomach the roads or the suspension.”
“Thank you for reminding me,” Timor said glumly. “You are both just showing off for Alex and Emily.”
“I wasn’t doing anything!” Katya protested. “I was harmlessly reminiscing.”
“They are trying to con you,” Timor said, leaning over Emily to confide to Alex. “Normally, they fight the whole way here about what movie they plan on watching on the big television downstairs.”
“Now who’s showing off,” Katya muttered, closing her eyes and leaning her head against the window.
It wasn’t a long trip, perhaps four hours with traffic, which was generally heavy and varied from bicycles to massive Chinese cargo trucks, all crowded together on the same narrow roadway. Most of the vehicles they passed were vans and trucks, all sitting low on their suspensions, loaded with cargo or covered in passengers clinging to every available surface. Anastasia and Katya quarreled briefly, then both appeared to go to sleep, while Emily stared out the window at the lush countryside, Svetlana read, and Timor and Alex played Gin on the foldout table in between the seats. They crested a particularly large group of hills, and then started to descend back down into an urban area.
“I recognize this part of the road,” Svetlana said, in her clipped, Russian-accented English. “It is not much longer, now.”
“You know, you never say anything when I’m around,” Alex observed, discarding one bad card and getting another to replace it. “I started to worry that you hated me.”
“No,” Svetlana said, shaking her head. “But I am a servant, not a member of the family, not a favored guest like yourself. It is not my place to speak, so I don’t.”
“Wow, that’s a really fucked up attitude you have,” Alex said, tossing his cards down in disgust. “Does Anastasia own you or something?”
