the Dark back-to-back. Emily must have used an entire package of tissues. Even Therese got all weepy.”
“I would swear that chick from the X-Files was in one of them,” Alex said uncertainly. “Why do girls like depressing movies so much?”
Katya shrugged, uncapped her plastic bottle, and took a long drink from it.
“Don’t ask me,” she said, wiping her mouth, and holding out the plastic bottle, waggling it in his direction. “I’m not into that stuff.”
Alex took the wide-mouthed bottle hesitantly. Whatever was in it smelled very fruity, though he couldn’t identify the fruit, with a strong alcoholic undercurrent.
“What kind of movies do you watch?” Alex asked, cautiously sipping from the wide-mouthed bottle. Katya was watching him while he drank, and burst out laughing when he made a face, forced himself to swallow and handed it, rather insistently, back to her. “And what the hell did I just drink?”
“Old black-and-white movies and artsy Asian horror flicks, mainly,” Katya said, laughing. “And rice vodka mixed with lychee and tamarind juices. It’s good.”
“I guess,” Alex said doubtfully. “Old movies? You mean like Psycho, or the Maltese Falcon? Stuff like that?”
“Sure,” Katya said, shrugging. “Not like it matters. I wasn’t planning to invite you over to watch movies any time soon. Hey,” she said, glancing over at him, either amused or curious, he couldn’t tell behind the sunglasses, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Alex said unenthusiastically, watching the ocean slowly recede back from the beach, each wave incrementally less dramatic than the one before it.
“What are you doing here?”
Alex broke his own rule, and looked over at Katya. She was crunching her way through an ice cube she had extracted from the bottle, waiting for his response.
“What kind of question is that?”
“Don’t get all pissy with me. I just don’t understand, that’s all. You came to an island on vacation with a girl who obviously has the hots for you — to the point that it’s more than a little bit embarrassing for those of us watching, by the way — a vacation that, as far as I can tell, you were invited to, rather than forced to go on. And yet I’ve seen Mormon girls who didn’t work as hard at not getting laid, honest to God.”
Alex had to laugh with her. There’d been a Mormon temple a few blocks from his high school, so he had a good idea what she meant. Katya handed him her bottle, so he tried the pink stuff again, and it still tasted weird, like orange juice gone slightly off, but not as bad as before.
“I’m not really sure,” Alex admitted, handing the bottle back to her. “I don’t know why I agreed to come, except that I didn’t really have anything else going on. I guess it seemed like a better idea at the time. Now that I’m here, it’s nice and everything, but I sort of wish that I’d stayed back at the Academy.”
Katya nodded. She must have been content with the answer, because she didn’t ask him anything else, but he was certain that he caught her glancing at him out of the corner of her eye a few times. He had the unpleasant sensation that he was being evaluated, gauged, weighed on a scale and then set aside, found wanting.
“Hey… question for you,” Alex said, watching the sun creep toward the water, growing redder as it descended. “You went to some sort of Black Sun school for assassins, right? What was that like?”
Katya frowned and then took a longer swig off the bottle. She didn’t seem too happy with the question, but at the very least, it seemed to have shifted her attention off him, for which he was grateful. She offered him the bottle again, and then dug it partway in the sand by her towel when he refused.
“It was a lot like the Program, but all of the time,” she said grimly. “How many Black Sun members do you know?”
“Well, uh,” Alex said, trying to count in his head. “You, Anastasia, Timor, Renton…”
“Right, so basically just Anastasia,” Katya said, pursing her lips. “Well, the people in the cartel are nothing like her. She’s at the top, you see, and she’s smart, so you can’t really tell how ambitious she is. But the people underneath her? Ambition runs through her followers like the plague. I was lucky, actually, because I had Timor with me. Otherwise, it would have been lonely. You can’t really trust or like anyone you meet there. It’s just… well; you must have some idea by now. Lots of killing, not all of it simulated. Lots of doing things you’d never want to do, until it doesn’t bother you anymore.”
As she spoke, Katya’s voice changed, from her usual cool flippancy to a lower, contemplative tone. She was staring out at the ocean, now blood red, as the sun sank slowly down into it, so rapt that Alex studied her without fear of her noticing. It was funny, now that he thought about it — Katya was kind of attractive, in her own way; but normally she carried herself with an air of hostility that obscured it. He didn’t feel it at all, now, and he wondered why, but he didn’t think to hard about it. He couldn’t exactly ask, after all.
“At first it doesn’t seem that bad, because you have to finish the Program before you can go. Those first couple of weeks, while they test out your potentials and gauge your abilities aren’t too terrible. The first time you have to kill some poor farm animal is pretty terrible, but after a while, it starts to become routine. But after you’ve been there for a while, eventually, it hits you — everything you do there, everything you learn, everything they teach, it’s all in the service of murder. And everyone there, all the people around you, each of them spends their waking hours dreaming up ways to kill. The Academy can be tense, with the cartel conflicts and everything. But, can you imagine sitting down to dinner with a bunch of murderers-in-training, all speculating on how they would kill you over their soup? It gets to everyone there, eventually. Nobody wants to hang out, or make friends, or date or anything. I was glad when Anastasia said she was pulling me,” Katya said quietly. “I don’t really want to go back. Although I have to admit that it colored my way of thinking.”
“You don’t say?”
“Yeah,” Katya confirmed, smiling over at him. “For example — if I wanted to kill you, Alex, and do it so that no one looking at the body could figure out how you had died, how do you think I would do it?”
Alex was a little alarmed by the turn in the conversation, but he had been at the Academy for months, and was sort of getting used to this sort of thing. He glanced around at the beach that surrounded him.
“Well,” Alex said, biting his lip uncertainly, “I guess you’d either bash my head in with a rock, or stick needles inside me somewhere horrible, right?”
“You are a very direct thinker, aren’t you?” Katya laughed, uncapping her ice-choked bottle, drinking from it, then taking an ice cube from her mouth and holding it up in front of him. “If I used needles, I don’t think it would be very hard to figure out that I did it. I would use ice, silly. An ice cube this big, there’s better than a dozen places I could put it in your body that would kill you real fast, but once the ice cube melts, there wouldn’t be anything left to clue anybody in on what happened.”
Katya smiled and capped off the demo by popping the aforementioned ice cube back into her mouth.
“Huh,” Alex grunted, thinking about it.
“You know,” Katya said idly, “I was thinking you could do the same sort of thing. Freeze a small area. Ice crystals in the brain, or in the blood next to the heart. Assuming you could get that unwieldy protocol of yours under control. I bet it would be faster to operate, as well, if you tried to do less with it.”
“No way,” Alex said definitely, shaking his head. “I can’t get that kind of precision with it.”
“Is that so?” Katya said contemptuously. “And you know this because you’ve tried this already?”
“Well…”
“Thought so,” Katya said smugly.
Alex sat quietly, not exactly embarrassed, just considering. He cleared his throat before he spoke again.
“Well… could you teach me? To aim it, I mean. To do what you just suggested?”
Katya looked over at him seriously, and again, he got the unpleasant sensation that he was being weighed and evaluated.
“Okay,” Katya agreed.“Sure. But you’re gonna owe me.”
Alex sighed theatrically.
“I should have figured. What do you want?”
“I’ll let you know once I think of something,” Katya said, standing up and straightening out her swimsuit, then glancing back at Alex. “Do you want to swim before dinner?”
After considering it briefly, Alex got up to join her.
Eerie coded by rote, one-handed, while she poured the contents of a purple Pixie Stick on her already stained
