were shaking beneath him. Anastasia glided by, riding along the foam of a dwindling wave, and smirked at him.
“Poor Alex,” she said cheerfully. “Always in over his head.”
21
“I don’t get it.”
“What a total surprise,” Katya said tiredly. “I am starting to get the impression that the number of things you do understand can be counted on one hand. Now tell Auntie Kat what it is you don’t get.”
“Why are you suddenly acting like you’re older than me?” Alex asked, his arm extended self-consciously in front of him, as if he were a traffic cop gesturing for the foliage in front of him to stop. “Never mind. Why do I have to hold my arm out like this? I feel stupid.”
“You need to learn to gauge distance,” Katya said, reluctantly setting her rice paper-wrapped spring roll down on the table and walking over to where Alex stood. “Depth is the hardest part of aiming a protocol. It’s not like a gun; you don’t aim in two dimensions. Everybody can get the other two axis’s down, but the last one is a bitch. With your arm out — what’s your reach, anyway?”
“I think it’s, uh, like, seventy inches or something…”
“Right, so your arm is about half the distance to the glass,” Katya said, shrugging. “Near enough. Go ahead and try your protocol out up close, to get a sense of how it works. Activate your protocol a couple inches in front of your hand. Only a little, mind you. Don’t go freezing your arm off.”
Alex grumbled, but settled into the focusing routine Michael had taught him, staring hard at the point in space where he was focusing all of his efforts.
“Is this some sort of focusing exercise?” Katya asked doubtfully. “Because you look like you are having a really hard time going to the bathroom.”
Alex ignored her. Not that it mattered. It still took him the better part of a minute to activate his protocol at the end of his hand. Then he felt pain, and he jerked his hand back reflexively, like a child from a stovetop, the tiny breach into the Ether collapsing instantly.
Katya finished the last of her spring roll while cursed and jumped, clutching his frost-burnt hand, where round, white patches were forming on the pads of skin below his fingers, that would eventually bloom into hard, yellow blisters.
“Not bad,” Katya allowed, wiping her mouth delicately with a napkin. “Kinda slow.”
“Not bad? I burned the shit out of my hand! Didn’t you see that?”
“Yeah, the breach you opened was too big, so it was too cold, too much vacuum, and it took you too long,” she said, shrugging. “We’ll have to fix all of that. But the depth was pretty close. That’s one point for you. Score three points, and I’ll give you a prize.”
“Um… okay. But it better not be something painful…”
“You have a strange concept of the word ‘prize’. Let’s move on to the second target,” Katya suggested. “Use your arm as a guide again, but this time, instead of trying to open the breach right in front of your hand, I want you to stand on the line I drew, and open a breach as close to twice the length of your arm as you can. And a smaller breach this time. Much smaller. I don’t want you to freeze it solid.”
Alex looked at the target propped on a tree stump at roughly at shoulder level, and then the crude line in the moss on the rock that Katya had made by dragging the toe of her sandal through it.
“It’s a glass of water.”
“Right.”
“You want me to make ice?”
Katya nodded, digging in her army surplus rucksack for a moment, before coming up with tonic water and a number of miniature bottles of Bombay Sapphire.
“I need ice,” she explained, smiling and leaning her chin on her hand, watching him.
“I should’ve known,” Alex muttered, turning back to the target and extending his hand again, trying to draw an invisible line between the glass and himself, about twice as far as he could reach. He tensed his body and closed his eyes.
“Not like that.”
Alex was startled by Katya padding up silently behind him, one arm wrapping around his waist, the other forcing his elbow to unlock. “Loosen up. Tensing your muscles won’t help you operate a protocol. Bend your knees. Relax your back. You aren’t trying to tear reality to pieces; you don’t have to murder that glass of water. This may be a first for you, Alex, but I think you might be trying a little bit too hard.”
He tried to relax, knowing he could have done a better job if she hadn’t had been standing right there. He could feel her chest brush against his back, and it was a terrible distraction. Still, he had to try, so he closed his eyes briefly, visualized the distance, raised his arm, and tried to punch the smallest hole into the Ether he could imagine, so small that he imagined a single molecule struggling to fit through the breach. The effect was subtle to the point that at first he didn’t think it had worked it all. Then the glass cracked in two places, but didn’t shatter. The water in the glass had a shard of ice in the center an inch think, running from the top to the bottom.
Katya yelled encouragement and slapped his back while he hurriedly shut the breach. She practically skipped over to gingerly collect the ice from the fractured glass, breaking pieces into the two plastic red cups that she had brought with her. She hummed to herself happily as she filled them with a restrained amount of tonic, and a more generous helping of gin.
“Cheers,” she said, handing him one and offering hers up for a toast. He tapped the plastic rim of her cup with his own. “Good job. I think you are starting to get it. And that’s another point for you.”
“Thanks to you, Katya,” Alex said, sampling his drink, making a sour face, and then adding more tonic water. “Really. I’m sorry I was such a jerk to you at first. I completely misjudged you. You’ve done nothing but look out for me, and teach me, and I’m grateful for it.”
Katya smiled, blushed, and then looked unhappy in an impressively quick array of emotional responses. She sat down on the bench behind her and then patted for him to sit down next to her.
“Not bad,” Katya said quietly. “That’s three points. You win the prize. First, though, Alex, I’m not sure you totally understand something. Do you know why Anastasia assigned me to look after you?”
Alex looked away for a moment, considering both what he thought to be true, and what saying it aloud might do to their suddenly improving relationship. In the end he decided he wasn’t smart enough for anything except the truth.
“Because you are an assassin,” Alex replied, suddenly shy for no specific reason. “Because I need someone watching over me who is willing to kill.”
Katya laughed mirthlessly and drained her cup, pausing to refill it.
“Not hardly, boy,” she scoffed. “Anastasia has lots of people who are willing to kill, and plenty of trained assassins. She sent me for two reasons. The first is that I am completely loyal to Anastasia, and Anastasia alone. I can’t be bribed, persuaded, or threatened, my trust can’t be shaken. I do whatever she says, no questions asked, no compunctions, no moral scruples, no trouble sleeping at night. I owe her everything. Literally.”
“Okay,” Alex said, rattling the ice in his cup, taking a certain satisfaction at having made it. “What’s the second reason?”
“Because I don’t give a fuck about anything or anyone else,” Katya said sweetly, looking at him with a mixture of pity and affection. “I’m not like the other people at the Academy, Alex. I don’t want power or money. I don’t have any hidden motivations or secret agendas. My outlook on life is simple. If Anastasia told me to screw you, Alex, I would have you flat on your back before you had time to reach for your rape whistle. And if she told me to kill you, well, I don’t need any other reason to fill that vacant head of yours with pointy metal bits. And it wouldn’t even mess up my afternoon.”
“Huh,” Alex said, trying to thaw his brain out of its induced freeze. “You feel like trying that out?”
“What? No,” Katya said, shaking her head. “I’m not Alice Gallow. If I go through the rest of my life without having to kill somebody, then that’s fine with me. I don’t like killing people, I just don’t mind it particularly. Besides, I’m supposed to be teaching you.”
