he didn’t think that much about it when they didn’t respond. Then he looked up at them, and saw Drake’s colorless face.
“Hey, Chris?” Drake said, looking concerned. Concern looked odd on him: two-hundred pounds of muscle and extra twenty or so of flab, a beard that he braided, and an insane scrawl of multi-colored tattoo work all over his body, excepting only the insides of his hands and the majority of his face. “I thought you said they were down already…”
The crash happened before Chris could turn all the way around. But it was definitely Leigh, perfect, invulnerable Leigh, who was picking herself up from the wreckage of the wall she had collided with. Where she had been seconds before, one of the Auditors was standing, the young one, and the Japanese girl woman red eyes. Mitsuru Aoki, if he remembered correctly. It was obvious, even at a distance, that it required a tremendous effort for her to stand. Typically, he would have assumed that was because of all the blood. Leigh’s claws, after all, could make a terrible mess.
However, this girl’s blood was black. And everything it touched, it consumed.
“What the hell is that?” Chris asked, backing slowly away.
“Nanite dissemblers,” Michelle said hesitantly, trembling at whatever her remote viewing protocol was showing her. “Her blood is saturated with them. What is this woman, Chris? How can she live with those things inside of her?”
Leigh moved cautiously from the wall she collided with, and the Auditor turned toward the movement. Her eyes were fire engine red; they made Chris’s eyes hurt in sympathy. The black blood crawled across her skin in rivulets, each drop falling silently to the ground and then eating away at it. She took one slow step, and then another, and even her footprints were corrosive. Everywhere she stepped, the black liquid expanded outward like rot.
“The dissemblers are self-perpetuating, and they are reproducing rapidly,” Michelle said, horrified, her normally slight French accent becoming pronounced. “Chris, that girl is a monster. If this continues, I don’t know where the damage will stop…”
Chris understood her fright. It was a nightmare idea that he heard described hypothetically, a favorite doomsday scenario among the physicists at the Academy — an Operator who could generate nanites that did nothing but build more of themselves and take everything else apart, functioning unchecked, their mass growing exponentially. The whole planet would be consumed in a matter of weeks. Of course, the scenario had been kicked around because it was widely assumed to be impossible — nanites of this variety had never actually been encountered, to the best of his knowledge. Nothing in the information they’d been given on the Auditors had mentioned Mitsuru Aoki as having such an ability — so Alistair had either withheld the information, or he hadn’t known himself.
“Do we have to do something about this?” Drake asked urgently.
Chris actually begin to explain that with Leigh doing the fighting, they had nothing to worry about. The plan had always hinged on her, after all. She had spent a decade and more in stasis, embedded in the flesh pits, her skin crawling with blasphemous workings and forbidden technologies, asleep and growing strong in the Outer Dark. They had slaughtered a dozen vampires, elders of the European Syndicate, to provide her with the nanites used in the procedure; the Witches that the Anathema held in thrall had sacrificed century’s of collected power. Selecting Leigh for the process had been the offer that brought Chris over to the Anathema. He’d been forced to allow himself to be implanted with a false persona, and to fake his own death, for the purposes of collecting Alice Gallow. But he had never doubted his decision, ever since Leigh had emerged from her bath of blood and nanotechnology like Lady Bathory; naked, perfect, and invulnerable.
Except for the places that the red-eyed woman’s blood landed on Leigh’s waxen skin. Because there was nothing left there except a boiling, slowly-expanding black mass. The ground beneath Mitsuru’s feet fared no better, as she left craters behind her in the asphalt. Even her clothing and weapons were consumed. Only her skin and the knife in her hand were ignored by the ravenous nanites.
Chris said nothing; he stood and watched as Leigh snarled and threw herself at Mitsuru.
Even if she didn’t know exactly why, Leigh had clearly already decided that making her opponent bleed was a bad idea, so she had sheathed her claws before she struck, molding her hands back into fists. Thin, rotating tendrils of black blood surrounded Mitsuru, hanging in midair in frank disregard for gravity, drifting gently with the wind like seaweed, consuming even the moisture from the air around them. Leigh’s timing was exquisite. She jumped one branch like a hurdler, and ducked under another, landed in a crouch and then sprang back up with blinding speed. Truly, she was a marvel to Chris’s eyes.
Mitsuru laughed, and hurled a handful of blood collected from her wounded arm, hanging crooked from Leigh’s kick. Leigh put her arms up to block reflexively, and the blood splashed along her forearms and past, splattering across her chest. A tiny drop hit her immaculate cheek and it started the hissing, fizzing conversion. She tried to step away, and one of the ribbons sliced through on her, neatly severing her left arm at the elbow. The limb was already coated with black, viscous goo by the time it stopped rolling.
Leigh did not feel pain. She did not scream. She retreated, absorbing a glancing blow to the calf as she fled. She was beside them, a moment later, and the black spots had expanded. Her right arm was almost totally lost, and spreading puddles of it were consuming her chest and neck.
“Get rid of it,” Chris commanded Michelle. “The black blood and all the skin touching it. Now.”
“What?” Michelle said, gaping. “I don’t want to…”
“You can’t hurt her,” Chris said impatiently. “But whatever it is that bitch is bleeding all over the place, it’s breaking her down faster than she can rebuild herself. Leigh will die if you don’t do it.”
Michelle hesitated for another infuriating moment, before nodding to herself, closing her eyes, and exercising the other half of what made the petite girl from Normandy such a valuable asset, first to her family and the infamous Terrie Cartel, and then to the Anathema. Michelle was a skilled remote-viewer, but more important, she was an exceptional telekinetic, capable of gross and small manipulations. Leigh’s flesh was neatly incised everywhere the nanites had spread, and she gasped in shock, but that was all. There was no blood. She showed no signs of pain.
Mitsuru shrieked as she turned toward them, all reason gone from her red eyes, while Alice Gallow stumbled to her feet, still clutching her head.
“Fuck this,” Chris snarled. “Let Alice Gallow deal with it. Drake, get us out of here. Start stage two, now.”
“About time,” Drake said, raising one tattooed arm. He brought it down like a conductor, and then there was no one where there had been four.
Alice stared at the spot unsteadily for a moment, waiting for her vision to realign, then turned and regarded Mitsuru, advancing on her surrounded by a tempest of black blood filigree, her eyes livid red, her delicate features twisted and feral.
“Mitzi? I mean, Mitsuru?” Alice tried hopefully, wondering if that Leigh bitch had actually killed her, and she was just too dumb to realize it. “You wanna tone it down a bit?”
Alice wasn’t surprised that it didn’t work, but she didn’t think she could be blamed for trying, what with her head in the process of falling off.
“Hey, Xia?” Alice called out to the motionless figure embedded partway in the wall. “Any chance that you’re still alive?”
Still nothing. Mitsuru came forward, the first of the black tendrils splashing against the strip of concrete that separated them, consuming everything it touched.
“Gaul?” Alice tried, not sure if she was talking or thinking. Her head felt sick and fat, like a rotten jack-o- lantern, one side so badly caved in she was afraid to touch it. “Mitzi is about to kill me. Little help?”
Mitsuru froze and howled, caught in a bubble of rainbow-tinted, oil slick light emanating from the front of her brain, where her implant rested.
“Like that, for example,” Alice said gratefully, stumbling over to where Mitsuru lay. Alice had meant to check on her, but all she managed was to fall over in her vicinity. “That will work.”
Gaul was staring. He had been staring since he had arrived here, called to the abandoned bulk of his own Analytics building, the hallways littered with dozens of dead bodies, summoned by perhaps the last person that he would have suspected.
