would have been nothing he could articulate.
It got quieter as they approached the gate, and there were more bodies scattered around the trees and the road, some of them probably people he’d seen around, some of them maybe even people he liked. He tried very hard not to look at them.
The road broadened into a plaza, a roundabout with a stone pavilion in the center, directly in front of the Gate. There had been a bus stop and a rain shelter in its shadow, but now there were only fragments of torn metal bolted to the stone that reminded him of the way Emily laughed on a certain afternoon. Katya motioned for him to be quiet as they approached, and something about the gesture recalled the way it had looked — Emily’s lovely, well-proportioned head marred and violated by a thin, rounded piece of metal — and for a moment, he thought he that couldn’t go on any further. Then he saw them, standing near the Gate and talking in low voices. Anathema, dressed for battle, in face paint that he couldn’t identify but he knew indicated their cartel membership. He didn’t need to be able to read it to recognize them. He’d seen the same paint a half-dozen times tonight, and the people wearing it had always been trying to kill him. There were five of them, and all of them had guns.
Alex crouched in the brush, not far from the edge of the woods, where the road begin. Katya bent down beside him. The heavy skirt and jacket combo she’d worn had seemed unreasonably warm on the island. Now he envied her the heavier clothes.
“What do we do now?”
Katya opened her mouth to answer, and then she closed it again, and shrugged.
“I have three needles left,” she offered. “Can you take some of them from here? I’m going to have to get closer…”
As it turned out, she didn’t have to, after all.
Normally, an apport was delivered as close as possible to ground level. When Svetlana performed an apport, Alex noticed that he often had the sensation of falling slightly, on arrival, probably due to inexperience. But whoever put Grigori twenty feet above the huddled group outside the Gate did it on purpose. Apparently, the electric blue crackling aura that surrounded him was enough to be absorb the impact.
The two men who were caught below him, not so much. Alex sincerely hoped they were dead. They sure looked dead; with a whole lot of what was supposed to be on the inside suddenly squeezed out by Grigori’s telekinetic dive-bomb. A shallow crater contained the carnage that Grigori was still in the process of extracting himself from.
The first one of the survivors to react was a guy wearing one of those ski-mask things that people use to rob gas stations. He must have been a pyrokine, and he clearly wasn’t stupid. Apparently, he didn’t need to use his hands to operate his protocol, because the air around Grigori ignited while the man leveled his squat British bull pup SMG, flicked off the safety, and started pumping rounds into Grigori, who had gone up like a Christmas tree in February. Alex moved to help him automatically, before he even thought about what he was going to do, but Katya pulled him down by his arm, hissing her disapproval. She indicated with curt, angry gestures that he was to follow her. She crouched and then lead him off to the side, flanking the remaining men near one side of the Gate. Ten steps later, Alex realized why.
Grigori was invisible inside the Roman candle he had become. But he wasn’t flailing or falling down. He was moving toward the men, slowly but surely, and beneath the layer of livid orange flame, Alex could see brilliant blue undertones.
He had seen Grigori use his protocol before, once or twice, when he visited sessions of the Program, but he didn’t really understand it that well. Grigori was some kind of wideband telekinetic, as Alex understood it, powerful but with an extremely limited range and a blunt, dramatic dispersal. He couldn’t project or strike at a distance like Michael. Instead, he used his protocol almost entirely in contact with his own body.
Grigori crossed about half the distance between him and the remaining Operators before they had the good sense to kill the fire. Underneath, Grigori was sheathed in a shimmering blue field that ebbed and waxed around him, tidal fluctuations in high speed. He looked a bit cooked and unhappy, but otherwise unhurt. Two of the men had the good sense to start using their rifles, banana-clipped AK-47s. The last one had the even better sense to go for his radio. Alex could only assume that meant that the squad telepath had been one of the two unfortunates that Grigori had landed on.
Grigori got his hands on the closest one, the pyrokine. The air in front of his fist radiated a livid blue as he concentrated his telekinetic abilities down into a single point. Alex had seen him do this before, once, but it had been as part of a demonstration, on a block of concrete. The effect on the pyrokine’s abdomen was similar, but much uglier.
One of the other ones must have been a telekinetic. Alex didn’t actually see it that well, but whatever happened, it knocked Grigori over and sent him skidding across the pavilion, the shifting energetic field that surrounded him tearing a furrow in the old stone of the road, raising sparks and making an awful squealing sound. He hit the wall next to the gate hard, sending chips of stone and dust flying. Fortunately, for Katya and Alex, all of this made so much noise that the Anathema didn’t notice them circling around until they were close enough to do something about it.
Katya was supposed to go first, and he was supposed to hang in reserve, since she could strike multiple times rapidly, and he had only managed to figure out how to do it once, with a long windup. But something about the remains of the post in the ground where the bus stop had been, where Alex had stood with Emily, brought back memories; the sly way she smiled when she was enjoying a private joke, the way she would nestle, comfortably, underneath his arm, the way she looked in a dress that she liked. Now all of these memories were poisoned.
Alex put his arm out in front of him to use as a visual reference. But he didn’t open a pinhole. Instead, he let his anger decide for him, and it went for the walls of reality like a scorpion’s stinger, white-hot at its sharpest point, clawing free of him like a living thing and then tearing through to the Ether like it was frictionless. There was no resistance whatsoever. The hole he opened to the Ether was about the size of a basketball, and expanding rapidly, fueled by his irrational anger.
It was crueler than he expected. The air temperature dropped first, shards of frozen water shattering against the stone with a sound like gentle music. Then the men fell, and that was ugly, as they choked on the frigid air that burned their lungs. Their skin blackened and crackled, frostbite expanding manically across their bodies; but they lived on somehow, not exactly screaming, crawling around and moving spasmodically. Eventually, he supposed, their blood froze or their hearts stopped from the trauma. He didn’t actually see that part, because he kept his eyes firmly closed until he was sure they were dead, and then he closed the rent to the Ether.
Grigori, sheathed in a telekinetic field, and Katya, needles dangling from slack fingers, had both stopped to stare at Alex.
“Alex,” Katya said softly. “You’re going to fall asleep again. You can’t do that sort of thing.”
“I’m past caring,” Alex said curtly. “I have places that I need to be, and no more time for this bullshit. Grigori, who sent you here?”
Grigori rubbed his stubbly chin and looked at Alex with obvious curiosity.
“Maybe I have misjudged you, Alex Warner,” Grigori rumbled thoughtfully. “I did not realize that you were so capable.”
“Whatever,” Alex said irritably. “I want to be done with this. I have other things to worry about, and I couldn’t care less about your opinion. Now, who are you here for, and what do we have to do next?”
“I see,” Grigori said, slowly, shrugging his broad shoulders. “Very well. I’m working for Gaul. He had Choi port me over here when he said the time was right. Vivik had you two tagged a half-mile away.”
“What’s it like inside there?” Alex asked, inclining his head in the direction of the Academy. “How bad is it going to be, getting to the infirmary?”
“Its hit and miss,” Grigori said, nudging one of the dead Anathema with his shoe. “There are some places that are pretty safe, like around the Admin building where Gaul’s got the kids all bunkered up. Some others aren’t. But you don’t need to worry. Gaul sent you a guide.”
“Oh, then you aren’t coming?” Katya said brightly. “Pity.”
“Please, Katya,” Grigori said, walking off. “Do try not to get yourself killed. It would be such a shame.”
Alex shrugged and then he and Katya walked through the gate. Things on the other side looked a little bit better. Then their guide stepped from the shadows, an uneasy smile on his face, and his hands in the pockets of his brown tweed jacket.
“Katya, Alex,” Mr. Windsor said cheerfully. “Either of you two fine young people up for an evening
