Zachary Rawlins - The Anathema

“I think they made it as far as Michelle could see,” Song said, with her bizarre North Korean accented English, that Chris always had to run back through in his head to achieve a complete understanding. “There is something in there that inhibits protocols.”

“This must be it,” Chris said, running a finger along one of the invisible joining lines between the stone blocks that made up the base of the arched ceiling. “Beneath the hill the Academy was built on, as we suspected.”

“This is stupid,” Leigh complained. “Just send me in, Chris. They can’t hurt me, whoever is in there.”

“Unless it’s Gaul,” he scoffed. “He’s got an implant, remember? He can download telepathic protocols that could probably neutralize you, by yourself. An innate resistance to that kind of thing only goes so far.”

“Are we just going to stand here?” Leigh demanded impatiently. “If you don’t want me to do it, then what are we going to do?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t want you to do it, I said I didn’t want you to do it alone,” Chris said sternly. Leigh looked mildly chastised at the public rebuke, but he didn’t have much choice, if he wanted to retain the respect of the troops under his command. Leigh might be the future of his race, but he wasn’t about to start letting her tell him what to do. “Okay, we move on. Leigh goes first, as fast as possible, until the next chamber is clear. Song, you follow after that. Curtis, you stay a cautious distance behind her, keeping an eye on their mental shields. I will be right behind you, then Michelle. Be ready — if we ending up fighting, we’ll need a barrier. Drake, you stay back here, and be ready to pull us out if things go south. Clear?”

The nods were more reluctant than he would have liked, but he didn’t blame them much. The narrow tunnel in front of him was the kind of position a soldier hopes never to be put in — dark, tight, with only one way in and one way out, too small to maneuver or fight in, and nowhere to run but forward. Only Leigh looked pleased by the situation, but then again, she could see in the dark. He gave her a nod and she started forward. Her speed was, as always, blinding. Song went next, and then Curtis followed hesitantly, with Chris and Michelle right behind him, almost pushing him along.

The tunnel was exactly as awful as it had looked — musty, cramped, and filled with stale air; and, now, nervous people walking in single-file. The ceiling arch was still a full meter overhead, but the path was so narrow that occasionally the stone walls would brush against his shoulders. Chris wasn’t a claustrophobic normally, but in that tiny passage, almost treading on Curtis’s heels, with Michelle so close behind him that if he came to a sudden stop that she would probably have collided with him before she could react, he suddenly became acutely aware of the thousands of tons of rock and dirt overhead, held up by stone supports built centuries earlier, never reinforced or supplemented. He couldn’t shake the idea that he could actually feel the weight of it, pressing down overhead, invisible through the inky blackness that surrounded them but omnipresent. Even the beams of their flashlights seemed subject to the terrible pressure, flickering and receding the further they went. Chris could smell rank sweat coming off Curtis, and he knew that the Operator was even more frightened than he was, which, paradoxically, made Chris feel slightly better.

The attack was timed so well that, despite his excellent hearing, Chris couldn’t tell what happened first — Leigh hollering that she had reached the far end of the passage, her voice echoing in what sounded like a vast space, or the sound of flesh yielding to something harder and heavier. Then was another sound behind them, more difficult to place, but when he turned around, something about Drake looked a little off. Then his body tumbled into sections, legs and waist collapsing in one direction, torso falling backwards. His head leaked everywhere as it rolled away into the darkness.

From the shadows behind him, Alice Gallow, mortifyingly alive and upbeat, waved cheerily.

Chris shoved Curtis into the next chamber, yelling incoherently as he did so. If he could have, he would have shoved him out of the way. After all, if Alice was still alive, then that meant that Xia might be as well, and if Xia was alive…

On cue, the tunnel they were in lit up with reddish-orange light, and Chris felt a tremendous heat behind him, the stone walls groaning with the unexpected temperature change, having been held at a constant by its depth for centuries. Fortunately, Michelle had good reflexes, and her barrier protocol was ready, or they would have died right there. As it was, the heat just behind Michelle was intense. Michelle had ground into his back in a panicked attempt to run and had almost fallen over, so that he was practically dragging her along. A wall of flame licked the pinkish-purple barrier she’d erected across the tunnel, like looking at a forest fire through a soap bubble. The barrier stopped the flames, but Chris could feel his back blistering through his cream-colored jacket. He managed to drag Michelle with him, pushing Song and Curtis forcefully into the next chamber, where things were not a great deal better.

The space was so huge it was hard not to be awed by it. To Chris, it seemed very likely that the whole of the Administration building that was the heart of the Academy could have fit comfortably inside the massive space. A great domed ceiling and utterly flat floor, carved from the stone around them and seamless, with no obvious joinings or tool marks, dominated it. The ceiling was so far overhead that the center of it, where the dome reached its apex, was lost in darkness, despite the shafts of reflected sunlight that made the room dazzlingly bright, at least to Chris’s eyes. Even in this situation, Chris couldn’t help but wonder who could have carved such a place, and how they moved equipment and debris through such a narrow access tunnel, but then he had to turn to more immediate concerns.

Leigh was down on her hands and knees, no doubt incapacitated by the man in glasses near the center of the huge chamber. It had to be Gaul; though he had never actually met the Director of the Academy in person, the red eyes, visible even behind his glasses, were a dead giveaway. There was a shifting, strange aura around the Director, threads of interwoven red and blue light that twisted and crawled through the space around him, dim and ephemeral. The red-haired girl who was kicking Leigh in the ribs like she expected a reward for it was more familiar.

“Margot, that is no way to treat someone who is practically your sister.”

“What?” Margot asked, hesitating. “I thought you were dead, Christopher. I preferred that idea to what I’m seeing here.”

Chris shoved Curtis, who was still staring at the chamber around him like an overwhelmed tourist.

“Activate Leigh’s telepathic shields, you moron.”

Curtis closed his eyes briefly, and then followed that with a series of strange hand gestures. Chris had never bothered to ask what exactly his subordinate was doing with his hands when he used his protocol, because he genuinely didn’t care. Now, however, it struck him as particularly ridiculous.

“Christopher Feld,” Gaul said warningly, his voice echoing all throughout the huge space. “I have been led to believe that you are the kind of man who likes to know things. You should know, regardless of what happens, I cannot find a future in which you leave this room alive.”

Normally, he would have chalked that up to the standard prefight demoralization. However, coming from a precognitive, a renowned precognitive, that was bad news. Chris was considering his response when Leigh swung into action, her shields apparently restored by Curtis. She stood up and grabbed hold of Margot in one fluid motion, one hand on her shoulder and the other on her wrist, then threw her, overhand, so far that Chris couldn’t actually see her hit. He watched her body sail through the air, into the darkness, and then hit the stone with a sound like a bag of meat dropped on concrete.