Zachary Rawlins - The Anathema

“Okay. Alright, I will go,” he said, reaching for the doorknob. “But when you get it figured out, please give me another chance. Because, I promise you Eerie, my mind is made up.”

The pillow she threw missed by a mile, but it still made him jump. When he turned back to face her, there were tears running down her cheeks, and her eyes blazed with an anger he had never seen before.

“It’s not all about you!” She howled, her voice catching.

“Eerie…”

“Just go! Just… just go away.”

He stood there, looking contrite, hoping she would take pity on him, and hoping she would forgive him. Eventually, he realized that she wasn’t going to, and he bowed his head, sighed, and then he let himself out quietly. She kept herself in front of her computer, pounding out code so fast that she was sure she would have to redo all of it later, until well after she heard the front door close behind him, until she was sure that she wouldn’t go to the window to see if he was still out there.

“Stupid,” Eerie muttered, aware that she was crying but refusing to acknowledge it. She slid her headphones over her ears, bent over her keyboard, and stayed that way until she could only stumble, half-blind with sleep, to her bed, falling asleep with her clothes still on, her face still streaked with tears.

There were many funerals that week, and though he was not expected to attend all of them, he felt that it was his responsibility to do so. He’d known about many of the death were coming, after all, long before they’d happened, and he’d thought himself resigned to it. The future that he had steered them toward, he knew, was the brightest and best that he could manage. Nevertheless, faced with the physical reality of the carnage it was built on, Gaul felt part of himself recoil. Therefore, he forced himself to face it, one grieving family after the other; seven days of watching the ground swallow coffins. Margot’s funeral was the most painful by far.

In general, the student’s funerals were more difficult, because he couldn’t help but take it personally. Steve Taylor and Charles Brant nagged at him even though he hadn’t thought much of either boy. But there were many different kinds of unpleasantness for him to experience. Certainly, he had not enjoyed facing the Raleigh’s, who were burying one daughter and dealing with consequences of their other daughter defecting. Knowing that their daughter’s most likely killer was standing across from him, right now, on the other side of Margot’s coffin, in a tasteful black mourning dress, that was a bit hard to swallow. She’d been justified, certainly; but he didn’t think that she’d needed to go as far as killing her. There was no way, of course, for him to confront her openly. The Hegemony would use it as a pretext for war.

And things on that score were very fragile at the moment. A final tally was still being made, but the numerical losses were heavily weighted against the Black Sun, with four cartels defecting on top of significant casualties during the fighting. Their previous dominance was reduced to a rough parity with the wounded Hegemony. The losses the Hegemony had suffered were less severe, but whereas the entire Martynova clan had survived, much of the Hegemony’s leadership had been destroyed in a single attack, and many cartels were in disorder while matters of succession were handled. Still, the balance had shifted, and if the Black Sun’s ascendance was still overwhelmingly likely, it had at least been postponed.

Gaul looked at the faces arrayed around him, and he updated his list. There was always more to do, after all. They had not just lost the dead, after all. There were all sorts of casualties.

Rebecca stood at the head of the coffin, reading poetry that he couldn’t be bothered to identify, looking like she was about to be sick. It wouldn’t have mattered to Margot, anyway, who had no family to mourn her in the first place. Instead, she had a weeping, blue-haired changeling, Anastasia and an honor guard from the Black Sun, and a few members from the staff at the Academy who had raised her. Doubtless, Rebecca was the most grief-stricken of all of them. The empath suffered greatly during the funerals, unable to shield herself from the full weight and gravity of the grief that surrounded her.

Michael sat beside her, looking as somber as Gaul had ever seen him. He was close to the students, and their loss had wounded him more than Gaul would have expected. Part of him took a vindictive and petty satisfaction in it, as Michael’s moral objections to Gaul’s plans from years ago still stung him. However, it was unnerving to see the big, powerful man gritting his teeth as he watched the coffin lower into the uneven ground of the cemetery, out in the rolling hills of the Fringe, underneath the eternal fog at the outskirts of Central. Vladimir watched from a distance, a nurse standing behind his wheelchair. The bandages on his head shone white against the grey sky.

Gaul wondered if the second time Margot had died was any better than the first. He wondered if she would have blamed him; he wondered how much of the blame genuinely belonged to him. He knew he was hardly innocent.

He was surprised to see Alex there. He had been asleep for most of the week, since the attack, attached to an IV in the hospital. It was funny, how mercurial young people could be — the last time Warner had been in a coma, he’d had a rotating cast of visitors at every hour that infirmary staff would permit. This time, he had been left alone, except for the nurses who tended to him. Even Katya had contented herself with mounting a camera in his room so she could monitor him remotely. Now, he noticed, Eerie was being led with great care around Alex by Gerald Windsor, while the boy watched helplessly, obviously desperate to talk to her. Vivik put his hand on Alex’s shoulder, whispering to him, restraining him. Gaul remembered Therese Muir’s funeral, remembered the orders he had signed for the dissolution of the Raleigh cartel, and decided he didn’t feel bad for him at all.

Rebecca, clearly uncomfortable and having trouble walking in heels and a dress, seized Gaul’s arm for support and pulled him along as the funeral broke up.

“You need to try and be subtle,” she warned, pausing for a moment to light a cigarette, and then grabbing his arm again. “Everyone sees you evaluating them, and it makes people nervous.”

“You are right,” Gaul said, surprised at how moody he sounded. “When you were in the hospital, I actually thought that this place might fall apart.”

“That’s almost a compliment. The funny thing is, while I was in the hospital, when I wasn’t fantasizing about murdering Alistair, I was worrying about you falling apart,” Rebecca said, smiling while she led him on a rambling walk through the headstones, away from the new additions and back toward the older, less emotionally loaded graves. “How are you holding up, by the way?”

“I should be asking you that,” Gaul said, the dew from the grass soaking unpleasantly through the legs of his slacks. “But I’m worried, since you asked. The cartels are depleted and in disarray. The Hegemony is trying to decide whether to lick its wounds or to attack the Black Sun now, while they are at their weakest. John Parson is alive, somewhere out in the Ether, he has a supply of nanites that he can use to make living weapons, and one day soon, he will come back here. No one feels safe in Central anymore. And the Auditors have never been weaker…”

Rebecca nodded sympathetically. Gaul could tell from the way she hugged his arm that she had bad news for him, bad news that he had already anticipated, so he braced himself and waited while she stared off at the sun peaking over the sea of fog that surrounded the Academy, working up her courage.