Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

Alice sipped her coffee again, and then grinned at him over the cup.

“Don’t worry about it, Chris. For reasons I don’t understand, I have a certain misplaced affection for you. What is it going to cost me?”

“Well,” Chris hedged, “what do you need to know, exactly?”

“Everything,” Alice answered flatly. “I need to know everything that the Terrie Cartel has been doing for the past several years, what the Witches have to do with it, the Weir, everything. Gaul says that the store is open on this one.”

“He wants it that bad?” Chris asked, too stunned to hide his surprise. Gaul was notorious for his cheapness.

“He has a hard on for this like you wouldn’t believe,” Alice said glumly, setting her coffee aside. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen him so worked up. I need to know anything I might need to know, alright? So, tell me what it is that you want.”

“Two things.” Chris considered his coffee, and then decided against it. It wasn’t that he couldn’t drink the stuff, but the last time he had, it had given him heartburn for days. “I want a favor from Central, and I want a favor from you.”

“Oh, Chris,” Alice said, putting one hand on her chest, and fluttering her eyelashes. “I’m here in a professional capacity…”

Chris did his best to look appalled, rather than hurt and saddened. He didn’t like to make Alice aware of the times when her memory failed her, even if it wounded him that she had forgotten the nights they’d been together; at the Russian embassy in Prague, on the porch outside a tiny cottage near Hamburg they had rented one balmy weekend in June, in a hotel in Copenhagen so expensive that they never even saw the employees — fresh towels and meals simply appeared, as if by some kind of domestic magic. Chris couldn’t imagine forgetting all of it, but that had always been the score with Alice.

“I’d never try and blackmail you into it, my dear,” he said with a pained grin. “I’m certain that eventually you’ll succumb to my charms. No, I think you’ll find that what I want you to do is more along your usual line.”

Alice shook her head in mock resignation.

“Your loss. But I can’t offer anything, until I know the particulars.”

“I want Central to assume total responsibility for Margot’s education and upbringing,” Chris said abruptly, moodily pushing his coffee away. “I did make promises to provide her with mentorship and financial support, but it has become quite a burden.”

Alice smiled at him.

“Times are hard all around then, Christopher?” Alice pursed her lips briefly. Chris knew from experience that meant she’d agree — reluctantly, of course. He’d seen that face during that bad business in Moscow in the ‘53, and then again, decades later in Serbia. Alice was extremely concerned about something, and he had a pretty good idea about what. “You’re gonna break that little vampire’s heart, if she finds out you are shifting the responsibility. And what do you want from me?”

Chris folded his hands in front of his face as if in prayer, and tried his best to look beneficent and thoughtful. Not that he could hope to fool Alice, who knew him well enough to spot an act, even without using the Inquisition Protocol she had access to as an Auditor. It was a habit that helped him feel more confident in his presentation.

“It will probably get heavy,” he admitted. “But, you know I wouldn’t bother you for anything that wasn’t.”

“I’d probably get bored with anything else,” Alice said, gradually shredding a discarded sugar packet into dull pink ribbons. “Get to the point, please, Chris.”

“I need you to watch my back on a job,” Chris said plainly. “It’s something personal, it isn’t Society business. I can’t use my normal channels to handle this thing.”

Alice leaned back in her chair and looked at him with the most open confusion he’d ever seen her express, already starting to morph into anger.

“And now I am supposed to say ‘Just like old times’, or something, right? I’m an Auditor, Chris, not a hired dog. I don’t do favors. I certainly don’t help you deal with your ‘personal business’.”

Chris held up his hands pleadingly.

“Credit me with a bit more intelligence than that, Alice. I know perfectly well who I’m talking to. I wouldn’t have bothered to make the request, but the fact is…”

Chris hesitated for a moment, then. It was like looking down off of a height, right before he jumped. It didn’t change anything, other than reminding him to be terrified. He still had no options other than a leap of faith.

“The fact is that this job pertains to your Audit, Alice, and I think you’ll be very interested in it.”

“I already am,” Alice said grimly, her smile suddenly gone. Chris wondered how he’d forgotten how much scarier she was without it. “Have you done something ill-advised, Chris?”

Chris shook his head and sighed.

“I wasn’t planning on trying to hide it,” he said guiltily. “We don’t have nice jobs, Alice, and they aren’t easy, either. I’ve made a mistake.”

Alice leaned forward even further, taking his ice-cold hand in her own. It was a friendly gesture, but with an underlying firmness. He knew better than to flinch from her touch.

“What did you do for the Terrie Cartel, Chris?”

He heard the edge in her voice, and knew that it could go either way, but Chris faced it down with the nerves of a life-long gambler.

“Remember, when I took the job, they were still a cartel in good standing!” Chris protested. “The suspension only came down a few weeks ago. This all started almost three years ago.”

When he realized that no reaction from Alice was forthcoming, Chris sighed again, more out of habit than anything.

“The Terrie Cartel approached us, the Society, wanting to buy all kinds of intelligence — anything at all on the Witch cults, those Anathema freaks in the Outer Dark, the movements of the Weir tribes and population estimates, that sort of thing.” Chris shook his head, and wished that he could take his hand out from under Alice’s. “It’s obvious to me, now, they were interested in how much we knew, and by extension, how much Central was likely to know, rather than the information itself.”

Alice nodded grimly, but she released his hand, much to Chris’s relief.

“You provided this information?”

Alice tapped her fingers on the table expectantly.

“Of course,” Chris acknowledged, feeling a bit foolish. “There was nothing proscribed, nothing outside the boundaries of the Agreement. We continued to provide intelligence for them up until we heard about the attacks. The arrangement was terminated before Central proscribed the Terrie cartel.”

Alice’s grin returned. Apparently she had caught the emphasis on the last part of the statement, the proactive termination of the relationship. Weeks could mean everything. Nothing was trivial when Alice Gallow was sitting across the table, and Chris wasn’t about to assume any more guilt than he had to.

“What happened once you heard about the proscription?”

Alice finished the better part of her coffee in one swallow. Chris found himself wondering idly what his chances were of surviving the encounter, and then put it aside. There was no point in worrying about what couldn’t be changed.

“I told them the arrangement was dead, of course,” Chris said, immediately regretting his choice of words. “They told me that ending the arrangement would be a very serious error on my part, that it could have consequences for the Society. I walked away, never even looked back.”

Chris wondered if Alice had activated the Inquisition Protocol. She was a skilled enough Operator that he couldn’t read anything from her Etheric signature, but it was certainly possible. He hoped that she had. He desperately needed her to know he wasn’t lying.