Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

“Take my warning to heart, whelp. You have been compensated in full for your part in this. I am under no obligation to share my designs with you, regardless of our previous collaboration. I advise you not to interfere in my affairs, with the boy, or anything else. We will not speak again.”

“Fine,” Anastasia said airily. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.”

After a moment, the light around Eerie dissipated and her eyes slowly refocused. She sat back on the bed, looking self-conscious, and then turned her attention back to the mute TV screen and the crawl of numbers that represented an abstraction of the world economy. After a little while, Anastasia also resumed watching the silent television.

“So, you do like him,” Anastasia remarked cheerfully a few moments later.

She managed to keep the smile off her face until she heard Eerie stomp off to the bathroom, slamming the door behind her. Like children, she thought. All too easy.

Alex looked at the streets around him, confused, and then over at Margot.

“Hey, Margot? Is this the way back to the hotel?”

Margot seemed to find something in the buildings across the street that required her urgent attention.

“Round about,” Margot said finally, still avoiding eye-contact. “Wanted to check and see if we picked up any company, before we took it back with us. And,” Margot added, reluctantly, “there was something I wanted to talk to you about, anyway. She isn’t what you think she is, you know. Eerie, I mean.”

Alex sighed, and looked over at Margot. The bar behind her made heavy use of blue and pink neon, and she was weirdly illuminated by it as she walked underneath the signs, almost otherworldly. Literally otherworldly, Alex corrected himself.

“Are we still talking about this? Did Anastasia put you up to it?”

Margot looked perturbed, stepping neatly around the blankets and cardboard boxes of a homeless encampment, which extended out from the alcove of a gated electronics store to encompass the inner half of the sidewalk. Alex looked away from the eyes he saw there, shining in the darkness, feeling an obscure and fleeting shame.

“I’ve known Eerie since she was little. We’ve been neighbors, since we arrived at the Academy, and because no one else would talk to us, we ended up spending a lot of time together.” Margot frowned, momentarily, and then continued on. “I am working for the Black Sun right now, Alex. But, it is a temporary arrangement. I’m not one of Anastasia’s creatures. I’m somebody who helps out, in return for an appropriate fee.”

“I’ve always wanted to ask,” Alex said, with more malice than he’d intended, “why didn’t you do something about Steve, that day in the cafeteria? You were right next to her, after all.”

Margot was silent for a while after that, and Alex started to wonder if he’d gone too far with his last comment. Somewhere in the city around them, not too far, a woman or a child screamed, the sound starting high and piercing, like a siren, and then slowly modulating down, and then trailing away to nothing. The silence that followed was more disturbing than the scream.

“We aren’t friends Alex, she’s just someone I’ve known for a long time,” Margot said curtly. “My profession doesn’t allow for much in the way of personal relationships. And I’m not about to start compensating for Eerie’s social inadequacies. If Steve was a real threat, I would have stopped him. He is a petty bully. Not my concern.”

Alex laughed and looked up at the moon, jaundiced and huge, like that first night, with the Weir, the night that the world opened up to reveal another world inside of it, like one of those little Russian dolls. It seemed wrong that the moon should still look the same, when everything else felt so different to him.

“Are you sure? Because it doesn’t really look that way, to me.”

Margot shook her head. Alex had gotten used to her pigtails, and she looked a bit strange to him with her hair down.

“Are you any different, Alex? We are all mercenaries, if you think about it. The lucky ones get to negotiate their own terms of sale. That’s all there is to it. Don’t think they won’t find a way to buy you. You’re lucky they are even interested.”

Alex shrugged and gave her a half-hearted smile to cover his confusion. They walked along in silence for a short time, passing through a block crowded with small restaurants and bars, each spilling patrons and cooking smells out onto the sidewalk.

“Alex, do you know what vampires are?”

Margot’s eyes were cold as she looked at him. Alex laughed, the sound carried away by a rush of passing traffic. He’d been in Central so long, it felt strange and crowded here.

“Oh, what my life has become,” he said, smirking. “Please, go ahead and tell me.”

Margot eyed him coldly.

“Remember the nanomachines that they injected you with, when you first got to the Academy? The ones that saved your life?” Margot’s eyes narrowed as she spoke, but her tone remained cold and flat. “Well, they ended mine.”

Alex looked at Margot blankly.

“Oh, didn’t they tell you? Those nanites kill a third of the people they introduce them into.”

Alex shook his head, feeling a bit ill. Michael had mentioned that there was a mortality rate, of course, and he’d even said that it was high — but Alex had never suspected anything along those lines. He fought a bizarre desire to scratch at the now invisible spot on his upper arm where the IV had plugged in.

“That’s why the Hegemony objects so much to the Black Sun’s philosophy of mass-introduction to the populace at large,” Margot said with a shrug. “They are imagining a few billion corpses.”

Alex failed to keep the horror off his face, and Margot seemed amused by it.

“Obviously, to Anastasia’s crowd, that kind of thing goes with the territory,” Margot said, shrugging. “Anyway, if your body rejects the nanomachines, cardiac and respiratory arrest starts almost immediately, followed by total brain death. Fast and irreversible. But they can’t just bag the body and call the morgue, at least, not right away.”

Pausing for effect, Margot seemed to soak up the curiosity and repulsion she could see on Alex’s face.

“They trundle the bodies on down to the basement of the medical building, where the only vampire on staff works, an old guy named Jorge, who’s had the job for decades now. I don’t blame him for not giving it up; after all, it seems pretty damn easy, as long as you aren’t squeamish, and don’t mind the hours.”

She deftly maneuvered her way through a crowd of smokers outside of a packed, faux Irish-themed pub, carving a path through the drunks and the underdressed girls who lined the sidewalk, raising her voice so that Alex could hear her while they walked.

“Jorge keeps an eye on the bodies, Alex. Weird guy. For three days, twenty-four hours a day, for everyone who rejects the nanites. And most of the time, that’s his whole job — staring at corpses.”

Margot turned back and looked over her shoulder, giving Alex an almost feral grin. For the first time, he noticed that she did in fact have fangs — or rather, a pair of subtly elongated canine teeth, the points of which peaked out from underneath her pale lips when she smiled.

“He gets a lot of reading done. Except, of course, when one of them sits up and starts screaming.”

“How often does that happen?” Alex asked, morbidly curious.

“Not that often,” Margot said, slowing her pace as the sidewalk cleared, so that Alex could walk more easily alongside her. “In the time I’ve been at the Academy, it’s only happened twice.”

“You woke up needing to drink blood after a three day coma? That seems a little unlikely.”