Allie's War Season One (160 page)

She was like a blank doll, staring without seeing him.

Pain wracked his light. This was
Allie
he was thinking about. Allie he’d seen chained...Allie he’d considered raping...

She’d tried to trick him...lied to him. She didn’t want him.

She wanted that son of a bitch who locked him up, instead...

Confusion filled his light.

She’d refused the boy, knowing Terian would rape her for her refusal. Why had she let that happen? Had she liked it? Was it possible?

No. He’d beaten her, too. He nearly killed her.

He said he’d done it for a reason, but not a single reason came to Revik’s mind that made any sense to him, not even in terms of Terry.

His friend, Terry. He’d stolen his wife…raped her.

He gripped the elevator wall. He couldn’t believe how bad everything hurt; he’d never had separation pain like this, not even as a kid, in the mountains. He could feel that his body had had sex, a lot of it, and recently...it didn’t help.

He’d waited for her. For goddamned years, he’d waited. They’d promised him that he wouldn’t have to be alone. They promised him, taught him all the ancient texts. They showed him how they said all the same things, that he wouldn’t be alone, not once she came. They said she would recognize him, too.

They said she belonged with him.

He had to find her. He couldn’t let her go. She was raised human, she wouldn’t understand; he would have to help her. But he had to get out of there first. She wouldn’t have waited...Salinse’s people wouldn’t have let her. They’d want her safe.

And anyway, why would she wait for him now?

The humans would be waiting, though. Terian’s people, too. His aleimi sought out opportunities, weapons. That part of him felt comfortable...working in that space, doing what it had always done...better than he had ever done anything else. Hunting was easy, uncomplicated. Combustible gases, broken piping, liquid fuel, wooden pieces of wall and curtains like tinder already burning, residual powder, exposed wiring...he’d seen fireplaces in the plan...there had been gas somewhere, too...maybe the kitchen.

He’d heard the bombs. That meant planes. Fuel.

The two sides worked together, but separate...on separate rails.

The know-how, so familiar now despite its years of absence, mixed with the military side of him, the part that planned the op to get inside. His fractured mind worked best with concrete goals.

It only really derailed when he thought about...

Pain tried to take over his light once more.

He had to find her. He had to convince her...make her listen.

The doors of the elevator slid open. He found himself facing the ground floor. He stood there, a heartbeat too long, and the doors started to close. A guard saw him when he stuck out his arm, stopping them before they could meet. As the organic panels reopened, the black-clad human raised an automatic rifle.

Revik concentrated, briefly...

...and the gun broke apart in the man’s hands.

The shell exploded backwards into his face.

The Sweep yelled as metal burnt flesh, but not for long because Revik broke his neck before he finished exhaling on the first scream.

He didn’t have time to feel this.

He felt another gun go up and scanned. He broke the firing mechanism before he snapped the owner’s spine, causing another of the armor-plated soldiers to crumple. He stood there, panting, staring at the two men lying on the wide, red carpet runner, their bodies motionless, like broken toys.

For a second, he hesitated, filled with doubt.

Then a kind of wonder came over him as he looked from one man to the other. He gave a startled laugh, and it sounded loud in the hollow hall.

Something new pinged his light, and his focus returned again, sharper.

He stepped the rest of the way out of the elevator, reaching up high into parts of his aleimi that felt so much like him his chest actually hurt. He remembered this!

Terian was right.

He remembered…

Epilogue

PAMIR

I SAT NEXT to Vash, cross-legged.

We were mostly alone inside an enormous cave, next to a fire that burned high and hot. I say mostly because the cave itself lay inside a vast network of other caves that wound deep into the Pamir range and beyond, between Tajikistan and China.

Since the incident in DC, those caves slowly filled with refugees from Seertown and other places as the political climate shifted all over. Refugees continued to trickle in from Europe and the Americas, and even Africa and parts of Asia...joining us in what was fast becoming the new (old) seer stronghold in Asia.

The circle really was revolving back to where it started, I guess.

Anyway, none of us were ever really alone in those caves, not anymore. Despite their vast size and complexity, the whole place was a giant construct. Once again, that construct was actively maintained by the Adhipan as they took on even more of their traditional duties in the wake of ‘the incident,’ as most of us referred to it now, or simply ‘the thing in DC.’

Fire illuminated the cave walls around us...including a tall mural covered in fading images of animals and people.

A turtle sat under the world, next to a king and a queen and a knight that weren’t from the chess board, and a dragon that swam through the ocean. The Bridge stood holding lightning in her hands, next to a laughing boy holding a blue-white sun, his eyes filled with joy.

I tore my eyes off the boy’s face, taking a sip of my cup of chai.

The cave was warm, surprisingly so, given how damp and dead-seeming the maze of tunnels had been just a few weeks earlier, when we first arrived. Already, power was available in over half of the occupied caves as well, with the others in some stage of progress as the techs scrambled to keep up with the influx of residents. Even with the technological advances, however, I knew we were only now rolling into the hottest months of summer. From what I’d been told, most of us younger seers were in for a shock when we hit our first real storm in the later months of that year.

Most of us in the Seven were settling in to stay, just like the seers had for millennia before us.

Tarsi even lived with us now.

Well, more accurately, with Vash. They shared one of the cave rooms together, which surprised me, I guess...as did Cass’ decision to bunk down with a giant Wvercian she’d met somewhere while I’d been held in captivity.

Actually, the Cass thing surprised me less, although I could tell there was still some tension with Chandre.

Even Jon seemed to be getting on better in the world of the seers. He and Dorje played chess every night in the largest of the now-occupied common spaces, and I’d seen him in the sparring ring a few times, too, learning mulei from Tenzin and Garensche and some of the others.

He was certainly doing better than me.

It was quiet there, living in the mountains, but it wouldn’t be for long. Nor was it particularly quiet in the world outside. I still had access to feeds, thanks to Balidor’s people and a number of pretty high-tech organic satellite dishes arrayed further up in the mountains and protected by weatherized covers.

The United States had locked itself down.

Martial law had been declared in most major cities as riots raged, mostly in seer-related businesses, but also against the Chinese, who were blamed for colluding with seer terrorists, thanks to Terian’s war-mongering of the previous year. The United States’ borders had closed to all seers and a large percentage of human foreigners; they’d installed mandatory DNA tests for entry into all government buildings as well as major banks and other businesses.

Those seers still living in the United States...those unable to leave in time, or to disguise themselves adequately...were already being rounded up. We didn’t have a lot of intelligence on the details yet, but we knew it was bad, even just from glimpses in the Barrier.

Washington DC remained a quasi-militarized zone. We were waiting for news, but preliminary reports didn’t look good.

No one in the Adhipan had managed to find Feigran, either.

His capsule set down somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, but Balidor hadn’t been able to direct any of his people to his best guess at the coordinates in time; the heavy organics in the machinery made the exact location too difficult to pinpoint, and most in the Seven were fairly distracted anyway, even before the attack on the United States’ White House and later, its Capitol Building.

By the time ships made it out to where satellite images found it floating, the capsule either sank, or was no longer there.

In any case, while the fate of Feigran himself remained under debate by the infiltrators in the Adhipan and the Seven, all of the Terian bodies appeared to be gone.

Wellington had been found dead in his bunker along with the Secretary of Defense, Andrea Jarvesch. The young girl that the Wellingtons had adopted a year earlier, Melissa Wellington, died mysteriously, too. The unexplained deaths hadn’t stopped reverberating through the human world. Nor had the fact that I had apparently “disappeared” from under some of the heaviest security ever deployed to guard a single seer…and seemingly without a trace.

Everyone from the Chinese to homegrown insurgents to seer terrorists from the Middle East had been blamed for the attacks. The Americans dropped a second set of bombs on the White House after Tobias drugged me and carried me off the grounds. Apparently that second bombing had been done in response to the deaths of Wellington and Jarvesch, in a desperate attempt to destroy the last of the terrorist cell.

It hadn’t. By then, no one had been left inside, apart from corpses and the odd straggler from Secret Service. The Scandinavian Terian had been there, too, his body dragged out of the underground chamber with at least three bullet holes in his limbs. According to the coroner, however, it wasn’t the bullets that killed him. He’d died before the wounds could bleed out.

Instead, he was pronounced dead from “unexplained causes,” like the others had been...like Wellington and Jarvesch and the girl, Melissa.

The usual talk of conspiracies and cover-ups made the rounds of the lesser-known feeds. There was talk of a new weapon, something developed with seer tech. They thought I might have done it, using telekinesis I guess. They thought Caine’s old terrorist buddies might have evened a score.

Elan Raven hadn’t resurfaced yet either. Nor had Maygar.

But I didn’t much care about any of that.

I found myself thinking, now and then, about Haldren, however…otherwise known as former United States President Daniel Caine, also known as Hraban Novotny in Eastern Europe, or simply Galaith.

It had occurred to me more than once that the name Galaith meant “Shield” in the oldest of the seer tongues.

The shield had certainly crumbled since his death. During his life, Galaith had managed to maintain treaties within both the human and seer worlds. He’d protected the Seven in his own way, by keeping the rebels in the mountains under control, and keeping human passions in check when some might have wanted a more aggressive stance against the free seers in Asia. He’d created SCARB as a means to assuage human fears of uncontrolled seers, and then infiltrated it with his own seers to keep them from getting overly zealous. He’d even done what he’d claimed to do all those years ago.

He protected the world from Syrimne.