Allie's War Season Three (101 page)

So yeah, Wreg hadn't been kidding about Revik being a different animal where ops and training were concerned. Allie hadn't been much more sympathetic really, although Jon could tell she'd tried a little harder to be.

They only stayed on the ship for about 36 hours.

Most of that was spent in planning and intel-sharing meetings, to which Jon had only been invited to about half. He did manage to overhear part of a big fight about whether Jon himself should be allowed to come with them to South America, and in what capacity. Allie wanted him to remain behind, left on the ship with Jaden and the others. In fact, Allie argued the most vociferously for leaving him behind, which Jon tried not to take personally and pretty much failed. He understood her logic...or the excuse she was using anyway. Allie saw him as a possible asset for the other side, if captured. She also argued that Shadow clearly had his eyes on collecting and/or killing as many as he could from the list of humans meant to lead in the coming phase of the Displacement. Given what nearly happened to Dante in Times Square, Jon couldn't argue with that really, either.

Still, he felt more behind her argument than she was admitting to any of the others, and while he loved her for caring, it made him want to shake her, too.

Revik, surprisingly, had disagreed with her...almost as adamantly as she disagreed with him. The male Elaerian argued that Jon being on the list meant, for better or for worse, that he also had a role to play in the conflict. Related to that, he argued that they couldn't afford to bench all of their real assets, simply out of fear that Shadow might try to kill them. After all, by that logic, he should be sitting out the conflict too...as should Balidor, Wreg, Allie herself, and everyone else who made the list.

Funnily enough, Jon got the feeling Revik wasn't sharing the whole story as to why he wanted Jon along, either, but unlike with Allie, Jon couldn't get a clear sense of his real motive.

In the end, Allie agreed reluctantly to let Jon come. At first she tried to argue to have him accompany Balidor and the rest of the infiltrators, not the main strike team, which included Allie, Wreg and Revik, along with most of the military seers from New York and Garensche and the others from San Francisco once they joined Wreg in Brazil.

Revik didn't like that, either, and again argued he needed Jon with them on the ground. At that point, most of the rest of them sat out their back and forth, realizing it bordered on a family argument at that point. Only Balidor intervened once, and that was, surprisingly, to agree with Revik. Allie eventually backed down, but Jon could tell her emotions were running high when she accused Revik of doing it just to placate Wreg.

Jon didn't bother to voice his opinion, or even to get too invested, either way.

Truthfully, he didn't really see how he would be much good to them in the main assault either, no matter how good he'd gotten with a gun of late, at least according to Wreg.

He did know that after that last argument got resolved, Revik ordered him to work with Holo on line jumping...as in practicing how to parachute out of a plane.

Jon had been skydiving exactly once in his life, which he was reasonably sure was one more time than Allie had been. That was over eight years ago, though. He'd also gone with a group of friends in Oregon during vacation in broad daylight...not in the Andes Mountains in the middle of the night as part of a military drop. Holo tried to reassure him that they might not need to use it, but Jon didn't feel at all reassured.

When Jon left the aircraft carrier, it was on one of those planes that looked like a helicopter, in that the engines could swivel up and down for vertical landings and take-offs. Like everything the Seven used, it looked beat up...so much so that he wondered if it belonged to the Navy or if they'd gotten it somewhere else entirely. No one told him where the airship was taking him exactly...he didn't get a lot in the way of specifics about any of it, just another lecture from Revik about following orders and the chain of command.

Regarding that, Jon had already been told he'd fall under Wreg for the main assault, but also that Wreg answered to Revik. Even Allie agreed to fall under Revik's command for the assault itself, which again, all made sense to Jon. He found it interesting that she'd ceased to argue with him once the basic strategy had been agreed upon, and seemed fine with following his orders on the ground. Jon knew they must have some sort of system worked out, but he also couldn't remember Revik and her ever arguing about a point of strategy the way they had about him. It made him uncomfortable, and also a little annoyed...at both of them, really.

He also didn't really trust either of them to give him a realistic assessment of his actual abilities on the ground.

But Jon kept that to himself, too.

Now he sat strapped into a seat between Yumi and Holo, with Allie on the other side of Yumi and Revik across from her. He knew Balidor already left the aircraft carrier as well, along with a good portion of the higher-echelon infiltrators. Jon knew he didn't really belong with that crowd, either, but sitting here now, looking around at expressionless seer faces in serious military mode, Jon felt more superfluous than he really wanted to think about.

Only Revik seemed relaxed compared to the rest of them. Jon watched him look out the window into the night sky, his arms looped around his seat harness comfortably as the plane jostled his long form back and forth.

Jon wondered again why he'd fought so hard to bring him along. Allie thought it had to do with Wreg, but Jon had his doubts.

Truthfully, he suspected it had more to do with Cass.

Jon had been thinking about Cass most of that day, actually. Balidor's team had gotten new intel related to the search for her, while the rest of them were in San Francisco. That had been one of the planning meetings to which Jon had actually been invited.

They'd found Baguen's body.

The Wvercian had been killed outside Phoenix, Arizona, in an alley behind a gas station. His body had been stuffed into the trunk of a rental car, which had been leased to one of Cass' aliases. Apparently she'd used it to fly from Beijing to Moscow to Berlin to London to New York, back when the rest of them were in Asia. She'd then gone from New York to Phoenix, presumably to visit some friends. They'd tracked that same alias before, as the name and passport had been provided to her by the Adhipan for her trip to Beijing the year before. They just assumed she'd stopped using it after Phoenix, maybe after purchasing a new one.

The fact that she and Baguen had gotten off the plane in Phoenix and immediately rented the car actually lent credence to the theory that Cass might have been heading west to visit her mother after all. They now theorized that she'd decided to drive the last leg, maybe to avoid the stronger airport security measures against seers in San Francisco, due to the heavy SCARB presence on the coasts. Given that Baguen was Wvercian, and therefore had no chance at all of passing as human, driving into California actually made a lot of sense.

It seemed pretty clear now that they'd never made it.

From what the Adhipan and Seven operatives could determine, they'd been ambushed at that gas station outside of Phoenix. It looked like they might have been heading to Sedona, actually, which Jon happened to know was one of Cass' favorite places.

After seeing the VR images Yumi shared of Baguen's battered and bloated body, Jon found himself feeling a wave of regret for the passing of the Wvercian, even though he hadn't known him very well. Baguen, despite his social limitations, had been good to Cass...and, Jon suspected, good
for
her in a lot of ways, too.

He'd been difficult for the rest of them, sure, in terms of getting to know him or finding some way to incorporate their relationship into the rest of the group. Baguen also caused friction with Chandre, who was clearly still in love with Cass and resented the Wvercian's presence openly, pretty much every second they occupied the same room.

But the bottom line was, Baguen made Cass feel safe. He'd been unswervingly devoted to her. He'd been a total badass physically and had a long military background, to boot. He'd also been a halfway-decent infiltrator, from what Revik told him. He had that Wvercian sight, which was different from regular seer sight, but could be equally effective if trained to a high enough level. He'd also been hyper-protective of Cass, even for a seer, which Revik told Jon was pretty normal for a Wvercian.

The thing was, Cass seemed to need that. After the Terian thing and losing her whole life in San Francisco, Cass turned pretty badass herself, but she never got over that fear that she might be snatched up again in the middle of the night, and turned into some psychotic seer's plaything. She'd suffered a lot more PTSD than Jon had, and he understood why, given the way Terian had treated her, compared to him.

In any case, Baguen helped her. She calmed down a lot, lost that wild look she would sometimes get in her eyes, not long after the giant Wvercian moved in with her. Baguen seemed perfectly okay to play that role for her, too. He made it clear to everyone, Jon included, that he wouldn't hesitate to die for her, if it came to that.

It bothered Jon a lot that Cass had lost him, too, after everything.

Maybe he should have been worrying more about Cass' immediate wellbeing instead, given the state of Baguen's corpse, but Yumi seemed to think Cass was still alive, and for reasons he couldn't explain, Jon found himself agreeing with her.

Even so, something felt deeply wrong, whenever he found himself thinking about Cass, and not only because her boyfriend had been shot in the back of the head, at close range, execution-style, as if he were nothing more than an afterthought.

More than that, Jon
felt
Cass. He'd been feeling her for weeks...long after the estimated day of death of Baguen. He couldn't bring himself to tell Allie or even Revik that, but he felt her even now. The feelings he got came in waves, wrapped into his own emotions in such a way that he couldn't quite trust them...at least not the specifics.

But the feelings didn't stop coming. Their mere persistence convinced Jon that something in them had to be real.

Still, that fact didn't really reassure him...not even in terms of her being alive. He couldn't tell what condition she was in, not really, but the ways in which she appeared in that dark space made him feel worse, not better. He preferred, really, to doubt that feeling...to see it as not real. Something in those bare glimpses felt sickeningly familiar, and in all of the wrong ways. They didn't strike Jon as exactly what he'd felt when Cass had been in that metal cage under the Caucasus Mountains...but they felt similar.

A little too similar, if Jon were being truthful with himself.

That same feeling of madness dragged at his light whenever he got too close to hers. With it came a dull acceptance that madness might be all any of them had left, that it might constitute the true reality. The feeling was different, sure, than what he'd felt as Terian's captive, but it was eerily similar. Deeper somehow...more permanent...but similar.

Jon couldn't decide what the feeling meant exactly, so he didn't talk to anyone else about what he felt, not even Revik. It worried him, though.

It worried him a lot.

I FELT THE edges of the construct even before we breached it.

Revik warned me about that. From the intel he, Balidor, Yumi and Wreg had done prior to our leaving, none of them seemed to think that we'd be able to sneak up on Shadow and his people in any true sense of the word.

That had been one of the deciding points in our decision to go after Ditrini first, and do what we could to keep at least most of the Lao Hu out of the fight. Voi Pai had agreed to stay out of it, once we contacted her about having Ditrini and four of his lieutenants in our custody, including the one Revik wounded with the telekinesis in Balboa Park. Of course, we knew we couldn't trust the Lao Hu leader even remotely in this, but Revik shrugged that off too, saying if she breached it even slightly, it would at least be an excuse to get rid of that bunch. Anale and Dongren, who had been given custody of the Lao Hu infiltrators, had orders to shoot to kill if any evidence of Lao Hu involvement surfaced during the fight.