Allie's War Season Three (118 page)

PAIN... MORE PAIN than she could endure, despite her body’s refusal to not endure it. More than her mind could think past. More than even she thought she could have stood without dying outright from the sensation alone. Memories of a different cage, a dark, green organic cage, being caged like a dog, raped, the only bitch in a pack of wolves...cut...beaten...burnt...no longer human. But that was the goal. That was the only thing that would save her.

To kill the humanity inside. Just kill it.

She wouldn't win. She'd already lost, and she didn't want to remember anymore.

She didn't want to remember.

She didn’t want to remember her name.

CASS WOKE.

Something woke her. A gunshot, maybe. Whatever it was, it came from far away...so far, that it sounded more like the echo of a gunshot than the gunshot itself.

Or maybe a memory.

Yes, a memory. It could be that.

An image slid through her mind, unbidden. In it, her boyfriend, Baguen, lay face-down in his own blood. A sick smell came off him, not just of shit, although that was there, too, just like it was there whenever Cass had been close to someone who'd been shot dead. Bags smelled of the disease, even though there was no way he could have had it. He smelled of death...his own, and of all deaths, of every death that would follow.

They would all die, and soon.

More images pressed on her, tried to come forward, to confuse her. They mixed with the sick smell that still lingered in her nostrils, the feeling that wanted to twist her stomach as she fought to sort out what her mind wanted to show her from the feet she saw padding bare on the cold tile.

Or maybe not tile. Maybe she was wrong about that, too.

She walked, unsure where she was going.

The floor looked like metal. Metal bars, metal water, metal green floors that breathed and warmed her feet. Floating. She was floating, she remembered. She rode an underwater aquarium where she was one of the fish. She couldn’t remember when they brought her here. She couldn't remember when any of it started anymore, or when it changed from that time when things used to feel different. Something sparked in the back of her mind.

Cass remembered...

Allie laughing from the grass in Golden Gate Park, in the middle of telling her and Jon a story, propped on her elbows as sun lightened her eyes. Jon sprawled beside her, one arm over his face to block those same rays, rolling his eyes right before he laughed involuntarily at whatever Allie said. Cass couldn't remember the exact day, or the details of the ridiculous thing Allie had been painstakingly unfolding. She remembered the look in her friend's eyes, the exact quirk of her mouth as she withheld the funnier bits for later, the way she glanced between them as if to gauge if she'd lost them already, if she needed to make the words more colorful...

Even back then, Allie knew how to hold court.

Or maybe she’d just been blessed with the instincts of a speaker, or a storyteller at least, which Cass supposed was the same thing, when it came down to––

Christmas.

The three of them hunkered around a fireplace, not far from the bent, plastic tree Mrs. Taylor always managed to dig up and decorate, no matter how drunk she might have––

––And before that, Allie's dad, Carl Taylor, who Cass always harbored a secret crush on, but not an icky, gross, pining-after-an-old-man kind of crush, more of a
dad
-crush, in that she wished he'd been her own father, instead of the one she'd had, who'd been high most of the time when he bothered to be around at all, and who had––

Allie got everything...where it mattered, at least.

Allie got everything when it came to love.

She got just enough taken away to make her life sympathetic, without it being full-blown depressing. She lost the great father, but she’d had him, too...and he’d adored her, of course, thought she walked on water while he’d been alive. Allie had him through the worst parts of growing up, the times when she was most in need of a father who could be counted on to say and do the right things, at least most of the time.

Allie had the perfect life, until she turned eighteen.

Her dad had been sick, but he'd been
there.
She had the great brother, the rockstar boyfriend. She'd been smart and people might think she was a little nuts but everyone liked her. Men liked her, even though Cass had always been prettier than her. Well, she
had
been prettier...Allie changed a lot in the past few years, and Cass’s face got carved up. It wasn’t whole anymore, and Allie’s figure had even changed, too.

Back then, they just
liked
her.

It was almost worse that Cass couldn’t pin down the exact reasons the real guys always seemed to like Allie more than her. Maybe it was some fragrance of the seer thing, even then. Maybe the quality came from something less definable, something Cass could only understand if she’d had more of it herself. All Cass knew was that she got the drunks and cheats and drug addicts and low-lifes, and Allie got the guys all the other girls wanted. Sure, Allie got stuck with the weird stalkers, too, but even that somehow contributed to her allure, if nothing else by bringing out that protective thing or whatever that a lot of guys seemed to have.

Then, yeah, Allie had Revik.

While that whole thing had its ups and downs, only Allie would end up married to a guy like Revik. Only Allie would have the most infamous seer alive in her bed, or hell, doting on her to the point of mental instability...

Cass's mind stuttered again, echoing with that faraway shot.

...Allie was in charge, the First of the Four. The Bridge. Intermediary. Elaerian. Fabled lover of the Sword. Leader of her people. She was the darling of the Seven, the Adhipan, and now even the rebels. Given all of her lofty titles and important meetings and whatever else, she probably barely missed Cass in all the months since they’d seen one another.

Hell, she’d probably been too busy screwing Revik's brains out to even notice Cass had been gone.

Cass’ head started to pound, hurting her in waves through her thin skin.

She’d been happy once.

Even recently, Cass had been in a happy place...a stupid, childish happy place, but a happy place nonetheless. Behind her eyes, she saw red rocks in the desert, Bags’ dark eyes and wide-lipped smile as she told him about a trip she’d taken with Allie and Jon when they’d all still been in high school. She chatted to him about cave drawings and cactus, vortexes and new age stores, asking his opinion on whether she should get another tattoo. She told him how she planned to check them into their room, seduce him into screwing her for a couple of hours so they could end up on the patio of the hotel’s restaurant before the sun went down, eating kick-ass Mexican food and drinking salt-rimmed margaritas...

All of those images, sounds and smells were gone in a single flash of metal and smoke, only brighter for the harsh glare of the Arizona sun.

Cass knew that echo would stay with her, forever really. Burnt into her mind by the sheer happiness that she’d felt, only seconds before.

But that was Cass’ problem really. Her mom always thought so, anyway.

Cass couldn’t just let things go.

Allie could let go of things. Her dad, her mom, Cass, Jon, Vash, Dorje, Yerin, even Revik...she’d let go of all of them, at one point or another, when she thought she had to. Allie compartmentalized, she fragmented, she avoided or simply sidelined anything that got in the way of the primary objective, which seemed to Cass to consist of something along the lines of 'keep going, no matter what.' Where exactly, Allie was going, had always been the question.

Either she was super zen, or some kind of sociopath.

I like the way you are,
a tentative voice said. It whispered in her mind, just as softly,
I think the way you are is very good, just as it is, my most Formidable darling...

Cass smiled, in spite of herself.

Will you come back to bed?
he whispered.
...After you speak to him?

Cass looked around, coming to a halt on that metal floor. She’d been walking. The bare feet were now stationary below her, and for the first time, Cass realized she was entirely naked. The realization would have bothered her before, but somehow, now it didn’t.

You are beautiful, War Cassandra,
the voice murmured, quieter.

Cass felt a flicker of his warmth, the desire that underlay it.

“You are, indeed,” another voice confirmed, holding a faint note of humor.

That one came from outside, from only a dozen yards away.

Cass turned, lifting her eyes from her beige feet with the chipped nail polish.

She gazed at the apparition cutting a shadow over a view port on the side of the floating metal boat that had become her home. The beast had its own heartbeat, its own way of swimming through the waves beneath the waves, its own blood circulating and nervous system and mind that governed every one of its movements.

Cass looked at the man standing there, and saw him looking at her, too, his expression untainted by lust or even that less-definable but ubiquitous
want,
the one from which no one, seemingly, could escape.

But he did want something from her, Cass remembered.

He was like all the others, really.

Maybe he was worse, if she could believe Revik.

The man felt some fragment of this, because he smiled.

"It is true," he conceded gently. "I do want things, Cassandra. And yes, I want them from you. But realize this, my dearest of intermediaries...it only
seems
the world wants in this way, hungers in this way, because of who you are. To others, there are only things to want, things that elude them. You are powerful, War Cassandra. The weak always hunger after the strong..."

The gaunt man turned to face her more fully, clasping long, white hands in front of the tailored jacket he wore. His expression didn’t change, apart from a slight lift of his chin.

"...Powerful people are desired,” he added. “Sought out, pressed upon for aid, coveted and envied, secretly loved and just as passionately hated." He shrugged eloquently with one of those pale hands. "...I am not above this, it is true.” He smiled. “Yet, I wish to give you things too, War Cassandra.”

He gave her another of those gentle-seeming smiles.

“...This is partly selfish on my part, too. But it is also what I consider my sacred duty. To help the most powerful of the Four to attain her mission here in the manifest world, as the scriptures dictate, would fulfill me in ways you cannot imagine. This is the true source of my love, pride and conceit..."

Cass frowned. She didn’t look away from him though, studying his face where he stood against the lighter blue-green of ocean, lit by the submarine's lights on the outer hull. Her eyes were pulled briefly by a cruising shark that paced the ship's motions through the water. One of its black eyes rolled white, yellow in the submarine’s lights, right before the knife-like fish darted back into the darker reaches of water.

Still turning over the seer's words, Cass gave a derisive snort.

"Your conceit, huh?" she said, giving him a hard look.

He nodded, his face unmoving. "Yes."

"You don't really believe that," she said.

The seer remained unmoved. "In which respect?" he said only.

"You don't think I'm the most powerful of the Four.” Cass folded her arms, looking past him to that school of fish, their silver sides flashing in the lights of their underwater fortress as they fled the shark. "...Not next to Allie. Certainly not next to Revik...your precious Nenzi."

The man’s thin lips rose in a perceptible smile.

"That's funny?" Cass said, frowning harder. "Really."

"I would never presume to flatter you, Formidable War," he said, clicking mildly under his breath, even as he laid a pale hand on the metal rim around the window. "I am quite serious about what I said. And while I may be deluded about myself and my own motives...I feel I am most definitely clear about
you,
War Cassandra."

"I'm human," she reminded him bluntly.

"To the undiscriminating eye, yes," he conceded, albeit cryptically. "So was our departed brother, the Shield, if you recall."