Allie's War Season Three (186 page)

They had more information on the seismic activity now, too.

Earthquakes were being reported across all of the feed stations that Arc Enterprises could tap from inside the city, and even some of those located outside, in the contamination zone. Some reported quakes as high as 7.5 in the vicinity of Manhattan, and one that may have been as high as 8.6 a few miles off the coast.

Unfortunately, Balidor and Wreg’s team hadn't gotten a transmission from Arc in at least ten minutes, and there'd been two more tremors in the time since.

Balidor himself was somewhat relieved that most of the ex-rebels worked or spent significant time in Asia, so were accustomed to earthquakes and the associated precautions. Having spent significant time in places where earthquakes were less common, Balidor knew how crazy they could make people, if they hadn’t been conditioned on how to react. He and Wreg needed everyone focused, not panicking, especially if they ended up having to evacuate to accommodate structural damage...which was growing increasingly likely, too.

They’d traveled more than a mile from the hotel basement by now, chasing Ditrini.

Since they’d significantly beefed up the shields above, both in terms of a multi-layer OBE erected over the basement levels for the first time, as well as significant enhancements being incorporated into the hotel construct itself, it was possible there was now too much interference between them and Arc to receive updated reports, given their current distance from the receivers. Balidor had a second group of seers tracking the helicopter that had left the roof, but he hadn’t heard from them, either, despite the regularity of their reports up until the last quake.

"Do we have anyone up top yet?" Balidor asked, turning to Wreg.

The muscular seer nodded, without clicking out of the Barrier. "Two blocks. They're encountering some traffic upstairs...determining now if it's directly affiliated with the extraction team for the Sword and Jon. In any case, they're well-armed, official..."

"SCARB?" Balidor said. "Can we put Chan and Talei in touch with them?"

Wreg nodded, giving Balidor a dense look that told the Adhipan leader more than his words. Wreg didn't like handing that to Talei, since he didn’t know her. Balidor agreed with him, but didn’t see that they had much choice.

Balidor didn’t disagree with Wreg’s overall assessment, though, in terms of the confluence of events.

“What do you want to do, brother?” Balidor asked him, gentler.

Wreg looked at him. “Would you let me take a few and head up? If they’re human, I’ll push them into helping. If not, then I can’t do any worse than I am down here...”

Balidor thought about his words, then nodded. “Agreed.” Hesitating, he added, “Remember, it’s not just Jon. Don’t let them kill Nenzi, brother. However clear he feels, you know he’s probably half-crazed by now...liable to take any number of risks...”

Wreg nodded, his eyes holding a harder understanding. “Yes. I know.”

The silence between them lasted only another beat.

Then Wreg clapped Balidor on the back, his touch carrying more warmth than perhaps Balidor had ever felt from him, right before the muscular seer touched his link to pull Jorag and Neela to join him as he went aboveground.

Balidor tried really hard not to feel that last pulse as a goodbye.

I SAT IN the padded jump-seat of a military-grade Sikorsky helicopter, feeling a sense of déjà vu that almost overwhelmed me briefly, if only for the pain that wanted to blot out my mind.

Terian didn’t sit across from me this time, though.

Shadow didn’t either.

Instead, my best friend from pre-school on sat there, only I didn’t recognize her.

She smiled at me as I stared at her. Even that looked foreign, almost painfully so in that shockingly familiar face.

Someone had fixed the scar that Terian had cut into her face in that cell under the Caucasus Mountains. The skin of Cass’ cheek and mouth looked flawless again, almost inhumanly perfect. It looked how Voi Pai’s faced had looked to me when I first met her in the Forbidden City and she looked like she’d been sculpted out of some fine, pore-less clay.

Cass’s black hair hung in a long, inverted sheet down her back and forward over her shoulders. Shocking, blood-red dye colored only the lower third, blending upwards into the black as if she’d had it done in a high-end salon and paid hundreds of dollars for the privilege. The way that color streaked up the midnight black of her natural hair color made it look like scarlet flames licking up a silk mortuary curtain.

Cass wore a brown leather business suit that looked a lot more expensive than her hair’s dye job, accessorized with diamond earrings and heels that probably cost more than both of us made in a whole year of working that crappy diner on Geary...combined, that is.

Her eyes were what kept drawing me, though.

On the surface, her eyes appeared to be that same light brown that I knew, almost a coffee color, shining with a similar inner sharpness and light. Something in them had changed, though. I could feel it even before I saw that flicker of something else emitted from inside, a pale gold that edged into the lighter green of mine...or Revik’s, for that matter...whenever his aleimi got activated out of fear or lust or intention or whatever else.

Cass had gotten me pretty easily, all in all.

I hadn’t realized where Jon was taking me, of course.

Well, not until it was too late.

Maybe I would have, if I hadn’t been totally lost in what Revik had just told Maygar. Or maybe I wouldn’t have, since it never occurred to me to question Jon, just like it never would
ever
have occurred to me to question Jon, or anything Jon had asked me to do, no matter how strange, and no matter how little sense it made, in retrospect.

Maybe it was the pregnancy itself, and the fact that my spidey-sense wasn’t exactly working at its usual eighty or ninety percent.

Or maybe I’d just gotten lazy, depending on Balidor, Wreg, Loki and Yumi...and especially Revik...to tell me when I was safe and when I wasn’t.

Either way, I didn’t really get how wrong everything was, until Jon started leading me up the stairs to the roof. Even then, I didn’t fight him.

I don’t think I even thought anything bad might to happen to me, not at that point.

Instead, I worried there was something Jon and Revik and Balidor hadn’t told me. I worried that they’d kept me out of the loop...again...probably for personal reasons, or because they thought I couldn’t handle whatever it was. I worried that they’d avoided telling me something awful about Cass. I went up there figuring something bad had already happened to her, or maybe to someone else I loved.

I really thought it had to be Cass, though.

I thought all of those things pretty much until the instant I walked through the door leading onto the roof itself.

But Cass hadn’t been hurt. She’d been waiting for us on the other side.

My mind never really caught up, I don’t think. Not the conscious, directive parts of it, anyway. Instead, that other part of me kicked in. The Bridge part of me, as Vash called it, kicked into fight mode almost before I could make sense of Cass’s face. It certainly acted on my behalf, long before anything happened in my brain that would remotely qualify as a decision.

So yeah, I hadn’t thought. I’d acted, pretty much like I always did in those kinds of things.

Maybe like Revik did, too, when he saw Menlim in Argentina.

My telekinesis snaked out.

Totally out of control. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t aim anything, and I found myself overly conscious of Jon...of Cass herself. Something above my head crackled and burned. It hurt like hell when I let it go, but I aimed it at her anyway...and roughly in the direction of that line of black-clad soldiers.

A cut blast of light left me...I fought to pull my aleimi together, to get all of the structures working roughly in the same direction again...at least until I couldn’t.

Then pain hit me. Hard. Too hard to fight.

Too hard to think through, or push away.

The pain that came from letting my telekinesis muscle do its thing went from difficult to beyond what I could stand. The fist I used to normally hold the telekinesis back clenched inside that pain, and couldn’t let go.

I let out a cry. I heard it somewhere...far away.

I couldn’t see enough to know if I’d damaged myself or not, like Revik had done, but I felt drained, sick with it, even though I’d managed to remain on my feet.

Then I just stood there, sparking like some kind of burnt-out transformer.

I saw broken glass vessels by the landing pad for the giant, converted Sikorsky. I saw a crack in the windshield of the same, and five of the seven or so landing bulbs exploded into powdered glass. One of the soldiers had fallen to one knee, too, yelling where his gun had cracked in half, sending shrapnel into his chest. Another lay on the edge of the white target circle of the helipad, not moving at all.

I tried again to loosen my hold on the telekinesis, but I couldn’t. I clenched my fists at my sides, trying, but I couldn’t see anything now; I could barely see Cass with my physical eyes.

Crying out for Revik in the Barrier, I felt my attempts to reach him hit another series of walls. I tried again, screaming for him...

Still, I saw it when she aimed the gun.

Cass was smart, just like Cass had always been smart. She didn’t point the gun at Jon, or even at my head. She didn’t bother to make threats.

She pointed it at me, right at my belly.

It was enough to click my mind back into a sharper focus. My head cleared without thought, seemingly outside of my control.

In a way it never would have for anything else.

“I don’t care if the baby dies,” Cass said. “I really don’t, Allie.”

Looking at her, I believed her.

“What makes you think I do?” I said, clenching my jaw.

Cass smiled, aiming the gun at my head only then. “Is this better?” she said.

I felt my throat close, even as I fought again to gain control of my light, to loosen the grasp my aleimi had around the structures I needed for the telekinesis.

I got it, though. She’d known, somehow, that a part of me would try to protect the baby. I wouldn’t be able to help myself. The thought closed my throat, although I couldn’t think about why, not then.

“What about Revik?” was all I could think to say.

I looked around at where I stood. I looked at the helicopter already powering up, at the row of guards wearing black armor with the insignia of Black Arrow on the front of their vests.

“...I’ll skip the preliminaries and assume you don’t care about me, since you’ve got a gun aimed at my head,” I’d added a little bitterly. “But what about him? Do you really not care if Revik dies, too?”

“Not really,” she’d said. “...Should I?”

When Jon moved away from where he stood beside me, I’d watched him wordlessly.

I’d seen the blank, unflinching nothingness in his face and eyes as he turned around, disappearing back through that organic-plated door, thumping mindlessly down the cement stairs on the other side. I’d listened to his footsteps, feeling each one as he placed his feet, pushing the emptiness I’d seen on his face out of my awareness, too, knowing only that he wasn’t safe, either, even if it seemed that Cass might be letting him go.

I knew I was cut off from the main construct; I could feel it.