Allie's War Season Three (188 page)

“I’m going to find Nenzi,” he said, blunt. “...just like I said I would.”

REVIK GASPED, LEANING against the wall as Ditrini pulled the chain tight, tight enough to nearly black him out that time, right before he hit him again, harder, and in the throat.

Revik choked, fighting to tighten muscles when the hard-muscled man hit him again, in the jaw, hard enough to briefly white out his vision. Ditrini hit him again when Revik raised his head, fighting to meet his gaze. Before Revik could recover from that, the seer punched him in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him yet again, even as he struggled to turn his body to deflect part of the blow.

Revik had it half in his mind to speak, to try and reason with the older seer again, but Jon spoke up before he did, and even before Maygar, who stood beside Jon now, breathing hard as he watched Ditrini lose control.

“What the hell is this accomplishing?” Jon snapped, fear vibrating his voice. “Have you totally lost your mind? We’re all going to
die
down here. We have to get out of here...”

His words seemed to force some out of Maygar, too.

“Fucking psycho...” Maygar swore. He switched to Prexci, then to Mandarin, swearing more, and using more colorful words. “Suicidal prick...whatever you think of him, is it worth dying over? If you want to see Allie again, don’t kill him, for fuck’s sake!”

Ditrini looked up, that manic glint back in his silver eyes.

“Defending
Dad
now, are we?” Ditrini said, smiling at Maygar wanly.

Maygar blinked at him, then frowned, looking at Revik.

“Just don’t kill him,” he muttered again, still looking at Revik’s face, as if assessing the damage there already. “And don’t be stupid...Jon’s right. We’ll all die down here, if we don’t get above ground...”

Ditrini laughed aloud, and that time, Maygar’s eyes turned openly wary.

Silent, he just watched the older seer laugh, as if he was seeing him for the first time.

Watching the younger seer’s face, it occurred to Revik that Maygar hadn’t interacted with Ditrini at all until now. While he’d obviously picked up on the fact that Ditrini had some ‘issue’ with Allie, he didn’t know what the infiltrator had done to her, either, not in terms of details.

Ditrini looked back down at Revik.

Sweat made a light sheen across his face from his however-many minutes of hitting him. His expression itself was unreadable, but Revik saw the light in those silver eyes, recognized the instability there, as well as the fury that shone beneath. He didn’t try to talk, but crouched there, doing his best to make his light submissive.

He had to get the fuck out of this. It was all that mattered. If that meant catering to Ditrini’s power fantasies, so be it.

Ditrini laughed, yanking on the chain, forcing Revik back to his feet.

Revik fought to keep his balance as he pulled himself shakily upright, still fighting to get his breath back as he focused with an effort down the hallway.

“You weren’t lying, Sword,” Ditrini said, his voice a faint sneer. “You’re good at being a slave. Perhaps I really should keep you around...see just how good?”

Revik didn’t answer that, either.

Ditrini had lost it on him, and none of them really knew why.

Well, not precisely.

Word had come down from upstairs about a wave coming. Revik didn’t know for sure if Ditrini had been talking to Cass that time, too, but he definitely saw the look of anger that had risen to Ditrini’s face as he cut off the person on the other end of the line.

“Are you certain?” he had said. “What do you mean, ‘a wave?’ How big?”

Silence as the other person explained.

“The fields cannot stop it?” Ditrini said. “You are sure?”

Another moment passed where he only listened.

“What?” Ditrini had said, his voice suddenly ice. “Where?”

A few more seconds of silence fell before Ditrini cut the other person off.

“No. That is not what we agreed...”

Another, briefer silence.

“...You had said you would take care of that problem,” Ditrini snapped. “How can I go up there, if it is likely that...”

The person on the other end must have cut him off again. That time, Ditrini’s face twisted in a fury that made Revik nervous, in spite of himself.

Allie’s face flashed through his mind, even in the instant the other seer spoke.

“How can I know that will be the case?” Ditrini said, obviously cutting the other person off again. “Where are
my
assurances, if I do as you say?”

When the silence fell that time, Revik could almost feel the rage emanating off the Lao Hu seer’s light, even wearing the collar. Ditrini stood there in silence, listening to the other person speak, but Revik could see him thinking, could see him coming to some conclusion that he didn’t like, but that he clearly felt powerless to do anything to change. It was that look of powerlessness and loss of control that made Revik the most nervous.

Then Ditrini had looked at Revik, his silver eyes like liquid metal.

Reaching up, the infiltrator turned off his link, without taking his eyes off Revik.

That’s when he’d started hitting him.

He’d attacked him without saying so much as a single word, barking a command in Prexci for the guard to hold him up while he hit him in the face, again and again, and then in the stomach and upper body, hard enough that Revik was pretty sure he’d cracked a few more ribs, and probably bruised a few organs in the process. Really, he was pretty sure a good chunk of his abdomen and chest were already bruised inside and out. One cheek had swollen, to the point where he was having trouble seeing out of that eye, and his jaw throbbed between hits, painful enough that he wondered if something had been cracked there, too.

But that bothered him less than the other, really.

Ditrini worked him over as if it was the most logical thing to do under the circumstances, and not a complete waste of all of their time when they faced probable drowning or worse when the water hit that tunnel.

Now Revik leaned his back against the curved wall of the pipe, panting, trying to get his mind back together after Ditrini had yanked him back to his feet.

The guard next to him looked nervous too, from where he held Revik’s bicep lightly in one hand.

The tunnel dripped under the yellow-green glow of the yisso torch, turning faces sickly, making it hard for Revik to think. He tried to decide how he might convince Ditrini to let them survive, to not kill them just to prevent someone else from getting Allie...or to prevent her from having his child.

The thought brought a wave of pain so intense that he instinctively tried to block it, triggering the collar enough to force out a moan.

When he looked up next, Ditrini was staring at him again, those silver eyes shimmering with a hatred so intense that Revik could only stare back, unthinking.

“We’re not going to get out of here,” Jon muttered.

“Shut up,” Maygar told him. His eyes went back to Revik, then up to Ditrini. “Well?” he said. “Is Jon right? Is
this
how you plan to spend your last minutes roaming this creation, brother Lao Hu? Because, while I sympathize with the sentiment, I would think one of your long life might have something more meaningful to impart, before you go...?”

He used formal Prexci that time, the old version.

Revik found himself looking at Maygar after he said it, remembering for the first time that he’d been Vash’s student for most of the thirty or forty years of his life.

He really didn’t know his son at all.

Now it looked like he might never know him.

Revik watched Ditrini as he gave Maygar another of those predatory smiles.

Then Ditrini turned back to Revik.

Without warning, he wound up and kicked Revik in the balls, hard enough that Revik nearly blacked out. Letting out a half-formed cry, he felt every muscle in his body let go as the pain ran like a shock current through his light. When he could see again, he was on his knees, in the water at the bottom of the pipe, gasping, unable to move through the pain, which was more than he could think through at first.

He looked up, half in a daze, and Ditrini spat in his face.

The other seer walked away then, back the way they had come.

Back towards the larger pipe that lived deeper underground.

Revik stared after him, still gasping, confused when he saw the series of hand-gestures Ditrini aimed at the other five seers of his crew. Those same seers released Maygar and Jon where they’d held them by their chains. They didn’t untie them, or remove their collars, but they walked away from them where they stood, too, glaring at all three of them before they left.

Ditrini gave another command, gesturing towards the torches, and the largest of the five guards threw down the yisso torch he held with a grunt, his eyes murderous as he paused long enough to glare at the three of them.

Then he was gone, too.

They’d left them there.

They’d left them with a torch.

Ditrini...or really, someone else...wanted them to get out of this alive. They wanted Revik to get out alive, probably to keep Allie alive, too.

Revik watched them go from his knees, still fighting to think through his confusion, but unwilling to raise his voice to voice the question, sure it would only bring Ditrini and his goons back. Given Ditrini’s instability, Revik couldn’t push his capacity to take orders too far, or he would find himself with a bullet in his head regardless.

When Revik looked at Jon and Maygar, the puzzlement on their faces mirrored his own.

Revik was struggling then, leaning his weight against the pipe wall and trying to force himself up to his feet. Jon moved forward, using his body as a counterbalance to help him up, and after a few seconds, Revik managed to get himself more or less upright again. He gasped a little when his light sparked around him, igniting the edges of the collar enough to bring a cold shock of pain he felt all the way to his abdomen.

“We have to go,” he gasped, looking at the other two.

They looked at one another, then down the pipe after where Ditrini just left.

“We have to go!” Revik snapped. “Now! Grab that fucking torch! We’ll likely need it, or they wouldn’t have left it...”

He watched for a few seconds as Maygar walked to the torch. Turning his back to the sparking and sizzling thing lying in the dirty water, Maygar lowered himself in a swift crouch, grabbing hold of the end of the black handle with his hands bound behind his back.

Once Revik knew he had it, and was more or less vertical again, he turned away.

Without another word, Revik began limping up the slope as fast as he could while still navigating the silt, water, and chunks of concrete in the bottom of the curved cement pipe. He stumbled through the water and debris, some of which had likely fallen in the last series of quakes, nearly falling more than once before he could see the light bouncing behind him again, and heard the other two following. Revik managed to get his speed up to a reasonable facsimile of a combat jog right around the time he heard the other two catching up, splashing their way through the foot or so of water and closing the gap to where he ran into the near-dark.

Revik’s eyes scanned the walls for a ladder, any hint of a way to a higher level, but it seemed like they ran forever and while he could hear the sound of water getting louder in the background again, he still hadn’t seen a damned thing that looked like it might lead out of there.