Allie's War Season Three (42 page)

Frowning slightly, he stared at the female seer on the other side of the wall. Her shackled wrists kept getting in the way as she read a book on a portable monitor someone in the Adhipan must have lent her. Her black hair fell in a straight curtain, obscuring most of her face. One of her turquoise blue eyes remained visible, however...focused on the text in front of her with that strangely intense concentration he remembered. She always read as if she weren't just absorbing the meaning of the words, but trying to imprint them forever into her light.

He'd been trying to read her, to catch some glimpse of why she'd come here, what she wanted with him. So far, he'd come up blank. With Allie upstairs with her brother, doing whatever she could to help him deal with his boyfriend not only killing Vash and betraying all of them...but also committing suicide in the minutes that followed...Revik figured he could use the distraction posed by the puzzle of Elan Raven being here.

It had been almost two weeks since Vash had been shot. Revik spent most of those two weeks in ritual with Balidor and the Adhipan and Seven, along with the majority of the ex-rebels. They'd left Allie with Jon, partly because she didn't know the rituals yet, and partly because Jon needed her more...which meant Revik had been tagged the senior soul, and asked to officiate. What would have been a long process anyway, particularly with a soul like Vash's, which required offering him the opportunity to audience individually with any of his students, friends, fellow Council members and family (the list was long with Vash, given that he'd been nearly 800 years old), had become something much longer and more complex once Revik became the officiate. The work pretty much wiped out the last twelve days, taking most of the daylight hours to prepare for each nightly ritual and offering, as well as to hear petitions by those who had known Vash.

Dorje's rituals, which had been done over the same stretch of days and nights, had been simpler in some ways, but also a lot sadder. His soul had been difficult to locate in the Barrier. Even after they found it, there hadn't been a lot Revik and the Council could do for him, given that he seemed to have strong ties to some other group of souls, one that reminded Revik a little too much of what he remembered of the Dreng.

Still, they'd done what they could.

He hoped Jon didn't ask him about it, though. There was some evidence that Dorje could have been a plant for some time...years, maybe, at least more than the past six months. How that was possible, and how the young-seeming, Tibetan-looking seer Revik got to know through Jon could have been an agent of the Dreng, Revik still didn't understand.

Either way, it had been depressing. He would miss Vash more, of course, but the old seer left in such a fanfare of light and love it had been difficult to feel sad in any real way.

The Dreng were far less kind to the souls they used down here.

That all finished around twelve hours earlier, which was when Revik had finally been allowed to hang up the officiate hat and get some sleep. He'd checked in on Allie and Jon on his way up, and found her asleep on the reclining chair in his room. He hadn't wanted to wake her, so he left her some clean clothes on the bedside table, then left the two of them alone, too.

When Revik woke up himself only a few hours later, he'd come downstairs rather than trying to drink himself back into unconsciousness, the way a lot of seers had been doing since the rituals finished. Wreg had been one of those seers, Revik knew. The ex-rebel took Vash's death harder than most would have imagined, given how he'd treated the old man when he was alive...but Revik knew Wreg better than most, and he wasn't particularly surprised. Wreg had always been a lot more complex than most realized. Allie got that, pretty much from the start with Wreg, but even rebels who'd worked with him for decades didn't always see it.

Anyway...Wreg had his own issues lately, Revik knew.

So did Revik, for that matter. So for more than one reason, the Raven thing felt like a logical distraction...at least until Allie reemerged from Jon's room.

The fact that Raven had willingly submitted not only to a collar but to being locked up was puzzle enough. He couldn't help wondering if her presence here had anything to do with what Dorje had done, too.

Someone obviously wanted all of them hurting...and off-balance.

Whoever they were, they'd also been willing to sacrifice a long-term plant to get rid of Vash...which meant several things he and Wreg and Balidor had already discussed, albeit briefly. It meant that same person likely had more plants here. It also meant they'd seen Vash as a threat, which shouldn't have surprised any of them...especially not Revik himself, who'd known Salinse viewed him the same way. The old man should have been better protected.

Dorje, as Jon's boyfriend, had been privy to a lot. They must have really wanted Vash gone to use him. Either that, or the other plants they had inside were worth even more.

Wreg and Balidor had done everything they could to pick apart Dorje's aleimi, looking for markers to trace so they could go through the aleimi of everyone at the hotel for yet another series of security scans, as well as the aleimi of all of their allies overseas, cleaning house.

As it was, the inner circle would need to tighten...a lot, maybe.

Revik tried again to think through what little they'd discussed in the wake of Vash's shooting. He couldn't totally tear his mind off the flashes of images and sensations he'd felt in those few seconds...Allie's screams of anguish when she saw Vash down, the look of complete shock on Jon's face when he realized what Dorje had done.

For what seemed like minutes after Dorje dropped, none of them had moved.

Of course, it hadn't been that long...not even close. Balidor reappeared at the conference room doors before Revik could decide if the danger was past, if he should be dragging Allie with him out of the room altogether. The Adhipan and Wreg's people had a perimeter set up on the floor before Revik fully made up his mind. Wreg dispatched security downstairs, upstairs, outside the hotel...even at different parts of the city...all within minutes.

Whatever this had been, it appeared Dorje accomplished his primary goal.

Vash was dead. With him went the last real link between the original Council and what remained of the Seven and the rebels. A few of the older monks could take on the teaching side of things back in Asia, even the transmission of the oral traditions. They could call the next in line down from whatever ice cave in which he or she was currently in retreat...if those seers hadn't already felt the ripples and were on their way down on their own. The religious forms would remain, probably past the Displacement itself.

But the real, concrete, political power of the last truly peaceful segment among the seers from that earlier generation was gone. Other than Tarsi, there were none who could come close to wielding as much influence as Vash, and Tarsi originated from the warrior caste, not from that of the religious scholars, like Vash.

Revik couldn't help feeling the incredible loss of his light. As Allie had said, Vash was often the only one at the table who could break through the pessimism of recent years. She'd learned to count on him to be the voice of reason and balance...and humor. She'd told Revik, too, that she wouldn't have survived those months in the tank without Vash. He'd kept her on track through that whole messy process...and encouraged her, even when everyone else thought she'd lost her mind. The old seer had maintained that light-hearted optimism no matter what was happening around him, and his sight had been the most far-reaching of anyone Revik had ever met, whether Rook, Seven, Adhipan or Council member.

He was irreplaceable.

Revik knew the ripples from that loss hadn't even begun to hit the small group of seers who lived and worked in the hotel, much less the whole of the seer community. He wasn't sure if they were in shock yet, or some form of collective denial. Wreg and Balidor dealt with it in predictable ways, by falling back on their military and infiltration training. They also did it by focusing on understanding the why of what had occurred...instead of the what.

Funnily enough, Vash's death had brought the two of them the closest Revik had ever seen to true cooperation between them.

They were in total agreement on one thing already.

They both thought Vash's assassination was some kind of message from that person in South America. How Dorje initially got involved...whether he'd been pushed or blackmailed or if his light had been altered or whatever else...they all still had competing theories.

Revik still hadn't voiced much, in terms of his own opinions, but he didn't like the direction of any of this. What Vash himself had said, in his last real contribution to the group's thoughts on Shadow or anything else, still resonated somewhere high up in his light. The idea of a longer timeline than they had been working from previously, and Vash's perception of this person, Shadow, setting up dominoes over decades rather than months or even years, wouldn't leave his mind. He could see it, somehow, this knocking over of each piece methodically as the time came, one after the other, each of them playing their role without even knowing what it was.

From that person's perspective, Vash's death was just another domino falling.

The feeling was familiar. That familiarity bothered Revik, too.

Balidor had told him to wait until morning to deal with Raven. At the time, Revik agreed. It would be better to have more eyes on her while he spoke to her. It would be better to spend a few more days, really, assessing her light, looking for taps and threads, before they let her spill the beans on whatever her "big message" ended up being.

Allie would want to be here.

But something in the way Balidor phrased things to Revik himself made him think the Adhipan leader was advising him to keep Allie away. At the very least, he seemed to think it was a bad idea to give Allie a front row seat to the main interview. Given that, and the fact that he knew he wouldn't sleep anyway, Revik found himself tempted to go in there now.

Before the thought could fully solidify, he touched his headset.

"Wreg?"

The other seer answered at once. Clearly, he hadn't been asleep.

"Yes,
laoban?"

"You busy?"

"I was considering getting drunk..." Wreg said, adding, "...So no."

Revik nodded, almost to himself. Even so, he caught the flavor of grief on the other seer's light. Remembering Wreg's face while they were moving the body...the respectful gesture he made before touching Vash's cooling flesh...Revik felt a little sad himself. He wished he'd spent more time with Vash in the past few months. As much as Wreg complained about the "old men" running things, he'd gone to pay his respects every few days, and ordered his security teams to treat Vash as a man of rank, much as he had with Salinse, once upon a time.

He'd been downright protective of the old man. Knowing him, he felt responsible for not having been protective enough. Wreg's light had changed pretty significantly since their time under Salinse, likely more than the ex-rebel knew himself. It made him softer and denser all at once...and a lot more open to seeing Vash for who he truly was.

Revik didn't voice any of that now, though.

"Want to come down here? Help me with an interrogation?"

"Now, Nenz?"

"You think it's too soon?"

"No..." Wreg hesitated. "I looked over all of the pre-work done by those Adhipan assholes. It seems pretty thorough. The map of her light, I mean. I doubt I could add much." He hesitated. "You sure you want to do this now,
laoban?
"

"Yeah." Revik glanced through the organic pane, frowning again. "I figure we could all use a distraction..." He paused. "Unless you'd rather get drunk?"

"No. No, I can drink later."

"Is anyone else there with you?"

"Jax is here," Wreg affirmed. "Loki, too...and Illeg."

"Good. That is enough. Bring them, if they're sober. Meet me down here in ten."

He felt Wreg's nod even before the seer answered. "Ten. We'll be there."

It seemed closer to five minutes later that Revik heard the elevator doors open.

He'd barely had a chance to pull up the pre-work Wreg referenced, much less do the preliminary taps with his own light, when he heard the four seers approaching down the basement corridor, talking to one another in mixed Mandarin and Prexci. He heard Illeg laugh at something Wreg said and smiled a little. It was good at least some of the ex-rebels and the Adhipan were getting along. He had joked with Allie that everything would be fine once they all started sleeping together after ops. He'd been kidding at the time...mostly...but now he wondered if there was some truth to what he'd said.