The Defector

by J. C. Andrijeski

  In some ways, that was worse.

  He couldn’t help feeling strangely guilty for making the other feel bad about what some unknown person or persons had done to him.

  Thinking about what Dalejem might see of him in the light exchange didn’t make him feel any better. Sharing light meant sharing memories, at least to a degree. Most of those memories occurred due to the resonance between both seers’ lights, and the relatively trust between them, and the relative affection there.

  For the same reasons, the exact memories that surfaced were more or less outside of either seer’s control.

  Forcing that uncomfortable fact out of his mind, Revik went back to trying to blank out his thoughts entirely. He couldn’t refuse the light, and he couldn’t control the process, so he just had to let it go.

  It wouldn’t make any difference at this point anyway, he told himself.

  He didn’t stay awake long enough to remember the connection being made.

  His dreams, once they came, were of him running through a different jungle, with steeper hills, more rocks, denser trees and harder plants… with different Rooks chasing him.

  It felt like a memory.

  Some things that came to him as dreams felt like fears, or abstractions, means of his mind chewing through some problem or anxiety. Some things came through as nearly prophetic, or as originating in some Barrier space or Barrier presence that was trying to tell him something, whether for his good or not.

  This didn’t feel like those.

  It came through as immediate, dark, filled with denser emotions he could almost taste, filled with a physical immediacy that stuttered his heart in his chest.

  He fought to breathe, launching his body up a near-vertical hill.

  He stumbled, face-planting into the peat and roots at the base of a heavy-trunked tree, sliding down the hill until he dug the toes of his boots into the soil and stone.

  He dragged himself back to his feet, bleeding from a gunshot wound, his arms, hands and neck littered with cuts and nicks from the trees and bushes as he ran.

  He’d lost his jacket somewhere.

  He was out of water, too.

  The dark forest loomed around him behind his eyes; it never seemed to end. He had been running here for weeks, it seemed. Months.

  Years.

  The same thoughts looped in his mind, through all of it.

  They wanted him dead.

  They all wanted him dead.

  He would be despised now.

  Not only by the Rooks chasing him, but by all of them, on both sides of that line.

  He would be despised.

  He woke up in pain.

  Not physical pain––separation pain.

  That shouldn’t have surprised him, either.

  It didn’t surprise him, not exactly, but it still managed to embarrass him.

  He controlled it in reflex, even as he fought to bring his mind back on line, to ground himself in his body.

  He knew one thing almost at once.

  He didn’t wake up on his own.

  As he thought it, his eyes slid to the open flaps of the tent, and the silhouettes that stood there, blocking the light from what must be another organic heater.

  Yumi stood directly in the opening between the flaps, talking to Dalejem, who stood just inside, and wore full armor. Revik could feel two others waiting just outside the tent, as well. Poresh and Mara, from what he could tell. It was pitch dark out there now, but he could feel tension in the construct of the camp, even beyond how Dalejem was dressed.

  They’d be on the move soon.

  Dalejem glanced over at him, his pale eyes visible in some outside light.

  “Yes,” he said. “We have to move. As soon as you’re ready.”

  “Where?” Revik said, fighting a yawn, in spite of himself.

  “Balidor wants us to take up a flanking position behind them,” Dalejem said, still looking Revik over, as if assessing his condition. “A new group was sent by the Org. This one looks dangerous… like a professional extraction team. They took helicopters to a site only a few minutes ago, landing a few clicks from Balidor’s people. He expects to be under hard pursuit soon, and they are in no condition for it––”

  “What time is it?” Revik said.

  “Oh-five-thirty.”

  “What?” Revik’s eyes opened wide at that, even as adrenaline shot through his system. His internal clock hadn’t prepared him for that answer at all. It must have gotten broken along with half the structures in his aleimi.

  “Gaos di'lalente… how is that possible?” he muttered.

  Dalejem didn’t answer.

  Yumi, on the other hand, let out a disbelieving snort, folding her muscular arms across her chest before she glanced at the seers on the other side of the flap.

  “You are very good at napping, Rook,” she said, quirking an eyebrow.

  Revik heard the teasing there, but still felt himself frown.

  Dalejem’s voice came across mainly as impatient, however. Revik couldn’t quite tell if that impatience was aimed at him or at Yumi.

  “Balidor has been re-routing the flavor of your light for most of the night,” Dalejem explained, looking only at Revik. “Mostly using key imprints from your aleimi the Org seems to be targeting, and bouncing them through the other splinter’s construct. He did it give you time to recover, but they need us now. This new group of professional hunters is gaining on them. That situation will not improve, given Kali’s condition.”

  Dalejem hesitated, as if he wanted to say more.

  He looked about to speak, when his eyes shifted abruptly to Yumi, as if she’d pinged his light, warning him silent.

  If she had, Revik felt none of it.

  He frowned anyway.

  “What?” he said. “Just fucking tell me. Jesus.”

  Yumi answered him, speaking before Dalejem could. “Kali asked for you, pup. She thinks they will need you soon.”

  “For what?” Revik said.

  He pulled himself up to a seated position, wincing and wrapping an arm around his chest. He fought to control his separation pain even as he blinked up at her, realizing only then that he was still shirtless, and then, mostly from her eyes on him.

  “I do not know,” Yumi said, matter-of-fact. “But as you likely know by now, your friend Kali often knows things most of us do not know. Therefore, brother Balidor does not usually bother to try and second-guess her.”

  Revik nodded, still fighting to wake up, but working at it more consciously now.

  He pulled his shirt off the mat when he saw it balled up on the side of the tent next to where he’d been sleeping. Untangling it clumsily, he yanked it over his head, trying to remember what he’d done with the armored vest.

  Then he remembered Dalejem had taken that off him.

  He glanced towards the tent’s door, and saw his guns and vest sitting there in a neat pile. He couldn’t remember if Dalejem had done that at the time, or sometime since.

  He didn’t look at the either of them as he pulled himself to his feet, pausing only long enough to assure himself he could keep his balance, then walking with more purpose towards the small pile of armor and weapons. He still wasn’t looking at them when he reached it and began promptly to dress and equip himself.

  He’d just finished buckling the holster back around his waist, the vest open around his chest, when someone handed him a canteen of drinking water. He barely looked at the hand holding it before he took it, and drank down probably a third before it occurred to him to come up for air.

  When he handed it back, someone handed him food, too, a plant-matter and protein-base wrap that served as basic req out in the field.

  He took a bite from that without thinking, too, and while he chewed, Dalejem finished doing up the front of Revik’s armored vest.

  Revik finished the wrap in about thirty seconds flat, and his stomach only protested that there wasn’t more.

  As if he felt that, Dalejem laughed, punchi
ng him lightly on the arm.

  “There is more,” he said, smiling for the first time Revik remembered since they’d left for Guoreum. “But you will have to eat and walk, brother.”

  Revik only nodded.

  He left the tent behind the other seer, only pausing to reach down and tie the organic strap around his thigh, holding the lower holster to his leg.

  They were already dismantling the tent as he left out the front.

  He felt better, though.

  A lot better.

  And strangely ready for a fight.

  Dalejem must have felt some smattering of that, too, because he laughed, even as he motioned Revik to follow him where the front end of the group was already hefting packs to their shoulders, entering in a single line through an opening in the jungle at the far end of the clearing.

  Realizing again that they hadn’t been kidding, that the whole group really had been waiting for him, Revik sped up his pace. He took a second wrap from Garensche when the tall seer handed it to him, unwrapping it quickly without slowing his steps.

  He took a bite out of the end, as much for the energetic boost as out of hunger at that point, following behind Yumi and Poresh as they disappeared into the trees along with the others, heavy packs already strapped to their backs.

  Revik glanced back just long enough to see the last two seers of their group, Ontari and Vikram, stuff the collapsed tent and mats into their packs and heft them onto their shoulders to follow the rest of them into the jungle.

  And just like that, they were a military unit again.

  Fourteen

  Sacrificial Lamb

  They hiked through the jungle for two more days.

  During that time, Balidor’s team and the Rooks sparred back and forth between constructs in the Barrier, crossing lines with Revik’s group and the other splinter.

  At the end of the first day, Balidor broke his own team into smaller fractions yet again, likely in a further attempt to keep the main Org extraction team away from Kali.

  Yumi’s team––as Revik had come to think of their group––now stood between the smaller group being led by Balidor, and that same Org extraction team.

  It took them almost twenty of the last forty or so hours to position themselves there, with Yumi, Gar and Vikram mapping the area of the Org’s mobile construct warily, and then skirting carefully around its edges to avoid direct contact.

  Revik knew that caution, in large part, was because of him.

  He also knew there was still more than a little uneasiness around their position because of him, and not only from within his own group.

  Everyone in their construct team, including Balidor and those helping remotely, from the Pamir and Seertown, worked to keep Revik’s light as far from that extraction team as they possibly could. Where they could, they projected it elsewhere, as a distraction and a means of confusing the team’s priorities.

  By then, they were pretty sure that team of hunters knew it was Adhipan they were chasing, not Revik running some private-sec team. Given the sight ranks of the seers in that new group, and the support they appeared to be getting from multiple, remote locations, Balidor warned them to assume they could see a lot more about our team that most SCARB or Black Arrow teams, even the highly ranked ones.

  Revik had been told by Yumi and Dalejem that their constructs were now being overseen primarily by Vash and Tarsi, which was almost unheard of for ground operations––apparently even for the Adhipan. Dalejem told Revik he had never heard of such a thing before, particularly not when Balidor himself led a ground mission.

  But there was a lot unusual about this op, Revik guessed, just from the way the Adhipan seers were acting––and the whispers of surprise and raised eyebrows Revik had witnessed a number of times when Yumi updated the group on new developments.

  Dalejem warned him that a team was also assigned to his light, specifically… and that Vash and Tarsi were overseeing that particular construct, as well.

  Revik’s own eyebrows went up at that.

  He didn’t try to probe closer, however––or even ask any questions.

  He also did nothing to test those boundaries, or do anything but try to keep his head down, even within his own unit.

  Even so, he felt flickers of recognition, of familiarity, at times––and not always from the Adhipan or Vash side of the Barrier shield. His aunt Tarsi had always worn her aleimi like a diamond wall, so he didn’t feel her at all. He knew he wouldn’t feel her, not unless she specifically wanted him to for some reason.

  That left the Org.

  At least some of the familiarity he felt had to come from them.

  The longer they spent out here, the more Revik suspected he knew at least one of the seers following them in that advance hunting team.

  He even thought he knew which one.

  He chose not to think about that too closely, either.

  For one thing, the idea deeply disturbed him.

  The idea of seeing Terian out here, given their last interaction in Vietnam, was more than his mind could really process from any kind of rational space. The last time he’d actually seen Terry was in Calcutta, when the other seer was shooting at him.

  Terry had hit him, too––twice.

  But then, Terry was always a good shot, even when he was drunk.

  Just thinking about his old partner made his adrenaline spike.

  It had been five years.

  Five years that stretched into infinity in those caves of the Pamir, leaving his memories of his time with the other seer hazy at best.

  He knew he’d been high for a lot of it, but that definitely wasn’t all of it.

  For some reason, Galaith erased a hell of a lot when it came to Revik’s memories of Terian. Revik could feel the gaps there. He felt them tangibly, like black holes in his light, empty spots in his structure.

  He supposed that made sense––after all, Terry was his partner.

  They’d done a lot of jobs together.

  Most of what he’d known, Terry had to have known, too.

  Hell, he couldn’t even be sure what their last interaction had been, precisely. He remembered Calcutta, but his last conversation with the other seer in Saigon was more than a little hazy.

  He tried to remember what he’d done to Terian, when he took Kali out of Saigon.

  Had he hurt him? He must have disabled him and Raven in some way, but he couldn’t remember the specifics of that last encounter well enough to know for sure how he’d done it. He couldn’t have just knocked them out with his light; they were both too highly trained for that.

  He must have hurt them.

  He must have hurt them pretty badly, to keep them from coming after him.

  It was the only thing that explained how he hadn’t been caught, or stopped before he reached India. Given the head start he’d given Kali, and then himself when he began making his way to Cambodia and then Thailand, he must have hurt them.

  He never would have gotten out of Saigon, otherwise.

  He especially never would have eluded Terian, who could be as dogged in his own way as those monks up in the Pamir.

  More so, maybe.

  Terian’s particular brand of crazy tended to come with a form of obsession that Revik hadn’t seen matched in many seers. All seers had a biological and psychological tendency towards fixation and obsession, especially when it came to sexual and romantic connections, but Terian was in a whole other category.

  For all of his short attention span in the normal day-to-day, when Terian really got his mind set on something, he could be frighteningly focused.

  He could be focused to the point of full-blown self-destruction.

  But Revik didn’t want to think about Terian.

  His body had finally more or less adjusted to the heat and humidity by the third day they’d been out there––meaning, the third day following the go-live for the op, which to Revik started on that predawn morning, when Balidor first broke Kali out of Guoreum.


  He hadn’t heard anything specific about Kali’s condition in the last twenty-four or so hours. Really, not since he’d asked Dalejem and Yumi about her from that stretcher as they carried him up to the make-shift camp at the rendezvous point.

  He took a few swallows of water without slowing his pace, walking with the others in his team (…pod, his mind whispered, inserting the Org term for a basic ground unit before he could restrain himself…), wiping sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand.

  Like he had been for days now, he did his best to keep his mind only on the immediate terrain, and on the seers around him. He and the others currently formed a broken line up the hill, distributed more or less like a guerrilla fighting force, but he could tell they still formed more of a diversion and a buffer for Balidor’s group than an offensive fighting team.

  That would flip on a dime, of course, if need be.

  Revik knew that. Some part of him waited for that, and waited for the order that would turn them back into a forward unit, not simply a support team.

  He could feel how close that order was at times.

  The particular slope they were traveling up now angled steeper and higher than the last few. The ridge of jungle-covered mountain formed most of one wall around a low, bowl-like valley filled with more grazing land.

  When Revik stopped and stared long enough, he could see scattered shadows covering that field, especially under the trees and by the river tributary that ran along the valley’s far wall. Revik knew from the way the shadows moved, they formed a good-sized herd of grazing cattle.

  He could feel that the Org construct was getting closer to them.

  Now that the sun was going down behind the hills to his left, he found the tension in his body worsening. The nights were more difficult for him, for some reason, in terms of the aleimic side of things. He had a tendency to resonate more with the Org constructs late at night––possibly because he was tired and controlled his light less well.

  Watching the sun dip lower towards the horizon, he fought to prepare himself mentally to spend another night out here, and to keep his light focused on Vash and the other Asian seers as much as he possibly could.