Trickster

by J. C. Andrijeski

  According to that theory, Dehgoies was a victim of psychic warfare. Rather than constituting the subject of some tawdry and breakdown-inducing infatuation, the covert female operative had merely bested him––due to luck, a better sight rank, more field experience, an exploited weakness they found in Dehgoies, or some combination of the above.

  None of that exactly boosted my opinion of Dehgoies.

  It did, however, strike me as more plausible.

  I knew for a fact that the kneelers were not above such games, despite all of their pious claims of “noninterference.” They interfered with the Org plenty. The Org had been engaged in a sort of “Cold War” with the kneelers since its inception, and I’d been hit with that crap out in the field more than once myself, in various forms.

  Dehgoies should have known the score.

  To let something like that emotionally break you…

  Well, it was just weak.

  Some explained Dehgoies’ vulnerability by saying he had been severely traumatized in his youth, more than most of our generation. The same theory speculated Dehgoies’ traumas left an opening in his light, one Galaith somehow missed––one the kneelers managed to exploit.

  A few seers in my pod put forth that same theory as we trudged through the jungle.

  One seer, Naragi, even claimed to have participated in a bonding ritual under Dehgoies’ command, which surprised me, I admit, and definitely pricked my ears for the rest of what she had to say about the infamous seer. She claimed to have seen him naked in one of those rituals, and even to have engaged with him sexually.

  I listened in the Barrier as she described Dehgoies’ bare back as one big scar map from his neck to his waist. He’d been scarred like a human, she said. She said they’d all stared at his scars and speculated about them afterwards. A few in her unit had been turned on by the marks, if only because they were so rare on a seer.

  According to Naragi, the scars looked old.

  Most were white in color, and stretched with time and growth as Dehgoies aged. They looked like torture wounds, she said––not like they came from an accident, or a fire, or even a bomb injury, which were the usual ways seers were scarred.

  If Naragi told truth, and my light told me she did, whoever harmed Dehgoies in his early years must have beaten him nearly to death, likely on multiple occasions. To scar a seer like that, one had to break the nerves in the skin so extensively, they could no longer repair the damage quickly enough to avoid permanent marks.

  The story was interesting, but I can’t say it changed my overall opinion of Dehgoies or his defection.

  All of us had known horrors in our past.

  Breaking as a seer was not acceptable. One had to overcome, to move past.

  The seers who didn’t, didn’t make it in this world.

  Work camps were full of those seers.

  I could have died on Krikev’s floor in that shack outside of St. Petersburg. Instead, I fought back. I fought back, I survived, and in the end, I won.

  I would eat a fucking bullet before I let myself break… before I let myself kneel.

  Someone as high up as Dehgoies, with as much raw psychic talent as everyone said he had, should have been able to hold his own––no matter who went after him, no matter how much “trauma” he suffered. Most seers would never in their lifetimes have access to the resources and light Dehgoies commanded under the Org.

  He could have called upon Galaith himself, something only a handful of seers would ever be able to boast, no matter how loyally they served.

  He could have inherited the network himself one day.

  Why would someone like that run?

  What kind of chicken-shit asshole did that?

  Despite my disgust of him, and my utter contempt for what he’d done, I admit, I was as curious as the rest of them. Now that we were out in the field, chasing him, I could not help but hope beyond hope to catch a glimpse of him in the flesh.

  The possibility of bringing down the mighty Dehgoies had me vibrating inside my skin.

  That was doubly true for me now––after Terian.

  The fact that I could feel an obsessive, borderline-fixated quality in Terian’s light around the same subject both intensified my own interest and twisted it into a kind of angry, adolescent jealousy, one that ignited a more sadistic flicker to my intent.

  I wanted to meet Dehgoies face to face.

  I wanted it perhaps more than I should.

  I wanted it more than I’d wanted to meet any seer, apart from Galaith himself.

  Again, I should back up, if only to update you on a few things that occurred after that first afternoon I spent in Terian’s bed at Guoreum.

  Our interactions in those barracks did not end where I left them before.

  Rather, the Org commander made the politically unorthodox decision to claim me, publicly––before my pod, before Varlan, before our local scouts, before the network itself––prior to our departure from the work camp.

  He did it in our final briefing outside the barracks, less than an hour before we walked to the helipad and left to join his people on the ground.

  Terian might as well have collared me for that briefing.

  Informing them all of my new status had been the very first thing out of his mouth, once he had everyone assembled.

  “…I am changing brother Quay’s designation,” he drawled in that lazy way of his.

  He addressed the group as a whole as he said it, his amber eyes sharp, his voice pitched in an Old World seer’s patois, making me wonder again where he came from originally, and who had raised him.

  I hadn’t managed to get any of that information out of Terian himself.

  The seer wouldn’t even tell me his physical age, much less anything about his childhood. He wouldn’t even tell me in which part of the world he’d been born.

  The few times I ventured to ask anything personal, Terian managed to turn it back around on me, and to turn it into a game, one that usually involved us fucking by the end of it, and Terian making power-plays over my light.

  “I want brother Quay working directly for me from now on,” Terian added, keeping his hands off me physically, but coiling his light overtly into mine in a way that none of them could miss. He did it without shielding the interaction in any way, highlighting aspects of my light that no one in the construct had been privy to prior to that time.

  Even the seers in my pod I’d exchanged sex with had never seen so much of me.

  Terian overtly sexualized me, in several, overlapping ways––partly by making it clear he’d been intimate with my light already, but also by showing the group his interest in those more vulnerable areas of my aleimi, the ones I normally only showed my long-term sexual partners. Terian both claimed those parts of me publicly and displayed them so the other seers would be turned on by them.

  Really, I might as well have been standing there naked.

  For a seer, it was worse than being naked.

  It would have been even more degrading if I hadn’t felt a flicker of humor in the other’s light, coupled with a significantly less humorous flare of possessiveness.

  Terian might have wanted the others to become aroused by his new playmate, but clearly, the underlying message was, “don’t touch.”

  I couldn’t help wondering what Terian might do, if one of them disobeyed that command.

  “…Brother Quay has qualities of light I require for my own purposes,” Terian added with a faint smile. “I need him working directly under me…”

  I flinched at the blatant double entendre, but Terian scarcely paused.

  “…as part of my infiltration unit on the ground. As a result, I’d like him outside the normal chain of command for this.”

  Pausing, he’d added,

  “…I hope no one here objects?”

  Terian looked directly at Varlan with those words.

  The whole interaction between Terian and Varlan during the exchange struck me as odd, even apart from the
more obvious weirdness of being claimed publicly as a personal fuck-toy by the second-highest ranked seer in the Org.

  Both seers were too highly ranked for me to ascertain the meaning of it. I couldn’t decide if Terian’s behavior during that announcement was crafted to connote respect to the older seer––perhaps even an apology for stealing the highest-ranked second-tier from Varlan’s pod––or if Terian conducted himself that way as a means of putting Varlan in his place.

  From the small amount I knew of Terian, I suspected the latter.

  It embarrassed me slightly, that I couldn’t see at those higher levels well enough to know for certain. It also made me wonder, again, what I thought I was doing with Terian, given the extent to which the other seer outmatched me.

  The whole dynamic made me nervous, truthfully, but I found I was growing more attached to Terian here, out in the field, not less. I still suspected Terian would tire of me long before I felt the same, but I also felt more and more powerless to control my reactions to the other male’s light, regardless of what I did with my body.

  My light pulled on Terian’s more with each passing day, even apart from the sex.

  And the sex had been frequent, and intense––even out here.

  Even in a tent where I suspected at least a few of the others stayed awake at night simply to watch and listen to us.

  I had more or less stopped trying to fight any of it.

  I never forgot exactly how stupid I was being, however.

  I continued to catch glimpses of the other seer’s instability as I spent more time with him: the shifting moods, the self-aggrandizement, how easily bored he often seemed, even in the middle of an active op, his tendency towards obsession, his propensity to lie, his inability to control his own voltage… his near-insatiable ambition and appetites.

  Unfortunately, I suspected at least some of those things were part of what made Terian so attractive to me.

  Those, and that maddeningly cheerful self-confidence he exuded, one that bordered on manic––not to mention the increasingly mind-blowing sex, coupled with that intensely sensual light of his––light that got me hard whenever I got anywhere near it.

  Over time, I found something else drove me towards him, as well.

  That something pulled on more than simply my light and my cock. It lived deeper in Terian’s light, deep enough that its pull was difficult to comprehend.

  Whatever it was, I wanted it.

  Those other qualities made Terian disorienting and worrisome; they caused me to back off and reassess periodically, to evaluate just how far I should be letting this person into my aleimi… but that deeper, more vulnerable quality drew me back, time and again.

  He felt like more than one person to me at times.

  Even in our short time together, I wondered just how many Terians truly lived inside that body whose bed I now shared.

  In any case, Varlan did not.

  Object, that is, to my new assignment in any way.

  Of course he did not.

  How could he object? Why would he object?

  As I watched the two of them play out this little dance, I felt my own test occurring within the same conversation––mainly in the overt way Terian staked his claim over me, body and light. I could feel him testing my reactions throughout that exchange, gauging how far he could push, how much ownership he could exert before I began to push back.

  I pushed back in my own way.

  Primarily, I did so by refusing to react.

  I stood there, unapologetic, and let my light be put on display by the senior seer to the entirety of my pod. Realizing what I was doing roughly halfway through his act, Terian broke out in a grin, even as he backed off exhibiting and opening my light, at least in front of the others. He did this primarily by throwing a secondary shield over both of us.

  He continued to wrap his aleimi into me from behind that shield, but he no longer did it where the others could see it.

  Gods, you just gave me such a hard-on, he murmured.

  My light reacted sharply to the male’s words, but I didn’t speak.

  Very clever, little brother, Terian whispered, winding that dense heat deeper into my light, making my chest clench. Very, very clever. So that is the plan, eh? You make me look like a rapist, to keep your unit’s sympathies with you? That way they see me as the big bad wolf… and you as a poor, molested innocent… rather than an opportunistic status-climber with a talented tongue and a sharp cock?

  A silence fell between us.

  I shrugged subtly with one hand, a seer’s shrug.

  When Terian pulled on me, demanding a real answer, I relented.

  You seemed to enjoy the role of overseer, I sent, stripping the thought of emotion. Perhaps I merely did not wish to deprive you of it, sir…?

  Terian laughed aloud at that, wrapping his arm around my waist.

  It was the first time he’d touched me physically in front of the others, but I found I didn’t mind. I pretended not to notice the stares, but I didn’t look directly at Terian, either, not until he jerked at my light, insisting I turn my head.

  Once I had, Terian met my gaze directly with those fiery, amber eyes.

  Shall I order you down on your knees right here, brother? he sent, still gauging my face. Show them just how compliant you really are? I wouldn’t want them to think I was abusing you. You are their friend. Their comrade. Perhaps they need a demonstration to know their concerns for your innocence are exceedingly kind, but wholly unnecessary?

  I shrugged with one hand, refusing to lower my eyes.

  If you wish, sir, I sent easily.

  Terian grinned at that, too.

  That time, however, he backed down for real.

  He released me with his arm, stepping a few feet away.

  The shield he’d erected around the two of us dissipated, leaving me feeling strangely naked, and alone in a way that disconcerted me, given that I’d known Terian for less than twenty-four hours at that point.

  Still, the skill with which he both created and then dissolved that dense and highly-specific shield blew me away, even as I fought to sort through my more personal reactions to what Terian had just chosen to show me.

  Stranger still, perhaps, I felt like I’d passed that particular test.

  I wasn’t sure how, precisely.

  Terian seemed to appreciate that I often took a somewhat unconventional approach to his power-plays, but I got the sense it was more than that.

  Now that it had been a few days, I thought perhaps it was simply because I had proven myself not to be a fool, or weak, at least not overly so.

  Whatever his reasoning, he kept his hands and his light off me in front of the others after that, at least while we were working.

  He only broke that pattern a few times.

  Once, on our first night in the field, he’d grabbed me by the belt and essentially demanded I accompany him to his tent. The other time had been at the end of that same, initial briefing, when he’d wrapped his arm around my back to push me in the direction of the Central Intelligence Command (CIC), right as the meeting broke up.

  By then, Terian had already verbally dismissed the rest of my pod––if I could even realistically call them that anymore––and instructed them to finish pre-op prep. He had already explained my new role as his direct liaison with the base infiltration team, so no one questioned it when I didn’t go with them.

  I knew it was a promotion.

  I’m ambitious, so that pleased me.

  As much as Terian joked about me cock-sucking my way to a higher status, I knew he didn’t mind my ambition, either.

  Personally, I didn’t even mind if the cock-sucking bit was essentially true; I didn’t care particularly how I moved up the hierarchy, as long as I did. Given my potential and actual sight ranks, I felt I deserved to move up, and a lot faster than I had been.

  I had zero issue with Terian helping me to that end; in fact, I actively hoped he would help me to that end.

/>   I didn’t give a rat’s ass what the others thought.

  Terian seemed to know these things about me, without my having to spell them out. More refreshing still, he didn’t appear to care in the slightest. If anything, I got the impression he approved of my pragmatism and refusal to apologize.

  He certainly had no qualms about giving me preferential treatment as long as the two of us were fucking––which, again, was fine with me.

  I paid close attention as we entered the CIC.

  Inside that room, Terian was all business, introducing me around and explaining my new role, then spending another few minutes methodically hooking and connecting my light into that of his infiltrators. He explained the purpose of many of the new aleimic structures he added to my light as he did it… but remained silent on just as many others, which I couldn’t help but find both interesting and frustrating.

  I still didn’t know if I was receiving as much bad intel as good, with only Terian able to discern the difference. Given who we were up against, I would have been surprised if that wasn’t the case, though.

  Regardless, I now served as the main conduit of information between our team and the home base at Guoreum––the latter group consisting of both private contractors and infiltrators employed directly by the World Court.

  Terian added structures to my aleimi that allowed me to operate as a kind of living antennae… with me often serving directly as the stationary infiltration team’s eyes and ears. Those same structures recorded everything I saw, felt, and experienced with my light, without filter or significant omission.

  By the end of that initial connection process in the CIC, both Terian and I were reacting strongly to one another’s light. Terian didn’t give any hint of that to the others, however, or even directly to me, so after a few minutes of fighting to control my aleimi, I started to wonder if maybe the reaction was only on my end.

  Terian barely looked at me while we were in sight of his infiltrators.

  I didn’t take offense.

  Truthfully, I almost took it as a compliment once it occurred to me that he might be serious about keeping me with him, on his permanent infiltration team. It would go far to explain why he didn’t give a rat’s ass how my pod or Varlan perceived me, yet exercised caution when it came to presenting me to his own people.