Trying to catch his gaze once more, I frowned, swallowing. “Brother. No one will hurt you. We only wish to help you. Come inside, before you freeze––”
“Lies,” Terian muttered, shaking his head. “Lies. They always lie. Lying liars.”
“I am not lying to you, brother. I swear to you I’m not.”
“I will be punished. Punished for defying him. Punished.”
The amber-eyed seer yanked at his own clothes, especially the thicker edge of that incongruously white T-shirt. As he moved the fabric around, my eyes caught marks on his flesh, here and there. Staring at those marks, I felt my throat tighten more.
I glimpsed bruises under that thin covering, cuts on the seer’s back. Blood from a few of those cuts had seeped through the back of the white shirt.
I hadn’t noticed, with the snow and the seer’s back facing the other way.
I swallowed now however, staring when the seer turned enough for me to glimpse more.
Someone had been beating him.
Someone had beaten him, likely with a whip, or possibly an electric prod.
“Gods, Terian––”
“NO!” the seer screamed, turning on me. His eyes grew wide, into yellow-orange lamps in that narrow face. He jerked his arm and shoulder out from under my hand. “NO! You can’t! You can’t bring me back! You haven’t the proper paperwork!”
“Brother.” I held up my hands in a peaceful gesture. “Calm yourself, brother. Please. I wish only to help you––”
“No! I’ve been punished enough! No more! No more! You said it was finished! You promised me! You said! You said I learned my lesson!”
“It is finished, brother,” I said. “It is. I promise, I will––”
“No! You are lying! You would not be here, if it were truly done.”
His voice held so much fear, I flinched.
“It is okay, brother,” I soothed, unsure what else to say. “It is okay.”
I could not honestly tell if he heard me, much less if he understood.
I tried to decide if I should reach for him again, try to drag him inside by force.
Standing there, he shivered.
Then his voice altered, growing childlike, but strangely prim.
“They promised me a new one, you see,” he explained, patient but low, darkly insistent. “They promised me a new one. This one is damaged, Revi’. Sub-standard. It cannot be recycled. It is too late, my brother. I must have a new model. I must.”
“Terry––”
“No!” the seer snapped, staring at me. “I want a new one! I want what was promised to me! Or I won’t cooperate! I will not!”
I felt sick with the pain I felt on the other male’s light.
I fought conflicting reactions in my own light, wanting to reach for him again, if only to comfort him, soothe him in some way. Instead I only stood there, palms up in a gesture of peace, as if trying to suppress the fear I saw seething through his light.
“Terry,” I began softly. “Terry, please. Listen to me. You need help––”
“No more listening! No more lies! Lying liars with lying eyes.”
“I will take you back. Before you freeze to death. Just come with me, and I will help you brother. We will go somewhere warm. We will talk––”
He reached for Terian’s arm, but the smaller seer twisted back.
“No! I want the new one! The new one!” the seer yelled. “I won’t speak to anyone until that has been delivered to me! It has been promised!”
Next to me, Cat extended her baton, snapping it out to full length.
Glancing at her, I saw that she’d slung her rifle over her back. I saw pity in her eyes as she looked at Terian, what might have been a softer wariness as she stared between the barefoot male and me, but under that, I saw only purpose.
Duty.
She’d heard our orders, along with me.
“Wait,” I said, turning to her. I held up my hand again, that time towards her. “You don’t need that. Just give me a minute to calm him down first. He’ll come willingly. Okay?”
Cat gave me a slight frown.
“Sir? They want us to subdue him. Now. They want him back inside. He could die out here. Especially given what he’s wearing. The blizzard is getting worse.”
I glanced up at the sky, realizing she was right.
The snow was coming down more thickly now.
It was wetter, colder.
“Okay,” I said, hearing the edge creep into my voice. “I understand. But give me a minute to talk to him first. Please. You won’t need that.”
“We don’t have a minute, sir. We need to bring him in now––”
“A fucking minute!” I snapped, glaring at her. “Stand down. That’s an order, agent. Follow it, or I’ll have Paulo shoot you for insubordination.”
Cat blinked at me, her eyes bewildered.
In seconds, the look there smoothed to glass.
Gesturing in respect, she lowered her head in a bow.
“Of course, sir,” she said politely.
As she spoke, she stepped back with the baton.
Sensing the undercurrents flowing back and forth between her light and that of the rest of my pod, I felt my jaw harden.
I faced Terian, watching him shiver in the snow in his bare feet, arms wrapped around his narrow body. Cat was right. We needed to get him inside.
Even now, I hesitated, though, not wanting to force him.
I didn’t want to force him, or treat him like a common prisoner.
The look in his eyes had changed again.
He appeared almost wistful now, staring out over the snow-covered grounds of the pens on the other side of the chain-link fence.
Looking at that childlike face, I wondered again what I was doing.
I should have let Cat tase him to the ground.
I should have just stepped back, let my pod handle it. I should simply wipe this from my mind, let them drag the red-haired seer back to whoever owned him in the labs, and forget this ever happened. What was I doing? What did I think this would accomplish?
I stared at the seer’s neck, at the sight-restraint collar there. I’d somehow neglected to examine the unusual, light-colored metal until now, maybe because I’d been too busy staring at the seer’s light, the seer’s eyes, and that fox-like, angular face.
Now I couldn’t help but notice that it didn’t look like any organic collar I had ever seen before, and certainly not like those worn by the prisoners on the other side of the fence.
I was about to try and speak to Terian again, to convince him to follow us inside, when the seer’s voice rose, oddly loud in the silence.
“Why would he leave me?” Terian said.
He looked up at me, his amber eyes unfocused, bright with unshed tears.
“Why?”
I frowned. Bitterness coiled into and laced my thoughts, changing my light’s colors in the Barrier space. I fought the pain that rose in me, but I already understood.
Dehgoies.
For Terian, it always came back to Dehgoies.
Always.
Even as I thought it, he turned, looking up at me with those amber eyes.
“Revi’,” he said, earnest. “I should have told you. I should have told you before.”
“Told me what, Terry?”
The seer’s lips pursed. “I should have told you. Before things got so… wrong. Before that cunt Raven. She didn’t treat you right, Revi’. She didn’t deserve you…”
The seer clicked ruefully, shaking his head.
“She was no good for you, Revi’,” he said, his eyes and voice serious. “She wasn’t a nice person. Not respectful. She was bad to you, Revi’… unkind. Very, very unkind. Not a kind soul. Not a good soul. Not like you.”
He looked up at me, his pale eyes so open and vulnerable, I flinched.
“I should have told you, Revi’,” he said. “It’s my fault. It’s my fault, for not telling you. Maybe it would have been different
…”
My scowl deepened.
“Told him what, Terry?” I snapped, my voice cold. “What should you have told that craven, traitorous, defecting prick of a worm-lover?”
“That I love you,” Terian said simply, his light opening more.
I winced in pain, feeling my jaw harden to granite.
“I love you, Revi’,” he said.
“Shut up,” I snarled.
“But why? I love you, Revi’. I should have told you.”
I looked away, scowling, having to fight not to hit him that time.
Still, the openness of the other male’s light affected me.
It affected me enough that I took a half-step backwards, fighting a stronger reaction in my aleimi, a dense pain in my chest––along with a rage that briefly stole my breath. The other male only watched me, that confused openness still snaking around his light, looking for its counterpart in mine.
Looking for its counterpart in Dehgoies.
Forcing my eyes off that face, I closed my light.
I took another step back, exhaling a sharp breath. Fighting the pain that wanted to slide deeper into my chest, I shook it off, wiping my eyes angrily.
I turned, giving Cat a hard look.
“Do it,” I said, not answering the question in her eyes, or that of Paulo, or Jaela, who stood next to her. “Knock this piece of shit out.”
I looked at Ringu next, clenching my jaw so hard it hurt.
“Make sure you get a decent scan of those seers he was talking to,” I added, motioning at the terrorists on the other side of the fence. “Bring that big fucker in for questioning… unless you get orders from Central not to. I’m heading back in.”
Turning on my heel, I didn’t even look to see if my orders were being followed.
I didn’t have to, I told myself.
They were of the Org.
I already knew they would follow my words.
Twenty-Two
Bad Dream
Visitors Barracks, Eastside
Parvat Shikhar Work Camp
The Kingdom of Sikkim, Northern India
March 13, 1979
I was dreaming.
I knew I was dreaming, but it didn’t make any of it feel less real.
“Rot in the dregs of the Barrier, ridvak parasite!” a kid hissed at me, spitting.
I used a dream hand to wipe the spittle off of my helmet’s visor. My dream lips barely tightened in a frown.
They hated me. They all hated me.
It was exhausting, being hated.
I could drop any one of them via their collars with one signal to my headset. The kid would be on the ground, screaming in agony––right before he puked his guts out, losing control of his bowels in the process.
And for what? Did he really think I hadn’t heard this shit a few thousand times before?
Standing behind the kid was a face and body I recognized.
Krikev. He would sodomize the boy after I left, I knew.
He wanted me to drop the kid. He held his cock in his hand, waiting for it.
The world didn’t change.
Whatever we did, it didn’t change.
Perhaps it was natural selection, like the worms claimed––weeding out those of the race too dumb to learn the fucking rules. The stupid ones either wised up or ended up dead, sacrificial lambs on the altar, from which the rest were meant to learn.
They served as training tools.
They served as catharsis––for human and seer.
I felt a surge of separation sickness, even as I thought it.
I didn’t want to be alone.
No seer wanted to be alone.
But I didn’t know anything else.
My parents… a distant memory.
I’d had lovers, friends.
All of those faces, and they just faded to static.
Too many faces, one face.
I was young for a seer. Too young.
The years stretched before me, endless.
More work camps. More electrified fences. More dead seers. More body parts, chopped up for machines. More labs. More collars. More humans keeping seer children as pets.
More wars.
More sadistic laughter.
More smug politicians, making decrees, speaking words they didn’t mean––worthless, useless words that would do nothing, that would change nothing because they entirely ignored the way things worked.
Entering the enclosure felt eerie.
I must have left my semi-organic shield outside the prison’s walls. The reddish brick of the workers’ shed loomed closer now. I paused briefly on the gaping, screaming maws of glass-less windows, but I could see nothing through those dense shadows.
A baby…
I could hear a baby crying.
I had to fight not to cover my nose.
I realized why as I stepped over a pit the inmates dug, filled with feces and urine. They’d done it to provide themselves a crude outhouse, only a few feet from where some unlucky ones slept––all so they wouldn’t have to venture out in the cold.
It was so fucking cold.
It was so cold in here––like a form of hell. Like Manaus was the hot hell, the diseased and insect-choked hell. This was the cold one.
The smells in Manaus baked under the buzzing flies and hot, tropical sun, assaulting my nose like a solid object. Here the shit and piss froze, but the smell still lingered, and new leavings melted through the old.
I couldn’t look at it.
I didn’t want to look at any of it.
The outhouse did force a break in the crowd, however, allowing me to step over and through the entrance to the cement bunker.
I could hear a baby crying…
I wondered if that was a memory, too.
The ground inside the cement structure was frozen as hard as stone.
Even apart from the outhouse, I could smell the crush of unwashed bodies, urine, feces, and bad water, the densely sweeter smells of rotting camp food mixed with the distant smell of the officer’s mess wafting coffee, smoke and cooking meat, making my stomach growl and churn with nausea in equal amounts.
I reached the doorway to the shed after what seemed like an eternity.
By then, I had totally blocked out the shouts and yells from the work camp seers.
Most of them continued to follow but kept their distance.
I couldn’t help catching flickers of angry stares and muttered curses––or fail to notice the hatred in those grimy faces and drawn-in cheeks, especially in the eyes but also in the set of their mouths, in their clenched hands and rigid bodies.
When I entered the pitch-black opening to the shed, it grew silent.
I forgot everything.
I forgot everything else.
I paused inside the doorway just long enough to let my eyes adjust.
The space was open, with no interior dividing walls. It smelled only faintly of mold. The lighting was poor, provided by narrow windows lining the wall on one side. Dust motes twisted lazily in the sun’s few rays, defying the freezing cold air.
My fingers tightened on the handle of my gun, a non-regulation, organically-enhanced Desert Eagle I’d carried since our last op in Israel. I felt my fingers slide closer to the trigger. Taking a step deeper into that darkness, I glanced around where I stood.
Dead bodies lay everywhere.
Stacks and stacks of dead bodies.
Too many for me to count.
My eyes found a floor pallet in the center of all of that death.
There, an unknown seer sat cross-legged on a foam mattress, its cloth cover streaked with black mold. My gaze slid higher, to the bundle she carried in her arms, then up to her face.
Slanted, shrewd, emerald-green eyes stared back at me.
She had long black hair and high cheekbones that stood out, even in the dim light. The female seer sitting before me had to be at least a few hundred years old. She held the bundle in her lap with a fierce protective
ness.
Yet somehow, the look in her eyes was utterly still.
Something about her forced me to pause, to try and speak to her.
“Who are you?” I said.
“My name is Kali.”
“Clan affiliation?”
The woman remained silent.
“Why are you here?” I said.
Again, the woman regarded me silently.
I attempted to reach my back-up infiltrators in the tower, using my headset, but I hit nothing but static. I needed to kill the child. I could feel that, with all of my heart, but I had no gun. My weapon had disappeared right out of my hand.
Standing over her now, a gray-eyed seer stood, holding a gun on me.
“Balidor.” I murmured his name.
My eyes shifted from the Adhipan seer back to the woman on the pallet, who was now slowly rising to her feet, the bundle in her arms held tightly to her chest. She straightened to her full height, and then she just looked at me, her eyes now full of sympathy.
“I’m sorry,” she told me gently. “There is not much I can do for you now. But I will do what I can. When you die.”
I swallowed, staring at her, touched and pained and angered by what I felt in her light, what I saw in those striking, green eyes.
I don’t think I’d ever felt more helpless in my life as I stared at the bundle in her arms.
I knew now. I understood.
It was the end.
For all of us… it was the end.
I looked at Balidor, and now the gray-eyed seer watched me sympathetically, too, compassion and understanding in his sharp, gray eyes.
“Please, brother.” I heard the genuine pleading in my own voice. “Kill it, while you still can. Please, brother. Think of your people… please.”
“I am thinking of my people,” Balidor said kindly. “And I am sorry, my brother. Truly. I wish a better path for you next time. I wish a better world.”
I could only stare at him.
Terror rose in my light, suffocating me.
I could feel it, with utter certainty.
I had made the wrong choice.
I had always made the wrong choice.
I had time to see Balidor take the woman’s arm, even as I fell to my knees in the packed, frozen dirt, my hands clasped over the hole in my chest.
My hands were already warm.
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