Bridge

by JC Andrijeski

  The ball hit hard––hard enough to crack the organic glass.

  It sounded like a gun report.

  Balidor and Jon both flinched, holding up their arms to shield themselves. Balidor had fallen to one knee as well, as if he’d really been shot at.

  Jon’s reflexes weren’t quite so fast. He just stood there, breathing hard, staring at the crack in the window, his heart thudding loudly in his chest.

  Neither of them moved as the sound echoed in the small, dead-metal room.

  The glass ball fell with a heavy thud to the floor inside the cell.

  When Jon glanced at the Adhipan seer, Balidor had a grim smile on his face.

  “It seems, perhaps, significantly less time than we thought,” he said.

  He accepted Jon’s helping hand, pulling himself back to his feet with another wry smile as he surveyed the damage to the window.

  “…Particularly if Nenzi’s teaching style remains this unrelenting,” he added ruefully.

  Jon nodded, looking at the crack in the glass. His stomach was starting to hurt from the adrenaline that slammed his bloodstream.

  He’d watched them install that organic pane.

  He knew the thing was something like eight inches thick.

  “Jesus,” he muttered.

  When he looked at Balidor again, he saw the faint tension in the other man’s face, right before Balidor wiped it smooth.

  “What?” Jon said. “You don’t think he can pull this off?”

  Balidor shook his head, clicking a little sharply. “It is not that.”

  “Then what?”

  “Nenz,” Balidor said simply, indicating towards Revik through the cracked glass, using the Elaerian’s older name. “…The Sword. I cannot help but be concerned about him.”

  Jon followed his intent gaze. “Yeah.” Exhaling between pursed lips, he frowned. “You haven’t actually seen him like this before, have you?”

  “This… motivated?” Balidor shook his head, his voice and smile humorless. “No. I suppose I have not.” He glanced at Jon, curiosity in his gray eyes. “Have you?”

  Jon’s frown deepened as he looked back through the glass.

  “Yes.” Amending his words, he said, “Well, no. Not quite like this. It’s different this time.” Still thinking aloud, he admitted, “Honestly? It’s almost worse. Better and worse. He’s… I don’t know.” Jon struggled for words. “…In it more this time. Deeper, I mean.”

  “The job in D.C.,” Balidor said, either reading it off Jon’s light, or picking the memory out of his own. “Yes. I had forgotten that.”

  “It’s not exactly the same,” Jon muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets.

  Balidor just looked at him for a moment. The older seer hesitated, then shrugged, asking the question that hovered there.

  “I would be interested in knowing the differences,” he said. “Given the circumstances, brother. If you would be so kind as to share.”

  Jon thought about the seer’s words, forcing himself to be objective.

  He remembered how Revik had been back then, the look in his eyes while they’d been working around the clock in that brothel outside of D.C. That had been about Allie, too. That had been what the military seers called an “extraction” job. Meaning, they’d gone there specifically to get Allie away from Terian.

  Remembering how Revik seemed then, including how the Elaerian woke up every night in the early hours of the morning, crying, Jon felt that pain in his heart worsen. Motioning towards the window with the hand missing fingers, he exhaled, trying to be precise with his words.

  “He’s less angry. Less openly afraid,” he said after a pause.

  Jon continued to watch Revik as he thought aloud.

  “…More sad. The focus is the same. More intense this time, like I said. That feeling like he’s got a clock ticking over his head, even when he’s eating. Or sleeping. Or showering. He’s just as shut down in a lot of ways. He’s also just as harsh, just as unforgiving with everyone else. Even so, he feels less openly dangerous.”

  Thinking harder on that last part, Jon frowned, shaking his head.

  “Well… different, maybe. His anger is more internalized. More contained. He’s sober this time, too, for the most part,” Jon added, glancing at Balidor. “I think he was drunk through most of that op in D.C. Maybe more drunk than I realized at the time. He drank to dull the pain, I think, from the bonding… to keep himself in the game. We could see that pain on him a lot. He couldn’t sleep. They were only half-bonded back then. I know they are now, too, but it feels different…”

  Realizing Balidor knew that, Jon flushed, seeing the patience in the older seer’s gray eyes. Brushing off his own words with a wave of his hand, Jon added,

  “More than anything, he feels sad to me now. Really damned sad. Defeated. Guilty. He blames himself, for letting Ditrini get the jump on him. For not noticing whatever they put in my light before it was too late.”

  Feeling his face redden, even as his jaw clenched in an anger he briefly couldn’t control, Jon forced himself to shrug it off.

  “…Before, in D.C., I think he was mostly afraid,” Jon repeated. “Terrified, really. Like, out of his head with fear. Now he just feels like this is all he has left. Like he’s going to do this if he has to crawl naked over glass, and no one had better get in his way.”

  Jon hesitated, still thinking aloud.

  “I think he wants this done so he can go back to trying to reach Allie… to staying with her.” Glancing at Balidor, Jon remembered himself when he added, “I know he’s spending a lot of time in there with her already, but honestly, if Cass wasn’t in the picture, I don’t think Revik would leave Allie at all. I don’t think it’s even about the kid so much…”

  He flushed, feeling weirdly guilty at saying that aloud for some reason.

  “…Or maybe I just can’t feel that part on him as much. Maybe he’s shielding his feelings around that more. I mean, I know the kid matters to him. But I think he’s obsessing on taking out Shadow and Cass more than anything… maybe Cass in particular. Maybe he thinks it’s too late to save their kid, I don’t know. Or maybe it’s just too much to think about, given everything.”

  Balidor nodded. Jon saw something shimmer briefly in the other’s eyes, even as a pulse of grief left the older seer’s light.

  “I see,” was all he said.

  Jon wondered just what it was that Balidor saw, apart from what he’d said.

  Just then, Revik’s voice rose, audible through the speakers mounted on either side of the glass panel.

  “No, goddamn it! Look at me! Look at what I’m doing right now.”

  Jon watched Maygar’s face screw up in concentration, even as he balled his muscular hands. He looked like he was bracing himself to be hit by a steel ball.

  “No!” Revik snapped. “You’re looking at the wrong goddamned structure.”

  He smacked him again with his light.

  Or Jon assumed he must have, because Maygar flinched visibly, almost like he’d just been punched in the face, even though Revik hadn’t moved. Maygar gasped a little, too, straightening before he wiped a trickle of blood sliding down his face from one nostril. Without doing much more than wiping it on his jeans, Maygar nodded.

  Revik barely seemed to notice any of it.

  “Yes,” the latter said, a few seconds later. “That one. Now sequence it the way I showed you. You can’t tense up over all of them, all at once. It’s about flow. It’s about letting the structure do what it wants to do. You want to be conscious of it, but a light touch… really fucking light.”

  Maygar nodded again.

  He took it all without complaining, Jon noticed. The hits, too.

  Maygar’s stoicism shocked him, truthfully, given what he remembered of his and Revik’s interactions in the past.

  Still, Jon had seen Maygar hanging around Allie’s room on the upper floors, more often than he’d seen most other seers up there. He knew Maygar’s feelings towa
rds his father’s wife weren’t entirely neutral, despite how much he and Allie used to argue, and despite the crap Maygar pulled on her, trying to “claim” her from Revik early in their marriage.

  Of course, Maygar hadn’t known Revik was his father back then. Jon had a feeling things would have gone down very, very differently, if either of them had known.

  All of that seemed so long ago now.

  That happened in Seertown, when Vash was alive, months before Jon even started getting to know Dorje. That was before Revik and Allie truly felt married, before any of them had any idea what that would really mean. It was before they knew about Revik being Syrimne, before Shadow and Salinse, before Ditrini.

  It was before C2-77 killed off most of the world.

  Cass had still been with them.

  Back then, Jon, Cass and Allie spent just about every day together, often in that crappy room Jon and Cass shared next to Allie’s in Vash’s compound.

  Pushing the memory aside, Jon clenched his jaw, fighting to suppress the feeling that wanted to rise in his chest, something a lot closer to rage than the grief he’d been feeling seconds before.

  Maybe, under the circumstances, that wasn’t such a bad thing, either.

  He was still standing there, fighting with memory, time, feeling and whatever else, when Balidor touched the link in his ear, speaking aloud to the man on the other side of the glass.

  His message was brief, but Jon understood it at once.

  “Nenz,” Balidor said. “It’s time, brother.”

  Revik looked towards the window.

  For the barest second, Jon saw him in that stare.

  Then the mask fell back over his angular face.

  He nodded, combing long fingers through his black hair, his colorless eyes trained on nothing at all. Jon noticed he still wore the ring Allie had given him, the one their father left behind when he died.

  Revik’s words vibrated through the small speakers.

  “Practice what I showed you,” he told Maygar. “I’ll be back in an hour. Two at most.”

  Maygar’s brown eyes sharpened as he glanced towards the window. “What is it? Are they going to try that thing? Where they pair––”

  “We’re done,” Revik cut in. “Keep practicing.”

  Without another word, he walked directly for the cell’s door, not looking either at the window or back at his son.

  Disengaging the lock on Tank-Jr’s sealed door with one hand, Balidor leaned over the microphone to the room’s speakers.

  “We’ll let you know,” he told Maygar, his voice somewhat kinder than Revik’s had been.

  Looking back towards the window, Maygar nodded, a faint pulse of gratitude in his eyes.

  The younger seer began to pace then, his eyes concentrated as he receded back into the Barrier, undoubtedly to practice whatever Revik had just spent the last few hours yelling at him and hammering on him to learn.

  Whether Revik noticed or cared at that moment, however, Jon had his doubts.

  The door had already closed behind the tall Elaerian, sounding off a dull clang as he left the room, and likely everyone associated with it, far behind.

  5

  GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY

  January 11, 2003

  San Francisco, California

  I JERK OPEN the door, all ready to grumble and bitch at her after I peer through the keyhole and see who it is. It’s three a.m. I have to work the next morning, and I’m tired as fuck, having spent far too long and consumed too many beers at Gecko’s already.

  Once the latch comes off the lock of the old-fashioned door, and I swing it open, I freeze.

  All my annoyance falls away, the instant I get a good look at her face.

  “Cass.” I grip the door, staring at her. “God. What happened? Who did that to you?”

  “Let me in,” she begs. Tears run from her eyes, running the black of her already smeared make-up, making her sniff. Her nose runs, too, already swelling from the bruise I can clearly see, where it almost looks broken.

  It might actually be broken, but I’m not a doctor; I don’t know for sure. I watch, shocked, as she wipes it with the knuckles of her bruised hand, wincing in obvious pain. She only manages to smear the blood trickling from her nostrils in a long streak to her ear.

  “Please, Al. Let me in, quick! Please!”

  I stand aside at once, and she practically sprints into the small living room of my one bedroom apartment, huddling in the middle of my hardwood floor, which is rug-less and stained with candle wax and a previous tenant’s dripped ceiling paint, where he must have been too stoned to remember to lay out a tarp.

  Leaning out the doorway, I peer down the steps of my walk-up apartment building, listening.

  I don’t hear anything at first.

  “Oh, please close the door!” she pleads. “Close it, Allie! Please! Don’t let him see you!”

  Even as the words leave her mouth, pounding starts on the glass of the outer security door at the bottom of the stairs. On the other side of that fist, I see a figure I recognize, even through the warped panes of glass between me and his shadowed form.

  “I see you, bitch!” His muffled, slurred voice erupts through the wood and glass. “I see you! I call you mother. I know you, Alyson… you a whore, just like her! I make you sorry! Tell Cassandra come down here right now! Right now!”

  “I’m calling the cops!” I shout down the stairs.

  “You don’t dare call the cops!” he says in his heavily-accented English. “You call the cops, you be sorry, little girl! You be very, very sorry!”

  When I don’t answer, he pounds on the door again, harder, shaking the frame.

  I wince, conscious suddenly of my neighbors. Before any of them can open their doors, I retreat into my apartment, closing and locking my own door and putting on the chain. As soon as I finish, I fumble my headset off the table by the door and begin fitting it over my ear. Before I can finish, Cass lunges at me, grabbing at my hands.

  “Allie, don’t!” she cries out.

  “Don’t?” I stare at her, at the bruise under her eye that is already starting to swell. “Cass, you have to. This time, you have to.”

  “You can’t call the cops on my dad, Allie!” she pleads.

  Her words hang in the air.

  Somehow, she manages to remind me of my own father, maybe just with the depth of her emotion, even though my dad couldn’t have been more different from the man pounding on my door––a man barely able to stand from the cheap whatever-the-fuck he drank, probably wine mixed with whisky or something equally noxious.

  I bite my lip, shaking my head.

  “Seriously, Cass. Listen to yourself. Or fuck, go look in the mirror.”

  “It doesn’t involve you!”

  “It does!” I snap. “Anyway, he’s threatening me now, Cass. You heard him!”

  Biting her bruised and cut lip, my best friend stares at me, her brown eyes filling with tears.

  “Please, Allie. Please don’t call the cops, okay? They might deport him. You know they might. Then my mom’s screwed… and my little sister.”

  I continue to stare at her, fighting what I want to say.

  We’ve had this conversation before, of course.

  We’ve had different permutations of this conversation over and over again, pretty much since we were in grammar school. So I already know this is like a blind spot in her, something she can’t or won’t see, can’t think rationally about, can’t talk about, or even seem to comprehend, not even when it stares her in the face.

  I know that shouldn’t matter on some level, whether she “gets it” or not.

  I know he could kill her one of these times.

  I know it doesn’t change anything really, whether or not she understands, but it makes me hesitate anyway, if only because she’s my friend, and I know how I’d feel if someone I loved decided they knew better than me, about my own life. About someone I loved.

  I know what Jon would do.

&n
bsp; I know what my mom would do, too, although their two responses would be diametrically opposed. I don’t agree with my mom’s reasons for staying out of it, which seem hopelessly dated and screwed up to me––but I’ve also never really believed in doing things regardless of what others want or feel, not when it pertains to their life.

  I’ve never been able to draw black and white lines in the sand, unlike my mom, who would have said it was none of my business, or my brother, who would have called the cops without a second’s hesitation.

  I look at Cass instead, see the fear in her eyes, the pleading.

  I can still hear the pounding on the outside door, even with both doors closed.

  I consider calling Jon, but that would be the same as making a decision to call the cops, only a more cowardly way of handling it, by pushing it off on him.

  “You know you should do it,” I say instead. “If he gets deported, it’s his own damned fault, Cass. Your mom and sister would be better off, anyway.”

  “On the street?” Cass says. “That would be better, Allie?”

  “There’ll be another way,” I say, shaking my head. “There’s always another way, Cass, even if it seems like there isn’t. Ask my mom. She lost everything after dad died. The insurance didn’t cover any of it. Then she lost her job. She found another way.”

  Cass only looks at me, not hearing me, that pleading look still on her face.

  “Please don’t, Allie. I’m begging you,” she said. “I’m begging you, Al. Please, I swear to God, I’ll make sure he never bothers you. Anyway, he’ll sleep this off and apologize tomorrow, he always does.”

  Her voice grows more urgent.

  “…Allie, it was my fault for going over there on a weekend night, okay? I knew he’d be drinking. You know this isn’t an issue much anymore, since I’m hardly ever––”

  “––IS EVERYONE HERE?” Revik said, his voice monotone. “Can we start?”

  Jon sat in one of the high-backed chairs, on one side of the antique table, both of which were made of some heavy, dark wood. Balidor sat two seats to his left. Wreg sat opposite Revik, at the other end of the narrow dining room. Jorag sat directly across from Jon.