by SM Reine
Cass nodded in agreement, returning from where she’d finished descending the ladder. She sat cross-legged on the floor and began to eat again, silent.
Revik checked her mind. He clicked out seconds later, exhaled.
“We’ll need water,” he added, turning to Jon. “As much as we can carry. And food, of course.”
Cass looked up at them suddenly. Her eyes widened, grew bright...as if a light had just gone off somewhere in her head. Revik didn’t read her, but both men watched as she got to her feet and crossed the small space. She opened one of the lockers she’d explored earlier, began rifling through the back of it. Revik took another drink of juice, still watching her warily.
She turned then, jingling something in her hand.
When they only stared, she jangled the metal harder. Revik’s eyes snapped into focus. In her hand dangled a set of keys, clearly fitted for some kind of vehicle.
“Shotgun,” Cass said, grinning.
It was the first time Revik had seen her smile since watching her and Allie together in that diner in San Francisco.
Meeting her gaze, Revik grinned back.
Candar was a poor city, even smaller than its sister city of Mestia in Upper Svanetia, the higher half of the Svaneti region in the country of Stalin’s birth.
Georgia is smaller than most people imagine, at the southernmost tip of what had been, once upon a time, the Soviet Union, and closer to Tehran than Moscow. In the winter, like now, the Caucasus Mountains were buried in snow and ice, more so since the climate started changing and increased the average snowfall across most of Asia, at least in the past few centuries.
Historically speaking, the town of Candor was also new, grown up from the slave trade between Asia and Europe that erupted after the second world war.
Trade in young seers remained the town’s only real industry.
Sight slavery was, of course, legal in Georgia.
Ironically, the dearth of visiting free seers made it easy to slip past racial checkpoints unnoticed, even in the heightened paranoia caused by rumors of a telekinetic seer terrorist.
No one expected a free seer to walk into Candor willingly.
At present, Allie was supposedly training seers in India, readying her nascent army to wage war on the United States and China. While no one in Candar was overly fond of the governments of either place, purges had occurred there as elsewhere, in reaction to the news of a telekinetic seer in their midst. Bids on her blood and any genetic “samples” were whispered on the sidelines, too, of course, but Sark settlements in places like this were work camps, or else holding pens...and recruiting grounds for the Rooks.
They wouldn’t get any real bounty hunters sniffing here.
Revik was able to think through this much just from his own knowledge of the area combined with what they heard on the live news feeds. The snowmobile was fitted with organics like their prison had been, in this case to give it satellite capability. Even so, the weather interfered at times, and he avoided any feeds with two-way capability, which meant most of the majors as they tended to cull demographics for ads.
Jon and Cass didn’t look like seers, so that would help. Revik’s blood type would help them fly under the radar, as well.
No one stopped the snowmobile as they approached the town.
At the registration checkpoint, the guards seemed bored. Dirty, horny and bored. They only noticed Cass with any real interest. They wanted to know race-cat, local contact, settlement preference...the usual for clan-based systems. Revik knew they’d bother him less if he was specific, so after giving them all the ID info they asked for, he told them he wanted the 4th, nearest Multe markets, hoping they hadn’t burned down in any recent riots.
They hadn’t. The human took their blood on the spot, and Revik waited, the snowcat’s engine still on, while they ran it.
In the pause, he assessed his two charges, who still looked dazed and dirty, which luckily wasn’t unusual up here. Their condition couldn’t have been helped by staring at nothing but snow for two days straight. It occurred to him how thin all three of them really were. The same thing seemed to have occurred to Cass, who had wrapped her face and neck in a thick scarf just before Revik rolled down the window to speak to the guard.
Thinking about this, he smiled at her again. For a human, she wasn’t stupid. Neither was Jon, for that matter, who kept his hand by his gun the whole time the guards were gone, his hazel eyes alert even through their fatigue.
The guard returned. He motioned towards Revik’s arm.
When Revik held it out, the man clamped a white wristband around his bony wrist. The guards continued to look bored, and now slightly drunk. Cass and Jon followed Revik’s lead, sticking out their arms. Revik watched them look at the wristbands, dazed, and realized again it was probably the first time they’d ever seen anything like them before.
The guard motioned to Revik again, speaking in heavily accented Russian.
“...You know where to go?” He glanced at Cass.
Revik nodded, giving him a quick three-finger salute in thanks.
He pressed down the clutch, shifting down to first and hitting the gas before the man could ask him anything about Cass’s status. Women got sold here, too, seer and human. He’d rather not make his companions any more paranoid than they already were. As they slid past the entrance to the mountainous town, Revik pointed up at the skyline.
“Mount Shkhara,” he said. “Over 17,000 feet, I think.”
Jon’s eyes didn’t leave the band on his wrist. “You speak Russian?” He glanced up. “Any other languages?”
Revik shrugged. “A few.”
Cass laughed. When Revik looked over at her, she was smiling at him, but her eyes were clear. He returned the smile, shaking his head.
“Are you ready to sleep?” he said.
“Can you sleep?” Cass asked.
“No,” Revik said. He glanced at her, again surprised. He wondered just how much they’d picked up in their months with Terian. “...I can’t,” he said. “Not yet. But you can. I thought we’d get cleaned up and you two could rest while I do some scouting. I’m hoping we can get a small plane here, go to T’bilisi in the morning. We can probably get an international flight from there.”
Cass was staring at him again. “Have you been here before?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
Revik glanced over at them. Jon was looking at him too, waiting for an answer. Revik shifted slightly in the seat.
“Awhile ago,” he said finally. “Seers have photographic memories,” he added. “I’m not unusual in that.”
“So what next?” Jon said. “After that place that sounds like a skin fungus, where do we go?”
Revik had been thinking about that, too.
He knew where he wanted to go, but he also knew he’d be a fool to risk it. He could think of only one other place with constructs close enough and safe enough that he could reach within a reasonable timeframe. Even with that location, there were complications.
“England,” he said finally. “London.”
“London?” Jon stared. “Didn’t you say Allie was probably in Asia by now?”
“Yes.” Revik glanced at the two of them, then sighed, clicking softly under his breath. “There are things I need in London.” Seeing Jon’s frown, he added, reluctant, “...and I don’t want to go straight to Allie.”
“You don’t?” Cass’s voice held genuine surprise. “I thought you’d want to go there first.”
Revik nodded. “I do. It’s just—”
Jon said, “You think we’d be followed?”
Revik glanced at him.
Again...not dumb.
He nodded, shrugging with one hand. “Yes.”
Cass was watching his face. “That’s part of it.” She hesitated. “Is it also because of the stuff Terian said? About you cheating on her or whatever?”
Revik sighed, but felt his body react regardless. Waiting for the nausea to pass,
he turned the wheel of the snowcat slowly, navigating around a stone fountain in the middle of the town square. Then he shook his head.
“No,” he said. “...Not exactly.”
“But that was true? You did cheat on her?”
Revik glanced at the human, flinching slightly at the look in her eyes. “Yes.”
Shaking her head, Cass folded her arms. “Figures.”
But Jon looked between them, his eyes holding a faint wonder.
“So you guys really are married, then?” he said. “That wasn’t just Terian being a dick?”
Revik didn’t answer at first. Feeling both of them looking at him again, he turned, blowing air out from his cheeks.
“Yeah. We’re really married.” Hearing the silence this produced, he glanced over at the two of them again. “Seers are different. It can happen like that.”
“Like what?” Cass said, snorting a little. “Like...overnight?”
“Yes.” He made a more or less gesture with his hand. “Well. What I meant was, before the rest of the mind catches up with it. Ours happened fast. A little too fast for us.” He shrugged with one hand. “Well. For me, anyway.”
She frowned. “Terian said you hadn’t slept with her.”
Revik hesitated, feeling himself tense a little. Then he shrugged again. There wasn’t a lot of point in keeping secrets from the two of them. Not now.
“We haven’t consummated, no.” He glanced at her. “That’s complicated, too, Cass. For seers, I mean.”
She folded her arms, giving him an openly skeptical look.
“So you didn’t want sex with her?” she said. “With Allie?”
“I didn’t say that,” he said, giving her a warning look.
“So what, then? You slept with someone else, so sex isn’t the problem, clearly.” Her frown deepened. “Is marriage more of an arranged thing with seers? Some kind of social contract...like a business thing?”
“No, it’s not a...a business thing.”
“So what’s your issue with Allie?”
He looked at her. “There is no issue, Cass.”
“Is she not your type? Isn’t she pretty enough for you?”
He felt his jaw harden a little. “You are getting too personal for me, Cass. I don’t want to talk about this, all right?”
Anger touched her eyes. Then she exhaled, and he could feel her thinking. Folding her arms tighter, she frowned a little, but nodded.
“Okay. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Jon was looking at him, too, his hazel eyes thoughtful. “You think Terian let us go. To find Allie for him.”
Revik hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I do.”
Both of them fell silent. Revik saw them exchange glances.
“So we can’t go to her at all?” Cass said.
“We can,” Revik said. “First I need to go somewhere where I can jump safely...see what’s going on with the Rooks...the seers Terian worked for. It’s pretty clear he and Galaith aren’t working together as they used to. I want to know how many people might be looking for us. I also want to talk to the Seven...” He cleared his throat. “...the seers who have Allie. I can’t do that here.” He squinted through snow on the windshield to see the sign for the hotel.
“England could be complicated. I was owned...” He paused, letting that part sink in. “I don’t know if my employers will have my place under surveillance or whether they would turn me in to SCARB. My guess is no...” He glanced at Jon before the human could speak. “...It’s more likely my stuff has been destroyed, my space given to another seer.”
There was a silence. Some of the sharpness left Cass’s light.
“Oh,” she said. “That sucks.”
Revik smiled at her. “Not really.”
“So what would we do then?” Jon said. “If that happened?”
Revik blew air out from between his lips. “I know people in London. People who’d let me use their places to jump. People who would help us.”
“Other seers, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Jon nodded, leaning back in the seat and folding his arms.
“All right,” he said. “London it is, then.”
Jon closed his eyes. Watching him lean on Cass’s shoulder, it occurred to Revik that Jon really thought he had a vote.
In the same moment, Revik wondered if maybe he did.
It took him another few breaths to realize that what he felt for the humans was more than just responsibility for having indirectly gotten them into this. They felt like friends. More than that. They felt like family.
Gazing up at the whitewashed sky, he forced the tense part of him to relax as he thought about the reasons that might be. He thought about Cass’s questions about him and Allie, and realized he already knew why that was.
She was more seer now, he could feel it.
Pushing the thought from his mind, he downshifted in front of the wooden hotel sign hanging from the edge of a steep, slate-tile roof. Bringing the snowmobile to a slow stop where it wouldn’t hang out in the faint outline of road, he stepped on the foot brake, turning the wheel to wedge the tires into a line of rocks.
He turned off the engine. The silence once he had was strangely disorienting. All he could hear was the wind through the thick glass, and the faint squeak of the chain holding the sign from the roof overhead.
“Hey, Revik,” Cass said, watching him pull the keys out of the ignition.
“What, Cass?” he said, not looking over.
“I’m sorry about what I said.”
He glanced at her. She looked timid, lost inside the bundle of blanket and scarf. She touched his arm with her bony hand, and he flinched a little, feeling the emotion behind the gesture.
“I just don’t get it, I guess. You seem like one of the good guys.”
Looking at her, he felt his fingers grip the steering wheel, still holding the keys. He glanced at Jon and saw the male human looking at him, too.
Revik exhaled shortly, rubbing his face with a gloved hand.
“There is nothing to get, Cass,” he said. He met her gaze, his jaw hard once more. “...And I’m not that good.”
Jon spoke up, surprising him.
“Do you love her?” he said.
Revik looked at him. Focusing back down on his hands, he watched the leather crinkle around his fingers. After another moment, he exhaled again.
“I love her,” he said. He nodded, half-surprised he’d said it. “Yes.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When he glanced up next, Cass smiled at him. Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his good hand, shaking him lightly in the same gesture. A faint smile tugged at his lips.
“All right.” He smiled wider, tugging at his shoulder a little harder, to get Revik to look at him. “Come on, man. Let’s find that shower.”
Watching Cass fumble with the door handle, Revik nodded, wiping his face before he turned to do the same.
27
LONDON
I aimed my body down a London street, scanning faces.
I took in buildings as well, and the occasional car as we strolled past yet another wooded park, a different park from the one we’d first passed as we’d left the tube station.
I stopped at a newsstand and stared blankly at the morphing feed headlines blaring from a monitor over the stand window. My eyes took in the actual words beats later, which went something like this:
“NEW SYRIMNE KILLS 28 IN PAKISTAN BOMB BLAST! TERRORIST PLOT LINKED TO CHINA!”
Even after months of travel and India, I still commanded the front page.
I read details as they ran out under the headlines. Apparently I was believed dead again, I noted. I was still reading about how I’d died when Maygar came up from behind me and took my arm none too gently in his thick fingers. He led me down a street lined with white houses that looked to me like they’d been torn from the pages of a London storybook.
Flags from different countries flapped over o
ur heads.
A limo slid by with tinted, bullet-proof glass and small square flags on the front of its hood, too, then another flanked by military police.
It struck me as interesting that Maygar had brought me here, where representatives from at least a dozen countries seemed to have taken up residence, most of whom would pay top dollar to see me collared and stuck in the back of a windowless van.
Still, it was pretty, where we were.
The park flourished in the background, dense with green, filled with strolling men in suits who held the arms of women wearing hats and gloves, giving it a strangely timeless feel. I looked down at my own hands, which were dyed darker than my normal skin tone. My stubby nails made me look like a drug addict, or some kind of street kid. Touching the silver chain necklace I wore around my neck, I shoved those same hands into my pockets.
For the plane ride over, the seers used everything but surgery to disguise my appearance. I flew out of Kolkata wearing facial implants, skin dye, blood patches on all my fingers in the event of a random racial screening, colored contact lenses, a wig, a hat, several scarves. My fingerprints and DNA matched my ident, which was that of an East Indian woman traveling for business with her merchant husband.
My current attempt to blend was a bit more West than East, and consisted of men’s mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. Pretty low-tech, but surprisingly effective against the street-level facial recognition software employed by cameras that dotted most London public areas.
I still wore the black wig and skin dye, blood patches and contact lenses under the dark shades, but the facial implants had started to hurt, so I took most of them off. Maygar seemed to think we could avoid the higher grade facial-rec stuff as long as we weren’t picked up...and as long as we stayed away from banks and private residencies in the more exclusive areas.
The Seven employed seers in London who could intercept a breach, as well.
According to Maygar, they would pick up any flags well in advance of the humans...if not perhaps in advance of the Rooks.
Still, despite all the precautions they insisted upon, most of the Seven’s Guard seemed fairly comfortable with my proposed trip and destination. London remained a Seven town, at least in terms of operational majority.
