Following my lead, he nodded, once.
"When we get back," he agreed.
I tried not to notice the pain I could still see etched into his angular features.
I just hoped that whatever we'd gotten out of that damned vault was worth it.
"WHICH BOX IS it?" Revik had asked, still half in the Barrier as he scanned the walls for more organic machines. I watched his eyes sharpen with light, even as I pulled the number from the memory of my conversation with Feigran.
"2789930-22991-EF99837," I told him.
Revik immediately began scanning the ranges dividing the different rows of security boxes.
"Not here," he said a few seconds later.
I'd been doing the same on the other side, but damn he was fast, even as hurt as he was. After a few more seconds, I had to concede he was right.
"The lower vault," he said, looking at me.
We'd both known we'd probably need to go down there, that the thing we wanted likely lived in the deepest hole inside the bank's security systems, but neither of us liked the idea much. We'd be trapped down there. The walls consisted of a few feet of cement and steel and organic casing. We also figured there would be a few nasty surprises waiting for us, too...things that wouldn't show up on any of the plans we'd studied. After running into that organic machine on the upper floor lobby, we were both reasonably sure that someone had paid a lot of money to give this thing quasi-military protection.
Maybe even from us. Which meant they'd planned for telekinesis.
Revik didn't have another shield in him, I knew that, too...not if he had to break us out through the walls. I'd needed him to use too much light, helping me find this thing. The explosion upstairs pretty much negated any "out through the front door" scenarios we might have harbored. That meant Revik would need every ounce of his light to get us out...and probably most of mine, too.
We had to be prepared to leave with almost nothing.
I'd already done the patching job on his side. As soon as we were in the upper vault, I'd locked the doors, sealing us in so I could work on him without interruption. That had to take precedence, in my mind...and luckily, it did in his, too. I was worried I'd have to fight him in terms of priorities, but he sat down at once, pulling out the organic sealant gun and patches he'd been carrying in the military backpack that lay flush with his back.
He gave me a few pointers as he took off his jacket, then the vest and the armored shirt. I was pretty amazed actually, at how completely matter-of-fact he was about the whole thing...but then, he'd been wounded in the field before. We'd gone through all of this in the planning, too, including the possibility that one or the other of us might need to stabilize the other somewhere in the middle of the action.
At least he was conscious. I could have been completely on my own, but he was reasonably clear for all of it.
Even so, I'd had trouble with all of the blood. I didn't faint or anything...thank the gods, blood has never had that effect on me. But I freaked a little.
Mostly because it was his blood, I guess.
He seemed to think that was normal, too. He talked to me about my reactions calmly, rationally...saying it might even be a survival mechanism of some kind, since we were bonded. He'd joked that he'd probably be reacting a lot worse if our positions were reversed, and from glimpses of his memory, I knew he wasn't just humoring me, at least not entirely. For the same reason, I felt a lot of sympathetic pain, at least before the numbing properties of the sealant and patch kicked in, dulling his screaming nerve-endings.
The pain alone made it hard to concentrate, and got bad enough while I was cleaning the wound that I worried I'd been injured in the blast, too, and both of us had missed it somehow. Luckily, he was still pretty sharp at that point, so he'd been able to talk me through the parts where I might have struggled otherwise.
Between us, we got it done pretty fast.
He looked a lot better after I got the patch on him. He still had a fair bit of his light then, too, which helped...and I had nearly all of mine, so I had a lot more to give him. I was reassured by the fact that the patch and the sealant would prevent infection, as well as start to heal the hole in his flesh...even the nick in his organs, according to Revik. He seemed confident that, overall, his injury was fairly minor. I was less confident, of course, but his business-as-usual attitude went a long way towards calming me down.
The lower vault ended up being easier to breach than we'd expected.
The only real surprise was that, once we were inside, the door closed via some automatic security measure, and locked us in. Apparently, the primary security mechanism was not letting us leave. They probably figured the walls were so thick, the vault would serve as a high-security cell while they gassed us or whatever else.
Revik seemed to think gas would be coming, anyway. But we'd prepared for that too, at least as well as we could. We were wearing the oxygen masks we'd packed within seconds of the door closing, looking like some bizarre scuba-diving couple as we began going over the numbers on each of the different security boxes.
That time, he found the box within a matter of seconds.
By then, I was fighting that feeling of overactive adrenaline already. I could feel the clock ticking over our heads, even without being able to sense any of the specifics. The Barrier field inside the vault tied somehow to the organic walls, which were nearly as sentient as that animal-like one I'd encountered the year before in São Paulo. It hadn't attacked us, but I had no doubt it was feeding information to someone in building security. Revik also motioned in sign language that the gas had been triggered. He could feel it through the hole in his armor that the shrapnel had made. He motioned for me not to take off the mask...or even my gloves. Maybe it was some kind of power of suggestion thing, but after that, it felt like my skin was itching all over, which also wound up my nerves.
Still, we got it done fast, like I said.
That probably saved us as much as anything. Revik was all about working fast. Get in, get out...don't give them time to get clever.
So when I pointed out the box to him, he already had the extraction tool out. He wedged the organic lever into the crack between the box and the wall, bypassing the locks altogether. The tool bled into the crevices on either side of the box's storage cavity, and before the organic being managed to ripple back to our section of the vault to investigate what we were doing, Revik had already yanked the thing out, grunting when it strained the part of his back covered by the organic patch.
He threw the box down on the marble-topped table in the middle of the room, and motioned me over as he used the organic extractor to rip off the lid.
Both of us peered inside once the box was open. Revik flipped it over rather than reach inside...I assume also as a precaution. When he did, an old-fashioned, hand-held data key fell out, plunking onto the marble table top with a light bounce.
It was pretty anti-climatic, really.
Then again, I didn't exactly know what I'd been expecting. An ancient stone, covered in hieroglyphs that told us how to thwart the Displacement, maybe. Maybe another of Galaith's diaries, or some clue to the true identity of Chandre's mysterious Shadow people operating out of South America. Or maybe just the equivalent of a big, wet raspberry from the Dreng...a desiccated body part, or a vial of bat blood or something.
But really, a data key made a lot more sense.
Revik also found a leather-bound book in there, something that looked old...like, maybe a few hundred years old...but it wasn't one of Galaith's, either. He stuffed the book into a vest pocket without looking at it after he'd checked it with a security scanner. I picked up the data key before Revik could wave me off, but nothing happened. I stuck that into a pocket in my vest and zipped it up tight.
Without speaking, he turned to the walls, only then assessing our options for escape.
He found the gas mains outside the outer shell of concrete...but only after we managed to neutralize the sentient portion of the organ
ic wall, which maintained a Barrier shield around the vault. That hadn't exactly been easy, either, but luckily, its mind functioned similarly enough to the one I'd encountered in São Paulo that I was able to communicate with it, at least a little. By reading me, and following my lead, Revik coerced the thing to unlock the security measures on the relevant portion of wall. He also talked it into creating a kind of shield for us, for when he ignited the gas lines.
Not long after that, things really got interesting.
By then, the security team was trying to get inside the vault, instead of simply us trying to get out...probably because they could tell we'd commandeered their sentient machine.
The organics in the vault's wall dealt with that for us, too.
When the first, real explosion finally came, it terrified me.
It also reminded me of what the boy version of Revik had done at that school in Sikkim. The drop in my light was so severe and dramatic that I fell to the floor. Revik had been ready for that too, of course...I thought I had been as well, but it turned out to be one of those "works in theory" kinds of things, not so easy to experience in real life.
Even so, it was me who got us through the still-smoking hole into the underground cavern once most of the gas had burned away. By then, Revik was delirious, and trying to convince me that the we should bring the organic being in the wall with us so that it didn't get punished by the security team. Tears came to his eyes as he continued to argue with me about it, but he didn't fight me outright as I led him into the first set of sewage pipes...which had also been blown apart by the gas, making me wonder how far the explosion traveled up the mains.
Those first few minutes were some of the hardest of my life, I think. The wall had caved in not far from where we left the vault, and I was jumping at shadows, half expecting I'd have to kill someone once the SWAT team or the Sweepers fell on our heads.
But they never did. I have to assume they had their hands full upstairs, as half the manhole covers in that part of the city were blown off their moorings. After the first waves of shock dissipated in the Barrier space above, I did feel them hunting us, but by then we were past the most damaged part of the tunnels.
They got close a few times, but somehow, I managed to lure them away.
I think by then, the parts of the plan that did work surprised me a lot more than those that didn't...and maybe frightened me more in some ways, too.
WE MANAGED TO pop out in a storm drain inside the park itself. In fact, when I finally got Revik out, it was through a sewage access tunnel not far from the Natural History Museum and the lake by the nearest footpath to the road.
I was kind of amazed, really, at how far uptown we'd walked...but so happy I'd managed to hit the park I didn't care. I'd been off on my calculations by at least two or three street blocks, but we still managed to come out close to the main thoroughfare of Central Park West, which had been my real goal.
After doing a light scan under a dense shield, I climbed out of the hole in the ground first. I walked around some, mostly up and down the path and to look at the cars parked along the nearby street, to make sure the coast was clear…relatively, that is. As I looked around, scoping the area for undercover cops and Sweeps and whatever else, I was practically bouncing on my feet I was so overtired and amped...but it was quiet. Really quiet. I imagined most of the party was still by the bank, or dispersed to airports and the train station or one of the roadblocks I had to assume they'd set up around every access point in and out of the city.
I didn’t see or feel a lot of air traffic, although a few news helicopters flew overhead, following the course of Sixth Avenue rather than cruising over the park itself.
Once I managed to get my nerves ratcheted down a few notches, and convinced myself it was safe, I went back for Revik and helped him up the ladder...which was a lot harder than it sounds. By then, I was pretty damned exhausted too, and he's not exactly a small man, even when he's on the lean side, like now.
Still, I got him out fairly quickly, and then it was just a matter of making our way to Central Park West to hail a cab. We could have walked back to the hotel, of course, but I didn’t want to push Revik any further than I already had, and I was pretty sure a cab would be a lot safer than walking on the street with our real faces. We'd already changed into more civilian-type outfits in the tunnel below. That essentially meant taking off the armored vests and stuffing them into our backpacks, then pulling out the more colorful, regular shirts we wore beneath so they covered the tops of the black, military-style pants, making them look more like any club-goer's outfit.
Then we donned the long, black jackets, which were cut in a civilian-style anyway, and made sure none of our guns or organics or anything else showed.
The boots, too, could pass for somewhat dungeon-y club wear, so we might look a little overly tough, but no more so than a good subset of youngish people who would be roaming the streets this time of morning.
What we couldn't hide, we left in the tunnel.
We also erased the plans and maps from Revik’s hand-held, and cleared the memory on his headset, in case we did get stopped for some reason. Although why we bothered, I have no idea. If we got caught, evidence around us robbing the bank would be the least of our worries.
Someone would probably find evidence that we'd popped out here eventually, but hell...it wasn't like they didn't know by now that it was us anyway. Revik's little muscle flex in that vault had pretty much removed any shred of mystery as to the identity of the robbers. They would be able to hack the organic machine eventually as well, and pull images of us, along with whatever other trace evidence we'd left behind.
But Revik hadn't wanted to kill the damned thing, and I didn't want to do it, either…and not only because Revik would have been really upset with me.
Frankly, it wouldn't have made much difference anyway. That was the thing with the telekinesis. When you're one of only two seers who can do it...and the only one trained at a high enough level to do it right...it kind of serves as a footprint that can't really be explained away. As far as anyone knew, Revik was the only seer in existence who could do what he'd done that night, so there wasn't a lot of point in hiding our identity...just in hiding ourselves.
I got him through the park. We even managed to look relatively normal doing it...apart from the fact that being in the park at all around six a.m. borders on eccentric, at least for New Yorkers who don't have death wishes or armed bodyguards.
I did see a few joggers, however, by the time we reached the road, and by then the sky was turning rosy above the wash of light pollution from the city itself. Of course, one of those joggers did have armed bodyguards and looked vaguely familiar as some kind of media personality from the feeds, but it was close enough to actual morning that I figured we could be labeled as drunk idiots rather than dangerous terrorists...assuming anyone noticed us at all.
I put Revik into the first cab that slowed to my waving hand.
Revik collapsed back against the worn vinyl seats, wincing enough that I saw the driver give us a second look when I climbed in on the other side, tossing both of our backpacks into the space between the seat and the metal divider. I'd been watching the driver anyway in the rearview mirror, making sure he didn't recognize us.
He didn't, but the look on Revik's pale face obviously caused the guy some concern.
Maybe he was afraid Revik would barf inside his cab.
"You okay, buddy?" the driver asked, peering at him closer in the mirror. Unfortunately, this guy seemed pretty wide awake, which meant he was likely coming onto his shift, not leaving it.
"You don't look so good..." he added, pursing his mouth.
He didn't look or feel suspicious yet, not in a relevant way, but I found myself blowing a faint reassurance over the man's light anyway, if only to make it difficult for him to remember the specifics of our appearance. Ideally, I wanted to make sure he forgot he’d ever seen either of us, but I wasn't sure if I had enough light left for so
mething that thorough.
Anyway, I could try that as we got out of the cab; for now, I just needed to make sure our looks were hard for him to track, and to ensure he didn’t trace our appearance to the bulletins that had likely been spraying our real faces across the feeds for the last few hours.
I relaxed when I saw the man's face smooth. His expression grew nearly serene by the time I spoke, but I reinforced it anyway, sending light flowing out along with my words.
"...Pulled something at the gym," I said, breathing calm into him.
My voice came out somewhat sharp, in a way that let him know I blamed Revik for the injury...or the character I was playing blamed him, more to the point. I rolled my eyes at the man's reflected eyes in the mirror. They were that odd, light-blue color that I only seemed to see in Eastern European humans.
Or on seers.
But his light didn't feel like a seer's. I let my aleimi probe deeper on the off-chance that he might be better disguised than I'd first allowed, but I still found nothing. I couldn't do too much, at least not without setting up a flare that would bring the Sweeps down on us like a bunch of angry insects with poisonous stingers, but I felt confident I was right. ID'ing seers was something they actually spent a lot of time teaching me while I lived with the Lao Hu.
Throughout my scan, my lips had continued to move independent of my actual mind, even the parts of it I’d left with Revik.
"...Keep telling him to take it easy, he's not twenty anymore," my lips formed in a grumbling accusation. "...Hurt his back playing football in college, but still thinks he's some indestructible kid, that he can bench press along with all of those pumped up pretty boys who probably drink 'roid slurpees for lunch every day..."
The cab driver chuckled, shaking his head.
Revik did his best to play along. He pushed my hand away with a grumble, glaring at me as if he was tired of my nagging. At the same time, he sent me a pulse of warmth that nearly brought a pause to my words before I pushed past it and plowed on.
Allie's War Season Three Page 8
