Jon knew Cass had her own political thing going with the seers...and that in some ways, it aligned more with the rebel outlook than that of the Seven or Adhipan. She'd always been one of those people who sympathized with outsiders, and something in the cause of the seers seemed to bring that tendency to the fore in her.
Jon also knew she still had unresolved issues from the whole Terian thing.
In a lot of respects, Cass had it rougher with Terian than Jon had. Revik definitely suffered the most in terms of out-and-out physical abuse...he'd also been the target of most of Terian's mind games. But for the latter, Terian often used Jon or Cass, sometimes both of them together. He seemed to get off on using Cass in particular to get at Revik...maybe because she was female, and therefore easier for Revik to associate with Allie. Or maybe because he knew Revik had his own issues with women, and a lot of guilt around his own tendencies towards sexualizing violence.
In any case, Terian had gone out of his way to use Cass to exploit Revik's weaknesses in that regard, as well as his guilt at Cass being there at all...which meant things had gone a lot harder for her than they had for Jon. If nothing else, what she'd endured had been a lot more personal. Terian had raped Jon, too...hell, he'd raped all of them, probably Revik more than any of them...but he hadn't pulled Revik into it as much where Jon was concerned, at least not compared to Cass.
Jon knew Cass and Revik probably hadn't talked about it in any depth, but he also knew there was nothing really weird there...that if anything, they'd bonded over the whole thing in a brother and sisterly kind of way. Revik was still protective of her, though...Jon had seen that, even when he'd been Syrimne. Also, Revik himself had been through worse, so it probably was less of an issue for him in the bigger scheme of things. Knowing Revik, he hadn't registered the Terian thing in a real way at all, given what he'd been through as a kid.
Cass was the one Jon worried about.
She'd hidden it well, especially around Allie, but Jon knew she was still working through a lot of the fear and anger and whatever else that had been left behind by Terian. Maybe because she'd always seen herself as strong, as someone who could never be beaten down, Cass had taken the thing with Terian really badly. As a kid, she'd dealt with a fair bit of crap with her family, from her mother's multiple boyfriends to the drunk uncle who would 'accidentally' pass out in her room every weekend he was in town...so she probably thought she was tougher than most.
But that was all normal, human crap, nothing like what Terian had done to her.
Something about the thing with Terian stripped every last piece of her confidence. She still played the part of the tough and worldly city girl, but she didn't seem to believe it anymore. Instead she started hanging out with seers like Baguen...the ones who straddled that line between well-meaning rebels and out-and-out terrorists.
She'd done that even before she'd broken things off with Chandre and started sleeping with Baguen himself.
Jon didn't minimize what she'd managed to do on her own at all, in terms of working through her issues after Terian...but he'd worked with enough trauma victims that the gaps there made him nervous. The fact that she acted like she was fine only made Jon's nervousness worse. She'd been decidedly cool to him, too, ever since she found out he'd been visiting Feigran on a semi-regular basis. She seemed to view his interest in their ex-captor as an overt betrayal, and Jon couldn't really blame her for that, either.
In any case, he was worried.
The silence from her end felt ominous to him, in a way it never had before, even when she first disappeared after the thing with Allie in China. He couldn't tell if he was just being paranoid, though, or if it was some guilty conscience thing from hurting her with his visits to Feigran.
Jon hadn't said anything to Allie about his fears.
He hadn't said anything even when Allie had been wondering aloud at some of the more obviously strange things Cass was doing. Like, for example, Jon hadn't told Allie his own theories as to why Cass had chosen a giant, hyper-protective and somewhat simple-minded seer as a boyfriend...over say, Chandre, who had noticed Cass' trauma right off, and tried to get her to face it head on. Chandre at least tried to get Cass to talk about it.
Jon hadn't mentioned any of his thoughts on Cass' mental state to Allie, though, for obvious reasons. The three of them, meaning Revik, Jon and Cass, pretty much had an unspoken pact that Allie couldn't know too much about what happened with Terian in that cell under the Caucasus Mountains. She already felt guilty enough, and there wasn't anything she could have done.
Also, Revik hadn't come out and said anything point blank, but he made it clear he didn't want Allie hearing about the vast majority of the sexual things that Terian had forced on them, especially those involving him.
Now Jon wondered, though.
He was beginning to think maybe he needed to have a talk of his own with Revik. He also wondered if they would need to involve Allie at some point, if it was even fair to keep her out of the loop on this, given her own relationship with Cass. They'd been friends since they were in diapers. Jon already felt guilty for not voicing more of his worries about Cass' mental state, but he'd rationalized it by telling himself that Allie had enough on her plate. Now that Revik was better, that excuse didn't feel as valid as it once had.
Someone would need to talk to Cass...especially if she really was off doing something crazy. She wouldn't listen to Jon at this point, not on his own anyway. Maybe she would listen to Revik, though. And if not Revik, Cass would definitely listen to Allie.
Thinking about the pluses and minuses of where Cass might be and what she might be doing only settled the worry into a deeper, colder pit at the bottom of Jon's stomach. He didn't have an answer for any of the possibilities her silence raised. He couldn't help but think Revik was their best chance of finding her, too. Cass didn't seem to want Allie to know anything was wrong with her. She could b.s. Allie about how fine she was and how badass she was with the seer rebels, but she couldn't b.s. Revik about it.
Truthfully, Jon doubted Allie couldn't see past it, either. She'd just been too preoccupied to do much about it, and Jon knew Allie tended to have a hands-off approach in general when it came to her friends, unless they specifically asked for her help. Usually that was a good thing...she didn't tend to psychoanalyze people she cared about, or push 'help' on them when they wanted to work through things on their own.
This time, Jon thought an actual intervention might be in order, though. He felt sure Allie would agree, if she had more of the facts. If the three of them hadn't kept most of that stuff from her in the wake of the whole Terian thing, she probably would have confronted Cass already.
When Jon glanced sideways, he caught Wreg watching him. The mask had faded once more, leaving a more complex array of feelings on the seer's face...the primary one being a dense empathy, real enough and immediate enough that Jon found he couldn't look away.
After another pause, Wreg himself broke the stare.
As if remembering himself, he glanced behind them, in the direction of the atrium they'd just left. For the barest pause, Jon saw him hesitate, as if struggling with something in his own mind, or maybe fighting some kind of decision he'd already made. When he looked back at Jon, however, he only shook his head.
Speaking in a quiet voice, he said, "I'm sorry, brother."
Before Jon could think of a reply, the seer clasped his arm, gripping him tightly enough that Jon felt the pulse of warmth Wreg sent through his fingers. When Wreg released him, turning back to stare at the closed elevator doors, the look on his face bordered on confusion...mixed with a frustrated anger that lay nearly on the surface.
Jon was still staring at the Asian seer's face when the doors pinged in front of them and began slowly to open.
8
GUESTS
CHANDRE STARED AT the high, organically-reinforced gates at the base of the long driveway where they'd parked the jeeps.
The fence looked out of place.
Tall, clearly organic, and machine made, it starkly contrasted the buildings of the village below, much less the stretch of wilds they'd passed to reach the coastline, bouncing and jostling for hours around rocky trails and steep cliffs circumventing the last, petering edges of the Andes Mountains. It took them hours to reach the small village where the boss man's "hacienda" lived...long enough that Chandre had to wonder whether they usually received their supplies via airdrop, or possibly by ship. Given where they were, it probably would have been equally efficient riding horses for the last leg of their trip...or even donkeys. The final ten miles of track could more accurately have been called a dirt trail littered with small and large boulders than it could be considered a real access road.
It was cold, too.
The heavy coat she'd brought probably wouldn't be sufficient, at least not for being outside at night. Hopefully, she wouldn't be required to do that for any extended period of time...like, say, because she was forced to run for her life back across those mountain peaks on her own.
To Chandre, the hacienda looked a lot more like a stone castle than any kind of peaceful ranch house surrounded by quaint villagers. The driveway leading up appeared to be made of hand-hewn stones, maybe a few hundred years old, but obviously refurbished to handle gas-powered and solar vehicles. It looked as smooth as cement, but the different-colored stones lent it an opulent and strangely 'clean' feel, as if one could eat a meal directly from the rock without getting so much as a speck of dirt in their mouth.
She understood now why so few in Ushuaia, the nearest town with a real airport, had ever visited this place. Most wouldn't admit to even having heard of it, although her and the other seers' scans soon revealed otherwise.
They knew of "the patron," of course. They also knew it was better not to speak of him, especially not to strangers with red-tinted eyes.
Chandre understood that fear. She understood even before she saw the high-grade construct over the village and preceding segment of road...and before she felt the several dozen seers who seemed to be watching over it. Those construct guards hadn't even bothered to hide their presence from the Barrier...if anything, they were deliberately overbearing, edging into Chandre's light in a way that felt invasive, if not downright threatening.
The land, being held in private ownership pretty much from the border of Chile up to the break to where Patagonia met with the rest of mainland Argentina, clearly carried the stamp of its seer overlords. That private tract included Ushuaia itself, as well as the northern town of Rio Grande, and basically consisted of the entire southernmost tip of the continent...at least the parts that weren't technically a part of Chile.
Chandre happened to know a good chunk of that land, especially on the coast north of where she now stood, used to be a military holding for human government powers, mainly American and British. That was prior to its being taken over by its current owners, which seemed to have happened about two decades earlier. Chandre found it interesting that the land had changed hands so quietly, making not so much as a ripple in the human news feeds.
This town and the grim facade of its overlords' mansion felt much older than either of the last two landlords' presences, however.
Chandre had been told that it could be warm down here, that it was a bit of a tropical pocket amongst the currents of the nearby bays where the Pacific and the Atlantic met.
So far, however, she hadn't seen a lot of evidence of that, either.
What she still couldn't figure out was what she was doing here...why they had let her inside in the first place. She had to assume it was because they viewed her as some kind of emissary of the Bridge and the Sword. Given how well-connected these people appeared to be...and how well-fortified...she found it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know who she really worked for, given that Varlan had access to that information himself.
She also found it unlikely that whoever was hosting this little party didn't know that the Bridge and the Sword were working the same side of the fence again, too.
Given what they'd had to go through to even get this far, Chandre mostly just hoped her head on a spike outside the hacienda gates didn't end up being the message these people wanted to send to her bosses.
So far, Varlan's take on the whole thing hadn't exactly been reassuring.
He'd been relatively thorough in his debriefings on the way out to the remote location, as far as Chan could tell. It was hard to know for certain, of course, given that he was a good four ranks above her in actual infiltration skill. So if he left out key details...or even planned on betraying her entirely...she likely wouldn't know.
Still, Balidor seemed to trust him. Balidor was probably the only seer alive that Chandre would believe could actually infiltrate a seer of Varlan's capability, at least well enough to discern his motives.
Even Balidor could be fooled, of course.
He also could have gotten over-eager, seeing an opportunity to get close to the beings who were pulling the strings on the Lao Hu, Salinse and whoever else. If enough seers were monitoring this area...and Chandre was beginning to think the number was significantly higher than what she could feel...she was pretty much on her own.
Hell, even her allies here weren't allies in the truest sense. She scarcely knew the three seers with whom she traveled, and had only been working with them for a bare handful of months. They'd been united in their desire to find Maygar and Eddard following the op at the labs under the Hayward substation. Even for that, however, their reasons had been different. Varlan merely wanted to complete the job for which he'd been contracted; which meant destroying all of the virus, including the samples they all suspected Eddard had stolen during the op.
Chandre wanted the same thing for different reasons; she wanted the virus neutralized. She also wanted to find Maygar if she could, and rescue him if he needed it. While her feelings about the young infiltrator were mixed at best, she couldn't knowingly leave one of her own...not without at least verifying whether or not he remained alive.
Anyway, he still felt like a brother, to Chandre at least. Whatever else she might think of Maygar, she no longer believed him to be a traitor. While his reasons for being in the White House while Terian held Allie captive hadn't exactly been virtuous, at least not in their entirety, Chandre couldn't help believing him that he only stayed in the hopes he might be able to get her out. He claimed he'd tried to convince his mother to protect her, too...although he admitted his attempts on that front hadn't been particularly successful.
Chandre also understood the strength of familial ties, and how confusing they could be, especially for seers. Elan Raven, Maygar's mother, was a Rook. That fact alone likely confused Maygar's loyalties more than he felt comfortable admitting, particularly to anyone in the Seven, much less anyone in the Adhipan. Yet, while he didn't sell out his mother at any point during those years...neither did he do the reverse, which was not a small thing.
Truthfully, Chandre's biggest issue with Maygar was that he was a bit of an ass.
That stunt he pulled on Allie, trying to claim her in marriage from Dehgoies before the Sword and the Bridge had consummated, was the worst of his transgressions in that area. Really, that had been the final nail in the coffin of his deteriorating relationship with the Sword, although no one had known he was the Sword at that time.
At the time, and really, since, Chandre hadn't felt very sympathetic. Given that Maygar nearly raped the Bridge in his attempt to break up her marriage, Chandre was more than happy to see Dehgoies beat him down for that little stunt.
Maybe not kill him...but yes, put him in his place.
Unlike Maygar, who had never truly strayed from his allegiance to the Seven and at least the overarching principles of Code, Varlan worked as a Rook under Galaith for at least seventy-five years. The six-hundred-year-old infiltrator seemed comfortable enough working both sides of the fence, so he clearly wasn't a zealot on the religious end of things...or even a zealot in terms of the interventionist political camp
that had once been represented by Galaith.
At least...Chandre assumed not, since he happily took a job ridding the world of a human-killing disease. Still, for all of his courtesies and supposed partnerships with Balidor and the Sword and whoever else, Varlan was still, essentially, a Rook.
Of course, Balidor reminded her that Varlan had also been a member of the Adhipan, once. Given that his association with the holy guardians of the Seven likely ended a few hundred years before she was born, Chandre didn't find that fact overly reassuring, however.
Chandre didn't know Varlan's exact affiliations these days, in terms of how he would identify himself, but he'd been high up in the Pyramid under Galaith. She hadn't seen any indication that he'd experienced any kind of change of heart in the time since, in terms of his philosophical leanings. He'd chosen to go his own way following the Pyramid's demise, true, but Chandre had a feeling that was more of a no-confidence vote in Terian than a deeper change in Varlan's philosophical leanings. Given that he'd lost status, money, power, as well as a boss and friend in Galaith, Varlan had likely felt the destruction of the Pyramid more keenly than most.
As a result, it was unlikely he had fond feelings for Allie, given that she'd been the one to bring that whole thing crashing down.
But Allie hadn't been the one to kill Galaith. Not technically, anyway.
Given Varlan's choice to go freelance rather than follow Terian, it was possible the aged infiltrator knew exactly who was to blame for the death of his former boss, as well.
As far as Chandre could tell, Varlan still worked for himself...which could mean anything and nothing. There was no way to gauge the depth or breadth of any of his alliances, including the tentative one he seemed to have forged with Balidor.
Chandre had spoken to Dehgoies during her last check-in call, too, mostly so he could hear her report on the situation firsthand. He'd spent most of that conversation pulling imprints from her light...enough of those pertained to Varlan that she knew he was having trouble trusting the ex-Rook, too. His actual questions remained focused on Varlan's mysterious client, however, and what she could discern about the fortifications of his stronghold.
Allie's War Season Three Page 19
