Allie's War Season Three

by JC Andrijeski

  I found myself looking at what I was wearing again.

  After a bare pause, I slid deeper into his aleimi, trying to see myself through his light instead of my own, trying to see what he saw. When he realized what I was trying to do, he let me in at once, showing me openly what he was talking about.

  It didn't take long for me to realize what he'd meant.

  Something about the fabric did pull on my aleimi...some kind of organic weaving that made the material flow differently, but that also affected the quality and color of my light. Not only did it pull at my aleimi in general, it channeled it in particular directions.

  Now that I could see it, I realized I'd even felt some of the effects of that, here and there. Something in the fabric actually made it really easy to open when I was wearing these clothes. Ironically, it might have been partly why I'd been so reluctant to give them up.

  The truth was, I liked wearing them. They practically forced me to relax.

  At Revik's prompting, I also saw how it affected the way the other seers saw my outline. That same pale organic in the fabric channeled slightly more dense and warmer currents down my legs, and in my chest. Again, with Revik's prodding, I saw how it pulled colors from my light too, highlighting different aspects of my figure, especially my breasts, waist, hips and butt. It also highlighted some of the more open, vulnerable areas of my light...the parts of my light that would make most seers, male and female, instantly think of sex.

  Looking at myself the way he saw me...and likely the way the others saw me, too, I realized I was close to naked, from their perspective. More than that, I was naked with big, colorful spotlights on all the aspects of my figure and light that they would most want to touch.

  I felt myself flushing even before I clicked out.

  I must have had a funny expression on my face, because when I glanced up, Revik laughed again, pulling me closer with his hands.

  "It's all right," he assured me.

  "Umm...not really," I said, pursing my lips.

  "I admit," he said, kissing my cheek. "I'm a little relieved you didn't know. I honestly couldn't be sure...you've gotten so good at hiding things from me in your light..."

  "Jesus, Revik. Why didn't you tell me?" I smacked his arm, still flushing. "I can't believe you didn't tell me this. No wonder Wreg was giving you shit..."

  He shrugged, his expression growing faintly uncomfortable again. "You know why. I wasn't sure if you knew already. I figured the Lao Hu would have taught you that kind of thing. And, well..." He shrugged. "I didn't want to be that guy."

  "That guy?" I said. "What guy?"

  He gestured vaguely. "You know. Passive-aggressive, possessive, jealous, telling-his-wife-how-to-dress guy. I didn't want to embarrass you..."

  "I'm thinking it's okay to mention it when one of us is walking around stark naked."

  He burst into another, half-embarrassed laugh, tugging me closer.

  "Did you get your touching me fix?" he said, kissing me again. "It's okay if you didn't...you can touch me all you want tonight. But we should probably go upstairs."

  Looking at him, I felt my light protesting already, sliding around him in denser eddies. Sighing, I pressed my face against his a last time.

  "Do we have to?" I said.

  I was already taking my arms from around his neck as I said it, though, fighting to pull my head and light together as I realized I would need to go upstairs and change clothes now, too. When I saw him just sitting there, grinning at me, I couldn't help smiling back. I smacked him on the shoulder again when he didn't stop.

  "What?" I said. "What are you so pleased about? Are you really that amused that you've let your wife walk around like a stripper for the past four months?" Snorting when his grin widened, I added, "You look like a big kid right now..." Realizing what I was saying was true, I paused, looking at him again. I couldn't remember a time where I'd ever seen him look quite so happy, not outside of memories in the Barrier, anyway. Smiling wider at his grin, I leaned closer briefly, kissing his face, gripping his shirt in my fingers.

  "Seriously," I said. "What are you so happy about? Didn't we just find out a bunch of people are trying to kill us again?"

  "My wife loves me," he said simply, kissing me back.

  "Well, d'uh," I said, tugging on his hair. "Did you just figure that out?"

  He shrugged, still smiling faintly as he cradled my hips in his hands, once more staring down at my clothes. Clicking at the predatory look I saw rising there, I shook my head, still a little amazed at the expression I saw beneath that.

  He really was happy. Maybe happier than I'd ever seen him...even inside the Barrier, even when he had a lot more reason to be.

  When he laughed again, I couldn't help laughing with him.

  Somewhere, in that, I almost thought I could feel Vash laughing, too.

  THE MEETING ITSELF felt pointless.

  Since no one wanted to gather in our previous meeting space, around that same table where Dorje shot Vash, we staked out a new conference room on the fifty-eighth floor, where Revik and I had been staying before we moved up to the penthouse. The room was smaller, more cramped and had no windows. Instead, a liquid VR wall played in the background, where someone had streamed the realtime feeds.

  I mostly just found that distracting...and a little depressing.

  The news feeds only intensified everyone's anxiety anyway. I felt a bit saturated on that front, and came close to telling them to turn the damned thing off, or put it on an aquarium setting...something to give us all a break...but I didn't want to seem insensitive. We still weren't any closer to an antidote for the human-killing disease. The lab techs were on it, working day and night both in the hotel and in Asia, as well as in a site somewhere in the Southwest of the United States...but so far, no major breath-throughs.

  No new messages from our friends in Argentina, either. Everything was pretty quiet in China too...and there was still no word on Salinse.

  We also weren't any closer to translating that book, which they now thought had been written in some kind of archaic code. They'd tried to map some of the diagrams it housed to Barrier structures, organic machines and even human mathematics, but none seemed to fit.

  Balidor did say he didn't think the book came of good origins.

  He said it didn't 'feel good' to him, when he looked at it from the Barrier. He also said the codes and diagrams there reminded him of things he'd seen while hunting Rooks in the New World back in the 1600s, when a lot of them were active in Mexico and South America. Of course, no one called them 'Rooks' back then, but Balidor seemed to think a lot of those same seers later joined Galaith in Germany and Eastern Europe. While he talked, I got an impression of blood sacrifices in the jungle, tall altars and pyramids awash in blood and people kept in cages...so yeah, it seemed like the same basic m.o. of terrorizing the humans and overall bad times.

  Whatever the code was, if Balidor was right about its origins, it had been created well before Wreg and Revik's time, because neither of them could make sense of the pictographs or other writings, either. No one even knew what language it was, or if it had a basis in a real language at all.

  So yeah, that was pretty much a dead end.

  We spent another handful of minutes discussing whether Feigran should be given a copy to study. We all agreed it was worth the risk, then dropped it once Balidor said he'd take care of it.

  Wreg and Balidor shared portions of the Sark and human lists with their seer contacts in Europe, Asia, South America and Africa...as well as in other parts of North America, including Toronto and Mexico City, as well as Chicago, Albuquerque and Los Angeles. Wreg seemed to think someone else might be watching to see if they pulled seers from the list, not just the humans, so he and Balidor screened anyone they shared the info with from the lists, and gave no one more than a handful of names. They also warned their contacts to pull anyone they found quickly, without letting anyone know they were investigating the individuals beforehand.

&nb
sp; Most of us suspected Shadow was behind the attempt to kill Dante, but it could have been Voi Pai, too...or even Salinse.

  I had my money on Shadow, especially given what Surli told me.

  Balidor, Wreg and Revik all asked me, albeit in different ways, what Surli had been talking about, in reference to Shadow's true identity. I suppose I could have told them what I thought he meant, but I ended up not saying much. Really, there wasn't much to say...all I had to go on were a few drawings Feigran had done, and all of those stupid nightmares I'd been having before we did the bank op, which wasn't exactly what I'd call 'evidence.' I figured I'd talk to Feigran first, try to get some clarity before I went to Revik and the others directly. Feigran was crazy, sure, but there was no doubt he knew things...things none of us could explain how he knew.

  If I could get him to say something concrete, I could bring the others in to question him...and then maybe question Surli again, too.

  I could tell Revik knew I wasn't telling him everything...and maybe Balidor suspected as much, too, and just hid it better...but neither of them pressured me to say more.

  No one could agree what we should do, in terms of the most important 'next thing.'

  We'd sent four scouts to San Francisco...Garensche, Poresh, Deklan and Illeg, with Gar being the ranking officer.

  They were supposed to start at the houses of those humans on the list, since they were at the greatest risk of the disease...followed by any seers who might have been caught behind the lines, meaning those whose names showed up on the list, too. Their orders were to see if those same seers might be open for recruitment, warn them of the dangers around someone killing those on the list, and arrange to pull any who might be willing to come to New York.

  So far, Gar and the others were still in blackout, stuck in governmental holding prior to being allowed past the barricades. As a result, we hadn't gotten any messages.

  Supposedly, 'Dori had contacts in the SCARB forces operating the barricades, so they should get through with little problem by the end of the week. Between that and the message-routing system Wreg helped set up with a few ex-rebel seers on the inside, we should be getting our first real update tomorrow. Hopefully by then I would know whether I should be freaking out about Cass...in addition to Chandre and Maygar and whoever else that Shadow guy already had in custody.

  Revik and I exchanged looks a few times during the meeting.

  Even from across the table, I felt enough off him to know we were thinking along similar lines. Otherwise, the consensus seemed to be to wait until we heard from the Lao Hu or this Shadow person directly. No one thought we could trust Raven or Surli, and given their perspectives on the whole thing, I couldn't blame them. From the outside, it certainly looked like an attempt to divide our forces, and to draw us out of New York.

  Surli certainly seemed to think New York was safer...for me, at least.

  Balidor and Wreg agreed. Right now, while we weren't exactly untouchable, the hotel was pretty darned secure. With the defense grid along the shoreline, New York itself also had some of the strongest security of any American city apart from D.C. itself. We wouldn't get hit by any air attacks, not unless they were domestic in origin. We weren't likely to get any surprises either, given the fact that Wreg had most of the NYC-based SCARB team in his pocket from when they'd worked for him under Salinse. The fact that their local leader had flipped to follow the Sword had been one of those fortuitous things we couldn't have anticipated, but that made our position infinitely more secure, even in as heavily human of a city as New York.

  Assuming we could trust him, of course. I have to admit, Surli made me paranoid on that score.

  More paranoid, anyway.

  I didn't bother to bring up the obvious point, which was how we would extract Chandre, Maygar, Stanley and whoever else, if we didn't go to Argentina ourselves. I knew Revik had his mind on the same thing, but he didn't argue with the others, either.

  I came out of there feeling more like I'd just witnessed a group venting session than a real strategy meeting, though.

  I'd also never felt Vash's absence so keenly.

  He'd been the one I always looked to at times like these. Without fail, he managed to laugh at just the right moment, or make a comment that diffused the most irrelevant or paranoid of the arguments. No matter what was going on, he managed to keep things on at least a somewhat less dire note...if only by always retaining perspective.

  Jon hadn't been there either, presumably because he was still trying to reach that girl lieutenant of his, Dante...who I found out he'd moved to a hotel room, so she wouldn't feel so much like she'd been locked in a dungeon. He had guards with her, sure, but she was relatively free to move around and whatever else.

  I felt his absence keenly, too...and I was beginning to realize how much I relied on him in those meetings. He, like Vash, had this talent of bringing the group back on track when they went too far off the deep end. He also helped keep the important points front and center...and had no problem disagreeing with either Balidor or Wreg, which most of the seers present still seemed reluctant to do. Both the rebels and the Adhipan had been hierarchy-based since their inception...both systems were also firm believers in the chain of command. That single fact made it difficult to get a straight answer out of those lower on the food chain, even when I could tell they disagreed.

  I needed to talk to Jon anyway, fill him in on what Surli told us, along with what little had happened at the meeting...but somehow I just wasn't up to it.

  Not the part about seeing Jon himself. I definitely wanted to see him. But I wanted to check in and see how he was doing personally, meaning with Dante and Dorje and everything else. What I didn't want to do was relay all of that tiresome crap that I'd barely been able to process on my own, and listen to him wade through it.

  The truth was, I'd wanted to see Jon all day. I'd been thinking about him since I'd seen him in that interrogation room with Wreg, wondering about him, and feeling almost a compulsion to get him alone, spend some time together just the two of us. Being in there with him and Dante and the others hadn't made that feeling dissipate...in fact, it made it stronger. I wanted at least an hour alone with him before I took off for the evening. In spite of that, or maybe because of it, I figured I'd leave all of the political debriefing for tomorrow.

  Truthfully, I wanted a night off...from all of that stuff.

  At the same time, given the tenor of the meeting, I knew it was possible that Revik might not feel the same, no matter what he'd said earlier. He usually felt like it was his job to pull the troops back together when morale took a nose-dive. It was clear even to me that everyone was feeling pretty wiped out and discouraged.

  But I needn't have worried.

  Revik grabbed me by the door, stopping me by catching hold of my hand, something he didn't usually do in front of the others. Pulling me close enough that he could lean down to my ear, he kept his message brief.

  "Six o'clock," he murmured. "The lobby?"

  I glanced up at him, saw him cock an eyebrow, as if daring me to argue.

  I smiled. "Inner or outer?"

  I felt a pulse of relief off him. He'd been worried I might try to beg off because of work, too. He smiled back, squeezing my fingers before he let go.

  "By the elevators," he said. "We're going out."

  Without another word, he left through the door, speeding his steps to catch up with Wreg. I saw him clap the other seer on the shoulder right before he leaned over to say something in his ear. Whatever he'd said, it made Wreg laugh, and I saw the Chinese-looking seer's shoulders relax slightly before he glanced back down the hallway at me.

  I followed the two of them with my eyes, remembering that morning, what had been weeks ago now...and what seemed like a lot longer, given everything that had happened. Pain coiled briefly around my form, until I snapped my mind back.

  I needed to get a dress.

  Thinking about Jon again in the same instant, a slow smile spread over my face.r />
  I HEADED DOWN the opposite hallway as the others had gone, towards the elevator bank that would drop me in the inner lobby...rather than the service route to the basement, where I could feel Revik and the others heading.

  As I walked, I reached out briefly to find Jon. I was a little surprised to find him alone, but even more surprised when I could tell he felt me looking for him. Before I had time to decide if I was imagining things or not, my VR link beeped in my ear.

  "Hey," he said. "What is it?"

  I heard the surprise in my own voice. "Nothing. Just wondering what you were doing."

  "Contemplating a nap." He sounded faintly irritated. "You know, you could just call, Allie...not go all peeping tom first. I don't really need you testing my reflexes, too..."

  Unsure how to respond to that, I just blinked. "Sorry."

  "Forget it," he grumbled.

  "You're not with Dante anymore?" I said, still a little lamely.

  "No." He sighed, and I could almost see him standing there, fidgeting with something on the desk in his room. Realizing it was something that had belonged to Dorje, I withdrew my light from his hands, feeling like a peeping tom.

  "No," he said again. "I wanted to let her go home, actually...or at least let her call her mom, but the others said absolutely not...they disconnected the phone in her hotel room."

  I had to laugh at that, although there wasn't much humor in it.

  "Well, yeah," I said. "...And, uh...d'uh, commander Jon. Someone did just use an illegal government weapon to try to kill her in the middle of the most crowded part of New York City. I'm going to have to go out on a limb and say I'm with the paranoid infiltrators on that one. You'd never see her again if you let her go. Besides –– "