Allie's War Season Three

by JC Andrijeski

  "Yeah. Okay."

  Wreg didn't wait, pushing Jon once more to his back, more forcefully that time.

  Jon was pretty sure he was crying again by the time he actually came.

  It was hard to know how he felt about anything by then...Wreg spent hours on him it seemed, although if it was to get him off or get him to feel, Jon honestly couldn't tell.

  But he no longer cared. Whatever that emotion was that wanted to choke him each time, it no longer felt like guilt.

  Not exactly, anyway.

  20

  OFFENSIVE

  "SO YOU AGREE then?" I said again, still a little thrown. "Really?"

  He nodded, taking another bite of toast and resting an arm on the back of the booth. "Yeah," he said when he'd finished chewing and swallowing. "I do."

  "Why?" I said, still watching his face.

  "Because you're right," he said, picking up a piece of bacon in his fingers and gesturing a near shrug with the same hand. "...Any route we take will be risky. They've got us holed up here, afraid to move, and that doesn't feel right to either of us." His eyes met mine, and I saw a glimmer of that predatory look. "It's a good plan, Allie...an infiltrator's plan. This makes the most sense, given the layout of our resources and the few things we actually know." He gave me a serious look. "We need to bring the others in on this right away. At least Wreg and Balidor. Maybe Yumi, too, since she seems to be working a lot with both teams. I'll give them a map on splitting up the intelligence, in case any one of them gets picked up..."

  "You mean creating cells," I said. "Like the Pyramid?"

  He nodded, swallowing another bite. "Yes. You agree?"

  I nodded, feeling something in my shoulders relax. More than a held breath, it was more like I'd unhooked a pin caught in my throat...or maybe some kind of pressure gauge I'd been using to keep my feelings back on the whole thing.

  "Definitely," was all I said. "That's great."

  "I'll call them," Revik added, touching his finger to his head. "Jon too...now that we know he's immune, he might have a vote on where he should help out, now that he's actively doing his own recruiting..." He gave me another searching look. "We may need him there, you know," he added more cautiously.

  I nodded again, but didn't bother to hide my worry at that idea.

  What he was saying made sense. If he was going to be logic guy, I could be, too. Jon was an asset now, plain and simple. I had to treat him accordingly.

  Leaning back in the booth, I picked up my cup of coffee, sipping it as I watched Revik eat. I'd already decimated most of my eggs and was feeling pretty stuffed, but he'd been in one of his 'eat everything in the kitchen' modes and actually ordered a second omelette after he took out a veggie and sausage fry-up that reminded me of the terrible breakfast Maygar and I ate that morning we arrived in London all those years ago.

  Watching Revik now, it was amazing to me that he used to have a complex about eating in front of me. I knew why, of course. He'd been beaten as a kid, severely in fact, for eating like a seer in front of humans. Since he'd been beaten so often by his uncle's thugs, and often without knowing why, or what he'd done wrong precisely, he'd gotten in the habit of doing most of his eating in private, at least when he could. He was still an exacting eater, even when he was ravenous. Not fussy, but unnervingly thoughtful about it.

  I watched his eyes blur as he talked to Balidor and the others, using his knife to scrape eggs onto his toast at the same time. I couldn't help nodding to myself again, relaxing as I saw the more military-type vibe rising to the forefront of his light.

  This was the right way to go. I was sure of it...or as sure as I ever was of that kind of thing, meaning the kind of thing that came to me without a lot of logic or reason. Like with the bank op, some part of me just felt it as right.

  Usually when I had those kinds of flashes, everyone around me thought I was nuts. To have Revik agree to it so readily was almost unnerving. It was also a huge relief.

  I didn't want Jon going, but the more I thought about it, the more that made sense, too. I could tell I was being slow to get on board with all of the changes going on with Jon, although Revik hadn't come out and told me that in so many words. He didn't have to. I could see it on his face whenever I said or did something that he clearly thought meant I hadn't been paying attention to who Jon had become.

  And yet, still, my overall feeling remained one of relief.

  I honestly thought I'd be in for a fight. I thought it would be complicated at best...requiring hours of negotiation and strategizing and convincing him, Balidor, Wreg and whoever else that I wasn't bat-shit crazy, or speaking purely from fear or sentiment. I figured I'd at least be told it was impossible a few dozen times before I managed to convince them to trust me.

  I should have known better. Teasing from the others aside, it really did seem like Revik and I were on the same page with most things these days. I imagine it was some kind of 'old habits' thing, expecting him to fight me whenever I came to him with a plan that was so high-risk, especially if it was one I felt strongly about.

  On the plus side, our lab techs had finally developed a reliable method of testing who was susceptible to the killer virus and who wasn't. So we now had two opinions telling us that Revik and I were immune...Surli's report from the Chinese, and now that of our own scientists.

  We'd been tested last.

  They'd spent the previous two weeks verifying all of their simulated results in the field, testing over six thousand random humans and seers in the New York area. The test produced consistently accurate results...and the outcomes even matched what Surli told us the Chinese tests told them in Beijing. Once our lab team had gotten the beta tests out of the way, they checked all of the seers in our party, as well as a few hundred more from the seer businesses on the middle floors and over half of the refugees living in the lower floors, before they finally checked out me and Revik.

  Then the lab techs tested the actual humans in our immediate party, too.

  Which really meant, well...Jon.

  Of those initial, 6,000-plus humans, it was depressing to note that approximately 74% were likely to be killed within days if they were ever exposed to the disease.

  Weirdly, I found that number almost hopeful, in that it meant over two hundred million people in the world were completely immune to the disease's effects. Given what we knew about Shadow, I'd more than halfway expected that percentage to be hovering right around zero.

  Further, the disease itself seemed to have been contained, temporarily at least, behind the quarantine walls in San Francisco. They'd had a few scares in other cities, and a number of deaths, but they isolated those cases quickly enough that they'd managed to contain the spread. Still, I knew that in disease terms, 74% was insanely high for an estimated fatality rate.

  In fact, it was the closest to 100% by far of any outbreak in recorded human history.

  Oddly, there didn't seem to be any middle ground, either. If people caught the disease, they died, seemingly without exception. If they didn't catch the disease, they didn't. They hadn't found a single case of someone who caught the manufactured virus and lived. The lab tech who came and briefed us all on their findings seemed to think that might have been encoded into the disease deliberately as well, but he had zero theories as to why. He described it as closer to a 'machine' than a disease, and speculated that if they could get a pure form of it, they might even find it had been engineered with some form of semi-organic nano tech.

  Really, given everything they told us that day, the real reason for my relief must have been the fact that Jon appeared to be immune. Interestingly, Dante passed into the ranks of the twenty-six percent, as well. We hadn't tested cousin Marcus yet, or Kara, both of whom were staying with Uncle James, Aunt Carol and some of my art school buddies in another wing of the hotel, but I couldn't help wondering if every name on that list would turn out to be immune.

  Which didn't bode well, really, for the remaining 74%.

  Six da
ys and six nights had passed since the wedding.

  We'd all been up and talking and planning during that time, of course, but it wasn't until today that I woke up at five a.m., certain it was time to move.

  The group as a whole was still dealing with the fallout from Tarsi's hallucino-cakes and whatever crazy thing they'd done after eating them. The overall mood remained positive, though...a lot more so now than in the days leading up to the wedding. Revik had been right when he said that everyone on the team needed a break.

  He joked that Balidor and Wreg needed the damned wedding as much as we had.

  Something about that night calmed everything down.

  Strangely, all of the coupling that had been going on felt appropriate, too. I couldn't put my finger on why, exactly, but it felt close to necessary. Not the sex so much as the lowering of barriers of various kinds. I couldn't help wondering if maybe what came next required that we all be tied together a bit more closely.

  Of course, everything hadn't gone smoothly that night.

  There had been one, not minor, complication.

  Feigran was missing.

  No one noticed until the next morning. The security feeds had all been wiped, long-distance, according to the security team left in the hotel. So whoever had done it, they hacked into the hotel's private network somehow, and disabled everything...without setting off any alarms. That fact alone had a lot of the infiltrators in war-planning mode.

  But that wasn't the thing that nagged at me.

  Truthfully, I'd almost forgotten about Feigran. He hadn't really been on my radar since before the bank op, at least not until I'd talked to Surli about Shadow. I hadn't even been in to see him since we'd gotten back that morning, even though I'd spent about an hour a day there for a few weeks prior. That had been the same period where Revik and I took most of our dinners in my hotel room, planning how best to work our approach to the bank op. My talks with Feigran had been mostly about my dreams...and his drawings, which weren't always easy to decipher, even when they were fairly detailed.

  Those had been pretty bizarre conversations, in and of themselves...but he'd been oddly helpful in his own way. He'd been enthusiastic about our plan to rob the bank. He'd even drawn a picture of the vault door-locking mechanism, and the outside of the security box we wanted, with the correct number and everything.

  The fact that I'd written down the same number after waking up from a dream was part of what convinced me that the job was worth risking.

  I probably should have checked in on him, at least once, even apart from the Surli thing. But with the shape Revik was in after the op, and then what happened to Vash and Dorje and then Jon, it just never occurred to me.

  Not until the Surli thing, and it turned out that had been too late.

  I wondered if Jon had been to see him much, either.

  Before Dorje and Vash died, Jon had been Feigran's most dedicated visitor, apart from the infiltrators assigned to assess his drawings and his light. Revik visited Feigran informally, too, but everyone knew about the regularity of Jon's visits...and pretty much everyone had mixed feelings about them.

  Especially Dorje...although looking back on it now, I seemed to remember Wreg complaining about it rather vociferously a few times, too. Jon never came out and said much, but I knew he got a hard time about it behind closed doors. He'd muttered to me a few times about fights he and Dorje had about the lunatic seer.

  Still, Jon stubbornly clung to those visits...maybe because he didn't like being told what to do, or maybe for some other reason. I knew he felt sorry for Feigran. Apart from Revik, he seemed to be the only one convinced the seer was lonely, and that it was cruel to leave him on his own for so much of the time.

  Again, no one seemed to notice the irony of Jon being the one to emphasize this.

  In spite of the above, and in spite of the fact that we'd all pretty much forgotten Feigran in the intervening weeks, his being missing posed several serious problems.

  Revik was the first to say it aloud, but I'm reasonably sure we'd all been thinking it.

  I know I had been, anyway.

  Funnily enough, none of us bothered to question who'd taken him. We all seemed to agree on that particular point without even needing to discuss it.

  Shadow had him. Shadow would be the only one crazy enough to want Feigran. Even Salinse didn't seem to care about the deranged seer, as he'd left him behind when he fled that rebel encampment in the mountains. Voi Pai hadn't wanted him; she'd passed him on to Balidor without a word of protest after the Lao Hu's raid on that same rebel compound. Before that, she'd traded him to Revik for Balidor's life, without so much as blinking.

  Shadow would want him, though. Not only because Terian was an intermediary, but because he was one of the Four...meaning one of the Four of us that were supposed to be key to the Displacement. Revik, Feigran and I made up three of those four; we still hadn't found the last of our little quartet, War...which happened to be one of the names blacked out on our list.

  As far as I was concerned, Shadow having Feigran was a serious problem.

  On that issue, as well, Revik immediately agreed with me.

  "We can't let him get Terian operational again," he said at once, clicking under his breath as he stared at the open organic chains by the hotel room wall. "We cannot. We'll have to send someone to South America now...we can no longer afford to wait."

  No one answered him at first.

  A half-dozen of us stood in the hotel room that had been Feigran's makeshift cell. The cameras still weren't working at that point, and the chains seemed to have been coaxed open by a some kind of bypass system, or so the security team told us.

  "We cannot," Revik muttered again, still shaking his head. "If he's reintegrated...via the Dreng like I was, or even through some artificial means...we've got a serious fucking problem." He glanced at me, his jaw hard. "He wouldn't be Feigran anymore. We'd be dealing with Terian again...only worse, Allie. Maybe a lot worse."

  I'd only nodded, but I let him know with a pulse of light that I agreed.

  Even so, I had to restrain myself from kissing him for saying it.

  "So we go after him," I'd said, probably more emphatically than necessary. "In fact, absolute agreement here on going after him. Shadow can't have Feigran. And anyway, he seems to be collecting intermediaries at the moment...that can't be good for anyone. This also has to be some kind of message, his waltzing in here like this, taking him right out from under our noses. He wants us to know he can get to us..." Sighing a little, I looked at Jon, my hands on my hips. "You were right...we should have moved him upstairs, kept a better eye on him. We at least should have posted extra guards when a lot of us wouldn't be here..."

  Revik gave me a look at that, his face taut. I hadn't meant it as a dig, and I made sure he knew it when I blew a pulse of warmth in his direction, but I knew he blamed himself anyway.

  Jon just shrugged, avoiding everyone's eyes, especially mine, which kept drifting involuntarily to where Wreg rested a very possessive-looking hand on his shoulder.

  All I could think at the time was, Revik had been right.

  Wreg wasn't exactly being subtle about his interest in Jon.

  Fighting to keep my light and my opinions to myself, I'd glanced back at the door, where the body of Inge lay sprawled.

  I'd never known her well.

  She'd been pretty quiet, but I'd seen her around off and on since I'd been living at the compound in Seertown with Vash. Inge was one of the infiltrators for the Seven who had crossed over into the Adhipan after Seertown had been destroyed. She'd been around in Delhi even, and had spent some time with us at the Pamir before I had my brilliant idea to go public. Looking at her now, I wished I'd at least invited her to coffee once.

  I knew her sister, Illeg, better, mostly because she was the more talkative of the two, and because Balidor had chosen Illeg as part of my protective duty when we were hiding out from the rebels. We'd always been forced into such small spaces in tho
se days that I'd known a little too much about everyone on that team.

  From that, I also knew Illeg had been close to her sister.

  Illeg was in San Francisco with Gar and the others, though. We had no way to even tell her what had happened, at least not immediately.

  Jerking my mind back to the present, I refocused on the cooling cup of coffee in my hand.

  Revik found me in the restaurant about two hours after I first lay wide awake and staring at the ceiling at five a.m. He met me down here, after pinging me first from the Barrier to ask where I was. I'd been writing and sketching and drinking coffee since before the sun came up, and by then, I was ready to take the plunge and run my idea by him.

  I explained everything I'd been thinking while he ate that fried mash-up thing and I scarfed down a plateful of eggs and toast, both of us sitting in the same booth we'd occupied with Wreg and Balidor over a week earlier. He did nothing but listen at first, but I could tell before I was even done talking, and even before he'd ordered the omelette, that he not only agreed with me but was starting to think through the actual logistics.

  I was still smiling, waving at the waitress for a warm-up of my coffee, when Wreg slid into the booth next to me. Revik and I had been sitting across from one another, so I watched in some amusement as Balidor and Yumi shoved in next to Revik.

  That smile only faltered a little when Jon sat down on the other side of Wreg.

  "Table's too small," Wreg grunted, taking a piece of toast off Revik's plate.

  Revik hit out at his hand, but too late; he only managed to smack his fingers and Wreg didn't let go of the toast. He only grinned at him right before he bit into the crust.

  "Barbarian," Revik murmured.

  "I'll order more," Wreg said, giving a dismissive wave. "Anyway, can I help it if your reflexes are slow? When's the last time you were in the ring, anyway?"

  "Yesterday," Revik said, giving him a warning look.

  "Fighting your wife doesn't count," Wreg informed him.