He'd been difficult for the rest of them, sure, in terms of getting to know him or finding some way to incorporate their relationship into the rest of the group. Baguen also caused friction with Chandre, who was clearly still in love with Cass and resented the Wvercian's presence openly, pretty much every second they occupied the same room.
But the bottom line was, Baguen made Cass feel safe. He'd been unswervingly devoted to her. He'd been a total badass physically and had a long military background, to boot. He'd also been a halfway-decent infiltrator, from what Revik told him. He had that Wvercian sight, which was different from regular seer sight, but could be equally effective if trained to a high enough level. He'd also been hyper-protective of Cass, even for a seer, which Revik told Jon was pretty normal for a Wvercian.
The thing was, Cass seemed to need that. After the Terian thing and losing her whole life in San Francisco, Cass turned pretty badass herself, but she never got over that fear that she might be snatched up again in the middle of the night, and turned into some psychotic seer's plaything. She'd suffered a lot more PTSD than Jon had, and he understood why, given the way Terian had treated her, compared to him.
In any case, Baguen helped her. She calmed down a lot, lost that wild look she would sometimes get in her eyes, not long after the giant Wvercian moved in with her. Baguen seemed perfectly okay to play that role for her, too. He made it clear to everyone, Jon included, that he wouldn't hesitate to die for her, if it came to that.
It bothered Jon a lot that Cass had lost him, too, after everything.
Maybe he should have been worrying more about Cass' immediate wellbeing instead, given the state of Baguen's corpse, but Yumi seemed to think Cass was still alive, and for reasons he couldn't explain, Jon found himself agreeing with her.
Even so, something felt deeply wrong, whenever he found himself thinking about Cass, and not only because her boyfriend had been shot in the back of the head, at close range, execution-style, as if he were nothing more than an afterthought.
More than that, Jon felt Cass. He'd been feeling her for weeks...long after the estimated day of death of Baguen. He couldn't bring himself to tell Allie or even Revik that, but he felt her even now. The feelings he got came in waves, wrapped into his own emotions in such a way that he couldn't quite trust them...at least not the specifics.
But the feelings didn't stop coming. Their mere persistence convinced Jon that something in them had to be real.
Still, that fact didn't really reassure him...not even in terms of her being alive. He couldn't tell what condition she was in, not really, but the ways in which she appeared in that dark space made him feel worse, not better. He preferred, really, to doubt that feeling...to see it as not real. Something in those bare glimpses felt sickeningly familiar, and in all of the wrong ways. They didn't strike Jon as exactly what he'd felt when Cass had been in that metal cage under the Caucasus Mountains...but they felt similar.
A little too similar, if Jon were being truthful with himself.
That same feeling of madness dragged at his light whenever he got too close to hers. With it came a dull acceptance that madness might be all any of them had left, that it might constitute the true reality. The feeling was different, sure, than what he'd felt as Terian's captive, but it was eerily similar. Deeper somehow...more permanent...but similar.
Jon couldn't decide what the feeling meant exactly, so he didn't talk to anyone else about what he felt, not even Revik. It worried him, though.
It worried him a lot.
I FELT THE edges of the construct even before we breached it.
Revik warned me about that. From the intel he, Balidor, Yumi and Wreg had done prior to our leaving, none of them seemed to think that we'd be able to sneak up on Shadow and his people in any true sense of the word.
That had been one of the deciding points in our decision to go after Ditrini first, and do what we could to keep at least most of the Lao Hu out of the fight. Voi Pai had agreed to stay out of it, once we contacted her about having Ditrini and four of his lieutenants in our custody, including the one Revik wounded with the telekinesis in Balboa Park. Of course, we knew we couldn't trust the Lao Hu leader even remotely in this, but Revik shrugged that off too, saying if she breached it even slightly, it would at least be an excuse to get rid of that bunch. Anale and Dongren, who had been given custody of the Lao Hu infiltrators, had orders to shoot to kill if any evidence of Lao Hu involvement surfaced during the fight.
Somehow, I had a feeling Voi Pai wouldn't risk that. She might be afraid of Shadow, like everyone said, but she still wouldn't give up her best infiltrators without a fight.
She also must know how quickly Revik would give the order to execute Ditrini, given the excuse. The fact that Ditrini alive constituted leverage at the moment was the only reason he hadn't been killed already.
Salinse, on the other hand, we couldn't do much about.
For all we knew, Salinse and the remaining rebels formed the primary military arm for this Shadow character anyway. Revik seemed to think so. He also said they hadn't been able to find large numbers of infiltrators operating in the area that couldn't be traced back to either Salinse or the Lao Hu, which told him that "Shadow" might be purely a leadership entity, set up to organize disparate elements spread in other parts of the world.
He also said, for all we knew, Salinse was Shadow.
The truth was, we had no reason to think Shadow was a single individual at all. The moniker, Shadow, could just as easily stand for a collective entity of some kind. It could be the name of an organizational agreement between a particular group of humans and renegade seers...or it could be the symbol of one or both. Revik seemed to think our bigger worry might come in the form of SCARB or one of the human governments, if this Shadow entity was as well-connected as our intel seemed to suggest.
All of these points made sense, of course. They just didn't jive with how I felt, at least not exactly. I felt a presence there, behind this Shadow thing. Even when someone just said the name, I felt it. That presence could have been some kind of collectivity, but for some reason, I doubted that, too.
More disturbingly, the presence felt familiar. I didn't really want to talk to Revik about that either, though...at least not yet. He'd already cautioned me not to get too close to what I felt behind "Shadow," at least not while we were prepping a military attack. We couldn't afford to let Shadow establish a link with any of us, as it would give them access to pretty much everyone else on the team, even Balidor to a degree. Revik wanted the infiltration team to handle everything on that end, which again, made sense.
It also meant I had to stop actively trying to figure out what I felt in the presence swimming around that entity. Like a sore tooth, a part of me wanted to prod at it, to see if it moved under my tongue. At times, I had to concentrate to keep portions of my aleimi from trying to puzzle it out without my conscious intention.
Thankfully...or not...I had plenty of other things to hold my attention over those 36 hours.
Like Jon.
Revik was adamant about having Jon come with us, and I couldn't discern his real reasons why, no matter how many different ways I asked him. I finally accused him of catering to Wreg, which offended him, I could tell...but really, that accusation had been more an attempt to get a reaction out of him, maybe in the hopes that he might tell me the truth.
I knew Wreg wasn't the reason. Revik actually seemed a little worried about Wreg's reliability with Jon on the ground.
I didn't have much time to worry about that either, though.
Ultimately, I could have overruled him, and might have, but I could tell that whatever his reasons were, they weren't fully emotional, or reckless. My reasons, however, were emotional. I didn't want Jon to get hurt. I didn't want him taken captive by this Shadow, the way we now suspected Cass had been. I didn't want Jon shot at or killed, and clearly Shadow wanted a lot of humans on the list eliminated. I knew he'd be a target, probably more than Revik or I would be
targets...or even Wreg. I couldn't stand the thought of him being on the ground for that, and I knew how easily things could go wrong once the op went live.
But...because I knew my reasons were mainly emotional, and I couldn't figure out the true source of Revik's, I backed off. Still, I wasn't happy about it. I'd already endured hours of listening to them talk back and forth about the possibility of having to sacrifice Cass.
Most of our meetings involved conversations about how best to approach the stronghold itself, knowing full well we'd likely be seen before we got close enough to hit them effectively. We talked about what we might do in the event this Shadow had some means of curtailing Revik's and my telekinesis, which also seemed likely given his willingness to provoke us into an open conflict. Of course, it was equally likely that Shadow could accomplish the same thing through threatening the people of ours he already had in his custody.
So basically, we had to prepare for mind games of whatever kind, as well as what might be some sort of offer to trade or negotiate. As a result, most of the arguments centered around what we might be willing to give up, if push came to shove. For example, would we give up Stanley for Chandre, given that Stanley was an intermediary? What about Cass for Feigran, given how potentially dangerous the latter was, in the hands of the Dreng?
So yeah. Fun conversations like that.
We'd also talked about who it would be better to kill than to leave in the hands of the Dreng. Feigran topped that list, but we had to have the conversation about Maygar and Stanley too, given who they were. No one enjoyed that part of the discussion much, either. I could tell the lengthy discussion about whether or not to kill Maygar stressed Revik out more than he tried to let on, even to me. He'd barely gotten his head around the idea of being a father; I could tell the idea of killing his own son, even for a good reason, when he'd never had a chance or a reason to try and get to know him as anything other than a sexual rival and an irritant, didn't exactly appeal to him. He'd been raised traditional seer, after all. The idea of fatherhood carried a lot for seers...maybe more than it did for humans. The idea that he might lose his son without ever having reconciled what that meant in terms of Maygar bothered him.
I suspected it bothered him a lot, actually.
In any case, by the end of that thirty-six hours, I think it's safe to say that all of us were in a pretty foul mood. We also weren't any closer to real agreement on who was "expendable" and who was not, and who should be killed when push came to shove. Opinions diverged for a lot of reasons, some of them heated...and not all of them personal.
We couldn't even agree fully on how to deploy our own people.
Like me, Wreg wanted Jon out of the combat zone altogether, but Revik managed to convince him more easily than he had me. He assigned Jon to Wreg directly, and gave him extra protection under Balidor and the primary infiltration team, as well, overruling both of us, but also appeasing both of us in different ways...which both infuriated me and placated me at the same time. It also showed me again that Revik knew how to get compliance from people, even when they didn't want to give it to him. It convinced me as well, as if I'd needed convincing, that he was the right person to run things on the ground.
Funnily enough, despite all of the furor around whether or not he should accompany us, I could tell Jon felt pretty sidelined.
I could also tell he was worried about Cass, although he hadn't come out and admitted that to me, either. I caught enough glimpses from his light to know it had something to do with the time they'd spent in Terian's captivity, but I couldn't get a sense of the exact connection. He might be worried she was being raped or beaten or whatever...which I couldn't even make myself think about, frankly...but I didn't get the sense that was it. A different kind of fear lived in Jon's light. Darkness lived there instead, a desolation and madness that my light flinched away from, even more than it had from the idea of Cass being tortured.
Whatever that feeling was, I could tell Revik had some awareness of it, too.
More and more, it convinced me that Cass was the real reason Revik wanted Jon along. He thought we might need him...especially given that Revik and I would likely be pretty distracted with other problems.
I'd always known that more happened with Terian than any of them wanted to tell me. I'd left it alone, figuring, hell...in that area, they all deserved their privacy...but this thing with Cass had started to gnaw at me. Truthfully, it bothered me as far back as when we all lived together in Seertown. I saw it again after I got back from D.C. and everything had gone to hell with Revik. By then, Cass had gotten that sword and sun tattoo burned into her arm and spent most of her time hanging out with Baguen and the more rebellious of the younger seers...those I'd worried would probably end up working for Salinse and Revik himself in not too long a time. I'd also worried Cass might go with them, if they left. I'd worried about what might happen to her, in a rebel stronghold where humans were seen as the enemy.
She'd always been good at exempting herself from that kind of thing, though. She'd championed the underdog in San Francisco, too, and through a few of her boyfriends, she'd also skirted the edges of legality.
But back then, it felt more like a lark...a way to rebel against the increasing restrictiveness of the Human Protection Act and even SCARB itself. Unlike Jon, Cass' politics had been based more on rebellion than research, and she'd always liked a good fight. She also hated anyone telling her what to do, for any reason.
But after the Terian thing, that fight in Cass changed tenor.
It deepened somehow, and for the first time, I found her stances on some topics borderline scary. At the time, I'd honestly worried that she'd developed one of those 'identify with the abuser' kind of mental stances. Meaning that something in her time with Terian convinced her that she'd never survive as fully human, so she adopted the identity of a seer instead. I hadn't voiced that to Jon overtly, but he'd said a few things that made me wonder if he'd been wondering along those same lines. The sword and sun tattoo itself had been pretty strange. Chandre told me she'd tried to talk Cass out of it, but Cass had been adamant. She had it done using seer ink in the ceremonial colors, too, which had to have burned as badly as it had for me when I got that sword and sun symbol on my back in Beijing.
In any case, I could tell Revik and Jon didn't think Cass was wholly stable.
I'd actually been jealous of Cass with Revik for awhile after we were all first reunited...part of that had stemmed from the fact that I could feel that protectiveness he had with her. Jon had it, too. They both watched her at times, and I'd even seen them exchange looks, as if they were both wondering the same thing about Cass and her mental state.
I couldn't claim to understand, but I wasn't blind, either. Something had been boiling under the surface with her, and it had been for awhile. Whatever it was, I also strongly suspected it had been the thing to break up her and Chandre...more than the appearance of the Wvercian, Baguen, at least on his own. It had also been the thing to drive a slow wedge between Cass and the rest of us, even me. Even Jon and Revik.
I would pretend it wasn't there a lot of the time. Sometimes that was even easy to do. She'd be Cass, totally how I remembered her. We'd eat dinner together, go for a walk, make stupid jokes or listen to music while she told me about Baguen and made jokes about seer sexuality. Everything would be normal...more or less.
Then something would happen and that look would come to her eyes.
I'd see something in her I didn't know, and yeah, sometimes it scared me. Sometimes I even got the impression she saw me as the enemy. Enough so that I worried she blamed me for the Terian thing more than she'd ever let on.
Jon and Revik remained protective of her, even now...and more than they tried to let show, at least around me. Clearly, they both knew more than I did about what was up with her. Maybe they'd even talked about it...or guessed more about what it meant than they were saying.
I tried to corner Revik on this, of course. I'd tried a few times in New York, aro
und the time Balidor sent another team to go looking for her and Baguen. I tried again after we left the last meeting on the aircraft carrier that day.
He didn't lie to me outright...at least I don't think he did. But he didn't tell me everything, either. I caught him doing that eye-avoidance thing he did when he didn't want to tell me the whole story about whatever I wanted to know.
He did admit that he and Jon had been talking about Cass periodically. He also admitted he'd been concerned about her mental health for awhile...pretty much since they'd first gotten free of Terian's prison in the Caucasus Mountains. He said he and Jon had both noticed...anomalies, is how he put it...with Cass. He said they both relaxed a lot when she began dating Baguen, as something in the giant seer's presence had stabilized Cass, in ways both of them had noticed. Before that, even when Cass had been with Chandre, they'd seen things in her that made them nervous. Revik said that as far back as Seertown, he'd considered asking Vash if he could remove Cass' memories of her time with Terian. When he broached the topic with Cass, however, she'd threatened him. He didn't say what she'd threatened him with exactly, but whatever it was, it had both disturbed him and gotten him to back off.
When I pressed for specifics on what those 'things' were that he and Jon had noticed, Revik only made a vague gesture, his expression apologetic.
"You know what I mean, Allie," he said.
"But I don't," I insisted. "I know what I've seen...not what you've seen."
He gestured again vaguely. "It's the same," he said, avoiding her eyes that time, too. "I know it's the same. I've felt you notice."
There wasn't a lot I could say to that, either.
I had noticed...of course I had. But he knew full well he wasn't answering all of what I'd been asking, either. I'd seen those foreign expressions that would come to Cass' eyes sometimes. The two that disturbed me the most were a broken look she got sometimes, like something in her had just died...and a kind of blind rage. They felt related somehow, like two sides of the same coin. But yeah, the rage scared me more, I guess. It struck me as unstable, which I knew Revik and Jon must have felt, too. In Seertown I thought at first she'd developed an anti-male thing of some kind. From what I could tell, usually that rage thing had been aimed at men, especially male seers who implied she wasn't their equal in some way.
Allie's War Season Three Page 67
