But then Revik came back and I couldn't help noticing that she leaned on him, even more than she did on me. Then she threw over Chan for Baguen. More than that, she seemed to take comfort in the hyper-masculinity of the giant seer...so yeah, I guess I thought maybe I'd misread her on the anti-guy thing, too.
Whatever that thing was that lived in her, I'd seen Jon watching it, too. Truthfully, he'd been watching it a lot more closely than I had. Probably because he knew more about the source of it, since he'd also been with Cass and Revik in that mountain prison. Or maybe he tracked it more closely because Cass was the only tie he had left to San Francisco and his old life as a human. Or maybe I'd just been too distracted with my own crap. In any case, Jon had been around her a lot more than Revik had, at least for the past few years. I could tell that the Baguen thing had pushed Jon out of Cass' inner circle somewhat, too, but he'd never stopped watching her, or trying to understand what he saw.
That loyalty, and that paying attention, I guess, made me realize how self-centered I'd been with my own issues over the same period.
I was supposed to be the seer, after all.
But it hadn't been indifference that kept me from probing more closely into Cass' mind. Honestly, I'd gotten the strong impression, more than once, that none of them wanted me probing too deeply into Cass' mind anyway. Something lived in that experience with her, Revik and Jon that none of them really wanted me to know...Revik maybe more than any of them.
I suspected, from the few glimpses I'd gotten, that I really didn't.
Want to know, that is.
Of course, I couldn't keep myself from drawing inferences entirely. Hell, I knew Terian. I'd been his captive too, although not for anywhere near as long a time, and for various reasons I hadn't been treated as brutally as any of them. Still, Terian himself, and even Feigran, later on, had dropped enough hints that I got the gist of the kinds of games he'd enjoyed playing with Jon and Revik and Cass...maybe especially with Revik and Cass. As willfully blind as I might want to be when it came to the idea of Revik being faced with the choice of having to rape my best friend or watch her get murdered in front of him, I couldn't ignore certain conclusions that knowing Terian's personality raised.
Like, yeah...of course he would.
My mind knew that. I didn't even have to think about it all that hard.
Really, it was Terian 101.
Before he'd been Feigran, Terian had been a sick fuck who liked to make his torments as personal and as psychologically damaging as possible. He would have done it for the simple reason that I would be sure to find out later. He would have done it so he could picture Revik trying to explain it to me. He would have done it for the guilt it created, and the hurt on all sides. He would have done it because he was crazy, because he was bored, because the idea amused him...or simply to watch the expressions on their faces while it was happening.
But I couldn't really think about that, either, not even now.
I couldn't see how having that confirmed would help me anyway...or help Cass. I should have talked to Vash about her, while I had the chance. I should have found out what he thought might have helped her...but it was too late for that now, as well.
Maybe I could still talk to Tarsi, when we got back. Hopefully we'd have Cass with us, so maybe Tarsi could take her into the Barrier, try to figure out the source of the problem, whatever it was.
Hell, maybe Cass needed a few years in snow caves herself.
Sitting there, I found myself resolving that I would make it happen. If Tarsi thought the snow caves thing would help, we would do that. Whatever the solution might be, I'd make it happen...even if Cass didn't want to do it, I'd make it happen anyway. Hell, I'd do whatever I had to, if it might help her find peace. I'd let this go on for too long already.
I glanced at Revik, who sat strapped into the seat across from mine. Right then, he felt too far away, but I knew this wasn't exactly the time to start pulling on him, or feeling needy. He smiled at me, even as I thought it, sending me a pulse of warmth. His arms hooked around the canvas harness that held him into the HV-22 Osprey, making him look like he was swinging from some kind of hammock. He looked comfortable, almost amusingly so. The Osprey itself struck me as an odd sort of vehicle. It looked like a jacked up helicopter to me, but I'd been told it was actually closer to a prop plane, only one with vertical takeoff and landing capability.
More importantly, to me anyway, it had the range of a medium-sized prop plane, and it held a lot more of us than a helicopter.
I knew Balidor and his team had been taken to shore somewhere further north in another of these monsters. The only part that worried me was when and how we'd actually be leaving the plane...which Revik warned me might happen before the plane actually landed.
I still held out some small hope that we could land the Osprey instead. During the briefing after our strategy meeting, Revik made it sound like there was a 50/50 chance, but now I wondered if he'd just said that to ease my mind.
"We'll look for Wreg's flare," Revik had said, looking at me more than the others seated around that conference table below deck. "...He's been forced into radio silence, so we have to assume he's found the edge of the construct already..."
"How will we even find him?" someone asked, Loki, I think.
"We have rough coordinates," Revik explained. "Everything's timed out, and he has orders to break radio silence in the event of an emergency. The problem's not the terrain..." He added, glancing again at me. "What we were having trouble mapping was the construct itself. Whatever call he ends up making will depend partly on how close we need to land to where they are...and of course, whether they've already been engaged..."
Meaning, whether they were already in the middle of a shooting war.
Pushing that out of my mind, too, I forced myself to take a deep breath.
Really, when it came down to it, Wreg had been right in New York. This was a little crazy. This wasn't like one of our clandestine ops. We were now in an actual war with not only this Shadow, but likely over half of Revik's and Wreg's old team in the rebels.
When I glanced at Revik again, where he hung from the harness in his seat, he smiled at me a second time, sending me another pulse of warmth, that one stronger. He could probably feel how nervous I was. Revik himself appeared unnervingly calm. I glanced at Yumi, who sat next to me, and Chinja, on the other side of Revik, who had been assigned to keep an eye on Jon, although no one had told him that, of course.
I didn't look at Jon himself, although I knew he sat strapped into a seat on the other side of Yumi. I could feel him though, and knew he was nervous, too. Maybe even about the same thing.
A dozen more Asian seers filled the rest of the cargo area of the Osprey, many of whom I didn't even know by name. I recognized faces, but not even all of those. They'd all been polite to me...deferential, really, even more so than they had been with Revik. I knew they made up the remainder of the infiltrators who'd been trained under the Adhipan, those who had initially been left behind in Asia to protect the refugee camps and the remnants of the settlements in the Pamir. Balidor ordered them over not long before we left for San Francisco, leaving armed refugees in charge of their own defense.
Balidor said that transition was overdue anyway, but I didn't like how vulnerable it left them.
"Tell me again why this isn't crazy," I said to Revik.
Next to me, Yumi laughed, patting my leg.
Revik smiled again, making a noncommittal gesture with one hand.
"That's not reassuring, husband," I told him.
Yumi laughed again, signing something quickly to Chinja that made her laugh, too.
Revik's eyes remained on mine. He smiled wider when I rolled my eyes at him, leaning back in the padded seat. I could tell he was still wound up, despite his expression. His eyes looked overly bright, like they had before the bank op, and like they had right before he left for the Registry op, as well. Despite his taut nerves though, I knew he really had relaxed,
that it wasn't all for my benefit. Something about our being in motion seemed to relax him, just like it had in every op before this one. Already, some of the tension lines had left his face from that windowless room in the aircraft carrier.
"Would you rather be back with Balidor's team?" he asked me.
I gave him a look, fighting real irritation that time as I bit my lip.
"I wouldn't let you," he added, smiling. "...I was just asking."
"Taking a poll, huh?"
"Something like that."
Rolling my eyes again, I clicked at him. Even so, I couldn't help smiling a little, although my face felt overly stiff. Trying to get my mind off Cass and what we were doing and how Jon might be feeling right at that moment, I looked out the dirty window of the Osprey, but couldn't see much. The sun had gone down a few hours earlier, leaving us with very few stars. If any kind of moon hung in that sky, the clouds obscured it from view, too.
"Have you got the beacon yet?" I asked Revik, still speaking aloud.
He slid his helmet's headset down over his ear rather than answer me immediately, glancing forward at the copilot as he tapped the connecting organic pane. We all sat on modified benches closer to the nose of the plane, and most of my view of the pilots and the cockpit window was blocked by a big segment of organic bulkhead. I could see the co-pilot though, and a smattering of instruments and even some black night beyond where he sat. Revik had more visibility on his side, probably more than any of the rest of us really, but I doubted he had an unobstructed view, either, due to the instruments on the wall.
The layout of the airship was pretty simple, though. I knew, for example, that the tail end would open, if we had to jump. For the same reason, I was perfectly fine with being seated as far away from that opening as logistically possible.
Glancing back at Revik, the co-pilot nodded. When I leaned forward a bit more, I saw him hit in a few keys on one of the organic segments of the console. Probably the feed to the coded signal being broadcast by Wreg's team.
After a few seconds, Revik looked back at me.
"We're close," he said. "Fifteen minutes."
"Are we going to have to jump?" I said.
I asked the question a little too quickly. I saw him hesitate.
Of course, we all wore our parachutes in preparation for that possibility, but I couldn't get my mind off whether we'd be using them. Revik had said from day one that we might have to do a combat drop if we went to South America. He spent hours with me, even starting in New York, running over the basics on how to land, how to control the parachute canopy, what to do if I lost sight of the drop target, how to position my body for a static line jump.
We'd even practiced on the roof of the hotel...not me jumping off the roof, of course, but using the wind off the wall to get the feel of the canopy controls, and even jumping off the wall itself so Revik could look at my body position. Apart from my crash course with Revik and Wreg, however, I'd never so much as read a pamphlet on the how-to of skydiving. I'd never even been bungie-jumping, much less jumped out of a plane into the middle of a combat zone that happened to be located in a bunch of jagged mountains.
Oh, and at night.
"Are we going to have to jump?" I asked him again.
After another pause, Revik glanced at me, his eyes apologetic. He didn't have to verbalize the answer; I got the message, well enough.
"They aren't fighting," he assured me. "We shouldn't be shot at while we fall. But they still think we shouldn't risk landing the plane..."
"Is that just Wreg being paranoid?" I pressed.
"I want him to be paranoid, wife."
Biting my lip, I nodded again.
"We'll go together," he said, still trying to reassure me. "It'll be fine."
I didn't look at him that time when I gestured in the affirmative. After a bare pause, I glanced at Jon instead, to see if he'd caught the gist of our conversation. I guessed from the paleness of his face inside the dark helmet that he had.
Before I could even begin to wrap my head around the idea, I found my eyes jerked off the dust and salt-encrusted window to see the other seers already unbuckling harnesses and getting to their feet. I heard the groan of the engines as their orientation shifted, moving vertical once more. We didn't come to a stop, but our velocity slowed as the orientation changed.
I didn't move for a few seconds, watching as the other seers lined up on either side of the plane but closer to the tail, where I knew the metal door would open soon. I knew the plane had been modified somewhat to make it easier to do these kinds of jumps, but that thought didn't reassure me overly, either.
I sat there, still harnessed to my seat, when Yumi unlocked the latch to the control panel and and shoved the manual lever up to open the tail door. The instant a dark crack appeared around the seal, wind rushed through the rear cabin, turning it into a billowing cave and searing me to the bone, despite the organic jumpsuit I wore. The air felt like moving ice, and seemed to freeze the skin of my face and ears where they lay exposed by the helmet. More than that, the noise filled my head, making it difficult to breathe or even think, despite the added oxygen.
I didn't get up until Revik motioned for me to join him.
Following as he led me to the back of the line of parachute-wearing seers, I moved in front of him when he motioned me forwards. I reached up to hook my line to the railing next to Chinja's while he gave my chute another once-over, pulling and jerking at straps to make sure everything was in its correct place. I didn't miss the fact that Revik had sandwiched me between himself and the military-trained, female infiltrator, with Jon in front of her. Chinja was doing the same thing to Jon's chute that Revik was doing to mine, which I only found vaguely reassuring. I watched her work with a machine-like methodicalness even as Jon hooked his line in front of hers. Once he had it in place, he yanked hard to make sure it was secure, just like I'd done, and like I'd seen the rest of them do.
Revik held my arm now, firmly in his hand.
"Calm down, Allie," he said. He leaned down by my ear, which was mostly exposed, despite the helmet. "Please calm down, baby...trust me, okay?"
I nodded, but I didn't answer him. He blew warmth through my body, and I tried to let it relax me, breathing it in as best as I could.
"I'm okay," I muttered.
"You can do this," he assured me. "You did everything technically right when we practiced. I wouldn't be letting you do this if you hadn't..." He paused, then spoke again, telling me things I already knew, maybe in the hopes his words might reassure me, or give me something more tangible on which to grasp. "...You don't have to worry about the chute, okay?" he said. "It's a line jump, Allie, so all of that is taken care of for you. If there's any problem whatsoever, all of us will feel it...and the one closest to you will bring you down. There shouldn't be any weight problems with one of these chutes carrying two people..."
I nodded again, still not looking at him.
"Your headset's working?" he said. "It should switch to infrared as soon as you're out of the plane..."
I nodded again, but checked the headset attached to my helmet anyway, as if I hadn't already checked it a few dozen times during the course of the flight, and even before we got on the plane. VR, infrared manual and automatic settings, altimeter, comm link...it all seemed to be working fine. Just like it had been the first fifty times I checked it.
"I'll talk you down if you need it okay?" Revik said. "I'll be right there...all of us will, if you have any problems. Most of us have been doing night jumps for years...we can pretty much handle any contingency that comes up, but there shouldn't be any, Allie..."
I nodded again, trying to feel his words, but unable to feel much of anything but a blind panic at the idea of jumping out the ass-end of a moving plane in the dark. I couldn't see anything past the running lights of the plane itself through that searing wind from the open door. My skin had gotten used to the cold, sort of, but it still felt like I'd be free-falling into a dark, arctic pi
t with nothing but ice and sharp rocks at the bottom. Thinking about that, I realized we weren't all that far from the Antarctic really, not down here. As if on queue, I found myself making out a white, jagged shape in the distance, what might have been snow on the looming shadow of a nearby mountain.
The ground itself looked black as ink.
Then people were disappearing from the line in front of me, seemingly faster than my eyes could track. I watched four of them go on my side alone in a matter of seconds, and realized more than that had already disappeared through the opening ahead of them. Before I could wrap my head around this, Jon disappeared, then Chinja...then I found myself moving under Revik's prodding, aiming my feet for the opening and the pitch black sky before I let myself think, much less feel. There was a split second where I hovered over that abyss...
And then I was out the door.
The first thing that hit me was that shock of cold air. I struggled to get my body into free-fall position, panicking briefly when it wanted to tumble at first...but then I had it, and it seemed like there was nothing but silence for second after second after second...
Strangely, it was during that silence, where all I could see was dark below and before my infrared goggles kicked in, that I completely relaxed. The feeling of falling vanished, leaving me with the rush of air in my ears and my face, a feeling of floating...
Then a tug.
I'd expected something more violent, I guess. I thought it would jerk me backwards, yank on my shoulders like the kickback of a big gun.
Allie's War Season Three Page 68
