He had to get the fuck out of this. It was all that mattered. If that meant catering to Ditrini’s power fantasies, so be it.
Ditrini laughed, yanking on the chain, forcing Revik back to his feet.
Revik fought to keep his balance as he pulled himself shakily upright, still fighting to get his breath back as he focused with an effort down the hallway.
“You weren’t lying, Sword,” Ditrini said, his voice a faint sneer. “You’re good at being a slave. Perhaps I really should keep you around...see just how good?”
Revik didn’t answer that, either.
Ditrini had lost it on him, and none of them really knew why.
Well, not precisely.
Word had come down from upstairs about a wave coming. Revik didn’t know for sure if Ditrini had been talking to Cass that time, too, but he definitely saw the look of anger that had risen to Ditrini’s face as he cut off the person on the other end of the line.
“Are you certain?” he had said. “What do you mean, ‘a wave?’ How big?”
Silence as the other person explained.
“The fields cannot stop it?” Ditrini said. “You are sure?”
Another moment passed where he only listened.
“What?” Ditrini had said, his voice suddenly ice. “Where?”
A few more seconds of silence fell before Ditrini cut the other person off.
“No. That is not what we agreed...”
Another, briefer silence.
“...You had said you would take care of that problem,” Ditrini snapped. “How can I go up there, if it is likely that...”
The person on the other end must have cut him off again. That time, Ditrini’s face twisted in a fury that made Revik nervous, in spite of himself.
Allie’s face flashed through his mind, even in the instant the other seer spoke.
“How can I know that will be the case?” Ditrini said, obviously cutting the other person off again. “Where are my assurances, if I do as you say?”
When the silence fell that time, Revik could almost feel the rage emanating off the Lao Hu seer’s light, even wearing the collar. Ditrini stood there in silence, listening to the other person speak, but Revik could see him thinking, could see him coming to some conclusion that he didn’t like, but that he clearly felt powerless to do anything to change. It was that look of powerlessness and loss of control that made Revik the most nervous.
Then Ditrini had looked at Revik, his silver eyes like liquid metal.
Reaching up, the infiltrator turned off his link, without taking his eyes off Revik.
That’s when he’d started hitting him.
He’d attacked him without saying so much as a single word, barking a command in Prexci for the guard to hold him up while he hit him in the face, again and again, and then in the stomach and upper body, hard enough that Revik was pretty sure he’d cracked a few more ribs, and probably bruised a few organs in the process. Really, he was pretty sure a good chunk of his abdomen and chest were already bruised inside and out. One cheek had swollen, to the point where he was having trouble seeing out of that eye, and his jaw throbbed between hits, painful enough that he wondered if something had been cracked there, too.
But that bothered him less than the other, really.
Ditrini worked him over as if it was the most logical thing to do under the circumstances, and not a complete waste of all of their time when they faced probable drowning or worse when the water hit that tunnel.
Now Revik leaned his back against the curved wall of the pipe, panting, trying to get his mind back together after Ditrini had yanked him back to his feet.
The guard next to him looked nervous too, from where he held Revik’s bicep lightly in one hand.
The tunnel dripped under the yellow-green glow of the yisso torch, turning faces sickly, making it hard for Revik to think. He tried to decide how he might convince Ditrini to let them survive, to not kill them just to prevent someone else from getting Allie...or to prevent her from having his child.
The thought brought a wave of pain so intense that he instinctively tried to block it, triggering the collar enough to force out a moan.
When he looked up next, Ditrini was staring at him again, those silver eyes shimmering with a hatred so intense that Revik could only stare back, unthinking.
“We’re not going to get out of here,” Jon muttered.
“Shut up,” Maygar told him. His eyes went back to Revik, then up to Ditrini. “Well?” he said. “Is Jon right? Is this how you plan to spend your last minutes roaming this creation, brother Lao Hu? Because, while I sympathize with the sentiment, I would think one of your long life might have something more meaningful to impart, before you go...?”
He used formal Prexci that time, the old version.
Revik found himself looking at Maygar after he said it, remembering for the first time that he’d been Vash’s student for most of the thirty or forty years of his life.
He really didn’t know his son at all.
Now it looked like he might never know him.
Revik watched Ditrini as he gave Maygar another of those predatory smiles.
Then Ditrini turned back to Revik.
Without warning, he wound up and kicked Revik in the balls, hard enough that Revik nearly blacked out. Letting out a half-formed cry, he felt every muscle in his body let go as the pain ran like a shock current through his light. When he could see again, he was on his knees, in the water at the bottom of the pipe, gasping, unable to move through the pain, which was more than he could think through at first.
He looked up, half in a daze, and Ditrini spat in his face.
The other seer walked away then, back the way they had come.
Back towards the larger pipe that lived deeper underground.
Revik stared after him, still gasping, confused when he saw the series of hand-gestures Ditrini aimed at the other five seers of his crew. Those same seers released Maygar and Jon where they’d held them by their chains. They didn’t untie them, or remove their collars, but they walked away from them where they stood, too, glaring at all three of them before they left.
Ditrini gave another command, gesturing towards the torches, and the largest of the five guards threw down the yisso torch he held with a grunt, his eyes murderous as he paused long enough to glare at the three of them.
Then he was gone, too.
They’d left them there.
They’d left them with a torch.
Ditrini...or really, someone else...wanted them to get out of this alive. They wanted Revik to get out alive, probably to keep Allie alive, too.
Revik watched them go from his knees, still fighting to think through his confusion, but unwilling to raise his voice to voice the question, sure it would only bring Ditrini and his goons back. Given Ditrini’s instability, Revik couldn’t push his capacity to take orders too far, or he would find himself with a bullet in his head regardless.
When Revik looked at Jon and Maygar, the puzzlement on their faces mirrored his own.
Revik was struggling then, leaning his weight against the pipe wall and trying to force himself up to his feet. Jon moved forward, using his body as a counterbalance to help him up, and after a few seconds, Revik managed to get himself more or less upright again. He gasped a little when his light sparked around him, igniting the edges of the collar enough to bring a cold shock of pain he felt all the way to his abdomen.
“We have to go,” he gasped, looking at the other two.
They looked at one another, then down the pipe after where Ditrini just left.
“We have to go!” Revik snapped. “Now! Grab that fucking torch! We’ll likely need it, or they wouldn’t have left it...”
He watched for a few seconds as Maygar walked to the torch. Turning his back to the sparking and sizzling thing lying in the dirty water, Maygar lowered himself in a swift crouch, grabbing hold of the end of the black handle with his hands bound behind his back.
Once Revik kn
ew he had it, and was more or less vertical again, he turned away.
Without another word, Revik began limping up the slope as fast as he could while still navigating the silt, water, and chunks of concrete in the bottom of the curved cement pipe. He stumbled through the water and debris, some of which had likely fallen in the last series of quakes, nearly falling more than once before he could see the light bouncing behind him again, and heard the other two following. Revik managed to get his speed up to a reasonable facsimile of a combat jog right around the time he heard the other two catching up, splashing their way through the foot or so of water and closing the gap to where he ran into the near-dark.
Revik’s eyes scanned the walls for a ladder, any hint of a way to a higher level, but it seemed like they ran forever and while he could hear the sound of water getting louder in the background again, he still hadn’t seen a damned thing that looked like it might lead out of there.
Allie’s face flashed in front of his eyes again, even as he let out a low groan.
“Ideas?” he gasped, not slowing his pace as he slogged through the deepening mud and silt. “We’re running out of time...”
Silence from the other two, when Maygar’s voice suddenly burst out from behind him.
“There!” he said. “Another pipe...looks like it’s going up!”
Revik stared at it, but only for an instant.
Cursing the collar, he fought to decide, then abruptly changed course when they reached the Y-junction, running up the slightly larger tributary. Jon and Maygar splashed behind him. He heard a grunt as one of them fell then struggled back to their feet, but Revik didn’t slow, and within a few more minutes, he could hear both of them splashing not far behind him in the tunnel again.
The sound of rushing water was getting louder.
“Fuck,” Jon muttered. “Fuck, fuck, fuck...”
Revik saw it then, and let out a cry.
He would have pointed if he’d had use of his arms, but as it was, he only ran towards it. He didn’t really think about the logistical issues until he was standing right in front of the damned thing, and then he could only gasp, giving the other two a kind of helpless look.
It was a ladder, but they didn’t have use of their arms.
Hearing the water rushing louder behind them, Revik turned around, grasping hold of one rung with his bound hands. Leaning as much of his weight back as he could, to keep from toppling over, he stabbed his foot onto the lowest rung, and fought to pull himself up. Quickly, he realized it was futile. His hands were bound too closely together, and every time he let go of a rung, he would fall, face-forward, into the bottom of the pipe.
“What the fuck do we do?” Jon shouted, now to be heard over the rushing of the water filling the pipes below. “There’s not going to be any way out...not without a ladder!”
Revik looked between their two faces, feeling his chest go numb.
They could let the water bring them to the surface...in theory...but the reality was, it wouldn’t. The flood of water would knock them over, instead...send them spend them spinning down the pipe, slamming into the walls and ceiling until they got knocked out or drowned...assuming they weren’t stabbed or beheaded by shrapnel, first.
Revik fought to think, to breathe through his panic to come up with something, anything.
If there was some way to get the chains off even one of them, but there was no time for that, either. There was no time for any of the dozen of so solutions that flickered through his mind. He fought to think past the obvious barriers to something he hadn’t tried before. Maybe he could risk blacking out, try to get a signal to Wreg and the others through the collar.
He could ask Maygar to try, too. Maybe between them...
“Well, hello down there!”
The voice jerked all three sets of their eyes up.
Revik stared up at the faces peering down at them, feeling a kind of disbelief as he saw a few of them smiling, their eyes taking in the three of them with the torch clutched behind Maygar’s back, their faces dirty and Revik’s swollen and darkening from Ditrini’s fists.
None of the three of them had heard the manhole cover being rolled away, with the sound of the water coming at them.
Immediately, looking up at them, though, Revik knew they weren’t friends.
On the other hand, he wasn’t all that sure how many friends he had left.
“Need some help?” the man in the NYPD uniform asked, grinning at Revik above a dark rain slicker with florescent bands across the front. “Or were you planning on learning to surf in the next five minutes, iceblood?”
Looking up at them, Revik didn’t need his sight to know they wouldn’t help him get to Allie. But right now, that couldn’t be the priority, either.
“Help!” Revik said, staring up at them. “Help us!”
“Now why would we want to do that, iceblood?”
“I’m him!” Revik said at once. “The Sword...Syrimne. I can take you to her! I can give you what you want...” Panting, he felt his heart jackknife in his chest as he added, “...It’s her you want, right? That’s why you’re here? For her? My wife?”
The man grinned at him again. Then, glancing to his side, he motioned someone next to him to bring something over.
Turned out, it was a crane.
20
DARKNESS
REVIK WOULD HAVE held up his hands, probably, under normal circumstances.
Surrounded by automatic rifles held by some very pissed-off looking humans, it would have seemed the logical thing to do.
As he couldn’t hold up his hands because of his bound arms, Revik just stood there instead, balancing most of his weight on the leg Ditrini hadn’t hit with the coiled chain right in the muscle of his thigh. He knew how the three of them must look, him in particular, given the blood running down his face, one eye swollen most of the way shut, and not so much as an armored vest since he’d gone down to interrogate Maygar in his street clothes. The white shirt he’d worn was now stuck to his wet skin, spotted with blood where his injuries marked it as he ran, along with mud and cement dust and whatever else.
Revik coughed, hopping a little on his good foot, before he glanced at Maygar and Jon, who huddled not far from where he stood, dressed about as appropriately as he was.
Needless to say, they hadn’t taken off the collars.
Revik found himself loaded roughly into the back of a military grade helicopter, dark black with dead metal, so likely SCARB or one of the several other federal or international branches that operated with high-paid seer infiltrators acting as advisors. Sikorsky X4, so one of the high speed varieties, and able to do quick extractions even under conditions such as this.
Jon and Maygar were loaded into the same vehicle next to him, and all three of them were locked to the jump seats, including the collars themselves, forcing them to sit upright and not really turn their heads.
Revik watched as the first human he’d spoken to, the one who’d crouched in that circle of light from the open manhole cover, sat down across from him. The human smiled at him, but it wasn’t a friendly smile. He arranged his muscled weight in a seat while his eyes took in Revik alone, measuring him without apology.
“The mighty Syrimne,” he said, grinning a little. “Who would have known you would turn out to be such a bad swimmer?”
Revik didn’t answer him.
Instead he swallowed, shifting his eyes to look out the window at the driving rain, and the wind buffeting the side of the helicopter even where it sat parked in the middle of the Avenue of the Americas.
“Don’t worry,” the man said, pulling the fingers of the gloves off his hand one by one, right before he banged on the glass separating them from the cockpit with his bare knuckles. “We’re leaving, your royal ice-bloodedness. As much as some of my people would love to leave you here to test that swimming ability of yours, I’m afraid your presence is wanted elsewhere.”
Smirking a little, the man leaned deeper into his seat, pr
opping an ankle on his own knee.
“It didn’t take long for you to throw your wife to the dogs either, did it?”
Revik didn’t look away from the window.
Sighing audibly, the man leaned deeper in the seat across from him.
“We’re going to take you somewhere else before we ask you a few questions, Mr. Syrimne,” he said with mock politeness. “...If it’s all the same to you. Since you seemed to be so amenable to our ‘help’ just now, I’m going to assume you’re willing to return the favor...”
Smiling a little wider, almost as if he couldn’t help himself, the human motioned at Revik’s face. “...Although it looks like someone who likes you even less than we do already paid you a visit. I guess karma is a real bitch, isn’t it, iceblood?”
Revik didn’t answer that, either.
Feeling a pit trying to burrow back into his stomach as he thought about Allie, he tried to reassure himself that at least he was alive.
At least he wouldn’t kill her that way.
And being alive, he could find her.
Even though the man was human, he chuckled, looking at Revik’s face, almost as if he’d guessed his thoughts.
“I wouldn’t count on any grand rescues, either, O Mighty Syrimne,” the human said, smiling. “We’re going to have to travel a spell, I’m afraid...and there aren’t a lot of windows where you and your friends are going...”
The man motioned towards the open doorway again, even as the Sikorsky lifted agilely off the ground, creating a dip in Revik’s stomach when it caught him off guard.
The bird continued to rise smoothly between the buildings, compensating for the wind as it slid up and sideways before clearing enough ground to begin moving forward as well, in a line heading due south.
Revik couldn’t stop himself from following the motion of the man’s fingers with his eyes, seeing the scattering of other helicopters rising with the US Army logo stamped on the side of their dead metal walls. Revik’s eyes flickered lower then, sensing the change on some level, even as water began flowing out of the manhole covers from the sewer pipes underground.
Swallowing as he thought of where he, Jon and Maygar had just been, as well as the probable locations of Balidor and Wreg, Revik found he couldn’t look away as the water flow increased, until the manhole covers disappeared under the onslaught.
Allie's War Season Three Page 124
