Allie's War Early Years

by JC Andrijeski

  No one could ever know who, or what, she was.

  The reality of even her biology, being different than that of other seers, could get her killed on its own. Or, more likely, enslaved in some human... or seer... lab. Kali risked everything even getting near an operative of the Org, much less one with such a high standing within their hierarchy.

  For Dehgoies, understandably perhaps, was a bit of a pet of the Org’s leadership.

  At the very least, a trusted lieutenant.

  Kali’s own race was the same reason she’d avoided other seers over the years, consistently living in areas populated primarily by humans. She’d been forced to do that her whole life, pretty much from the day she was born, when her parents hid in South America in order to give birth to her, hoping it would keep the Seven and the Adhipan from ever knowing she existed.

  This man, their future daughter’s future husband, hadn’t been so lucky.

  Kali knew that.

  She knew some of the difficulties of his life. Being cut from the same cloth, more or less, perhaps made his personal history more, well... real to her. More real than to Uye even, or any seer who had been raised in the old ways, where so many of Dehgoies Revik’s actions and emotions would be viewed as inexcusably vile, no matter what his personal history.

  Kali herself couldn’t view things in quite so black and white of terms.

  She had sympathy for her husband’s point of view, of course. The idea that this man could be forgiven for what he had done over the years, given the gravity and agency there, struck Kali as both childish and almost heartbreakingly naïve.

  Even so, she could not hate him. Not in the way that Uye could.

  Certainly not in the way most of their kind would, who would see him as the worst kind of traitor to the most important principles of their shared culture.

  Kali couldn’t even feel compassion for Dehgoies in the same way as those elders. Rather than an abstract horror and fear for his soul, she found herself lost only in the sadness she could feel emanating off him, even at great distances through the Barrier.

  She knew who he was. She was not blind to the reality of him.

  She knew that, on some level at least, he had chosen this.

  The same as Uye’s daughter herself will have chosen her own path, whenever she was conceived... which wouldn’t be long now, Kali knew.

  Again, Kali wished sometimes she didn’t see so much... understand so much.

  That feeling of the day of her daughter’s birth approaching formed the real reason why she could not wait any longer to try and reason with this young seer. Once the blindness set in from the pregnancy itself, she could not afford to travel, much less be away from Uye himself for more than a day or two at a time.

  It was now or never.

  Anyway, apart from her more frightened and personal wishes, and as much as she loved him, Kali did not want Uye here for this. Uye would want to protect her, and that would make him aggressive. His feelings about this male seer’s disruptive effects on his life and his wife would further cloud the issue, beyond what Kali could possibly correct through her own understanding. Uye would not be able to hide his animosity from this hot-headed youth, either, and it would only alienate Dehgoies from Kali herself even more.

  Or worse, cause him to close down altogether.

  She did not need Uye’s protection in this. She rarely needed it truthfully, but she knew he could not help himself in trying.

  What worried Kali far more than her own personal safety, were the rules imposed on her, in terms of what she could and could not say to Dehgoies Revik himself. That, combined with the intense certainty that she needed to find some way to reach him, made her very nervous indeed. There was some chance, after all, that Uye was right, and that Dehgoies would attack her. If she could not convince him of the truth of her words... or worse, if he recognized her for what she was... she might be put in a very precarious situation indeed.

  She had to believe the risk was small, however, since she had seen the dreams about her daughter so many times that they felt practically written in stone.

  Not being pregnant now, she had to assume she’d make it back to Uye, too.

  Kali walked into the hotel’s lobby as her mind spun over those same images again, scarcely seeing her own surroundings. Still, she had some faint awareness as she passed into the portal of the hotel’s glass doors and into the cooler air within, pushed lazily by more fans overhead and scented faintly with rose petals and mist. She passed potted palms, a lobby with a dark-wood desk and another, smaller, stuttering fan on the counter. The man standing behind the registration desk nodded to her in greeting, smiling faintly as he watched her pass, and she nodded in return, giving him a single look before continuing to walk towards the back end of the lobby. There, a piano stood in the shade away from the window, and Europeans lounged on cushioned seats with drinks sweating with ice on the small tables beside them. A number were reporters, she knew, and they watched her curiously, as usual, still wondering who she might be.

  She had tried to find a hotel where her foreignness would be more at home, but it only worked to a degree. They likely assumed her to be the mistress or wife of one of the others of their ilk, but she wondered how many they’d asked already to find out whose, and if they would grow more curious as time passed, instead of less... particularly if they couldn’t identify whose consort she was.

  Kali knew she was continuing to avoid her main problem, however, even now. Namely, how would she approach him at all?

  How would she get him to talk to her?

  But, as ironies sometimes did emerge in her life, it turned out that ended up being the one problem Kali did not have.

  For, when she walked out through the restaurant at the back of the lobby and to the deck surrounding the pale blue pool behind the hotel, a shadow fell over her face and eyes, forcing her to look up.

  Dehgoies Revik stood there.

  “Who are you?” he said, frowning at her.

  He took a step closer, looming over her even more, close enough that she could smell the sweat on his skin. It was an aggressive act, almost without seeming to be one.

  “Who are you?” he said again, his voice colder. “And why are you following me, sister?”

  TWO

  HIS VOICE WAS blunt, deeper than she had imagined it. She heard the trace of a European accent, lost somewhere in the syllables, present even in their blunt cadence. Something Germanic from the hard edges, and familiar from when Kali lived in that part of the world.

  His posture was deceptively casual.

  His hands sat on his hips, the fingers long and strangely pale-looking under the Southeast Asian sun. He wore the same dark t-shirt she remembered from the meeting hall, but he now had mirrored shades on, blocking her view from those pale, clear eyes.

  She grew more aware than ever of the gun he assuredly wore under that leather jacket.

  “Who are you?” he demanded once more. “Are you going to tell me?”

  She met his gaze, not intimidated really, but certainly taken aback.

  That silver light continued to spark and harden around his form. She knew he was likely accustomed to intimidating people, and not only due to his race.

  He must have picked up on some element of her thought, because his posture changed subtly. He backed up without seeming to... with his aleimi, or living light, as much as with his actual body. As he did, his shoulders lost some of their tension. She felt a flicker of what might have been embarrassment on him, or perhaps doubt at his own assumptions.

  Now, when he looked at her, she felt other things in his light, too, perhaps from his opening to discern more about her. That hard silver remained the most obvious thing, of course, what had become the signature of the Org and their followers, which included all of those who lived within the Rooks’ network.

  But she felt a different frequency there, too, as he continued to try to get a read on her.

  Clearly, the fact that she hadn’t p
anicked at the sight of him, after she’d clearly been following him, as he accused, had thrown him off-balance. She could almost see him rethinking his own approach, now that he hadn’t gotten the reaction he expected. He looked at her with a wary kind of compulsion now, as well, as if he couldn’t quite make himself look away from her.

  She felt this more in his light than saw in his features, of course, which remained obscured by the mirrored sunglasses and the stillness of a trained infiltrator’s face.

  “What do you want from me?” he said again. “Did someone send you?”

  She held up a calming hand. “No,” she said simply.

  There was another silence.

  Again, he handled that silence less gracefully than she did.

  After more seconds ticked by, he shifted his balance on his feet yet again, stepping back from her physically, as well as with his light. She was about to attempt to say something, when the doors behind her opened, letting out a cool breath of that rose-scented air, and causing his face to shift directions, his eyes undoubtedly focusing behind her from the other side of those mirrored glasses. She watched him take in whoever had joined them on the outside patio.

  Kali herself did not turn, but felt the humans pause as they saw the two of them facing off against one another. When Dehgoies Revik looked back at her, or it felt like he did, Kali raised an eyebrow, as if to ask him what he wanted to do now.

  “Will you talk to me?” he said, his voice carefully polite that time.

  He made a graceful gesture towards the tables and chairs that dotted the other side of the pool. Both the gesture and the change in his light surprised her, if only because they told her he had received formal schooling at one point.

  Yet another thing to add to her understanding of him.

  “...Please, sister,” he added, using formal Prexci once the humans had moved past them and out of earshot. “I will not harm you.”

  Clearly he wanted her to know she had guessed correctly, in that respect, at least.

  She nodded, once, following the indications of his hand to walk in front of him. She could almost hear Uye yelling in her ear, and wondered if he watched her from the Barrier even now, biting his lip and cursing under his breath for her allowing herself to be taken by him so easily.

  But really, Kali found this development almost a relief.

  He had certainly saved her time.

  Dehgoies Revik waited for her to sit in one of the folding wooden chairs before he joined her in another on the opposite side of the same table. The table itself came equipped with a glass ash tray, as well as an umbrella sticking through a hole in its middle, open to a white canopy overhead to shield them from the hot, Southeast Asian sun. Wide, woven fans rimmed that edge of the pool, just like they did indoors, held together with ropes and pulleys and run from some kind of generator inside the kitchen, off to the left of the glass doors leading back into the main hotel. They moved lazily behind her, pushing air against her skin. A dozen or so paces from where they sat, a bar stood in the shade of a few palm trees.

  The bar was where the group of five humans now clustered, still watching them curiously.

  Kali recognized all of them as guests of the hotel. Some even seemed to more or less live here, on assignment with one or another newspaper or magazine. Every one was male, wearing a cheap suit, rumpled with sweat, their collars open at their necks.

  These same men, most of whom she’d seen staring at her for the past few days, seemed especially fascinated with Dehgoies Revik, likely because they assumed him to be the mysterious Westerner with whom she shared her bed. Kali knew from her brief scans that her own ethnicity frustrated them, even as they contemplated bedding her themselves. Now they wanted to know what nationality this new, strange male claimed, too. She assumed they saw him as some kind of unwanted intruder into their mating pool, and quickly wanted to categorize him for either dismissal or some kind of direct challenge.

  Kali tired of being seen as an ‘exotic’ by human males, even though she knew she’d suffered that indignity far less than most of her sisters.

  From their own living light, Kali picked up that two of them speculated Dehgoies as a civilian contractor of some kind, or perhaps C.I.A.

  “Sister,” Dehgoies said politely. “Can I get you a drink?”

  She glanced at him, and saw that he’d taken off the mirrored sunglasses, leaving two red marks on either side of his nose from the frames, but his eyes clear and intent-looking. She suspected that was an attempt at manners, too, and smiled.

  “Yes,” she said. “I would like whatever you are having.”

  He quirked an eyebrow at her, but she managed to make him smile that time.

  “I can perhaps do better than that for you, my sister,” he said.

  She smiled, giving him a nod. “I defer to your judgment then, my kind brother.”

  Again, he gave her a look that bordered on a smile. He seemed to have relaxed somewhat in her presence, however, and far sooner than she would have expected. She noticed something else in his light that time, too. A flicker of separation pain left him in a whisper even as she thought it... muted, but intense enough, even from behind his light’s shield, that it startled her a little.

  So he was lonely.

  He gave her a hard look at that, even as he finished motioning towards a waiter.

  Clearly, he thought she had overstepped with him that time, by not hiding her appraisal of his emotional state. Even so, he didn’t pull his light away from hers entirely, and it struck her suddenly, nearly making her laugh aloud, why he was nervous around her now.

  “I am mated,” she told him gently.

  He nodded, once, but that other look never left his eyes. “I have a girlfriend.”

  He said the words almost as a challenge, but she didn’t think they were untrue.

  “We are a bonded pair,” Kali said only, her voice softer still.

  He nodded again, but that time, she saw a flicker of surprise touch his clear eyes. He scanned her light, surreptitiously that time. No doubt he was looking for the tell-tale structure that would support her claim of a bonded mate.

  She didn’t attempt to hide it from him, but gazed out over the pool, relaxing into the sunlight and shadow play over the smooth, white stone that formed the pool’s rim. She smiled at the waiter when he brought over their drinks, and it struck her suddenly, that Dehgoies must have used his light in the human’s mind to order them, rather than waiting to tell him in person.

  So Dehgoies Revik wasn’t particularly patient, either.

  Or worried about being ID’d as a seer.

  When the human waiter left them, leaving behind two drinks sweating on the table under the shade of the umbrella, Dehgoies Revik’s eyes clicked back into focus.

  He nodded again, once, almost without seeming to realize he had done so.

  His long fingers encircled his glass, what looked like bourbon or perhaps another type of whiskey on ice. As he more or less promised, he had gotten her something different than what he had acquired for himself. In fact, what he had ordered for her didn’t smell or feel as if it had alcohol in it at all, for which she was more than a little grateful. He must have gotten that from her light, too, which was more polite than not, under the circumstances.

  It was also, perhaps, a message of its own.

  She took a sip, and was pleased to find the drink consisted of fresh-squeezed lemonade with ginger, and strong in both. Gracing him with a smile, she took another sip.

  “Thank you,” she said. “An excellent choice, my brother.”

  “Are you going to tell me why you have been following me?” he countered, his voice still polite, still subdued from before. “Do we know one another, sister?”

  “No,” she said, lowering her glass back to the table with a sigh. “We do not. I wished to introduce myself to you, brother.”

  “Why?”

  Curiosity edged the word that time, but also that harder wariness. People from the old world ge
nerally did not approach him with benign intent, she knew.

  He was still thinking about sex with her, as well. It was confusing him.

  Kali made a soothing gesture, almost without knowing she did it, and without thinking how it might look to the male humans watching them from the bamboo-fronted bar.

  “Brother, it is a difficult thing,” she said. “I am not toying with you, I promise. I am merely trying to determine an appropriate entry point. It may take some time to explain...”

  “I have time,” he said, blunt.

  “Do you?” She smiled at him, quirking an eyebrow back in his direction. “You have seemed to me to be quite busy since I arrived here.”

  “And when was that, exactly?” he said, wary again.

  “Five days ago,” she said without hesitation.

  She didn’t know if he had known that already, and had been seeking truth from her, or if he worried it had been a longer time than what she answered. Either way, something in her response relaxed him still more. He leaned back in the chair, gazing out over the same view of the pool. She watched him sip the bourbon, and again felt that flicker of pain in his light. With it came a more specific hurt, one that had more of a flavor of loneliness than she’d felt from him before.

  She might have winced, if she hadn’t been so close to his light already.

  “Brother,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t know how much my words will mean to you right now. But you have featured prominently in my mind for some time...”

  He turned at that, sharply that time. He didn’t speak, so she made another reassuring gesture before she continued to speak.

  “...I am a prescient,” she told him quietly. “A real one.”

  He blinked, once.

  She saw him attempt to suppress the surprise that time, and fail. Taking another drink to cover his reaction, at least somewhat, he turned his gaze back over the pool, where a white woman in a blood red bikini was wading into the shallow end by slowly and deliberately descending the stairs. Kali felt another flicker off his light when the woman smiled at him, clearly including him in her somewhat heavy-handed show for the watching males. The group of men by the bar stared at the woman in the pool, too. Looking away from the water and the skin exposed by the bikini, Dehgoies Revik stared directly at Kali’s face, not hiding his scrutiny that time.