NO ONE KNEW yet, back then, that the world had changed.
Gaos... most seers walked right up to us in those initial raids.
That was the part that stung me the most.
Not guilt... anger. Anger that those of my race could still be so bloody stupid, even after everything that had gone down since First Contact with the humans. Something about that trust-bordering-on-idiocy really got to me.
It got to a lot of us, I guessed.
We drank a lot, after those early raids.
Even so, it was easy to remind yourself you were helping the race, if only by toughening them up. Waking them from their sheep-like trance and introducing them to the world as it truly existed. Like, hey, guys––news flash––the fucking Ancestors aren’t going to swoop down and save your sorry asses. Following Code isn’t a mystical ticket to safety, whatever you think it’ll do for you in the afterlife. Being compassionate to the human worms isn’t going to turn them into little fluffy bunnies, either. Not everything in this world is Barrier and light, like the elders still taught the gullible masses from their exalted ice caves up in the Himalayas, lining their people up like sheep to the slaughter, intentionally or not.
I, Quay, was fighting a war.
I was trying to save my damned race.
So yeah, me and the others may have drank a lot back then, but we never forgot the job.
We never lost sight of what it was all for.
That first crack in the childlike fairyland most traditional seers inhabited was a tough one, but it was necessary. Damned necessary.
The world had changed.
Are you all right, brother? Varlan asked me, as we walked towards the compound.
My superior officer spoke directly to my mind that time.
Shaking off that cloying feeling of familiarity, what had surrounded my light since we’d first landed in this jungle shithole on the ass-end of the world, I wiped sweat from my brow, clicking softly under my breath.
I’m fine, sir, I sent back only.
It is understandable, you know, Varlan said, his thoughts smooth as silk. We all react this way to the camps... despite their necessity, brother...
Looking away from the razor wire at the top of the nearby enclosure fences, I had already started to brush off the seer’s words, but Varlan wasn’t finished.
... All of us feel misgiving for allowing such a thing. For being complicit. Whatever story we tell ourselves... whatever rationale we favor... we are responsible for the systematic imprisonment of our own kind, brother Quay. Whatever the case for these temporary measures in ensuring the overall health and survival of our race, that does not change that essential fact. You would be wise not to forget it. It is our duty to never forget it. To hold onto that awareness with open eyes... that is the real burden of our work...
I suppressed my own rebuttal, feeling the defensiveness there.
Instead I only nodded, giving Varlan a bare look.
I understand, I said. Thank you, sir.
I even meant it... mostly.
I knew all about necessity.
I’d known it even more keenly back then, in those early years after the war: that push, from both seers and humans, to minimize the visibility of free seers in human population centers. All of it seemed like one thing, but really was another. Rather than being pushed by humans, most of it had been pushed by seers... and really, by Galaith himself... in an attempt to calm the paranoia around the “seer menace” among the human worms.
At the time, a mass extermination of the seer race loomed as a real possibility.
A very real one.
The seers in these camps didn’t know that, of course.
To them, everything that happened in those years was just plain evil.
Everything that happened since was evil, too.
Really, though, all of it was protection, I knew. Race protection, which was too big of a concept for most civilians, seer or human, to wrap their minds around, and not only because of their insane naiveté around inter-species conflict and whatever else.
Often, the Org yanked seers before they could do something stupid that would ID them as seers... and before they might prove an embarrassment to either the race, the Org, or later, the Seer Containment and Regulation Bureau itself. Following WWII, that new world was only just starting to take shape: image bans, mandatory registration at birth, mass-production of sight-restraint collars, freedom of association laws, travel permits and designated “seer-free” zones.
The Human Protection Act gave us the justification for all of it.
Galaith designed it deliberately, to give humans the illusion of control.
For the defense of the race, was the battle cry back then.
... the rationale, my mind supplied, remembering Varlan’s words.
We were approaching the main bunker of the work camp now, one of the biggest such camps in South America, about fifty clicks north-west of Manaus in Brazil.
I didn’t look at faces as we passed that long, chain-link fence.
Really, I didn’t want to think at all, but before I could blank out my mind in full infiltrator mode, Varlan’s thoughts once more intruded.
None of us feel good about imprisoning our brothers and sisters, the elder infiltrator thought at me softly. It creates a sort of sickness in all of us, no matter what we tell ourselves. No matter how many words we use to construct our reasons. It makes us ill. It causes a canker of the soul. It is one that we all feel, whatever we tell ourselves... one we all hope would heal.
A faint pause showed in his thoughts.
It will kill us all eventually, if we do not fix this world, brother...
Something about the other male’s words forced a dense shiver through my light.
All of us feel this, too, Varlan added, softer still.
Then, out of nowhere, a wry amusement touched the older male’s light.
... Well, Varlan thought next. Most of us feel it, anyway.
That time, my eyes followed Varlan’s.
I followed the older seer’s gaze all the way to the entrance to a crumbling, brick building that hunched like a mangy animal at the edge of the high palm trees. That building formed the first of four cement-block structures that made a curved line into the trees, and now stood only a dozen or so yards away from where we walked. The walls and roof obviously had suffered under jungle rains, although the structure itself looked more or less intact.
The major components of it, anyway.
The jungle itself loomed and grew around and over the stained, red-tile roofs, as if waiting for its chance to grow back entirely and consume the remains of those buildings for real. A newer roof covered the largest of those buildings, meaning the one that stood directly before us now, its back end twisting off into the hanging palm trees that grew on either side, and no windows visible on any of the walls I could see.
Everything I saw, apart from the roof itself, had been built of that same brownish-yellow brick, likely mud brick reinforced with cement.
I had to assume the ventilation happened through some other means.
I focused on a series of high-beam security lamps on high poles that circled the clearing and the penned yards, as well as the bunker-like buildings themselves. Only then did I let my aleimi, or living light, slide cautiously over the structure itself. Once I had, I realized the buildings and their respective Barrier constructs were much larger than I’d first realized, and––like most seer-designed structures––a good portion of the actual, usable space lived underground.
Likely far underground, given the number of seers imprisoned out here.
I felt the presence of another light, then.
Alien. Unknown to me.
Our approach was being monitored overtly now.
My eyes searched for the source of that vibration and soon found it.
In the doorway stood a lean, auburn-haired seer.
His face was one that I vaguely recognized, although I knew for certain I ha
d never met the male seer before in the flesh. I had perhaps seen glimpses of his features inside the network... perhaps even in feeds in the physical world, either black market or those monitored and populated by the humans on their major media channels.
The longer I looked at the youngish seer, however, the more I realized it was the seer’s light that I recognized, not so much his face, although that had a vaguely familiar quality to it, too.
The latter might have been more of an illusion, however.
He looked to be roughly my own age.
The seer had classic features for an Asian seer. High cheekbones. Light-colored but almond-shaped eyes. Sculpted, dark-lipped mouth. Darkish skin, but more olive than red in base. Hair that had been black (if the roots were any indication) before he dyed it that vibrant, if dark red. A well-defined jaw. Lean but muscular body.
The seer was handsome.
More handsome than usual, even for a seer of his obvious pedigree.
More than that, though, his light had a quality to it that I found myself reacting to within seconds. Sparks of heat rose from my own aleimi, as soon as I’d tasted the other man’s... an out-of-control fire that ignited somewhere in the middle of my chest, exciting parts of my light that I could barely feel at the high end of my upper structures. I felt that heat roll down through the rest of me, skin, flesh and bones, causing physical reactions... my heart beating harder, my lungs and breath tightening, my throat closing, my skin flushing.
I found it difficult to even look at the other male then.
As a general rule, I tend to prefer males as sexual partners, anyway, which perhaps confused my reading of that light, even before it started interacting with my separation pain.
This brother seer was definitely my type.
I could feel that in the other male’s light, even more than in terms of his overall physicality. That unique and tantalizing flavor in his light drew me like a drug.
Despite the fact that I generally adopted a hands-off policy with any seer in the Org who had the power to hurt me politically––a power that this seer, above all others, I suspected, had in razor-sharp spades––I found myself surreptitiously checking the male seer out, and not in an entirely neutral way. My light had already started to lean towards an even more directed interest in the other male, well before I’d admitted to myself exactly what I was doing.
I could feel from the light of my pod that I wasn’t the only one.
Checking the new seer out, that is.
Male and female, they all found this new male interesting, albeit in slightly different ways. I had stirrings of jealousy at the realization... I could feel also from the light of my pod that none of them had met Terian in the flesh before, either, apart from Varlan himself.
For I had to be looking at Terian.
Commander of over half of the military pods under the enforcement branches of the Org. Brilliant strategist. Favorite of Galaith. Notorious in his own right... even more so than the man he had supposedly supplanted, after he’d recruited that same seer, once upon a time, from a German jail cell during World War II. For it was rumored that Terian himself had found and flipped the infamous Defector, Dehgoies Revik.
It had to be Terian.
Nothing else could explain what I felt in the other male’s light.
Even as I thought the seer’s name, Varlan’s mind rose in mine.
Have a care, brother, Varlan cautioned softly.
I glanced at him, as casually as I could.
Varlan’s voice grew softer still.
Brother Terian is brilliant, Varlan murmured to my mind. His light is highly unique, as you’ve clearly already surmised. He is charming, well-read, witty, extremely talented in multiple areas, including military strategy, genetics, chemistry, non-dimensional and semi-dimensional construct manipulation, organic machinery, weapons, infiltration, hand-to-hand combat... even fine art, I am told, particularly music and painting. His sight is almost unparalleled within the Org’s network, and I am told he even shows signs of being a true prescient. I am not immune to the pull there, either, brother, I assure you...
I only stared at Varlan, feeling my jaw harden, waiting for the punchline to Varlan’s words. I could feel the hesitation there, in the other male, the decision evolving even then, on how much Varlan would tell me.
Moreover, I already felt how little good it would do, regardless of what the other said.
I felt the sharpness in my own light already, what might have been a bare thread of defensiveness, and fought to pull it back, before the other seer could feel it.
Even as I did, Varlan seemed to make a decision.
His light changed... subtly at first.
The gradual, cumulative effect turned Varlan’s living light mesh-like, impenetrably dense. That cloak fell entirely over my mind in the seconds that followed, and it was as if the old seer whispered his words directly into my ear.
He is a psychopath, Varlan sent simply.
I flinched.
... An incredibly talented one, Varlan added, softer. One who is invaluable to the Org. One who may even lead us one day. But he is a psychopath, brother Quay... so have a care.
Realizing I was staring at Varlan’s pale, violet-tinged irises, I jerked my eyes off the older seer, feeling my chest clench.
I didn’t speak, however.
I didn’t say a word.
1
PRISON BREAK
PERHAPS I NEED to roll things back some.
Perhaps I would do better to introduce myself first, before I get into that whole thing with Terian, and how we met and what happened out in the jungle during those few days I knew him.
I am what most civilian seers call––seers who generally don’t know shit, by the way––a Rook.
They call us Rooks, we call them sheep, so I guess it all evens out.
Those of us on the inside call it the Org.
And yeah, yeah... I know.
I know that is much like the CIA and their whole fucking “the Company” thing, but every group has their shorthand, na? We seers are no different.
Who am I, you say again? Well, I can give that to you in Org-speak, too.
Clan name, Forteng, given name, Gulqua.
“Quay,” to my friends.
Sight rank 9, potential... with about a 7.86 actual.
Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.
Although, yes, okay, I hear that they changed the ranking system again for my department, which happens to be the Seer Containment and Regulation Bureau, otherwise known as SCARB. Until we get the new lists, I can’t really assess my own score with the same precision, since it’s no longer the criteria on which I got trained.
Why did they do that, you ask? Well, that’s simple, too.
They did it so those fucking Chinese fucks, the Lao Hu, can’t do an accurate one-to-one comparison between their seer infiltrators and ours.
They play those same games with us all the time. This is espionage, my brothers and sisters. This is how things unfold in our world.
Anyway, because of that change in ranking criteria, my actuals could be up from the 7.86 average of my last formal test... which we all take every six months as a condition of our employment... or, it could be roughly the same as it was before. Actuals tend to fluctuate incrementally and inconsistently, anyway, based on the assignments they throw at us and the types of sight-skills employed in the field and whatever else.
Registration Code: Alpha-19.
That means I can travel openly as a seer (non-human, or NA) without restriction. I don’t even need a work classification permit. I can also carry a gun.
Reg codes like mine are worth hundreds of thousands on the black market.
I’ve heard of seers being killed for reg codes like mine, so I still travel incognito when I’m alone and use my human ident to cross borders. There are still plenty of un-reg’d assholes playing at the fringes, and not only those working for organized crime syndicates.
A few of t
hem are even ex-Org.
Defectors.
Traitorous fucks, in other words.
Current assignment: second-tier support, Extraction Team Six-Two-Ought-Four. Level Three, Code Violation 2900-129. Reg tags violation. Suspected terrorist.
Code name (Central always got cute with those): White Rabbit.
It wasn’t quite a throwaway job, but it wasn’t one I thought I’d lose a lot of sleep over, either. We all figured it’d be in and out. Forty-eight hours, tops.
Of course, that was before Varlan briefed any of us on all the b.s. surrounding this job. At the time, we figured routine extraction, hunt and re-acquire... maybe a chase-type scenario if things got heated, but nothing we couldn’t handle given the resources at our disposal.
We saw shit like this a few times a year, if not more. A lot of these “incidents” were too small to even warrant a footnote.
The intel we got was to the point. Clean, at first. Simple, even.
They had a suspected work camp incursion in the “refugee zone” located outside the city of Manaus in Brazil. I’d only seen the prelim intel of course, but it looked like the perps had some skills. It also looked like they may have absconded with at least one living seer already, if not several. No mean feat in such a heavily-guarded camp.
So yeah, not totally amateur.
Far from it, if they got in and out without facial rec picking them up, not being fried in the perimeter grid or shot down by one of the guards.
We still primarily got amateur runs on the work camps, amazingly enough, so a pro job definitely pricked Central’s ears. Otherwise, it was generally one of the usual suspects––family members, mates, girlfriends, boyfriends. Seers just not thinking clearly, due to their light connection to whatever loved one of theirs got picked up and sent to the camp.
Central tried to be gentle in those cases.
They still had to send a strong message, of course, but there was nothing personal in that. Seers could be emotionally volatile at the best of times. When strong light connections got involved, and the seer in question felt their loved one might be in danger, they pretty much lost their shit altogether.
Seers on the ground more than understood. They even sympathized... even if they couldn’t tolerate the behavior.
Allie's War Early Years Page 25
