Terian’s voice grew harder still.
“...For that matter, if I make you my dog and ask you to suck off every shit-blood in this camp, purely for my entertainment, then you’ll do that, too, brother. And things will continue that way with you and I until I’m done with you... do you understand?”
He waited for my nod.
Once I had, Terian clenched his hands into fists by his sides, pulsing the muscles in his tanned arms. He made his voice softer still, so low my ears strained for the words, although nothing in my light or mind managed to miss a single one.
“...And if I’m never done with you, brother Quay, then you’ll belong to me,” Terian said, his voice a whisper in that dark. “Do you understand me, brother? Are we on the same page with this thing yet? You might want to ensure you do understand me, brother Quay, because if you ever try to run from me again, I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you without a second thought... and I’ll make sure that death takes a very long time and that it hurts a fuck of a lot when I do it. And after I’ve finished making it hurt and I’ve cut the cord to your miserable life, I won’t ever think on you again... not once. Not even on your birthday... assuming I ever bother to learn what it is in the first place. Do you hear me yet, brother? Do you?”
My pain worsened, but I only nodded that time, too.
I felt that emotion strengthen in my light the longer we stood there, in the dark. It still wasn’t quite sympathy for the other man... or even fear, which I probably should have felt by then, given what the other had just said.
Instead, I continued to feel that overwhelming pull at my light, almost to the exclusion of all else. I felt the connection to Krikev, of course, in my own past and childhood... the part of me that learned to look forward to those sessions, even as I fantasized about killing the human in his sleep. I felt that darkness still living in my light, the longing, the desire to die, to lose myself and be ripped apart within it... or perhaps to simply lose control and no longer care that I had something less than beautiful that drove me.
At the same time, some more hungry part of my mind wanted to understand it, too... to pull Terian’s pain into my own light, examine it perhaps, maybe see why it resonated so strongly with my own. That part of me wanted to see what Terian saw... what he told himself about what this was, what the thing with Dehgoies had been... why Terian would not open to me.
Had he opened to Dehgoies?
Did the other man feel his light?
Had he really felt it, perhaps in a room not unlike this?
Either way, I knew what Terian was asking of me.
I would not leave, like Dehgoies had done.
I would give Terian permission to be that darker thing, to not hold back or pretend to be something else. Perhaps I could give him a haven from all that, a place to truly be himself, to work through this wound to its logical conclusion.
Perhaps Terian could rid me of Krikov, too, once and for all.
I could not help but believe that ridding Terian of that emotional handicap might be the very thing to finally allow him to reach his full potential as an infiltrator... and as a seer.
I could see... anyone could see... that Terian was not like other seers.
He was different. Better, perhaps.
I wanted more than anything to help him to step into his role as the rightful leader he was clearly marked out to be. Perhaps I could crawl reborn out that darkness, too... finally purge myself of the need to blame myself when it came to those years I’d been a slave to that filthy, drunken pile of human excrement in that work camp outside of St. Petersburg.
Perhaps I would rise with him.
Perhaps we would rise together... phoenixes in the night.
Perhaps this was the role for which I had spent so many years waiting.
I didn’t doubt the other male’s words, though.
I didn’t doubt them for a second.
4
JUNGLE
EVEN APART FROM Terian’s presence in the work camp outside Manaus, this op was a weird one, for a couple of reasons.
Some of those reasons were purely operational.
The main one of those was that whoever these fake-reg’d assholes were... or, more realistically, given the intel Terian provided at the camp before we left for the jungle... whoever these unreg’d assholes were, meaning that they’d never been on the grid in the first place... they’d been dumb enough to stay on the ground.
I flat-out couldn’t figure that part out.
I thought for sure we’d be chasing their off-the-books extraction team overseas by the time oh-five-hundred rolled around. Probably back to North America, to one of the coastal cities like New York or Los Angeles... if not all the way back to Hong Kong or one of the big cities in India where untagged seers generally liked to hide. Really, if their rogues or terrorists or Adhipan or whoever the hell else they were had any kind of brains at all, they would have left the continent at the earliest damned opportunity.
Instead, they’d chosen to split their team in the middle of the Amazonian jungle, hiding their numbers behind multiple constructs and evading them through confusion more than what appeared to be a well-thought-out exit strategy.
Terian’s remote infiltration team tracked them along the river heading northwest, into the branch of the Amazon known as the Rio Negro.
If it had been me, I would have led my team southwest instead, towards Manaus.
They would have faced denser security grids going that direction, true, more surveillance and potentially more World Court agents... but they also would have access to at least three private airfields, and, more importantly perhaps, main roads heading back to Rio and São Paulo, where they might have hopped freighters or more flights heading off-continent.
They might even have been able to lay low and build a construct on one of those things, sliding under the radar of the World Court completely.
That is, assuming they found a safe house somewhere, where they could ride out the three-week period it took to build any kind of real construct on a freighter or a plane of sufficient size and weight to ground a construct connection.
I could only think they must have no operatives at all in South America... at least none who might have helped them bypass the security teams. It was the only thing that made sense.
But why would they risk an extraction in the first place, without adequate support on the ground? That was a whole other level of stupid I didn’t even know how to unravel.
Unless, of course, time had been a critical factor.
Given their current course on the map, and the imprints Terian’s infiltrators pulled off the primary team’s light, they were likely heading for Columbia now. If so, they’d left a huge opening for a strike team to cut them off before they could cross the border.
Terian seemed to think they’d split their forces as some kind of diversion attempt.
He believed the main group––meaning the one transporting their extraction target––was the one aiming north in a straight line, for either Guyana or Venezuela.
Of course, that team might be a diversion, as well. They’d split their forces a second time since that first break, but Terian seemed to think we were still behind the real target. He had his infiltrators back at the work camp attempting to confirm that fact, (as best they could, anyway), but Terian had us on an active track now, too, using markers we’d already semi-defined for the leadership team from the intel collected by work camp spooks.
Of course, those likely had all kinds of misdirection woven into them, too.
Still, I suspected I knew why Terian had chosen the northbound team to follow. Those seers appeared to be the same ones with the strongest Adhipan imprints in their light. Perhaps more significantly, the one glimpse I got of the imprints I’d been given for Dehgoies seemed to be connected with that team, as well.
Honestly, I’d never given much thought to Dehgoies before now.
I’d thrown insults his way along with the others whenever the defe
ctor’s name came up... but otherwise, yeah, I had long since dismissed Dehgoies as a footnote and a fool. Like I said, as far as I knew, Dehgoies only left because he’d suffered some kind of breakdown, something over a female seer with whom he’d grown infatuated.
Theories abounded as to the identity of that mysterious female, of course.
A number of seers also thought the whole thing about a female was a ruse.
I’d overheard more than one senior infiltrator speculate that Dehgoies himself had been an operational target of the Seven... that the female had been a plant, sent to neutralize him as a threat. According to that theory, Dehgoies had been a victim of psychic warfare. Rather than constituting the subject of some tawdry and breakdown-inducing infatuation, the covert female operative had merely bested him... whether due to luck, a better sight rank, more field experience, or some combination of the above.
None of that exactly boosted my opinion of Dehgoies.
After all, we all got hit with that crap from time to time, in various forms. The Org had been engaged in a sort of “cold war” with the kneelers since the Org’s inception. That was especially true whenever it came to any large-scale human military or political events.
Dehgoies should have known the score.
Vietnam was hardly the first human war in which he’d been involved. Hell, it wasn’t even technically a war at all. To let something like that emotionally break you was just... well, weak.
I wondered whether the higher-ups, perhaps even Galaith himself, had been embarrassed by Dehgoies’ abrupt departure. Perhaps that’s why they’d surrendered him to the kneelers so easily, without so much as a whimper of protest.
Dehgoies obviously wasn’t made of very strong stuff.
Maybe Galaith realized that, decided he’d backed the wrong horse.
Of course, some explained Dehgoies’ rapid demise by saying that he had been severely traumatized in his youth––even more than most seers of our generation. That trauma had left him open, the theory went. Vulnerable to infiltration from within. A number who claimed to have participated in bonding rituals under his command also claimed to have seen him naked. A few of those seers told me that Dehgoies’ body had been one big scar from the back of his neck down to his waist. He’d been scarred like a human, they said... as if his skin hadn’t been allowed to regenerate at all following whatever injuries caused the marks.
If those rumors were true, whoever did that to him must have beaten Dehgoies nearly to death... likely on multiple occasions... likely at a young age. To do that to a seer, one had to break the nerves in the skin so extensively that they could no longer repair the damage quickly enough to avoid scar tissue.
That, or Dehgoies had been born with some genetic deformity.
I did not know what I thought about that story, either, or even if I believed it to be true. If it was true, I still thought it pathetic that someone as high up as Dehgoies, with so much of the network at his disposal, could have let himself be taken down by a kneeler.
All of us had horrors in our past.
We all learned to move past those horrors, or else we died.
Or worse, we broke inside... which meant slavery, life lived as a lesser being.
The work camps were full of seers like that.
I could have been a seer like that. I could have died in that work camp outside of St. Petersburg, but I’d fought back, and I’d won. I would eat a fucking bullet before I let myself become one of those seers again.
Moreover, most seers would never in their lifetimes have access to the resources and light that Dehgoies commanded under the Org.
Dehgoies could have wielded the whole damned network on his own behalf.
He could have called upon Galaith himself, something only a handful of seers would ever be able to boast, no matter how loyally they served or how many years they worked inside the Pyramid. Someone as high up as Dehgoies, with as much psychic talent as everyone claimed he had, should have been able to hold his own. That should have been true no matter who went after him, and no matter how much “trauma” he suffered.
Why would someone like that run?
What kind of chicken-shit asshole did that?
Most of my friends felt pretty much the same way I did.
Of course, now I had a different kind of interest in Dehgoies.
Now, the idea of possibly meeting Dehgoies in the flesh had me vibrating in my skin. The idea of taking him in the field as a live captive turned that vibration into a blasting furnace. The fact that I could feel an obsessive, borderline-fixated quality in Terian’s light around the same subject both intensified my own interest and twisted it into a kind of angry, adolescent jealousy, one that brought out a more sadistic flicker in the background of my own intent.
I wanted to meet Dehgoies face to face.
I wanted it perhaps more than I should.
I wanted it perhaps more than I’d wanted to meet any seer, apart from Galaith himself.
Thinking about this as I trudged through the jungle, I found myself remembering that final briefing before we left the work camp barracks near Manaus. That had been just minutes before we walked back to the helipad outside Terian’s construct and the main gates.
Terian might as well have collared me for that briefing.
He’d all but laid a public claim on me, and in front of Varlan, too.
In fact, informing all of them of my new status had been the very first thing out of Terian’s mouth, once he had the others all assembled.
“...I’m changing brother Quay’s designation,” he’d drawled in that lazy way of his.
Terian had been addressing the group as a whole as he said it, his amber eyes sharp, even as his voice pitched into a near-patois, making me wonder again where he came from originally, and who had raised him. If he’d been raised by much older seers, seers who grew up with the older forms of Prexci and its less-formal variations, where pronunciations and one-to-one definitions never quite translated over into the modern forms of the seer tongue, it might explain some of his stranger speech patterns.
I hadn’t managed to get any of that information out of Terian himself, however.
The seer wouldn’t even tell me his physical age, much less anything about his childhood, or even which part of the world into which he’d originally been born.
The few times I ventured to ask anything personal, Terian managed to turn it back around on me... as well as to turn it into a game, one that usually involved us fucking by the end of it, and Terian making power-plays over my light.
“I want brother Quay working directly for me from now on,” Terian added, keeping his hands off me physically, but coiling his light overtly into mine as he spoke the words, in a way that none of them could fail to miss.
Terian did the latter without shielding the interaction in any way, highlighting aspects of my light that no one in the construct had been privy to prior to that time. Even the seers in my pod that I’d exchanged sex with had never seen so much of me before.
In the process, Terian overtly sexualized me, too, in several, overlapping ways... partly by making it clear that he’d been intimate with my light already, but also by showing the group his interest in those more vulnerable areas of my aleimi, the ones that I really only showed my longer-term sexual partners. Terian both claimed those publicly and displayed them so the other seers would be turned on by them.
Really, I might as well have been standing there naked.
It was worse than being naked, really.
It might have been even more degrading if I hadn’t felt that flicker of humor in the other’s light, coupled with a significantly less humorous flare of possessiveness.
Terian might have wanted the others to become aroused by his new playmate, but clearly, the underlying message was, “don’t touch.”
I couldn’t help wondering what Terian might do, if one of them got tempted to disobey that command.
“...Brother Quay has qualities of light I require for
my own purposes,” Terian added with a faint smile at me. “I need him working directly under me...” I flinched at the double entendre there, too, but Terian scarcely paused. “...as well as my infiltration unit on the ground. So I’d like him outside the normal chain of command for this, if only for reasons of security.”
Pausing, he’d added,
“...I hope no one here objects?”
Terian finally looked directly at Varlan with those words.
The whole interaction between Terian and Varlan during the exchange struck me as strange, even apart from the more obvious weirdness of being claimed publicly as a personal fuck-toy by one of the highest ranked seers in the Org.
I could feel some deeper undercurrent going on with Terian and Varlan around this op, too, one that might or might not have had anything to do with me. Either way, both of them were too highly ranked for me to ascertain the undercurrent’s meaning. I couldn’t decide if Terian’s behavior during that announcement had been crafted to connote respect to the older seer––perhaps even an apology for stealing the highest-ranked second-tier from Varlan’s pod––or if Terian had conducted himself that way as a means of putting Varlan in his place.
From the small amount I knew of Terian, I suspected the latter.
It embarrassed me slightly, that I couldn’t see at those higher levels well enough to know for certain. It also made me wonder, again, what I thought I was doing with Terian, given the extent to which the other seer outmatched me.
The whole dynamic made me nervous, truthfully, in terms of the possible implications for my own career within the Org... but I found I was growing more attached to Terian here, out in the field, rather than less. I already knew I had no intention of halting the progress of this... whatever this was... and, anyway, given Terian’s words on the subject, I doubted very much that I had much choice in the matter anyway.
Terian had said he’d kill me, if I tried to leave.
On the other hand, I didn’t know how meaningful those words were, in terms of a confession of commitment from the other seer, either. I figured Terian would likely tire of me long before I felt the same, but I also felt more or less powerless to try and control my reactions to the other male’s light, regardless of what I did with my body. I found my light pulling on Terian’s more with each passing day, not less, even apart from the sex.
Allie's War Early Years Page 33
