Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine

by Andrijeski, JC

  The view I gazed at wasn’t real, of course.

  Not this time.

  Well, it was real…essentially…but I wasn’t looking at it from the top of the high-end apartment building, like I had been before. Rather, the view was being projected into the space around us via some virtual hook-up of Dante and Vik’s.

  It was easy to forget that as I watched the sun sink closer to the horizon.

  The hole in the far enclave wall still smoked in the distance.

  I could smell the smoke in fleeting whiffs carried to the rooftop by a humid wind, along with the echoing sound of occasional bursts of automatic gunfire. The red-hued sun reflected on the shimmer of the river and I could see its bouncing glare off the tips of buildings, some of those the holy Wats situated in the oldest part of the city.

  Clouds gathered at the distant edges of that horizon too, tinted pink and red and orange with a darker blue in the background.

  I couldn’t see any stars straight ahead of me yet, but if this were a real view, they’d be starting to appear in just a few minutes if I just looked over my shoulder.

  A stray thought flickered through my mind.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant thought…but it was unwelcome right then.

  I remembered Revik and I sitting on a different roof, in a different city on the other side of the world, back when airplanes still passed overhead and the neon of the city buildings and people passing in crowds on the street below had their own form of civilized beauty. We’d been lounging in the roof hot tub a few days after our wedding ceremony at that restaurant in Central Park, discussing having a honeymoon on the beach.

  Revik had tasked me with finding us a place.

  He brought it up again in San Francisco, right before we went live on that op to extract List humans out of Jaden’s house by Golden Gate Park.

  Both times, Revik teased me that it would be my job to choose our honeymoon spot since he staked out that cabin in the Himalayas. Garensche later joked that he fully intended to come with us, since he’d been snubbed for the wedding itself.

  The thought of Gar closed my throat, too.

  He’d joked about that wedding a lot, but I knew missing it really bothered him.

  And yeah, I had, too…picked out a spot, I mean. More or less.

  Fiji.

  I had no idea why I wanted us to go to Fiji except it came with the best pictures in my head. Whether I’d made those pictures up wholesale or they came from some subconscious memory from the feeds back from when I’d been a kid, I had no idea.

  I just got pictures of turquoise blue water, grass huts and white sandy beaches.

  I had no idea if Fiji even existed anymore. That rash of tsunamis in the Pacific really pissed on my parade.

  Even our talking about it felt a million miles away now.

  Forcing my mind back to the present, I turned to look at the seer with whom I shared the virtual space. Studying his amber eyes, I refolded my arms across my chest.

  “You’re sure?” I asked him. “You wouldn’t lie to me about this…would you, Feigran?”

  His eyebrows merged together in a puzzled stare.

  That stare didn’t appear to be focused on me, of course.

  Instead it focused somewhere about a hundred yards past me…or maybe a thousand.

  It could be a million, knowing Feigran.

  He sat on the floor, his thin body huddled around a large drawing pad surrounded in a row of charcoal sticks and pens arranged in some precise manner that only Feigran understood.

  It clearly was a kind of order, though. I could sense that order, even amidst the randomness. Focusing back on Feigran himself, I noted the visible outline of his ribs under his open pajama top. Taking in the thinness of his pale skin, the darker, almost reddish nipple and hairless chest, I winced, feeling invasive for staring in spite of myself.

  The reaction wasn’t to his body, but to what I’d walked in on when I came down here.

  Apparently the move had “upset” Feigran.

  Lately, Varlan had taken to soothing Feigran’s emotional ups and downs, utilizing methods that had worked on him back when Galaith had been the fractured seer’s keeper.

  Primarily that occurred through sexual gratification, I was learning.

  Although affection was a part of that, too, I guess.

  And yeah, it worked…better than anything we’d tried on him, for sure…but it still made me feel kind of gross. Feigran was so childlike and dissociated in some ways I struggled not to see Varlan as taking advantage of the half-crazy seer. At the very least, it felt closer to conditioned abuse than anything my mind could call truly consensual.

  Even so, Varlan had been matter-of-fact about it.

  He claimed Galaith had been managing Feigran in such a way for decades, that it was how Feigran had been conditioned to find comfort.

  I knew Varlan wasn’t doing it to hurt Feigran, but yeah…eww.

  So when I glimpsed the two of them together through the portal window earlier, I’d given Revik a disbelieving look that shifted into something closer to anger. Revik hadn’t looked all that happy about it, either, but he only shrugged, telling me bluntly,

  “He asked for him.”

  I knew he meant Feigran asked for Varlan, but it didn’t help my reaction much.

  That one glimpse of Varlan getting blown by Feigran, stroking the seer’s long red-brown hair as he got off, would probably be burned into my retinas forever.

  Still, there wasn’t a lot I could say.

  Long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, black ink pen…long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, blue ink pen, orange crayon…long piece of charcoal, green ink pen, yellow crayon, black crayon…

  It went on like that, fanned out in front of him in an impressively symmetrical half-moon pattern that he’d spent a good two hours arranging, according to Balidor. He’d started the instant the construct tank had been locked down onto the bed of the armored truck.

  When he’d finished with it, he’d asked for Varlan.

  They’d offered him food, sims, but he hadn’t wanted those.

  He’d wanted Varlan.

  I knew Cass was in here, too, somewhere. They’d found a way to split the construct on the inside of the tank, although they still shared the same overarching Barrier space. We only had room for one tank on this ride, so we couldn’t separate them totally, but we could keep them from interacting.

  For this interview, Revik took the further precaution of knocking Cass out.

  I’d already made a mental note to have someone else knock her out next time.

  I knew he wouldn’t kill her on purpose.

  Well, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t.

  Since we hadn’t been able to use Cass to fix Lily’s light, it was getting harder to find reasons to keep her alive, though. Whatever I’d hoped in that regard, meaning in using the Four to help my daughter, that hope turned out to be nothing more than wishful thinking. Even after multiple tries with our highest-ranked infiltrators, we couldn’t do jack shit.

  Lily’s light remained broken. So did Revik’s.

  So yeah, strictly speaking, we didn’t need Cass.

  Maybe that was another reason I didn’t fully trust Revik with her. Cass not only hurt our daughter by giving Lily to Menlim, she’d been unable to fix her, too. But it was more than that, and I knew it. Even before our experiments with Cass and Feigran’s aleimi, I knew the part of Revik that might kill Cass “on accident” wasn’t anywhere near as rational as the part of him that wanted to help our daughter. He could barely stand to look at her…I could feel that, too.

  And yeah, it was difficult to blame him.

  Pushing that from my mind with a sigh, I looked back at Feigran.

  His drawing pad lay open below my eyes now, apparently lying on a stretch of white cement that rimmed the swimming pool housed on the roof of the apartment complex. The complex itself was the same one we’d been using as our headquarters. In real life it stood
just northwest of Silom, what used to be Bangkok’s business district.

  Feigran had his bare leg dunked in that same pool, a pale white with dark-red hairs. As soon as the projection appeared around him, he’d happily hiked up his pajama leg and stuck his leg and foot in the blue water.

  He swished that same leg around periodically, a smile ghosting his sculpted lips.

  He’d dunked his hair carefully in the water at one point too, squeezing it out even more carefully, presumably so he wouldn’t get water stains on his drawing.

  The illusion was compelling, for sure…down to the wind ruffling the top few pages of Feigran’s drawing pad so that he had to smack them down with his fingers and palm to keep them from ruining the charcoal lines as he drew.

  In truth, however, I wasn’t even in the tank…much less lounging with Feigran by a crystal blue swimming pool and looking at a smoke-filled, late afternoon sky over a post-apocalyptic Bangkok. I couldn’t be in the tank for real. My light couldn’t be cut off from Revik's or my daughter’s.

  So we did this.

  “I would not lie,” Feigran said presently. He held the paper down on his pad, swishing his foot in the pool thoughtfully. “Do you think I would lie to you, sister? Even now?”

  I glanced at the VR reading, feeling it shift as he thought about something.

  I couldn’t really feel Feigran’s thoughts or feelings, of course, but Vik and Dante found a way to translate the Barrier signatures so I could glimpse meanings here and there. It didn’t work for more subtle stuff, but it was pretty straightforward when the thoughts themselves were.

  This time, the thought was crystal clear.

  Feigran was hoping I would offer him a drink.

  I smiled. “Alcohol doesn’t generally do you any favors, Fig.”

  “But it would be nice up here…so nice. For the pool…”

  I nodded noncommittally. “I understand. It’s still not a good idea, brother.”

  “How about a slushy drink?” He lowered his voice to a mutter. “Fire water better…but slushy is good. Can pretend it is sunlight. Boats and pretty skirts…light wind…”

  “Not right now. And no,” I added, answering him belatedly. “I don’t think you’d lie to me. Not on purpose. But you might do it on accident.”

  Grunting, Feigran focused back down on his drawing.

  I couldn’t tell if the grunt was about my refusal to get him a drink or if it related to the second thing I’d said.

  He muttered to himself as he sketched on the open sheet of paper, still holding it in place with his open palm and now the foot of his that wasn’t dunked in the pool. I strained to make out his words above the sound of the virtual recording of wind.

  “He tried to find out…” he muttered. “He tried, beloved sister…he tried…yes he did. Most diligently he did…over and over and over…”

  In some respects, Feigran hadn’t changed much since we’d last held him in New York.

  In others, he was significantly different.

  A lot of the latter remained nebulous to me, however…at least in terms of what I could describe with words. His light was different. Really different at times. It also struck me as somewhat less broken and scattered than I remembered from the hotel in New York. I strained to hear him as his voice grew lower, using the virtual translator.

  “He tried to find out,” Feigran repeated. “…He could not. Many many secrets inside the dark place. He is persistent…he tried. Nibbles and bites. Big things. Little things. Details. Not details. Bigger things…bigger. They live underground. In the dirt, sister, where he won’t go…” He shook his head, clicking. “He is sneaky. Very sneaky…but so is father. It is like chess, yes? Like chess. Father likes to win…”

  Feigran clicked more softly.

  I heard a note of regret there that time, but I may have imagined that, too.

  I’d always struggled discerning Feigran’s use of pronouns. I knew he would use the same pronoun to refer to totally different people even within the same sentence. It made it really hard to follow a lot of what he said. I always felt like I was guessing, maybe even twisting things so that it would fit into a larger picture I could live with.

  Even so, his last comment caused me to grunt. I also made a concessionary gesture in seer sign language.

  Shadow is sneaky. Check.

  Pretty hard to argue with that. It didn’t really help me clarify the rest of it, though. The pronoun thing could really be frustrating as hell.

  “You mean Terian, right?” I clarified. “You’re talking about Terian trying to find out what Shadow was up to when you worked for him. When Terry worked for him, I mean…”

  “Yes, yes…of course…that is always true sister. Always. Even before…”

  I was reasonably sure that the “dark place” referred to being inside Menlim’s construct. The underground thing was troubling, though. Given the context, it also made me wonder if Feigran had done the pronoun switching thing mid-sentence again.

  The “where he won’t go” part might have been a reference to Revik.

  Revik was claustrophobic as hell. If Shadow had something important, something secret he didn’t want Revik to find, he’d definitely put it underground.

  Then again, knowing Terian, the underground reference could be purely metaphorical.

  “Feigran,” I said, clearing my throat. “Can we go back to the first thing you told me? About the person Menlim has here. Meaning with us…inside our leadership team.” At his blank look, I gritted my teeth. “The spy. Did Terry…Terian…find anything at all out about this person? Gender? How old they were? How high up they are in our structure?”

  “No.”

  I bit back frustration, but kept my voice patient. “You’re sure?”

  “Sure? Yes, yes…of course. Of course I’m sure.” Feigran gave me a direct look, his amber eyes strangely clear in those brief seconds. “…He is me, you know,” he told me confidentially. “Terian. He is me, sister. A part of me…we are the same.”

  I nodded, fighting an absurd impulse to laugh.

  I forced my face still, exhaling as I nodded again, politely.

  “I see,” I said. “Thank you for clarifying that, brother.”

  “Of course. Of course…happy to help, my beautiful sister. Always.”

  I might have wanted to laugh again, but I found myself turning over his words instead.

  It was easy to forget, truthfully…that Terian really was Feigran and Feigran was Terian. Not figuratively, but literally. Then again, I couldn’t be sure how much of “Terian” remained inside Feigran since we’d cut him off from the rest of his bodies by putting him in the tank.

  On the outside, meaning outside of the tank, it looked like all of those bodies died.

  The Terian body died right in front of me.

  Watching Feigran go back to drawing, I fought another wave of frustration.

  If Loki was telling me the truth, then by tomorrow at the latest, I’d have people in the field again, hunting Menlim’s Network. Chandre would follow shortly.

  Neither thing reassured me, though.

  I knew Revik and Wreg were right. None of this was happening fast enough. It wouldn’t be fast enough, even if Loki and Chandre managed to find and acquire their targets right off, sans complications…which was unlikely in the extreme.

  I rarely spoke that thought aloud though, even to Revik.

  Anyway, I knew he agreed with me. What would have been the point?

  Thinking about Wreg’s comments earlier that day, I bit my lip.

  Tarsi, Wreg, Revik, Yumi and ‘Dori had been punting around possible network models for months now, in the hopes they might dismantle part of it remotely if we managed to destabilize a few pillars. The problem was, the damned thing seemed to look different depending on who studied it. It was like the elephant and the ten blind men. One person thought it was a rope, another a tree, another a wall, another a fan…they were all probably partly right but mostly wrong and none of
it added up to a coherent picture.

  Revik being disconnected from that Network both helped and hurt us, I suspected.

  Worse than any of that, if Feigran was right…if he wasn’t just fucking with us or planting information for Shadow…we had a mole. A real one.

  Of course, we’d long suspected that. Balidor brought the possibility up within minutes of Dorje murdering Vash right in front of us. The problem was, whoever it was, it was probably someone I cared about. It was probably a friend of mine. Or a friend of Revik’s.

  Definitely someone we trusted.

  Maybe someone we loved.

  Which just…sucked.

  It flat-out sucked, even without knowing the specifics.

  For awhile, Revik and I told ourselves the mole might be him. Meaning, we speculated that Menlim might have found some way to pull intelligence off Revik’s own light…or even Wreg’s or Jorag’s or one of the other ex-rebel seers. Which also sucked, yes, but sucked significantly less than finding out one of our friends was deliberately betraying us.

  “He has checked the information I provided, yes? Your ex-lover?” Feigran managed to blink those amber eyes of his at me innocently. “He has seen that this information checks out? That the intelligence is good?”

  I winced at his reference to Balidor.

  I was positive Revik liked it even less than I did, from where he listened on the other side of that glass. Assuming he was even over there.

  I’m here, Revik sent.

  I clicked a little under my breath. Even so, a troubled jab rippled my light. Even if Revik was partly joking, his answer had been curt. Unnecessarily curt, given that this was Feigran and we all knew he was batshit crazy.

  Revik had been acting pretty weird lately, though. More than usual, that is.

  Of course, I knew why…more or less…but his mood swings still made me nervous. I knew things would get worse in the coming months, not better. Increasingly I was starting to wonder if the two of us would be able to handle it, either individually or together.

  But yeah, I didn’t want to think about that, either.

  As it was, lately I found myself fielding a lot of questions about Revik’s erratic behavior from other people when they couldn’t get straight answers out of him. I also found myself defending him, more often than not. To Wreg. Jon. Loki. Chinja.