Revik couldn’t help thinking that wasn’t all the heat.
“Your guy, he’s reliable?” Revik said, switching to Russian.
The man flinched again, then smiled. He answered in the same language.
“He’s good,” he assured Revik. “He claims he’s got a line on a big shipment. Three times what you got in that piss-ant village.”
“I thought you didn’t know who I was,” Revik said.
The man gave him a sideways smile, probably meant to be coy.
“News travels fast,” he said. “This is expensive merchandise. The market is getting bigger too. Lots of Americans now. Chinese, too.”
Revik wasn’t interested in that though. The man wasn’t telling him anything he didn’t already know.
“Age range?” he said.
“Kids, he says.” Looking Revik over, as if it only then occurred to him that he might not be human, he frowned. “Everybody wants kids. Little girls. They think they are easier to train.” The man smirked. “Easier to sell, too… and not only to militaries.”
“How old?”
The man gave him a puzzled look, his flat eyes squinting. “Kids. You know… they look like kids. With glow eyes, you don’t know, but they look little. Maybe five or six. So for Sarks maybe a little older. Maybe eight or ten.”
When Revik didn’t answer, the man shrugged, taking a drink of the warm beer.
“He says the supplier raided a school in Laos. They bring them in through Bangladesh. Then Burma. There is big competition now. Everyone want in the trade… a lot of money.”
Revik nodded, taking a sip of his own beer and grimacing a little.
“How long?” he said. “How many days?”
The man shook his head. “He won’t come through Saigon––”
“I don’t want him to come through Saigon,” Revik growled, staring at him. “How many days before we can intercept?”
“How close you need them to be?”
“I don’t have a limit,” Revik said. “I just need advance warning, so I can arrange for transport. How close do they plan to get?”
The man’s light blue eyes relaxed.
He nodded, once.
“He says to tell you he’ll be at Phan Rang Air Base. One week. You’ll have to intercept before that… or Americans will take them.” He grunted, sliding off his barstool and looking down at Revik where he sat. “He says to bring the money. You won’t be disappointed. Lots of pretty little girls in this one, he says.”
Revik felt his jaw harden.
He looked at the human, and fought the overwhelming desire to push the man into eating a bullet from his own gun. Suppressing the impulse, he only looked away, refusing to comment as the man grinned at him stupidly.
“We won’t meet in person like this again,” Revik said, giving the human a dark look. “Give the exact map coordinates for the meet to the concierge at the Lotus Flower Hotel when you have them… along with a time.”
The human looked puzzled, but only nodded.
Scowling at the man’s back as the Russian made his way to the door, walking with those strange, overly-wide strides adopted by a lot of male humans, Revik wondered if he should kill him anyway. If any seers were nearby, the guy was a walking billboard for what Revik was doing, which wouldn’t exactly go over well if any kneelers ran across him.
He'd kill him after the product changed hands.
For now, he couldn’t afford to screw up the sale.
A voice rose in his mind, even as he thought it.
Do not worry, beloved brother, the familiar voice murmured. Humans will not control this trade for much longer.
Revik grunted.
Lifting his glass, he stared at his reflection in the tarnished mirror on the back of the bar as he took a sip of beer.
They’d better not, he sent back after a beat. Or I’m seriously fucking up on the job you sent me here to do.
Galaith smiled in the spaces behind Revik’s eyes.
I have little doubt you are excelling in that job in all respects, my friend. I know for a fact you are, for I cannot help but hear news of your doings through the network.
Revik nodded, appreciating the complimentary words.
Even so, he couldn’t help venting some of his anger at the situation on the ground, now that he had a sympathetic ear.
These people are dogshit, he muttered in his boss’s mind. Even for humans. We should line them all up against a wall and just rid the world of them when we’re done. Just shoot them. Or light them on fire, if we don’t want to waste the bullets.
Galaith chuckled.
When his voice rose again, it was softer than Revik’s.
This is why I send you for these tasks, brother, the other male assured him. You are able to do the difficult thing in the moment… and the right thing, once that moment has passed.
Revik grunted again.
Even so, satisfaction infused his light as he stared at his own angular face in the bar’s mirror. He knew his boss well enough to know he’d just been given permission.
It couldn’t happen right away, of course.
They needed this network for at least eight or nine more months.
But eventually, that sweaty, smiling fuck who joked about raping baby seers with a big grin on his alcohol-soaked face would see some modicum of justice.
He was the ghost after all.
What good was a ghost without a good ghost story?
Revik might not be able to stop the slave trade in young seers. He might not be able to save all of the babies who had already been caught up in it. He might not be able to even slow that trade down, now that humans were starting to realize the commercial potential of seers, and not only in terms of their military needs.
But he could save some of them.
He could offer some of them freedom, if only by pulling them into the Org’s protective folds while they were still young enough to not be damaged too badly.
He might not be able to punish all of the humans who facilitated this sadistic trade either, much less all of those who profited off his brothers and sisters’ flesh and blood––who raped them with impunity, who joked about it and got off on it and slept soundly in their beds at night without a thought to the lives they’d ruined or the hearts they’d broken.
He might not be able to fix any of it, really.
He certainly couldn’t force them to understand what they’d done. One could not train an animal in empathy.
One could not grant a soul where none existed.
Yet, he could still get some small satisfaction that at least a few of these sociopathic worms would come to their ends by a bullet from his gun.
He could be their ghost, their angel of death, in the small corners of the world he touched.
For now, that was all he had.
For now, anyway, that would have to be enough.
Three
Kali
SHE WATCHED HIM, eyes riveted to the way he moved, the confident, almost heavy gait that still managed to be strangely feline.
He’d only just entered at the back of the auditorium, and already she nearly lost him in the crowd.
She might have missed him altogether if her light hadn’t pinged her from very high up––much higher up than she normally felt her aleimi in a regular scan.
Now she had him, though.
Now she couldn’t make herself look away.
A faint sheen of sweat covered his face and neck, as it did pretty much everyone else in the room, herself included, despite how hard the fans worked in grating, circular motions over their heads.
Kali had been looking for him for months… years.
It was strange to be finally faced with him.
It was strange to see him as a physical reality, not as light or a mirage of presence in her mind, in the Barrier, or in her dreams.
It was also disconcerting. She was one of the few people alive who knew what he truly was, underneath that expressionless mask.
He looked and felt young to her still, despite what his life had encompassed already.
He was young, from Kali’s perspective, although she knew he might not feel it, nor would he appreciate her pointing out that fact to his face. Like most male seers, he was likely sensitive about his age.
They all were, it seemed, when it came to the opposite sex.
Male seers never seemed to get their stride with sexual confidence until they’d hit the two or three hundred mark. Despite who he was, Kali doubted he would be any different.
She had to remind herself that the reality of being a living animal in this world would change much of the light aspects she saw of him in the Barrier. All creatures were changed by the process of life. Beings of infinity above, of wisdom and perspective… their reality on the ground was always more complex, more messy, more contradictory, more confused.
For the same reason, she couldn’t assume she knew him down here, simply because she knew him up there.
She used her sight to memorize every line of him, every taste of his presence, every structure in his light she could map and touch. She needed as much detail of who he was as could reasonably be obtained… at least without him noticing her looking.
If nothing else, she needed it to track him, in the event he bolted again, before she got up the nerve to approach him.
She knew the Rooks protected him closely.
Galaith, their leader, held him closer still.
She knew the young infiltrator was comfortable with violence––more comfortable than most seers, even infiltrators. She’d additionally been warned he was paranoid.
From her scans, she also suspected he was a drug addict.
At roughly eighty years old, he had reached most of his adult height, but not all of it. Already he was tall, though, like his father. He was tall even for a seer.
She guessed him at perhaps 6’5” or 6’6”, utilizing human measurements.
She guessed his full adult height would probably top out at 6’7”, if not 6’8”.
Despite her perception of his light, he looked old for his age––physically, that is. Perhaps it had been the content of those eighty-odd years, but his face had a harder cast to it than most seers his age, or even those who’d lived twice as long.
To the humans, he would look perhaps thirty.
Not older than thirty-five.
Not younger than twenty-seven or twenty-eight.
His straight, raven-black hair hung down in a ragged line, partly in his eyes now.
Those same eyes shone in the dingy overhead lights as he continued to case the room, his irises an indiscriminate pale, one almost completely devoid of color. The long hair fit the style of the current human fashion, but he was relatively clean-shaven compared to many of the male humans in his rough age-bracket, wearing only a few days’ shadow versus the full-fledged beards worn by many of his contemporaries.
Since he was blending with and passing as human, however, it didn’t surprise her that he chose to let his hair grow out.
Even so, she couldn’t help noticing that, on him at least, the longer hair managed to make him look more warlike than the scraggly, softer look of the human “hippie” contingent. Part of that might have been the lack of facial hair, and the hard, sharp planes of his face without anything to soften those lines, but Kali suspected that wasn’t all of it.
In the same way, the longer hair somehow made him appear more seer than not.
He wasn’t a handsome man, really.
His features fit together too inharmoniously for that.
His large eyes stared, lamp-like from that tanned skin above high cheekbones and a not-small nose. His narrow mouth formed a firm line above an even more firm and distinctive jaw, and there was a sharpness to his eyes that made him more intimidating than beautiful.
He definitely wasn’t as pretty as a lot of her brothers, as seer males were relatively famous for their symmetrical features and handsome faces.
He was attractive though, in his way.
He was also striking––even difficult to look away from.
The strange silver lights Kali could see obscuring and darkening his aleimi took away from that attractiveness for her, but she knew the intensity of those same lights would undoubtedly have the opposite effect on others.
Even now, she saw the eyes of human females noticing him.
A European reporter did a double-take on his face and then his lean, broad-shouldered body, measuring him with an openly appraising stare. Without seeming to know she’d done it, she wet her lips as she continued to look at him, her pupils dilating as she flickered her gaze over him in his worn jeans and leather belt. The thin, dark green T-shirt he wore stuck to the lean muscles of his chest with sweat, making a dark mark from his neckline to about his sternum.
He wore a jacket, too, despite the suffocating heat, a thin leather sheath which told Kali he had at least one gun strapped to his side, if not more than one.
For his part, he barely seemed to notice the reporter.
Kali saw him return the woman’s appraisal in a furtive kind of rote, staring briefly at her bare legs and noting the lack of a bra before he went back to taking the measurements of the room. As his mind returned to work, he slid back into the blank, work-face mask of a trained infiltrator.
That mask was particularly still on him, Kali noticed, particularly for one of his age.
If not for the tell-tale markers in his light, she would have thought him to be much older than he was. It was not surprising Galaith treated him the same, giving him responsibilities far beyond his years.
Dehgoies Revik disappeared inside that mask, then back into the crowd, melting away from her view as he continued his ghost-like walk around the perimeter.
It unnerved her, even without her knowing precisely why he was there.
The year was 1974.
Nixon had just resigned as President of the United States, in the wake of one of the worst political scandals of the Twentieth Century, at least that didn’t result in out-and-out war. Back home, Kali’s adopted country of the United States was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the war in Southeast Asia ground on, seemingly without end, even though the United States had finally diminished their presence on the continent, preferring to throw money at the South Vietnamese army instead.
Standing at a press conference in downtown Saigon, in a basement meeting hall down the street from the famous Caravelle Hotel, Kali felt old suddenly, in a way she hadn’t felt in a very long time.
She’d finally found him.
The man who would be her unborn daughter’s mate.
Even with everything she knew, Kali found the thought chilling.
HE WENT by the name Revik now.
Dehgoies Revik, which meant he came from one of the older, more well-connected clans in the Himalayas. Those clans, being some of the first to immigrate into China and India from the caves of the Pamir, generally held themselves as having “higher blood” than those who came after.
In typical, Old World, traditional seer naming protocol, his given name, Revik, came after his family name of Dehgoies.
Kali knew Revik had nothing but contempt for those designations, and for the family to whom he was attached by blood. Like most Rooks, he held those blood and clan designations to be corrupt, archaic, out-of-touch… oppressive to seer culture as a whole.
He hadn’t stepped foot in Seertown in at least thirty years.
Of course, given who he was, that was hardly surprising.
Kali did wonder if that was Revik’s own decision, however, or if he’d been ordered to stay away by Galaith. She supposed it didn’t matter. Whether he had been forbidden to go there or simply chose not to return for his own reasons, Revik had been more or less disowned by his high-status, “pure blood” clan.
It mattered little, given where Revik’s loyalty lay these days.
The group of seers who referred to themselves as “The Org”––but that every other se
er on the planet called “The Rooks”––arranged itself more as a series of combat units than a civilian hierarchy. Clan status didn’t factor into their structure at all.
It was a sort of irony that, in this, the Rooks were more democratic than their more peaceful brothers and sisters in the north. While the hierarchy of the Rooks was no less rigid than the clan hierarchies of old-school seers, it did have the benefit of not being based on ancient aristocracies, or delusions of blood “purity.”
While most Rooks called Revik by his family name of Dehgoies, they did so more as a formality within that military structure, not in any deference to where Dehgoies was from, much less who his family happened to be.
The Org fancied itself a military organization, first and foremost.
For the same reason, it adopted those forms of address and affection common to military hierarchies in the West, which may have been part of that preference to call him by his family name instead of Revik.
Part of it was Dehgoies himself, Kali suspected.
That military bent of the Org suited both his personality and his background.
Knowing him, he also likely didn’t want anyone getting much closer than the more formal version of his name implied.
Kali spent some time researching him before she came here, in the hopes it might help her talk to him once she arrived.
She researched his family, too.
The immediate, biological parents of Deghoies Revik were dead.
Dehgoies Revik had since been adopted by a cousin of his father––as in his real father––as well as that cousin’s non-bonded mate and their other two children, Whelen and Golire. The adoption occurred formally, through the clan families themselves.
Kali knew that meant the Council itself had likely been involved.
Based on the records she’d seen, they’d likely intervened directly, possibly even pushing the adoption on the father’s cousin in the first place. Kali could think of a number of reasons Vash and the other elders might have done that, including to clean up Dehgoies Revik’s clan affiliation issues, and (ostensibly, at least), to give him a new start.
Revik Page 3
