Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  I will pass that on. Oh! And tell Brother Balidor he is missed here, Feigran added. Very very missed. Most aggrievedly and jealously missed. He will understand what I mean.

  I frowned in puzzlement. I was about to ask, but Feigran’s presence was already fading from around me like smoke. Realizing I couldn’t pull him back, I let the question go.

  When my eyes clicked back into focus, I felt Balidor looking at me and turned.

  “Who was that?” He nudged my shoulder, his gray eyes curious. “Someone from the ship?”

  Shaking my head at him subtly, but not really in a no.

  Thinking about Feigran then, I snorted, rolling my eyes.

  “Trust me,” I said, letting out a half-laugh. “You don’t want to know.”

  After a pause, Balidor let it go, turning back to face the rising sun.

  “I suspect you’re right,” he murmured diplomatically.

  I considered the message Feigran told me to pass on, frowning faintly as I turned over his words, and why they nagged at me on some level. Studying Balidor’s profile, I wondered who Feigran could have possibly meant. I knew Balidor and Yarli had broken up––months ago now, and not amicably from what I’d heard.

  Had they gotten back together? Was he dating someone else now?

  If so, who? And why the secrecy?

  Deciding there was no way I could pass on Feigran’s message without invading Balidor’s privacy more, I decided to let it go.

  Whoever missed ‘Dori so dreadfully, he or she would see him soon enough.

  We were still sitting there, shoulder to shoulder, not talking, when the first boat appeared on the horizon, bouncing over the waves as they rolled towards the Japanese shore.

  Seeing Tenzi crouched in the bow next to Illeg and Holo, holding binoculars to his eyes to look for us, I couldn’t help breaking out in a grin.

  6

  RECEPTION

  A LOT OF people waited for us when we landed. I saw them through the binoculars when we were still pretty far out.

  They clustered just outside the control tower of the small aircraft carrier some part of our team stole, likely from the Chinese military.

  Wherever they got it, the carrier had clearly seen more than one skirmish already. Burn and bullet holes marred the deck and control tower, along with a number of larger black marks likely from missiles. From the shape of some of those burn marks, it looked like they’d targeted helicopters or small planes once lashed to that part of the deck.

  As we got closer I could see less and less, just from the angle of our small boat compared to the larger ship. In the end, I couldn’t see anything at all but the steep wall of the hull as we pulled into the carrier’s shadow and out of the morning sun.

  As I climbed the ladder from the heavy rubber motor boat, I saw smoke streaks that blackened the gray-painted sides, along with view ports broken, and a crane that looked like it had once been on fire.

  Automatic weapons fire decorating a few sections of the outside walls, too.

  I knew I’d be slowest to climb the ladder, so I wanted to go last.

  Illeg followed behind me, despite my protests, but I heard the shouts when Balidor, then Wreg, Jon, Tenzi and Holo reached the top of the ship’s wall ahead of me.

  My leg was a bitch on the ladder, but I’d refused to let them pull me up with a stretcher, given that it was more of an inconvenience than a true handicap. Anyway, I could use my arms to compensate, I was just slow. It still beat sitting in the boat for another twenty or thirty minutes while they got all the equipment ready to pull me up.

  I heard voices raised in excited chatter as I made my way up over half the ship’s height after them. I heard Wreg’s booming voice, laughter. I even heard Balidor once or twice.

  When I finally got to the top, I admit, I hoped no one would make a fuss.

  As I poked my head over the side though, I met one pair of eyes first.

  Clear as crystal, they gazed only at me.

  He stood apart from the rest of the landing party, not talking to anyone, but not approaching the side where I was climbing up either.

  My breath caught, taking in his long form, his broad shoulders, his hair, which was longer than I’d ever seen it. His expression didn’t move, but he wasn’t avoiding looking at me, like he had by that wall outside the Forbidden City.

  His eyes never left my face.

  Swallowing, I fought back the pain that rose in my chest, and suddenly it hit me that everyone on the deck had gone silent.

  My eyes returned to our landing party.

  The joking and laughter and talking had stopped. They all stared at me.

  All of the people I saw wore windbreakers and heavier jackets, making me aware of the shock of cold air that ran through the thin dress I still wore, even three days later. Most of the faces I saw belonged to people I would have expected to see waiting out there to meet us. A few of them surprised me.

  My father for one––my biological father, that is.

  Uye stood there, more or less in front of the rest of the small crowd, only a few yards from Revik. I don’t know if it was the look on his face, his posture, a glimpse of his aleimi through my half-blind sight, or something else, but I knew he didn’t come out there just to wave and give everyone a hug.

  I also knew he was there, in some way, because of me.

  I’d forgotten they would all be here. I’d forgotten that Balidor called everyone back. Everyone but Tarsi, who’d taken Lily somewhere, and no one knew where.

  The thought to Lily closed my throat all over again.

  As I threw my leg over the side and put my bare foot on the deck, I again grew self-conscious about what I wore. I’d worn Wreg’s deck shoes down from the Russian helicopter when we jumped, letting Wreg do the real landing when we hit the ground.

  Wreg, being Wreg, landed practically at a walk, so my feet never even touched the ground.

  I’d tried wearing the deck shoes for a while after that, but they were so big, they not only gave me blisters, but I tripped over them more often than not. We looked for shoes for me a few times around the military base in North Korea, but we never found anything there either, so I ended up getting into the plane barefoot.

  It hadn’t seemed like a priority, honestly.

  So, yeah… I was still barefoot.

  Even as I thought it, I saw my father’s eyes shift down to my feet, right before he frowned.

  Before I could react to that, I sensed movement and turned without thinking about why, or who could have pulled my eyes so quickly.

  Revik was approaching me.

  His expression hadn’t changed.

  Straightening somewhat, I limped forward, moving away from the ladder and the ship’s wall so Illeg could climb up behind me.

  My eyes never left Revik as I did.

  I just stood there, watching him walk, lost briefly in his usual, feline grace, lost in his light, in his face, in the set expression of his mouth. He didn’t slow as he walked up to me, and once he loomed over me, I winced in spite of myself, unsure exactly what to expect.

  I had a brief image of him throwing me back over the side––

  When his arm wrapped around my waist.

  He yanked me to him, holding me against him in a hug.

  I sucked in a breath, startled into looking up.

  Before I could take in his expression, he lowered his mouth.

  That mouth found mine. He kissed me, cautiously at first.

  But only at first.

  He deepened the kiss. Then he kissed me harder, parting my lips with his, using his tongue. I found myself kissing him back, first almost without knowing what I was doing, then, when his light opened and coiled into mine, I gasped a sound that half-choked me. My light opened in response, maybe for the first time since he’d left me by that wall.

  Pain flooded my light, filling my chest, my throat.

  It blanked my mind entirely.

  His fingers tightened on my skin, right before
he yanked me harder against him.

  Again, my mind just kind of phased out. I wrapped my arms around him, gripping his long hair in my fingers and he half lifted me off the deck, winding his arm tighter around my waist before he kissed me again.

  His light was so open I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see anything else. His pain suffocated me, confusing my light, my body, igniting the telekinesis.

  Green light filled my eyes, whiting out the aircraft carrier, the sky, even his face.

  I don’t know how long the kiss lasted after that.

  I felt him wrapping into my light. I felt the purpose around it, the message behind that purpose, and I gripped him tighter, clutching his hair and neck.

  When we finally parted, I could only stare down at him.

  Pain suffused my light, confusion, relief, bewilderment, what might have been hope. For a long moment, I could only breathe, trying to think past it, to control my light. I couldn’t decide if I could relax into my own feelings, into what my light wanted. I couldn’t decide if I could let myself feel what was coming off Revik’s light––if I could let myself even see it as real.

  This didn’t feel like goodbye. Whatever this was, it didn’t feel like goodbye.

  He must have heard some part of that thought. He squeezed me tighter against him, fiercely that time, with a possessiveness that was overt.

  I gripped his hair in one hand, my other arm wrapped tightly around his neck and shoulders. My legs had wound around him somewhere in the past however-many minutes, and he supported my weight in both arms, holding me easily as he looked at my face.

  I looked down at him where he held me, and saw him studying my eyes, his glowing faintly with green-tinted light.

  Kissing his mouth, briefly that time, I squeezed him in an unconscious hug, tightening my arms and legs around him even more. I felt his breath catch as I squeezed his ribs.

  When he met my gaze that time, his narrow lips quirked in a faint, sideways smile.

  It was only then that I heard the laughter.

  Looking past his shoulder I saw every seer in the landing party watching us.

  Some, like Jon and Wreg, just smiled bemusedly, shaking their heads like they were mentally rolling their eyes. Uye, my father, watched with a complex array of emotions on his face, something like worry mixed with satisfaction, grief, what might have been regret.

  My biological mother, Kali, shocked me by being one of those laughing, joy and disbelief in her eyes, wiping away tears and laughing along with Illeg, Vikram, Holo, Poresh, Pima and Jasek, the List-1 seer I’d met in England.

  Dante stood near them, her face bright pink and looking like she’d rather be just about anywhere else. Her mother, Gina, watched us with open amusement, her ring-clad fingers stuffed in her pockets, her back hunched against the wind.

  I saw Maygar then, standing with my friend from art school, Angeline, one of his muscular arms wrapped around her shoulders. Sasquatch stood near them, along with Frankie, another friend from the tattoo parlor on Geary Street.

  I was still looking around, taking in faces, as Revik lowered me carefully down so that my bare feet once more touched the deck. He didn’t let go of me, gripping me tightly around the waist, his other hand holding mine tightly as he let me pull us towards the rest of them.

  I hadn’t yet reached them when they shocked the hell out of me again.

  Right as I was wiping my face, smiling at all of them––

  They burst into applause.

  It took me a few more minutes to realize they were clapping for us.

  It took me a few more to remember why.

  I knew they weren’t only clapping because we’d managed to finally do what everyone said couldn’t be done––dismantle the network of the Dreng. Even so, I knew that was probably a lot of it. Despite everything we’d lost, despite even the bombs falling on Beijing, the world felt lighter with that network gone.

  It felt a lot lighter.

  For the first time, I really let myself feel that.

  Instead of a break in the clouds, the sun shone down for real.

  We had no idea how long it would last. We had no idea if any of us would survive in the end, or how long it would take for Menlim and the Dreng to hit us back––but for now, the sun was shining again. We’d really broken it this time, in a way I couldn’t have imagined when we took down Galaith’s pyramid all those years ago.

  It was a lot longer before it hit me there was one person who wasn’t in that crowd.

  There was one face I didn’t see anywhere among the faces of my friends clapping for me and Revik under a South Pacific sun.

  Dalejem was no where to be seen.

  “DAUGHTER? MAY I have a word with you?”

  The voice jarred me, warming my cheeks before I’d even turned my head.

  I met those ocean-blue eyes, feeling strangely shy.

  Revik still had his arm around me, and his fingers wrapped around my waist. He’d been about to take me inside the ship, but now he turned towards the voice when I did, stiffening slightly before his hands on me tightened.

  I felt possessiveness there, but not only that. Reluctance mixed with caution in his light, along with a pulling, wanting, needing to have me alone.

  I felt him wanting to talk, I felt him wanting very badly to talk to me.

  The pulls coming off him made it hard to focus on the older male, who touched my arm on my other side.

  Uye, my biological father, seemed to feel the same thing.

  “I won’t need much of her time, son,” he said to Revik.

  I jumped a little at what he called Revik.

  A breath after, I found myself noting his tone of voice, what lay behind it.

  Something had definitely changed between them.

  His words hadn’t been overly polite in that way of stranger to stranger––or even in the especially awkward politeness of familial stranger to stranger. Rather, they had an element of exerting authority, but in a way that implied an understanding, as in something they had already discussed and worked out between them.

  I looked up at Revik, quirking an eyebrow in a silent question.

  I got a deadpan expression in response, but somehow felt him through his hands, arms and fingers, even then.

  What he conveyed was something along the lines of I have a lot to tell you, mixed with, Your father might want to explain some of it, as if he wasn’t sure himself.

  “…I do need her now,” Uye added, his voice slightly sterner.

  Revik released me at once.

  I still felt the reluctance there, but also a complete willingness to obey.

  I felt a sense of him hovering over me, too, an even deeper reluctance to leave me alone, even for a short time––even with Uye. That part felt more driven by his light, by separation pain, by compulsion, and I realized it was affecting me so much my heart was hammering in my chest just from standing near him.

  Revik seemed unsure if leaving altogether was what was being asked of him, or how close he could be while he waited for us to finish.

  If Uye felt any of that, no change showed in his face.

  My biological father only offered an arm to me, gesturing us towards an empty part of the flight deck.

  After a bare hesitation, I slid my arm into his and walked with him towards the bow, until we were along the rails adjacent to the carrier’s runway.

  I glanced back to see Revik standing by the railing a few dozen feet behind us, gazing out over the ocean. He was definitely out of earshot there, even without the wind, but I found it strangely comforting that I could see him.

  “I’m sorry to pull you away now,” Uye began.

  I turned back towards him, my hair whipping briefly across my face until I pushed it back, facing him. “It’s okay,” I told him.

  Somehow, just looking at him made my light soften.

  Remembering how I’d intended to bind him and my biological mother to Lily when I thought Revik was dead, I felt my throat close. I
couldn’t help but wonder at my own emotionality. I wondered if it was from Revik, from the Dreng network being gone, from knowing Lily was okay, or some combination of all those things.

  I honestly couldn’t tell, but it made it hard not to react to every tiny thing. My light was more open, more vulnerable-feeling than it had been in as long as I could remember.

  Maybe since I was a child.

  I fought to think about practical things, about what I had to wrap my head around at some point that day. All the conversations I’d had with Wreg, Jon and Balidor on the way here kept swirling in my mind, even as that reality hit me again.

  We all agreed we could expect to be hit, and soon.

  We agreed we needed to split up and regroup only in stages and probably after we’d all spent time operating as separate, fully-functioning military groups to cover more ground. We agreed Kali, Uye, Yumi and Maygar were the best choices to defend the bulk of the civilian group. They would need to find a safe place to hide, most likely––preferably one where they could get all or most of our people underground if another attack came.

  We knew they might be targeted separately with nukes, regardless of what the rest of us were doing, or if we had any luck tracking down either Menlim or Chandre.

  That was another thing I got briefed on during the flight to Tokyo––Chandre.

  I admit, it was more than I could really take in right then.

  She’d killed five seers. Five.

  I couldn’t believe five more of us were gone, given who we’d already lost.

  The loss of Neela hurt the most. We’d also lost Surli and Talei, along with Ike and Mara, who’d both been Adhipan. I could tell those last two hit Balidor hard, especially Mara.

  Neela hit Wreg hard, and I knew her loss would hit Revik hard, too. They’d known her for decades, since the first rebellion, before and during World War I.

  I was a little surprised at how upset Balidor seemed about Neela, too.

  None of us had known Talei well, the ex-SCARB seer from D.C.

  No one on the team had known Surli but me. I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea he was dead, either, but I also couldn’t say much about it right then, for a lot of reasons.