Vikram nodded, supporting her words.
“Yes,” he said. “We discussed this with the Sword prior to his infiltration of Shadow’s network. We considered Beijing’s presence on this map to be one more piece of evidence that Beijing was initially intended to be a quarantine city.”
“But why Denver, then?” Poresh said. “Why the airport?”
Frowning, Vikram looked at Dante, then at Poresh.
“Denver is also on the map,” he said, thinking that should have been obvious. “It spiked along with all of the others in this recent flare. It is possible these hotspots are a naturally-occurring phenomenon, that the cities were chosen to accommodate them, not the reverse. Some are right in the heart of cities, but a percentage are miles outside of them.”
“You think the bunkers coincide with the hot spots?” Balidor said, sharper.
Again, Vikram and Dante exchanged looks.
“It’s just a theory, Holmes,” Dante said, puzzled. “We won’t know for sure until we get someone on the ground to check. But it makes sense, right?”
Vikram nodded, once more agreeing with her words.
When he shifted his gaze back to Balidor, the Adhipan leader was looking between the two of them, as if noticing something between them, or perhaps seeing something in their lights.
Vikram cleared his throat.
“It could be Denver and Beijing were anomalies, of course,” he said. “…Or prototypes, perhaps. But if Shadow meant for those humans and seers in his quarantine cities to survive whatever is coming, it makes sense that the bunkers have something to do with that survival. It follows that the bunkers were built first, with the cities located near enough to be accessible. If they built the bunkers to coincide with these hotspots, it’s possible they have something to do with that survival too. Or a ‘next phase’ in this apocalypse plan of theirs.”
Balidor nodded, his eyes sharp as he followed Vikram’s train of thought.
“Yes,” the Adhipan leader said after a beat. “You might have something here. The Sword was very interested as to why Shadow changed his mind in regards to Beijing, given its strategic significance. He seemed to believe the incident with the Bridge, when she killed that Wvercian, was only a pretext for Shadow to renege on his alliance with the Lao Hu––possibly so he had a pretext to invade the Forbidden City and take direct control.”
“The Sword thought it was a deal he’d made with Ditrini originally, right?” Pagoj broke in from the infiltration side. “Some kind of quid pro quo?”
Glancing around, Pagoj aimed his words at all of them.
“The theory is, Ditrini brought over most of the Lao Hu’s top infiltrators to Shadow, with the promise he could control the Bridge. Shadow promised Ditrini the Forbidden City in exchange. Ditrini was to replace Voi Pai, something the Sword seemed to think Shadow would be in favor of. As for Ditrini’s motives, the Sword said it was a miracle Ditrini hadn’t attempted this already, given that endruk et dugra wasn’t super fond of powerful females. Voi Pai’s actions in regard to the Bridge would only have infuriated him more.”
Balidor was nodding. “It is a sound theory. Shadow did not have as many strong economic ties among the humans of Beijing. He could wait for the virus to kill off most of the resistance to an invasion, then bring his own people in to deal with the Lao Hu.”
“Which is what the Sword more or less did for him,” Delek muttered from the other side.
Vikram nodded, musing, “They then opened and reclaimed the underground structure they’d created in preparation for these events.” Still thinking, he asked Balidor, “Could Dante be right? Should we assume there is a structure of this kind in or near every quarantine city?”
Balidor also nodded thoughtfully, his jaw firm.
“It follows,” he said. “We will do what we can to verify on the ground, as Dante suggests. We may have to make do with a sample size only, given how many there are, and how stretched thin we are already… but it should be enough to give us a clear idea of the pattern.”
Balidor’s voice turned grim.
“These Myther armies, they also have their eyes on the quarantine cities. We should not assume these two things are unrelated.”
Exhaling, Balidor placed his hands on his hips, his eyes on Vikram’s.
“I suspect, given the haste with which the Mythers are moving on those cities, we should assume that reason is still approaching, despite the destruction of Shadow’s network. Whatever this is about, they have not given up on their end goals just yet.”
Vikram felt a shiver of apprehension go through his light at the other’s words.
As it did, he realized Balidor was right.
He could feel that rightness in his bones, in his very light. The urgency vibrating his aleimi struck him as animal in nature, like something he picked out of the very air.
With it came an utter certainty: whatever had been coming, it was still coming.
Whatever it was, it would be coming soon.
10
HARD TRUTHS
MY EYES JERKED open, aimed at a nothing, at pitch darkness.
I was panting, covered in sweat.
Pain burned my light, more than I could think past, more than I could breathe through. White-hot glass filaments of pain slid through veins in my aleimi, making my limbs ache, my tongue, my fingers, my throat, my bones.
It felt like being ripped slowly apart.
I couldn’t move.
For a long-feeling few seconds, I didn’t even try.
I felt his light around mine, both comforting and maddening. Comforting in that he wound it into me invasively, going as deep as my own light wanted––no, needed, like water to blinding, irrational thirst. Maddening in that it wasn’t enough, that it couldn’t be enough, not with where we were with things.
I understood now, what Revik had been trying to tell me.
I understood what he’d meant when he said we weren’t fully bonded, how we needed to proceed in stages, how some of those stages would hurt like hell.
After we’d eaten breakfast, we talked about doing just one session, just one turn of sharing memories, giving one another breaks in-between.
We talked about dipping our toes in.
We talked about starting slow.
We decided to go sequentially, which meant the memories would be Revik-heavy at the start, just because his timeline with me started a few decades earlier. The idea was to look at everything, at every piece of our memories of and about and with one another, whether we were fully aware of the other at the time or not.
We were going to start slow, but we didn’t.
We were just going to look at one thing, but we didn’t do that, either.
I don’t know what time it was exactly that we started.
Late morning sometime? Noon, at the very latest.
I was pretty sure that had been at least a full day ago now.
“Two days,” a voice murmured near me.
A warm, muscular arm wrapped around my waist and back, pulling me close. It hit me that we were both naked, but I didn’t remember taking off my clothes.
I didn’t remember seeing him take off his clothes, either.
“You still suck at estimating time, my love,” he murmured, softer still. Kissing my face, he pressed his into mine before looking at me. “At least where the Barrier is involved.”
I felt him study my expression. I felt caution bleed through his light, even as he tried to discern where I was now, how I was feeling about him, how I felt about all of it.
“We have to go back soon, Allie,” he murmured, kissing my cheek. “They’re asking for us.”
I nodded, not speaking.
Leaning half over me, he kissed my neck while I thought about the reality of his words, about the fact that I would have to be around other people soon. I’d have to act normal soon, have conversations, make decisions, be the leader.
I winced as he continued working his way down my neck, as the pain grew. My f
ingers wrapped around his arm, pulling it tighter against and around me.
“You hated me.” My words came out low, thick. Disbelief colored their lines. Disbelief colored my light. More than that, confusion lived there. I didn’t even know what I’d felt exactly, not until I spoke it aloud. “You really hated me.”
Pain whispered through his light, cloying, pulling on mine.
He held me tighter, warming me with his skin.
His chest pressed against mine, his weight.
Briefly, it made the pain unbearable, closing my throat.
“I didn’t know you, Allie,” he reminded me. He kissed my mouth, fingering my hair. “I didn’t know you at all. You were a child. The hate and resentment I felt had absolutely nothing to do with you.”
I turned my head, looking at him in the dark.
I couldn’t see him, even with him so close. The darkness in the room was almost complete. Even though I felt his breath against my neck, his lips, his tongue, I couldn’t see him.
It was driving me fucking crazy.
“Did I feel that?” I said. “Did I feel you hating me, the whole time I was growing up?”
Silence.
I couldn’t see him through the dark, but I felt the pain on his light worsen.
I felt him thinking about the question, trying to answer it.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Vash asked me that question once, and it made me feel like shit, to be honest. I think that’s when I first tried to pull myself out of it. I knew everything I felt, everything I projected on you was wrong. I knew it had nothing to do with you.”
“Was it really because Dalejem left you?” I continued to try and see him through the dark, even though there was no light to see him with. “That’s why you hated me? You blamed me for Dalejem leaving?”
Through my light, I saw him wipe his eyes with one hand. He shook his head.
His voice came out thick.
“Allie, I think it was everything and nothing. I blamed you for Dalejem. I blamed you for my being alone. I blamed you for my being an outcast. I had to be hated to keep you safe, so no one would look at me too closely. I hated you for how protected you were. How loved.”
He cleared his throat, and I felt another stab of pain leave his light, along with a shame so intense I found myself gripping his arms.
“Your parents loved you so much… your human ones. Your seer ones. When you got older, it got a lot less simple. I saw how hard it was for you. That’s when I realized what a bastard I’d been. It forced me to face the fact it was all in my head. It was all just a story, something I used to avoid feeling any of it.”
His fingers tightened in my hair, right before I felt his lips and tongue on my jaw. He kissed me to my ear, his voice dropping to a lower murmur.
“I felt worse when I realized why I aimed it at you,” he said. “Some part of me felt like you could take it. Some part of me believed you gave me permission. You burned it away. You just… I don’t know. It felt like you absolved me in some way.”
Shaking his head, he kissed my face again.
“…On some level, I never saw you as a child at all, Allie. That same part of me never treated you like one. I treated you more like Vash. Like a teacher.”
I thought about that.
I thought about what I’d felt on him.
I thought about that wanting to hit at something, anything. When I’d felt like that as a child, I aimed it at my father. I aimed it at Jon… and my grandmother.
I aimed it at the people I loved the most.
I aimed it at the people who made me feel safe.
Like Revik, I aimed it at the people who could take it.
“You protected me that day,” I said. “On the playground.”
His hand wrapped around mine, squeezing it, hard.
“Allie.” His voice grew rougher. “Allie, I loved you. I loved you from the moment I saw you. Before that, when I first felt your light, before you were even born. I felt like an outsider. I felt like you had everything, and I was on the outside, looking in. I felt invisible to you. I felt like the hired help. I didn’t want to be that to you. I didn’t want to always be on the outside, looking in, like some kind of fucking voyeur. I didn’t want to be your goddamned bodyguard. I didn’t want to be your fucking disciple, either.”
Feeling the pain behind that, the sincerity, something in my heart opened.
Even so, my mind didn’t stop turning over his words.
After I’d been thinking about them a few seconds longer, I frowned.
“But Kali already told you you’d be more than that to me.” I turned my head, trying to see him through that impenetrable dark. “She told you we’d know each other as adults, that we’d be close. She said you were reacting to her because you felt me… that you and I would have a future together. She implied we would be more than just friends.”
“I didn’t believe her.”
I turned, lost again inside the darkness of the room.
I still couldn’t see him.
“Why?” I said. “You knew she was a prescient. Why would she lie?”
He grunted, his voice growing deeper. “Why would she lie? You’re asking a lifelong infiltrator that question. Someone who spent his life manipulating people… and being manipulated by them. I can think of a few dozen reasons why she might lie. To convince me to give my life for yours. To make me more invested in keeping you safe. To convince me to risk things I might not otherwise risk in order to protect you. To keep me watchful, attentive, loyal as I looked out for you.”
He paused, stroking my arm.
His voice grew heavier.
“Allie, I was hated by every seer in Asia back then, and by most of those in the West. I couldn’t go to seer bars in Russia. I knew there was a good chance I wouldn’t get out of one alive. Even with how isolated I was, I got jumped more than once by someone who recognized me. I didn’t believe for a second the Council would ever let me anywhere near you as anything other than a hired gun. Your father all but threatened me, even when you were a baby. I showed you that, what he said to me––”
“I know.” Biting my lip, I gazed back up at the ceiling. “It’s just… it’s hard to feel that.” I turned, staring at him through the dark. “It feels familiar. Like I did know, on some level. I knew you were there. I remember that feeling. I remember it making me sad.”
I felt him wince, but his fingers didn’t pause in caressing my skin.
For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Biting my lip, I tried to see him, and couldn’t.
“Did you really hate Russia so much?” I said. “Your life there?”
Behind my eyes, I saw eagles wheeling in the sky, Revik wrapped in furs, snow-shoeing across powdery snow, his breath pluming between his lips. He had a dark beard. His hair was long, almost as long as it was now, and he gripped a rifle he’d propped on his shoulder.
On his other shoulder a brace of some kind of bird hung down his back.
Where he’d lived had been beautiful.
Beautiful, and desolate.
I wondered how I’d do, living like that.
“It was beautiful,” he said, kissing my palm. “I didn’t hate the place, Allie. It even provided comfort at times. I liked to hunt. I had animals I cared for, even.”
“Then why?”
“Why? Why was I so unhappy, you mean?” He shrugged.
I could feel him looking at me again, but I couldn’t see his face.
“Vash put me there as a kind of meditation retreat, I think,” he said, his German accent more pronounced. “I know you haven’t done a lot of meditation, but it isn’t all smiling buddhas and golden light, wife. I was still dealing with all the things I’d done as a Rook. It was hard to be alone so much. It was hard to have so few distractions. Hell, for some of those years, it was hard to be sober outside the monk’s caves. I didn’t realize how much I’d been leaning on them… on their light. Not until I left.”
Thinking
about his words, I nodded slowly, once more seeing those snowy forests behind my eyes. I could feel that, what he was saying.
It rang true.
I felt his loneliness, that dread of being alone.
I felt him wanting to kill it in any way he could––with sex, with alcohol, with the drugs he’d shown me he’d used when he’d been a Rook.
“Were you still an addict?” I said, turning towards him. “Was it withdrawals?”
Slowly, he shook his head. Then he made a “more or less” gesture with one hand. I felt it with my light more than saw it with my eyes.
“Technically, no,” he said. “…meaning physically. They detoxed me when I first got to Seertown. I went through withdrawals, cold sweats, hallucinations, the whole thing. I was completely clean by the time they sent me to live with those monks in the Pamir. But in Russia, I was on my own for the first time since I’d been a Rook. My mind was still an addict, if that makes sense.”
I’d known a lot of addicts in San Francisco. I knew exactly what he meant.
I heard him exhale again and glanced towards him in the dark.
“It’s weird to you, isn’t it?” he said. “That I did drugs?”
Frowning, I thought about that, too.
After a long few seconds, I shook my head.
“I don’t know if this will reassure you,” I said. “…But no. It’s not that weird. It’s weird only in that I never knew that about you. You never told me anything about what you did, or what you were like when you worked for the Rooks. So it’s strange in that way, in that it’s new information. But I can’t say it completely goes against how I see you.”
He grunted, rubbing his face with a hand. “Because of all my other stellar qualities?”
I snorted a faint laugh, in spite of myself, even as I shook my head.
“No.” I turned my head towards him. “You’ve got a bit of an addict’s personality in some ways, husband. I never noticed it before, because in other ways you’re not at all like the other addicts I’ve known. It’s not even something I could put into words, really… but suffice it to say, a phase of drug addiction doesn’t entirely clash with other parts of you I’ve seen. It doesn’t even clash all that much with how you can be with me.”
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