Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Not once did Torek feel a single thought come through the silence of their minds.

  Wondering again what was going on here, who the silver-eyed seer was to them, what kind of community they’d created out in this near-empty desert, Torek returned his gaze to the retreating form of the graceful, slim-hipped female seer.

  He glanced behind him only one more time, when two of the humans picked up the cowhide and pine pole stretcher to bring Chandre with them back to the camp.

  15

  FAMILY DINNER

  I’D FORGOTTEN I’D told my father we would eat dinner with him and my mother.

  I’d forgotten Uye told me Kali had a vision she wanted me to see.

  I’d forgotten even though Uye said it was something important, something they both felt we needed to know. I had no idea if Kali had shared that vision with anyone else yet––Balidor, Tarsi, Yumi, or anyone else on the infiltration team or the Council.

  I did know I hadn’t even remembered to tell Revik.

  In fact, no matter how you looked at it, I’d more or less blown them off.

  We were only about a day outside of Istanbul when Uye must have given up on me getting in touch with him to follow up.

  He pinged my headset, asking if we could schedule something for that night.

  Five days had passed since our conversation on the flight deck of the carrier.

  Immediately, I felt terrible. I’d intended to follow up with my father that very night, and instead I’d gotten caught up with everything going on with me and Revik. I’d gotten caught up with the Mythers, with Loki’s team, with Dante’s satellite feeds. I’d gotten caught up in the Cass and Balidor thing, and with Declan and Torek in New Mexico.

  I’d let nearly a week go by without so much as a word in my parents’ direction.

  Granted, my focus wasn’t the best over those five days.

  Even apart from Revik, I was still struggling with the Cass and Balidor thing.

  I knew it should probably be at the bottom of my list of priorities, but somehow, it kept floating to the top. Revik brought the conversation to the leadership team, where I tried to approach it rationally––but I’m not sure if my being there was more of a hindrance or a help. There was a fair bit of yelling on both sides before I got the whole story from Balidor about how it happened, and what was actually going on between him and Cass.

  Revik was surprisingly calm about the whole thing.

  Whereas in the past, he’d been the one prone to homicidal rages when the issue of Cass came up, this time, he came across as borderline indifferent.

  I definitely didn’t get the impression he’d forgiven Cass for what she’d done.

  It felt more like she simply wasn’t a priority to him now.

  Truthfully, it felt almost like she was dead to him––providing she wasn’t a ongoing threat to either me or Lily. Most of his questions to Balidor had to do with security concerns. He wanted to know how Balidor knew he wasn’t being manipulated. He wanted facts, in detail, about the progression of their relationship and any deviations he’d made to security protocols on her behalf. He insisted on Barrier checks of Balidor’s light by every single one of our high-ranked infiltrators, including Wreg, Yumi, Tarsi, Kali, Dalejem, himself, Varlan, me.

  He wanted assurances Balidor wasn’t sharing intel, intentionally or not, or allowing his new “girlfriend” any form of access to our constructs.

  My approach was a lot less rational.

  Truthfully, I mostly wanted to punch Balidor in the face.

  Even Revik’s practical approach to the whole thing infuriated me.

  After I’d spent a few minutes more or less yelling at Balidor, I handed the discussion over to the others. It was pretty clear I wasn’t adding anything productive to it, and I was too angry to do much else if I allowed myself to speak at all.

  I spent the rest of my time in the room staring at Balidor’s light.

  To his credit, Balidor opened entirely when he felt me scanning him, giving me permission to see whatever I wanted. Of course, that was assuming I would know if he was hiding something from me, given that Balidor was still the most highly-ranked infiltrator we had, apart from Tarsi––and maybe Varlan.

  Even so, I felt more than I wanted to feel.

  Balidor thought he was in love with her.

  Moreover, he was convinced Cass was in love with him.

  He was convinced she’d changed––that he’d “healed” the damage to her light––although he admitted she still carried scars, both from the trauma and from guilt.

  I listened with as much patience and open-mindedness as I could muster while he explained to the Council and our leadership team how he’d been working with her, in a similar way to how I’d worked with Revik in the tank in those mountains. Biting my lip, I said nothing as he explained how he’d found the root of the traumas Menlim used to break her mind, and how he’d been working with her to repair them.

  He claimed the sexual and emotional part of the relationship happened purely “by accident,” but I could feel from his light that wasn’t entirely true, whatever he told himself.

  He wanted her.

  He’d wanted her as far back as Seertown.

  Moreover, there was some kind of preliminary light bond between the two of them, something that couldn’t have happened “on accident.”

  A bond like that took intent.

  Unsurprisingly, Cass also turned out to be the real reason Balidor and Yarli broke up.

  Yarli felt that wanting on him. She grew increasingly furious when Balidor insisted on trying to help Cass anyway, rather than handing the job over to someone else. Hearing Yarli talk about it now explained a lot, including a number of partially-overheard arguments I’d unwittingly walked in on in the period before she and Balidor broke up.

  For the record, I was totally and completely with Yarli on this one.

  Anyway, it was hardly a first for Cass.

  From high school hookups to adult marriages and engagements, she was practically known for torpedoing relationships in San Francisco. Relationship ethics were hardly at the top of the list when I used to try and tabulate Cass’s virtues.

  As for Balidor himself… gaos.

  I couldn’t believe it. I really couldn’t fucking believe it.

  I couldn’t believe he could be so stupid, for one.

  I couldn’t even talk to Revik about it. I couldn’t make my own thoughts coherent enough to even vent about it rationally.

  More than that, I felt broadsided.

  Balidor was someone I’d relied on through everything. He’d been there through the mess with Revik as Syrimne, even through helping Revik in the tank, as much as he’d been against the process on some level. He’d masterminded our attack on Shadow in Argentina. He’d been the one to help Revik when he’d been on his own in San Francisco.

  Through all of it, he’d kept my daughter safe. He’d protected Tarsi and Jon. He’d run operations, kept the infiltration team on track, provided solid, actionable advice.

  Balidor was the fucking reliable one.

  He was the one who was supposed to be the best of all of us.

  Balidor didn’t compromise on moral or ethical points. Before this, I would have said Balidor had more integrity than anyone I’d ever known in my life, apart from maybe Jon.

  Maybe even including Jon.

  Now I felt like I didn’t know him at all.

  I felt like I couldn’t count on him for anything. I felt like he was just another dumb asshole who fell for Cass’s manipulative bullshit, another guy who put his dick before his brain, before his principles, before everything he professed to care about.

  I felt lied to.

  I felt myself questioning everything he’d told me for the past year.

  The thing with him and Cass had been going on for months. It started before the op in Dubai. It started before Revik left to infiltrate Shadow’s people. It was going on the whole time I ran that op with Dalejem. They’d s
tarted having sex around Christmas, from what Balidor said. We hadn’t even reached Thailand at that point, which meant he’d been “dating” Cass when we had that group bonding session in Bangkok.

  He’d brought Cass into that, indirectly or not.

  For that alone, I felt betrayed.

  Balidor knew exactly what she’d done to me. He’d been there, in San Francisco––maybe not when they first found me, but he’d been there for the aftermath. He saw how she’d left me, how I’d barely been alive for months afterwards. He saw what it did to Revik.

  He knew she’d cut our child out of me.

  He knew she’d taken everything from me, and from Revik.

  How could one of my closest friends fall in love with someone who could do that to me?

  In the end, I got up and left.

  I felt Balidor react when I did. I felt others around the table react, too. Only Revik didn’t seem surprised when he saw me leave my chair and walk out the door.

  I couldn’t bring myself to try and reassure any of them, or even make an excuse. Maybe everything going on with me and Revik didn’t help. Maybe the pregnancy didn’t help. Maybe I wasn’t stable enough right then to see it all clearly. Maybe the loss of the dampening effects of the Dreng construct was making me more emotional than usual.

  I wasn’t even sure I was angry. I went back to Revik’s room and I cried. I hated her and I cried, and a part of me toyed with the idea of confronting her directly.

  I hadn’t done that, either.

  I also hadn’t managed to be alone in a room with Balidor since.

  That night, when Revik came back to his room and found me there, he let me know he’d arranged for the security and infiltration teams to do a thorough assessment of the aleimi of both of them. He said they’d already started, and that he’d ordered all of them to report their findings directly to him. He told me he’d be sharing those findings with the Council.

  He assured me he would handle all of it, that I didn’t need to be involved in any way.

  He seemed to know I didn’t want to talk about it beyond that.

  Watching me with a touch more scrutiny than usual, he stood over the bed and took off all of his clothes, hanging them on a chair. Once he had, he nudged my light for me to do the same.

  After he crawled under the covers with me, we went back to working on our own personal project. We were still on him, still working our way up to the time where we actually met in real life, so we were still immersed in his light, in his memories.

  Those sessions had been getting more intense, too.

  Despite me asking him outright multiple times, including that night, we still hadn’t had sex.

  I could feel he wanted to by then.

  I also felt his determination to wait until our lights were more open.

  I knew what he was really worried about. He expected both of us to flip out when we got to me and Dalejem, and to him with those consorts in Beijing. The older stuff was bad enough; it would be about a million times worse once we were dealing with fresh imprints in each other’s light, and with issues that were more relevant to us right now.

  Already, I’d been struggling a lot with things he’d shown me.

  We were getting closer to the point where I first remembered him. We were getting closer to the point where I’d thought our timelines actually intersected for the first time.

  I fought to push all of that out of my mind as I helped Tenzi set the table for the dinner with my parents.

  We were on the far port side of the flight deck, not far from the entrance to the control tower and the lower levels of the ship. We didn’t have enough table space in Revik’s quarters, and the weather was good. As a bonus, there should be a nice sunset that night––so I’d proposed to Revik that we eat here, where we could be outside for a few hours.

  I had no idea what they’d be cooking for us downstairs.

  Tenzi offered to handle all of that, I suspected at my mother’s request. I’d noticed she had Lily’s knack of wrapping other seers around her little finger when it suited her.

  Either that, or I was just feeling more bitter about females like that in general.

  Cass had that knack, as well.

  Shoving my old best friend’s face out of my mind, I gritted my teeth, doing my best to keep my thoughts empty as I finished laying out silverware and glasses.

  It only took us a few minutes.

  Tenzi poured me a glass of wine, probably because I was stressing him out and he was too polite to say it. At his insistence, I sat in one of the cushioned deck chairs to wait for the others to arrive. He left shortly after to check on the food, and I shifted my chair sideways so I could prop my feet on the railing while I watched the sun sink lower in the sky.

  I’d actually made an effort and dressed for some reason, if in a somewhat casual way.

  I hadn’t had a ton of clothes to choose from, but I picked out a long black skirt with slits on the sides and a dark green beaded top from our last clothing run to New Delhi, what must have been a few years ago now. High-heeled shoes wrapped around my ankles and calves with straps, and I’d put my hair mostly up.

  Again, I couldn’t have said why I made the effort.

  Given the way things had been with our group for the past few months, I suspected no one would have batted an eye if I’d worn ripped combat pants and an armored shirt.

  Maybe the parental thing was more ingrained in me than I realized.

  Or maybe Revik’s nerves about anything to do with my biological parents was starting to rub off on me.

  Either way, I’d been about forty minutes early, so I hadn’t expected anyone else to come up on deck for a while. I sipped the glass of wine Tenzi poured for me and watched the sky start to change colors, the pattern of gold sparkling over the waves in a rippling line to the ship as we headed north.

  I did my best to clear my mind, to focus on the moment. I focused on my breath, in and out, following the heartbeat of the waves and the ship––

  When a voice jerked my head sideways, nearly making me spill the wine.

  “Are we too early, daughter?” Kali asked cautiously.

  I took my feet off the railing, feeling myself flush.

  Looking at her standing there, wearing an understated green skirt and a loose, white, peasant top, a confused wash of feelings came over me.

  I hadn’t exactly gone out of my way to be polite to my biological mother since we’d first met. For the first time maybe, I found myself really seeing her as my mother, not as some religious fanatic stranger who left me callously under a bridge when I was a baby.

  Maybe it was all the things Dalejem told me about her.

  Maybe it was just that I was seeing a lot of things differently these days.

  Whatever it was, I found myself fumbling with how to behave towards her.

  Rising to my feet, I did my best to smile normally.

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I was early too. Do you want something to drink? I could have Tenzi or one of the others bring something up?”

  She smiled back.

  The relief and hope in her smile and light made me wince a little.

  Clearly she hadn’t been sure what to expect from me, either.

  “That would be lovely,” she said, her voice warm enough to bring another stab of guilt to my light. “I’ll have whatever you’re having, if that’s okay.”

  I gave her a nod and another stiff smile, then glanced at Uye, who was looking over the railing at the sunset, likely to give me and Kali those few seconds to interact. He was dressed similarly to Kali, only the male version, wearing new-looking jeans and a collared shirt. Both of them wore sandals on their feet, I noticed.

  Funnily enough, all I could think when I looked at them was how Californian they looked. It was easy to see them blending in where they used to live in the Santa Cruz mountains.

  Uye’s eyes returned to me the instant he felt me looking at him. Hearing my question about the drinks, he glanced at
my glass, his lips pursed.

  “I’d prefer something harder, if you have it,” he said.

  “They’ll have bourbon,” I offered. “My husband drinks it, so they generally have some in stock. There’s probably vodka and tequila too, since Wreg and a number of the Rebels prefer those. We tend to be short on rum and sweeter alcohols––”

  “Bourbon is fine. Neat.”

  I nodded, smiling faintly in spite of myself.

  Picking up my headset from where I’d left it on the table, I let Tenzi know to bring up the drinks, along with a third one for Revik. Clicking off the headset, I smiled again at my parents.

  “Revik’s on his way,” I explained, still fighting nerves for some reason. “He said he’d be here more or less on time. He’s finishing up some security work with Adhipan Balidor.”

  Something must have come through my light as I said that.

  That, or they’d already heard the latest shipboard gossip on Adhipan Balidor and his new lady-love, Cassandra Jainkul.

  Either way, I saw my mother wince, right before she glanced at Uye, whose mouth briefly formed a thin line. I saw Kali hesitate then, almost like she was considering asking me about it, but wasn’t sure how.

  She seemed to think better of it a few seconds later, maybe because of something she felt on my light, or maybe just common sense.

  Either way, her eyes drifted to the sunset, instead.

  “It’s beautiful up here,” she said.

  Exhaling, I walked to the railing, gripping it in both hands.

  There was a silence where all three of us watched the sun sink incrementally towards the dark blue water.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning to look first at Uye, then at Kali. “I should have contacted both of you days ago. It’s just been a crazy time. And I haven’t really been myself––”

  Uye held up a hand, opening his mouth to speak, but Kali got out words first.