She slid forward, kicking out, hard, towards his chest.
He blocked the kick, but it turned out to be a feint.
Twisting in midair, she leapt up lightly on the balls of her feet, using her weight and downward momentum to punch him, hard, in the face.
She started to move back, to retreat, but he recovered faster than she calculated, sliding forward and sweeping her legs.
He didn’t jump back, out of the range of her arms or legs––but followed as she fell, before she could recover her balance, or get out of his way.
She fell to her back with a sharp exhale.
He landed on her, sitting astride her while she gasped, winded.
“Get the fuck off me!” she snarled, still panting as she hit out at him.
He blocked at least half of her hits, and moved closer to gut the power of the ones he couldn’t block. She writhed under him, trying to twist out from under him, but his weight held her to the mat, obviously infuriating her when she couldn’t twist free.
“Is that a flashlight in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” she snapped, gritting her teeth. “Trust you to be getting off on this––”
“It’s my cock,” he growled back. “And yes, it’s hard. Want to see it, love?”
“I’ll pass.” She glared up at him. “I think I saw enough of it last night… in those fucking sex club freak shows in London.” She pounded at him again, and he blocked the first hit, absorbing the second one in his chest. Still panting, she bit her lip, her eyes blazing up at him. “I guess your exhibitionist tendencies aren’t gone entirely, though, are they, husband? Not if you want to do this here, in front of all these people––”
“Why the fuck shouldn’t I?” he growled. “If you’re going to threaten to leave me if I don’t fuck you… threaten to whore yourself out to other men… then I guess I’d better fuck you, hadn’t I, wife? Isn’t that what you want from me?”
When she writhed under him, gasping in fury, he slid further up her body, trapping her hips and legs under his thighs.
“Come on, love. It’s not like we both haven’t done it for an audience before. Don’t be modest. I’m not the only one who learned how to put on a good show.”
“Fuck you!”
“I’m trying,” he said, his voice faintly humorous, but cold. “Open your mouth, love. That’s what you did in Beijing, right? Wasn’t that your specialty?” Pausing a beat, he added, colder, “Maybe Jaden’s training wasn’t a complete waste. He’s the one who introduced you to group sex, wasn’t he, love? Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m too hard on him. Hell, I should be grateful. Maybe I should buy him a beer for breaking you in for the rest of us…”
She froze, staring up at him.
Jon tensed too, feeling his heart stop in his chest.
He didn’t fully understand what Revik had said, what he was referencing, but he could feel the precision behind the words, the calculatedness of the jab.
He felt the flinch in Allie’s heart, belying the anger on her face.
Briefly, that anger receded, and he saw the hurt there. He saw it clearly enough, it gutted him, making him look away.
She knew Revik had hit at her deliberately. She knew he was trying to get a rise out of her, but knowing that wasn’t enough to soften his words, or the light he put behind them.
Jon and Allie weren’t the only ones who felt that punch.
A silence fell over the crowd.
When Jon glanced around, he saw humans and seers all standing there, gazing up at the two Elaerian, their faces stunned.
None looked away, though.
For those few seconds, Allie only stared up at Revik’s face, panting.
Then her eyes ignited, glowing a light, sharp green. Jon could almost see her trying to use the telekinesis––right before her face contorted in pain. The collar kicked in, forcing her to stop, until she just lay there, panting, her face taut.
It took her a few seconds longer to recover.
Once she had, blind rage twisted her expression.
She swung at him for real that time, jerking her body up before he could react and catching him sharply in the jaw. Gasping from the hit, he caught hold of her wrist when she swung at him a second time. She hit him on the side of the neck when he weaved out of the way of her third swing. Then he’d captured her other wrist.
That time, she writhed so hard under him, Jon got worried she would hurt herself.
“Come on!” Revik snarled. “I know you’re not this fucking weak!”
Feeling a pulse of light behind that, too, Jon winced.
Once more, he saw the veneer of anger on Allie’s face melt back, just long enough for Jon to feel that sharper pain in his heart, worse than before.
Clutching at his chest in reflex, he looked at Wreg, his jaw hard.
We should go, he sent. All of us. Everyone in here. Leave them the fuck alone.
Pausing at Wreg’s alarmed look, he added,
It’s all right. I think I know what Revik’s doing. I have no idea if it’ll work, but we’re not helping either of them, being in here. We’re just making it easier for her to avoid what he’s trying to get her to feel. If he could have locked us all out, I suspect he would have. I say we kick everyone out and post guards… even if it’s only us.
Wreg’s mouth thinned briefly, then he nodded.
Sending a sharp ping through the construct, he waited for eyes and faces to turn in his direction. Once enough of them had looked over, he made a sharp, circular motion with his hand, and pointed to the stairs, indicating for them to leave.
Understanding reached a number of faces right off.
A few felt Wreg’s order through the construct and began making their way towards the stairs without looking back. Wreg’s dark eyes glowered at the few who hesitated, their light and facial expressions showing them to be reluctant to leave.
In the end, they all turned to go.
Jon saw the back of Dante’s head in that crowd, her arms folded in front of her body.
Frowning faintly, he watched her go, giving a last glance up to the boxing ring where Revik still had his wife pinned to the mat.
Revik still had her pinned there, but now Allie was crying.
Tears ran down her face, but she didn’t make a sound. Her chest seemed to collapse instead, although she didn’t stop fighting him with her body, trying to get him off her.
Jon was about to turn away, when light burst out of her in a shocking wave.
Her back arched, as if it came out of something deep in her chest.
She choked on it, letting out a low series of gasps.
Revik gasped when she did, leaning his weight on her harder, lowering his body, until his chest touched hers. He put his mouth by her ear, and Jon saw him murmuring something, talking to her in a low voice, too low for him to hear.
For a long-feeling few seconds, she only seemed to breathe while he spoke, her eyes closed. Jon couldn’t tell if she could hear him, if she was even in the room.
Then she took a deeper breath.
Jon saw her nod, more tears spilling down her face. She was breathing too hard still, but deeper now, pulling air from the humid room deep inside her lungs, closing her eyes as Revik continued to murmur to her, as he released her wrists, caressing her face––
That time, Jon turned away for real.
He followed Wreg to the top of the stairs so they could stand guard, keeping everyone out until whatever was happening in there was done.
It occurred to Jon that even a year ago, he might have wanted to know what that was about, what Allie meant about his memory being erased, what Revik meant by what he’d said about Jaden.
Now, Jon didn’t even want to know.
It wasn’t indifference.
He honestly felt it was none of his business.
Frowning at the thought, he couldn’t help wishing he could make himself feel the same way about Balidor and Cass.
But now wasn’t the time to be think
ing about the two of them, either.
They would be landing in Istanbul in a few hours.
Once they had, everything would change for all of them, yet again.
20
BOUNTY
DESPITE WHAT I’D said the night before, I didn’t go looking for Jaden after I left my room the second time that day. I’d showered by then, and Revik had put disinfectant seemingly over a third of my body, before he called in the prosthetics team.
He’d hovered over me while they worked on me, pacing and muttering the whole time that I’d have to stay out of the Barrier pretty much 24/7 once we got on land.
By the time they’d finished disguising me and started working on him, even my hangover was mostly gone.
Unfortunately, that also meant my separation pain was worse.
Now, less than an hour after I’d finished eating breakfast with him, Jon, Wreg, Yumi, Illeg, Stanley, Kali and Uye, I stood on an old-looking wooden dock, my bruised hands and knuckles shoved in my pockets, watching everyone around me unload boxes, crates, equipment and bags, dumping them in piles just past where the wooden planks ended.
They’d found cranes for some of it.
Some in our team had gone looking for trucks, motorcycles and other means of moving people and supplies across land. Wreg left right after breakfast, leading a team to go looking for air transport––primarily for the group going directly to North America, but also for a few of the smaller deployments heading for quarantine cities in Northern Europe, South America, Africa, and Asia.
Revik and I were going to drive.
Well, drive and probably take a boat, likely a hop from Montenegro over to Italy, if we could find a way to do it safely. We’d been told that every inch of the Italian coasts––not to mention their airspace––was being heavily monitored.
Taking the carrier was completely out of the question, as was taking a plane.
That being said, according to Dante, they seemed to mostly ignore smaller boats, especially sporting boats, especially those manned by locals.
There was some debate around Revik and I going that route, though––and really, about us going to Rome at all, now that we’d seen Kali’s vision.
Time was a serious issue now.
Time was the issue, after what Kali and Uye showed us.
Even though Revik was the one to sound the alarm on our need to move fast, he still thought we should go to Rome. After listening to him and Wreg go back and forth with Yumi for about an hour, I realized I agreed with him. Not only on our need to go to Rome, but on the smaller team, the low-key approach––even the harder pill to swallow of who we needed with us.
I agreed with him, although I couldn’t have said why.
There was something we needed in Rome.
Maybe there was something we needed to see there.
Anyway, flying was out of the question, as I said.
We still needed time to talk through the meaning of Kali’s vision with the rest of the leadership team––meaning Wreg, Jon, Balidor, Yumi, Tarsi, Declan, Vik, and so on––but we decided to do most of that en route and in virtual, so we didn’t stop operations. Kali shared her vision a second time with about fifteen seers in the CIC before we left the ship, so at least everyone would be on the same page when we referenced it.
In the end, everyone more or less agreed with me and Revik’s priorities.
We needed access to at least one of the hotspots. Close access.
We needed to know how much time we had left before the Dreng made their move to try and open the doors. We needed to know a lot more about the doors themselves––what they looked like, what they consisted of, how they functioned.
More to the point, we had to either figure out how I could open one of those doors on my own, or, if that wasn’t possible, find some way to disable the Dreng’s telekinetics well enough that they couldn’t open the doors without me.
Most likely, we’d have to do some combination of both.
None of us really talked about the implications of all this––meaning, there was a good chance the world would end in either scenario, or that our best hope might involve sending most of our people through some kind of inter-dimensional portal to a completely unknown world that might kill us just as fast.
We stuck to the practical, immediate things in the discussion itself, although I noticed Jon, Illeg and Stanley definitely looking paler by the end of the conversation.
I still felt strongly we needed to go to Rome.
Some of that was rational, based on the strategy we were outlining around the hotspot locations. Some of it was pure instinct.
I only shared the rational reasons with Jon, Wreg and Revik.
It was the origin point of the Mythers and their leadership; it might give us an idea of their timetable, if nothing else. It was also a quarantine city, and the location of one of the hot spots. If we could find the area where Dante had been seeing light flares in her satellite feeds, we might be able to get eyes on one of the gates, or “doors.”
As of now, we had no idea what we were even looking for.
Also, although he hadn’t come out and said it, I knew Revik believed it was one of the more likely locations of Menlim’s bodies––assuming he had a store of them down here at all, and they weren’t in some high-tech bunker under the Antarctic Ocean.
His theory made sense.
They’d clearly set up the Vatican as an apocalyptic “Plan B.” They’d housed their fanatical Myther cult and its leaders in Rome, built the city up into a veritable fortress.
It wasn’t inconceivable that the Menlim bodies would be stored there, too.
Remembering Kali’s vision of a living, breathing sun being torn apart, I fought a darker fear that shivered through my light. It was warm out on that dock in Turkey––borderline hot, and humid––but I was strangely cold standing there. I found myself touching my belly a lot in reflex, although I didn’t let myself think about why.
Neither Revik nor I were on the Displacement List as part of the “Second Wave.”
I had to assume the Second Wave was reserved for those who survived.
Shoving the thought from my mind, I wrapped my arms around my ribs, trying to think about where we were going, what we’d be facing in Rome, how we would get there. I needed to keep my head in the fucking game, not make guesses about things I knew nothing about.
My hair was reddish brown again, hanging straight down my back.
Contacts tinted my eyes to a near black. They’d changed the shape of my face, filling out my cheeks and giving me a slightly more prominent brow, chin and nose. Each individual change seemed small, but when they’d finished, I’d looked in the mirror and barely recognized myself.
Revik’s hair was long enough now, they didn’t bother to change it much.
Tinting it slightly lighter, they left it loose and filled out his features with prosthetics, making his face less narrow. They made his eyes greenish-blue, which made me stare at him more than the change in his features.
He was talking to Balidor right now about moving Cass and Feigran.
I’d barely spoken two words to Balidor since I’d walked in on him and Cass, and now we’d be traveling across southern Europe with him, likely in close quarters. We’d be traveling with both of them, and with Feigran, since Revik felt strongly the Four should stay together for this––and as much as I fucking hated it, I agreed with him.
This trip was going to be a barrel-full of monkey laughs all around.
The thought of sitting in a truck for ten hours with Cass was enough to make me want to hit something all over again, which is probably why I’d stayed out of that part of the conversation, other than to voice my agreement with Revik and give him the go-ahead to make arrangements. It was why I was letting Revik handle that end of things now, watching from a distance while he talked logistics with Balidor, Wreg, Yumi, and whoever else.
I couldn’t help thinking about it, anyway.
With Shadow’s
network down, it was actually feasible for the first time that we could bring them with us. According to the Myths, I needed them for something. Not just Revik, but Feigran and Cass, too. Maybe I would need them to open the doors.
Maybe I needed them to kill telekinetic clones.
Maybe I needed them to stop the Dreng from destroying the Earth.
Could I really risk not bringing them, just because I had issues?
Exhaling in annoyance, I stared out over the docks, my jaw clenched.
I wished I had a job to do right then. Any job would have been fine at that point, even carrying boxes with the human and seer refugees.
I’d been asked to do nothing, though.
Revik literally asked me not to help with the unpacking.
Wreg went out of his way to ask me to stay off the scouting missions for transport vehicles, too, even with my hair dyed and my face covered in prosthetics.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about everyone suddenly treating me with kid gloves, but I decided it wasn’t worth getting in an argument over––not when we were all going back into military op territory in a matter of hours.
I hung out with Dante instead, who’d been excused from unpacking as well, and Gina, who’d been helping her daughter monitor satellite and drone feeds via handhelds while their bigger comp-room equipment was being moved by List seers.
Dante shared surveillance feeds of Rome and Vatican City with me while we waited, asking my opinion of the security measures she saw. She also showed me a ton of footage from drones she’d hacked in and around Vatican City.
Seeing the high, razor-wire and debris walls they’d built around the Vatican, reinforced with anti-aircraft weapons and OBE transformers––in addition to an actual moat built around the quarantine enclave of Rome––wasn’t exactly reassuring. Dante briefed me on the high-tech drones and holographic security measures they had in place, as well, showing me military drones equipped with radar that could identify heart rate differentials between seers and humans, along with the usual gait- and facial-rec software and X-ray technology that could ID organ placement and bone structure to pull more specific IDs.
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