An abyss opened under her feet.
Somewhere in that, she became aware of chanting.
All around her––the worms were chanting.
She didn’t understand their words.
Gasping as the chanting grew louder, she closed her eyes, trying to block it out, but it only grew louder, reverberating inside the bone of her skull.
The snakes didn’t like the chanting.
They didn’t like it at all.
They writhed faster, hissing in the spaces behind her eyes, their bodies and teeth silver metal, their eyes the color of dark urine. They hissed at her, and she felt their cold bite, their razor-like teeth as they bit into the back of her mind.
The chanting grew louder, vibrating the bones of her face, her skull.
She held her head in her hands, trying to hold it in, to keep it inside.
She could no longer hold it in.
She couldn’t hold it in.
Once that really hit her, once it really sank in, every part of her wanted it out. She wanted to expel it any way she could. She felt the chanting pulling at her––pulling at her light, pulling at the back of her head, and this time, she fell into it, trying not to fight it.
Gasping in pain, she fought to throw up, to scream.
Anything. Anything to get it out of her.
She knew she would die when it left.
She knew she would die, but she no longer cared.
Let it take me, she whispered in her mind, a silent prayer. Let it take me. Let me do no more harm. If I cannot do good, take me, and at least I can do no more harm.
The chanting shook her body, her ears, her teeth, her tongue, until she could no longer hear her own thoughts. The chanting shook her chest, until she was sure she would have a heart attack, that her heart would explode and she would die right there. She groaned, letting the shaking jar her whole skeleton, back and forth, like a hammer driven into a stake.
The steam grew thicker, harder to breathe through.
The chanting grew louder…
Then, out of nowhere, came the tiger.
It coiled out of the fire in front of her, blue with dark red eyes.
She stared at it panting, unable to move. It was here for her.
It would kill her. No longer screaming, it growled at her, roaring in the darkness of the cave-like space. It growled at her, its dark eyes shining in the light of the fire. Then, while she stared at it, it roared, pulling back its blue-black lips to expose ivory teeth.
It leapt at her––
And Chandre remembered no more.
42
COMING DOWN
I GAZED OUT over the land through an oval view port, feeling a swell of emotion as I made out the landscape shadowed by our plane.
My fingers absently stroked the black hair of the head resting in my lap.
Clouds broke up my view, here and there, white and mountain-sized, their shocking contrast darkening the blue of the sky I saw out the window to my right, as well as the blood red earth that appeared when I looked directly below.
Revik stirred in my lap. His fingers wrapped around my thigh, squeezing harder as a hot pulse of pain left his light. His face grew taut. I watched him as he rode that wave of pain and want, fighting it back, until it gradually began to let go.
As it did, he relaxed with it, his hand loosening without letting go. He continued to hold me firmly through the armored pants as he buried his head deeper against my abdomen.
I fought with my own pain, looking down at him.
He’d crashed from his telekinesis high about four hours into our transatlantic flight to Langley, Virginia. Luckily, Balidor warned me Revik was likely to come down pretty hard, or I might’ve been really thrown when his mood and light abruptly shifted.
The Adhipan leader pinged my headset ID, setting the message to “private,” not long after we got off the group check in.
When I saw the message he left with the ping, I frowned.
PRIVATE CONTACT REQUESTED, it read. SUGGEST SUB-VOCALS.
Still frowning, I’d glanced at Revik, who still held my hand but was talking to one of the new seers in the seat next to him. Hesitating the barest instant, I switched over to sub-vocals, then hit Balidor’s private ID back, bringing up my virtual screen.
The Adhipan leader picked up at once.
“I just wanted to give you a head’s up about Nenz,” he said, speaking stiffly but quickly, like he wasn’t sure if I might hang up on him or not.
“…I had to pump him full of a lot of light. For him to bring down the Basilica and all those caves below, he needed a lot of it,” he added, not waiting for me to reply. “A hell of a lot, Allie. Those walls were six feet thick in parts. He had to explode them from within. I’ve never channeled that much light to a single seer before in my life. Hell, that’s more light than I’ve channeled to whole squadrons of my people.”
Hesitating, he added,
“He also insisted we find and kill all of the Menlim bodies. Well… all except the one I convinced him to bring back with us. He spent a fair bit of light making sure he’d accomplished that. He obliterated all of their biological matter so no more samples could be extracted. He also hunted down samples in their genetics vaults––not only of Menlim clones, but all the clones of himself, and the bio-matter they had for you. Then he proceeded to break every construct that had a flavor of the Dreng. Plus all the embryos we found.”
Grimacing a little at the images I got from Balidor’s light, I nodded.
“Okay,” I said. “Is he all right?”
“He’s fine. But he’s pretty high on light right now. And just from operating the telekinesis, I suspect. He’s going to crash before we get to the States, probably within the next three or four hours. His emotions are likely to be volatile when he does. I don’t think most of what he’s done today has really sunk in. While he obliterated the military barracks inside the Vatican, he had this huge smile on his face. He kept telling me how beautiful it was, sending all of these souls ‘home.’ He might see it differently when he crashes––”
I’d caught up by then.
I was fully on board with what the Adhipan leader was trying to tell me now.
“Got it,” I cut in. “I understand, ‘Dor. Thanks for the head’s up.”
“Let us know if you need any help,” Balidor said. “I don’t know how rough these kinds of crashes are. I haven’t dealt with many of them.”
“I will.” I sent him a pulse of warmth. “Thanks, ‘Dor. And for getting him out of there alive. I know he needs some serious babysitting when he’s like that.”
The Adhipan leader grunted.
“Let’s just say, I get now, why Menlim always had him with multiple handlers.” Pausing, he added, “You never really told me, you know, what it’s like. I assume you must get like that, too, while you’re performing the telekinesis. I know that with…”
He hesitated, cutting himself off.
I distinctly got the impression he’d been about to mention Cass.
“…It’s almost like you Elaerian half-dis-incarnate to do the telekinesis,” he continued a beat later. “You leave most of your body behind, even as you use your physicality as a kind of anchor and conduit that transforms light into matter. It’s fascinating, I have to say, from a technical perspective. But it seems to put you in a whole other reality, perhaps akin to a kind of religious trance––”
I laughed. I couldn’t help it.
“Is that a nice way of saying it makes us lunatics, ‘Dor?” I teased. “It’s okay, you can say it. It makes us loopy. And not super reliable.”
“It is like a drug, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much,” I admitted. “Control is an issue. Staying grounded is a serious issue. It’s hard to see things logically. It’s even harder to see things up there the way they’ll manifest down here. Death looks really different in that space.” Pausing, I added, “It’s why I lost control in Brazil. Revik praised me up and down for having m
ore control than he’d had when he first started, but the truth is, I basically had to run out of juice before I stopped.”
“Ah.”
I felt a different kind of understanding come over Balidor.
“I always wondered what happened there,” he said. “You didn’t look scared in the image captures. You didn’t look conflicted. You looked… happy.” His voice held a faint apology when he added, “I admit, at the time, I thought it meant you’d fully given yourself to the Dreng. Those feed images made you look sociopathic. I didn’t see the come-down, so I just assumed you enjoyed it.”
“Well, in a sense I did,” I admitted. “But I didn’t really ‘get’ it until later. Then I was a basket case. Revik talked me down. According to him, I did well if only because I didn’t kill Wreg and all the seers with me, in addition to the Black Arrow security team. I guess his first time in a live op was that battle in Serbia that made him so infamous… the one where he wiped out both armies, not just the one he’d gone there to fight. Menlim and the Dreng made sure he had an unlimited supply of light, and he completely lost control. He had no idea what happened or how many he’d killed until hours later.”
“Ah.”
Again, I felt understanding reach the Adhipan seer. It was a different kind of understanding that time, or maybe the same understanding at a deeper level.
His voice turned thoughtful.
“That explains a lot, actually,” he said. “It certainly explains the religious fanaticism of Syrimne during the first World War, and his dogma around the more violent versions of the texts. I always knew there was an element of self-rationalization there, but the conflict would be much greater if one couldn’t fully reconcile the acts with who they were normally.”
Clearly thinking aloud, he added,
“I can also see why Menlim first trained him to kill with a gun and his bare hands, rather than having him kill only via the telekinesis. He needed to harden him, and the telekinesis alone likely wouldn’t have done that. The telekinetic version of killing probably seemed almost benign to Nenzi in comparison.”
Still thinking, he added, “It also explains, conversely, why the war itself traumatized him less than his personal experiences during that same period. He likely can barely remember the war apart from the emotional after-effects, which Menlim no doubt would have mitigated in various ways. Nenzi’s telekinetic work was likely catalogued by his mind at more of a distance, perhaps even dissociated from the rest of his mental processes.”
I nodded, turning over his words.
“Makes sense,” I admitted.
“One would need some way to reconcile the two realities, and to rationalize the outcomes from both. One would need a strong ideology for that,” Balidor added. “Giving him a religious framework to make sense of it all is actually quite ingenious.”
“Yeah.” I grunted. “Menlim was a lot of things, but dumb wasn’t one of them.”
“Clearly.”
There was a silence between us.
Realizing this was the most normal conversation I’d had with Balidor since I found out he was sleeping with Cass, I fell silent, feeling awkward suddenly.
A flicker of guilt reached my light as I thought about how I’d been treating him. Some part of me wondered if I should try to make a joke about that, then realized it was definitely too soon for cracking jokes about him sleeping with my ex-best friend and attempted murderer.
It was too soon for either of us.
I wondered if I should apologize instead.
In particular, I wondered if I should apologize for some of the things I’d said in the tank that day when I first found them together.
“No, Esteemed Bridge,” he said through the link, his voice gentle. “It’s quite all right. I completely understand.” Pausing, he added, lower, “I should have told you.”
I grunted at that, half in a laugh.
I couldn’t help it.
“I can’t imagine why you hesitated,” I said wryly.
He burst out in a laugh, as if he couldn’t help himself.
Forcing his light subdued, as if maybe realizing laughter wasn’t the right reaction to my words, he said, “I hope you know I do understand, Allie. I really do. I feel terrible about that, when I step back and look at the objective reality of what she did to you and your mate. And Lily. I really can’t explain why––”
“Please don’t,” I cut in, grimacing. “Really. We’re good, ‘Dor. But don’t explain anything. I’m not ready to hear that yet. I’m really not.”
There was a silence after I spoke.
In it, I felt him hesitating a second time, wavering between saying something or not.
Exhaling in defeat, I grimaced again.
“Fine,” I said, sighing where he could hear it. “If you really want to fucking explain––”
“No,” he cut in. “No, it’s nothing like that. It’s just…” Hesitating again, he said it, his voice reluctant. “It’s Cass. She’s really happy right now.”
His voice grew lower still, and I felt him shielding, probably from Cass herself.
“She thinks things turned a corner with you,” he said. “She thinks maybe things will eventually be okay. That you and she might be okay.”
I looked out the window, seeing a flock of birds flying in a V-shape alongside the plane. The sharp blue of the sky outlined their silhouettes where they flapped in unison, necks outstretched as they flew.
I could hear the hope in Balidor’s voice. I could feel it through the comm.
“‘Dor––” I began, exhaling.
“I know,” he said, cutting me off before I could even collect my thoughts. “I know, Allie. I really do. I just thought I should tell you. I’m not saying you should do anything with that. I’m not asking you for anything, I swear to the gods, I am not.”
There was a silence.
Then, thinking about his words, I let out a humorless snort.
“Bullshit,” I grunted. “Bullshit, ‘Dori.”
Another silence fell between us over the link.
Then, defeat coming off his light, Balidor sighed.
He didn’t answer me, though.
REVIK CRASHED HARD, just like ‘Dori said he would.
He also got emotional.
It didn’t help that we’d done more of that sharing memories work in the period before he crashed. In fact, that definitely made it significantly worse.
By then we were on a real plane.
Atwar hadn’t been kidding about the fleet of planes.
He had more than enough for all of the seers and humans living in his enclave in Dubrovnik who wanted to join us, and plenty left over for the approximately two hundred more humans and seers who lived outside the Old City walls and who wanted to come as well.
Many opted to stay behind, which I suppose wasn’t that surprising.
Apart from telling his remaining leaders the possible risks of staying behind, Atwar didn’t press the point, just told them they might find refuge at one of the Shadow Cities, if they could find one not yet invaded by the Mythers.
He seemed worried about it though, when I saw him on the tarmac in Croatia.
But we had plenty of planes.
He even had enough planes to give our smaller team a plane of our own.
Revik took my hand as we were boarding, leading me to the back of the cabin, which was hardly unusual for him.
Instead of taking the bulkhead seat right in the middle, however, like he would have if we’d been planning a military op, he brought me to a row on the starboard side of the plane. Jerking his chin at the second to last row of seats, he quirked an eyebrow at me in question.
It was fine with me.
Better than fine, really, since I could recline the seat.
The plane had a construct, but it was rudimentary, and purely for military op purposes.
Revik threw up a shield to give us privacy instead, even as he took out his headset, stuffing it in a jacket pocket then tossing the
jacket in the empty seat at the end of our aisle.
Then he reclined his seat and pulled up the armrest. Once he was sprawled out in the window seat, he motioned for me to join him with a few flicks of his fingers.
I didn’t need to be asked twice.
I curled around him, and he sank his fingers into my hair, coiling his light cautiously into mine. He was still humming along at a pretty high voltage at that point, and I jumped, fighting a surge of pain when my light reacted strongly to his. I felt him flinch in return, but he didn’t release me, or withdraw his light.
“Can we?” he murmured in my ear instead. “It can be a short one.”
I thought at first he meant sex.
Or maybe I just really, really wanted him to mean sex.
My pain turned liquid as his words sank in, making it difficult to breathe for those few seconds I’d misunderstood him.
Then I felt a nudge from his mind and light, and realized my mistake.
I admit, it was really fucking hard not to hit him.
“I want to get this done,” he coaxed, caressing my hair off my neck, running a finger down my face and jaw. “I want to get this done, Allie.”
He pulled on me with his light, making it crystal clear why he was getting impatient, why he was pushing me to work on this bullshit now, when all I wanted to do was either sleep or fuck.
He chuckled, his chest moving under my cheek.
“You’re not alone in that,” he murmured, kissing my face. “Just one,” he coaxed. “We can make it short. Well… short-ish. We couldn’t fuck in here anyway, not with all of them here. And I don’t want to waste a twelve hour flight when we can get some of this done.”
“How romantic,” I mumbled in annoyance.
He wrapped his arm tighter around my back.
“Do you want to sleep first?” he said. “Grumpy horny pregnant lady?”
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