Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  He regretted that he’d been too much of a coward.

  His eyes clicked back into focus.

  Wiping his eyes, he nodded.

  “We’ll do one more session,” he said, turning, looking at me. “We’ll do one more, Allie. When we get to Ship Rock. However long we can… however much time we can spare. I’ll work on the strategy, the battle plan, on the walk there, then we’ll find some way to be alone.”

  He turned, looking at me.

  “Atwar called while you were asleep. He’s going to be a few more days. He has contacts in other parts of Europe and Asia he wants to pick up and bring here with him. Some are infiltrators he thinks can help us. Others are relatives and friends who don’t think they can get into one of the Shadow cities in time to access one of the other doors.”

  Revik met my gaze, eyes grim.

  “He knows the score… and the risks. I was crystal fucking clear with him about that. He doesn’t want to leave them behind, and I don’t blame him.”

  Firming his mouth, he studied my eyes more closely.

  “So we have some time, wife,” he said. “You shouldn’t attempt to open the door until they get here. Not unless we’re forced to do so.”

  I frowned, looking at him. “What about the Mythers? Aren’t they on their way here now?”

  Revik nodded, once.

  “Most likely. Like I said, I told Atwar the risks. We’ll have Dante and the others keep an eye out for any activity with the other doors… and for any sign of the Mythers arriving here. Now that we don’t have to relocate to a whole new site, or deal with a telekinetic machine, I’m less worried about waiting on the Barrier door until we absolutely need it open.”

  He turned, studying my gaze.

  “Still. We may not have much time. It could be hours, Allie. As soon as they see movement on either front, they’ll have to pull us… whether Atwar’s here or not.”

  Turning over his words, I only sat there for a minute, staring into the fire, thinking about what he was proposing.

  On one level, it was foolhardy.

  Revik was the best strategist we had, especially against Menlim and the Dreng.

  On the other, he was right. There was never a good time.

  There would never be a good time.

  And this might be the last chance we got.

  “Okay,” I said, nodding. “Okay. I agree.”

  He gripped my leg tighter, a plume of love leaving his light, pooling with liquid tendrils in my chest. Love and grief, all his regrets and longings and gratitude washed over me, branching through the veins in my aleimi, infusing me with his presence.

  Then he let me go.

  By then, I’d stopped breathing. Longing rose in me, too, and I found myself fighting tears as I sat next to him, trying not to think about all the things I’d fucked up, all the opportunities I’d wasted, just by being stupid.

  For me that started in Seattle, too.

  We sat by the fire, and I watched him eat, while he watched the fire.

  Everything in me hurt, but I felt weirdly contented, too.

  WE COULDN’T ALL fit in the trucks.

  Some of us rode motorcycles, even bicycles.

  Others of us walked.

  Revik and I ended up on horses, for a variety of reasons.

  For one thing, no one wanted us to arrive first.

  Declan, Hondo, Anale and Maygar didn’t find anyone guarding the site at Ship Rock, but everyone was still feeling cautious. With the help of the local scouts, they’d found a door leading underground, and a network of caves, just like existed in all of the sites. Like at the other sites, the caves were extensive though, and they still had people exploring them.

  On the plus side, it was looking more and more like we might actually have room to house everyone underground, even with Atwar’s four or five planes on their way.

  Given the size of the caves described to me, I couldn’t help wondering if Menlim hadn’t created those underground caverns in Denver, Beijing, Rome, and wherever else so much as he’d covered them in concrete and built out what already existed at those sites.

  Still, Declan confessed to me that it hadn’t been easy to find.

  If they hadn’t had a guide with him, they wouldn’t have found it all, he said––even using their seer’s sight. Whatever living beings had used those caves over the years, they hadn’t been back in a long time.

  The door leading inside looked old, he said.

  Made of volcanic rock, it had been covered in a mosaic of other stones and metals, mostly rose quartz, onyx, silver, gold, and turquoise, forming the pattern of a sun.

  It had also been covered by at least three feet of dirt.

  Declan said he felt no trace of anything on the stone door, nor on much inside the caves. He felt some animals when they went further in, but he could discern nothing about the cavern’s architects, not even whether they’d ever lived in their own creation.

  The elders told us they kept that area clean.

  I didn’t know if that meant they’d used those caves in the past and just found some way to energetically cleanse them of imprints, or if they kept people out altogether, or both.

  I didn’t ask.

  Even now, we felt like guests here.

  This was their land, and I found myself treating it as such.

  Luckily, Revik was on top of the water situation, which was part of why he’d told everyone to get a few hours’ worth of sleep. He’d needed that time to fill casks, barrels and organic containers from the box canyon’s creek.

  So while I slept, and Wreg and Jon and however-many others slept, or had sex, or whatever else they did, Revik coordinated a team of local humans and seers to fill up every watertight container they had or could fashion from something else.

  From what Jon said, we now had enough to last weeks, if we were careful.

  Food might be more of a challenge, but water had to be the priority, especially out here. For short-term food needs, local hunters and farmers were bringing everything they had stored, including what was meant to last them through the winter.

  They were taking a big risk, trusting us. Really, they were taking more than one kind of risk on us, now that they’d been drawn into our military problems, as well.

  They didn’t seem bothered by that fact at all for some reason.

  They, along with some of our seers, started transporting food and water to the caves under Ship Rock before Revik and I even finished dinner. I’d been told the first groups arriving had already started scouting the tunnels, looking for underground sources of water and, potentially, food, as well as marking out storage and other communal rooms.

  Now, sitting on an appaloosa mare, her coat mostly white with cinnamon spots and a pure white mane and tail, I listened to Revik, Maygar, Wreg, Tarsi, Balidor and Cass discuss tactical uses and configurations for the telekinetics we had at our disposal. The hardest part would be finding ways to crack the Myther seers’ shielding, as well as ways to keep them from cracking ours. Shielding could mean the difference between most of us staying alive, and watching large numbers of our people get wiped out in a single strike.

  I threw in suggestions here and there, and used my higher structures to look at specific ideas and suggestions others raised. By the end, the plan that was beginning to form started looking pretty solid to me. A lot of the details needed to be worked out, of course, but I felt less actively stressed about that, now that the bare bones of a strategy had been outlined.

  Revik told me to focus on the door.

  That would be my job––getting all of those doors open.

  They hadn’t found an organic machine at the Ship Rock site, but Tarsi theorized the door under Ship Rock would still be connected to the others when it came to being opened. That meant the telekinetic machines at the other doors might theoretically still have access to me, and ways of slowing down or stopping me once I made my presence known.

  Revik, who rode a tall, cream and black piebald with
a black mane and tail, listened without speaking as Tarsi talked to me about the doors.

  She told me everything she’d read or seen about them in the Barrier, everything she’d heard from other sages and seers, including Vash while he was still alive. She showed me images from her extensive Barrier travels and jumps, including things she’d seen of the Dreng, filling in gaps with her own interpretations regarding this or that aspect of how the doors functioned.

  Kali, who’d opted to ride with us as well, added things here and there to Tarsi’s narrative, describing things she’d seen in other, related visions over the years.

  It was already decided that Tarsi, Uye, and Kali would stay with me while I attempted to open the doors, along with Feigran.

  Revik and Cass, as the other half of the Four, would join us soon after, providing everything went well up top with the telekinetic work.

  Revik would be leading the telekinetics in the actual fight, at least at the very beginning, with Maygar acting as his second. As had been true since New York, Balidor would lead our high-ranked infiltrators, with Yumi as his second, while Wreg ran the on-the-ground military strategy, with Loki as his second.

  I couldn’t think about any of that too deeply yet, or it would start to dawn on me that we would lose people in this––people I loved.

  I couldn’t go there, not yet.

  For now, I had to be content with the fact that we had a basic plan in place.

  Moreover, Revik had kept his promise.

  He told Wreg, Balidor, Tarsi and the others while we rode that he and I were going to take some time alone together when we reached Ship Rock, if possible until Atwar arrived with his people. Otherwise, he said, signal us as soon as they got a bead on the location of any Myther military forces headed in our direction––or if the hotspots grew active again––or if there was some other, unforeseen emergency that required us.

  I knew that might only give us hours.

  Hell, it might not even give us that.

  We might not have time to get into anything important. Worse, we might get into the very edges of it only to be cut off before we could resolve any of it.

  Still, he was right. We had to try.

  We had to take whatever small time we had left.

  47

  CAVE OF DREAMS

  REVIK DIDN’T EVEN look in on the cave they’d set up for central operations.

  He didn’t check in with Dante, or with Loki or Declan. He didn’t ask about supplies, perimeter watches, weapons, where they were storing what, how they’d designed or distributed work shifts, sleeping areas, rations or command.

  As soon as we reached Ship Rock, and descended down the pine ladder into its underground network of caves, we were approached by one of the local humans and Jorag, who’d already found us an area to be alone in the maze of smaller caves and tunnels.

  He assured us it would be totally private.

  I was amazed at how much they’d done already.

  Yisso torches lit the wider, main tunnels, and everywhere I looked, I saw people carrying supplies and staking out “rooms” carved into the rock.

  Revik and I followed Jorag and the native human, whose name was Davis. I recognized him as the same human who’d led the strawberry appaloosa out to me back at the canyon. Maybe in his mid-forties, he had short-cropped dark hair and an easy smile.

  The two of them brought us down the main tunnel from the entrance, then down two ladders to take us further underground. I started to get worried Revik’s claustrophobia was going to flare down here, when the tunnel began to slope upwards once more. About ten or fifteen minutes of walking brought us to a dry, relatively flat cave with a sort of foyer at its entrance and a trap door in the ceiling overhead.

  I saw Revik survey the trap door in a kind of relief, even as Davis took me into the small cave and showed me the supplies they’d brought to make us more comfortable. They’d already filled the inside wall with a stack of blankets and skins, water skeins, bags of dried fish, fruit and venison, and a handheld, presumably so they could signal us.

  He told me, with no small amount of embarrassment, to use the plastic bucket they’d left, if either of us needed to relieve ourselves, and to place it outside so someone could deal with it.

  Thanking him as he walked out, I just stood there while Davis and Jorag hung another two heavy blankets over the cave’s opening. Jorag poked his head in a last time to inform us they’d be posting a guard, too, likely a local human.

  I knew why they would avoid posting seers down here.

  They knew roughly what we were going to be doing.

  They likely expected the Barrier blowback in terms of our sex, bonding, emotional confusion and whatever else to be hard on most seers.

  While Revik stepped outside the cave briefly to work out the last of the security logistics with Jorag and Davis, I took the time to unroll the sleeping pads they’d left us on the bare rock. I spread out the animal skins next, then a few lighter blankets than the kind they’d used as our makeshift door.

  They’d even given us pillows, although relatively flat, hard ones, made of more animal skins stuffed with something dense, likely plant fibers.

  Revik pulled aside the heavy blankets and entered the cave right as I was finishing.

  It was surprisingly cold underground.

  Even so, Revik didn’t hesitate, but immediately began removing his clothes. He tossed his jacket and gun harness on a rock shelf that stood over the floor on his side of the cave. He added his armored shirt, his belt, and two side holsters to the pile next.

  Pausing long enough to motion towards me with his hands, indicating he wanted me to undress too, he began unfastening the front of his pants.

  After a bare hesitation, I followed his lead, shivering a little when I first took off the heavy shirt I’d been wearing on the ride over. Unfastening the holster from around my chest and shoulders, I pulled that off too, resting it and the gun on top of my jacket. I took off the thigh holster next, and my belt, adding those to the pile––along with the knife I’d pulled out of a third holster I’d worn at the small of my back.

  Without waiting, I tugged the armored shirt I wore over my head, leaving that on the pile of weapons, then I started unhooking the front of my pants.

  By then, Revik lay on the pallet, watching me, the lighter blankets over him.

  A thick plume of heat and pain left his light when I got my pants off. I glanced over and his expression was taut, his eyes on me unapologetically. Feeling my stare, he glanced up, his expression still as glass. I felt his pain worsen as he studied my face.

  Clicking at him softly, I shook my head.

  “Work first, right?” I said. “Isn’t that what you said?”

  “I hope you don’t mind if I lay on you with a hard-on while we ‘work,’” he muttered.

  “As long as this isn’t one of those, ‘I can touch you but you can’t touch me’ things, you can do whatever you like.”

  His jaw hardened more. “Gaos, wife. Maybe this is a bad idea.”

  “It was your idea,” I reminded him. “You wanted to do one more session. You asked me for that, and I said yes. Originally, I was just offering to fuck.”

  He flinched. The pain coming off him briefly worsened.

  Then, clicking softly, he looked away.

  When I glanced at him next, he’d leaned back on one of the cow-skin pillows, cushioning his head with an arm. His eyes never left my body. I felt that hotter, more predatory flavor in his light grow more intense as he watched me fold my clothes, setting them on the opposite stone shelf. A flicker of impatience left him, along with a darker cloud of pain.

  “I don’t want to die without us bonded,” he said.

  Tensing, I looked over at him and frowned.

  “I don’t want to die at all,” I said, my voice warning. “Don’t go fatalistic on me, Revik. I’m fucking pregnant. We have a child––”

  “All right.” He raised a hand, a peace signal. “All righ
t. I’m sorry.”

  I bit my lip, fighting a low surge of anger despite his apology, even as some part of me continued to turn over his words. I knew he was right. I felt the same thing he did about this, about what might be coming for both of us.

  I felt it around the doors, around the Dreng, around what I might need to give up to open those doors.

  I wasn’t ready to look at that, though.

  I definitely didn’t want to look at it now.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his voice more subdued.

  Pulling back the blankets for me, he nudged me with his light, asking me to come to bed.

  I nodded, more to myself than to him, tossing my pants on the pile with the rest of my clothes, and setting my boots against the wall. I tugged the elastic band out of my hair, what had been holding it in a braided ponytail, and chucked that on the pile of clothes, too.

  Without waiting, I walked to him, and crawled under the blanket. He threw it over my back, then enveloped me in his arms.

  For a long moment, I just wrapped myself around him, not speaking, or trying to do anything in particular with my light other than wind it into his. Honestly, I would have been perfectly happy to just lie here and make out, like we had on the plane.

  More pain rippled off him.

  Sliding a hand into my hair, he tilted my head back.

  After looking at my face for a few seconds, he leaned closer, kissing me on the mouth.

  His kiss deepened, growing more sensual as he tugged me against him. He pressed his body into mine, and I couldn’t help noticing he tasted like salt from all the work he’d been doing, or that his body felt insanely good pressed against mine. I could feel every muscle in his chest, legs, arms, abdomen, even before I wrapped my hands and arms around him. I dug my fingers into his shoulders and back, and a heavy sound came out of his chest.

  He pushed me onto my back and followed me, kissing me harder.

  It felt like a long time before he ended that kiss, but I still followed him with my mouth, borderline resentful when he pulled away.