Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Revik thought about that, frowning faintly as he nodded.

  “Yes,” he said as he ran the scenario in his mind. “Yes, I like that. We’ll start there.”

  Looking at her, he glanced next at Feigran, who sat on the stone floor under the row of virtual images, watching the army grow closer on the horizon.

  He glanced at his timepiece again, wondering if he should ping Maygar.

  Still gazing at Feigran’s back, Revik scanned the Elaerian briefly, then clicked out, looking back at Cass.

  “I want ten more possible scenarios. Minimum. Keep working on them… to improve them, but also so you have options. We should assume some will work better than others. Work with Feigran if you can.”

  He gestured towards the seer on the floor, grunting.

  “Terian always had one hell of an imagination. Feigran will have that now, too. If he doesn’t have thoughts on this, I’d be shocked.”

  Combing both hands through his long black hair, he continued to think aloud.

  “As for the illusions themselves, think range,” he said. “They can be loud and jarring. They can also be subtle and nuanced. Try to give me some real options, not just variations on the same type of thing. And keep in mind you’ll have four of us operating them. Allie won’t be able to help with this part. We shouldn’t count on it, anyway.”

  Pausing, he darkened his voice,

  “…We need it now, Cass. As in, within the next twenty minutes. They’ll be in firing range soon, assuming they aren’t already, given some of the hardware they’re hauling. The fact that they aren’t just hammering us with bombs and missiles from a distance tells me they’re here to wipe us out. They want to be close enough to make sure few of us escape. You can bet they’re monitoring every entrance and exit they can find to these caves. They’ll be particularly determined to kill the four of us.”

  She nodded, jaw firming.

  “Okay. Twenty minutes. I can do that.”

  “Once you’ve got a portfolio you’re happy with, talk to Wreg,” he added. “He’ll need to provide input, and the two of you need to talk through the geography of the illusions themselves, so you don’t screw up anything he’s doing. He’s going to be designing his shooting strategy around you, Feigran and Maygar, at least to a degree. You don’t want to surprise him… not that way. It could potentially fuck up everything.”

  Glancing at Wreg, who stood next to Jon, she nodded, somewhat more hesitantly that time. Revik saw her give a thin swallow, a fainter pulse of fear and grief leaving her light as she glanced at Jon, focusing a beat too long on his profile.

  “Okay,” she said, her voice more subdued.

  “You’ll need to work with Dante, too,” he continued. “And possibly Jaden, depending on if he replaces Vik up here, and Vik moves down to the secondary comp room they have staked out. Dante, Vik, Jaden and Dalejem are all working on hacking their satellite and ground readings now. They’ll need to know everything on the geographical maps you and Wreg work out, or most of what you and the team does on this front will be close to worthless.”

  She nodded, swallowing again.

  “Okay.”

  “Can I check your structure?” He kept his voice casual, but part of him already focused on the spaces over her head. “I still don’t know much about your training. I might be able to boost you a bit, if you’ll allow me.”

  She grunted, flushing red, but waved him on, a seer’s form of permission.

  “Knock yourself out. I’ll take all the help I can get.” She glanced up at him then, her brown eyes cautious. “And b.s. on not knowing much about my training. If anyone knows anything about my training, it’s you.”

  He nodded, acknowledging her words without fully agreeing with them.

  “I’m starting now.”

  “Okay.”

  Opening his light for real, he ignored her flinch.

  He scrutinized areas of her aleimi, focusing mainly on the parts structured by Menlim. He noted details of the breaks, boosts and twists performed by the Dreng, noting changes she’d wrought in herself via the telekinesis she’d performed already. Pulling a few structures into alignment, he broke off a few things he found that Menlim had left there, and pulsed light into a few others the Dreng likely shadowed to keep her from using them.

  Since the latter of those resonated with frequencies the Dreng wouldn’t like, they were probably waiting on activating them until they could reprogram her aleimi more as a whole.

  Untangling a few more segments Menlim seemed to have left deliberately confused, likely to force her to rely more on the structure of the Dreng, he marveled again at how much Balidor had done already in fixing her light.

  Compared to how she’d looked when they first brought her back from New York, he barely recognized her in this space. She also felt significantly different from how he remembered her in San Francisco, when he’d been playing bodyguard to Allie.

  Frowning slightly, he zoomed in on a few areas, making a number of more subtle adjustments once he had the bigger pieces mostly clean. Zooming back out, he took snapshots with his light, noting a few other areas she hadn’t used at all yet.

  “Try creating one of the illusions now,” he said, still staring at her structure. “Limited space. Don’t let it go outside the boundaries of the construct here. I just want to see what you can do.”

  “Construct?” She looked up at him, confused. “What construct? I thought Balidor and the others were still working on building a construct here, that––”

  “The human one,” he broke in, patient. “There’s a human construct here, Cassandra. Get to know it. It’s far more powerful than anything we’ll be able to create in the time we have, and it’s already protecting us. It’s also obscuring our position, and the position of the Barrier door. I suspect that has a hell of a lot more to do with the delay around the Mythers getting here than anything on Deifilius’s end.”

  Pausing, he stood perfectly still, watching her light expand out tentatively, looking for the human-made construct. When she still seemed confused, he pointed out the structural “spine” in a series of flashed images, giving her a place to start.

  Feeling her astonishment as she pulled the lines and limits of that construct out of the waves of the Barrier, he watched her shift to exploring its size. Following her with his light, he stopped her here and there, showing her aspects she missed, nudging different parts of her structure that resonated with some element of the functionality there.

  As he did, he highlighted the edges of the construct and their overlap with the physical world, showing her the markers he’d mapped so far, showing her the lines she should not let her light cross under any circumstances. He showed her the ways in which it differed from seer constructs, making it more difficult for many seers to see.

  “Fuck,” she muttered.

  “It’s impressive engineering, to say the least,” he agreed. “Like I said, it’s more than anything we could have done on our own without a few decades of work. I’ve never seen anything like it, truthfully, not even in Asia, where seers had a lot of contact with humans over the years and even trained some of them prior to First Contact.”

  Following her light as she continued to explore what he’d shown her, he shrugged.

  “You’re right about Balidor working on a construct too, of course. His construct is more related to specific military needs we have… for functionality within structures familiar to our team’s training.”

  Glancing at her, he added,

  “The ex-Rebels and Adhipan have combined ops training and drills in most respects. They have enough crossover now, they no longer need separate constructs for operational coordination. Of course, they’ll still primarily use the human one as the structural base––creating more of a construct within a construct for our own needs.”

  He let her look at it a few beats longer.

  “You got it?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  Her voice held doubt, but he could
feel she had the gist.

  He could also feel he was intimidating her.

  He brushed the latter aside, both in his light and hers. It wasn’t his intention to make her feel small. Nor would it help with anything he was trying to do with her right now.

  He felt her bewilderment deepen when she realized he’d tried to raise her confidence in her own abilities, reassuring her with his light.

  He didn’t pause for long on that, either.

  “Okay,” he said. “Show me the first illusion.”

  HE WAS STILL working with Cass when the two seers walked in.

  Despite spending the last five or six minutes with her in deeply immersive spaces, Revik snapped out of the Barrier at once––the instant they crossed the boundaries of the cave door. His eyes and light followed, seemingly on their own.

  Once he saw their faces, he forgot Cass altogether.

  He stared at both of them, his light flaring out in a near-reaction already, before his mind uttered so much as a word, or even identified the two seers in a way that connected.

  Then his physical eyes clicked into focus.

  He stared at Chandre first, at her long braids, her dark red eyes, the high-cheekboned face that still made him think of what they used to call a “hunter” back in Asia––a type of infiltrator that got stuck with a lot of wet-work and deep-cover infiltrations.

  She’d always had that stamp on her light to him.

  Her light had changed from when he’d last seen her, though.

  Grief came off it now, a sadness he didn’t recognize.

  With that, an openness lived in her he found disarming, despite everything he knew about what she’d done. Noting the collar around her neck, he frowned, feeling an involuntary pulse of sympathy as he watched other seers turn and stare at her as she walked past.

  He’d heard about what the humans had done with her, of course.

  Declan told them how the local shamans took her under their wing, one of the elders in particular, and protected her. They’d taken off her collar for some kind of local ritual she’d participated in with them, something they claimed “expelled the demons” she’d been carrying inside of her. The collar was returned to her at the ritual’s end, but according to the head shaman here, a male human named “Max,” she no longer needed it.

  Balidor and Tarsi checked out her light, of course.

  The rest of the infiltration team checked it obsessively too, and probably still ran checks on it every spare minute they got. They’d gone back and forth as a group as to whether to keep her under some kind of house arrest, but in the end, Tarsi made the call on behalf of the Council to respect the word of the human tribal elders.

  Not everyone agreed with that decision, of course.

  Revik knew she was still in high danger of being shot by friendly fire before this whole thing was over.

  Looking at her light, however, he understood the Council’s decision, as well as his wife’s, who’d agreed with that decision when she was asked to weigh in. It had been Allie who ID’d Chandre as a possible mole in the first place, so they brought her in to look at Chandre not long before they all left for Ship Rock.

  After seeing Chandre in person, and assessing her light, Allie agreed to go along with the Council’s decision.

  Privately, she told Revik that the link she’d seen to Menlim was no longer there.

  Revik hadn’t noticed the link on Chandre before, but he could feel the difference in the hunter now. She felt lighter, more emotional than he remembered, but more than that, he felt that openness in her heart.

  He didn’t remember ever feeling that on her before.

  Chandre had always been a bit of a cipher to him. He’d known her for years, they’d been friends, yet in some ways he doubted he’d ever really known her. Now, watching her walk into the room, he felt like he was seeing her more clearly than perhaps he ever had.

  His eyes swiveled to the male seer walking to Chandre’s right even as he thought it.

  Once they had, Revik stiffened all over again.

  WREG NUDGED JON, his eyes trained on the other side of the room.

  Jon turned, following his husband’s gaze.

  Once he saw who just entered the cavern, his whole body tensed.

  He immediately looked for Revik, who’d been working with Cass in one of the alcoves, presumably on whatever telekinetic thing they were designing to go with Wreg’s military strategy. He found them at once, and saw Revik’s pale eyes focused on the same person Jon had just been looking at.

  “Fuck,” he muttered. “Should we do something? Tell him to leave?”

  Balidor grunted from their other side.

  “Good luck with that.” Seeing Jon’s questioning frown, Balidor clicked under his breath. “You clearly don’t know brother Dalejem. If you tell him to leave, he’ll stay just on principle. He’s as stubborn as your brother-in-law. Hell. He’s nearly as stubborn as your mate.”

  Giving Wreg a faint smile, he nodded towards Chandre, who stalked beside Dalejem like he’d hired her to be his bodyguard.

  “…Anyway, he’s likely here for a reason, or he wouldn’t have risked bringing sister Chandre in here with him.”

  The human standing on the other side of the console turned sharply at Balidor’s words.

  President Moira Brooks stared across the length of the cave floor, her brown eyes hardening when she saw the red-eyed seer heading in their direction.

  Chandre clearly noticed a number of eyes on her as she made her way deeper into the cave, including Declan and Jax, who stared at her with hatred in their eyes as she passed by a flickering yisso torch someone attached to one of the stone pillars.

  Jon remembered suddenly that Declan had a decades-long, perhaps even centuries-long relationship with Mara, one of the Adhipan seers Chandre killed in cold blood at Langley. Balidor told him Declan had taken her death hard. He and Mara had apparently worked hundreds of missions together, dated off and on, and had been extremely close as friends.

  Wreg frowned. “So that fucker really is acting as some kind of body guard to her, isn’t he?” He grunted. “Good luck to him, if Declan decides to get in his way.”

  Jon glanced at his mate, raising an eyebrow.

  He knew Wreg respected Declan a lot. Despite the tall, big-boned, Eastern European seer being ex-Adhipan, Jon could feel a resonance between the two of them. Declan would have made a good Rebel in some ways.

  Wreg grunted, giving Jon a sideways smile. Damn straight, he would have.

  Jon snorted, rolling his eyes.

  Seemingly oblivious to the exchange between them, Balidor continued to watch Dalejem and Chandre, his eyes shrewd.

  “I’m not convinced it’s all one way,” he said, giving Wreg a sideways glance. “Meaning, I don’t know if it’s all a matter of Jem protecting her. Personally, I wonder if maybe brother Jem is not entirely reassured by the light ministrations of our human cousins. Maybe he’s worried Chandre might try to kill our Esteemed Bridge in her sleep next time.”

  “Can’t exactly blame him for that,” Jon conceded.

  “I can blame him for a lot else, though,” Wreg muttered.

  They were still watching them head their way, when movement in Jon’s periphery caused him to turn. He tensed when he saw Revik crossing the cave floor, his strides long, making his legs look somehow longer as he closed the distance between himself and Dalejem.

  “Christ,” Wreg muttered. “We’d better deal with this.”

  Balidor frowned, glancing at Wreg, then Jon.

  Jon could almost feel what the Adhipan leader was thinking.

  He was wondering what in the hell Wreg thought they could do, exactly, if Revik decided to kill either or both of them.

  Even so, Balidor followed Wreg when the Chinese seer began jogging in the same direction as Revik. Jon knew Wreg hoped to head him off, or at least to calm him down, but he could already see they wouldn’t get there in time.

  They were still a few yards away
when Revik reached Dalejem.

  Jon watched in disbelief as his brother-in-law walked directly up to the green-eyed seer with the strange violet rings around his irises, and, with barely a hesitation––wrapped his arms around him in a strong hug.

  Revik yanked the other male against him, holding him tightly against his chest.

  Jon saw Dalejem’s eyes widen in disbelief, his arms tensing into a fighter’s pose even as Revik pulled him into the embrace.

  For a long-feeling few seconds, Revik just held him.

  Dalejem’s hands and arms remained stiff as he stood there, enduring the hug without seeming to know what to do.

  When Revik finally loosened his hold, meeting the seer’s gaze, he gripped his biceps in his hands, clenching his jaw. Jon was stunned to see tears in the Elaerian’s eyes.

  Jon saw that same fact stun Dalejem even more.

  The handsome seer’s expression broke somewhere in those few seconds of exchanged stares between them. Jon wondered if words passed between them, but he couldn’t tell from the expressions on their faces. If so, they passed silently, inside the Barrier, and behind whatever shield Revik threw up around the two of them.

  From the outside, they seemed only to be staring at one another, their faces growing increasingly expressive as they looked at one another’s eyes.

  It stunned Jon even more when he realized he recognized the look in Revik’s eyes.

  It was love.

  It wasn’t long before he recognized the same emotion in Jem’s face, although he seemed to be fighting it more, almost like it angered him.

  “You motherfucker,” Jem said, wiping his eyes angrily.

  “I’m sorry,” Revik said aloud.

  Hugging him tightly again, nearly crushing him in his arms, he kissed him on the cheek.

  “I’m so fucking sorry, Dalejem. For everything, brother. We all owe you so much. Allie and I owe you our lives. We owe you our daughter’s life. Everyone in this fucking cave owes you, whether they know it or not. We all owe you everything.”