Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  If he killed her now, after everything…

  His jaw clenched, but he steeled himself, reminding himself why he had done it. They had to know. Now they did.

  “You should go back,” he said to the other seer. “Engage the secondary construct. I’ll stay with her while she reconnects.”

  Dorje hesitated. “You? Alone? Is that a good idea, Balidor?”

  “Someone must stay with her. If we’ve left it too close, someone will need to perform the proper medical interventions. I do not want her to die, either, Dorje. I am trained for this. And it is my responsibility.”

  Dorje hesitated again, then gestured affirmative. “All right.”

  “Tell the others I am sorry,” Balidor said. “Make sure they know I failed them in this. Those who want to leave, they should do so now. Quickly, before he can recover enough to find us.”

  He met Dorje’s gaze, knowing his own eyes likely showed his strain. He fought not to look at the lock while he waited for it to release.

  “My friend, you should go, too,” he told him. “Go to the mountains. Find friends who will disguise you. We are better separated for now.”

  Dorje looked confused, and a little angry. “You want me to leave the Bridge?”

  “I want to save your life, brother,” Balidor said, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I want to save as many of us as I can, and we have little time.”

  He glanced through the transparent window, his voice grim.

  “All kinds of hell are about to rain down on our heads, my brother.”

  22

  ALIVE

  WREG STOOD AT the gate of the door, watching him. It felt as though he had done so for months. It hadn’t been nearly that long in reality, he knew, but it felt longer than he could count in days and minutes any longer.

  He knew it wouldn’t be long now. The Elaerian wasn’t fighting anymore. He lay on his back in a pose of waiting, his clenched hands the only overt expression of his strain.

  Wreg had even wondered at times, watching him, if they should hasten the end for him, ease his suffering.

  He had not. Not only because he was the Sword, but because Wreg knew this as part of the bonding process, too. You lived for one, you died for them. It was right to let him experience this to the end, no matter how unpleasant.

  Still, it was an act of will to remain by him at this point.

  He could remember the Sword as a child, and as a young soldier in his ranks, when he’d had no idea who he really was, or the true role he’d played during the war. The Sword’s guardian, Menlim of Purestred, had wanted the young Syrimne to earn his own stripes, to not depend on his soul’s status to earn him the respect of his brothers and sisters.

  He had succeeded… at least, in part.

  Nenzi, as he had been called then, had been a frighteningly good soldier, even at that young age. It had irritated Wreg almost, that this veritable kid could do some of the things he could do, even against some of his more seasoned men. It hadn’t all been hand-to-hand or a knack with a gun, either, both of which Wreg had seen in youngsters before.

  Nenzi demonstrated a keen instinct for strategy, even if it verged on reckless at times. He understood the psychology behind war, something Wreg had never determined how to train into his charges as effectively as he would like. His seers either seemed to acquire such knowledge through experience and time––or they didn’t.

  Truthfully, though, Wreg had also thought Nenzi a bit of an ass.

  Immature, often angry, attention-seeking, vindictive––even petty––he’d seemed overly concerned with his sexual conquests, way too ready for a fight, and he drank too much, even when he was supposed to be on duty.

  He’d been too young, for one thing.

  Wreg hadn’t even wanted such a kid in his ranks, and would have refused him if he’d been nephew to anyone else. He’d suffered all the usual problems of seer youths, plus a few that were less usual, especially in the quantities Nenzi displayed. He’d been far too easy to emotionally trigger. He’d been too clearly damaged, truthfully, and in ways he didn’t seem willing to own at the time, much less communicate in any coherent way.

  He’d shown not an ounce of understanding of the real work they were doing, or its importance to the Sark race––or to the world, for that matter.

  Wreg spent half of his damned time disciplining him, it seemed, and cleaning up after him when he overreacted to some perceived slight, or tried to seduce the girlfriend or spouse of one of his brothers or sisters and nearly got his head kicked in.

  At the time, Wreg dismissed him as one of those who fought for their cause simply as an excuse to spill blood.

  He found out later that some of that had been cover.

  Nenzi’s guardian had instructed him to keep his feelings to himself about the war, and to play up some of the more immature aspects of his own personality. He’d even instructed him to pick fights, to sleep with the girlfriends of other soldiers, to steal from them, to show up at ops meetings drunk, to make mistakes on the field… providing his transgressions didn’t get him or too many others killed.

  Menlim hadn’t wanted it to be too obvious that Nenzi had been extensively trained already, given his young age. Nor had he wanted his nephew getting close to anyone in the regular ranks. Menlim wanted him isolated, friendless, unapproachable. He wanted him disliked by his fellow infiltrators and soldiers. He didn’t want anyone missing him when he wasn’t around, or if they wondered, he wanted them to assume the worst.

  He’d succeeded in that.

  Pretty much everyone in Wreg’s unit hated him. Wreg hadn’t mustered up the courage to even tease the Sword about those years yet, much less to tell him that they’d had a drinking party in honor of his demise. The overall theme of that party had been along the lines of, “good fucking riddance.”

  Now that he knew some of the worst of those behaviors stemmed mostly from Menlim’s charade, Wreg felt a bit ashamed of himself for his lack of perception. Knowing the man behind the act shamed him further, for it was clear he’d suffered in those years, and that the isolation had weighed on him.

  But still––and Wreg hoped his thinking along such lines wasn’t purely rationalization––the acting in those early years didn’t account for all of the changes he saw in the Sword now, at least not from Wreg’s perception.

  Nenzi had matured in the intervening decades.

  Wreg found him an altogether different person, in fact.

  This new version had even more of the traits that had made him a good soldier back in the day, and far fewer of those which had reflected on him so poorly in the past. Even before he’d killed the boy and reunited with his Elaerian self, Wreg found he’d been happy to follow this new person, this “Dehgoies,” into that dangerous mess in D.C. At the time, that surprised him greatly, even though he’d heard, of course, who the man’s wife was.

  Like the others, he’d assumed Dehgoies coerced her in some way, that he’d taken advantage of her naiveté to advance himself in status.

  He didn’t think that anymore.

  In fact, the Sword’s relationship with the Bridge contributed to his newfound respect for the man that Nenzi had become. He’d become someone Wreg could look up to, even admire.

  He’d also become his friend.

  Exhaling in a slow breath, Wreg rubbed his face with a hand and realized he needed a shave, and probably a shower.

  Some food wouldn’t be amiss, either.

  He was just starting to back out of the room, when the Elaerian nearly made him jump out of his skin.

  “Gods!” The Sword’s hand reached out, from the bed. “Allie! Allie! Is that you?”

  It was unnerving, like watching a corpse rise.

  Wreg blinked at first, unable to move.

  Then, slowly, he reentered the room, shutting the door behind him.

  If he was going to start screaming again, the others didn’t need to hear it.

  The seer on the bed was breathing harder.
Tears coursed down his cheeks as he continued to reach out, his eyes unseeing. Wreg watched in disbelief as his spine seemed to arch in some extreme duress of feeling.

  “Allie…” the Elaerian choked. “Allie… please be there… please be you…”

  Wreg walked closer to the bed, trying to decide if he should do anything. Was this some final death rattle? A confused hallucination as his body ended? Even as he thought it, his light smacked up against another presence.

  Wreg blinked, coming to a dead stop.

  Once he had, he realized he knew the presence. He knew––but it couldn’t be. He scanned the Sword’s form in disbelief. Whatever it was, it coiled around his body, strangling his light in its attempts to get close to him. Wreg wondered if she had somehow come back from one of the Barrier’s places of death, perhaps to comfort him in his last moments.

  But the presence lingered, strengthened.

  Soon, it flooded the whole room, raining down gold and white ribbons of light. They spun and threw sparks, brighter than the sun, soft enough to take his breath.

  Wreg scanned more deeply. Too deeply, as it turned out––he found himself shoved violently out of the space by Dehgoies. But even that felt less out of control than what had killed one of his infiltrators a few days earlier.

  Retreating a few steps in respect, Wreg watched from a distance, still in shock when he saw the female’s presence coil even more tightly around his friend.

  The Elaerian’s arm curled around himself, thin from the weight he’d lost. He hugged his own chest, tears still coursing down his face.

  “Allie,” he murmured.

  He spoke an endearment in Prexci. Then more of them.

  He switched to using her language, the human English, still speaking so low Wreg could barely hear him. Wreg didn’t get close enough to even attempt to translate the words with his light, but pain contorted the Elaerian’s features as he listened to her response.

  For a long time, Wreg watched them speak to one another.

  As he did, what he was seeing really sank in.

  She was alive. The Bridge wasn’t visiting him from the death place.

  She was alive.

  As the thought sank in, Wreg felt a kind of fever take him. The implications of her being alive churned in his mind, and the fever worsened, becoming a darker feeling of rage.

  Those fuckers in the Adhipan had done this to him.

  They’d simulated her death, somehow.

  He watched the Elaerian and his mate, saw the Sword’s face crease then soften as he held her light to his, as if cradling his own heart in his chest. Already, he was breathing more deeply. His light moved around his long form as if it had remembered how.

  From his expression, Alyson hadn’t been a party to this. She hadn’t done this to him, which meant it had been done against her will, too.

  Wreg’s rage boiled hotter as he looked at them together. He watched the transformation in his friend’s light, felt the pain coming off the two of them, even from where he stood, and bit back his fury with every ounce of his will.

  Those motherfuckers would pay.

  They would pay if Wreg had to spend his life in the cause of it.

  JON STARED AT the Adhipan leader, his face frozen in an expression that made it difficult for Balidor to know if the human even comprehended his words.

  The joy that stood out in his features upon finding out she lived faded as the infiltrator continued to speak. Jon’s eyes turned confused, almost lost, just before they shifted back to the wasted form on the military-style bunk.

  That blank confusion was somehow worse for Balidor than outright anger.

  “What?” Jon said. “You did what?”

  “It was necessary, Jon,” Balidor said, hearing the defensiveness in his own words. “I assure you, it was. I did not like doing it, believe me. But we now know the limits of our options.”

  “The limits of our options?” Rather than holding anger, Jon’s voice remained lost-sounding. “I can’t believe you. I really can’t believe you did this.”

  Tears stood out in his eyes when he looked at Balidor next.

  “Jesus, ‘Dor,” he said, half-choking. “Look at her!”

  Balidor did not answer.

  He forced himself to focus also on the female Elaerian.

  The train moved her body in short sways as it clacked down the tracks. They’d brought her on board in a gurney after meeting the humans in Shanghai. He and the other seers had been forced to clear the way for her over an hour in advance, pushing humans not to notice as they loaded her into one of the private cabins in a car situated towards the rear of the long passenger train. They bought tickets for over half the train, and still Balidor felt eyes on them.

  It had been over a week, and she still did not look well.

  Her hair hung sweated to her back. Balidor knew a shower might help, but even so, a distinctly unhealthy look remained in the weight of her dark and light curls. That unhealthy look was even more obvious in the jaundiced look of her skin. The gunshot wound had mostly healed, but she still had a bandage where he’d pinpointed her chest in such a way as to simulate hitting her heart, while missing it by a hair’s breadth.

  That had truly been the riskiest part of the illusion––the scene of murder.

  To do it right, he had to come close to killing her for real.

  She still looked dangerously thin. She had a tendency to lay wrapped around herself since she’d come out of the tank, and Balidor felt enough of Dehgoies around her to know she was fighting her way through the collar to reach him every chance she got. The drugs helped with that, but only marginally, and those were making her sick too, further prolonging her recovery.

  Balidor folded his arms tighter, looking back at the human.

  He shoved the tendrils of guilt angrily away from his light.

  “We had to do it, Jon,” he said, his voice rougher. “We had to know if it would kill her, if we separated them. We could not tell her. We could not. You must understand this. She would have approved of the principle.”

  “Approved of the principle?” Jon said, incredulous. “That you planned to shoot her? Then stick her in a metal box while she wasted away to a skeleton?”

  Frowning, Balidor gestured a half hand-symbol with one hand. “Jon, you must understand. We could not give her details as to how, much less when we might test this. She could not know, not given her connection to––”

  “That’s fucking crazy!” Jon burst out. “When did you decide this? When did you decide to do this, ‘Dori?”

  “Jon,” Balidor warned. “She wanted to know if she could sever things with him. She wanted to know that more than any of us did. She asked Vash to try this with her, and with what we know now, it is good that we made the attempt in this way first. Vash’s method would most certainly have killed her, Jon. Really killed her. That, or we would have had to find some way to bring Dehgoies here and help him to reestablish the connection to her personally.”

  Jon continued to shake his head, uncomprehending.

  “How could you not tell her?” he said. “How could you not warn her that you would be doing this?”

  “We could not,” Balidor said, clicking sharply. “We could not, Jon! You must see it. Dehgoies would have felt it, had she known. He would have sent everything he had at us, trying to stop it. There was a danger as it was that he might come after her––”

  “Well, for crying out loud, ‘Dor. You can’t exactly blame him, can you?”

  “––and if it had worked,” Balidor cut in, biting back his impatience. “It would have been better if he did not know she remained alive.”

  “Better?” Jon stared at him. “Better for who? And for how long? You don’t think he would have figured it out eventually?”

  Balidor frowned. “Probably. Well… definitely, at some point. But in the meantime, she would have been safe, Jon.”

  He stared down at the bed, feeling his jaw harden.

  “She would hav
e been free of him,” he finished bitterly.

  When the human wiped his eyes, staring at the form on the bed, Balidor found himself relieved he had waited to show Jon that his adoptive sister was alive. If Jon had seen her when they first pulled her out of the tank, he would not be reacting anywhere close to as well as this.

  She had truly looked like a corpse.

  Pale, with thin limbs like something from a death camp run by humans, she’d scarcely been breathing. He’d lifted her out of the gel inside the tank and carried her gingerly out of the Barrier construct chamber, half-afraid he might snap one of her bones accidentally. Wiping her skin free of the gel as best he could, he laid her on a bed in one of the back rooms of the compound and drew a thick blanket over her.

  He watched as her light rejoined that of the living world.

  He’d worried at first that the construct might slow her ability to connect with the Barrier proper, but it did not.

  It also didn’t slow her reconnection with her mate.

  Within seconds, it seemed, Balidor felt a presence appear around hers.

  Tentative at first, it whispered cautiously over her form.

  Then, before he could confirm the identity of the person behind it, light flooded the room in a hot wash, bright enough to shock Balidor’s aleimi.

  He’d taken a step back in reflex, taking himself out of the aura of her light. He scarcely blinked and the other had already overpowered the space.

  The new presence wrapped around her aleimic body with a desperation he could almost feel, that closed his throat in spite of the sparks of anger it inflamed in his light. Dehgoies slid into her like she was sustenance––water after the drought.

  Despite how frail she was, he seemed to lean into her very being, as if resting on her.

  Balidor stood there, still as death, seeing her eyes flutter.

  She took a deeper breath as the other Elaerian explored her aleimi. The breath after was deeper still, expanding her lungs. The whole time, the presence slid through her, touching her lightly at first, as if she were some kind of damned sacred object, until gradually it grew more and more deliberate, and again Balidor felt that desperation behind it.