Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  He paused, and for a second that approval turned into something closer to reverence. He touched my arm lightly.

  And we do not resent you for this life you have led, Esteemed One. Not at all. It is right, that you had this. It is good for you to be pure. And it is good for Syrimne to be not so pure. You see? He needs you like this, as much as you need him to be how he is. It is why there is no Syrimne without the Bridge. It is why he could not do this before, alone––without his mate. It is likely why the Shield had to stop him. ‘The Bridge speaks to Death… softens him with love.’ I know our scripture is new to you still, but do you understand this?

  Feeling my good humor and that sense of camaraderie evaporate, I nodded, giving him a wan smile to show him I understood. Fighting to escape his scrutiny, I looked out the window of the helicopter, gazing down on the dark shadows of the mountains below.

  The sick feeling remained with me, though, forcing me to return to his words, again and again. I tried my damnedest not to think about it in terms of Revik, or to really go there in my head, envisioning the things I knew he’d done––but I couldn’t stop myself completely.

  He’d killed thousands of people. Maybe even millions.

  Fighting it out of my light, then my thoughts, I gripped the edge of the seat. I tried to focus on the current mission, what we were doing now. I tried to remind myself that this time, it wouldn’t be like that. He’d promised me low casualties. None, if all went well. This op was all about stealth. Get in, get out. Don’t trip the alarms.

  I had to believe he wouldn’t lie to me about that.

  Even as I thought it, I felt him from wherever he was. I knew he and his team were already on the ground, but remained hooked into our construct through a number of connecting structures. He tugged gently at my light.

  What is it? he sent. Everything okay?

  Realizing he’d just now checked in on me, that he hadn’t heard the rest of the back and forth with the others, I shook my head, even though I knew he wouldn’t see it where he was.

  It’s nothing, I sent. Just nerves. How much longer?

  Two minutes, Allie.

  He hesitated. I felt a whisper of doubt on him.

  You sure you want to do this? he sent. You can still sit this one out. Just ride with the others back to Santos. It will complicate things, but it’s not too late. He hesitated again, and I felt that worry in his light sharpen. I didn’t push you into this, did I?

  No. Thinking about this, I realized it was true. Not at all. I want to be here.

  I felt a pulse of warmth off him.

  So we’re all go, then? he sent.

  I folded my arms, exhaling. Why? Are you afraid my “decent at mulei” won’t be enough? Or that because I still suck at seer sign language, I’m going to manage to blow the whole operation?

  I felt his amusement. They showed you?

  Erratic? I sent. Really, honey?

  I felt a whisper of pain off him. Don’t distract me, love.

  I realized he was right and swallowed.

  All right. I shooed him with a Barrier hand. Off to work with you then, husband.

  I felt him chuckle, right before his light withdrew from mine.

  My eyes clicked back into focus to find Garensche grinning at me.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Stop distracting him, Bridge!” He tossed a flare at me, and it bounced off my helmet with a ping, and hit Nikka in the shoulder.

  “Hey!” Nikka said, irritated, rubbing her arm.

  Garensche added, “We don’t want to find the two of you in a dark corner somewhere, necking in the middle of the op. Or rutting like dogs—”

  “That’s enough,” Wreg said mildly, holding up a hand.

  When the giant looked at him, the humor in Garensche’s face faded.

  Wreg added, just as mild, “You’re going too far, Gar. Don’t you remember why you got yanked off detail with her?” He clicked at him softly, but I saw the clear warning in his eyes. “Manners, Gar. Manners. You know he hears everything.”

  I gave a short laugh, but no one else did.

  Finally, glancing around at the others, I looked at Wreg.

  “It’s okay.” Giving Garensche a mock disapproving look, I clicked at him, shaking my head. “Gross. But okay. In a boorish, low-class, I-spend-way-too-much-time-with-my-machines kind of way. How about I just think poorly of him and feel sorry for his mate?”

  Everyone chuckled––probably as much from hearing me butcher a common seer expression with my badly-accented Prexci as for what I’d said.

  Still, I felt a lingering tension as they all glanced at Wreg.

  Wreg smiled after a beat, lowering his hand. His eyes remained serious when he bowed his head to me. “As you wish, Esteemed Sister.”

  Garensche smiled at me, his broad face crinkling around the scar.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that the look on his face was relief.

  34

  OP

  I CLIMBED DOWN the metal ladder behind Wreg, gripping the upper rungs with gloved hands and placing my feet on slippery rungs below me in the dim light.

  Jumping the final few feet and moving out of the way of the seers behind me––or above me, really––I looked up and down both ends of the tunnel, hands on my hips.

  Wreg caught my eye, then tapped his helmet.

  I turned on the low-frequency transmitter.

  “Use this if you need to talk, Bridge,” he said, using sub-vocals. “Barrier grid is dense in here. Denser than anything you’ve likely seen––even in the White House. They’ve got about forty seers maintaining it full time. More when they’re on heightened security.” He tapped his throat. “We’ve only got two of these, you and me. The rest will use sign language. Keeps the noise down.”

  I gestured a yes so he’d know I understood, glancing over as I saw the others reach the bottom of the ladder behind us.

  “Why am I down here?” I said, also speaking without moving my lips. “Revik said you would tell me my role in this once we started? He seemed to think it was better if I didn’t know in advance for some reason.”

  Wreg inclined his head down the tunnel.

  “He thought you could help us shield,” Wreg said, his face unmoving. “He said you’re a master at it. Better than him.” Feeling me about to speak, he added, sharper, “I think he didn’t tell you so you wouldn’t argue that last point, princess.”

  I stared at Wreg through the dimly lit tunnel, unmoving.

  I honestly thought he was pulling my leg––or maybe Revik was. Seeing the complete lack of humor in Wreg’s black eyes, I bit the inside of my cheek, shrugging.

  “Don’t you have some kind of mobile construct for that?”

  “Yes,” Wreg said. “But it likely won’t be enough in here. The construct’s primarily to keep our presence hidden from breach scans, but that’s assuming minimal Barrier presence and no light work. We’ll need to use sight skills, Esteemed Bridge. To open locks. To get past any guards we find. Any time we need more than a surface scan, it could be seen. If you monitor the construct and keep those Barrier flares from getting to the sensors, we’d be grateful.” He hesitated. “You should know, they’ve gotten better at finding our constructs, too.”

  I got now, why Revik kept my role in all this purposefully vague. I don’t know if I would have argued with him, but I probably would have laughed in his face.

  I also wondered if him not telling me had something to do with the Balidor thing.

  Shoving the thought from my mind, I nodded to Wreg. It was too late now. I had to trust that Revik knew what the hell he was doing, giving this to me.

  “Okay,” I subvocalized. Keeping my expression as still as possible, I gestured with a hand. “Lead the way.”

  I followed Wreg and the others down the tunnel, fighting not to panic as the reality of what they wanted me to do sank in. I decided the hell with trusting our fearless leader.

  I was going to kill Revik.

  The idea of all
of these lives in my hands made me feel physically sick.

  As we walked, I started to experiment with my shields, trying to think of the best way to keep the construct dark from the outside. After trying a few different combinations, I decided it wasn’t enough, and started pushing out the shield I’d been keeping around my own light for the past however-many months. I did it in small, incremental steps, examining the mobile construct Wreg’s team used as I did.

  Wreg had said it would withstand a basic scan, so I did that first, trying to get a sense of the size of it, where it hooked into the Barrier, what it looked like from the outside.

  As I did, I flinched, feeling a whisper of silver strands.

  Backing off, I looked at the whole thing from another angle.

  I realized I could see it then, the box woven around the twelve of us, hooked to a structure in the Barrier. I felt beings behind that, but I didn’t get too close.

  The Dreng. Of course.

  Another dose of reality I didn’t really want.

  I examined where my own shield came from. Somehow, it had never occurred to me to do that before.

  I felt glimmers of Vash, then something a lot bigger, behind him.

  A pure, pristine white, whatever it was shone as steady as a sun. It had a sharp quality to it like glass, a diamond knife, but I felt a profound stillness there, too––a stillness that only deepened the longer I focused on it. A whisper of a lighter blue flashed past my awareness, a flavor I associated with Revik, and the way his light felt when he opened his heart.

  Whatever it was, it definitely didn’t have the agitated feel of the silver light of the Dreng, or the bite I felt behind their metallic coils.

  It was easy to forget while I was staying here, that Revik and his people––and now me, too––were lost in the equivalent of the Pyramid’s construct pretty much 24/7. Salinse’s Rebellion likely wasn’t as big as the Pyramid had been, but since Terian died, they seem to have taken the Rooks’ place in a lot of ways. They certainly seemed to be the most organized and widespread of the groups still linked to the Dreng, at least that I’d heard of.

  I didn’t like thinking about that very much, either.

  Still experimenting, I hooked the team’s construct to the white light I used for my own shield, using my aleimi as the resonance link. It took me a few minutes of experimenting to get it right. I tried hooking it directly to that light I saw above me, but it wasn’t steady enough and got moved by Barrier currents that intervened. The construct eventually lost its structure and dissipated in the areas where I tried to build a link.

  Flipping my strategy, I looked for an anchor point in my own aleimic body. I realized in a kind of wonder, after exploring structures in myself, that I had an exact replica of that blue-white light I’d seen behind Vash, right in the center of my chest.

  A small, dense node of sharp light lived there, as if a part of me.

  Gradually, working carefully, I pulled the team’s construct away from the silver light of the Dreng. I fed the aleimic structures with more of that white light, using the node in my chest as the anchor point for the construct.

  I watched as the whole thing changed frequency.

  Wreg clutched my arm.

  “What are you doing?” he subvocalized.

  I heard a thread of panic in his voice.

  I glanced at the others, even as a wash of fear fell over me, along with crippling self-doubt. I was messing around with their primary construct in the middle of an op. What in the gods was I doing? And why would I think I knew how to pull something like that off in the first place?

  My throat closed, my heart started pounding in my chest, thudding against my ribs as it occurred to me what would happen to all of us if we were caught. I could have just gotten all of these people killed, thrown into work camps, tortured, cut up, or worse––

  Wreg’s fingers relaxed on my arm.

  He looked at me, his oddly opaque, nearly black irises holding a kind of wonder. I felt him scanning the space around all of us.

  His light suddenly seemed to relax.

  Looking up at him, I felt like I was seeing him for the first time, without the silver light dominating his aleimi. Sparks came off his light, still sharp from the Dreng, but behind that lived a more subtle, red-orange glow, like sunset clouds, roiling in wind. That glow grew brighter in the seconds I watched––brighter and even more difficult to look away from.

  I almost commented on how pretty it was, but couldn’t find words.

  He spoke first.

  “How did you do that, Bridge Alyson?”

  My worry returned, even as it occurred to me that the Dreng might not appreciate what I’d done very much, either. The fact that I’d been allowed to do it at all surprised me––at least now that I was thinking about that end of things.

  “I didn’t screw anything up, did I?” was all I said.

  “Screw anything up?” He smiled. “No, princess. No.”

  I glanced at the others, and saw something different in their faces, too.

  Their lights sparked around me in a flicker of different-colored waves, all contained by that high, white light. Rather than covering over their own light, it sat on top as a sharp, dense cloak that seemed to bring out their individual flavors of presence even more. They bathed in that protective shield without being overpowered by it.

  I looked around at all of them in wonder. An odd flood of emotion hit me, as I did. These weren’t the bad guys. They were my family.

  Wreg slapped me affectionately on the back.

  “If I wouldn’t lose a finger for it, I’d kiss you,” he said, grinning.

  Before I could ask him anything else, he walked past me in the tunnel, his boots splashing though the half-foot of water in the bottom of the drainage pipe.

  Loki, the Middle Eastern seer who worried I might murder Revik, followed after him, and I couldn’t help but stare after him in wonder, too. A deep green and blue light emanated from Loki’s chest, still as a windless lake and filled with structures so fine and delicate they looked to be woven with silk threads.

  Saying a silent thanks to whatever or whoever might be listening that I hadn’t killed all of us before we reached the first checkpoint, I followed after them, trying to make as little noise as possible in the dank-smelling water.

  AS WE WALKED, physical lights grew dimmer and fewer, until eventually, we passed the last one.

  Ahead of us, I could hear a faint rush of water, like a waterfall or a pipe flowing faster than the stagnant pool we waded through. I also heard scurrying feet and the squeaking of rats, or, for all I knew, cockroaches the size of cocker spaniels. The lights didn’t come back on as we walked, but the water did get gradually deeper, until I was pushing my way through bilge that came a little past my knees. After a few random splashes from my legs reached my face, I kept my mouth firmly closed, and waded more carefully.

  It felt like we pushed our way through the dark like that for over an hour before Wreg came to a sudden stop, holding up a hand to halt the rest of us.

  It occurred to me that, even in the pitch dark of the tunnel, I could see him.

  His outline and features were faint, but if I’d been human, I wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. As it was, the aleimi of all of the seers allowed me to make out each of their forms and faces inside our mobile construct.

  I had to really concentrate to see much of the pipe walls or what lay under our feet, and for that, I was almost grateful. The smell alone was enough that I was fighting to take breaths only when I had to, and my legs had touched things here and there that mashed down my squeamish button to the point of near panic.

  So far anyway, I’d managed not to embarrass myself.

  When he spoke in my ear, I focused on Wreg’s shape and light.

  “I don’t think anything’s getting through that shield, Bridge Alyson,” he said, respect present in the subvocalization in my ear. “But, if you please, I would not mind you keeping an eye out
, while I open this lock?”

  “Oh. Of course,” I said.

  I moved closer to where he stood, sloshing through the rank-smelling water.

  I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be looking for exactly, but I scanned the space around him, trying to pick up any anomalies. Out of nowhere, I saw his light flare, illuminating that part of the construct. Immediately, I used my own light to smother the resulting flicker, then, realizing I might be cutting his access off to it altogether––I eased off, finding a balance where my light simply contained his in a smaller bubble.

  I gradually pulled back more as he worked, controlling his light more subtly still. I felt a whisper of relief off him as I did, along with a flicker of softer amusement.

  “What’s so funny?” I asked, using the transmitter.

  He shook his head, not answering.

  A moment later, the flare of light coming off him died down. I heard an audible beeping sound and jumped. Following the initial tone came a series of soft clicks, and I realized all of the noises were physical.

  “Is everything okay?” I said.

  “Easy as can be,” Wreg subvocalized. “Thank you, Esteemed Bridge.”

  I felt a little flush of pride. Or maybe it was just cold-sweat relief.

  A mechanical sound jerked my attention off him as a door above us began to open.

  I looked up, watching a rapidly widening crescent of light shine down on where Wreg and I stood. I realized only then that one of Wreg’s gloved hands gripped the eye-level rung of a wall-mounted ladder. Next to him, a dark panel with a print-scanning surface hung on the wall, blinking rhythmically as the door finished opening.

  Wreg glanced at me, his black eyes visible once more in the white light. He grinned, then began climbing the ladder, hand over hand, using his feet and arms to propel himself up rapidly.

  I realized my own hands were shaking.

  I concentrated briefly until they stopped.

  Then I grabbed my own eye-level rung and began to climb after him.