Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  Everywhere else, the human-killing disease continued to rage. That same disease now chewed through every continent where humans lived. Which, at this point in time, with the exception of what remained of Antarctica, included all of them. Of course, every human onboard the ship had already been vaccinated for the disease. All of the seers had been vaccinated, too, on the slim, off chance that C2-77 mutated into something seers could catch directly.

  So yeah, the disease wasn’t the issue, really.

  The issue was Revik.

  For the past few months, a black hole lived in the Barrier where Revik’s light used to live. They’d lost their direct line to Jon, too, and through him, to Wreg. Cass and the others got glimpses...mostly of Revik himself, and mostly while Revik slept, as he had a tendency to wander outside his own construct at night.

  Shadow smilingly called it Revik’s tendency to ‘hunt in his sleep.’

  Unfortunately, none of those glimpses did much to illuminate Revik’s waking state.

  Shadow seemed to find that strange. More than strange, perhaps. He didn’t say why, exactly, that he found it so strange. He only commented that he’d never been so thoroughly cut off from Revik’s light before, even in those years when Revik’s light had been split.

  Cass knew Shadow wasn’t telling her everything.

  That was okay, too...for now.

  She glimpsed enough to know that Shadow’s concerns had something to do with Revik’s light, with the way Shadow usually accessed him in the dark. As far as their inability to penetrate Revik’s mind while he slept, well, Shadow seemed to find that less unusual. Revik had been trained to protect himself in his dreams. He’d been trained to shield while he slept, to fight while he lay unconscious. Cass and the others could feel him, mostly through emotional links and triggers of whatever kind. None of them managed to translate those feelings into real intelligence, however...at least not yet.

  For the first time in months, no one knew what Revik might be doing, or thinking about doing, or even what his exact mental state might be.

  At the thought, Cass couldn’t help smiling, shaking her head into the wind.

  Of course, she had some idea of his mental state.

  That smile slid upwards into a grin when she remembered the last time she’d encountered Revik in the Barrier. The big guy was hurting, yeah. She’d felt pain on him, confusion, a kind of sad puppy vibe, frustration, focus. Anger, too. Maybe more than just anger. Those stronger emotions were pretty obvious, actually, and not particularly illuminating.

  But yeah, fun. Cass couldn’t help finding the combination a bit of a turn-on, too.

  Shadow described his ex-ward’s reactions more from a psychological perspective. Revik had never really grown out of an almost adolescent grasp of his emotions, according to Shadow, especially when it came to those with whom he grew attached.

  None of that answered the real question, though.

  What would Revik do?

  It remained the question they all theorized about, discussed, argued and spun around...all except Shadow himself, who seemed to think he knew Revik well enough not to have to guess much around his probable countermoves.

  Cass herself felt less sure.

  Granted, she hadn’t known him as long, but maybe she’d known him more recently.

  In any case, Cass couldn’t help but be curious about what Revik must be thinking right now, given everything. Yes, indeedy...some not-small part of her remained very intrigued with the possibilities around what the infamous Sword might do, or try to do.

  Five months had passed since Cass had left San Francisco.

  So far, they hadn’t heard a peep out of him.

  Not so much as a ripple, despite his unquiet sleep.

  Cass knew there was no way in hell that would be the end of it. That understanding didn’t bother her, though, it intrigued her. She would very much like to know what Revik might be capable of, when push really came to shove.

  It was all pretty exciting, truthfully. Even Shadow seemed to think so.

  The thought sent a small shiver through Cass’s light, and brought that grin back to her lips. She bounced briefly on her heels for warmth, wrapping her arms around her jacketed torso and staring out over the horizon. She focused on a bank of low-hanging clouds and the gold light highlighting contours under the black and gray.

  Revik would definitely move on them, and probably soon.

  Cass still had something he wanted, after all.

  At the thought, she turned her head, gazing back over her shoulder.

  Her eyes ran down the length of the seventy-five-foot ship, noting the organic sails which moved languorously in the strong wind, jerking in sharp snaps and pulsing outwards like a living membrane. She watched the mast pivot as the crew turned two of the largest sails to shift course. Their interiors shone different colors in the wind, like oil-slicked water as they hit the sunlight from different angles, until they snapped suddenly back into full tension as the crew finished realigning them. The deck itself shone like pale green glass, despite the grips for her feet as she walked along its surface. The above-deck cabin had an unearthly quality to it, partly because one-way, dark green organic panes made up the majority of the domed shape, like an Emerald City floating along the top of the water.

  Feigran jokingly called the ship the ‘Ark of All Elements.’

  The vessel could be submerged all the way under the waves, so that was part of Feigran’s––or Terian, as he’d started calling himself again––smirking reference.

  The vessel wasn’t quite a submarine, nor was it simply an ordinary ship. It couldn’t fly exactly, but it could hover, long enough and high enough for short hops across blocked passages. It could climb up on shore, too, becoming a land vessel. The high masts could also be retracted, turning it into a low-sitting (if very long) speed boat. The vessel’s hull stretched strangely narrow, closer in shape to a submarine than the majority of ships Cass had seen, either on the feeds or at the docks of San Francisco or New York.

  And the organically-enhanced ship could really move when called upon, Cass knew.

  The other seers, meaning everyone but Terian, called it ulintek, which Cass thought for a long time merely referred to the ship’s name, like what a human would paint in white letters across the stern. She didn’t realize for months that ulintek meant ‘sea bird’ in Prexci. Another expression seers used for ‘neither fish nor fowl,’ ulintek meant something that belonged in more than one place at a time, or that lived in more than one environment.

  Cass still missed a lot of seer references.

  She would have to learn them, if she was going to be able to pass those cultural inferences on to her daughter. She knew Shadow and Feigran could fill in a lot of the gaps, but that didn’t weaken her resolve to know those things herself. Cass certainly didn’t intend to sit on the sidelines while everyone but her contributed to her child’s education on her race.

  Shaking her hair out of her face once more in the wind, Cass leaned her full weight back on the metal railing, resting her chin on her hands as she looked out over the gray and blue waves of the North Sea. She was still standing there about twenty minutes later, when a female seer approached her from behind.

  Cass turned, feeling her before she heard or saw her. The seer’s robe hung such a dense, starless black, the woman’s form seemed to disappear where the fabric coiled liquidly around her legs and torso in the wind, leaving only her bare white feet visible. Even before the seer spoke, Cass knew why she had come.

  Cass could feel it, trembling just outside the conscious areas of her light.

  She could feel her.

  The seer touched Cass’s arm carefully, reverently.

  It is time to return to your duties, most precious and Formidable War, the seer sent gently. Your presence has been greatly missed.

  Cass felt a now-familiar jolt of tenderness and wonder in her light.

  She had been missed.

  The realization still caught her
off guard, each and every time. She still felt the same flush of awe, love and bewilderment, a near electricity in her light, moving it out of whatever place in which her light normally lived. That one emotion rendered everything around it insignificant. It made the rest of what Cass felt and thought and believed utterly irrelevant...or trivial, at least. Some part of her still wondered at the truth of those feelings, doubted them in the child and even in herself, each and every time.

  Then Cass would see it.

  She would see that love reflected back at her in those pale, silent eyes.

  It was real. What she felt...what Cass felt from her child...it was all indisputably, irrevocably real. It was the realest thing Cass had ever experienced, likely more real than anything she would ever experience again. It made everything else feel both utterly meaningless and, for the first time in her life, completely worthwhile.

  Cass had always been one of those who scoffed at people who waxed on and on about how having a child made their lives meaningful, how it was a spiritual experience and whatever other New Agey crap they would gush while bouncing their chubby, weird-looking offspring in their laps, giving her pitying looks because she ‘just didn’t get it.’

  Cass used to laugh at people like that.

  She always thought them self-satisfied fools, elevating motherhood––one of the basest and most crudely biological of all human functions––into something quasi-mystical, just to feed their overblown and deluded egos.

  She didn’t feel that way anymore.

  Excitement mixed with warmth, pooling in the center of Cass’s chest as she turned to follow the black-clad seer to the door leading below-deck. That precise combination of conflicting and intense emotions still felt so new to her that Cass shivered, each and every time that denser feeling came over her. Love lived there.

  Love, gratitude, affection, awe, wonder...yes, even reverence.

  They mixed with a denser and more heated protectiveness that Cass couldn’t quite wrap her head around, that superseded all the rest, turning her light and mind fierce, certain of itself, certain that whatever the outcome might be, one thing would not be taken from her.

  She was a mother.

  A real mother.

  Cass followed the seer female down the narrow, circular staircase to the lower levels of the sea bird, biting her lip to hold back that part of herself that wanted to run the whole way, to skip down those stairs two at a time so she could be reunited with her sweet girl once again. When she slid through the low door into the pink and green painted room beyond, her smile slid into a full grin. She’d already seen the eyes peering over the edge of the crib.

  She was growing so fast.

  Cass still called her Kanya, which was what her own mother called her as a baby. It meant ‘girl’ in Thai, and while Cass knew that some of the more senior seers had already assigned her daughter some long, difficult-to-pronounce intermediary name befitting her rank and the age of her soul, Cass and Terian both called her Kanya or ‘Kani’ when they cooed at her alone.

  Shadow’s scientists had accelerated little Kani’s growth, of course.

  They did it the first time after they placed her tiny embryo in that incubation chamber after they’d taken her out of Allie in San Francisco.

  They accelerated Kani’s growth a second time after she’d finally been ‘born’ under the most careful of conditions in the high-tech lab next door to where Cass’s baby lived now, in her own cozy nursery whose walls Terian had painted with his own hands. Terian painstakingly added to that murals for weeks, surrounding little Kani with exotic jungles and snow-capped mountains and intermediary beings and painted sunlight, along with larger animals that smiled down at her where she lay inside her crib.

  Cass broke into a laugh at the eyes looking at her solemnly over that crib wall.

  The child’s lips lifted carefully to mirror her expression.

  Narrow lips, like her father’s. A bare fuzz of near-black hair. High cheekbones like Allie’s, although the exact shape of her face wouldn’t be known for some time, of course, not until after she grew into her features and started to shed some of the baby fat that now made her so adorably round and soft and squeezable.

  Her eyes shone like pale searchlights, nearly colorless, like Revik’s. Even so, they had a rim of brilliant green around that lighter center near the black pupil, almost as if her eyes had split her parents’ right down the center.

  She was tall for her age already, and curious.

  Cass looked down at her, beaming when one little hand carefully let go of the side of the crib to grasp the air insistently with her chubby fist. Her clear, green-rimmed eyes never left Cass’s face. The intensity in that stare brought a tightness to Cass’s throat. She was so beautiful, so smart. Little Kani had already learned the universal sign for asking to be picked up. She still couldn’t stand up inside the crib without gripping the wooden edge with one hand, but she knew how to ask to be picked up.

  Even so, the motion of that one, pink fist nearly brought Cass to tears.

  Her darling girl.

  Even as she thought it, Kani sent her a flood of warmth, so much love Cass could barely stand it. The sheer amount of love, the complete unconditionality of it, the trust she felt behind that dense pulse of feeling, only made the tightness of her throat worse.

  Cass had never known she could love any person, any thing or being so much. It was beyond love. It was like a force all of its own, so densely tied to the core of who Cass was that she could already no longer imagine living without it. She would die before she lived without this feeling. She would die before she let anyone hurt her precious girl. It gave a meaning to her life and identity that she’d never known before. It made her want to be a better person.

  It made her want to save the world.

  Cass would do all of it. She would do anything for little Kani.

  Cass was grateful to Revik...and even, at times, to Allie...for giving her Kani. At times, that gratitude overwhelmed her, turning into a heated love that felt more familial than anything she’d ever felt towards the two of them before, despite how often Shadow and Terian tried to hammer that family thing into her head about the two intermediaries who made up the other half of The Four. Cass suspected she would never stop being grateful to the two of them for being the biological parents to the one thing in life that finally made sense to Cass...the one thing that finally explained to her, after all these years, what her life actually meant.

  So yeah, Cass was grateful. She felt love for the two of them...and a sharper, denser kind of compassion at all that they had lost, together and separately.

  But no one would take Kani from her. No one.

  She would die before she let anyone take her baby girl away.

  2

  PLAY WITH FIRE

  I REMEMBER US on that field, in blooming wild grasses in the valley among mountains of the Himalayas. I remember what he says to me, when he thinks I can’t hear him.

  I can’t hear him, not then.

  I remember you, he tells me. Gods, I remember you... I remember you, Allie... please remember me. Remember me...

  He wills the words at me.

  He feels them more than thinks them, not understanding them himself.

  He feels like a teenager, watching me, trying to read me without touching my mind. He wants to fuck, wants to wrap his arms around me, to tell me romantic things, to lie on me and with me in the grass, to stroke my hair, whisper in my ear, against my mouth, to confide in me, to coax me into confiding in him. He can only watch me, though, unsure of himself, his confidence shaken from our conversation of the night before.

  But I haven’t left. I haven’t left yet.

  I’m still here, with him. I’m watching him, too. He can feel it. He feels glimmers of my pain, glimmers of my eyes on his body, his chest, his face. Glimmers of shyness, of my wishing I could feel more of him. Glimmers of wanting to move closer, to be in his light.

  There is love in those glances. H
e feels that, too. Lust, too, yes, but even that feels more like love... maybe love that doesn’t know how to express in any other way.

  I feel his light.

  It is distant then, still broken somewhere over his head.

  But I can feel that part of him now. I know it now, better than I know myself. I can see the parts of us, whispering in that dark. I can see him saying romantic things, blushing in his light, even as he pours his heart out to me. I can feel the high, clear white light where he lives.

  I feel truth there. Truth, and so much beauty. He is innocent there.

  Innocent, and so open. Beauty in fragility. Yet so much strength lives in that light. More than I’ve ever seen in him, even in his most warlike moments on the ground.

  We are children. The older we get, the more obvious that is.

  Up here, we are forever children.

  HE HOLDS HER hand, gripping her tightly, maybe too tightly.

  He can’t help but stare at her face...at her eyes, more than the rest.

  Disbelief floods him as she blinks a second time, bringing a shock of heat to his whole body. His mind fights to comprehend that she’s awake.

  Gods. She’s awake.

  She’s finally awake.

  Seeing her focus on him, looking directly at his face with those luminous, green irises, the heat worsens, turns primal, mixed with a love he can’t control, a longing that resides somewhere past him. Pain arcs through his chest, nearly debilitating, a joy he can’t hold with all of his light. He grips her fingers harder, fighting to stay with this moment as long as he can, unable to think as he hears the others react to her around him.

  They walk up to touch her, to touch her face––Jon, Balidor, Jorag, Tenzi, Chandre, Illeg, Wreg, even Torek and Oli, who’ve known her less long than the rest. He hears them joke with her, tease her. He feels their relief, their love. He sees a denser thread in Torek’s eyes as the other seer leans down to kiss his wife’s cheek. Jealousy arcs through him irrationally, so intense that he has to fight not to bark at all of them, to drive them possessively from the room.