Jon hadn’t asked for details, but he got the impression the content of those attacks disturbed everyone involved...and not only because Shadow could apparently penetrate their Adhipan-designed construct at will.
Remembering the night before, that odd, empty look in Revik’s eyes when he showed up at his door, Jon frowned, slowing his approach to Allie’s bed.
He didn’t stop, though.
Once he reached the left side of the thick mattress, he forced himself to look at her. He realized only then––or admitted to himself, maybe––how rarely he’d let himself do that, since they found her comatose at their mother’s house.
Jon didn’t know what he expected actually, but the simplicity of what he found forced him to stop, if only for a few breaths.
She looked asleep.
The sight didn’t fill him with relief, but it managed to drain most of the overt tension from his limbs. Somehow, without knowing what he’d expected exactly, he’d expected something worse. To see her emaciated, maybe. A skeleton lying there, eyes sunk in her head...or maybe the opposite, bloated and flabby-looking, scabs on her face, like junkies Jon had seen, back when he lived in San Francisco the first time.
Allie looked pretty much exactly as he remembered her, though.
It was strange, standing there, watching her chest move up and down, her eyes closed on that smooth face, her dark hair framing her cheekbones and hanging down past her shoulders on the white comforter and even whiter pillows. She’d lost weight, sure, but not that much. He knew some of the other seers took care of her body. He knew they watched over her almost as if she were a holy relic, bathing her, turning her frequently to prevent bed sores, using electrodes to stimulate her muscles, feeding her and wiping her face and feet and whatever else.
That is, when Revik didn’t do those things himself.
Even as Jon formed the thought...
...an exhale broke the silence, a soft shift of clothing and limbs.
Jon froze, heart hammering in his chest.
Turning his head, breath still held in his lungs, Jon focused on the shape curled up in a squat lounge chair parked on the opposite side of the bed. Since the chair’s back had been turned to face the door, and stretched up high enough to obscure the body ensconced within the lower cushions, Jon hadn’t seen him until now.
He stared at Revik’s face.
He watched it grow taut in sleep as the male seer shifted again, seemingly trying to make himself more comfortable in the confining chair.
Revik had pulled the dark-green lounger as close to the bed as it would go. Even now, one of the Elaerian’s pale arms hung over the comforter, following his last rearrangement of limbs. It struck Jon as somewhat ironic that he would have seen Revik lying there when he stood at the door, if the male seer had adjusted himself even two minutes sooner.
Jon wondered if he would have dared enter the room at all, if he had.
Another, duller pain in his chest started to throb.
Seeing Revik so near to where he stood––even restless, easy-to-wake Revik who probably still wanted to beat the hell out of him––wasn’t enough to dissuade Jon from what he’d come here to do. He hesitated only a moment more, and that time, it was purely logistical. For those few seconds, Jon weighed between sitting on the floor, where Revik wouldn’t see him if he opened his eyes...or on the bed, where Jon could actually touch her. After going back and forth in his mind, he carefully...and achingly slowly...lowered his weight to the mattress, letting himself sink so gradually that he didn’t shake the bed at all.
He ended up less than a foot from her torso.
Jon reached out in the dim light, carefully picking up her hand. He lifted it gingerly from where it rested on the top of the white comforter and gripped her fingers. They felt cold to him, even after he wrapped both of his hands around them.
He fought to warm her skin, even as tears rose, wanting to choke him briefly.
But he hadn’t come here for that, either.
Closing his eyes, Jon let his light slide back into the Barrier. He did it without electrodes, without jump chairs or even Revik...without anything but himself.
He knew what he was doing might get him killed.
He didn’t care. Death hadn’t scared him for a long time now.
Death wasn’t the worst thing, not by a long stretch.
LIKE THE JUMP with Revik earlier, Jon doesn’t feel any sense of motion or travel.
He simply finds himself in a new place.
The place makes him sick...really fucking sick, nearly instantaneously.
The instant he arrives, he wants to leave.
He’s never wanted to leave any place so badly in his life.
Fear overcomes him. That deeper disgust and sickness is almost worse, a scent of rot and death and brokenness, a revulsion so deep it feels instinctive, animal-like, triggering a base form of self-preservation. Jon thinks he might retch, as if he’s suddenly been thrown into a sewage tunnel and bathed in every imaginable foulness, forced to drink it and breathe it in, to make it a part of himself. Every atom of his being, every tiny particle of his aleimi, wants to leave.
He forces himself to stay.
He forces himself...
How he stays, how he manages to be here at all without screaming or retching or crying out, he does not know. He would rather be dead, really dead, then be lost in this place.
Somehow, it is that thought that stabilizes him.
It is that thought that reminds him...he is not alone.
The world around him begins to slip incrementally into focus. Jon’s mind creates images out of that foulness, trying to understand it, to put it in a context, a set of references that his conscious mind can understand. Whatever this place is, it is dark, suffocatingly dark. Everything around Jon feels like death, like the stink of death smells and tastes and images all rolled into one, but his mind fights to sort through them all, to make sense of where it finds itself.
Shapes gradually emerge.
Those shapes become discernible as the light slowly rises. Eventually, after what feels like an endless stretch of time where Jon thinks he won’t be able to force himself to stay in this desolate place after all, that he’ll have to flee and wash himself for the next six months to get the taste out of his mouth and nose...those shapes become familiar.
He is someplace he knows.
He recognizes the compound in Seertown.
It is a place he knows, but not. Too much smoke hangs in the air for Jon to make sense of the surrounding landscape. He can’t see the mountains, the snow-covered peaks of the Himalayas, the dense trees and ferns and rock formations he remembers from that high-up perch. The trees nearest to where Jon stands, the only trees visible to him, are blackened sticks reaching to the sky. Surrounded by low-lying mist, a sickly brown mist that throttles the life out of everything it touches, they stand forlorn and forgotten. Jon sees burn marks on the walls of one of the huts that once ringed Vash’s compound, crumbling brick, the ground blackened and filled with holes where he remembers shrubs and grass. Stone benches are gray now instead of white, covered in soot and turned over, their legs broken or smashed to powder. Litter covers the grounds. Plastic bottles and used condoms, oil drums and dead animals and feces...
Jon feels beyond sick. He can’t get the cloying sickness away from him...he is immersed in it, choking on it...unable to extricate himself in any way...
He. Will. Not. Leave.
The thought stabilizes him again, however briefly.
The sky hangs low and dark, as different from the sky in that gorgeous, life-teeming paradise of white sand and golden oceans as any Jon could possibly imagine.
He feels lost inside clouds here, barely able to see more than a dozen yards in front of him, wading through a sickly mist, tangled threads. Like all Barrier spaces, when he focuses his attention on something, it pulls up like a zoom lens jammed back, growing more vivid, close with excruciating detail. Here, unlike standing on those cryst
al shores, that detail brings only torment, not wonder. It is like stepping barefoot in pile after pile of shit and decaying bodies teeming with insects and disease and larvae.
A scent fills Jon’s Barrier mouth, making him cringe and cough as he forces his legs to move forward across that dark path. He fights not to focus, to keep his mind uninterested in any of it, even as dark threads pull at his light, trying to tempt his attention. Those threads use fear...fear that causes him to stare, unable to help himself, like a prey animal caught in a predator’s gaze. Jon fights to look away, but the threads continue to tug, to wind their way deeper into his light, which only makes the panic and fear worse.
He feels overrun, outside of himself, invaded.
He walks slowly up to the House on the Hill.
Here, the building is haunted, an inside-out version of the ancient, sacred structure that seers believed to be built and prayed in by the First Race. Jon knows this version isn’t real, even as the air fights to extinguish and throttle and bend his light, to make it compatible with––to make it resonate with––the dense sickness that surrounds this place. He can only bear it, fighting his way through the slug of air and smoke.
He. Will. Not. Leave.
His head gradually fills with that smell, with confusion and mist.
He is choking on it. He is drowning...
Despair hits...he’s never felt so completely alone.
Not alone. This isn’t about being alone. It’s about being unloved, powerless, crushed under the heel of something sick and dark that wants only to see every spark of individuality in him extinguished. This is about being forced to live without hope, until nothing of him is left, until he forgets the light ever existed. Until he can’t tell the difference anymore.
Until he thinks he belongs here. Until this feels like home.
Allie was here...is here.
The thought doesn’t make him angry. It fills him with horror....with fear. A terror that explodes out of him, that drives him briefly insane with its intensity. Allie can’t be here. This can’t be where he’s left her...it can’t be...
Allie! He screams her name in panic. ALLIE! ALLIE! Where are you?
Some part of him refuses to believe it. He is in the wrong place. He can’t wrap his head around the thought that she could really be here. How could the Ancestors, how could Revik or Vash or Tarsi or Wreg, let Allie be in a place as horrible as this?
ALLIE! he screams up at the monolithic gray walls. ALLIE! WHERE ARE YOU?
Black and gray streaks ride up the white stone. The smell is worse here, causing him to stumble, one hand clamped over his mouth and nose. Jon closes his Barrier-constructed eyes, trying to block it out, feeling them sting against the smoke, against that tangle of threads he still feels touching every inch of his bare skin. His feet crunch on bird corpses, squishing through his toes and he yells out in horror, hearing the snap of small bones even as he forces himself to keep going, to keep moving in the direction of the mansion on the hill.
The gardens are gone.
It is as if someone used a flame-thrower here, charring the hillside, leaving nothing but blackened bones. The trees stand like corpses, their arms reaching up in supplication. Jon sees a half-eaten, dead dog rotting next to one of these. Vultures stand over it without moving, staring at Jon with dead-looking black eyes, stirring their bloody feet restlessly.
ALLIE! Jon screams up at the house. ALLIE! ANSWER ME!
He still doesn’t understand how she could be here, but he knows that she is, even as his mind fights the knowledge, tries not to think about what she might look like when he finally finds her. Unlike the beach with the gold-coated ocean and the blue sky and water teeming with fish and brightly plumed birds, this dead version of Vash’s home is the opposite of who Allie is.
Even as he thinks it, it hits Jon how true it is.
He doesn’t see it until now...he has grown so used to her and who she is that he takes her for granted, but she...she is light. She is light, like nothing and no one Jon has ever known. He doesn’t understand it, not with his mind, but he feels it.
She is light.
Not like Vash was light, with his warm heart and his constant laughing.
Allie’s is a different kind of light. Slower-burning, distant, yet strangely more immediate, too. Something about that light is quieter, more penetrating than Vash’s.
She lives in it quietly, too...inside a golden-white sun. Her and Vash, they fit together, resonate together, just as she resonates so strongly with Revik. Just as all of them are different, they fit together, they bring different things to the world.
But Jon knows Allie’s light best of all.
The thought brings tears to his eyes, a deeper sense of grief.
Allie’s light invaded every corner, lit up the things that needed to be seen, whether people wanted to see them or not. She’d never, ever let you down...never, ever let you go, no matter what happened, no matter what it did to her to hold on, no matter how much she lost. There was fire there, in all of that quiet. More fire than Jon had ever let himself see, more fire than he’d felt in anyone, even Revik. He could even see now, that she built that fire herself.
Every decision made, over the years. Every turned corner.
It isn’t just some gift bestowed on her. She hadn’t been handed this thing, like being born into wealth, or being gifted with inordinate brains or beauty. Allie forged herself.
She was made. Built. Honed over time.
Beaten and reheated and beaten again...
Even as Jon thinks it, he remembers the clarity of that golden ocean. He realizes with a start that it matches exactly the clarity he knows from her. That place wasn’t just her place. It isn’t simply a refuge, a place of healing where Allie goes to lick her wounds.
That golden ocean is her.
It reflects some aspect of Allie herself.
He remembers staring down at her in that crib, for the very first time, remembers...
Blinded by his own connection to her, he gasps, feeling for Revik again, feeling so much for the other man, understanding even more why Revik came to him that night. They share this thing, in some, strange way. They share some part of their connection to her.
For the first time in his life, Jon shares that with someone else.
The thought makes him sick with worry. Dread rises in him, a wash of terror that he may have lost her right when he finally understands, right when they need her the most. And they do need her. He sees it now, sees it so clearly. He has to find her so he can tell her.
He has to make her understand what she really is...
ALLIE! He yells her name. He chokes on the foul smell of the fog and the sticky heat that fills his lungs. ALLLIE! GODS, ALLIE...I’M SORRY...I’M SO SORRY! PLEASE! TELL ME WHERE YOU ARE, PLEASE!
He is running out of time.
They all are.
ALLIE! he screams. PLEASE, ALLIE! PLEASE!
It’s why Shadow sent her here.
He wants her out of the fight. He’s trying to take her out of the fight.
ALLIE, PLEASE! WHERE ARE YOU?
Jon reaches the door that leads inside the House on the Hill.
Instead of the fifteen-foot, burnished copper and iron panels Jon remembers from before, covered in elaborate designs of the pantheon of seer gods and ancestors...now, only one door remains, and it is broken. Hanging crookedly on bent hinges, the broken door drags the ground, blackened by fire and that sickening smoke. It looks less like a door than a piece of melted scrap metal, half-blocking the entrance to the high-ceilinged hall.
Jon steps gingerly over glass shards in his bare, Barrier-made feet, holding one arm out for balance as he once more covers his nose and mouth with the other hand.
He takes his hand away only to call her name.
ALLIE! ANSWER ME, PLEASE!
Jon looks up, taking in the stone banister and the marble stairs that once led to a higher floor. He sees the staircase broken down the middle, cutting him of
f from the upper levels of the house. Curtains hang in tatters from the one intact window.
The raised platform under the stained glass window to his left, with its altar and statues of seer gods and tapestries, now stands stark and empty. The altar itself is burned black with smoke, and dead birds are littered around it, along with what looks like blood and broken glass. The gold that once covered the wall behind that altar is gone, ripped out by greedy fingers. All that remains of the stained glass are bent pieces of iron that once formed an image of the blue and gold sword and sun.
Jon chokes as another wave of that foul-smelling smoke assails his nostrils.
His light is drenched in smoke now, as if he’s been dipped in tar and his skin suffocates slowly under the slick, oily substance. He forces himself to walk into that broken temple, to stare up at the skylight which appears to have burst in the same fire. Tapestries flap in tattered rags in a breeze that smells worse with each breath. Jon feels glass slice open the bottoms of his feet, but forces himself to keep walking, to approach the blackened altar.
He nearly reaches it, when he sees her.
She appears on top of that altar, sprawled there almost obscenely.
At once, Jon feels the resistance.
Voices buzz and clang inside his head, winged creatures diving at him from above. He puts out a hand and falls, slicing open his knee on a glass shard where he lands. He lets out another cry, staring down at the blood...the pain is numbing, overwhelming, more than he can handle. Even so, something in his mind screams louder, and when he focuses next, he is kneeling at the base of the altar.
It isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real it isn’t real...
The screaming in his head doesn’t abate, but it dims somehow.
He wants this now, wants it so badly it forces him past the horrors he can feel and see. He screams back, fighting to hear his own mind over the voices that try to take him over, to see through the sickening dip and jerk of his light as they pull on him in the dark. Jon beats his way through ghosts and half-apparitions, sick to the point where he is bent over, gripping the stone where she lays even as his cut and broken feet fall on the maggot-filled bodies of the corpses that ring the raised platform.
Allie's War Season Four Page 10
