Balidor hesitated, glancing at Wreg, who raised an eyebrow at him.
When Balidor looked back at Dehgoies, however, the Elaerian had not changed expression.
“Go on,” Revik said.
“Well. Her structure remains intact,” Balidor said, once more looking at her, almost without meaning to do it. That time, he found her green eyes focused on him. He hesitated, caught in her stare, lost there briefly, in that emptiness he glimpsed, the lack of her.
That lack pained him, somewhere in his chest, making it hard to breathe.
It wasn’t his only reaction, though. The rest held even less rationality. Despite that emptiness, something he saw in those eyes relaxed him strangely, too. He didn’t know if he saw her there, but he saw something. Whatever that something was, it made him wonder if maybe she approved of him mentioning this option to the Sword.
“...Well, I am wondering if you can use that,” Balidor ended belatedly, glancing again at Wreg, feeling his skin flush as he realized that either of the two men could have been reading him just then. “I am thinking also that it might be a way to protect yourself,” he said. “Like routing a signal through multiple sources. It could confuse their construct as to where to focus their defenses. It could also––”
“She isn’t coming with me,” Revik said, his voice warning.
“I understand that, Nenz.”
“That’s not on the table,” Revik repeated.
“She wouldn’t need to,” Balidor broke in, holding up a hand as he shook his head, once. “We could coordinate that piece from here, laoban, purely from the Barrier. We’ll use the same construct you wanted me to set up to aid you and Maygar on the ground. You wouldn’t have full access to all of her structure, but it would give you a boost. A significant one, potentially, if we set up connections to her and you and Maygar before you left.” Giving Wreg an apologetic glance, almost without meaning to, Balidor added,
“...We could use Jon for that, too, Nenz. To strengthen that connection, and to hide it in more than just the two of you as anchors.”
There was another silence.
Again, for reasons he couldn’t articulate to himself exactly, Balidor looked at Allie first, not the Sword himself. This time, she was frowning at Balidor, her green eyes just as blank as before, but her mouth set in a distinctly harder line.
Something about the look there held Balidor again.
He felt the same disinterest and confusion on the surface as he had since she’d first opened her eyes. He also felt a denser, more complicated pull.
She didn’t like it, Balidor found himself thinking.
She didn’t like what Nenzi said about leaving her behind.
She didn’t like that Balidor agreed with him.
The thought was absurd, of course. The chances that she could even follow this discussion were slim to nil, given what Balidor could see in her light, the almost utter absence of connection between her aleimi down here and what lived above her head. Her mind operated at the level of a very young child, one who hadn’t fully landed in their physical body yet, following birth. She could not possibly have understood him.
And yet...looking at those green eyes, Balidor wondered.
Something lived there. He couldn’t make sense of it, not even in the abstract, but that feeling of something lingered, keeping his eyes riveted to hers for a few seconds more.
But Balidor knew the truth of her condition. He’d seen the scans. Hell, he conducted a large number of those scans himself. Collaborated with Tarsi. Yumi. Wreg. Even Varlan. All of them agreed. Even the Sword did not disagree, although he refused to voice his conclusions aloud.
Balidor could not indulge in fantasy, not in this.
Fighting that uncertainty out of his mind, as well as the uneasiness he felt with Allie frowning at him with that dense, disconnected stare, Balidor adjusted his weight on the unpadded couch, averting his gaze from hers with an effort.
When he looked at the Sword next, Balidor saw that some of the harder tension had left Revik’s clear eyes. Dehgoies appeared to be thinking again, even as he coiled an arm tighter around the woman in his lap, seemingly oblivious to her blank frown aimed in Balidor’s direction. Balidor felt another hard flush of separation pain on him as she slid deeper into his lap, along with a paler pulse of grief, something the Sword hadn’t let Balidor or the others feel very often, not since they’d first found her in San Francisco.
As far as the pain itself, Balidor couldn’t remember feeling that much pain on Dehgoies even back in New York, when he’d been pining over her for months after they left China. Remembering how Allie had tried to use that pain to seduce her husband, and more than once, despite his fragile emotional state at the time, Balidor felt his jaw clench. He’d been so furious with her back then. Hell, it still angered him.
He fought that out of his light, too.
Being angry at her now was pointless. Less than pointless.
Still, when he looked up at her next, Balidor could have sworn that frown on her face had grown more prominent.
Again, Dehgoies seemed to notice only in the barest edges of his awareness. The Elaerian was still clearly thinking as he tugged Allie closer, reassuring her instinctively with his light and his hands, even as he nodded slowly.
“Yes,” he said. “I can work with that.”
Balidor felt a pale ping from the male seer to his left and nearly jumped.
Keeping it off his face, he gave Wreg the barest of looks.
The seer was good at hiding his communications, even from the Sword. It struck Balidor again that Wreg’s sight ranking might be a lot higher than any of them had ever guessed, and not only because the seer seemed to be in the habit of actively hiding just how high it was, and just what skills he possessed.
Do you think that’s the best idea, brother? Wreg whispered in the back of Balidor’s mind. Giving them reason to become even more entwined in light, given her condition...?
Balidor thought about this, keeping any hint of their communication off his face.
I don’t know, he sent finally, without turning his gaze off the Sword. Do you think it is a mistake? Will it worsen her condition? Or his?
Wreg sent him a faint pulse of misgiving. I do not know what it could do to him, brother. I truly don’t. All I know is, I have heard of not a single case of one who has come back, after what they did to her. Those who recover from the wires are few and far between as it is. But to bring one back, after their mind has essentially been severed from the body...
Balidor kept his face expressionless.
Even so, Wreg’s thought hit him, and hard. The meaning penetrated in a way he hadn’t fully let it before now, at least, not since Alyson first reopened her eyes.
For another, longer pause, he found himself turning over Wreg’s words.
He also found himself agreeing with them.
You think she is gone, then? he sent. That she is well and truly gone?
Wreg sent him another pulse of misgiving, woven into an affirmation.
I think it is far more likely than not, the ex-rebel sent next. Esteemed Bridge or not, I think the boss is setting himself up for a world of pain, by continuing to light-bond with her as he is. I also think that, wherever she is now, she isn’t exactly with the boss, if you catch my drift.
Balidor sighed internally.
He remembered those blank, green eyes, the way they looked at him.
Again, he found himself agreeing with Wreg, even as the other seer continued.
...I also think that even if he manages to ease her off the wires over time, she won’t ever be the woman he married, Wreg sent next, still not mincing words. You saw the scans of her aleimi. All of the primary connections were severed, brother. All of them. She is more dead than alive now, whatever structure and strengths still live above her head. She cannot access any of them. She has little or no ability to connect to the rational areas of her mind. Or to what we would think of as her personality...her very inter
face with the material world. She is barely held to her body at all, brother. She no longer has the ability to––
Yes, Balidor broke in wearily. Yes, brother. I know. And I understand.
Another silence fell between them.
Then Wreg’s words grew even softer in the back of Balidor’s mind.
...He’s not...you know? With her? Wreg’s eyes shifted, too quickly and too subtly to even be called a glance in Balidor’s direction. He’s not...is he? Have you felt it?
Balidor shifted his rear uncomfortably again on the hard, padding-less bench.
I do not know, he replied. I confess, I do not like to dwell on the idea.
Wreg’s mind held a darker twist of discomfort.
He can’t be, the seer sent, his thoughts holding the faintest thread of disgust. He added with his usual lack of finesse, Gods above. It’d be like necrophilia...
Balidor didn’t answer that, either.
Even so, when he looked up, he found Allie staring at him again, those blank, weirdly light-filled jade eyes focused on his. The intensity he glimpsed there, under that lack of coherent presence, struck him as unnerving in the extreme.
Even so, in the back of his mind, he found himself thinking Wreg was right.
Wherever Allie was, precisely, he didn’t see much of her down here.
He didn’t want to think about what the Sword might be telling himself about that fact.
Truthfully, Balidor didn’t really want to think about the two of them at all, or what went on between them when they were alone in that master bedroom upstairs.
JON ONCE MORE had to wonder what the hell he was doing here.
He knew the bare bones basics, of course.
According to Jorag, they were going to attempt some kind of reconnection between what remained of Allie’s light down here and parts of Allie’s higher aleimic structure. They intended to use him––meaning Jon––along with Revik and Maygar for that reconnection.
Jon didn’t entirely get that part, truthfully, but Jorag explained it in terms of ‘anchors,’ as in using their aleimi to anchor Allie’s closer to Earth. They were doing it mostly so they could access those higher structures of her light out in the field, from what Jorag said.
Whatever the truth of it, structurally-speaking, the way Jorag described it reminded Jon of hearing Wreg talk about construct design. Jon couldn’t claim any but an extremely high-level and probably inaccurate understanding of how that worked either, though.
Jon knew the overall goal had something to do with allowing Revik to piggyback on Allie’s high-octane telekinesis and shielding abilities. In theory, it should also allow Revik and some of the other seers to access functionality Allie had in other areas...meaning those abilities she had simply from being the Bridge, and an Elaerian. Structures under discussion in that latter category even included a handful that Allie herself hadn’t yet learned to tap.
It made Jon uncomfortable when he realized the strategy wasn’t that dissimilar to how Revik once described the Pyramid of the Rooks working...with seers accessing the abilities of other seers, sometimes without that seer even knowing it.
Revik said he’d done that––used the structures of other seers in the Rooks’ network––while working for Galaith. He said that Terian would even mark out seers with abilities he admired so he could steal their bodies and aleimi wholesale. Revik told him in that same discussion that a lot of abilities that he’d personally envied in Menlim as a kid, Vash later explained had actually been stolen from Revik himself, meaning from his own aleimic structures.
Parasites was the word Vash used.
Then again, from what Vash told Jon, the Dreng stole pretty much everything they had down here, since they had no abilities of their own in the physical world.
Jon didn’t know whose idea this whole thing had been, but he found himself thinking it must have been Revik’s. Even so, Jon felt a lot of misgivings and reluctance in Revik, too. Clearly, something about this process didn’t sit well with him, either.
That feeling remained intense enough that Jon could feel Revik’s reluctance through the undercurrents in the room, even now.
Even so, Jon found himself doubting that Wreg or Balidor would have suggested this.
Given how they stared at Allie and Revik whenever Revik wasn’t looking, Jon found himself thinking that neither Balidor nor Wreg would suggest anything that would strengthen Revik’s connection to Allie’s light...and not only because they worried Revik might develop a wire addiction of his own.
Jon got the feeling that Balidor, in particular, worried about Revik’s mental state.
Jon also got the sense that both Wreg and Balidor were disturbed by how often Revik and Allie seemed to be together since she regained consciousness.
The Elaerian leaned over Allie even as Jon thought it, saying something in her ear when she writhed and jerked awkwardly on the padded bench where they had her loosely tied. She gripped Revik’s shirt when he leaned down, and seemed reluctant to let go of him when he tried once more to straighten. He gently untangled her fingers, though, kissing them before laying them back down on the padded bench. When she visibly calmed, still looking up at him, he tugged a sheepskin-lined leather strap gently around her wrist and began to buckle it. Something about the slow, careful movement of his fingers forced Jon’s eyes away.
He had trouble watching them together, too, truthfully.
Since Revik already reamed him a new one on that score, and more than once, Jon tried to make himself get used to it, regardless of his own feelings. He didn’t know how successful he’d been, though.
Revik remained beside her even after he had all of her limbs restrained. His fingers remained on her at all times, too, Jon noticed...caressing her hair, touching her shoulder, touching her neck or cheek. He talked to the other infiltrators without missing a beat, even as his light remained entwined with and mostly focused on hers.
What might have touched Jon before, only brought a pain to his chest now. The grief that lived there, in those small, insignificant touches, the careful and gentle uses of his light, the looks he gave her, the patience...all of it and none of it could take Jon’s breath, without him even being able to articulate why exactly. The very normality of it made it worse, perhaps, the feelings he glimpsed from Revik...at least, when Jon let his mind go there...the sum of all those subtle and delicate threads, the complete lack of any feeling of sacrifice on Revik’s part himself.
At times, it struck Jon as one of the most profound examples of unconditional love he’d ever seen.
At others, it seemed so deeply deluded as to constitute a kind of sick parody of their marriage, whatever Revik told himself.
Jon still couldn’t even bring himself to think of her as Allie.
He didn’t know precisely who the woman was who lay there now, looking up at Revik with those clouded, confused eyes, but he didn’t see his sister in her anywhere.
She wore Allie’s face, and Allie’s body. At times, she even seemed to move like her, at least in those brief moments where nothing in her mind determined the nature of how that movement occurred, where it happened more like muscle memory than directed action. Those movements ended up feeling like ghosted echoes of the woman he remembered...the movements between moments, what took place in the spaces between where the cloudiness of her light would catch up with her body well enough to affect the way she took up space.
Mostly, though, Jon looked at her and saw a stranger.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, Jon receded deeper into the corner of the room, wondering again what exactly he was doing there. He knew his personal connection to Allie must be why they’d asked him to be a part of this, but he didn’t really want to think about that, either.
He looked at Maygar, instead, maybe to distract himself.
Revik’s son had gained back some of the weight he’d lost while he’d been held captive in Shadow’s house in South America. He still looked thinner than Jon remembered from when
they’d first met, but his shoulders looked broader again, and his biceps bigger. Maygar looked taller, too, which threw Jon at first, until he remembered that the same thing happened to Allie when she discovered she was a seer...and even to Jon himself, to a lesser degree. In addition to recently finding a father he never knew he had, Maygar had only just started exploring his ‘crossover’ status, too, which might have accelerated the changes in him.
Jon also happened to know that Maygar was still relatively young for a seer. He wondered if some of the height change came more as a function of normal seer aging, since Maygar still hadn’t reached full maturity.
Whatever the real reasons, the changes in Maygar had definitely accelerated, probably due in some part to the extensive work he’d done with Revik and the time spent in Revik’s light, working on the telekinesis. Jon remembered something similar happening to Allie not long after she and Revik got together...especially after she and Revik finally consummated their marriage.
But Jon didn’t really want to be reminded of that, either.
The combined effect on Maygar was sort of interesting, though, in that it seemed to make him resemble Revik a lot more than Jon remembered him looking like Revik before. Maygar still had the more Asian features of his mother, Elan Raven, who looked more or less like a Chinese human––a tall Chinese human, with shocking, turquoise-blue eyes, but a Chinese human, nonetheless––only now Jon could see a lot more of Revik in Maygar’s face, too.
Maygar’s own eyes were significantly darker than either of his parents’, a chocolate color that could contain surprising depths. His black hair hung long now, wound into a male seer’s clip at the back of his neck, and his chest still looked broader than his father’s, too, stretching the dark green T-shirt he wore under a thicker black flannel.
Allie's War Season Four Page 16
