Some part of him screams, fighting it...
He fights what he feels, fights that knowing, that realization, the reality it represents. Jon screams and screams, but it is too late to change anything. It is too late to stop, to pull out of this thing, or even to say he’s sorry...
It is already too late.
Jon watches as the connections solidify, like drying paint...like glue hardening. Seconds later, or maybe hours, or maybe days, something locks in.
Jon gasps, overwhelmed with feeling...a swirl of thoughts, emotions, heat, connections and currents flowing through and between and within Maygar, Revik, Allie and himself. Some of these feelings he shares, he is a part of. Some are not his, but he is carried along with them regardless, or sometimes, merely privy in voyeuristic glances past the edges of who he is. Some of them come from Magyar, from Revik, even from Allie alone...but they no longer belong to any of them. They belong to all of them, to the entity they create together.
He feels Allie there. Distant still, but closer than he’s felt her.
As the realization hits him, along with another blast of fear, Jon also realizes that whatever this thing is, it is over now.
...Or really, to be more accurate, it has already begun.
9
CAPITULATION
JON FINISHED BUTTONING the front of his pants, trying not to care that he could feel the other seer’s pain as Wreg watched Jon dress himself.
Then again, Wreg wouldn’t leave long enough for Jon to dress alone.
Jon couldn’t help swallowing back his light’s own reaction, to try to beat it somewhere far outside of his awareness. He felt Revik react somewhere, in the edges of his light, and Maygar, too, and shoved that out of his mind. Pain coiled around him from the other two males, making the feeling worse, even as he fought back the suffocating feeling of their presence, their very skin against his, somewhere on the edges of his light.
Struggling to find himself, to create a space for himself in the odd entity he had become with the other three seers, Jon found himself fighting not to look at Wreg at all... much less think about the last time he’d gotten dressed in front of him.
That time, they’d barely been able to keep their hands off each other.
Shoving that memory out of his mind, too, Jon didn’t manage it before he got a pulse of disgust and irritation off Maygar, strong enough to invade his light and flush his cheeks. Revik withdrew entirely then, shielding himself in a way that neither Jon nor Maygar seemed to be capable of doing, at least not from the other two.
Maybe Revik simply had more practice, from being bonded to Allie.
Clicking shortly under his breath, Jon fought to tighten his light around his body without looking up. Wreg shoved at him with his own light, though, forcing Jon to glance at him anyway.
“No,” the seer said, his jaw hard as he stared at Jon. “Goddamn it, Jon... no.”
Jon shook his head, clicking at Wreg more directly that time, even as he slid his arm into the long-sleeved, armored shirt he held in his hands. Jon found he couldn’t look at the other seer, not directly. His light still skirted around Wreg’s larger form, although it hurt... or hurt more, to be more accurate... when Wreg stood this close to him.
He shouldn’t have let him in the room.
He’d managed to keep the ex-rebel out until now... well, at least since Wreg helped him recover from the light sickness. Why he’d let him in this time, Jon couldn’t articulate to himself clearly. That, or maybe he just didn’t trust himself to tell the truth. The truth was, he’d been struggling more, lately. Something about the bond with the other three, it ripped something open in him. Made him feel more, maybe.
Most of that translated into a kind of sick vulnerability, a feeling of exposure.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t stand to have Wreg so close to him right now.
“Jon!” Wreg snapped. “Are you not going to talk to me about this at all?”
“No,” Jon said. His voice sounded surprisingly calm, even to himself. “I’m not. We’ve been over all of this, Wreg. Over it and over it...”
“Over what? We haven’t been ‘over’ anything!”
When Jon started to move past him, Wreg stood directly in his way, pushing him back gently but firmly with his hand. Something must have shown on Jon’s face, though, because Wreg lowered his voice, making it sound almost submissive.
“You’re following Nenzi around like some kind of suicidal lap dog, Jon. You’ve been doing it for months. You’ve been doing it since we got here. You do anything that fucker says, no matter how ridiculous his demands...”
Jon forced himself to shrug, even as the pain worsened briefly in his chest.
He could have told Wreg that wasn’t entirely true, but he didn’t suppose that admission would be welcome, either. When the pain worsened, and Jon felt it coming off the ex-rebel, too, he fought to close down more of his light, ignoring another angry flare from Maygar even as he finished tugging the dark shirt over his head and torso.
“You’re so willing to just die, then?” Wreg said.
“Who said anything about dying?” Jon snapped.
His words came out stronger than he intended. He saw the ex-rebel flinch, almost as if Jon had struck him. Catching the harder look forming on Wreg’s face once that surprise began to fade, Jon exhaled shortly.
“Look. Wreg.” He paused, gathering his thoughts as he stared out the window.
Outside, a seagull winged by, a dirty white streak gliding on the breeze. The cloud cover had grown dense again, but without satellite reports, Jon had no idea if that signaled a storm, or the more historical San Francisco clouds that could linger for days without a drop of actual rain.
He felt Maygar trying to push him out of his light again, and frowned.
“What?” Wreg said, jerking Jon’s eyes away from that gray view. “Look, what? Are you going to pretend you haven’t noticed how fucking weird that whole thing is, with Nenz and your sister and––”
“I’m not talking about this any more,” Jon cut in. “I’m going with Revik. It’s a done deal. I don’t even know why it would surprise you, given what’s going on. If you’d think about it for even one minute––”
“Are you fucking him, Jon?” Wreg said, cutting him off. “Nenz.”
Jon froze, staring at Wreg, in spite of himself. He saw Wreg’s eyes brighten in that pause. Barely brighten, the faintest extra sheen over those dark irises, but Jon couldn’t help but notice, couldn’t tear his eyes off Wreg’s face once he had.
“...Because I’m not the only one who’s wondered,” Wreg added.
His voice sounded thicker that time, less coherent, and Jon winced, pulling away from the emotion he felt emanating off the other man.
“No,” Jon said. “Jesus. I’m not fucking Revik.”
Wreg frowned at him, his eyes openly skeptical, and Jon clicked at him angrily. He saw Wreg attempt to shake it off, even as his voice grew harder once more.
“This is a suicide run,” Wreg accused him coldly. “For both of you. He’ll let anyone die to get that bitch who destroyed his wife... who stole his child. He won’t so much as blink if one of those people happens to be you. He won’t give a damn about you, about me... even about how the Bridge would feel, if she were truly here. Even if you are fucking him, Jon... or sucking his cock when he asks, or whatever the hell is going on with the two of you... he won’t care. You know this. I know you know this. I just don’t understand why you’re letting him drag you into it anyway. You must know he only wants you there to use you for your connection to Cass...”
Jon shrugged off the other man’s words, feeling his jaw harden.
“So what?” he said. “What makes you think I’m not okay with that, Wreg?”
“You want to die,” Wreg accused, his voice colder. “You’ve wanted to die ever since we got here, Jon... before that. In those damned sewers. On the plane ride from Langley. You’d rather blame yourself for how they used you. You’d
rather do that than feel anything about what happened to your sister. You’d rather die than feel that... or risk that it could happen again...”
Jon shook his head, clicking. “You’re over-thinking this, Wreg.”
“Bullshit! Everything we do now matters... everything!”
“Jesus. Drama much?” Jon said.
“You are a fucking commander, Jon,” Wreg growled. “You are the first name on that human Displacement list... or had you forgotten that, too?” When Jon only clicked at him again, Wreg raised his voice, putting light into his words. “You don’t have the luxury for this emotional bullshit, Jon! You are too important to be killed off as part of the Sword’s personal vendetta... even if it feels like some kind of catharsis for both of you. The humans need you. Or are you too selfish to give a damn about them, either?”
Jon turned, glaring at him directly for the first time. “I’m going to New York. The humans are there, Wreg... not here!”
“Bullshit,” Wreg hissed. “You are going with Nenz. You don’t care about them. Do not pretend that you do. They have not crossed your mind once in this.”
Jon started to answer him, then fell silent, feeling his fingers curl into fists before he could stop them. But he couldn’t feel anything about Wreg’s words, not really. All he could feel was a desire for the other seer to shut the fuck up, to get out of there. Anger seethed through his light, but his heart felt strangely closed off once more, distant from the other man in a way he wouldn’t have been able to imagine, even a few months ago.
It made it difficult to even look at Wreg’s face.
“I’m sorry, Wreg,” Jon said finally, exhaling a forced breath. “I really am. I know you don’t like this, but I’m not going to change my mind.”
“And if it kills me?” Wreg said. “If I die, in your mission to purge yourself? Is that an acceptable outcome to you now, too, you goddamned little pup? Or has it not occurred to you yet that such a thing is possible, given who we are to one another...?” Wreg’s voice grew colder, even as he took a step closer to Jon. “...Or should I say who we were to one another? Given that Nenz now has you by the dick?”
Jon felt his jaw harden more.
Shoving the black duffle bag backwards on the Victorian armchair so he could sit on the edge, Jon lowered his weight to finish buckling his boots, pushing down the organic snaps to lock them into place around his calves and ankles once he had his heels settled. He felt Wreg’s eyes on him, and his light, but all he could do was shield from both.
He couldn’t lie to himself about one thing, anyway.
As far as he was concerned, he couldn’t get out of here soon enough.
Wreg gave a humorless laugh, but all Jon heard in it was anger.
“Yeah,” the muscular seer said. “Fuck you, too... brother.”
Jon finished the second boot, and rose to his feet.
“Take care of Allie, Wreg,” Jon said, hating the tonelessness of his voice, but unable to do anything about that, either. He didn’t look up, or open his light. “I’ll come back if I can, Wreg. I promise I will.”
“Yeah.”
Wreg seemed about to say more, then didn’t. The silence that fell grew thick as Jon glanced around the room, trying to distract himself even as he tried to think through anything he might have forgotten.
When that silence continued, however, Jon couldn’t help himself.
He looked up.
Wreg’s obsidian eyes met his, unflinching. Disbelief stood there. Disbelief and what might have been shock, a kind of lost expression... none of which managed to mask the almost crippling hurt Jon could both feel and see under that more intense veneer of anger.
Jon had never seen the seer look like that before. The expression there hit at him, nearly cracking the shield he’d thrown over his light.
Until Jon shoved that away, too.
“Good luck, my brother,” he murmured, not looking up again.
Hooking his hands through the straps of the carry-on bag, Jon slung it over his shoulder. He turned his back on the other man, reaching for the antique, porcelain door handle and jerking it sideways to open the door.
He left the room, fighting the sudden tightness in his chest, fighting to breathe.
Wreg didn’t follow him.
JON SAT IN a metal folding chair in the basement of the Victorian house.
This was supposed to be the final ‘talk’ before they left San Francisco. Not quite a planning session, at least from what Jon could pick out of the minds around him––most of the on-the-ground planning had been completed––but it wouldn’t just be a pep talk, either.
Jon had never really been along for a military operation with Revik before...at least not one the Elaerian led personally. He’d been with him when they broke out of that prison in the Caucasus Mountains, and when they’d been dragged by Ditrini through the sewers...but this didn’t feel like either of those. It felt a few hundred miles distant from that extraction op in San Francisco, and not only because Allie wasn’t planning it with him.
Less than an hour had passed since he’d left Wreg.
The metal folding chair in which Jon sat took up an exceedingly small part of a low-ceilinged space dotted with at least two dozen more chairs exactly like it. The room itself had padded floors and walls from being used as a mulei practice space.
Jon sat in a cluster of other seers in a half-ring around Revik, who faced them in another of those folding chairs. The chair looked oddly small under Revik’s long legs, despite the fact that he sat perfectly straight against the back, poised with that strange precision of his.
The seers all wore clothing that looked more or less like what Jon wore, Revik included. Black armored shirts hung down over armored pants. Thicker armored vests wrapped around the shirts with side and shoulder holsters for guns along with pockets and pouches for magazines, flares, hand-helds and whatever else.
Revik had his ankle propped sideways on his opposite thigh, his hand resting on his foot where it sat just above and past his knee. His fingers looked longer and whiter than Jon remembered, in contrast to all of that black armored clothing, as well as the dark green walls of the organically-padded room and his black hair. Most of the furniture in the place had been stripped, leaving only a mirror behind Revik, duplicating their numbers, and duplicating the emptiness around where they sat.
A pile of black duffle bags stood against a wall by the door, the only other things left in the room apart from the folding chairs, the floor pads and the seers themselves.
Jon found himself watching Revik, just as the rest of them did.
For a long-feeling few minutes, Revik didn’t speak. He watched the few stragglers come into the room and take seats, leaving their own duffels on the pile in the corner as they slunk in, looking vaguely guilty at the silence.
Jon watched Revik’s clear eyes as he scanned all of their faces. Jon wondered if Revik was thinking about what he intended to say, or maybe if he was counting heads and bodies to remind himself of their number, or to determine if everyone had finally arrived. He could have been once more contemplating that fine balance between what he needed in New York and what he wanted to leave here, in San Francisco, with Allie.
Jon’s eyes followed Revik’s as he took in the wash of different-colored faces and eyes. He followed them again as Revik paused to assess the pile of bags that stood in an uneven mound by the propped-open door, as well as the stacked crates of equipment in the hallway just beyond it. Jon knew the latter held everything from ammunition magazines to grenades to a frighteningly diverse number of hand-held guns, rifles and other weapons.
That didn’t even include whatever they’d already loaded onto the truck downstairs.
Revik never believed in scrimping when it came to weapons.
Jon’s eyes returned to the faces of the other seers, counting them.
Twenty-five in total...twenty-seven with him and Revik...but only half of those faces were truly known to Jon, other than in passing.
Neela was there, along with Maygar, Jorag, Garensche, Jax, Loki, Oli, Poresh, Illeg, that British seer friend of Revik’s, Torek (not to be confused with Tardek, Jon reminded himself, that older rebel who died in the tsunami). Chinja and Yumi were there, too. Jon didn’t know much of the concrete plan yet, but he knew that in New York, they would be joined in an operational sense by Holo, Deklan, Anale, Mika, Ullysa, Raddi, Hondo, Argo and a bunch of others, too.
Balidor would stay here, overseeing their shields long distance.
Wreg would be staying, too. He’d been put in charge of the protective detail over Allie.
Jon knew, just from knowing Revik, that he’d likely already spent the previous ten or so hours talking to the infiltrators he would leave behind. Revik would have hammered out a few dozen protection protocols with Wreg and Balidor personally, along with whatever contingency plans he would undoubtedly have in place in the event of an attack on San Francisco itself. Supposedly Varlan was tracking Ditrini and monitoring his location in the physical, aided by Chandre, Rig, Stanley and Balidor’s new girlfriend, Yarli, who was a better than decent infiltrator in her own right...as well as a male seer named Damon.
Even so, Revik wouldn’t want to take any chances.
Jon knew that nothing would truly calm Revik down about Ditrini except a bullet in the Lao Hu seer’s head. Jon felt pretty much the same way himself, actually. It only occurred to him sometimes, and usually in the dark when he laid down to sleep, that wishing someone else dead, even a psychopath like Ditrini, was a relatively new experience for him. He didn’t really want to think about what Vash would have said about that.
Right now, given everything, he didn’t really want to think about Vash at all.
When Revik shifted in his seat, Jon’s eyes jerked back to his.
That time, Jon found himself focusing reluctantly on the bruise under the other man’s eye and the top part of his cheek. The mark was fresh, mostly red still, although it had already started to darken. Jon already knew from Maygar and Revik’s minds exactly where that bruise had come from. Wreg had punched Revik in the face, during one of their ‘talks’ that morning.
Allie's War Season Four Page 18
