He knew he’d probably do it again.
He’d fuck her again, if she asked him for it.
Hell, he already had. Twice. Once, that same night.
He’d woken up in bed a few hours after they crawled off to sleep. She’d woken him, to be more precise... and she’d done it by putting her mouth on him.
He hadn’t stopped her that time, either.
He hadn’t even tried to fight it. He’d lost himself, instead, trying to find her light under the touch of her lips and tongue. He’d been begging her by the end, gripping her hair as tears poured down his face. He’d hated himself for that, too, but he’d only kissed her at the end, wrapping himself around her and caressing her bare skin until eventually, she began to doze in his arms.
She woke him up a second time, in the hours before dawn, wanting the wires.
She hadn’t asked him for that outright, of course. She never asked him for it, not in so many words, because she never spoke to him at all, not even in his head. She just pulled on him, instead, that urgency and panic in her light as she bombarded him with images.
He’d accommodated her, of course... just like he accommodated her every time she asked for the wires. After all, it wasn’t the first time she’d woken him for that reason. Unlike the impromptu oral sex, waking him to ask to get high was a regular fucking occurrence.
He’d fought to keep the bitterness away from that thought, even then.
He’d tried not to think much at all, truthfully. He’d been exhausted, mentally and physically when he slid the wire around her neck, activating the trigger so it would dig into the hole at the base of her spine. Fittingly, wires piggybacked on the same holes as sight-restraint collars, wrapping around and strangling the same nerve-endings, bones and flesh.
Revik had watched her face as the wire began to take effect. He watched her drift off into that less-complicated zone, her eyes glazing for real as she lost herself in that white-gold light, likely going right back to that same damned ocean where he always found her when he looked for her in the Barrier. Glimmers of feeling emanated off her as she left, including a relief stronger and more intense than anything sex with him managed to evoke in her.
Watching her, he’d felt angry all over again.
He’d watched her get stoned on the wires, and for the first time, he’d been tempted to join her. He’d considered just going there with her, saying the hell with all of this shit and just checking out.
Of course, that hadn’t been the only reaction to cross his mind.
He’d also wanted to rip the wire off her, shake her and yell at her like he had when he first got up to their room. He’d wanted to break the fucking thing, let her panic for not having it... break that sense of peace he felt on her as soon as she left him behind. Anything to shake her out of her stoned complacency, to make her realize how much it hurt him that she needed that goddamned thing more than she needed him.
In the end, he didn’t do anything, of course. He just watched her leave him.
Eventually, without warning or preamble, he’d fallen back asleep, too.
When he woke next, she’d been wrapped around him, the expression on her face still maddeningly content. It remained that way even after he removed the wire. She’d even kissed him, and that time, it had been more affection than pain.
After she’d kissed him a few more times, though, the pain came back.
Slowly, achingly that time, she seduced him again, using her hands and mouth and even those structures in her light, until he’d lost control.
He didn’t want to think about that either, though.
Whatever they’d done together, Revik still hadn’t felt her in it. Not the woman he wanted. Not his wife. He hadn’t seen her in those pale green eyes. Truthfully, he’d felt more of the Allie he remembered when she’d shoved him across that basement workout room with her telekinesis.
When they finally left the room, guards had been posted outside the door.
Revik barely looked at them as he led Allie downstairs by the hand to make sure she ate before he finished making arrangements to get all of them to New York.
He hadn’t been able to look the others in the eye.
They seemed to be avoiding him, too, he noticed.
The kitchen pretty much cleared out the second they entered, with only Jon remaining there with them, and even he wouldn’t look at either of them directly, not for more than a second or two at a time. He’d talked about nothing, filling space. Revik hadn’t even bothered to answer most of his words, but Allie had watched Jon silently, a solemn if still stone-looking expression in her pale green eyes.
Revik didn’t know how much of that night or morning the other seers had felt. He especially didn’t want to think about how much of it Jon and Maygar might have felt, considering the stronger connection between the four of them. Revik didn’t know if the others only heard him yelling at her. That might have been enough, really––hearing their commander lose his shit on a woman who wasn’t even mentally capable of understanding him, much less of helping him manage that loss of control. They must have thought he’d finally cracked.
They must have thought he’d lost his mind for real.
He especially didn’t want to know if they knew what he’d done after that. The idea of the whole construct watching him fuck his mentally incapacitated wife was more than he could let himself contemplate. At this point, he flat-out didn’t want to know.
Tugging a few strands of hair off one of her high cheekbones, he realized he was crying again. He only noticed that time when his vision blurred. Without looking up at the rest of the cabin, he wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He didn’t take the fingers of his other hand off of her, or stop caressing her skin. Her hands tightened on his leg, but her eyes didn’t open, and as he watched her expressions come and go under the wire she wore around the back of her neck, he couldn’t help wishing for an end to this.
He wanted this to be over.
He didn’t want to do this alone anymore. He honestly wasn’t sure if he could do it alone, even if he’d wanted to try...and he didn’t want to try. He knew it was beyond selfish to think that way, to even let his mind go there, considering where he should be placing his focus. He didn’t care. His capability for self-sacrifice had been strained too many times over the years. In the last month, he found it hard to pretend those pulls meant anything to him anymore.
He would stay until he found their child.
He would stay until Cass was dead.
He would stay until his uncle was dead, too. Really dead, this time. Dead by his own hands. Dead beyond question, refutation, or the barest fragment of doubt.
Revik intended to handle that end personally. Not out of pride, or ego. Those things didn’t mean anything to him anymore, either. He would do it himself because he couldn’t afford not to. He hadn’t spoken to the others about what he would do to make those things happen, how far he would go...but he knew it was far.
Really goddamned far.
Further than he’d ever gone, even at his worst.
He would die before he let what happened to him happen to his daughter or son.
He owed his wife that much, at least. He owed it to himself.
Hell, he owed it to the world, to not visit upon it another being that had been molded and twisted and broken the way he had been, all of those years ago.
Whatever else he did or didn’t know...of that one thing, he felt entirely certain.
JON HAD NO idea what JFK looked like these days, in its location almost due south of where he now stood, all the way on the other side of Queens... but LaGuardia appeared to have been stripped completely of both people and planes.
Jon walked down the staircase outside the plane after the others, feeling strangely exposed.
He hadn’t slept much in the six-hour flight, which probably didn’t help.
Reaching the tarmac, he looked around. He saw only a few commercial jets parked against the terminals, standing
against those accordion-like walkways like large land animals turned to stone. Glancing around the expanse of runway and the water and buildings on three sides, what struck him most was the silence.
None of those cart-drawn baggage carriers cruised over the tarmac. Jon saw no maintenance workers, no mechanics, no baggage handlers in their dark-blue jumpsuits. He didn’t see the guys who waved the tube-like lights to guide planes to the concourse and out to the runways. He didn’t see any bodies moving through the reinforced glass of the terminal building, either.
Seeing everything this quiet was unnerving, to say the least.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his vest, Jon shivered, zipping up the front. Even so, Jon had spent enough time in New York to know it was hot for eight in the morning, even for June, and muggier than he remembered.
He’d heard some of their team muttering about weather machines, and about Shadow manipulating those to put even more stress on the human population...what remained of it, anyway. Jon didn’t know why Shadow would have bothered at this point, though; the human population didn’t seem to want for stressors these days.
Dykes and probably soon-to-be-failing fields kept the worst of the rising waterline off LaGuardia itself, but Jon knew those would fail eventually, too, with no one to maintain them, or to keep the fields charged in the wake of the worst storms. Already, he had seen portions of the dykes failing. A sinkhole stood on the edge of one runway...too near the ocean to render all of the lanes useless, but the beginning of the end, Jon guessed.
In about a year––maybe more, maybe less––it would be as if LaGuardia never existed.
Jon turned his head, gazing at the skyline of Manhattan, feeling the beginnings of a headache lurking in the back of his skull. He wondered if he would even recognize the city this time. He wondered if he even wanted to recognize it.
At the thought, he glanced at Allie, unable to help himself.
She stood next to Revik, but her eyes and attention seemingly riveted by the ocean.
Revik held her hand, talking to Wreg as the wind over the tarmac ruffled his black hair. That same gust caught hold of Allie’s hair, too, sending it streaming away from her face and off her back. Jon saw that faraway look in her eyes, but imagined for a second that he saw Allie in it somewhere, too. She slid deeper into Revik’s side as he watched, and Jon saw the tall seer rearrange his grip on her fingers, holding her more tightly.
Looking away from the two of them, Jon cleared his throat, glancing around at the other infiltrators as they milled over the tarmac. He hadn’t asked a lot of questions about this stage of their trip. He knew Balidor and Revik had been working on it for weeks.
He also knew it wouldn’t involve a submarine.
Jon knew every aspect of their entry would be mapped out to the most minute detail, whatever it entailed. Revik wouldn’t risk his one and only shot at Cass by letting them get taken apart by OBEs before they even got inside the city limits.
He wouldn’t risk his one and only shot at getting his kid back, either.
But Revik never actually talked about his and Allie’s child.
Jon hadn’t heard Revik mention that child even once, in all of their planning sessions. Balidor told Jon that Cass had been taunting Revik about his daughter in dreams, claiming she was a girl, that she looked like Revik, that she had his eyes. As far as Jon knew, however, they had no real confirmation around any information to do with the child.
Well, apart from that. Apart from Revik’s dreams.
Jon knew Revik and Balidor must have discussed rescuing the child behind closed doors, in terms of factoring in risk and determining the best means of attempting extraction and whether they were likely to accomplish that while keeping the baby alive. Even so, the whole silence around Revik and Allie’s daughter constituted one of the more unnerving elements of this whole operation, in Jon’s view. He barely knew what to ask Revik when it came to that, though, so he hadn’t tried. Knowing Revik, the topic fell into another of those no man’s lands of emotional places where Revik just couldn’t go...at least, not yet.
Jon wondered if Revik never talked about his daughter because he assumed he’d never see her alive. Jon had done the math, and looked up gestation cycles for seers. At this point, the baby would scarcely be a few months old, if following a human gestation arc. She wouldn’t be born at all yet, if Allie adopted a more Sark gestation arc during her pregnancy, since those lasted a full fifteen months. The baby could only have been around six months old at most when Cass took her out of Allie, so unable to survive outside of the womb, in either case.
Jorag told Jon that experiments had been done by the rebels to accelerate the growth cycles of seer offspring. Jorag said the rationale had been to keep female seers from being rendered vulnerable for extended periods of time during pregnancy, and so that newborn seers would spend less time in the vulnerabilities of extreme youth. Since both conditions, pregnancy and youth, tended to force the afflicted seers into hiding for months or years at a time, Salinse ordered their technicians to find a way to shorten those periods.
Jorag said that rebel scientists had already found ways to accelerate development of fetuses in the womb, back when he’d been a rebel. He knew they’d been working on continuing that acceleration of development outside of the womb, too.
He also told Jon, told all of them, really––well, all of them except Revik, who presumably already knew this and didn’t want to think about it in relation to his own child––that those experiments had been extremely well-funded.
Jon had a pretty good idea of who had been funding them.
Revik hadn’t known about Shadow back then.
Even so, Jon couldn’t help wondering if Revik ever wondered exactly where the money came from, back when he worked for Salinse. Of course, knowing Revik’s penchant for detail, he probably thought he knew. Shadow probably long ago found ways to hide, confuse and distort that information long before it reached anyone who cared enough to ask.
Thinking about that now, Jon glanced at Wreg.
Those obsidian-black eyes shifted away as soon as their gazes met, but Jon saw a frown touch the infiltrator’s lips just before he turned back to face Revik. Jon continued to watch the two of them talk, right before Wreg nodded to something Revik said, making a respectful gesture in seer sign language. It struck Jon as oddly Wreg-like that one minute, he could punch his commanding officer in the face, the next, he could follow him without question.
Revik seemed to expect nothing different, though.
Exhaling, Jon stamped his booted feet on the tarmac, fighting to focus on why he was here. Instructions cycled aimlessly in his head. The words remained, like nails hammered in his brain...but Jon could scarcely make sense of their meaning, despite how long he’d spent thinking about and memorizing all of it in the previous weeks.
He had maps to Allie’s light, somewhere in that tangled mess.
He carried a separate set of instructions for every level of the operation in which he had direct involvement, including every type of contingency, along with a number of variables that Revik and Balidor trained him to look for in the event things really went sideways. He’d been given a dozen different contingencies for if the construct knocked out Maygar and/or Revik’s telekinesis, another half-dozen for if it impaired Revik or Maygar’s ability to connect with Allie, five more if the construct broke, knocked out or blocked their ability to use the Barrier.
He’d been given contingencies for if any one of the three of them––meaning Allie, Maygar or Revik––were killed. He’d been given contingencies for finding Shadow on his own and for what to do with Feigran and Cass, if he found himself facing either one of the intermediaries alone. He’d even been given instructions about retrieving his niece or nephew.
He just hadn’t gotten them from Revik.
Despite all of these different plans and counter-plans and contingencies floating around in Jon’s head, he knew he only held a fraction of the possibilities, f
or the same reasons he strongly suspected a fair bit of false information had been fed to him along with the good by the other infiltrators already.
Jon was fine with that, too.
He wanted his piece of the plan, and that was it.
He knew it was a relatively small piece. He knew that piece lived inside what must be a much larger puzzle, one that contained a few hundred other, differently-shaped pieces that spelled out a much wider and denser meaning. Despite knowing he was only a small cog in a larger machine, he took seriously the warnings not to minimize his role, or to assume the plan could succeed without him.
Thinking about that had a tendency to bring on a debilitating kind of panic, though, so Jon felt a lot better when he didn’t dwell on his own potential for screwing up.
When he focused on Cass, on seeing her again, he felt strangely calmer.
When he focused on the fact that Cass and Shadow had his niece, he felt calmer still. The idea of Shadow raising Revik’s child, after what had been done to Revik in his own youth, had a tendency to remind Jon why he wasn’t asking Revik a lot of questions about means versus ends. It also served as a chilling reminder of why Revik might not be eager to talk about what might have been done to his and Allie’s child already.
Six months had passed, since they found Allie in their mother’s house in San Francisco.
Six months, nine days and roughly twelve hours.
Jon glanced over at the others just as Revik finished speaking. He watched Wreg make that half-salute the rebels often used with Revik, the one that contained an abbreviated version of the gesture of respect specific to the Sword. Even as the Chinese-looking seer completed the motion, Jon heard beating rotors echo across the near-empty tarmac, like the thuds of a giant heart.
By the time he faced in the direction from which they came, the dark shape of a helicopter had risen over the furthest hangar, its nose tilted at a slightly downward angle.
Allie's War Season Four Page 22
