Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  Grief lived there, but it was more than grief.

  It felt like a part of his actual body, a pain so deep he’d barely learned to recognize it; the sensation and emotion so much a part of himself, he’d lost the ability to distinguish either from who he was. Maybe that had been true forever. Maybe it had been true since he’d seen his own parents dead in that wooded clearing in the mountains east of the Pamir.

  “Gods,” he heard Wreg say behind him. The other male’s voice came out choked, almost a prayer. “Gods...Nenz...guete a Hulen-ta...”

  He felt the other male reaching for him, but Revik only felt himself telescoping inward. He didn’t know where he was going exactly, what it meant, but before he went there entirely, his wife pulled him back to the room.

  Her light hit his, turning his head so fast no thought accompanied the shift at all.

  Allie stood there, in the doorway.

  She stared up at the same image of the three of them, her best friend from childhood, Cass. Terian, who had raped and beaten her in D.C. Her and Revik’s child cradled in both of their arms. Like a family portrait, only framed by organic machines instead of those gray and blue smudged backdrops in the old human versions.

  Once he met his wife’s gaze, Revik couldn’t look away.

  For the first time, he didn’t suspect, he knew.

  He saw something in her eyes, something beside the wires, or that faraway stare that scared him, even as it angered and frustrated him and left him with a perverse kind of guilt and pain and wanting when he couldn’t reach her through it. This time he fucking knew. He could see the awareness in her eyes. She knew what she was looking at, what it meant.

  Revik was still staring at her face, at the strange, off-kilter clarity he could see in her jade-green eyes, when he realized the wire had gone from her neck. She clutched it in one hand, gripping it in a fist by her thigh. She’d taken it off on her own.

  She’d never done that before, either.

  Instead of relief, fear erupted in Revik’s chest, although fear of what, he had no idea at first.

  He moved towards her before a single thought penetrated that terror.

  “Alyson...” he said. “Allie...no...” He choked out her name, holding up a hand, maybe to calm her, maybe to calm himself. Tears came to his eyes, shocking him, blinding him and confusing him all in the same set of seconds. “Allie...darling. Go back in the other room. Please. Please, don’t...” He fought for breath. “Don’t look at this. Please, wife...”

  A voice came out of the monitor then, a voice that made every hair on the back of Revik’s neck abruptly stand on end.

  “Al?” Cass called out in delight.

  Revik froze, turning his head, staring up at the screen.

  Only then did he hear Wreg on his headset.

  “Right now!” the seer snarled. “...Trace the fucking thing, now! She’s bypassed the server entirely...it’s in his room. Two-way signal...”

  Revik heard his words, but couldn’t make sense of them. He stared up at Cass, still holding a hand out towards his wife, maybe trying to shield her mind, or maybe her body, which wore only one of his long, button-down shirts.

  Cass squinted from the other side of the wall monitor, holding up her free hand to block a bright light on her side, so she could see. “Al, is that really you?”

  A kind of murderous hatred ignited in Revik, along with his eyes.

  “What the fuck do you want?” he snarled, glaring up at her. “What do you want from us?”

  Cass laughed, a melodious but somehow broken sound.

  “Well, pardon me if I’m calling at a bad time, big guy,” she said, her lips lingering in that sickly-sweet smile. “We just wanted to ask if you felt like coming out to play again...” Her smile turned into a grin, right before she gave Terian a conspiratorial wink. “...I had no idea the missus would be up and about so soon. You’re welcome to bring her along, of course...” Cass bounced the child affectionately against her hip, smiling wider. “...It’s been such a spell since the two of us had any real girl time together.”

  Revik lost himself in her words, lost in the awareness that Cass had done this to Allie, that she had killed her mind with less concern than flipping a switch, that she could laugh about it now, holding Allie’s child like it was nothing, like she hadn’t watched them cut his daughter out of his wife’s womb.

  The facts stacked somewhere in the background, creating a kind of short in Revik’s heart, something he almost couldn’t think past. He remembered Cass in that prison under the Caucasus Mountains, how happy she’d been to be with Allie again, in London. He remembered conspiring with her to put together his wedding proposal for Allie in that cabin, her laughing as she and Chandre picked out raunchy underwear and stockings for when Allie and Revik started having sex.

  Even in all that, his fear for Allie herself remained.

  Something in the look he’d seen there...not just the awareness, something else.

  He stared at his wife, refusing to look at the other woman at all.

  “Allie...don’t...” He didn’t even know what he was asking her. “Don’t, Allie...please...”

  He held out his hand, begging her with his light.

  “Don’t, Allie...it’s not time yet...”

  “Awww, come on, big guy,” Cass cajoled from the screen behind him. “Don’t be such a spoil sport. If Allie wants to play with us...let her play!”

  Revik looked between them, feeling that sickness in his chest worsen. When his gaze next fell on Allie, he jumped a little when he saw the expression there, as she stared up at the image on the feed monitor wall.

  Not just understanding lived there, he realized. He could see anger.

  Maybe not even anger.

  It was too self-possessed to be anger, or hatred, or even a desire to do harm. What Revik saw in his wife’s eyes came closest to a pure, fathomless, depth of knowing. Like she understood exactly what had occurred in the past few months, and just who Cass had become. That knowing had lodged deep inside her somewhere, woven into memory and thought and desire until it had by itself, somewhere while she’d been sleeping, become its own thing.

  “Allie...no,” he said, almost a whisper that time.

  In that same instant, the light in Allie’s irises ignited.

  REVIK LUNGED FOR her, not even sure what he intended to do.

  He reached her, caught hold of her arms, even as he felt her light snake out, sparking along every piece of aleimi connected to and shared by his. The sensation completely disoriented him, making him feel almost inverted, even though he could still feel his hands around her, could still feel his feet on the floor, the wetness of his face. He felt her pulling from his light, from the light of Jon and Maygar...the pools of light Balidor had collected...without yanking him into the Barrier with her at all. She seemed to not want him with her.

  Revik tried to follow her light, to understand, but he got lost there.

  He thought, in a split second of clarity, Cass was dead.

  Gods, she was dead.

  Allie was going to kill her, right here and now...

  In the irrationality of that second, all he could think was, Gods, she’ll drop the child. Cass will hurt our baby girl when she falls...or Terry will...

  But that instant of clarity vanished, too.

  Something happened in the snaking tendrils of Allie’s mind that left him in the dark, out of control, blanking out his conscious thoughts.

  He couldn’t think past what Allie was doing, but the power behind it caught his breath, blinding him to the room, nearly causing a panic reaction in his body. His nerves caught on fire, his skin, even his bones hurt from the influx of light, the directed awareness he felt behind it. He knew her in it, but not...it felt like a knowing he had forgotten, that he had lost somehow, maybe because it belonged to some other part of himself, some part he didn’t...couldn’t...access in the day-to-day.

  Whatever that part was, it lived so far outside of his ordinary a
wareness that Revik couldn’t even comprehend its thinking processes. Those thoughts rotated far above his head, a purely spatial, mathematical means of processing information reaching him in bare slices, too complex for his lower mind to translate into meaning.

  He stood there, holding his wife’s shoulders, gasping for breath. The lower parts of his light fought for control, fought to even keep up, to bring back to heel his own aleimi only to be slapped out of the way by hers.

  He let out a cry when she broke free of him entirely, and then...

  Gods, he felt her with them.

  Allie wound some part of herself into the lights of Terian and Cass.

  Revik cried out again when he got slammed with that presence, when it wound back into his light, forcing him into a construct that felt so much like the one he’d been raised in as a child that terror exploded out of him. Revik felt Allie’s light willingly immerse itself in that silver-gray prison. She didn’t go there to pull Terian or Cass out...or even their child...but to put her own light and Revik’s into it.

  “Allie, no!”

  Fear broke Revik’s voice.

  He felt those silver threads wrap into hers from all sides.

  Greedily, pulling at her light like sharks going into a cold frenzy at the smell of blood. They slammed into Allie from all sides and she just stood there, letting it happen, even as she wrapped her aleimi into Terian and Cass’s mindlessly, pushing Revik’s back when he tried to stop her, to pull her away from them...

  NO! He screamed it into the Barrier, but she kept him in his body, wouldn’t let him join her in that space, not with most of his light, or even his normal consciousness. She held him outside of whatever she was doing, so he could only watch, helpless, while her light lost itself in those gray and silver strands, opening to the heavy dark of those clouds of light. She seemed utterly oblivious as they stripped her, as they pulled her deeper inside, breaking her, smashing her in front of him.

  NO GODS, ALLIE NO! NO! NO!

  Abruptly, the light hit a sort of crescendo.

  The pressure whited out the room, the surrounding Barrier space, like lightning behind his eyes. It wiped out his ability to see any of it, or even feel where she’d gone, much less why she’d left him behind. When abruptly, out of nowhere...

  That light died.

  It just...snuffed out.

  Revik stood there, shaking, blinded by tears.

  The silence, the sudden end to whatever that had been, left him gutted, bereft.

  The sudden lack of light, of presence, disoriented him. For a long moment, he thought maybe he had died. He thought he’d died, that he had gone somewhere else, in some space across the Barrier, someplace outside the physical planes altogether.

  But he hadn’t.

  Slowly, the room came back into focus. The Barrier space dimmed from that brilliant shock that whited out its contours...like regaining one’s sight after being flashed in the face by a strobe. In the same way, everything seemed so much darker afterwards.

  The room looked gray, washed out to him...almost two-dimensional.

  Revik held her now, although he didn’t remember when that changed. He held her, crushed her in his arms, but something was wrong...something he didn’t want to look at, even when he could see again. She felt limp where he held her, more dead than his mind could comprehend. Her skin was already losing its blush of warmth, that pulsing heat he’d always felt pounding through her skin, even when she’d been in that coma for weeks and months on end.

  Even when she’d been gone, riding on the wire’s waves.

  “NO!” He screamed it, unable to stop himself. His mind broke. It actually broke, as if someone had knocked him completely off his mooring.

  He’d felt this way once before.

  Only once.

  “NO! NO, goddamn it...NO!”

  She was dead. He was sure of it...even as the larger part of his mind refused to acknowledge it, to let it be real.

  “NO! NO, gods no...Allie!”

  He shook her, fought not to scream at her closed eyes, the empty, peaceful look there.

  “NO! Fuck! Allie! Allie! ALLIE!”

  He didn’t know how long he stood there, doing it.

  He heard laughter from the monitor behind him. Revik even heard the surprise in it, although it made no sense to him at the time. He didn’t look up, but he heard Cass’s voice, heard her smile, her bewildered chuckle, even before she spoke.

  “Well, shit,” Cass said, her voice echoing in the suite. “That was really fucking stupid. Did she really just do that? Really?”

  Revik didn’t look up. He didn’t tear his eyes off Allie’s face.

  He heard Cass speak again, right before the monitor went dead.

  “I mean, how you can blame me for that?” Cass said, pausing as if waiting for his answer. When he didn’t give her one, she snorted, her voice still faintly incredulous. “I mean, you saw that, right? That was, like...suicide. She wanted to go, big guy. You saw it. She wanted to go...”

  Revik didn’t look up that time, either.

  He didn’t even really hear her words until later.

  He was kneeling, but he didn’t know how or when that had changed. He continued to kneel there, looking down at Allie’s face, until hands touched him from all sides, pulling at him gently, tugging at him. Fingers and hands, then arms catching hold of him from behind, pulling him off of her, separating her from his arms.

  Revik didn’t have the energy to really fight them.

  He couldn’t do much more than struggle vaguely. His arms felt weak, his legs. He already felt only partly connected to the Earth, to his body, to gravity, maybe. He let them drag him back, and then Balidor was on the floor with her...Balidor, who Revik hadn’t even seen enter the room. The Adhipan leader held Allie’s body gently, lowering her the rest of the way to the floor. Revik saw Yumi there, too, and Jorag. He watched as Balidor’s eyes blurred, as he brushed Allie’s hair gently back from her face. Revik writhed violently in the hands holding him as he saw it, suddenly unable to stand having any of the others touch her, even now.

  “Don’t...gods...leave her alone...” He fought to breathe. “Leave her alone...”

  He knew words were still coming out of his mouth, but he couldn’t tell how loud, or even if anyone heard them but him.

  He didn’t know if anything he said made sense.

  Most of those words might have been her name, but he heard other things, too, from him and from the people standing around him. He heard Jon crying. He heard Neela, and Yumi...Wreg, Jax, Holo, Vikram, Chinja, Illeg. He heard Tenzi there, talking, but couldn’t comprehend his words, or even the language. Everything around him, even his own words, the things coming out of his mouth, felt completely disconnected from his mind, from the part of him that watched Balidor lay fingers on her throat, taking her pulse. Yumi did the same with Allie’s wrist on her other side, tears blurring the dark tattoo that covered half of Yumi’s oval face.

  He couldn’t comprehend Balidor’s words when he next spoke, not at first. He didn’t need to comprehend them. He’d felt the change. He’d felt her go.

  He’d felt her leave.

  Cass was right. Whatever Allie had just done, it was deliberate.

  Maybe not suicide, but damned close.

  Revik could still feel those silver strands sparking in the further reaches of his light.

  She’d kept him from being connected to them. She’d kept him out of all of it, really, made him a bystander. As much as he’d felt through her, she hadn’t wanted him along. She’d kept him out of that cold light, out of the construct, away from Shadow and Cass and Terian, even as she’d gone into all of those things herself...for what?

  To leave him, maybe. Or, more likely, to try and kill Cass and Feigran and fail, like Revik tried to kill Menlim in South America and failed. Maybe she was just tired of being here, saw a faster and more efficient way out than the wires afforded.

  None of those things sounded like his wife, but
maybe he hadn’t known her as well as he’d thought. Maybe she wasn’t that different from him, after all.

  He didn’t know what Allie had wanted, though, what she’d intended.

  He didn’t know why she’d kept him alive, if she knew he’d only die anyway.

  Revik couldn’t understand any of it. He didn’t even want to.

  The screen had gone dark in the spaces between those moments. Revik didn’t know if Balidor, Garensche, Vikram and the rest of the tech team had done it, by cutting off Cass and Terian’s signal from the outside, or if Cass and Terian simply ended things once they got what they wanted. He didn’t even know for certain if Cass and Terian knew Allie was dead.

  None of that meant anything to him anymore, either.

  Nothing but his wife being dead on the floor mattered.

  Nothing but the child he’d seen in that monitor mattered.

  He knew, now, it would be a race. A race to get to them, to kill them and take his child back before Allie’s death killed him, too. He knew how long his own death would take. He knew exactly how long...from the last time he’d been cut off from her light, the last time her light had been severed from his behind the Barrier.

  He knew exactly how long he had before the pain would grow unbearable.

  He knew exactly how long before he wouldn’t be able to think clearly anymore.

  He knew exactly how long before he started to lose control of his light. He even knew how long it would be before he couldn’t aim the telekinesis.

  He wouldn’t wait that long, though, not for any of it.

  He would leave tonight.

  16

  SAYING GOODBYE

  REVIK HELD THE gun, willing his hand to still.

  He didn’t quite manage to make it stop trembling, so he clenched his jaw again, maybe to compensate. It wouldn’t matter, he told himself.

  He glanced around at the shelf filled with armaments, flashed briefly to when he’d last stood in front of a shelf like this with Allie, when they’d been getting ready to rob that bank and she kept touching him. He’d wanted to grab her that night, to pull her down to the floor, rip her clothes off right then and there, before they even left for the goddamned job. He’d known even then that he’d agreed to go with her partly because he’d take any excuse to be immersed in her light. She’d been driving him out of his mind for weeks anyway, hinting she wanted sex, half-seducing him without ever committing enough to give him a real excuse.