“What the fuck, ‘Dori?” Revik growled. “What is it? What aren’t you telling me?”
There was a silence. Then the Adhipan leader sighed.
“You’re not going to like it,” he said.
“I don’t have time for this...” Revik began, his voice a low warning.
“All right,” Balidor said, cutting him off with a virtual wave. His voice turned businesslike. “We’ve had some issues on our end.”
“Issues,” Revik said.
“Yes,” Balidor said. His voice grew clipped, once more sounding like a military report. “We’re looking into it, but Tarsi is missing. So is Anale. It seems that human hacker recruit of Jon’s, Dante-whatever...she has disappeared, too.” Hesitating, he added, “...So did Surli. That Chinese infiltrator your wife knew in Beijing.”
“Surli?” Revik’s voice sharpened. “They still had that fucker Surli in custody?”
“He was on the Displacement list, laoban,” Balidor said, his voice holding a faint warning. “Deklan and the others freed him during the tsunami...it seemed pointless to keep him prisoner, and Ditrini had left Surli behind when he escaped. Raven disappeared when Ditrini took you from the cell with Maygar, remember? We always figured Ditrini freed her, likely as a favor to Voi Pai. He left Surli with us.”
“What makes you think that’s any kind of indication of his reliability?” Revik growled.
He fought a sharper thread of irritation that no one had talked to him about this, but maybe even more so that he’d never thought to ask. He’d just assumed Surli disappeared with Ditrini...or maybe even that he’d been killed in the floods.
“So...what?” Revik growled. “He’s just been walking around the hotel all this time? Drinking coffee at the Third Jewel?”
Balidor made a vague gesture with one hand. “He had no security clearance, of course, to reach any of the higher floors or interact with intelligence, but yes.”
Revik felt his jaw harden. “And you didn’t think to tell me...why? Because he used to fuck my wife? Or was there some other reason?”
Balidor didn’t answer.
Rubbing his face with a gloved hand, Revik forced the emotions back, realizing he was treading on dangerous ground to even go there right now. Further, he knew why they wouldn’t have told him any of this. He wouldn’t have been capable of addressing it rationally, not at any point in the period after they found Allie in San Francisco.
Hell, he still wasn’t capable of looking at it rationally. Clearly.
“Fine,” he said. “Well, are you looking for him now?”
“Yes.” Balidor took another breath, then added in a harsher voice, “There is another thing, laoban. Your wife’s body is missing too...”
“What?” Wreg said, breaking into the communication. “What the fuck does that mean? Missing how?”
Revik could only stand there, though, unmoving. Wreg’s voice grew harsher, holding enough emotion that Revik flinched.
“When? How did you find out?” Wreg demanded.
Balidor let out a clicking sigh. “The imaging systems in the halls and elevators showed Dante to have gone to the sixtieth floor after she went missing,” Balidor explained. “Tarsi, too. We were looking for her. Holo checked the room. The body’s gone.”
The silence deepened.
Wreg’s voice sounded almost lost that time, despite the anger that overlay his words. “What the fuck is this?” he said in Mandarin. “Are they trying to screw with his head, or what? Is it a cloning thing? Some kind of fucking trophy?”
Revik winced, but didn’t look over at the other man.
Balidor sighed through the transmitter, his voice holding an overt grief.
“I honestly don’t know, brothers. We’ve recorded no breaches. It is possible Tarsi took Alyson’s body for her own reasons...for some ritualistic or protective reason of her own.”
He paused, then his voice grew more blunt, almost cold.
“...It’s equally possible Surli took her, and kidnapped Tarsi. It’s also possible that Anale was another mole, a plant of Shadow’s, like Dorje. If that is true, if Anale worked for Shadow, along with Surli, then this is likely a psychological attack on our brother, the Sword. That, and likely an attempt to take Tarsi from us, as the highest ranked infiltrator we have. There is the possibility that they wanted the Bridge’s biological matter too, of course. Any combination of those is possible...but we are as without answers as you are.”
Balidor stopped talking, as abruptly as he had begun.
His voice grew quieter, but suddenly carrying so much emotion Revik winced.
“I am deeply sorry, Nenz,” Balidor said, his words thick. “I do not have an answer for you at this time. I wish I did. I am sorry that I let this happen, and right under my eyes, my very light. I will tell you the instant we find out anything at all about this...I promise, laoban. I promise. And if Surli is indeed behind it, I’ll kill him myself.”
Revik stared into the dark of the nearby trees, trying to wrap his head around the other man’s words. He couldn’t. He couldn’t make himself understand them in any way that made sense to his conscious mind. Tarsi gone, possibly dead. Anale a traitor. Surli. Dante. Even the loss of Dante hurt. She’d been the most senior name on that human Displacement list after Jon. More than that, Revik liked her. He’d liked her light...the glimpses of her mind, her humor.
Allie liked her, too.
Revik found himself staring out over the park, the clouds and wind he could glimpse in far greater detail with his light than his physical eyes, and not only because of the darkness of the surrounding trees. A psychological attack made sense. Terian was back in the picture, so it could be some genetic crap of his, too, one of his obsessions with Elaerian light and telekinesis...or just his obsession with Allie herself. They were trying to destroy him, maybe...what remained of his mind. Maybe this was part of it, to take her, even after she was dead, to wear him down, so that when he faced them, there would be little of him left.
It felt redundant to him, though. He wondered how they couldn’t know that.
Revik still stood there, staring off, when he became aware that the others had moved closer to him, soundlessly, despite the gear and armor they wore. Before he could shake it off, Wreg had an arm around his shoulders.
On his other side, Garensche held him, too.
At first Revik thought they were worried he might lose his mind...that he could collapse right there on the sidewalk, have some kind of breakdown that would end the op before it even began. Revik thought about the possibility clinically, as if from a very great distance. He thought about what he would do, if he were them, faced with a seer who’d lost his mate, his child, his only living relation. He thought about whether he already had lost his mind, if he would be more of an asset to them or a liability at this point.
Maybe he should send them all home.
He could do this alone, while they escaped, taking as many from the list with them as they could. Balidor could bomb the building once Revik confirmed who was inside.
Sending them back to the hotel would be the right thing to do.
It’s probably what Allie would have done.
He felt the grief in their hands and light at his thought, and something in his chest tightened. Something in their feeling forced the same on him.
If he’d been anywhere else, in any other time, he might have just let himself feel it. He might have let the warmth of their light pull him into his own light for real...down that rabbit hole where he could just lay down and die, be done with this. He turned over the possibility of just letting himself cry, or yell...scream out whatever felt like death inside his chest. Maybe he could just stand here, surrender to the inevitable, wait for his mind to break quietly, without any of the drama. Even now, the possibility dangled before him, oddly tempting.
He could just let it happen. It was all a matter of when, of how long he kept choking a fist around the reins, fighting off the inevitable.
Lookin
g at the odds stacked against them once they entered the organic steel and glass Tower, Revik knew how likely it was this op played directly into Shadow’s hands. Maybe the right thing to do was to refuse to play. Maybe he’d do less damage that way. He should let the others leave. Let them live to fight another day.
“We’re not going anywhere, laoban,” Wreg told him gruffly.
The seer sounded almost angry.
Revik felt the agreement from the rest of them.
For a long moment, they just stood there, listening to the wind as it wound between the buildings, blowing trash and leaves down the street. Garensche, Wreg, Neela and Chinja didn’t leave Revik’s side, but seemed only to press closer to his armor-clad body. Jorag stood behind him, too. Revik felt Maygar and Jon on his other side, their light so entangled in his that he could barely see them as separate anymore. Revik could feel them all there, even if he had no way to speak to them, no way to acknowledge them in any way.
He didn’t feel any judgment. It felt only like they waited to see what he would do. Tendrils of their warmth touched him, along with emotion, fear, pain. He couldn’t help them with any of it, but they didn’t seem to even want that from him anymore.
Then, that moment ended, too.
Wiping his face, Revik cleared his throat.
That time, he didn’t bother with the subvocals.
“We’re going in the front door,” he said, clearing his throat again.
Nodding, Wreg patted him roughly on the back. “Yes, laoban.”
The muscular, Chinese seer stepped away from him, right before he wiped his own face with one broad hand. Pausing long enough to massage the muscle of Revik’s shoulder, Garensche released him, too, following Wreg towards the street. Jorag stayed by him, but didn’t touch him as the others had. Neither did Jon, or Maygar, Chinja, Neela or Jax. Loki’s team stood a little ways away, in another clump of trees, but Revik felt them in his light, too.
As Revik got ready to leave the cover of the trees, the seers standing with him closed around him, as if to shield him from the surrounding buildings. The gesture felt overtly protective, and Revik found himself relaxing even more into their light, even as he wondered why they bothered.
Despite how alone he felt, something about having them there, with him, made him feel strangely naked, almost painfully vulnerable. To push past the feeling, he had to refocus his mind on why he was here. The real reason.
He focused on the child. It was all he could focus on.
Remembering her eyes helped. Remembering the shape of her face, her hands, the way she clung to Cass’s neck, staring at him as if he were the enemy...or a stranger, at least. The way Allie had looked at their daughter, in those last minutes before they killed her.
He had to find her.
He had to find their child while he still could.
JON FELT SICK. He couldn’t remember ever feeling so sick, although he didn’t really let himself think about why, or the various components of that sickness.
He suspected a good chunk of it came from Revik, whose light still felt more immersed in his own than he’d ever felt another person’s, even Wreg’s. He glanced at Maygar, and found the seer looking at Revik, too, a tense worry etched around his dark eyes. Maygar looked somewhat more alert now, though, even compared to that morning. He had a determined set to his jaw, too, and Jon could feel glimpses around what that determination meant.
They all knew there would be a big, gaping hole in their group, if Revik snapped.
None of them needed to voice that worry aloud; they all felt it.
Maybe they all felt like Maygar in the background, as if some part of them geared up to carry him, when and if that moment came.
Jon was still looking at Maygar’s face when another arc of sparks left the OBE field in front of them, making a loud, harsh, buzzing noise after Garensche threw another food container at the wall of seething, artificially-intelligent energy. Jon flinched in reflex as Wreg cursed, but Maygar scarcely blinked, his brown eyes still focused on the front doors leading into the Tower.
“Fuck,” Garensche said. Glaring at Wreg, he took off his headset, his mouth curled into a frown. “I can’t talk to this damned thing...”
Wreg made a humorless sound. “That’s got to be a first,” he said, his voice low.
“We could knock,” Neela said again, folding her arms.
The others gave her a look. As happened with Neela from time to time, Jon couldn’t even tell if the female seer meant her words as a joke. From their faces, Jon couldn’t be sure if the other seers knew, either. Neela could be a bit of an odd duck.
Garensche looked at Revik. “We might need you to do it, laoban.”
Revik’s eyes remained distant, Jon noticed, not quite there. He nodded to the giant seer’s words, though. Abruptly and with no preamble, his irises ignited, startling Jon more with the swiftness of the change than the fact of those strangely animal lights, which he’d almost grown used to. He’d gotten used to it with Allie, too, Jon realized, even if what she’d been able to do with the telekinesis still had the ability to surprise him.
But he couldn’t think about Allie right then, either. He knew part of that was to protect Revik, but not all of it. Like him, he just needed to get through this.
“Stand back,” Revik muttered.
A silence fell, presumably while Revik looked at the physical elements of the field with his sight. Seconds later, Jon felt something in the other man’s light shift.
A sudden, loud explosion made him wince.
It came close to dropping him to the pavement.
Sparks flew off the wall in a delicate, slow-motion shower. They bounced and sputtered against the pavement, sizzling where they hit one another and the glass.
Jon suspected he only remained standing because of his obsessive attention on holding a shield around Revik’s light. That and the steadiness that came of being hooked to Revik himself, as odd as that might seem in a way, given Revik’s current mental state.
Jon didn’t question that, either, though. He just focused on the shield, connecting it not only to Revik and Maygar, but to Balidor and Yumi back at the hotel, too.
He couldn’t feel Tarsi anymore, either.
He missed her light, more than he would have guessed he could have, if anyone asked him before this exact moment. Truthfully, the old woman scared him more often than not, and not only because she seemed to see even more of him than Balidor did.
Mostly, Jon noticed the absence of the other Barrier flavors from his light...flavors Tarsi had apparently taken with her when she left. The most significant of these was Vash. Jon could no longer feel that faint flavor of Vash, and before, that presence rarely left him. Jon used to be able to feel the old seer clearly at times, almost as much as when Vash had still been alive. Jon felt traces of Vash in his light even in San Francisco, when Tarsi had been thousands of miles away. Jon hadn’t known Tarsi held that connection for him. Again, Jon would never have thought himself overly connected to the ex-Adhipan leader, but apparently there had been more tying him to Tarsi than he’d realized.
Another loud burst pulled Jon’s eyes up, along with a brighter shower of light. Sparks once more began to snap and spin in the air across the opening of the tall double doors of steel and transparent organic panes.
After a few more seconds, those died, too.
“It’s clear,” Revik said, even as the green glow in his eyes started to fade. Revik turned his gaze towards Gar, holding up a hand for the others to wait.
“Check it,” he cautioned. “Make sure. They could have a back-up system...something I can’t see. Menlim used to shield a lot of his physical defenses, too.”
Wreg nodded in agreement, looking at Garensche. “Do it.”
Gar saluted them both. Turning, he looked around at the nearest stretch of what used to be pristine, upper-echelon city sidewalk. After a few seconds, he walked over to pluck a plastic bottle out of an overflowing, freestanding trash bin––a tr
ash bin like all of the others Jon could see set at intervals down the same block, in that it clearly hadn’t been emptied recently, probably not since the quarantine had been instituted, six months earlier.
Cautiously, a frown still touching his full, scar-crossed lips, Garensche threw the empty soda bottle at the space where the OBE field had covered.
That time, it fell straight through.
Jon winced reflexively at the hollow plunk sound as the bottle bounced off of the organic panel of the left side door.
The seers all looked at one another.
Something about the quality of that silence, the emptiness of the street, with nothing breaking that stillness but the whistling sound of blowing wind, scattered trash and the slanting rain pattering down from a darkened sky...as well as everyone’s strangely disorientated air and light...made Jon suddenly nervous.
Well. More nervous, anyway.
This whole thing, them being here and Revik being half out of his head with grief and anger and whatever else...it just felt wrong. Something about even the quality of the silence made Jon feel off-balance and weirdly out of joint with time, with their physical location, with his own mind and light...even his body, as well as the presence of the other seers.
Jon didn’t know if the construct over Manhattan created or worsened that feeling, but he suspected the latter rather than the former. This didn’t feel like a military operation at all. Instead, Jon found himself as lost in denial as Revik––not only about their own chances inside, but even the idea that they had any agency left at all.
Moreover, something about the group of them standing here, pretending like nothing was wrong, made Jon feel oddly like he’d been transported back to high school, and was in the process of breaking into a building as part of a teenage prank.
Nothing he felt about Allie seemed real. Some part of him, and not a small part, didn’t believe her to be dead at all.
Revik turned his head, giving Jon a sharp look.
Allie's War Season Four Page 38
