He wondered where his daughter was.
When the guard got closer, Revik didn’t wait. He darted out, avoiding a blow to his face even as he countered it, kicking low, twice and hard, knocking out the man’s knee before spinning on his back heel, a sharp jerk to back-fist him in the throat.
He didn’t wait for the guard to fall but slid sideways, trying to get out of the corner. One of the others saw what he intended and tried to block his way, but Revik had counted on that, too. He’d already tagged the shorter, red-haired man as the worst fighter of the bunch.
Grabbing that same man by the shoulders after Revik slipped behind him, Revik used him as a shield as he backed out of the corner and into the wider room.
Once he got far enough back, he shoved him forward, tripping his ankles to send the man sprawling into the others. They stepped aside, and the red-haired one fell face-forward onto a low table.
Even Revik heard the crunch as the man’s nose broke.
Anyway, he’d gotten what he wanted...more space.
Stepping deeper into the room, he kept his eye on the door. He happened to look there right as three more guards appeared. Two of them blocked the door, keeping him in the low-ceilinged room, while the third entered, joining the others.
Reinforcements. Big guy, too. Moved like a fighter, like maybe they called him here to beat Revik down.
From the two at the door looking backwards, more would be on the way.
Revik glanced at the empty guns on the floor, and noticed none of his new attackers carried side arms, either, again probably so Revik couldn’t take them away. He tried to decide if he should start using his knife, just to even the odds a little.
Revik felt more threads pulling at his light.
He blinked back sweat, fighting to think.
“Look at yourself, nephew,” Menlim said. He clicked softly, a faint, sad smile on his lips as he shook his head, folding his hands at the small of his back. “Are we really back to this...to that more physical phase of your childhood? The childhood you left behind years ago now, my son?”
The ancient seer paused, studying Revik’s face, his yellow eyes suddenly harder, carrying a denser thread of light.
“...Will you really force us to take you with us by force? Bleeding and bloody...in chains? The greatest of our intermediaries? Will you require me to visit this indignity upon you, my beloved nephew?”
Feeling his jaw harden, Revik looked around at the row of faces. He felt his puzzlement leak into his expression as he focused on Terian and Cass.
Why hadn’t they just drugged him?
The answer was obvious, but knowing the answer didn’t clear anything up.
They wanted him conscious. Why?
He looked hard at Cass, seeing her watching him, her arms folded, lips pursed.
He’d kept his mind occupied earlier, during pauses between fights, trying to decide which of the seers standing in front of him might actually be in the room. He’d wavered back and forth on all of them, but eventually decided he was better off assuming that none in that row of Shadow’s inner circle were here at all. This was another hall of mirrors, only one with more physical props. Another layer deeper in the rabbit hole...but a simpler reality, in most respects.
A capture cage, for all intents and purposes.
The guards were likely real.
Knowing that didn’t really help him very much, either. Nor did it answer his question about why the guards hadn’t simply filed out the door, shut it on him, and gassed the fuck out of him until he passed out. Even he couldn’t stay conscious if they hit him with enough.
They needed him awake.
But why?
“It is pointless to ask yourself these questions, nephew,” Menlim said. His voice lowered, holding that maddening thread of empathy. “We cannot answer them. You are intelligent to ask them, but you must know, I will not give you an answer that satisfies you...”
Revik found himself believing that, too...but not in the way his uncle meant it.
It struck him that the way they wove into his light felt familiar, too.
He knew this sensation from before, from his time with Menlim, then after Menlim, with Galaith, when he worked under the Pyramid. Something he’d known all during his youth, that whole period where he’d been growing up...something he’d taken pride in, thinking it marked him as special. That amplification of his light felt false as soon as he stepped away from it, but he remembered it, like a taste in his mouth, a certain type of current, running through his aleimi. He’d felt the same way when he worked for Salinse, even just for those few months where he stood at the head of the rebel army.
It reminded him of doing drugs, back when he worked for the Rooks.
Back when he’d done a lot of drugs, usually with Terian, but with others, too.
That bitter tang in the back of his throat and nose after he snorted a line had a similar quality. Addictive, yes...but also harsh, disgusting really, if he let himself taste it and view it objectively. The addiction part scared him less than it used to, because the drug itself held less appeal than it used to. But maybe that would change in time, too.
That current tasted stronger down here.
Even now, it was stronger. They’d only just begun to crack his light, but that feeling strengthened, every passing second. Not only the feeling of being invaded. That feeling of being...amplified. He felt it stronger now than he’d felt it since...
Revik’s mind stuttered. Nearly ground to a halt. As it did, the truth hit him like a punch to the face, so obvious, so totally fucking obvious, he couldn’t make himself unsee it.
Gods, he was an idiot.
He was such a blind fool.
It was his light.
They wanted him awake, because his own fucking light was powering some vital section of the construct, maybe even the part that kept his friends trapped upstairs. They’d been using him all this time...likely in South America, too. Balidor said they only cracked that damned construct in Argentina after Revik’s light got blown out, after his structures got damaged to the point where they stopped working. Balidor confessed he hadn’t been able to break into the primary structures of that construct at all, really, not until after that happened.
Meaning after Revik himself was on the ground.
He remembered Balidor telling him that it was as if Shadow had somehow hurt the construct itself by hurting him.
And Revik hadn’t seen it, even then.
They’d been using his light, all this time.
They were using it now...and probably his daughter’s light by now, too. They’d been using his structures––his very abilities––to power their main construct since he first landed in Manhattan. Maybe even before that time. That was why Allie felt the construct so clearly when they returned to Manhattan after South America. That was why he’d felt it so clearly, why he’d felt so completely immersed in those sickly strands, from the very first second they’d breached the quarantine walls. Even after Balidor told him how subtle that construct felt to the rest of the infiltration team––to Tarsi herself––Revik hadn’t realized the truth.
He was one of the fucking pillars of their non-dimensional network.
He was the pillar...the one Balidor hadn’t been able to identify.
No wonder Menlim didn’t want him using his telekinesis. He hadn’t only been protecting Revik’s light from damage––he knew that Revik using the telekinesis in here would blow out his own fucking construct, and probably free Wreg and the others upstairs.
And no wonder he and Wreg hadn’t been able to map the damned thing. Revik’s being a part of that construct, as well as a part of the construct of the Adhipan and Seven, functioned to obscure the primary structural points of both in the Barrier.
It had always been true that those operating inside a particular construct had the least accurate vision on its overall structure. They’d been blinded to the construct simply due to that universal quality of all constructs, th
e fact that you had to be able to operate fully outside of a construct in order to see it accurately.
Turning the facts over in his mind, Revik couldn’t make them come out any other way.
He stared at the row of faces in front of him, and he knew, suddenly, what he needed to do.
Maybe he could even do it in time for Balidor to find where he was, to find Menlim and the others in his sick little circle in the flesh. Maybe he could do it in time for Balidor to find Cass...Terian, too. Maybe he could do it in time to blow this whole fucking mess sky-high, and end all of them...him and his daughter most of all.
“Nephew!” Menlim held up a hand. “Do not be rash, my son!”
Revik let out another humorless laugh. “Rash?” he said.
It came out like a curse.
Menlim’s face did not change expression. “We will only replace you in this role, as we said. If you want to see your daughter again––”
Revik laughed again, cutting him off.
There wasn’t a lot of humor in his laugh that time, either, although he did, at least, get the joke that time. His laughter sounded like it came through a mouth full of broken glass. It more or less felt like that, too. He understood what the seer was telling him, though. He couldn’t possibly have not understood it. They were already grooming his daughter for that role.
He was also already too late to get her out.
Hell, she might never have been here at all.
Menlim would groom their daughter, just like he had groomed him. She would take his place...his real place...as the pillar for the Dreng here on Earth. It wouldn’t be Cass. It wouldn’t be Feigran or Terian, either. It would be his daughter. Allie’s daughter.
She would be the one to usher in the new world.
At the thought, something finally broke through the haze that had settled over Revik’s mind.
Or maybe it just broke.
Revik couldn’t be sure when he made the decision to find her. He couldn’t be sure when he decided it didn’t matter to him what happened to his aleimi anymore, or if he broke it by turning it on Shadow’s construct a second time...and therefore breaking himself, maybe even killing himself, if they were done with him, or if they no longer needed him to hold up the construct while Shadow’s people escaped.
He just had to find her. He had to know where she was.
He crashed through every waving red flag in his light, through that choked feeling in his chest and throat, through the adrenaline running through his limbs and the sweat dripping down his face and into his eyes. He tried to find her, to find a thread to his daughter’s light through the construct he now knew for certain they shared.
For the first time since he’d landed in the basement, shieldless, he opened his light.
He looked for his daughter in the darkness surrounding them both.
Before he could find her, though, something else slammed him.
It came out of nowhere, the instant he opened his light at all.
Almost as if it had been waiting for him.
It hit him hard, too...hard enough to suck the air out of his lungs, to buckle his knees. He fell physically before he knew why, before he could wrap anything rational around his mind...around what he felt or saw. He landed on carpet in what felt like slow-motion, but he didn’t feel that, either. He didn’t think about the guards, about the fact that they were likely closing on him, even now. He couldn’t make himself care about any of it.
Allie.
He felt her so strongly it blinded him.
Then it did blind him, igniting the light in his eyes so swiftly and intensely that he lost touch with the room. A pale green glow obscured his vision, then flared...wiping out what remained of his physical sight, forcing him to remain where he was, kneeling, panting, feeling a pressure in his chest like a cement slab crushing him from above.
Allie.
She’d been waiting for him. He must be feeling her there, waiting.
The blackout must be over. That blackout after death.
His mind thought these things, but couldn’t make sense of them, either. He felt the last traces of that rational thread, and something in him broke. Grief expanded over him, over his light. He realized how closed down he’d been. In survival mode. Fighting to stay on his feet, like always. Fighting like he had as a kid, just like his uncle said. All of that felt gone now, though.
Gods. He had to find his daughter.
Maybe this was illusion, too. Another distraction, a means of pulling him away from the child. He shouldn’t feel Allie this strongly...not this strongly. It had to be another trick.
But gods, it was working...it was working.
He couldn’t let it go, couldn’t move past it.
He fought to remember what it had been like the first time, when she’d been in that tank in the mountains. But no...he hadn’t felt her.
He hadn’t felt anything then.
He hadn’t felt her like this...nothing like this.
Then she spoke to him, and his mind turned off entirely.
Revik, she sent. Revik, baby...try to stall them. Just a few more minutes...I’m coming for you, I swear to god. Just hold on for a few more minutes...
He groped for her in the dark, confused, blinded by pain. She was dead. It had to be her, dead. She wasn’t broken by the wires. She didn’t sound broken by the wires, so she had to be free of all of it. She had to be free of what they’d done to her.
He looked for their child again...
Don’t worry about her, Allie whispered. Don’t worry about her, Revik...I’ve got her. I’m holding her right now, okay? I’ve got her in my arms. She’s fine...
“Allie.” He said it aloud, fighting to breathe, the word a near-groan. “Allie...no. Don’t take her. Please. Please don’t take her from me...”
He knew the irrationality of his words. Moments before...days before...weeks before...he’d thought only of the same thing. Of killing his own child. Of releasing her from this place, of rescuing her, even if it meant snuffing her out of this world...and maybe Maygar, too, now that Revik knew Shadow would want him, as well.
But kneeling there, surrounded by Allie’s light, feeling hints of the girl with her, that irrationality bloomed, turned to a suffocating heat in his chest.
“Gods,” he managed. Tears ran down his cheeks, even as he felt another coil of her light through his. Leave her with me. Please. Don’t take her, too...please, wife...
Revik, it’s okay...
It’s not. It’s not okay. Please, Allie...don’t do this. I’ll find a way to free her. I swear to the gods, I will. Whatever it takes...
I’m not taking her from you, baby, Allie sent.
Love hit him, so much it cut his breath, fierce, beyond what he could think past. A warmer pulse of reassurance followed, but still wrapped in that hotter, protective light, flooding his body even as he realized the protectiveness was aimed at him.
Not at the child, him. The thought confused him, but it lingered, still making it difficult to breathe, to see anything past that pain in his chest.
I vow this to you, husband, she said, her voice still holding that heat. With all of my heart, I vow it, Revik. I’m not taking our child away. Well... she amended, her voice shifting, flickering out with a denser, angrier spark.
I’m not taking her from you. Never from you, Revik...I promise...
Allie paused, her light completely tangled in his, washing over his, invading and tumbling through him and yanking him out of the dark even as it ripped him raw. He felt completely unmoored, completely out of control, upside down and lost and torn apart. He fought to think, to feel their daughter, and got lost in that spark of heat and light all over again.
He felt hands on him, from far away, hands gripping his arms. Cold metal on his neck. He felt them around him, but he couldn’t make himself fight. He couldn’t see anything well enough to fight it off, to even make himself care. All he could do was look for the two of them in the darkness, to try to find the
m, keep them with him...
Then Allie was there again, so dense, so fucking real, he couldn’t feel anything else.
Honey, she sent, and he felt so much compassion in her light he squeezed his eyes shut, his hands balled into fists where he held them out in front of his body. I’m coming for you, okay? Hold them off...just a little longer. Just a little longer, please...
Her voice turned to steel.
...I’m coming for you.
I CLICKED OUT, frowning, staring up at the ceiling briefly, fighting to control my light, which seemed to be slamming and crashing around the room the second it came into contact with Revik’s, in spite of the shield that locked down my aleimi in most other respects. I felt that shield tighten around me even as I thought it, right before Tarsi smacked some structure above my head that both hurt and forced my eyes over to hers.
She had a smile on her face when I turned, however.
I felt her strongly, stronger than anyone now that Revik had been pushed out of my light. Stronger than the child I held in my arms, who still held her light apart from mine and watched me with fear in her eyes, sweet, small-girl tears glistening on her cheeks as she watched me with those clear eyes, measuring me, trying to decide what to do with me, maybe.
I couldn’t be sure if they’d felt me––Shadow and his minions, I mean.
Then again, they probably knew I was here already, regardless of the shield. I felt the other seers with me woven into that shield: Anale, Yarli, Chandre, Varlan, Vikram, some seer I didn’t know, Rig, Surli. Also, the one they called Stanley, the African-looking seer who’d been called ‘Rabbit’ on the Displacement lists and who always seemed to be smiling.
My mind felt weirdly sharp, almost unreal sharp.
They had to know I was here by now.
They had to, my mind repeated.
At the thought, my eyes returned to the other person in the room, the one who wore a tan leather skirt suit with knee-high boots, whose long black hair lay in a tangle around her shoulders. Somehow, the fact of her unconsciousness took the sheen off of her expensive-looking clothes, even making the flame-like red streaks in her hair look duller in the atmospheric light of the fancy apartment where we all stood.
Allie's War Season Four Page 53
