But Revik knew what he had to do.
The phantom Allie had told him to wait. He didn’t know how long he could. She’d told him to stall, too, but given they had him in cuffs, with a collar around his neck, he couldn’t be sure what that meant at this point, either.
He dug quietly, slowly, patiently, at the scar in his arm.
The scar he had the medical techs create in San Francisco, the same one that lived in the sliver of fat tissue they injected into his forearm, sewing the tool he’d asked them to create out of bone and organic into his very skin.
Confusion hit him, more tiredness that might have been blood loss...but that could have been the drugs they fed him, too. They did drug him, just not enough to knock him out.
Even past the drugs though, past the loss of blood...something changed. In the construct, in his light, he felt a difference, one he didn’t think he’d imagined. He hoped it meant that his friends had gotten out...not that Shadow’s people had killed them like dogs on one of the higher floors, or worse, captured them alive.
The two guards holding him had shoved him to the back of the elevator.
Big mistake, letting him hide his hands, but they probably figured it was a moot point now, that it couldn’t possibly matter.
The elevator was large, more of a cargo elevator than one he associated with passengers. Revik knew they were taking him somewhere outside of New York. He could feel that high up in his light somewhere, too. He thought about the word ‘distraction’ in that higher reach of his aleimi, mixing it in with other symbols, reciting scripture he’d learned as a child in the forefront of his light...
He could use the telekinesis still.
They might short it out, like before.
Maybe they wouldn’t care anymore, now that they were already on the run. Maybe they would let him knock himself out cold again, knowing they could build him up faster than before. He wondered now if they’d deliberately not repaired it after Argentina, meaning the last time it got damaged, so that he wouldn’t be able to interfere while they took Allie.
While they took his wife and child.
He wondered if that was the real reason his light repaired so quickly in San Francisco once Allie and their child were gone...once they no longer needed Revik out of the way.
Revik could feel it now, what they’d done up there, in his light. A kind of safety-defense mechanism. He couldn’t turn his telekinesis on anyone high up inside the construct, anyone above maybe the third or fourth tier. It instantly created a kind of feedback loop, overloading the structure and damaging it, and him, like shorting out a fuse by pumping too much electricity through it all at once.
Only, instead of electricity, triggering the failsafe in this instance brought down a massive dump of hard, silver-gray light, like pouring mercury over his head, or maybe just into his heart.
Revik’s mind spun around the mechanism at those higher levels, looking at it, all the while his fingers and hands worked in the physical, pulling out the tool, sawing at the cuffs on his wrists. In the foreground, he found himself reciting the succession order of the old Pyramid he’d built for Galaith.
...1, 1, 9, 2023, 12, 2878, 23, 21, 3, 4, 17, 188, 192, 101, 1, 3, 3, 2, 5...
“Stop that,” the seer holding him muttered, shaking his arm.
When Revik looked up, the man was wiping his nose with a gloved hand. His gloved fingers came away covered in blood. Revik continued to recite the numbers, looking for a way out, looking for a part of the construct where they couldn’t find him.
That part of him seemed almost to operate independently of the rest.
It looked like threads now, strangling him from all sides. In those telekinetic structures, so high up above where he normally operated, he hadn’t been able to see it...Balidor hadn’t been able to see it. So deeply interwoven into who he thought he was, Revik hadn’t known those extra pieces in his light as not-himself.
Allie might have figured it out eventually.
Maybe that was another reason they had to get rid of her, before she’d been trained well enough to feel what the Dreng had done to him.
...987, 231, 11, 11, 11, 57, 63, 44, 1, 2, 2, 2, 6, 6, 8, 2, 1, 6, 6, 887, 900, 600...
“Fucking stop it!” The guard next to him lost control, cuffing his head.
Revik felt Menlim’s light in his––invasive, uncompromising. They never left him alone. Menlim always acted like Revik’s light belonged to him as much as to Revik himself.
More, really. He thought it belonged to him more.
“Your light is a gift to the world,” he would tell Revik. “A gift to the world...”
Thinking about that now, Revik laughed.
He leaned against the wall between two of the largest of Menlim’s guards, both of whom had nose-bleeds now, neither of whom noticed Revik’s own blood running down his arm behind his back, where he extracted the tool he now used to saw at the organic cuffs. Revik felt something in their minds start to unravel as he laughed, and he laughed harder.
What the fuck is he doing? Terian sent to Menlim, his words floating somewhere in the construct. Revik saw the words, saw them drift below those higher structures in his own light. What the hell did they give him? Is he having some kind of psychotic break?
Menlim’s presence floated above him, too, along with Terian, and the lizard lady.
Cass had disappeared. Cass...she was gone.
A harmless sedative, Menlim sent back. It was meant to calm him, nothing more.
Does he strike you as particularly ‘calm’ right now? Terian sent, his thoughts holding more punch. What the fuck happened down there? You felt it too, didn’t you?
Of course I felt it, Menlim sent back, his thoughts cold as ice. It doesn’t matter. Whatever trick the Adhipan and that old woman are playing, it is too late. We have him. There is no way they can stop us from leaving with him now...
Yeah, Terian sent back, sharp. He sounded genuinely angry, furious at the older seer. We only had to sacrifice Cass to do it...and the child. And he’ll probably just die anyway...
He won’t die, Menlim sent, his mind firm. And we will get Cassandra and your daughter back, my son. Do not worry about that. I promise you they will not be separated from you for long. They have no one to protect them from us now, and I can easily track the girl.
Terian’s thoughts felt significantly more skeptical. You’re sure about that? In fact, are you sure you killed the Bridge at all? She didn’t feel all that dead to me.
She is dead. We confirmed it brother, believe me.
Terian clicked at him in the space, sounding unconvinced.
Revik felt Terian’s light darting around his in electric twitches and jerks, still reacting nervously to whatever he could feel emanating off Revik’s own aleimi.
Did you evacuate the rest of your little council? Terian asked Menlim. What are we doing next, if you’re serious about going after––
He is listening to us, Menlim sent, cutting him off. We will discuss this later, Terian.
Revik chuckled, glancing at the two guards he stood between.
They glared at him in return, but Revik saw the nervousness in their eyes. Six others stood in front of them, nearly filling the metal box as it descended down through the floors. He could taste water now, feel a boat, but somehow, he had to fight not to laugh again. Menlim was right. He could hear them. He could hear every fucking word. Not only that, he could feel where they were now. He could feel them below him, a few floors underground.
What had Terian said? That they’d lost the child? That they’d lost Cass, too?
Of course, the child was dead, Revik knew that...Allie told him that much. But why had Menlim claimed he could get them back? Was Cass dead, too?
He could feel that something had happened to Cass’s light. Something Menlim hadn’t planned for. He knew it was probably all just another trick, another attempt to screw with his head, but Revik couldn’t help thinking it might be more than that. Something had happen
ed. Something unplanned for by Shadow and his crew.
Something that was making Menlim very nervous.
Revik knew he hadn’t done it, but someone had.
The thought made him smile, even as he turned that word over in his head a second time. Distraction. Maybe he could be doing something, after all. Maybe he hadn’t been chained as much as he’d originally thought. Maybe he wouldn’t need to use only his body, or even the tool that he’d now used to cut most of the way through the first cuff.
After all, he was the head of the fucking construct. That meant he could rewrite that construct, right? In theory, anyway.
So he did. He just went around that whole land mine entirely, rerouting his light at the source, fixing the connections and broken pieces of his structure at the top of the silver-threaded Pyramid he could see in the lower levels of the Barrier.
The first thing he did was to eliminate that fucking feedback loop.
He just got rid of that sucker entirely.
Once he felt pretty certain he’d managed that, he let his eyes click back into focus. He waited for someone to react. Menlim. Terian. One of the guards down here. He waited for them to freak out, to try and reverse the changes he’d made, to go back to leashing his telekinesis from behind the Barrier. No one did.
Revik wondered if he should test it.
Concentrating briefly, he focused on something small. Something inconsequential.
Stall them, she’d sent. Give me some time.
He decided to stop the elevator.
The car complied with a hard jerk.
The motion nearly threw him off his feet, making the seers and humans around him sway and slam into the walls. A few fell, grabbing onto the uniforms of the seers and humans closest to where they stood. The alarm went off, exploding into harsh clanging overhead.
The guards gasped, even the ones holding Revik, wincing and covering their ears, one-handed. The two guards closest to him looked bad now, as did the other six crammed into the elevator in front of him. Four humans, the rest Sark.
The two holding him, as well as one other, each had actual ranks of about six.
Revik could feel all of it now.
The seer directly in front of him felt like a rank two or three––the fighter from before, so more of a physical guy. The woman next to him felt like a seven. Another female and two males all fell into the five and six range. Another rank two. A four. Another five.
He could see all of them, their structures, spinning in the construct below him.
The really big gun stood in the opposite corner. Female. Had to be a rank nine or ten, actual. Close to Wreg’s in potential, if not his equal in actual, not yet.
He started with her.
No one heard the cracking sound that came right before she crumpled to the carpeted floor of the elevator car. The alarms were too loud.
Well, no one but Revik. He only heard it in that high up, distant place in his light.
He felt the others react when they realized what he’d done, though. He heard a yell, with his physical ears, felt the panic as their lights flared out, one by one, starting with the seers and humans who stood closest to her.
He didn’t give them a lot of time to react.
Tapping into the higher light of the construct, he picked them off, one by one.
She’d wanted a distraction. She’d wanted him to stall.
The more he thought about it, the more he doubted that had been Cass, talking to him. He didn’t know where she’d spoken to him from, what it meant, but it felt like Allie.
Allie, and she’d told him that their child was dead...that he didn’t need to worry about her anymore. He could go back upstairs. He could go up, and tell Balidor to use the bombs. He could tell Balidor what he’d seen about that underground escape...what the ship looked like, how to find their main transport when they hit the ocean. He could tell them everything, and they could blow the damned thing out of the water before it even surfaced.
Or, he could do that part himself.
He could go downstairs right now, while they were all still in the building, and take that fucker out himself. Take Menlim’s magic council and just crack their spines, one by one. Sever the threads that held them to this world.
Even as he thought it, the elevator groaned.
Revik blinked his eyes, staring around the elevator car, realizing it hadn’t been the drugs, or some kind of dream. Bodies littered the bottom of the car now. He was covered in blood. He stood there, panting, nearly losing his balance without the seers to hold him on either side.
He still hadn’t managed to saw all the way through the organic cuff.
It only occurred to him then that he still wore a collar.
They must have done something to that collar so it wouldn’t interfere with Revik’s hold on the construct from those higher structures. He couldn’t help finding that funny, too, given that he’d used that same construct to climb into a part of his light that could move the construct around like so many tiny filament-like puppet strings.
Staring up at the god’s eye camera in the corner over the elevator’s control panel, Revik laughed. He was still laughing when the elevator jerked back into motion, the alarm shutting off without warning.
That time, it was traveling up.
The motion threw him to the ground as the car began ascending rapidly.
Revik struggled back up to his feet, climbing over bodies awkwardly, slamming his own body against the car’s walls by the control panel and using that to leverage himself back up to his feet. He’d dropped the tool by accident when the car lurched, and now he fought to pick it up, banging his side into the metal hand-rail that rimmed the back three walls of the car. He barely felt it enough to curse before he fumbled over the bodies lying there, looking back to try and locate the dropped tool. When he couldn’t find it, he stood up, fighting his way over the console instead, looking for the controls.
He couldn’t stop the elevator car with his mind that time...something was interfering. Something was in the way...something not in the Dreng’s construct at all.
Turning his back on the console, Revik tried hitting the emergency stop button with his fingers. He pressed it in, but it did nothing.
Pulling it out with his fingers and thumb, he pressed it in again, but still, no response.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
He looked back, once more trying to locate the cutting tool, but he couldn’t see it. One of the bodies or limbs must have rolled over on top of it.
He tried to use the telekinesis to undo the collar, but that time, it shocked him, hard enough to make him gasp, and to disorient him. It shocked him again when he tried to use those same structures to open the cuffs.
He needed too much of his lower aleimi to manage either thing, apparently.
He tried hitting other buttons, but when he looked down at the console, none of them would stay lit. Someone had hijacked the elevator car. Menlim must have had his people override the signal to get him to the lobby. But why couldn’t he reach it with the telekinesis? And why were they having him go up now, when before they’d been bringing him down? Why the lobby and not the roof, if they still planned to relocate him?
Using the construct, carefully that time, he tried to see who they were.
Cass remained invisible.
He could see Terian, briefly, standing in a cement tunnel, his clothes jerking under a heavy wind. Revik felt the cold air, the spray from a tunnel river, then saw the long, narrow boat docked behind him, it’s oval cabin door open and spilling light down a lowered staircase in the near-dark. Revik vaguely recognized the amphibious vehicle, but knew it had been heavily modified. He scanned briefly, looking for serial numbers...
When something slammed him, hard, knocking him out of the construct.
Revik gave a low laugh, leaning against the wall.
Fuck. They’d figured out how he was getting in. For some reason, the thought only made him laugh again, and he grinned up a
t the camera, tasting blood as his nose bled onto his lips from the hit. It still didn’t explain why the elevator was going up and not down.
“Kiss my ass,” he said up at the camera. “I guess you’re just going to have to kill me...uncle dickhead.” He let out another course laugh. “Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on...”
Even as he finished speaking, the elevator car lurched to a stop.
Revik managed to remain on his feet...but only just. He stared around at the stopped car, knees bent, panting. He half-expected to be shot. Some part of him felt an irrational flush of hope, wondering if they were going to leave him behind, if he’d proven to be too much trouble. Of course, they might just try to kill him anyway. Gas him. Or maybe just lock him up in here, collared, and let him starve to death, surrounded by the corpses of the seers and humans he’d slain. Maybe the Dreng hoped he’d go all Donner Party and eat them.
The thought made him laugh again, although it wasn’t really funny.
It had to be the drugs.
Even as he thought it, the doors in front of him pinged.
Then, slowly, they began to open.
REVIK FOUND HIMSELF staring into a familiar-looking space. Dim, covered in gray, marbled stone tile. Expensive looking...or it had been, before bullet holes riddled the walls.
He stared at the girl standing there, blinking at her from the lit car into the dark of the high-ceilinged business lobby. Revik recognized her blunt-cut black hair, but she looked thinner than he remembered, her face paler. She held a console between white, small hands, her face a blueish glow from the monitor itself, even as she keyed through commands. He saw that her hand-held had been connected to a panel outside the elevator with an organic filament.
Revik blinked at her, taking all of that in. He still leaned on the elevator wall, half-swaying on his feet, even with the support.
Then he saw Vikram standing behind her, and blinked again.
Allie's War Season Four Page 55
