The girl with the short, black hair blinked back, an open-mouthed surprise changing her features as she took in the vision he must have presented.
He remembered her name then, as she stared at him.
“Dante,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse. “It’s Dante, right?”
“Yeah,” she stammered at him.
She looked behind her, then, over her own shoulder at other figures lost in shadow. From the expression on her face, she was asking for help. Following her gaze, Revik realized a lot of other people stood there. More than he could probably handle, if they turned out to be unfriendly. He felt his muscles stiffening anyway, tensing around the handcuffs that still kept his wrists behind his back, wishing he’d finished with the cuffs instead of screwing around with the elevator buttons, trying to get downstairs. Forcing himself the rest of the way to his feet, so that he stood more or less under his own power, he blinked into that dark, fighting to see.
He was still staring when one of those figures moved forward from the dark, until she fell under the light washing out of the elevator doors.
“Well,” she said, smiling at him. “Are you coming out of there, husband, or not?”
Revik stared at her, feeling his mind go completely flat line.
That time, for those few seconds anyway, he almost didn’t mind.
BALIDOR JUMPED DOWN the last set of stairs, landing in knee-deep, ice cold water. The rushing sound down the sewer tunnels in front of him unnerved him. Still, he grasped Hondo’s arm in a friendly way when he saw her, smiling in spite of himself.
“You made it, my sister,” Balidor smiled. “We were worried.”
Hondo grinned back at him, clapping him on the back. “You were worried? I hear we all owe you a drink,” she added. “Maybe a few cases’ worth of drink, in fact...”
Balidor focused down that tunnel, shivering in the freezing cold water. “I suspect I won’t be turning that down,” he said. Exhaling as much to fortify himself as anything, he saw the cloud of steam his mouth exuded and frowned again. “How much has it risen?”
“It only just started to rise,” Hondo informed him. “Maybe three inches in total...but they’re saying we need to hurry.”
“Are we the last of them?” Balidor said, looking around. He saw Tenzi shivering on a higher stair. He smiled at him wanly, despite the fact that the other man was obviously freezing. “Really? No one else?”
“We are indeed the last, Adhipan Balidor.” Despite how cold he looked, Tenzi spoke with obvious pride. “Most of them are already off the island, sir.”
Balidor felt a sigh of relief leave his body somewhere.
He didn’t ask about the Sword.
He would deal with the bad news later.
Blowing on his hands and releasing another cloud of steam, he motioned for Tenzi to join him and Hondo on the lower stairs, just above where another seer––Balidor was pretty sure her name was Wanai––struggled to hold a thick-looking raft more or less even with their makeshift dock at the bottom landing before the stairs disappeared under the water entirely. Balidor nudged Hondo then, smiling at the other female as he gripped her arm, then leaned down to help Wanai hold the raft so the other two seers could board.
“Let’s go, then,” he said, glancing up at Tenzi. “I don’t want to wait for that water to rise, do you, my friends?”
Tenzi shook his head. Even so, he made an obviously pained face when he stepped deeper into the water. “Gods!” he said.
Stopping when the water reached his shins, Tenzi began cursing much more elaborately in Prexci. Balidor couldn’t help laughing at a few of the phrases. Tenzi gave him an indignant look when he heard him laugh.
“You just got here,” he reminded Balidor. “I’ve been here for hours, El Capitan. So has Hondo!”
“Of course, of course,” Balidor said, making a polite gesture.
“Smug bastard,” Tenzi muttered.
Even so, Balidor could feel that all of their spirits had lifted somehow. Maybe just the fact that they’d gotten so many on the Displacement lists out of Shadow’s reach. Maybe just the fact that they were still alive, in spite of everything.
“Did you really shoot him right in the head?” Tenzi said, using Balidor’s shoulder for balance as he climbed into the boat in front of him.
“Yes,” Balidor affirmed. “One shot.”
“What about Ute?” Hondo asked, moving to step onto the raft after Hondo.
Balidor shook his head, once. “No,” he said. “I got two of the others. We exchanged fire for a few minutes, but they must have thought there were more of us up there than there were...”
“Than just one, you mean,” Hondo said, gloating with pride as she shook her long hair. “Just one Mr. Balidor, and you had those fuckers shitting their pants...”
Tenzi burst out into another laugh.
The other female, Wanai, exchanged a grin with Balidor, too.
“So what happened then?” Hondo said.
Balidor shrugged, motioning politely with one hand for Wanai to get on in front of him. Hondo was leaning over now, holding the raft to the concrete landing, gripping the metal pole of what had once been the staircase’s guardrail in one very cold-looking hand. Her long, dirty-blond hair fell part of the way into the water, and Balidor heard her teeth chattering as he started to follow the other two onto the raft.
“They went over the wall,” Balidor said, shrugging.
He stepped onto the raft, using Wanai and then Tenzi as balance. Stepping into the center, he crouched and sat where they’d left him a spot that would balance the overall weight of the boat, across from the taller Tenzi. The placement made sense, given the gun Balidor himself still wore and the armor around his chest. Hondo, although muscular and tall for a female, would still make a better counterweight to Wanai than either Tenzi or Balidor. Balidor saw that they’d put a box of what looked like ammunition magazines more on Wanai’s side, too. Between the four of them and that, they should be able to keep the raft from capsizing.
“Thank you for waiting for me, brother and sisters,” Balidor said, realizing suddenly that they had done just that, and risked their own lives in the process, especially given the rising waters. The realization touched him. “It means a lot.”
Tenzi waved off his words, but smiled a little.
“So they’re gone?” Hondo said, even as she released the pole.
Balidor sucked in a breath, gripping the sides of the raft as the dark tunnel into the sewers rapidly approached.
“They’re gone,” he affirmed, speaking louder over the rush of water.
A bare breath later, the raft was plunged into darkness. Ducking down, more out of reflex than because he could feel or see the tunnel’s curved ceiling, Balidor fought to control his breath, fighting to peer down the tunnel in the dark with his eyes and light.
“It’ll be okay,” Tenzi assured him, raising his voice over the sound of the water in the hollow pipe. “They’ve all gone through just fine. We’ve got Ullysa on the other end, and they’re still monitoring the water levels...”
“Unless there’s an earthquake,” Balidor muttered, still crouched down in the front of the boat.
Laughing, Hondo, who sat closest to him, clapped him on the back.
“Unless there’s an earthquake,” she seconded.
JON WALKED BESIDE Wreg.
He fought not to grab the seer’s hand, knowing it wasn’t the time for that, either, even though they were finally on their way out of this goddamned place. For the past hour or so, spent in that chamber of horrors under the Tower, Jon felt like his nerves had been run over a cheese grater. Now he felt almost like he’d been drugged.
A dense, white, but somehow crystal-clear light hovered over the whole group. It made them all act pretty strange...not bad strange, really, but yeah, strange.
He couldn’t look at her directly, not yet.
At the same time, he found he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t seem to keep his light awa
y from hers, either.
They were in the park now.
Jon tried to focus on that fact, on what he could see and feel around him, in a location that should be at least vaguely familiar at this point. Even so, his mind kept returning to the woman who walked ahead of them, flanked by Jorag, Chandre, Chinja and Neela. Jax walked with that group too, Jon noticed, still limping and pale, but keeping up without too much visible strain. Jon got the sense that the soft light flooding their small group probably benefited him even more than the others, given how much light he’d lost from his injury.
Jon had been told that Tarsi, Vikram, Yarli and Anale, along with Loki’s team, already waited for them at the Chinook.
There’d been a minor argument in the lobby of the Tower.
Wreg, Neela, Jon and a few others wanted to go after Terian.
Revik wanted to go after Menlim.
They hadn’t been able to get a hold of Balidor at that point, to tell him to bomb what remained of the building. Anyway, Revik seemed to think it wouldn’t do them any good, that they needed to go after some ship he could still see and feel through the construct, before it disappeared under the ocean with Menlim and Terian and the rest of Shadow’s inner circle. Unfortunately, they had no access to the rest of the hotel seers, either, so they had no way to confirm Revik’s words, or even of communicating what they wanted those other seers to do, if something like a bomb or missile were still possible at this point.
It had been one of the strangest conversations Jon had ever been a part of. Revik wouldn’t look at Allie at all. He answered her words a few times, argued with her––mainly through the others––but mostly just stood there, staring at the floor, his jaw hard.
Thanks to Jon’s relatively new and still mostly annoying photographic seer memory, he remembered the conversation word for word.
“We need to go after him,” Revik had said. “Now. It’s probably our last chance.”
“No,” Allie had said, shaking her head. “No, Revik...you don’t know what you’re saying. It would be completely pointless. Moreover, I’m positive it’s what he wants.”
Revik shook his head, still refusing to look at her. “We have an actual chance to take him down now. We can’t pass this up. We can’t just let him––”
“No!” Allie cried out. “No, Revik...we aren’t doing that. Not now. We have to let him go this time...we have to. Don’t you see?”
She’d sounded exasperated, Jon remembered, but he couldn’t help wondering if it was more because Revik wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t even stand next to her, and had his light locked up tighter than Jon had ever seen it.
“No, absolutely not,” she’d repeated, in either case, shaking her head when he didn’t answer. “We can’t. We really can’t. I understand why you want to, but it’s a really bad idea.”
“Why?” Revik demanded. “Why is it a bad idea, Allie?”
“Because he’s one of the Dreng,” she said.
Not only Revik had looked frustrated at that one.
Wreg blinked at her, too, glancing at Jon and Jorag in disbelief before he frowned along with Revik and the others, facing Allie.
“Aren’t they all Dreng, Esteemed and Revered Sister?” Wreg said.
Despite the disbelief in his voice, Wreg asked the question politely.
More than politely, Jon thought with a grunt. He’d treated Allie more like a walking relic, some kind of resurrected holy ghost, rather than a person. And really, Wreg’s reaction to seeing Allie walking and talking had been significantly more sane than most of theirs, which had ranged from Jax touching her constantly and grinning...to Neela making religious gestures around Allie’s body and touching Allie’s hands every few minutes...again, like she was some kind of Buddha statue that was walking and talking and breathing...to Rig insisting on keeping his head and face below hers, even though he stood something like half a foot taller than her.
“Yes,” Chandre said, who fell into the angry, bewildered camp with Allie, although she seemed to be more used to talking to her at least. “Yes...explain this, Esteemed Bridge. Aren’t all of our enemies followers of the Dreng...? Why is this different?”
“You’re not listening to me,” Allie said patiently, looking around at all of them.
Jon had been in the camp of just staring at her, unsure if his brain was even working.
He mainly stared at her eyes, at the person he could see there, instead of the wirehead he remembered from all of those weeks in San Francisco. He remembered the woman who wouldn’t talk, who still managed to push Revik around in that basement under the Victorian mansion. Looking at her in that Tower felt like crossing time streams, or maybe like being lost in a complex and confusing dream––a dream he hadn’t decided the outcome of yet, nightmare or wish-fulfillment or catharsis.
She still wore what Jon had seen her in after she died, which didn’t help.
The clothes looked like fucking pajamas.
Dark sweat pants and a long, button-down shirt that Jon recognized as Revik’s, and dark blue Converse sneakers. Someone had draped a military jacket over her shoulders, but somehow that only contributed to the overall effect of her looking like she’d just crawled out of bed and wandered outside looking for the newspaper.
The image could have only been more absurd, under the circumstances, if she’d been wearing fluffy slippers.
“You’re not hearing me...” she’d said again, looking around at all of them, as if aware they still couldn’t quite fathom her existence at all. “I didn’t say he was a follower of the Dreng, or even ‘The’ follower of the Dreng. I’m telling you, he’s one of the actual fucking Dreng...one of the beings from behind the Barrier who orchestrated all of this...”
She waved her hands around, indicating the Tower, maybe...or maybe the world.
Wreg’s eyes had sharpened on her. “What does that mean?” he’d said, speaking first into that silence. “The Dreng are non-corporeal, Esteemed Bridge. They don’t have bodies at all. They are Barrier creatures only...”
Allie threw up her hands, a gesture so familiar that Jon flinched, nearly wincing away from her that time. She glanced at him, as if she felt his reaction, but instead of frowning, she smiled at him, maybe to reassure him.
“I’m not as sure about that part, honestly,” she’d admitted then. “But I’m reasonably certain he’s the progenitor of the whole ‘body switching’ thing that Terian does. I’m pretty sure that’s how and why he can’t be killed in the same way one of us can be killed. He’s already dead. Or he was never alive...however you want to say it.”
She looked at Revik then, and for the first time, her light green eyes held a glimmer of worry when he wouldn’t return her gaze.
Revik didn’t stand far away from her precisely, but even Jon could feel the ‘stay away’ vibe in his light, almost as if he’d erected a shield to keep Allie and her light as far away from his as possible. They’d cut the collar off him by then, and the handcuffs, and Vikram had given him a shot of something to counteract the drugs in his system, but he still looked out of it.
He looked like he’d lost a fair bit of blood and possibly light, too, although Neela had bandaged up his arm, using a ripped off piece of shirt from one of the corpses lying on the floor of the lobby. It was difficult to tell just how much of the blood on his clothes and skin was actually his, though.
Remembering the dead bodies that surrounded Revik when those elevator doors opened, Jon shivered a little. Revik looked half out of his head before he even saw Allie. Jon felt that suicidal thing on him, too. Hell, he’d felt that on him even before they got to New York. Even before Allie physically died...or whatever she’d done.
Now Revik just felt lost, gone in a way Jon didn’t ever remember him feeling before.
The military guy was still there. That seemed to survive past whatever shock he might be feeling. But the man himself, Jon wasn’t so sure.
Even so, Revik had fought the hardest to go after Menlim. He continued
to fight, even after what Allie said about Menlim being one of the Dreng.
“So we can kill this body, at least,” he said. “They take awhile to grow...especially if he’s attached to using that particular form. He’ll have to clone a new one...”
“Assuming he doesn’t have an underground bunker filled with back-up bodies already,” Allie said. She sighed, fingering her hair out of her face. “It’s not worth the risk. It’s not a good use of our resources right now, baby...and you know it.”
Revik flinched openly at her use of that word.
“...And anyway,” she’d said, talking over his reaction, although Jon was pretty sure she’d felt it. “We need to get you unattached from their construct first, Revik. We need to get Maygar and...” She’d hesitated, as if fighting over words. “...and our child unattached. We can’t do anything until then. We have to get all of you as far away from him as possible until then...don’t you get it? We’re too vulnerable right now!”
“I used the construct, Allie,” Revik said. “I got out of it. Hell, I managed to redesign it, even collared. How the hell do you think I got access to the telekinesis?” For the first time, it sounded almost like he was really talking to her, although he still wouldn’t look at her. Staring down at the stone tiles, he’d gestured behind him, towards the elevator doors. “You see what I did! You see it, right?”
“I do see it,” she countered at once, holding up her hands. “I see it, and I get it, Revik...I really do. But gods...you know how this works! You can only surprise them like that once. Menlim and his Dreng buddies are pissed as hell right now, and they still have links to all three of you...along with Cass! Even I can feel it now...and I’m only feeling it through you. We need a better plan than no plan, okay? He’s going to come after us as soon as he regroups, so we don’t even need to chase him. We’ve got a chance to get rid of them now...like really get rid of them...but only if we keep our heads.”
When Revik continued to stand there, breathing hard, jaw clenched where he stared at the floor, she’d raised her voice, her words carrying a strange combination of elation and hope and frustration and a pain even Jon could feel.
Allie's War Season Four Page 56
