A few yards away, Jon stopped again, letting his light snake out ahead.
Humans. At least two.
Of course, that didn’t mean there wouldn’t be seers back there. It just meant that if there were any, they were smart enough to stay out of the Barrier...or had a strong enough shield that neither Jon nor Maygar could see them.
“Do we need back-up?” Jon muttered.
Not getting an answer, he glanced at Maygar.
Getting only a dismissive shrug from the other male, Jon exhaled silently, fighting irritation at the unreadable expression on Maygar’s face. He began moving forward again, still moving as silently as he could, although he knew it would make little difference at this point.
Whoever was back there must have heard them talking.
They must have heard the silence after the glass broke, too.
Jon continued to scan the room behind that partition, looking for any hints of an ambush, or any other danger. He tried not to think about what Wreg had warned him about, too, specifically in regards to Maygar being a target. Jon couldn’t even imagine what Revik would say to him, if he let his son get nabbed by these Legion of Fire bozos.
Jon picked up a third human in his scan that time.
Definitely three. One appeared to be injured. Reaching the edge of the red velvet curtain, Jon started to reach out with a hand to move it aside...
When something burst out of the opening between the two pieces of hanging cloth.
Jon saw a flash of metal and jumped back, even as the person slammed into him. He felt a sharp pain then, in his side, just below where his armored vest ended. Letting out a gasp, Jon jumped back further, but whoever had him gripped the front of his clothes, refusing to let go.
The pain in Jon’s side worsened.
Gripping his assailant’s arms, Jon let out an involuntary cry.
Suddenly, Maygar appeared beside him. Jon saw the butt of the seer’s rifle get drawn back, had a momentary flash that Maygar might be aiming for his head...when Maygar slammed the gun into the back of the head of the person holding him.
The force threw Jon’s assailant harder into Jon’s body.
His knee buckled, partly from the blunt force and partly out of shock. The next thing Jon knew, he was on his back, and the person lay on top of him, unconscious.
“Jesus Christ!” Jon gasped. “Get her the fuck off me...”
Maygar leaned down. He caught hold of the clothes of the female lying on Jon––Jon still couldn’t tell if she was seer or human––and yanked her unceremoniously off him by the back of the leather jacket she wore.
Jon let out a longer cry once he did, feeling that pain in his side abruptly worsen, turning to liquid fire.
When Maygar tossed her unceremoniously to her back next to the fuzzy red and chrome bar stools, Jon caught a glimpse of a long blade in her hand, covered in dark-red blood. His blood. He let out another gasp, clamping a hand over the hole in his side below his ribs, fighting not to pass out.
“Are you all right, brother?” Maygar asked, frowning.
Jon looked up at him, fighting not to yell at him.
Still looking down at where Jon sprawled, and now apparently seeing the blood, Maygar glanced at the female on the floor, seeing the bloody knife she still clutched in one, white-knuckled hand.
“Gaos,” he said, clicking. He knelt down by Jon, reaching for the cut, but Jon pushed his hands away with his free hand.
“No,” he managed. “See who else is back there...I’ll send an ID back to Wreg on the one you just knocked out. See if she’s our Lister...” Fighting to think, even as he pulled his hand off the stab wound, trying to look at it, he shook his own head, clicking. “...If you talk to any of the others on the carrier, don’t tell them about this,” Jon added.
“Why the fuck not?” Maygar said, his hand halting halfway to his headpiece. “She stabbed you, brother...there could be internal damage.”
Jon let out a humorless laugh. “The thought occurred to me. But I’m not clear on how having Wreg flip out and send in the calvary to shoot the place up is going to heal my side, brother...” Jon winced a little at his own words, pressing his palm and fingers back over the hole in his side as he fought his way to a seated position.
Maygar let Jon’s “brother” go by without comment, too. Clicking under his breath, he exhaled. “Understood. But let me put a field dressing on it, at least...”
“In a minute,” Jon said. He motioned towards the curtain. “Look back there, first. Or all of this is for nothing...”
Even as he said it, the curtain parted again.
Jon found himself staring up at a muscular seer.
It was definitely a seer that time, no question, with black and gold streaked hair and light green eyes, almost the color of Allie’s, but maybe a shade or two darker.
That same muscular seer held an automatic rifle in his hands, too, and wore a dark green armored vest wrapped around his chest, heavy military-style boots, and what looked like a short sword hung through a thick leather belt. The rifle he carried as his primary weapon was an older model than Jon’s people used these days––well, at least since Revik took over control of their armory in New York––but it still looked menacing enough.
Jon noted the dark green organics that had grown into the side of the even darker gray metal. He also saw at least two sidearms strapped to the seer’s hip and ribs.
The seer wasn’t dressed in the black of the Legion of Fire, though. He didn’t wear one of those cheesy armbands, either.
In fact, if Jon didn’t know every single seer deployed in the current ground mission by face and by name, he might have thought he was one of theirs.
He felt...Adhipan.
Something like that, anyway.
Definitely infiltrator. Definitely highly-trained. He had that crystal-clear quality to his light that Jon associated with Balidor. That same frequency of light could also be found on Balidor’s most highly-trained seers, the ones who had been working and training out of the Pamir since they were children. A lot of Balidor’s Adhipan were even roughly the same age as this mystery seer, which Jon estimated to be in the three-hundred to four-hundred range.
So yeah, Wreg’s age, more or less.
“Yes,” Maygar muttered, glancing down at him.
Jon wasn’t sure exactly which of those thoughts of his Maygar was responding to, or if it was all of them. From the sense he got off of the other’s light, he suspected it was probably all of them.
“Yes,” Maygar said again.
Jon glanced up, but Maygar hadn’t taken his eyes off their mystery guest.
Seeing that Maygar’s hands were out at his sides now, too––more or less in the seer gesture for peace––Jon put something else together in his head. In fact, the most important detail of this new seer’s presence had somehow escaped Jon’s notice up until now.
The seer was pointing that automatic weapon at him.
“Who are you?” the green-eyed said.
Swallowing, Jon glanced up at Maygar, who shrugged.
Jon could feel Maygar weighing his chances of getting the drop on this other seer, or even managing to detonate his gun, using the telekinesis. Jon could also feel Maygar not liking those chances much. Somewhere in that, Jon felt the even less-comforting thought of Maygar’s, that he probably couldn’t use his telekinesis accurately enough to stop a bullet in midair. Jon knew Revik could have done it, but apparently Maygar was less sure. Somewhere in that tangle of thoughts, Jon also glimpsed Maygar worrying that he might have to explain how he’d gotten Jon killed to the rest of them. Maygar mainly squirmed at the idea of telling Revik and Allie that information...even beyond having to tell Wreg, who would likely try to kill him.
Clicking under his breath, Jon gave Maygar an irritated look.
When Maygar didn’t return his stare, he decided to act.
Jon fought his way up to his knees, gritting his teeth, still holding onto his side. Grimacing, he let out a
low gasp of pain when the movement jerked and tore at the hole from the blade. Once he’d recovered enough to move again, he used the nearest barstool to regain his feet. Still panting from exertion and pain, one hand pressed into the area just below his ribs, Jon aimed his grimace at the strange seer. He stood hunched, supporting his weight on his other palm, using the fuzzy, red stool for balance.
“We didn’t stab you, brother,” Jon remarked.
“Nor did I,” said the green-eyed seer said, glancing down at Jon’s bloody hand where it pressed against his side. “...Nor did I ask her to attack you, brother. Are you going to tell me who you are? Or must I guess?”
Hearing the faint humor underlying the other’s words, Jon clicked a little, shaking his head as he glanced at Maygar.
Fucking infiltrators and their inherent caginess.
Revik’s son looked openly wary now, and on the verge of possibly doing something really stupid. Realizing he needed to head that off, Jon straightened to his full height, facing the green-eyed seer as he spoke again in a forced voice.
“We mean you no harm,” Jon said.
“I don’t doubt that, in your case,” the mystery seer said at once, glancing more pointedly at Maygar. “...I’m less sure in his.” The green eyes narrowed slightly. “Can you tell him to stand down? You are the authority here, are you not?”
Jon nodded, once. He directed his words at Maygar. “Don’t do anything, Maygar.”
Maygar grunted, giving him a hard look.
He didn’t argue, though. Something in his light de-charged slightly, too, and Jon saw the green-eyed seer give him a sharper look once it had, right before his eyes scaled up, focusing above Maygar’s head.
“What is he?” he said, directing the question at Jon.
“He’s a seer,” Jon retorted.
The green eyes clicked back into focus, meeting Jon’s abruptly. Seeing the wariness there, along with a denser skepticism, Jon kept his mind blank.
He felt the green-eyed seer consider pressing the point, then abruptly decide not to.
“Do I know you, brother?” he asked Jon then.
“I doubt it,” Jon said. “You must know we’re not from around here.”
“Where are you from?” the other said.
“Why do you need that information, brother?” Jon said, clicking softly as he spoke in formal Prexci. “Does this need to be an interrogation? We’ve made it clear we have no hostile intentions towards you...and yet you continue to point a gun at me, anyway.”
The seer frowned slightly, but didn’t answer.
Jon had to assume he was being scanned. He fought to keep his light neutral, and most of all, away from any and all information about Allie, Revik and Maygar himself. Whoever this strange seer was, Jon had to assume he would be able to read him, at least to a degree, and regardless of the mobile construct. Jon could already feel the bare edges of a mobile construct around the green-eyed seer, as well, but he wasn’t familiar with either the structures or the flavors of that construct, any more than he knew the seer himself.
“I do know you,” the green-eyed seer said, a second later. His voice held a tinge of incredulity, even as he looked Jon over with slightly wider eyes. “But what happened to your light, cousin?” He let out a low snort then, as if hearing his own words. “Truly, I hardly know if I should be calling you cousin or brother...and in any case, I would never have recognized you. You are human, are you not? You were born into that race, at any rate?”
Next to him, Jon felt Maygar stiffen.
Jon felt it in his light more than saw it, and gave Maygar another warning look.
“Who are you?” Jon said then, fighting his own wariness as he realized the seer really did recognize him. He gave him a harder stare, still trying to protect his light. “Can we start with that? Or do only you get to ask questions?”
Jon didn’t really expect an answer.
Mostly he was stalling, trying to decide what to do.
While this guy might be Shadow’s, sure, Jon increasingly didn’t get that feeling off of his light. If he was, he was under some pretty hard-core shielding and probably at least one set of false aleimic fronts...if not more than one.
As it was, the green-eyed seer couldn’t feel more different from Shadow from Jon’s perspective, given that his light continued to remind Jon of Balidor...and now, even Vash a little. Given everything that had happened in the past year, Jon felt pretty confident he would recognize traces of that more Shadow-like connection, anyway...possibly even if it was well-guarded, as it had been on Eddard and others in Shadow’s employ.
Well, he was mostly confident.
He’d certainly spent enough hours working on that very thing with Wreg and now Revik, under the insane security protocols of the past few months.
Still staring at the green-eyed seer, Jon wondered if he might be able to send a quick flare to the ship without getting shot...if only to get a warning out, that there might be another player operating on Macau, one they hadn’t encountered before.
But the seer surprised him by answering.
Jon’s question, that is.
Even as he did, he lowered the barrel of that monstrous-looking gun.
“I am a Child of the Bridge,” he said. “And you are Jon Sebastian, otherwise known as ‘Knight’...as well as brother and warrior for my mistress.”
In the silence that followed, Jon could hear the unconscious woman breathing on the floor under the bar. He and Maygar must have been breathing, too, but it felt like they only stood there, gaping at the male seer with the sharp green eyes.
Jon couldn’t have been more surprised if the guy said he was the King of Siam.
6
WALKED IN ON
I CLICKED OUT, fighting the harder edge of fear I could feel riding my light.
I couldn’t feel much on the seer standing in front of me, which frustrated me more. I felt glimmers of Adhipan structures on him, like Jon intimated when I spoke to him briefly on the comm. I felt something else there, too, some taste that swam around mine, evoking memory and emotion, but so far out of reach it hit me more like the ghost of a long-forgotten scent.
Whatever it was, this seer was hitting my buttons in a big way.
“Who the fuck are they?” I said, not making any attempt to hide my annoyance that time. “This group you represent? Some kind of ‘Bridge’ group I’ve never heard of?”
Silence.
Not only from the green-eyed seer with the antique rifle, but from Balidor and Revik, too, who were the only others standing with me on the pier right then. They hadn’t disarmed the strange seer, which was odd enough––especially that Revik hadn’t insisted, given that we’d had a bunch more death threats aimed at me in the past few months.
Even more bizarre to me, neither Revik nor Balidor seemed all that curious about the group this seer claimed to speak for. Revik hadn’t asked the strange seer a single question, and Balidor had been unusually reticent, too.
That left me to be the one firing questions.
Increasingly, I felt like I was on my own, though. Not only in terms of my difficulty in trusting the other seer, or not wanting anything to do with yet another weird religious group that focused their angst on me and Revik...but in being willing to push against this other seer at all. It was like both Balidor and Revik had simultaneously opted to abstain.
They seemed unwilling to even challenge the authority of the other seer.
I admit, I was having trouble getting on board with that.
It didn’t help that I could feel something weird going on with Revik himself. Beyond the weirdness of him trusting this strange seer no one would admit to knowing, Revik didn’t want to know more about his claimed allegiances, either...or the seers he purported to represent.
But more than any of that, he felt off-balance.
Revik’s light being off always threw me off-balance, too, even when I didn’t know what was up with him. Really, especially when I didn’t know what was
up with him.
This time, I was having trouble fully admitting how much it bothered me, which only made that fear and concern and protectiveness twist into an even harder anger.
Even now, as I faced off with the green-eyed seer, I could feel Revik staring at him, studying his face and light from behind where I stood. Revik remained behind me pretty much that whole time, which wasn’t like him, either. The not speaking part was somewhat more like him, but the silence was extreme in this case, even for him.
Really, apart from me, no one was saying much, though, despite the fact that four of us stood near the end of that dock under the arc of softer lamp-light.
I could also feel Revik pretending he wasn’t looking at the seer, which bugged me even more. I could feel a denser emotional response wrapped up in all of that, too, but I had no idea what it meant, so it only stressed me out more.
I knew I didn’t have time to dissect any of this now, not for either of us.
We had less than twenty minutes on the clock, and that stressed me out, too.
Honestly, I couldn’t really understand why we––Balidor and Revik, especially––were perfectly okay with wasting those last, precious minutes messing with this mystery seer in the first place. I felt like I had little choice, though, given Revik’s reaction and the insistence of the seer himself, who had been respectful to me to the point of subservience.
Unfortunately, that subservience didn’t manifest as clarity.
He explained who he was and what he was doing here only in the vaguest of terms, implying he was here for List seers even as he implied he was here to help us. When I suggested to Revik and Balidor that he might have been the one to take the Listers we’d come here to find, I could tell both of them didn’t agree with me, although they were vague about that, too.
All of it felt like b.s. to me...or at least that there were more than a few yawning gaps in his story...which annoyed me even more.
Still, Balidor seemed determined to talk to him, even though neither of them said anything that actually made much sense. The Ahdipan leader stood a yard or two in front of me on the dock, with Revik more or less behind me, so that we formed an uneven line facing the seer, who stood slightly further away.
Allie's War Season Four Page 71
