Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  Feeling another, sharper pulse slide off of Dalejem’s light, Revik found himself thinking the ex-Adhipan seer probably wasn’t screwing with him, though. Not intentionally.

  He meant it. He thought he did, anyway.

  Revik fought with words, with some way to respond, torn between an inexplicable guilt and something that still felt a lot closer to anger.

  Dalejem didn’t wait for Revik to speak, though.

  The dark-haired seer began to walk towards the platform instead, no longer looking at Revik at all, his body moving strangely as he adopted a civilian’s gait.

  The train screeched to a stop in front of them in the same set of seconds.

  Revik followed Dalejem wordlessly, no longer looking directly at the older male, although he glanced at his back periodically, if only to make sure he still followed him. He walked straight through the same set of carriage doors as Dalejem did, and walked into the same segment of the carriage, glancing around only long enough to choose a seat.

  Once inside, Revik found himself acutely aware of the surveillance.

  Unlike the platform, the train had image recorders, audio and Barrier scanning equipment covering every inch of space. Revik could feel it.

  Still utilizing his own version of the civilian gait, which he’d practiced for weeks on the deck of the aircraft carrier with Allie, Revik found a bench in the corner opposite Dalejem and fell into it clumsily. Once he had, he slouched into the cloth cushion, folding his legs one over the other in a way he never normally did. The posture felt strange, even though he’d practiced that, too. He hoped it didn’t look as unnatural as it felt.

  Shoving his hands into his pockets, Revik slid lower in the seat, tucking his chin and closing his eyes as if he was tired.

  He knew they still might pick him up in a scan.

  His could not avoid being, by definition, a new face. They’d chosen this route into the city on the premise that any security agents looking at him would check him out, but that they would also accept the cover story and alias. According to that cover, Revik was a new day laborer who just got missed in the morning scan. Surli seemed to think it wasn’t uncommon that people got missed in such a way, given the volume of traffic and the high level of turnover.

  Surli and Stanley both theorized that Dubai was set up more to protect against breach in numbers, not one or two seers slipping through. The city’s security forces relied heavily on the construct and the ubiquitous surveillance system to pick up any potentially-dangerous strays.

  Mostly, Surli said, they didn’t see much as a threat, apart from the disease.

  Revik had his blood checked for his race and for any trace of C2-77 on the docks, even as a worker. Being a seer meant he was immune, even as an infected host, but they checked him anyway, presumably to guard against possible mutations.

  Revik knew that the fact that he’d come up new on a return trip still might get reported up in some fashion, depending on the standard operating procedures, or SOPs, for central security. The hope was, it wouldn’t raise any flags, even if it did.

  Either way, that reporting loop should take longer than Revik intended to be on this train, which at the moment was all he cared about.

  His fake credentials should cover him inside the system once they reached the city itself.

  Stanley and Surli had custody of the originals, meaning the two work camp refugees whose papers Revik and Allie were using. They’d been holding them in their hotel room for the past few days––although Surli seemed to think they wouldn’t be particularly inclined to tattle, even if one of them got free. Conditions in those pens and their servitude in Dubai were less than ideal. Surli made the decision to keep them locked up anyway, just in case, but he told Allie during his call-in that they’d been exceedingly friendly, even before Stanley offered to take them out of the city with them when the op finished in Dubai.

  Since both were unwilling refugees, stolen off the streets of Mumbai, they’d been nothing but grateful.

  So Revik’s papers should be good, as long as Dubai security didn’t document the physical characteristics of their slaves too closely. Revik knew the main thing was to avoid looking too much like an infiltrator, or like anyone with much sight skill at all.

  Like Dalejem promised, they weren’t on the train for long.

  Even so, those minutes ticked by slowly.

  Excruciatingly slowly, to Revik’s mind. He watched the city approach out of the periphery of his vision, but he didn’t stare at that, either, or do anything but exhale in boredom as he kept his eyes aimed mostly at his own shoes.

  By then, he was deliberately not thinking about what Dalejem said to him on that platform. Whatever else the seer had said, he was right about one thing.

  Now was definitely not the fucking time.

  28

  PRESALE

  EFRAIL ALMOST DIDN’T take the call.

  He was busy, he told himself. Overworked. It was auction day, the largest of these for the month, being the third Saturday. Moreover, it was December, and many large bidders came out in December, looking to expand their households and work forces for the coming year.

  Therefore, when the distinctive, atonal melody disrupted the long line of interested buyers who had already flooded Efrail’s personal communications queue, Efrail’s instinct was to simply blow it off. Pretend he had missed that particular call.

  He knew the specific set of off-kilter tones all too well, however.

  More importantly, he knew who would be on the other end. As he hesitated, wondering if there might be some way he could pretend to have missed the seer’s call... reality returned to his mind. One did not fuck with a man such as Dalcius Dontan.

  In their last quasi-social meeting, a drunken, stoned Dontan claimed to Efrail to have had a suit made of the skin of his last lover.

  He’d laughed like a hyena as he told the story, explaining that she had displeased him by fucking his chauffeur, and then compounded the insult by giving a decidedly sub-standard blowjob in apology. Efrail had been beyond words as the story unfolded amidst the seer’s half-coherent cackles, joined by the nervous laughter of the two naked humans who currently coiled around him on the leather sofa, all of them downing chilled, crystal glasses filled with three hundred dollar bottles of champagne.

  There had been enough cocaine on the glass table to kill a small water buffalo.

  One did not fuck with such a man, indeed.

  In particular, one did not fuck with anyone crazy enough to find such a thing funny, who would share it openly over drinks, while watching other females strip for him in an establishment he owned. Efrail happened to know that that same establishment was frequented by politicians and business owners whose assets exceeded the combined gross national product of most of the remaining countries in the world.

  Most of them counted Dontan as a close, personal friend.

  While it was certainly true that Efrail himself had grown cynical over the years in many ways, he never lost sight of the difference between a profit-driven business practice, stone-hearted or not... and full-blown lunacy.

  Dalcius Dontan was a psychopath.

  Further, he was a psychopath under the protection of their king.

  That same cold splash of realism jarred Efrail’s mind back to the present. Once it did, he could not answer that connecting point on his queue quickly enough. Mustering a magnanimous smile, he accepted the transmission with a snap of his fingers the next time that off-kilter set of tones filled his ears.

  “Sir, I am overcome...” he began, the smile plastered on his face so it would reach his voice.

  The other cut him off, as was his wont.

  “What have you for me today, my fat, greedy little friend?” The seer smiled through the exquisitely drawn lines of his virtual interface, inclining his avatar’s head. Even his avatar looked crazy, Efrail noted. “...I have been waiting for you to breathe your oily little words into my ears lo the morn, brother Efrail... and yet, only silence
has been my companion. You did not call. You did not write. I began to feel quite lonely...”

  “Sir, I...I...”

  “This heartsickness of mine will grow unbearable if I am not invited to the presale, my lying, squirming, little brother...” the other added in a softer drawl. “You had not thought to cut me out of this one, had you, my slippery, greasy, toad-like and small-cocked friend? To keep some of your shiny new toys for yourself? Or perhaps to bump them off the roster altogether so you might sell them at inflated prices to private traders outside our very own sun-kissed and sand-covered paradise on the Gulf?”

  The robed seer smiled at him through the virtual transmission, that smile twitching only slightly at the corners as he felt the darting angles of the other seer’s light.

  “I looked for the names you presented me, brother,” Efrail said, smiling at him even wider, so that it nearly hurt his face. “I looked very carefully, my venerated and most clever of brothers. I promise you, I saw none of those for whom you expressed an interest. So I did not think there would be any inventory at this time that would interest you. I did not wish to waste your time, given how dull and monotonous such trading can be, without––”

  “Yet you are having a presale, are you not?” the seer said, lifting an eyebrow.

  That time, the smile did not touch his full lips, even in avatar form.

  Feeling the warning there, Efrail swallowed, feeling his own saliva catching on some denser area in his throat. He nodded, his head jerking as if on puppet’s strings.

  “I am. There was another item. I did not think it would interest you, my brother...”

  “I will send my buyer,” the seer said over the line.

  “Are you certain, sir? It is more of a... well, a recreational purchase, sir. Likely mundane in your eyes, given what you normally have access to, in your line of work. No infiltration skills at all. She is purely a bauble, if a pretty one...”

  The other scarcely seemed to hear him.

  “Do not begin the bidding before my man arrives,” he said, his voice crisp. “I will be most displeased with you, brother Efrail, if you do.”

  The trader opened his mouth to answer, still fighting to find words...

  But the line had already gone dead.

  The presence dissipated like smoke around him as the virtual space melted.

  Efrail found himself facing the view through his balcony windows, the gold walls and furniture of his enclosed porch shining faintly with morning sun from where they overlooked the Gulf. His hand trembled violently where he still gripped the handle of a china teacup in one hand.

  REVIK STOOD IN a long, dimly-lit room, what felt like a converted cattle barn. The space appeared to stretch for half an acre underground, and smelled of smoke and sweat and stale alcohol, along with a faint breath of urine. Revik folded his arms as he gazed out over a sea of heads, most of their owners facing the opposite direction. Given where he was, that meant a few hundred head-coverings, significantly fewer bared heads and a lot fewer visible faces.

  He knew his light was growing increasingly erratic.

  No surveillance lived in the low-ceilinged space, so he concentrated most of his awareness on keeping his aleimi under control, if only to keep it from being conspicuous inside the construct. He’d be no good to her at all if he let himself get picked up.

  “We have been here too long,” Stanley said.

  The other male stood to the right of him, holding his hands together in a nervous clench in front of his lean body. His voice came out anxious, even as his dark eyes shifted from the stage, looking out over at the same sea of heads that Revik had been scanning.

  He gave Revik a nervous look, his gaze shifting away a bare second later, as though he felt something on Revik’s light when he looked at him.

  “We have been here too long,” he muttered, softer that time.

  Revik agreed.

  He fought to keep his light under control, standing slightly behind the rest of them. He knew some of that was psychological. He used the bare fact of their physicality to keep himself separated from the rest of the room. He knew there was a risk he could lose control of his light for real. He felt torn between hoping no one would be stupid enough to get in his way if that happened, and hoping they would find some way to stop him if it did.

  If he got picked up, he would be useless to her.

  The thought repeated, again and again.

  He would be useless to her if he got caught. He would be useless to Lily. Worse, Allie would come after him. She would probably get herself killed coming after him, and then all three of them would be dead, even if she was perfectly safe now.

  The thought kept him going, at least in terms of motivation to control his light.

  He couldn’t look at Dalejem at all.

  He could barely look at any of them. At that point, he was having to fight with himself not to scan for her openly, or do anything that might ignite the telekinesis, accidentally or not. He had to fight with his light just to keep it out of the Barrier, knowing he would be lost as soon as he went there, whether Shadow’s people picked up on him right away or not.

  Even from his vantage point outside of the Barrier, Revik knew his difficulties with his light were being noticed. He caught the nervous glances darted his way from the other seers with whom he shared proximate space in this claustrophobia-inducing basement. Revik knew they were worried about him losing his shit, too. They saw what was happening to his light. They glanced at him with worried eyes whenever sparks flared brightly enough for one of them to notice.

  Even as Revik thought it, Surli frowned at him, almost in the same half-second it took Dalejem to give him another worried glance... the latter being something Revik felt, but did not see. Chinja’s eyes reflected worry, too. So did Hondo’s.

  Revik had trouble holding eye contact with any of them, even when they were looking at him directly.

  His eyes returned to the raised wooden platform at the far end of the room.

  It helped with the claustrophobia to focus there.

  Marginally, anyway... if only by giving him something new to think about, and a reminder that doors lived in the walls of this dimly-lit grave, even if not in easy reaching distance, considering how many people stood between them and Revik.

  On that same platform... or stage, perhaps... the only bright lights in the underground complex were now trained on a row of Asian seers wearing sight-restraint collars and little else. Most were young, but not overly young. Most looked to be at least a century in age, but not more than several hundred years old. Most did not look to Revik like infiltrators, even in potential, although he’d heard the auctioneer describe them as such.

  Of course, Revik couldn’t use his light to confirm that for sure.

  Still, he wondered how carefully buyers checked the merchandise for claimed rank.

  Revik and the others stood in the darkest corner of the auction floor, across the entire expanse of the low-ceilinged space from the double doors that stood to the right of the stage. They were about as far from the stage as they could get, and likely would have had to shout, and loudly, had they been bidding on the merchandise themselves.

  No surveillance lived in this space, nor would it, Revik knew.

  Even here, in Menlim’s new world, public impressions mattered.

  For now, anyway.

  Until that changed, the slave auctions would remain underground.

  Revik could see the logic. People were always easier to control when their masters made it easy to pretend that they didn’t notice the atrocities occurring right in front of them. Easier still, if they could convince those same citizens that they were somehow permanently exempt from those atrocities happening to them or anyone they loved.

  Of course, the culmination occurred when those same citizens believed that their very livelihoods depended on the atrocities continuing.

  Compared to the glimpses Revik had gotten so far of the rest of the city, this was the first
space he’d been in that looked borderline primitive, and relatively old. Even the outside of the building reminded him of something from the previous century, which came across in stark contrast to the moving sidewalks, solar-powered tile streets with their semi-organic trolleys, and false skies with their misting sprays to keep out the worst of the desert heat and sun.

  On the way here alone, Revik counted seven shopping malls from the train, each of which appeared to take up several blocks. Those malls had hotels between them and business parks, every segment connected with outdoor gardens, swimming pools and sculpture gardens, in addition to rows of high-end, free-standing kiosks and high-speed transport.

  Down here, the floor was a cement slab.

  It wasn’t dirt, but it was a half-step up from it.

  Overall, the feeling the space evoked was the same as what Revik remembered from the other slave markets he’d visited, most of which had been during the previous century. He’d come across similarly-styled markets in Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia during the war, when he’d worked for the Rooks in the 1960s and 1970s.

  They all sold essentially the same merchandise, too.

  Mid-ranked, adult male seers being the most common of those commodities.

  Revik felt another ripple of nerves from the dark-skinned seer, Stanley, even as he glanced at where Revik stood just behind them.

  “I don’t think she’s here,” he said, his voice openly reluctant.

  “Where else could she be?” Chinja glanced at Revik, too, but managed to be more subtle about it. “Are there other markets? Some other place they would have taken her for such a sale? Do they stagger the sales, or sequester some of the merchandise in clean up or skill assessment before offering them in open market?”