Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  “Regarding the dancing,” the orange-eyed seer said, circling back to his first question as his eyes drifted down my body. “I mean sexually, of course. Could you entice a man in this way?”

  I felt my mouth firm, but only shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You have never done this?”

  “Only for boyfriends,” I said, giving him a harder look.

  A faint smile touched his lips, reaching his eyes again. “We will try this with you, yes? I suspect you will be quite good at it, sister.”

  I fought not to roll my eyes.

  I also refrained from pointing out that him calling me “sister” when he’d just purchased me and stuck a sight-restraint collar around my neck was about as disingenuous as one could get. He must have heard some of this, because from next to me, he clicked softly under his breath, giving me a sadder-looking smile.

  “We must all sometimes make sacrifices, my beautiful sister,” he murmured. “Is that not true? For the longer game, I mean?”

  “Spoken like one who defers all of those sacrifices to others,” I muttered back in Prexci. “But it is a lovely sentiment, brother. Truly.”

  He surprised me by laughing, then by looping his arm through mine.

  “Indeed,” he said, smiling at me when I glanced up. “You are most correct, of course.”

  I refrained from rolling my eyes yet again.

  “I am Alrick,” he told me, still watching my face, although I no longer returned his lingering glances. “I am very pleased to meet you, sister Ralla.”

  I bowed politely, but found myself studying his face with more scrutiny.

  “And your employer?” I said. “What is his name, brother?”

  Still smiling, Alrick made a noncommittal gesture with one hand. “I will let him introduce himself to you,” he said cryptically. “I will say that I very strongly suspect that he will be even more pleased than I when he sees you, my beautiful sister.”

  I ground my teeth on that one, too, but didn’t answer.

  “If he is not,” Alrick added, still smiling. “I might just purchase you for myself.”

  “Are you flirting with me, brother?” I said scornfully. “Really?”

  “Most certainly, I am.”

  I clicked in open irritation, but didn’t bother to answer.

  I wished I could think of some way to ask him if the guy who’d bought me was Dontan. Given that I supposedly just got here on a slave ship, I figured it wasn’t a good idea if I knew too much, but I needed to find out the guy’s name as soon as possible. If this joker wasn’t Dontan, I had to get the hell out of here, and fast. If it was Dontan, belonging to him might just get me a glimpse of where he was keeping the other List seers.

  Assuming they were still alive.

  I still hadn’t looked over my shoulder at Kat, or at the three seers walking with her, two of them there presumably keeping her and the other male from jumping head-first into one of those pools and trying to swim away.

  I knew I might have fucked up, though.

  If she recognized my voice, Kat might not keep that information to herself. She wasn’t all that fond of me, either... in addition to wanting to fuck my husband pretty much whenever she saw him. Moreover, she had her own reasons for needing leverage right now.

  She might try to use the information to barter her way to freedom. Or, at the very least, to receive some kind of special accommodation.

  Or, they might just read it off her.

  I kept all of those thoughts a lot further back, in the deepest cracks of my mind, where I still managed to partition off at least a tiny portion of my light.

  It was too late to do anything about it now, anyway.

  WE DIDN’T SO much as pause in the lobby of the Burj Khalifa itself.

  It was kind of a bummer, truthfully, because I would have liked to look around a little, given that I was pretty sure that even if I didn’t die here, I wouldn’t be coming back as a tourist. But the orange-eyed seer led us straight through those glass doors and directly across the high-ceilinged space to the nearest elevator bank.

  I still looked around a little.

  Most of this segment of lobby was taken up by a giant waterfall, which gave me a brief pang as it reminded me of the House on the Hill Hotel in New York.

  Of course, this place felt nothing like the hotel where we’d lived all of those months, and not only because of the vast differences between the two constructs. Instead of the giant boulders and streams and koi ponds of the atrium of the hotel in New York, this one had a sterile, modern-art kind of thing in the center, a giant metal sculpture with what looked like big metal buttons falling down on gold-tinted tile. It looked like expensive corporate art, and I pretty much hated it on sight. I guess it’s good I barely had time to look up at it before we were past it, and waited by that bank of elevators with gold and white doors.

  So yeah, maybe I didn’t miss much by forgoing the tour.

  The elevator pinged the instant the orange-eyed seer stepped up to it, which told me that the mechanism either had some kind of motion-detector trigger, or else the orange-eyed seer had a code he accessed through his headset... or maybe both.

  Either way, these obviously weren’t the public elevators.

  When we got inside, I realized the elevator was more private than I’d thought, in that it only had six buttons: the lobby, what must be the parking structure under the building, the gym, the pool, the restaurant (or maybe a floor of restaurants?) and a button with a strange symbol on it that I’d never seen before. Whatever it was, I was pretty sure it wasn’t a character in Prexci, not even one of the old versions.

  The orange-eyed seer smiled at me after he pressed the button with the strange symbol, almost like he felt some element of my thoughts. I wondered if he was getting off on all of the wealth-porn displayed here. In either case, he didn’t provide an explanation, so either I was off on thinking he heard me, or he just got off on keeping us in the dark.

  As the elevator rose, I found myself looking at Kat again, if only to try and assess her mood. I saw her looking me over, too. Her eyes held a harder scrutiny that time, which I ignored, even as I avoided returning her gaze when it lifted back to my eyes.

  She didn’t speak, however, which was fine by me.

  The elevator moved fast.

  Even so, I’d halfway expected to be on the danged thing for awhile, given where we were and how tall the building was. The car must have been moving faster than I realized, though. It seemed only a few minutes passed after that first lurch that left my stomach somewhere in the vicinity of the lobby before I felt the car beginning to slow.

  When it glided to a stop, the orange-eyed seer smiled at me, offering me his arm.

  I considered not taking it, then decided it was a stupid battle to fight.

  Sliding my hand through the opening between his body and arm, I held him through his suit jacket lightly with my fingers and followed him out of the elevator and into an expansive foyer. My eyes glanced down at the click of my heels on stone, and I nearly tripped over my own feet when I saw the mosaic of the sword and sun embedded in the second half of that same floor. It covered almost the whole area of marbled white tile right before the tile ended and a thick, sky-blue carpet took its place.

  Even that particular color of blue made me pause, being associated with the Sword, too.

  The guy was clearly a fan of my husband’s.

  Maybe him and Kat would get along just fine.

  Lifting my eyes from that design with an effort, I gazed forward, distracted by the enormous window overlooking the city and the Persian Gulf. Sunlight glimmered on the water, both the man-made variety and the ocean itself, as well as on the metal and glass structures that clustered around the Burj Khalifa like its children.

  I didn’t stop walking as I gazed out that window, although I flinched as it dimmed in front of me, clearly due to some kind of virtual, sun-shielding effect initiated by someone in the room.

  The vi
ew didn’t disappear entirely, but it grew significantly more muted. I could still see sun sparkles out on the water, but now those starbursts looked dark gold instead of white. The shielding also significantly cut the glare in the room, but I found the effect gloomy, and not as impressive as the real sun.

  By then, we had stopped walking.

  I stood at the center of that sky-blue carpet, not far from a fireplace that danced incongruously in a stone grate to my right.

  To the left of that fireplace, and more or less in front of me, a ring of white leather couches coiled around the edges of a sunken living room. The walls and decorative tables of that same room were filled with what looked like expensive art, even apart from a giant copper and crystal water-sculpture of the sword and sun symbol that covered the wall nearest to the foyer.

  The furniture looked expensive too. Some pieces looked like genuine antiques.

  I even recognized one of the paintings. I knew it was by a famous seer artist from New York, a female who had been owned by some Upper East Side socialite prior to the quarantine.

  I wondered if that artist was still alive.

  When I looked away from the painting, glancing again at the sword and sun sculpture on the wall, I heard a pale cough from the vicinity of the couch, and found myself reminded that we were being watched. I’d known we weren’t alone in the room, but I guess I’d been putting off dealing with that element, at least until I’d gotten the lay of the land.

  Now, with a faint air of resignation, I looked down.

  My eyes drifted to the nearest end of the white leather couch, where I saw part of the profile of a lanky, young, handsome seer with black hair. When I looked at him, he was stretching as if waking up, rubbing his face with one hand even as he looked back at me. He stretched enough to pull his black t-shirt up to where his stomach showed, but I barely noticed the flash of skin and muscle, or the rest of his dark clothes.

  I stared at his light-colored, gray-tinted eyes, thrown briefly by his features, by the familiarity of them... when someone cleared their throat more pointedly from the other side of that same piece of furniture.

  I shifted my gaze, turning my head almost entirely to the right to compensate for the length of the couch and the size of the room.

  Once I had, shock rippled through my light.

  That time, it was a lot stronger than when I’d seen Kat in that basement.

  I managed to control it before it rose to where one of them might see it, but in looking at that face, and the bright blue eyes that gazed back at me, I realized I needn’t have bothered.

  He knew who I was.

  The recognition there was overpowering, even without the emotion I saw woven into it, as well as into his words he spoke when he addressed me out loud.

  “Dearest,” he said, rising smoothly to his feet. “You are even more gorgeous than I remember... even with all of that crap on your face.”

  I followed him with my eyes as he rose, swallowing as I remembered how tall he was, even taller than Revik, which always threw me when I’d known him before. I watched his blue eyes in stunned disbelief. My gaze drifted down when he held out his arms, as if to embrace me from where he stood, even as he rapidly closed the distance between us.

  I fought to think, to decide what to do, if it was too late to pretend he was mistaken about my identity. That recognition was overpowering though, as was the affection I saw in his face as he crossed the room.

  “I am so very happy to see you, sister,” he said, still grinning like a loon. “I feared you would not come. I feared I would have scared you away, with my attempt to speak with you. I cannot tell you how relieved I am to have been mistaken...”

  My jaw dropped even more.

  I closed my mouth as soon as I realized how I must look, but the shock continued to reverberate and recoil through my light.

  By then, he had reached where I stood.

  “Allie!” he said, catching hold of my bare arms on either side of the beaded dress. “Darling! Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten me!”

  The wheel tilted once more, back to the voice I associated with this particular body, the one I thought I knew when I lived with him for a time in the Forbidden City.

  But I also hadn’t been wrong about the other thing he’d said.

  I’d seen the expression in those blue eyes shift. I’d seen the difference in him, heard his words when he first walked towards me.

  I stared up at him, mute.

  “Alyson! Do not pretend not to know me! After all of our time together in Beijing!”

  Confused, doubting what I saw and heard, even though I understood all too well, I stared up at him, fighting to decide what to say, whether I could deny any of it, even now.

  “It is me!” he said, shaking me slightly. “Ulai! Do not say you have forgotten me, Allie! I will be heartbroken!”

  From the couch, the younger, black-haired seer snickered.

  I looked over at him, and that time, even with the collar, I knew.

  Something in his facial expression maybe, or the way he stared at my bare legs below where the edges of the beaded dress ended.

  “Terian,” I muttered, feeling my throat close. I looked up at Ulai. “Gods. Terry? Are you Terry, too?”

  The man I’d known as Ulai beamed at me. But it was too much. I could see the person I knew then, and the understanding hit me even harder.

  I found myself remembering what Cass had said to me, the last time I’d spoken to her. What she’d known about me... about my time in Beijing.

  “Even then?” I said. I heard the bitterness in my own words.

  “Of course, darling,” he said, beaming at me again. “I could not leave you in that terrible place, all alone. Someone had to keep an eye on you... for Revi’, you see.”

  Before I could decide what to do, he leaned down, kissing me hard on the mouth. The kiss was passionate, woven through with light, and I tried to pull away. He tried to kiss me again, but I jerked my mouth and face away for real that time, shoving at his chest. Unhooking my arm from the orange-eyed seer, I stepped back, panting, staring up at him.

  Then I found myself staring at the orange-eyed seer, too, right before I looked back at the black-haired one, and realized there was something really damned familiar about him, and not only the fact that I could now see Terian’s light shining out through those pale gray eyes.

  Then it clicked, and I found myself staring at him, too.

  He looked like Revik.

  Like... a lot.

  If he’d been looking at me directly... and maybe if I didn’t know the real Revik’s face and body and light so well... I might have noticed the resemblance sooner. When he rose to his feet and I gazed up at his height... and got a better look at his narrow mouth and high cheekbones and light gray eyes, the resemblance hit me a lot harder.

  “What the fuck is this?” I burst out.

  I turned and stared at Kat, wondering suddenly if she was in on this, too.

  But she looked just as flabbergasted as me.

  More so, maybe, since she really had absolutely no idea what was going on. She was also staring at me, understanding bleeding into her light brown eyes. She looked from me back to the Revik lookalike, then back to me... almost like she couldn’t decide if she was looking at the real Revik or not, and expected me to confirm or deny who he was.

  Facing forward once more, I stared up at the Terian body I had known as Ulai.

  Remembering that he’d been the one to first train me in sex for the Lao Hu, on the orders of Voi Pai, I felt my face flush hot, even as my mind tried to wrap around this again, to make sense of it. I knew Revik would not like this at all, but I shoved that from my mind, too.

  I’d shared a bed with this fucker... for months in the Forbidden City.

  At the time, I hadn’t cared who I slept with all that much, not after Revik asked me for a divorce and kicked me out of his life for the second time in less than two years.

  I fought with the timeline, t
oo, with the fact that Ulai had been in Beijing after Feigran had been unified, when we thought no more Terian bodies existed.

  My mind tried to make sense of that, too.

  When had he been created? Did Salinse do it?

  Salinse must have done it, and long before Shadow got ahold of Feigran in New York. If Terian was telling the truth about Ulai being a plant while I lived in the Forbidden City, then all of that must have started months earlier. They must have started the splitting process a lot sooner than we’d realized... likely when Salinse and Revik held Feigran captive in those mountains.

  Clearly no one told Revik, but that didn’t surprise me all that much, either.

  Even so, how had Feigran remained more or less intact for as long as he had? Why hadn’t that same splitting process turned him back into Terian, and long before Shadow fashioned him into a playmate for Cass?

  Or had it?

  Had Feigran turned back into Terian in front of our eyes, without us even noticing?

  The questions spun in the background of my mind, fighting to be picked apart, to be understood in their entirety.

  But I knew I probably wouldn’t get answers to those questions here.

  Moreover, they were kind of besides the point––right now, at least.

  “Terry?” I stared up at Ulai’s face, then around at all three of them, feeling that sick feeling in my stomach worsen. “Terry, what the fuck is this?”

  All three of the male seers laughed.

  For a minute, I could only stand there, listening to them... staring from face to face as the reality hit me again. They really were all Terian. I wasn’t imagining it. The thought struggled to make sense to my mind, despite the fact that I already understood it perfectly well.

  Then all I could think was, Revik was right.

  We were crazy, coming here.

  I was crazy, thinking that finding Terian could ever be a good idea.

  30

  NIGHTCLUB

  REVIK WALKED INTO the darkened club, flanked by Chinja, Dalejem, Jax, Loki and Surli.

  He’d left most of his people outside. If they were following orders, they would be scouting exits and entrances even now, assigning posts to provide backup to the group inside, as well as the cover different parts of the interior with at least a few seers with high-powered rifles and infrared scopes.