Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  He held the gun there, his arm flexed as he fought briefly on whether he could do it, whether he should do it. I held my breath, watching him, waiting to see which way he would go.

  In the end, the military training won out.

  Cursing in Russian, he lowered the gun to his side.

  Facing the camera, he was snarling at me almost before he’d completed the motion.

  “Give me permission, Alyson. Let me fucking do this.”

  “Revik.” I shook my head. Relief washed over me so strongly, I almost sighed aloud. “Revik, baby. We’ve talked about this.”

  “Bullshit!” he cut in angrily. “Bullshit, Alyson! You talked about this. You. I’ve kept my damned mouth shut! And you know why I’ve kept it shut!”

  I could only shake my head to that, too.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t. I really don’t.”

  I saw his clear eyes spark with light, right before his gaze narrowed back at Cass. He didn’t answer me, though, only stared at her with hatred in his eyes.

  “So why now?” I said. “Why are you doing this now, with––”

  “You damned well know why!” he snapped, his anger exploding outwards as he glared up at me. “Goddamn it, Allie! Are you really going to ask me that question? When every seer in that room knows exactly why I’d do it? Hell, most of them agree with me, wife! Most would do it without a single fucking hesitation if I asked them to, even knowing you don’t approve!”

  I swallowed, nodding.

  I knew he was right.

  I didn’t want to, but my gaze slid back around the security station. I saw a grim look on Neela’s face as she looked at the monitor, but behind her stood Declan, who might as well have agreed with Revik verbally from the look on his face, not to mention Raddi, Oli and Sita, all of whom looked equally angry, maybe even at me.

  Even Chandre wouldn’t quite meet my eyes when I glanced at her.

  “Yeah,” I said, focusing back on the image of Revik through my headset. “I know. But I still don’t want you to do it, Revik.”

  “Why, Alyson? Why?”

  I stared at him, knowing he couldn’t see me, even though it almost felt like he could. Looking at him through the virtual reconstruction from the inside cameras, I felt my throat close, because I finally understood.

  “It won’t keep me alive, Revik,” I said finally. “It won’t.”

  “Bullshit!” he snapped. “You heard them in New York! That fucker thinks he can keep me alive if he has the two of them! We already know he can’t do it without her, or he would have killed you a long time ago. Terian isn’t enough to keep me alive. If we kill Cass, it’s over. If we kill her, he can’t kill you. Not without killing me.”

  “And what makes you think he’s not willing to do that?” I said.

  I turned as I said it, hearing and then seeing Balidor, Wreg and Jon as they ran through the high doorway into the security area. Balidor’s eyes met mine first, and I could tell by his expression that he’d been listening to this, that he’d heard every word between Revik and me.

  “I just know,” Revik said, pulling my eyes back to the image of him. “I don’t know how I know, Allie, but I do. Menlim won’t kill me. Maybe he even can’t kill me. But as long as Cass is alive, he thinks he can kill you.”

  I focused on Balidor, even as Revik finished talking.

  I saw those gray eyes flicker in the seconds after Revik spoke.

  Something in the Adhipan leader’s face hit at me, right in the middle of my chest. Even so, I knew what I’d seen.

  Balidor agreed with Revik.

  Not in the way the Rebels agreed with him, but because of what Revik just said. Balidor knew something about Menlim’s connection to Revik that maybe I knew less consciously but somehow avoided whenever the truth skirted too close.

  Menlim wouldn’t kill Revik because Revik was tied to him still.

  In through the out door…

  My jaw hardened, right before I refocused on Revik.

  “I’m giving you a direct order,” I said. “I’m ordering you to stand down, Revik. Stand down, and come out of there. Now.”

  Revik’s jaw hardened as he stared up at me, at the camera.

  I saw his eyes reflect the green light from the walls, then realized they’d ignited somewhere in that pause, that he’d triggered the telekinesis for real as he listened to me speak.

  It only occurred to me later that he’d gone in there with a gun.

  He hadn’t wanted to kill her with the telekinesis. Maybe using the telekinesis was too personal. Maybe there was something too intimate about using his light.

  It made me realize, too, that some part of him didn’t want to kill Cass, either.

  Even as I thought it, Revik lowered the gun back to his side.

  I hadn’t even seen him raise it the second time.

  When he looked up at the camera next, fury blazed in his clear eyes. I felt everyone inside the virtual communication hold their breath as he glared up at me. Even Cass seemed to know enough not to speak, maybe because she, like the rest of us, knew it wouldn’t take much for Revik to pull that trigger, even after what I’d said.

  He might never forgive me for this, I realized as I looked at him.

  Looking past him, I saw Cass watching him from where she stood on the floor, her chained hands held in front of her. Seeing the manic, almost excited look on her face, I wondered what I was doing, too. Why was I keeping her alive?

  On some darker, more strategic level, I knew I should probably let him do it.

  I should let him kill her.

  It had been a mistake to keep Ditrini alive, to not let Revik kill him––or hell, put a bullet in his brain myself, when I had the chance.

  That had been my mistake, and maybe Balidor’s, but not Revik’s. He would have killed the Lao Hu infiltrator. He would have killed him on the boat before we left in San Francisco, and dumped his body into the sea.

  If I put the rest of them at risk because of Cass, that would be my mistake, too.

  I knew that.

  I knew it, but still I couldn’t make myself do it.

  Frustrated, I stared down at Revik’s angry eyes, and tried to decide why. Apart from nostalgia, apart from holding onto the past, why couldn’t I kill her? Every logical thread in my mind told me Revik was right, that it was the right thing to do. When I didn’t let myself think about Cass––my best friend, Cass, who I’d grown up with since we were both in preschool––my logical mind told me it was the right thing to do.

  But the answer in my light was no.

  No, my light insisted. No, it couldn’t end that way. Me, Jon and Cass growing up entangled in each other’s lives, Cass’s family, Jack, all the fights and late night parties and bonfires on Baker Beach. Revik, Jon and Cass in that mountain prison, Cass bringing Terian down from that capsule in orbit, Cass being captured by Shadow––

  It couldn’t end that way.

  I wouldn’t let it.

  I knew family lived there, beyond love, memory, what we went through as kids. Maybe even that idea of the Four, which always seemed to elude me more than it did Revik or Terian, had finally wormed its way into my light. Once I admitted that much, I knew.

  I knew the real reason I couldn’t let this happen.

  It wasn’t only the Allie part of me that wouldn’t kill her.

  The Bridge part of me wouldn’t kill her, either.

  The part of me Vash exhorted me to trust, to pay attention to, even when it wanted or demanded things that made no sense––that part of me wanted Cass alive. For that part of me, sentimentality had nothing to do with it.

  “I’m repeating the order,” I told Revik. “Don’t make me repeat it again.”

  The emotion in my voice was gone that time.

  All that remained was the Bridge.

  Revik must have heard it, too.

  When he glared up at the camera that time, the fury in his eyes abruptly turned colder. He turned, though, lowering the gun eve
n as Raddi finally spun the outside wheel to open the door. It occurred to me only then that the ex-Rebel evaded my order until that instant, presumably to give Revik time to finish the job.

  When I glanced at Balidor, I saw caution in the middle-aged seer’s eyes.

  He reverted to a more relaxed stance as I watched, his face and gray eyes nearly blank as he combed a hand through his chestnut-colored hair. I could feel nerves on him, though, even as my eyes slid past him, focusing briefly on Wreg, then on Jon. It wasn’t until I saw the reflection in their more expressive eyes that I realized my irises were glowing.

  “We’re done in here,” I told them. I looked once, sharply, at Raddi. “I want him relieved,” I told Wreg. “And demoted. He’s not to work this station again.”

  I saw Jon flinch, right before he glanced at Raddi, too.

  Wreg only nodded, raising his hand in the respectful sign of the Bridge.

  “As you command, Esteemed Bridge.”

  I felt my jaw harden when I felt the ripple of his words throughout the room.

  There was a screech of metal––right before Revik exited through the open hatch. He walked up to me and stopped, his eyes holding that colder anger as he refused to lower his gaze. I saw Raddi turn the wheel to shut the locks on the heavy door in my peripheral vision, caught the flavor of anger in the ex-Rebel’s light at what I’d just said to Wreg.

  My attention never really wavered from Revik, though.

  Motioning with my head towards the corridor leading to the tank compartment we shared, I spoke before I knew I meant to, still using the voice of the Bridge.

  “You’re confined to quarters,” I told him. “That’s an order, too.”

  There was a silence.

  That time, it settled over the entire security station.

  I didn’t look at the others, but felt their combined reaction, like an inhaled breath. The person I felt the strongest was Jon, and not only because of the connection we shared. Shock expanded off his light, along with what might have been fear.

  I didn’t look at him, at any of them.

  I keep my gaze solely on Revik.

  His eyes flickered in what might have been surprise after I spoke, but that look was gone so fast I can’t truthfully say I even saw it––although I may have felt it shiver through his light. Surprise certainly wasn’t the look his expression settled on by the time I could make sense of the emotion in his eyes, or put a name to it.

  My mind flashed to a conversation we’d had in another hangar once, back at the Rebel base in those mountains. It was probably the last time I’d seen anything similar to the look I now saw in his pale eyes.

  I watched as he weighed me as an opponent, not as his wife.

  The look there bordered on detached, nearly clinical, but I felt the emotional undercurrent there, too, even as it grew increasingly distant from his actual appraisal.

  In some ways, that look scared me more now, and not only because I could see the man I loved in it fully this time. He knew me in that stare, and I watched as he stripped away the emotion from his thoughts, replacing all of it with logic, with a strategic distance hovering alone on the surface of his clear eyes.

  My jaw hardened as I returned that look.

  I didn’t avert my gaze, however.

  Eventually, he did.

  He bowed to me in the same handful of seconds, lowering his head deliberately and making the sign of the Bridge with one hand. He executed the salute flawlessly, without a whisper of sarcasm or rebellion, or even irony.

  I didn’t miss the flavor that wafted off his light, though.

  Nor did any of the seers in that station.

  Every one of them backed hastily from his path, the instant he began walking towards the door to our shared cell. They moved hurriedly, in a near-panic, and that time, I felt the fear on all of them, not only on Jon. I clamped down my own whisper of nerves as I watched him go, using the stronger currents of my anger to tamp down the rest of it where he wouldn’t feel it.

  Oh, we’d be having words, all right.

  Indeed we would.

  But I had a few other things I needed to take care of, first.

  26

  TAKING COMMAND

  I DIDN’T FACE the rest of them until the hatch door cycled shut behind my husband’s retreating form.

  When I did, I refused to flinch under their collective stares.

  I could see Jon, Neela, Chandre––even Wreg––looking at the door of the tank compartment with jaws hanging, but no one made so much as a sound when they shifted their gazes back to me. The seers who remained in the security station stared at me, too.

  Realizing I wouldn’t be able to talk to any of them here, even if I wasn’t getting death stares from Raddi and Oli from the doorway of the security station, I looked at Balidor. My mouth hardened when I caught him watching me, worry etched in his chiseled features, a worry even more prominently reflected in his light gray eyes.

  “Is there a place we can talk?” I looked at Wreg and Jon, then back at Balidor and Chandre. “You four. I want to talk to you. Now.”

  They all seemed to shift uncomfortably, exchanging looks that infuriated me, if only because I could so easily read behind them.

  They thought I was acting irrationally.

  They were expecting some kind of blow-out fight between Revik and me that might set the ship on fire, and they didn’t want to be in the middle of it.

  They assumed whatever I wanted to talk about would involve me asking for their help in controlling Revik, or punishing Revik, or even trying to get them “on my side” in whatever confrontation between us they expected to follow. While I couldn’t entirely discount their fears that Revik and I might blow up the ship, the rest of their assumptions pissed me off royally.

  Truthfully, they angered me a lot more than Revik had, and more than Raddi had when he openly defied me in front of the others.

  “Now,” I said. “That wasn’t a request.”

  That time, Balidor nodded. A single nod, seer-fashion, he followed it with a deeper bow, making the sign of the Bridge by his temple as he lowered his other hand.

  It was the old school way of saluting me, just like Revik had done.

  Shoving aside my impatience with their heavy-handed efforts to appease me, I waited as Wreg leaned over the console, typing in a security code and murmuring to Neela in Prexci that we’d be using one of the interrogation rooms.

  Wreg looked at me directly then, his dark eyes deferential. “I have a few things I should take care of here, first, Esteemed Bridge.”

  Feeling the gist of what he meant, I nodded, gesturing expansively with one hand.

  “Do it. We’ll wait.”

  Wreg nodded, then leaned over Neela a second time.

  I caught him sending more to her via the links, mainly about changing security codes on all of the cells and informing Yumi to come down and oversee the shift change following Raddi’s dismissal, and to have Yumi contact him as soon as she’d completed this, so they could discuss a new supervisor for the security station. He then gave Neela an additional order to reinforce security on all four cells, particularly Lily’s, given both Revik’s request and mine.

  I wanted those things done, so I was okay with waiting for them to be completed.

  What I wasn’t okay with were the constant looks between Jon and Balidor as they conferred silently between one another about which one of them should try to reason with me once we were all alone together in the interrogation cell.

  I didn’t catch all of it, but I got the gist.

  They thought I’d lost it.

  Balidor also thought I was needlessly provoking Revik––maybe even that I was wrong and he was right, or at the very least, that Revik had grounds for some of his complaints.

  I didn’t want to talk to them about that, either.

  When the interrogation cell got opened in the back, I walked around the security console to the corridor behind it, brushing past Oli and Torek unti
l they got quickly out of my way. Both of them bowed, despite the grumbling I could still feel emanating off Oli’s mind, much less the louder protests coming off of Raddi’s light.

  I could feel Raddi’s conflict, too, his anger now mixed with what bordered on shame.

  He was a Myther, after all. While he may not regret his decision to give Revik time to kill Cass, I could feel his shame that he’d defied me.

  I liked Raddi, overall.

  But I couldn’t let him get away with that shit, and everyone in here knew it.

  When I passed Torek, his light felt more torn.

  Torek and I had always gotten along well, and while he clearly had no desire to get in the middle of any issues between Revik and me, I could tell he felt conflicted that he hadn’t tried to do more. Revik had been his friend for decades. They’d lived near one another in London while Revik worked for the British. Torek joined the Rebels solely because Revik asked him, although he had religious leanings, too, from what Revik told me. He just wasn’t very vocal about them, viewing religion as more of a private affair.

  I liked Torek, too.

  Giving him a nod as I passed, I walked through the opening in the organic metal wall.

  The space promptly split into two, low-ceilinged corridors.

  One led to a row of security and interrogation cells to my right, the other towards the armory and equipment storage on the left.

  I aimed my feet for the right-side corridor, feeling Balidor following behind me now, and getting the number of the door we were to use off him as I walked. Jon and Wreg followed, both of them still feeling worried, with Chandre taking up the rear.

  I jerked open the door of the room in question and walked in, making my way to the other side of the table before I turned and waited for them to filter in after me.

  The room was basic, plain. Really, it looked like a conference room from one of my post-art school, crap temp jobs back in San Francisco, only with more expensive equipment.

  A semi-organic, brushed-metal conference table filled most of the space, ten feet long with two screens embedded on either end of its oval length. Sixteen plain, metal chairs with low seat backs stood around it. A third monitor, stretching the length of the conference table, was embedded in the wall, which told me the room probably had full VR capability.