Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Revik flinched, staring at me.

  Allie… he sent, soft.

  Seeing the sadness in his eyes only brought a flush of anger to my light.

  “I’m tired of this bullshit!” I said, maybe to all of them. “I think I can get rid of the structures in Lily… and probably in Revik. But it’s going to mean taking both of them out of the tank. I can’t have either of them cut off from my light. Ideally, I’d like to use the other half of the Four to really strengthen this. What I can do on my own might not be enough to get them to regrow the structures they need to connect on their own.”

  My jaw hardened more.

  “They’ll need to be connected to my light until then,” I warned. “…As in all the time. So no tanks. No Barrier separations at all––not until we figure out a way to regrow the critical pieces of their structure without the resonance of the Dreng.”

  There was a silence.

  When I glanced at Revik that time, his eyebrows had gone up.

  I could see him listening though, probably to hear what Balidor would say.

  “Alyson,” the Adhipan leader said, clicking through the loudspeaker. “You could kill them. Both of them.”

  “I’m aware of that,” I said.

  Even so, his words hit at me, enough to make me pause.

  Seconds later, I shook it off.

  “I don’t see a lot of good options. My…” I bit my tongue on the word, then refused to say it. “…Kali. She said Lily wasn’t safe on the ship anymore. If that’s true, we need to be able to get Lily out of the tank, at least for short periods. I want Revik with me in Dubai and we absolutely can’t risk that if he’s still tied into their construct.”

  I looked at Lily, coiling my arms more snugly around her.

  “I know it’s risky. I know that. But I really think I can do it. I wouldn’t be suggesting it, otherwise.”

  There was another silence. I didn’t look at Revik in that one either, but felt him listening again, almost holding his breath.

  I heard Balidor sigh, clicking, but there was a grudging admission in the sound.

  “You will also lose whatever intelligence your husband has managed to obtain for us off that connection,” Balidor reminded me.

  I grunted, giving Revik a look. I smiled for real when I saw him roll his eyes, showing his dismissal of Balidor’s words.

  “Yeah,” I said, looking back at the organic speaker. “Intelligence that’s probably being tampered with––if not fed to us outright.”

  There was another silence.

  I couldn’t feel anything through the tank’s walls. Even so, I definitely got the impression Balidor had others with him now, that they were consulting amongst themselves.

  Another voice rose, one that made me wince.

  “What does the Illustrious Sword think?” Kali said.

  I looked at Revik. He returned my stare, his mouth set in a hard line.

  Then he smiled, shaking his head and clicking softly.

  “I will do whatever the Esteemed Bridge thinks is best,” he said, facing the speaker. His words turned more brusque, more military. “If you want my opinion apart from that, I’m afraid I don’t have one. Not in relation to the specific procedure she’s proposing. Truthfully, I can’t see what she’s seeing. Therefore, I don’t know exactly what that procedure entails, although I understand the theory. As I said, I will defer to her judgment.”

  He paused, his voice and expression darkening, “I agree with her that Dubai is significantly more risky with me connected to Shadow’s construct.” He gave me a harder look. “I think if that were the case, I would have to bow out of the ground op, and provide support from outside the construct. Which means my wife would be doing the same.”

  He paused a second time, his voice harder.

  “For, if any of you, including the Esteemed Bridge herself, thinks I’m letting her go in there without me, you’re going to be very disappointed. I’m quite sure my wife knows this, but it bears repeating. I’m quite willing to go to extreme lengths to ensure that doesn’t happen.”

  Hearing the open threat in his words, I smiled.

  “Such a bully,” I murmured, tugging Lily’s hair. “Isn’t he, baby? Big, bad wolf.”

  Lily giggled, leaning her head and back into my chest as she looked at Revik. He lifted an eyebrow, but his eyes didn’t move, not even when he looked at her.

  Exhaling, I spoke to Revik directly, looking only at him.

  “You’re okay with her light being interdependent with ours?” I said, quieter, even though I knew the speakers would pick it up. “Even with Dubai coming up?”

  Revik’s expression grew more thoughtful.

  I saw him look at Lily, his clear eyes conflicted. Then he shook his head, but not in a no, at least not to my question.

  “Versus her being dependent on Shadow?” Smiling humorlessly, he sat up on the couch, weaving his fingers together where he held them between his knees, arms balanced on his thighs. “Yes. I’m okay with it, wife. Especially if Kali says Lily’s not safe on the ship. If you’re sure you can pull it off, then I say do it.”

  The silence on the line deepened.

  Then Kali spoke again.

  “Are you going to try it in there, first?” she said.

  I realized she was speaking to me. Thinking, I looked around the four walls of the tank and nodded, more decisively than I felt.

  “Yes. I think in here is better.” I hesitated, then looked at Revik, feeling a sharper flicker of nerves. “If anything seems to be going wrong, I’m going to have to stop,” I said, worry leaking into my voice. “We’ll have to reassess from there. There’s some chance we’ll have to rush Lily out of the tank, if I can’t rebuild the structures Shadow removed fast enough.”

  “Do you want us to join you in there? Tarsi and me?” Balidor said through the speakers. “Kali? Any of us?”

  I shook my head. “No. I think fewer lights in here is better.”

  Revik made a low, humorous sound.

  When I glanced at him, he smiled, too.

  I want you watching, I sent, holding his gaze. I’m going to try with Lily first, so you can see what I’m doing.

  He smiled, giving me a sharp of course gesture with one hand.

  Unfortunately, I caught the nuance there, too, which was something along the lines of: assuming I can see jack shit, since I have no idea what you’re talking about, wife.

  As usual, Revik was more expressive with his body than his actual words.

  “You said something about the Four,” Revik said next, still watching me intently. “What did that mean?”

  “We can talk about that later,” I said. “I would need to be out of here to look at that––out of the tank. It’s just an idea at this point.”

  “But you think they can help with this?” he said, pressing slightly. “Having all four of us in one place again?”

  Hesitating, I gave a nod.

  “In what way?”

  “Revik.” I held Lily tighter, sighing. “I think I can do enough to get you and Lily free of the immediate problem with the Dreng. But you’ll both be light dependent on me. Like… really light dependent. I’m not sure what the actual effects of that might be.” Hesitating, I clicked softly. “I think with Terian and Cass, we might be able to do more.”

  “What kind of more?” Revik said.

  “Like real independence. For Lily, anyway.” I gave him a faint smile. “You might be stuck with me, baby. Sorry.”

  He just looked at me for a moment. Then I saw him let it go. I knew I wasn’t off the hook; the conversation felt postponed, not off the docket.

  Even as I thought it, Revik nodded slowly, eyes thoughtful.

  When he looked at me, I saw conflict flare in his eyes.

  “Allie, don’t take this the wrong way, but how do you know you can do any of this? I’m not asking for me, but for Lily. Did you see this in a dream? You seemed to know what you wanted to do before we even came in here. Is it from�
�” He trailed, coloring a little as he glanced at the wall speaker. He looked back at me. “…Is it something to do with last night? With why your light is different?”

  I blinked, a little stumped.

  Looking down at Lily in my arms, I felt a corresponding flicker of doubt. It was there and gone, and once it began to dissipate, that warmer certainty continued to pulse.

  “I have no idea,” I said truthfully. “Does that matter to you? Do you want me not to do it?”

  Funnily enough, my answer didn’t freak him out. It might have freaked me out, if he’d said the same thing in relation to our daughter’s life.

  Instead, it seemed to stump him.

  Then it made him laugh.

  Clicking at me, he shook his head, still smiling. “No. It doesn’t matter. We seem to be running on prophet’s fumes these days anyway, love.”

  I thought about his words and frowned.

  As usual, he’d noticed something that was bothering me, although I hadn’t yet put a name to it, or even noticed it consciously.

  It didn’t seem to bother him, though.

  Even weirder, in looking at him, I could tell my words had reassured him somehow.

  I was still studying the expression on his face when he leaned back on the couch, resting his head on the back cushion.

  Watching my face, he motioned towards me expressively with his hands.

  “Hurry up, wife. I have big plans for tonight.” A smile ghosted his lips, despite his deadpan expression. “By my calculation you owe me a birthday present. Several, in fact. I fully intend to collect.”

  I couldn’t help laughing.

  And yeah, I was pretty sure he didn’t mean the painting.

  41

  PROPHET’S FUMES

  I WRAPPED MYSELF around him in sleep, even when I woke up too hot, confused about where I was, parts of my limbs numb from his weight.

  He did the same to me, which both reassured me and made it worse.

  We hadn’t only been having sex––we’d been talking for a lot, too. Most nights, I think the talking part was more exhausting than the sex part.

  We had a lot of sex.

  I finally asked him, point blank, about Dalejem. I asked him why things still felt unresolved between them, why it still felt like there was something there.

  Revik, as had been his tendency since everything went down between us that night, was honest. Maybe too honest.

  He told me he’d been in love with Dalejem. He told me he loved him still.

  When I reacted to that, he clicked at me, exasperated.

  “You know what I mean,” he said.

  “Not really, no.”

  “I mean, when you love someone––when you really love them––you always kind of love them.” Studying my light in the dark, he switched to Prexci. “Romantically, I’ve only ever felt that way about three people. My first wife was one. Dalejem was one. You are the third.”

  Pausing, he watched my face, his expression taut.

  “Allie, I have known you the longest. I have loved you the longest. I have loved you the most intensely––and in the most real, most mature ways I have ever loved anyone in my life. I feel our connection the most deeply, and I chose it. I have sacrificed more for it. Saying I love Dalejem does not make him a threat to you. It does not make him a threat to anything we have. I have entwined my life with yours, Allie. I chose us over me. I never did that with him. I never did that even with my first wife.”

  I’d nodded, not saying anything at first.

  He’d never said those things to me before, but they resonated somewhere high up in my light. I’d felt similar things about him, although I’d never articulated them to myself.

  I’d chosen us over me, too.

  When we left the tank with Lily the first time, everyone held their breath, not only me. Revik was terrified for Lily––more than he tried to show. He held her hand so hard she kept wincing and complaining, and of course his fear and doubt brought up the same in me. I panicked, questioning myself, wondering if I’d just killed them both.

  Then we were just standing there, in the security station, holding hands.

  Balidor waited for us behind the console with Neela and Declan.

  Wreg was there, too––along with Jon, Tarsi, Yumi, Chandre, Varlan, Kali and Uye.

  I avoided Kali’s eyes, but I saw her smiling. I saw tears on her face before I managed to look away. I saw Uye wiping his cheeks, too.

  Balidor more looked wary, as did Tarsi. Jon looked worried.

  Wreg beamed at me, his dark eyes dancing with light. He gave Revik an expressive scowl, showing he still hadn’t fully forgiven him for whatever he thought happened between us, then beamed at him, too.

  Most of the others just looked weirded out by me again––like I’d gone back to being the Bridge in their eyes, instead of Allie. Since I’d been trying to shake them of that since we left New York, I couldn’t help sighing at some of their expressions.

  Revik didn’t get that time alone with me he’d wanted––not for hours.

  We spent the rest of that day having our light examined by every seer on the infiltration team, along with Kali, Uye, Wreg, Loki and a number of others with high sight ranks on the military side. Honestly, they didn’t tell us much I didn’t already know.

  Balidor confirmed I’d replaced entire structures in Lily’s light with my own, and that I’d done essentially the same to Revik, only with structures much higher up in his light. They agreed the solution wasn’t a permanent one, or even a wholly ideal one, but it bought us time.

  More importantly, it bought Revik and Lily freedom from the tank.

  Revik and I moved our things to the ship’s flag cabin, which had a private construct already. The flag cabin had always been intended for Revik and me, although this past week was the first time we’d actually slept in it.

  Next door to us, a smaller cabin was given to Lily. It connected to ours via a door between bulkheads, but lived inside its own construct. Even with the separate constructs, I could feel her all the time now.

  That thread to her never got broken.

  I still struggled with some of what caused my shutdown after Sri Lanka.

  I struggled with Revik knowing my parents, with Dalejem leaving Revik to work for my mother, with my parents being in California all those years, with whatever the hell happened between my mother and Revik that still had my father watching Revik like a hawk.

  I couldn’t tell which part of it bothered me more: the stuff with Revik, the bullshit secrets for all those years––or my mother apparently instructing Dalejem to leave me under a fucking overpass when I was too young to even crawl.

  Plus, there was that whole other aspect of Revik’s life he’d neglected to tell me about.

  “How many men have you dated?” I asked him one of those nights. “And why haven’t you so much as mentioned a single one of them to me?”

  That made him roll his eyes, and probably deservedly.

  He told me, though. A funny thing about him since that blow up with me walking out: as annoyed as he might get with my questions, he never refused to answer any of them.

  “None apart from Dalejem,” he said, shrugging with a hand. “Well, Terry. But you already knew about that.”

  A flicker of shock hit my light. “I did?”

  Revik turned his head on the pillow, staring at me. His German accent grew more pronounced. “Allie! How did you not know about that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, clicking in annoyance. “Maybe because you never told me?”

  But Revik seemed to think the fact he and Terian dated should have been completely obvious to me. He claimed it was nothing, that he only called it a relationship because they’d been exclusive for part of it. According to him, his relationships with men had been almost exclusively about sex, apart from Dalejem.

  When I asked if he’d slept with any of the male seers on the ship, he’d gotten even more frustrated, but he told me the truth
there, too.

  “Yes,” he said, blunt. “Do you want a list of names?”

  I did, actually.

  Another part of me absolutely didn’t, though, and that part won out. Which was probably the same reason I didn’t ask him for any more specifics about my biological mother, Kali.

  Truthfully, I was pretty tired of the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole that was Revik’s sexual past. As soon as I thought I was more or less at peace with it, something else appeared to smack me across the head and unbalance me all over again.

  I fought to think past everything we’d said even now, through the heartbeat of the ship, as I lay curled up against Revik’s side, my head cushioned on his bare shoulder. We hadn’t stayed angry at each other––we never did these days, not after we’d apologized––but I still felt insecure with him, and weirdly, I could tell he did with me, too.

  He still wasn’t happy I’d spent those three days in the same residence as Jaden.

  I knew both of us were really tired of feeling threatened.

  My being awake and staring at the ceiling wasn’t all about Revik, though.

  It wasn’t about the dreams I’d been having, either––although those definitely didn’t help. I still dreamt of bombs falling and Beijing, but most of my dreams were more nebulous lately, like watching my friends get eaten by wormholes in space, watching myself give birth to dragons made of light, seeing featureless underground bunkers explode.

  I started to wonder if the sun was going to blot out the Earth.

  Maybe all this back and forth with the Dreng would finally be over. Maybe the Displacement wouldn’t be about us at all. Maybe the gods or the ancestors or whoever else would finally throw in the towel, declare “enough is enough.”

  I hated how little I actually knew.

  I hated that Terian was beginning to feel like one of my better sources of intel. I hated that my dreams got one of our people killed in D.C., and injured three others.

  Loki’s team pulled everything they could from that wall safe under the White House. Holo, Rex and Mika dumped a pile of data drives on the tech lab storage tables, along with organic machines I’d never seen before and reams of actual, dead-tree paper.