Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Not after the year before, when he’d thought she was dead.

  He’d take Allie to a tropical fucking island if he had to––fix his marriage away from all of them. His shoulders tensed as he continued to think about it, and to stare at the other seer.

  Dalejem wouldn’t look at him at all now.

  “Why?” Revik said finally.

  Dalejem turned slowly, giving him an incredulous look.

  “Why?” he said. “Did you just say ‘why’? Are you really asking me that, brother?”

  Revik frowned. “Of course I am. Why wouldn’t I? It’s been thirty fucking years, Jem.”

  “Don’t call me that, goddamn it!” Dalejem snapped.

  Revik blinked at him in surprise.

  He wondered briefly if he’d read the seer wrong before, if Dalejem meant Revik should be using his op alias, not his real name, even where there was no active surveillance nearby. Feeling another pulse off the older seer’s light, Revik realized he hadn’t, though.

  He hadn’t misunderstood him.

  Dalejem was offended Revik used the shortened version of his name for personal reasons.

  As if they were still fucking dating or something.

  “What do you want from me?” Revik said. “Seriously. You must know it’s pissing off my wife. It’s starting to piss me off, too, brother.”

  “I don’t think you can blame me or anyone else for your wife not trusting you, brother…” Dalejem muttered. Seeing Revik’s cold look, Dalejem shook his head, clicking, his sculpted mouth turning in a frown. “You want to get into this now? Really?”

  “No,” Revik said, cold. “I really don’t. But you’re not making it easy. So either talk to me about it, or fuck off with your light, brother.” He gave the seer a harder look, feeling the threat snake out of his aleimi before he could throttle it back. “…That includes staying the hell away from my wife’s light, in case that part wasn’t crystal fucking clear.”

  There was a longer silence.

  In it, Revik watched the other’s jaw harden.

  Dalejem’s green eyes grew colder. He deliberately drew his light close to his body, so that Revik could barely feel it. Revik remembered he’d started off as Adhipan, once upon a time, before he ran off with Kali in South America and joined the Children of the Bridge. When Revik first met him, he could barely taste the older seer’s light at all, not unless Dalejem wanted him to.

  Remembering that only made Revik’s frown deepen, though.

  He wondered why he felt so much of Dalejem’s light lately, given that.

  Clearly, the other seer wanted him to feel it. That, or something else was going on, something that made Dalejem less aware of his light than usual. Remembering the way he’d touched him that first night, at the guard station in Macau, Revik felt his face tighten more.

  He was still staring at the other seer, frowning, when Dalejem spoke. His voice was low, barely audible over the sound of the approaching train.

  “I’m still in love with you, brother,” he said.

  Revik blinked.

  Dalejem waited, as if to let his words sink in.

  “You can yell at me all you want for that later,” he continued after a beat, still not looking at Revik. “But you might as well save your breath. I’m well aware of your situation.” Dalejem’s eyes shifted towards the incoming train. “In any case, I’d prefer if we didn’t discuss the details of that now, brother. When it might get both of us––or your wife––killed.”

  Revik couldn’t stop staring. The words continued to reverberate, sending a jolt of shock through his light. Then, a flush of anger.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” he said, not hiding his incredulity.

  Dalejem gave him a cold look, not speaking.

  “It’s been thirty years, brother,” Revik said, unable to be silent. “You left me, remember? I spent the vast majority of those years alone… when I wasn’t selling myself to humans. So spare me your wounded animal bullshit, okay? I was there. I was always there. You weren’t.”

  A denser fury seethed off Dalejem’s light.

  He still didn’t speak.

  “I’m not even the same fucking person now––” Revik growled.

  “So you said,” Dalejem cut in, giving him a warning look.

  Revik bit his lip, forcing back another hard pulse of fury.

  He considered briefly that the other seer might actually be fucking with him.

  Then he considered that he might be an agent of Shadow.

  In the end, he wondered if Dalejem might just be another one of those people who rewrote reality to suit their own emotional needs, regardless of facts. It was less usual for seers to do that than it was for humans––mostly because seers had photographic memories so it was harder for them to lie to themselves so completely––but it definitely happened.

  Revik watched Terian do it for years.

  He’d seen Raven do it, Maygar’s mother.

  Feeling another, sharper pulse slide off 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.

  Revik fought with some way to respond, torn between an inexplicable guilt and anger that bordered on a furious disbelief, when Dalejem began to walk towards the platform. His light was entirely closed now, his body moving strangely as he adopted a human’s gait.

  The train screeched to a stop in front of them.

  Revik followed Dalejem wordlessly, no longer looking directly at the older male, either. He walked through the same carriage doors, following him into the same segment of train. He glanced around only long enough to choose a seat.

  Through all of it, he was acutely aware of surveillance. Unlike the platform, the inside of the train had image recorders. Audio and Barrier scanning equipment covered every inch of passenger 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, he 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 it.

  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, if only as 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 rate of turnover in workers.

  The main focus of the quarantine walls remained keeping out the disease.

  Revik had his blood checked twice for any trace of C2-77 on their way off the docks, even as a worker who’d supposedly been checked on the city side before he started his shift. It didn’t matter. Since he worked with cargo, seers and humans from outside the city, he was checked every time he crossed one of the security thresholds.

  Revik knew his face coming up new on a return trip scan might still get reported up in some fashion, depending on quarantine procedure. The hope was, his alias would hold, along with the prosthetics he wore, and the miss wouldn’t raise any flags.

  Like Dalejem promised, they weren’t on the train 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 didn’t stare, or do anything but exhale in boredom as he kept his eyes aimed at his 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 that.

  Now was definitely not the fucking time.

  50

  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 were expected to come 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, the seer’s instinct was to simply blow it off. Pretend he missed that particular call.

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

  More importantly, he knew the male on the other end.

  As he hesitated, wondering what excuse he could give, reality returned to his mind. One did not fuck with a man like Dalcius Dontan.

  In their last quasi-social meeting, a drunken, stoned Dontan told Efrail he’d had a suit made of the skin of his last lover.

  He’d laughed like a hyena as he told the story, explaining how she displeased him by fucking his chauffeur, then compounded the insult by giving a sub-standard blowjob in apology. Efrail was beyond words as the story unfolded amidst the seer’s half-coherent cackles, joined by the nervous laughter of two naked humans coiled around him on the leather sofa.

  All of them had been downing champagne from chilled, crystal glasses––champagne that used to cost thousands of American dollars per bottle.

  Enough cocaine had been piled 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 one crazy enough to share such a story openly, laughing about it over drinks in a public establishment while watching seer and human females strip for him. Such a man knew he was untouchable––above the law.

  That same establishment, in addition to being owned by Dontan, was frequented by princes, businessmen, ex-heads of state, leaders of organized crime syndicates, investment bankers. Many of them owned assets exceeding the previous gross national product of developed nations.

  Many counted Dontan as a close, personal friend.

  While it was certainly true Efrail himself had grown more cynical over the years, 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 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 the eyes of his avatar didn’t look sane, Efrail noted.

  “…I have been waiting for you to breathe your oily little words into my ears, lo the morn, brother Efrail. Yet silence has been my only companion. You did not call. You did not write. I began to feel quite lonely.”

  “Sir, I… I…”

  “My heartsickness will be absolute if I am not invited to the pre-sale, my lying, squirming, toad-like little brother,” the other added, softer. “You had not thought to cut me out of this one, had you, my slippery, greasy, 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 sun-kissed and sand-covered paradise?”

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

  “I looked for the names you gave me, brother,” Efrail said, smiling wider, so it 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, not without––”

  “Yet you are having a pre-sale, are you not?” the seer said.

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

  Feeling the warning there, Efrail swallowed, his 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, my friend. 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. 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 of Dalcius Dontan dissipated like smoke.

  Efrail’s hand trembled violently as he removed his earpiece, setting it on a glass table.

  He gazed out through his balcony doors, the gold walls and furniture of his enclosed porch awash in morning sun. Despite the serenity of the view, he couldn’t help thinking he should leave this place soon––before he ended up as clothing for Dalcius Dontan, as well.

  REVIK STOOD IN a cavernous, dimly-lit room. It felt like a converted livestock barn, but lived underground, with low ceilings and black-painted walls.

  The space appeared to stretch for half an acre underground, and smelled of smoke, sweat and stale alcohol, along with a faint breath of urine and stale food.

  He folded his arms, gazing 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. He concentrated at least half of his awareness on keeping his aleimi under control, 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’ve been here too long,” Stanley said.

  The other male stood at his right, holding his hands together in a nervous clench in front of his lean body. His dark eyes shifted from the stage, looking out over at the same sea of heads Revik had just been surveying.

  He gave Revik an anxious 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.

  Revik agreed.

  He stood slightly behind the rest of them, using the bare fact of their physicality to keep his light separate from the rest of the room. He knew there was a risk he could lose control 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, keeping him strangely calm.

  He would be useless to her. He would be useless to Lily. Worse, Allie would come after him. She’d probably get herself killed coming after him, and then all three of them would be dead. She might be perfectly safe, wherever she was. His wife was a good operative
, one of the best they had. He needed to trust her.

  The thought looped. It kept him calm.

  He couldn’t look at Dalejem at all.

  He could barely look at any of them. At this point, he was having to fight not to scan for her, or do anything that might ignite the telekinesis.

  He knew the difficulty he was having with his light hadn’t gone unnoticed. He’d caught nervous glances darted his way from other seers on his team. Sharing proximate space with them in this claustrophobia-inducing basement didn’t help.

  They were worried he might lose his shit.

  They saw what was happening to his light. They glanced at him warily whenever sparks flared brightly enough off his aleimi. Even as Revik thought it, Surli frowned in his direction, in the same half-second it took Dalejem to give him a worried glance. Chinja’s eyes reflected nerves. So did Hondo’s.

  Revik had trouble maintaining eye contact with any of them––not like most tried.

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

  It helped with the claustrophobia to focus there.

  It gave him something else to think about, and a reminder that doors lived in the walls of this dimly-lit grave, even if not in easy distance, considering how many people stood between him and the nearest exits.

  On the platform, bright lights 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 none 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 his team stood in the furthest, darkest corner of the auction floor, across the entire expanse of the rough-hewn space. They were as far from the stage as they could possibly get, and likely would have to shout, and loudly, to bid on merchandise themselves.