Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

“My sister, too. My sister. Don’t like her being gone...”

  Jon felt his jaw harden. He forced his eyes away from the seer’s child-like expression. Kicking that vacant, falsely-sympathetic face in with his new boots might have made him feel better...for an instant.

  But after that, it wouldn’t.

  He combed his hair out of his face with his fingers.

  “Terry,” he said. “Can we stop the war? You know, the plague or whatever the Displacement ends up being. Is it possible...without her?”

  “May not have been possible with her,” the creature said, matter of fact.

  “But is it possible now, Terry?”

  “Dunno,” the seer said, smiling at him.

  He went back to his tracing. His eyes had changed again, growing sharper, almost knowing despite the odd reflections in them still. Jon found himself watching the seer’s fingers, in spite of himself.

  “What are you doing?” he said finally.

  “Writing it down,” the seer answered.

  “Writing what down?”

  “The formula,” Terian said, looking at him with surprise.

  His voice shifted again, once more sounding like the version of Terian Jon had known...only a saner version. He spoke to Jon as if they were old school chums.

  “...I need to document it, Jon,” he said seriously, his eyes wide in his face. “For when I need it. It’s incredibly important that the knowledge not be lost. I have no idea if Xarethe survived, you see. She and I are the last of those who could accomplish such a thing...besides Vash himself, of course. And I don’t think he’d be willing to help. Too much guilt...”

  “Guilt?” Jon said, still bewildered by the sanity in those eyes. “Guilt over what?”

  “Nenzi, of course. Guilt for Nenzi Algathe.”

  Jon mulled this over for a moment. He only understood about half.

  “Document what?” he said finally. “What are you documenting?”

  “How to make more bodies,” Feigran said.

  Jon just stared at him for a moment. Then he smiled, in spite of himself.

  “You want to make more bodies.” Jon raised an eyebrow at him. “Why, Terian? I mean...look what it’s done to you.”

  Terian pondered this for a moment, still crouched over the stone.

  “Yes,” he said thoughtfully. “I see your perspective, Jon. But the thing is...what will happen if I don’t? For I’m quite mad now, you see.”

  Jon couldn’t really say much to that. Shrugging with one hand, he nodded, folding his arms tighter around the long leather coat he wore.

  “Yeah, Terry,” he said. “That you are.”

  “Mad as a hatter,” Terian piped.

  “Mad as a fucking hatter...that’s you.” Jon smiled.

  Nodding, Terian went back to tracing on the stone. Jon just watched him work, feeling a sharp wave of compassion as he watched the seer.

  These intermediary beings...they were all deeply screwed up.

  Terian laughed again, gesturing in agreement.

  Jon smiled, but his eyebrow cocked as he stared suddenly, at the collar around the seer’s neck. “Can you hear me, Terry?” he said. “Can you hear my thoughts?”

  “Sure, sure,” the seer said absently. “Feeling sorry for Terry. Poor Terry. Poor broken Terry...just like the broken Sword, and the girl was broken too. All broken...none of us supposed to be here, Jon. None of us. Not a vacation, either...no picnic...”

  He clicked to himself softly, shaking his head. Then he stopped, pulling up from his crouch. He stared at Jon, almost as if he’d just come to something...reached some understanding inside himself.

  “We’re here for you,” he said.

  He jabbed long, white fingers at him, and Jon noticed the bloody tips from his scratchings on stone.

  “For you, Jon,” he repeated seriously.

  Jon just looked at him for a moment. Then, refolding his arms in front of his chest, he sighed, exhaling a long breath of air.

  “Yeah,” Jon said. “Well...thanks.” He held up his mutilated hand, showing Terian his own handiwork. “Thanks a lot, Terry.”

  The seer smiled, and it lit up his whole face.

  “Anytime, Jon,” he said seriously. “You know that.”

  Jon let out a low laugh, in spite of himself.

  God, his sense of humor had gotten dark in the past few years.

  Rising to his feet, he walked back to the metal door. He was about to bang on it for Poresh to let him out, when he stopped a last time, turning.

  “Is he dead yet, Terry?” he said. “Revik.”

  Terian clicked softly, still drawing symbols on the stone.

  “Not yet,” he said softly. “Not yet, not yet...” He smiled that open smile again, looking up at Jon. “Soon though, Jon. Very soon...not much longer.”

  He muttered something else, under his breath, and Jon stiffened.

  “What?” he said, his voice sharp. “What did you say?”

  “I adore you...” the seer murmured, clicking softly. “Very sad. It is very very sad. Very sad...”

  Jon stared at him. Swallowing, he felt the tightness return to his chest.

  He jerked his eyes off that oddly twitching face, banging on the heavy metal door with the flat of his hand for Poresh to let him out.

  14

  DEAD

  I SWAM THROUGH darkness...immersed in sensual warmth.

  At first, it was almost pleasant. Like waiting to be born.

  I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know...anything. Only that I floated somewhere peaceful, in something not dissimilar to hot, thick water.

  The aloneness bothered me.

  It bothered me a lot.

  Even so, it took a long time before I felt anything other than pleasantly out of it. I might have been drugged. Or perhaps, I thought, everything would just be easier here, in this place. Forever easy. Something lived in that feeling of finality that had a comfort to it, in and of itself.

  Really, honestly...I figured I was dead.

  I remembered dying. I remembered a lot of pain, a terror as I realized...as I felt it slip away from me...

  It fucking hurt. Dying hurt...a lot.

  I didn’t want to do it again, that was for sure.

  But here, it didn’t hurt. Not at first.

  Slowly, though, that began to change.

  The pain started gradually, almost imperceptibly. It threaded through the tiniest of my veins like small sparks of electric current. I barely felt them at first. Then, some unclear amount of time later, they grew uncomfortable.

  Then a lot more uncomfortable...

  I started to have trouble dozing off. I started to dream badly.

  I started to sweat.

  Then I was panting, sweating all the time, sweating buckets...it felt like my skin was being ripped off my flesh.

  Then my flesh off my bones.

  I started to yell. I screamed for help, for someone to help me.

  I screamed for him.

  It hurt more than dying had...it hurt more than anything I’d ever felt in my life. I couldn’t remain still for how much it hurt...even when it hurt more. I fought to get free of the restraints. For I could feel those now, too.

  I couldn’t move. I couldn’t find or bang against the edges of whatever confined me. Dark surrounded me. Everything hung in pitch black silence...I couldn’t feel any other lights...nothing else lived in my world but me. I was suspended in a kind of hell of sensation and loss...

  Then that loss got worse, too.

  Grief like nothing I’ve ever felt before tried to pull apart my mind.

  My yells turned to screams...deep-throated, agonizing screams that wanted to rip out my spine. I called for him. I called with every ounce of my being...

  I couldn’t get away from the pain. I couldn’t stop trying.

  The pain didn’t flow in pulses anymore. My light didn’t move right. Everything grew more and more heightened, more and more difficult to process. It rose higher ev
ery hour.

  Every half hour...

  Every twenty minutes...

  I lost the ability to scream. I had no voice left, no lungs.

  I panted, feeling my heart slam up against my ribs. I knew for a fact that I was dying now. I was really dying this time...maybe I was already dead. For a shorter time the thought comforted me, the idea that it had to end soon, that there wasn’t much left of me to experience this...

  But the pain didn’t lessen...it got worse. It reached the upper limit, the highest amount I could even feel...then it got worse again. I would look back on the old pain with nostalgia, with a feeling like I could take that...that that had been all right...pleasant even...

  It got so bad I was begging to die, willing it to end.

  He felt dead to me, too...I wanted to go to him, to meet him in that other place. He felt gone, and I drifted alone, in a world I didn’t recognize, half my light ripped off my body.

  He’d said he couldn’t...that he couldn’t live without me...

  And still, the will to live kept me there.

  It kept me from letting go, from succumbing to it entirely.

  I hated it. I hated that grasping...that need to hold on...

  For a long, long time...for what felt like an infinity of black pain, of aloneness in a void, lightless place...I existed like this...

  I wished for death.

  I wished for anything to smash that grasping hold in me.

  “WE HAVE TO pull her!” Dorje said. He yanked on Balidor’s arm. “We have to! It’s not working, Balidor...it’s not!”

  “A little longer,” Balidor muttered.

  Still, he bit his lip, shifting his weight as he looked through the organic-paneled window, his gaze switching between it and the flat console.

  “Why?” Dorje said. “...Why are you doing this?”

  “You know why.”

  “It is over! It is over, Balidor!” Dorje’s voice held tears. Eyes wet, he stared at the body suspended in the organic tank, his hand shaking. “You are torturing her! You are torturing her worse than anything the Rooks could have done to her! Please, gods, Balidor...stop this! It is done!”

  “A little longer,” Balidor muttered again, folding his arms tighter.

  He stared through the thick, transparent wall, squinting through the faint green cast of the organic as he studied her...her body, her features as they hardened inside the gel. He watched the articulation of her limbs where she hung suspended, restraints holding her away from the walls of the tank where they’d immersed her so that her wounds wouldn’t be damaged as the other condition worsened.

  She looked thinner again, even in just the last half-day.

  The gel, which had already repaired a good section of her back where the bullet had exited, should also be providing her ample amounts of water and food through the absorption process...but it made no difference.

  She absorbed the nutrients and sweated them out...vibrating water and flesh out of her skin and her aleimi faster than her skin could absorb the new.

  Faster than her body could break it down for sustenance.

  It had only been eleven days in total, but it felt like months had passed since he had stood here, watching her.

  Still, each day he found himself faced with the same thing...trying to decide how far he could let things go before he killed her for real.

  THE TANK HAD been built decades ago.

  Balidor stumbled upon it by accident, during one of their raids. It had been the centerpiece of one of the labs Galaith had built...one of the many labs Galaith and his people had scattered across Asia and Eastern Europe. When the Adhipan found it, and determined what it had been designed to do, they surmised that the tank undoubtedly formed the centerpiece of another of Galaith’s questionable “experiments” with seer physiology.

  Something that required cutting a seer out of the Barrier totally.

  Ironically, it had been Terian who led them there. They had been following one of his bodies, a geneticist named Yongo.

  Galaith had been a firm believer in testing the bounds of manipulating the Barrier and its constructs. He had no doubt experimented on mated pairs before, using this very tank.

  Not all mated pairs of seers had interdependent lifespans, of course...but well over half did in the first decade of marriage. The numbers increased as the years of marriage increased, until the vast majority of those who had been mates for over a century tended to require their mate to survive.

  With Elaerian, it had long been believed that the number of mates with interdependent lifespans must be far higher.

  Vash had warned the entire Council and Adhipan that this would likely be the case with whatever mate Allie chose, and not long after full consummation.

  The records of the Rooks confirmed this supposition, as well.

  In any case, Balidor had no doubt that Galaith had used the chamber on mated pairs before. Interdependent mates would be the most concrete test of whether or not the shield really worked.

  For months, Balidor had found himself thinking about the tank...ever since they first encountered the re-unified Syrimne.

  He had hoped he might never need use it. He had hoped that it might be possible for her to remain outside Dehgoies’ influence enough that it wouldn’t be necessary. Since only about half of Revik’s aleimi had been intact when they’d taken one another as mates, Balidor had thought perhaps their bond would be easy to break following the full personality’s re-integration.

  Seeing her with him on that dance floor in New Delhi had been the cold splash of reality to that hope. Dehgoies retained a hold on her as Syrimne...far more than she seemed willing to admit to herself.

  Her denial of its import only made the bond that much more dangerous.

  Balidor held off on trying the tank until he had a good reason. He hadn’t liked the idea of forcing a split of this kind, even a temporary one, knowing what it would do to her. From the beginning, he meant not to kill her, but only to test whether it might be feasible to separate them. Even so, he had hesitated, wondering if there might be a better way.

  But Vash told him that his own methods of severance would only bring the same result, and worse, for they would likely not be reversible in time to keep her alive...at least not without Dehgoies’ help.

  So Balidor tabled the whole idea, thinking that their time in Delhi had finally convinced Alyson of the need to put some distance between them.

  Seeing her face while Cass read that letter had changed his mind yet again.

  The truth was, they had put it off too long already.

  They had to know. He had to know.

  Ultimately, he had not lied to her. It was his responsibility. Not only to keep her person safe...but to keep the world safe from her.

  Balidor needed to know what would happen if she was separated from her mate. He needed to know which contingencies were viable, given the nature of that connection. Vash had okayed the experiment as well, agreeing that it was better that they learn the truth in a relatively controlled environment, before they attempted to do a severing ritual for real...and certainly before they let her do anything so crazy as go undercover within Syrimne’s operation headquarters.

  Dehgoies could not know, of course.

  The opportunity at the basement archives existed as though made for such an enactment.

  If the severing worked, meaning if it managed not to kill her, Dehgoies would think her dead, which would give them time to rehabilitate her.

  If it did not work...well, Dehgoies would be incapacitated too.

  It had seemed like such a neat plan. A way to accomplish at least two things, and hopefully more than that, if they could make the severing stick.

  Watching her now, though, Balidor bit his lip.

  She’d stopped screaming a few days ago, but he could tell from the articulation of her limbs that the pain hadn’t lessened. Lines etched in her face from tension as her muscles clenched against some unseen agony. Her hands seemed to be
permanently clenched into fists for a day after her screams ended, but now her whole body had gone limp, only to tense again periodically...enough to frighten him.

  She was willing herself to die.

  He saw it at times, in her face. But he also saw the other, as well...that thing that gave him hope. Her will to live pulsed under the despair, even against her more conscious want for the pain to end. He still retained some wish that it might outlast that darker solution.

  In any case, he would have to make a decision soon.

  “Come on, Allie,” he murmured. “Come on...beat this...”

  He watched her, hoping to gods she would ever forgive him.

  At the same time, he got a grim sort of satisfaction, wondering how Dehgoies was faring with his end of their little experiment.

  WREG STARED OUT the hotel window, watching people walk by the Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple of the Sikhs. They were still in Amritsar.

  Using the old-fashioned telescopic glass, he watched the pilgrims walk alongside tourists, following their footsteps without seeing their faces as they queued up to enter.

  “No photographs” signs stood everywhere, of course. The ban against realtime imagery remained in effect here, as it did in most parts of the human world. The signs themselves felt almost redundant in fact, especially here, in a place holy to the local humans.

  They should have left Amritsar weeks ago.

  Initially, they’d intended only to stop in the border city long enough to park the plane and transfer equipment and supplies to land transport. From there, the Sword intended that they finish the rest of the approach to Seertown by back roads, where they would be less likely to be tracked. It was certainly safer than landing in the airport in Dharamsala, where the Adhipan would surely have spies watching for them.

  Their biggest concern at the time had been that the Seven might flee with her...with or without her consent. Watching from the Barrier, they had waited to see if that would be the decision by the Adhipan, upon hearing the contents of Dehgoies’ letter. The Sword himself had said almost nothing beyond telling them he wished for a broad blanket of surveillance for the hours he’d requested the note delivered.