Eventually, we both gave up.
I felt him withdraw, frustration pulsing at me briefly before he slid around me affectionately and drew away.
Lying there, I felt another flicker of nerves wash over me at how close he’d felt, even with the collar...much less the military-grade construct I had to be in, given where Balidor had brought us. Something about being shot and both of us nearly dying had torn down all the walls between us. It didn’t seem to matter anymore, where I was. Or even who I was with.
The realization was daunting when I thought about what it might mean.
At the same time, something else had changed in me, too. Being with him again no longer felt like a hypothetical, or a pipe dream. I don’t think I’d ever wanted him so badly. Maybe it was knowing finally that we really couldn’t be separated. Or it could have been something more biologically driven...some kind of base, biological need after having him absent so long from my light.
In any case, guilt lived around the admission, a near shame.
It didn’t change anything. He was still Syrimne. But more and more, my light didn’t care. I wasn’t altogether sure the rest of me did, either.
I couldn’t really think clearly about why that was...at least not yet.
Either way, I could admit to myself now that Balidor had been right about me, when he said I couldn’t be trusted around him.
I definitely wasn’t going to be thinking clearly when I saw him next.
17
LIAISONS
JON TRIED TO quell his apprehension as he left the chamber where Allie was housed.
She still didn’t look right. Her skin was overly pale, even taking into account all the time they’d spent indoors over the past few weeks, in trains and underground and far away from the sun. Her cheekbones looked hollow to him, in a way that worried him almost as much as the runway-model-thin body...and he definitely meant that not in a good way.
She seemed distant, too.
It could be from the collar, which Jon knew Balidor had jacked the limits up on a number of times, trying to keep Revik out. But Jon had his doubts that the collar explained it really. She seemed always to be listening these days, like a part of her was somewhere else. He’d noticed something similar about Balidor as well, but didn’t want to think too clearly about what that meant, either.
He’d caught the insinuation of that terrifying seer, Voi Pai, too.
Now he couldn’t help wondering...had Allie and Balidor been involved?
If so, it would explain why Revik hated him so much.
She’d kept it pretty quiet if they had been. They’d always seemed like friends, sure, at least until they got into that yelling match under the Old House in Seertown. Even now, after he’d almost killed her, she’d joked around with him in there, and gave him looks that indicated some kind of secret communication between them. But Jon had never picked up on anything else. Even their secrets struck him more as military-grade secrets than anything all that personal.
Balidor might have looked at her a little too long, here and there, but seers did that. All seers did that, seemingly. And Dorje told him that Allie affected a lot of seers that way, male and female, mostly because she and Revik’s separation messed with her light.
Usually, it didn’t mean a damned thing.
Reaching the end of the corridor outside her bedroom, he hung a right past the large, shrine-like area that formed a kind of foyer to the building where they had her housed. Barely glancing at the ornate wood around the second set of circular doorways and the altar above the row of stained wooden benches in the main room, he walked down the stairs into the courtyard outside. They’d given him his own quarters, somewhere, but he needed to be outside, at least for a little while, before he tried to remember where they’d been located compared to Allie’s.
Finding a corner of the garden next to a winding creek that curled around rock sculptures that formed part of an artificial landscape, Jon sighed, sitting down on a stone bench. He closed his eyes as he tilted his face up to the sun.
Gods, he’d missed the sun. He could barely remember what time of year it was anymore.
Before he could really relax enough to enjoy the warm rays, a shadow fell across his face.
He opened his eyes.
Dorje stood over him, his face showing impatience.
“What is this?” the seer demanded. “Were you going to tell me, Jon?”
Jon blinked a little against flickers of sharp sunlight, looking down at what the seer had thrust angrily into his lap. It was a large, square notebook with a hard cover.
“I hear you have been hanging out with your torturer,” Dorje said in clipped Prexci. “That you visited him? In Nepal? Daily, they said. What is that, Jon?”
Jon sighed, lowering his hand from his face.
“You seem to know all about it, so why even ask?” he grumbled.
“Jon...” Dorje said, exasperated.
But Jon only gestured dismissively, flipping open the notebook Dorje had given him. Looking at the lines sketched in black charcoal, he squinted, trying to make out the numbers alongside the diagrams’ boundaries, noticing the different shadings and textures within the same image. Some of those lines looked to be made up of dark dots, others appeared to be dashes...still others looked straight...or so light as to be mere shadows across the page.
He turned several of the diagrams a few different directions, but still couldn’t make sense of them.
“What is this?” he said.
“You tell me,” Dorje said. “What are you doing, Jon?”
Frustrated, Jon exhaled, squinting again against the sun, as the seer had moved his head and now no longer blocked the light.
“Will you sit down at least, so I can see you?”
Dorje sat promptly. His face didn’t relax. Neither did his eyes, which stared at Jon with a near-accusation.
Jon was growing used to the seer method of staring. It had struck him as invasive at first. Now, on Dorje, he found the concern behind it sort of sweet.
“Do not distract me,” Dorje said. “What are you doing, Jon?”
Jon frowned. Then he threw up a hand.
“Look, it wasn’t a big deal.” He sighed, flipping through more of the pages. He gestured towards the marks. “...His fingers were all bloody from drawing his crazy shit on the stone. I gave him paper. Big deal.”
“You are helping your torturer now?” Dorje said.
“Jesus. Drama much? Do I have to act like him to convince you I’m not up to something?”
Dorje caught hold of Jon’s hand, the one with the missing fingers. “Is he your friend, now? Your new pal?”
“For fuck’s sake,” Jon said, extracting his hand. “I thought it might be helpful, seeing what he was writing. For all I knew, it was the secret formula to finding Shangri-la...”
Dorje hesitated. His eyes grew baffled. “Secret formula to the what, Jon?”
Jon grinned at him. “You know...THE secret formula. That one.”
Dorje’s frown deepened.
“Come on,” Jon said. “Lighten up.” His smile grew a bit stiffer. “Anyway, I was just trying to kill time while you bastards were off torturing my sister...”
Dorje’s hard look faltered.
Jon waved him off with his mutilated hand.
“Forget it. I’m not in the mood for some speech about duty, honor and the American way of life...”
Dorje looked puzzled again, but Jon cut him off when he started to ask.
“It’s a human expression, Dorj...I just mean I know you have some long, convoluted seer explanation about how there was no other way, and you were really helping Allie by starving her half to death while she screamed in pain.”
Sighing, he looked back at the book.
“I don’t want to hear it right now, okay?”
Dorje hesitated, then looked out over the gardens. His gaze tilted up towards the cherry blossoms while Jon pored over the book, flipping from page to page, pausin
g on some of the more coherent-looking scribbles.
“You guys looked at this, I assume?”
Dorje clicked softly, folding his hands in the lap of his jeans. “If by ‘you guys’ you mean the Adhipan, yes...we looked at it.”
“And?”
“Barrier diagrams mostly. There is some chemistry. Biology. Genetics. Much of it is pure garbage, Jon. Refuse from his mind...it only seems important to him because he is grasping for coherence...”
Jon grunted, still looking at the images. He paused then, finding a page that was neither numbers nor a diagram nor any kind of language. He stared at a sketch made from the charcoal sticks he’d given the crazy seer, a little flabbergasted.
“He did this? Feigran?”
Dorje looked over his arm. “Yes. Appears you made quite an impression, Jon.” His mouth firmed once more. “Balidor believes that he likes males quite a bit...but you likely knew that, yes, Jon?”
“I more meant that he can draw,” Jon said, ignoring the last part. “Jesus. Who would have thought? Even before he was a babbling looney, I wouldn’t have pegged him as someone who could do this...”
Dorje shrugged. “Seers live a long time. He’s lived in many bodies. A lot of time to kill. You pick things up...”
Jon only half-heard, staring down at the image of himself.
In it, he sat on a wooden stool in the cell in Nepal. His eyes looked serious, holding a scrutiny that wrinkled the skin around them slightly, highlighting the wind-worn lines he’d collected in the past year or so. His mutilated hand stood out visibly against his dark coat, long fingers curled around his elbow where his arms crossed over his chest. In the drawing he wore the same leather coat he’d worn for most of his time in Kathmandu.
It struck Jon, looking at the image, how long his hair had gotten.
“There are more,” Dorje said.
He leaned over Jon’s lap, flipping to later images.
Jon frowned down at one of Allie. In it, she sat on the floor of a cavernous room with waterfalls flowing down a hill covered in rocks in the background. In the image, she was laughing with her head thrown back, wearing a sun dress, her bare legs splayed in a casual pose. It wasn’t a sexual image though. She was playing chess on the floor with a boy who looked astonishingly like Revik...only Revik at about twelve years old.
“Did the boy—”
“No,” Dorje made a line in the air with his finger. “He did not look so much like Dehgoies. It is eerie though, yes? Allie told me she played chess with him while Terian and the boy held her captive. That and ‘Go’...you know, the Chinese game...”
Jon’s mouth hardened. He remembered other things Allie told him about the boy. How he’d try to touch her at night, insisting she was his mate.
Dorje flipped to another page, tapping his finger on the paper.
An image of the terrifying woman with the slitted, yellow eyes of a cat stared out of the page at him, wearing a hanfu dress with a deep black sash.
Jon looked at Dorje. “Did Feigran know we were coming here?”
Dorje gestured negative. “We told him nothing.”
“Are seers normally prescient?”
Dorje shrugged, flipping his hand sideways. It meant ‘not really,’ more or less, in seer hand language.
“Some are. It is something we can all do, if we really work at it, but frankly, it is not as useful of a skill as you might think, Jon.”
At Jon’s puzzled look, Dorje shrugged again.
“The future changes,” he explained. “All the time. Free will, you know? It can be maddening, trying to keep up with that...most of us don’t bother. It confuses as much as it helps. Too easy to get married to possible futures we like...” He smiled. “...too easy to get married to those we don’t like.”
Jon nodded. “I get that.”
“True prescients...meaning those who can see things that are much more likely to happen, who see past the randomness in individual choice...who see more the fates of a species, or a life-wave even...they are rare, Jon. Very, very rare.”
“Does the Adhipan think Feigran is one of those?” Jon said.
Dorje smiled at him grimly. Jon didn’t know how to read that expression.
“One more,” Dorje said, flipping pages towards the back of the book.
But Jon stopped the turning pages before Dorje got to the one he’d wanted to show him, clapping a hand down abruptly on a drawing that Dorje would have skipped over. On it, Jon recognized Allie again. Only that time, it wasn’t a boy she was with. She was also, notably, without clothing.
He stared at the drawing for a full minute before he could make himself understand it well enough to form a mental explanation for what he was seeing. Despite his casual musing as he’d left Allie’s chambers earlier, he hadn’t really believed Allie and Balidor had slept together. Truthfully, he couldn’t imagine his sister sleeping with anyone these days.
Well, that wasn’t entirely true, either.
Once he’d admitted that much, he found he understood what was really bothering him.
He hadn’t really believed Allie would cheat on Revik.
Even if he was Syrimne. Even if he was psychotic. Despite everything that had happened in the past however many months, Allie still seemed, in her own way, determined to make things work with her husband...if not now, then at some indeterminate time in the future.
But the man in the drawing clearly wasn’t Revik.
In fact, it was unmistakably Balidor.
Jon stared at the male seer’s face, the expression Terian captured with a series of fine, charcoal lines. He again found himself a little thrown at the talent in those nervous hands. But he couldn’t quite remain as detached as all that, either. He knew he was a little old to be reacting like he was, but he could admit it to himself, at least.
He was shocked. Actually and truly shocked.
After staring at the image for another few seconds, Jon met Dorje’s gaze.
Dorje shrugged, his eyes flat.
“The future?” Jon said.
Dorje hesitated. “Past, I think.”
Jon felt his jaw harden. He couldn’t quite bring himself to stare at the picture again.
“Does anyone else know?”
Dorje shrugged again. “Who knows? I do not even know, Jon. I know there is a picture. I have my own guess. But he is the best infiltrator alive, Jon. And she is the Bridge.”
Feeling his mouth tighten further, Jon nodded. Despite his reluctance, he found himself looking at the image again. Terian had really outdone himself. Seeing the expressions on both of their faces, he looked away a few seconds later, feeling almost like he’d walked in on them.
Dorje watched his eyes, his own cautious. Taking the book from Jon’s hands, he flipped the pages forward again, looking for the image he had wanted to show Jon originally.
“This one,” the seer said, once he’d found it.
Jon looked down to find a detailed picture of an old lady with a lizard-like face. She looked vaguely familiar to him, but he couldn’t pinpoint where he’d seen her before. In the background stood Revik, gazing upwards at a pyramid made of light. It was an odd picture, in that, for the pyramid, he’d drawn in black charcoal what wasn’t there, rather than what was, so that the Pyramid seemed to be made of light.
“Who is that?” Jon said, indicating the old woman.
“Xarethe, we think...although we have no current images of her.”
Jon jumped a little.
“What?” Dorje said.
“Just the name. He mentioned her.” Jon looked up. “Feigran. When he was babbling about creating more bodies.”
Dorje nodded. “She was believed to be dead before now...killed in seer purges in Eastern Europe before World War I. She was a geneticist. One of the first to really latch on and experiment with human science.” He raised an eyebrow at Jon. “If she is alive, and if Terian knows her, it explains a few things...”
“Like what?”
“She is the
one who likely split Syrimne,” Dorje explained. “She had the skill to do it. She also is a servant of the Dreng. She has been for many, many years. She may even be the shadow connection to the current wave of Rooks...”
“Shadow connection?”
“Yes.” Dorje gave a lightless smile. “There are shadow governments in the human world, right? Those that outlast whoever is in office, at any given time? You told me this, yes?”
Jon rolled his eyes. “Okay, yeah. Sure. Technically.”
“She is the shadow connection. One of the ones who holds the line to the Dreng. There would be more than one...”
“Salinse?” Jon said, glancing at him.
Dorje smiled. “Yes. Very good. Balidor thinks so...maybe.”
“Balidor...” Jon muttered, frowning.
His eyes lost focus on the cherry blossoms as they waved in a faint breeze. That same breeze sent fragrance over where he sat, making the sun pinkish through the petals...but Jon barely noticed as his mind returned to Allie.
Well, he knew now, why Revik wanted the Adhipan leader dead...even beyond the shooting Allie part. He supposed it was a testimony to Balidor’s abilities that he wasn’t dead already.
Christ. What had Allie been thinking? Did she really need sex that bad, that she was willing to let Balidor risk his life like that? She had to have known what would happen. And whose idea had it been anyway? Hers? Balidor’s? If Balidor had a crush on her it would explain at least some of his erratic behavior. It would also explain why he seemed to take it so personally that he hadn’t been able to sever Allie from Revik.
But jeez louise...what was Allie doing? It was so not like her to put her friends in danger like that.
But really, Jon realized, that was just an excuse, too. It took him another minute to puzzle out that he was actually angry at her...and not even for himself.
He was pissed off at her for cheating on Revik.
Jon felt his jaw harden. Gods. What the hell was that about?
Allie's War Season Two Page 25
