Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  For him to get free now would be an unmitigated catastrophe...even without the hordes of religious fanatics who would rally to his side, pledging their loyalty to him and worse.

  Luckily, the Lao Hu understood this, too.

  The Chinese seers weren’t looking to invite a murderous revenge spree from a telekinetic seer, either...particularly given their role in the overthrow of the rebel stronghold. Balidor had thought everyone understood the danger...especially Allie. He knew she was pissed off that the Lao Hu had exceeded their agreement and attacked the Rebel stronghold with force, taking prisoners. He knew she was especially upset over the deaths that had occurred, and the fact that most of the rebels had been forced to swear allegiance to the Lao Hu in the aftermath of their surrender, or lose their lives.

  Balidor also knew, although she hadn’t said it in so many words, that Allie had grown fond of many of the rebels themselves. The death of one of the females, in particular, seemed to have hit her pretty hard. The seer in question reportedly took her own life to avoid capture by the Lao Hu.

  Balidor knew Allie felt responsible. She wouldn’t talk about it, but they all knew.

  There were a lot of things she wouldn’t talk about these days.

  Even so, regardless of personal feelings, he thought Allie understood the danger they were all in. Looking around him now, Balidor could scarcely remember how he’d gotten talked out of taking that circuitous route to its end, without stopping along the way.

  But he already knew how.

  As angry as he was at her, he still couldn't bring himself to refuse her. That fact alone infuriated him as much as anything.

  Allie snapped out of her stupor long enough to insist they make the stop. She made the decision not long after they got the invitation from the delegation in Hong Kong.

  Balidor suspected she’d wanted to throw the rebels off Revik’s trail even more than splitting routes would have done on its own. She seemed, in particular, to be nervous of Wreg, Revik’s second in command. And yet she’d refused to kill him when the opportunity presented...for reasons Balidor still didn’t fully understand.

  Allie seemed to think that, of all of the seers who wanted revenge and wanted Dehgoies back, Wreg would be the most difficult to shake. In fact, Allie seemed to think Wreg would die before he stopped looking for Dehgoies.

  Balidor reluctantly agreed, given what he knew of the militant seer.

  But she didn’t voice any of that to the others, when she brought up the Hong Kong thing.

  As per usual, most of her real reasons remained fairly close to the vest. Balidor honestly found it hard to believe at this point, that she still had no formal training as an infiltrator. Half the time, she acted more like an infiltrator than those he'd trained in the arts himself.

  He couldn't help wondering how much the marriage to Dehgoies played into that, too. Since the two of them shared light, Allie would have picked up a fair number of his skill sets, in addition to his emotional issues, mannerisms and whatever else.

  The thought didn't exactly lessen Balidor's anger at her any.

  What Allie told the others had been more political, of course. She said she needed to show her face, if only to let them know she wasn’t afraid. She’d also wanted, as she put it, “to at least try and stop some of the stupidity before it gets completely out of hand.”

  Looking around where they stood, Balidor felt confident they had only made it worse.

  Whether they’d accomplished her real goal, he could only guess.

  Humans and seers slammed up against the barricades that the Adhipan and local police had quickly put in place to deal with the crowd. The majority of the protesters seemed oblivious to the uniforms on either side of the racial divide, fighting their way forward despite the long line of infiltrators wearing the hanfu clothing and black sashes of the Lao Hu...or the uniforms of the Hong Kong police. The calming influence that the Lao Hu and Adhipan seers attempted to descend over the bulk of the crowd shook under multiple hits from seers interspersed in the same rolling crush...as well as those watching through the feeds, most likely.

  The mob didn’t want calm, and unfortunately, they had numbers on their side. The constant shaking of the construct rendered its effects close to zero, even with over a dozen infiltrators working, trying to keep the threads intact.

  Anger surged higher in the crowd...high enough that Balidor could feel something had changed. Looking up, he caught a glimpse of his own face filling one of the image capturing devices. The anger intensified as his face flickered on more than one screen, rising in a sharp wave that told him that either the news of his role in the Sword’s capture had spread, or more free seers among the rebels remained un-identified than even the Adhipan and the Lao Hu supposed. Ironic, really, that he was hated for destroying the Sword's marriage.

  Especially considering how things had turned out for him.

  “She cannot come out!” he yelled. “They will kill her on the spot!”

  Cass nodded, looking grim.

  She didn’t take her eyes off the crowd. She clutched the strap of the automatic rifle around her shoulder in one hand, gripping his sleeve in the other as she looked around where they stood. Balidor glanced behind them. He noticed the giant Wvercian, Baguen, watching her minutely from a few yards away. Everyone instinctively gave the Wvercian a wide berth, even the angriest in the gathering mob. Wvercians, an ancient ethnicity of Chinese seer, stood at around eight feet tall on average, and usually had the girth of two regular seers.

  Cass spoke up, her voice a near shout. “They’re losing control of them.”

  Looking around, Balidor found himself agreeing with her.

  Signs shook more violently over the shout of chanted slogans.

  Balidor tried to feel Allie through the secondary construct they were slowly losing control of as well, the one that housed most of the rooms in the Hong Kong office building where they set up shop. They had arrived only the day before and already Balidor’s team had been forced to respond to two bomb threats, a number of skirmishes with seers trying to sneak into the protected zone with weapons, most posing as domestic help or security staff, and more death threats via the net and feed channels than they had received collectively in the six months previous.

  It didn’t help, of course, that representatives of the Chinese government, meaning the Chinese human government, were known to be visiting Hong Kong that very week.

  That fact only solidified Allie’s race traitor status in the minds of the majority of Western seers. There was no way in the Barrier they would be convinced that their joint arrival had been merely a coincidence. Hell, Balidor wasn’t even sure that he believed it himself.

  For all he knew, Allie had planned that, as well.

  In any case, any but those seers under the direct influence and control of the Lao Hu considered Allie public enemy number one. Ironic really, given that she’d been the darling of those same seers only a few weeks earlier, due to her role and visibility in the Registry job. Those recordings of her using her telekinesis on Black Arrow security had gained her hero-worship status with just about every seer not directly aligned with one of the human governments...including, Balidor suspected, many among the Lao Hu.

  Her face had been plastered all over news feeds. She’d been called public enemy number one by the humans. At the same time, the very mention of her name or Dehgoies' elicited shouts of joy among most seers, many of whom had lost family and friends to the camps.

  When the survivors began trickling back, the emotionalism around the Registry job only intensified. Loved ones, families, friends and even mates had been reunited, and continued to be as the weeks passed. Stories and images of these emotional reunions, some of which had been several decades in the waiting, had been plastered all over the underground feeds run by seers. Allie had been toasted in every continent where seers lived...more so in settlements heavily raided for the work and slave camps that had been liberated.

  But really, Dehgoi
es had been credited with the jail break itself.

  The fact that Allie had been involved, that they’d done the op as husband and wife, only heightened the emotional reaction to the event.

  Seers liked nothing more than a story about the devotion of a mated pair...particularly when that mated pair appeared to be working for the benefit of the race. The fact that they were believed to be the Bridge and the Sword, intermediary beings famous for both their allegiance to their race as well as to one another, only drove the mythologizing more.

  But everything changed after that raid on the Rebel Headquarters, north of Ladakh.

  Truthfully, things weren’t even all that clear among the Chinese seers. Balidor had listened to their thoughts carefully over the past few weeks. It was obvious that most of them had mixed feelings about Allie’s actions towards Dehgoies, as well.

  Those who knew of the imprisonment of Syrimne, along with the disablement of the rebel army, generally viewed her warily at best. Even those who had been directly involved in the raids themselves hadn’t all been in favor of the move.

  They, too, were believers of the Myth.

  Many also had relatives in the recently liberated slave camps.

  The humans, of course, were doing their best to capitalize on the chaos within the seer community. Luckily, they didn’t know enough about the historical basis for the rift to take real advantage. They instead made an attempt to reach out to the various factions using their own, human-centric incentives...offering them economic and political concessions that meant little or nothing to either side of the warring tribes.

  Most, thankfully, did not bother to research why this approach didn’t work. Instead, they continued to try clumsily to negotiate at the fringes, embarking on not-so-subtle ploys meant to widen the fissures between the largest of the competing groups.

  Sadly, those fissures were plenty wide without the humans.

  Allie herself seemed to still be struggling to place herself within these competing contexts –despite the fact that, from the outside at least, she served as the main figurehead for the forces representing the downfall of Syrimne. Given the backgrounds of the majority of seers, that wasn’t a popular stance in the rank and file of the seer community. In fact, it marked her for death among the most dangerous of them.

  The humans seemed equally unwilling to embrace her.

  Whatever she’d done to bring him down, Allie still reminded them a little too much of Syrimne. Few would forget anytime soon the images captured of her using telekinesis to throw armed guards forcibly through the organic windows of the thirty-five-story Registry building in São Paulo. Or the fact that she blew up the top floor of that same building moments later.

  “Where is she?” Balidor yelled through his VR link. “Do you have her, Tenzi?”

  “She’s on the other side...with Dorje...”

  “Keep her in the goddamned room!” he yelled. “We’re bringing the transport to the rear entrance, but we’ll go up top if we have to...I don’t want her moving until I get there. Trank her if you have to, but keep her indoors...”

  Shots rang out.

  Balidor dropped as seers around him instinctively hit the deck.

  Gunfire being more common in seer versus human-only communities, reaction times were more swift among those of his own race. Many humans continued to stand or half-crouch over the sidewalk, screaming. Their visibility doubled when the seers dropped.

  On the plus side, it probably gave Balidor the most accurate seer to human count since the crowd initially gathered.

  He ducked lower with the rest of the bent heads as bullets whizzed dangerously close by their small group. Yanking Cass down alongside him when her head remained too high, he turned when he heard another series of screams. Before he could shove Cass back towards the doors, another pattering of gunfire erupted, loud in the confined space between buildings.

  That time, it seemed to come from both sides of the velvet ropes.

  It occurred to Balidor that the Lao Hu were firing back.

  A bullet came close enough to his head then that he dropped entirely, realizing he was being targeted. He landed on his hands, face down on the pavement. As he still clutched Cass’ sleeve, she landed with an ‘Oof’ noise beside him; he felt a ripple of pain from her when her weight fell hard on her palms into the cement. The gun knocked her head in the same instant, bringing another gasp of pain.

  He slid an arm around her body, holding her to the ground and doing his best to act as a shield. It occurred to him in the same instant that he was thinking of Allie, even as he did that.

  The thought brought back another surge of anger.

  Why couldn't he purge his mind of her, in that way at least? She was his job, goddamn it. She'd made it clear enough that she would never be anything more than that, not again, not to him. She could say all she wanted that she was in love with her husband still, the man she'd originally married, but Balidor knew the truth...he'd seen it in her eyes.

  She didn't just love Dehgoies. She'd fallen for that prick, Syrimne, too, while she'd been staying at the rebel base. She'd let herself fall in love with this new version of her husband, no matter how evil the son of a bitch was...or how many people he'd butchered. She'd rather stay married to a soulless pawn of the Dreng than try to build a new life with someone else.

  Anyone else. Even him.

  Balidor knew all of this. He'd told himself all the same things before.

  But he thought of her anyway, as he shielded Cass.

  The truth was, no matter how angry he was at her, he was worried about her, too. Whatever else happened at that rebel base, it had taken its toll on her, as well. If she lost another person close to her, she might crack for real.

  Or worse, shut down to the point where they couldn't reach her at all.

  He threw up a cloak with his light, disguising their appearance from those standing nearest. Pulling his face off the sidewalk only a few inches from the curb, he sent up a brief thanks to his Ancestors that his enemies' aim hadn't been better, then grabbed the human's arm to drag her along with him. He kept low, pulling her towards the glass doors and the armed contingent he saw standing there, rifles cocked at their shoulders, their faces grim.

  Feeling Baguen behind him, along with a surge of the Wvercian’s irritation at him, he glanced at Cass and saw why. Blood ran down the side of her face where the gun had smacked the back of her skull.

  Feeling a faint flicker of guilt, he pulled harder on her arm, as if to compensate.

  He heard and felt the local human police in the fray now.

  Gunshots echoed in the small space, right before he heard the lower thunk of gas being expelled from metal canisters. Screams erupted soon after the gas hit, echoing against the glass buildings, and Balidor felt a kind of tiredness mixed with grief come over him as he felt the fear and anger expand out of the crowd behind him.

  It was familiar, but not so much that he didn’t dread what it meant.

  The seer world was once more ripping itself apart.

  He didn’t let these thoughts slow his progress to the glass doors. Instead, feeling the heat of emotion ripple out behind them, he pushed his way through the crowd more aggressively, fighting his way towards the lobby of the glass-walled business building. Cass remained with him, but he felt her stumbling to keep up with his long strides. Balidor only tugged harder on her arm, keeping her as low as possible without slowing their pace.

  It occurred to him again, that Allie had wanted to come through the front door.

  Gods almighty.

  He’d managed to overrule her without the usual back and forth, but it had been hell getting her to agree to stay inside while a smaller procession of Adhipan showed their faces out of doors with the Lao Hu acting as security.

  He assumed Cass snuck out on her own, Baguen in tow.

  The crowd must have been waiting in nearby buildings, connected through VR or some other networking device. In any case, the normal street traffic swell
ed in seconds to a parade-sized crowd. Balidor also noticed a lot more diversity in faces and heights than he normally would have expected in that part of the city.

  Even with the efficient dispersal of the Lao Hu, it grew apparent within a few steps out of the building that things would quickly get out of hand.

  Another gun went off, seemingly right by his head.

  Balidor ducked. He turned reflexively, meeting the gaze of a seer he recognized from the ranks of the Rebels. The female disappeared back into the crowd before he could get a lock on her amongst the bodies pressing in from all sides.

  Even so, he sent her image to the Lao Hu commander, who acknowledged it with a pulse of thanks. He sent it to the others before he’d withdrawn from Balidor’s light.

  Whoever she was, she’d been strong enough to see through his shield.

  Ute, his mind supplied. Her name had been Ute.

  He sent that to the Lao Hu guard, as well, though he doubted it would be much help here.

  Ducking into and through the crowd with Cass, thanking the gods he’d chosen to not come in uniform, he finally reached the glass doors. He flashed a Barrier structure at the Lao Hu security detail for entry. He didn’t pause but pushed Cass in front of him even faster once they were free of the crush of bodies.

  Seconds later, all three of them stumbled past the main lobby desk.

  The doors shut behind them, noiseless in the melee and seemingly well after they’d passed through their bullet-proof organic panes. The deafening sound of screams and distant gunshots instantly muted, leaving the three-story lobby strangely silent.

  The chaos in the Barrier didn’t lessen, however. The urgency Balidor felt there kept his fingers tight on Cass’ arm, and his legs moving in a near jog for the corridor housing the suite of elevators that led to the upper floors.

  The lobby itself was empty of anyone apart from security. The military must have evacuated the building when they realized what was going on. Either that, or they’d restricted them to the upper floors until the disturbance could be contained. The only people Balidor saw, in fact, were their own people standing watch over the elevators.