“Yes.”
Draya smiled, her indigo eyes knowing. “I told you.”
Her tone set Chandre’s teeth on edge. She spoke up before she knew she intended to.
“She is the Bridge,” she said, her words curt. “It is not her place to make the easy choices, simply to gain the approval of the masses she leads. The Sword belongs to her.”
Draya rolled her eyes in the exaggerated manner of seers.
“Ah. So kidnapping and torturing her mate...or handing him over to those human-loving Lao Hu, who show nothing but contempt for the rest of us...that was a religious act, was it...?”
“Perhaps,” Chandre said. “Perhaps it was an act of love.”
The other two women looked at her blankly.
Then Draya laughed.
“If I were the Sword, I would be asking that she loved me less, then...” she smirked.
Tugging a brush through her long, chestnut hair, she didn’t see when Chandre came up behind her. Before the woman could turn, Chandre caught hold of her shoulders. Gripping her with both hands, she slammed Draya’s back into the locker door.
The woman cried out, giving a low squeal of fear when Chandre put the gun in her face.
“What the fuck are you doing? Crazy dirt blood – ”
“Watch your tongue,” the East Indian seer said, dangerously soft.
Chandre aimed the gun directly at the other seer’s forehead, watching the woman’s coppery complexion pale to parchment.
“...You are talking about intermediary beings,” Chandre added, hammering each word. She swallowed, cocking the gun pointedly. “...And more than that, my friends.”
“Hey!” From the side, Talei held up a hand, a peace gesture. “Hey...Chandre, right? She doesn’t mean anything. It’s just talk...no need for violence...just talk. We are all upset at what is happening over there, na? All of us sisters, yes?”
After a pause, Chandre flipped the safety and lowered the gun.
“I don’t kill my sisters,” she said coldly. “But I expect them to behave as such.”
The woman Draya swallowed, eyes wide with fear.
“You’re out of your fucking mind...” she muttered, as Chandre moved away.
“Be silent!” Talei shushed her. “She is a hunter...do you not see the marks?”
Chandre didn’t bother to react.
Realizing she’d blown a chance at connecting with a seer who could have granted her access to the inner sanctum of SCARB, and in the capitol city no less, Chandre just shook her head, clicking softly as she shoved the gun back into her shoulder holster.
It didn’t matter.
The woman hated her anyway. She would never have gotten over her connection to the Seven. Not enough to grant her real access.
Even so, it wasn’t until Chandre had walked away, closing the locker and heading for the exit with her daypack, that she realized she was mostly angry at herself.
CHANDRE SAT IN a bar in Georgetown, nursing the same drink she’d ordered when she came in, almost two hours earlier.
She’d been approached, of course, as humans frequented the place.
It happened so often she hardly noticed anymore; she couldn’t hide her race as well as a lot of the seers working in the United States. Anyway, a certain kind of human seemed to relish approaching seers who weren’t conspicuously owned.
Chandre adjusted. She had no choice, not without opting for major surgery...which she refused to do. Even contact lenses over her red irises didn’t help much, given her height and the overall shape of her face. She simply moved like a seer, as Dorje had chided her once, during one of their infiltration field ops under the Seven.
Chandre could shake all of that for deep ops, if the need was dire enough, but it usually required wearing prosthetics to soften her cheekbones and the shape of her eyes, as well as a retooling of all her mannerisms. So far, it hadn’t been strictly necessary. No one contested her ownership papers here, given that they had the federal stamp. She’d stayed out of the seer ghettos at night, where most of the attacks occurred.
The humans still hadn’t gotten over what happened when Dehgoies had gone after his mate inside the White House. The humans still acted like their capital city existed inside enemy territory. The large seer ghetto circling a good percentage of D.C. didn't help.
Chandre was shielded from the worst of that paranoia, however. Working overtly for SCARB ensured that most humans would see her as one of the “good ones.” It was enough protection that Chandre didn’t bother with the effort of concealment.
Realistically, passing might not have kept the human males at bay anyway.
It might have kept them slightly more polite, however.
“How much?” a young guy in a suit smiled, his words slurred through his grin, his face flushed from alcohol. From the caliber of his rumpled suit, Chandre pegged him as an intern of some kind...possibly a congressional aide, or someone who worked for one of the many nonprofits dotting the city’s core.
When Chandre ignored him, he seemed to think volume was the answer.
“How much?” he said, louder over the talking crowd. “You working, gorgeous?”
She didn’t turn until he laid a hand on her shoulder.
Her knife was out of her boot and to his throat in a heartbeat. She gripped his arm, turning him so that the blade wouldn’t flash in the bar lights, or get picked up by the surveillance feeds. Pulling his face near to hers, she met his gaze.
“Yes, I am working, worm. Do you think you’d still like to hire me?”
The kid, who probably had only seen twenty-five seasons, given that he was human and they aged more quickly, went white as a sheet, even faintly green.
“No...” he stammered. “No, no...sorry. My mistake.”
“I think it was a mistake, yes.”
She retracted the knife. Flipping it quickly in her hand, she reinserted it in her boot, glancing around to ensure no one who mattered had seen her do it. Then, without giving the human boy another glance, she turned her back on him, facing the bar. When she did, she found the bartender standing there, shaking his head a little.
He didn’t look angry at her, though; in fact, she saw a quirk of amusement in his brown eyes. Smiling a little in return, she downed the last of her drink.
“Can I have another of these?” Chandre asked casually, lifting her rocks glass.
“On the house,” the man affirmed, plucking it from her fingers. Leaning closer, he muttered in a lower voice, winking at her. “You have no idea how often I’ve wished I could do something like that to these little pricks...”
Smiling back at him, Chandre, gave him a finger salute.
“Much appreciated, cousin.”
“Don’t mention it.” He set the vodka and tonic on the bar in front of her, but not before Chandre noticed he’d poured her the good stuff.
It was a much-needed reminder that some of these worms were worth saving.
That was what the Bridge came here to do, after all.
Help the worms evolve out of a need for all-encompassing war. Help those escape who she could help escape, if war ended up being inevitable...which it likely was.
Save as many as she could before the Displacement took them all.
At the thought, Chandre gestured in respect to her, long-distance, before taking a long drink of the vodka and tonic.
“...Esteemed Bridge,” she muttered under her breath.
You might want to be careful where you make that sign these days, sister, a voice said in her mind. Or you might end up with a knife at your own throat one of these nights...
Chandre turned abruptly in her chair, in time to meet a hard look above a fatuous smile aimed at a human male. The seer held onto the human’s arm, and he didn’t appear to have noticed the exchange. She wore a backless, sequined gown, and he a tux, so they had likely come from a formal dinner of some kind, or perhaps were on their way out, to the opera. Her razor-thin collar barely showed at the base of her neck.
It must be a light one, indeed, if she could speak through it. Then again, it might only be for show. A lot of humans liked their seers uncollared, despite the regulations.
Chandre let her shoulders relax, taking her hand off the gun inside her jacket.
The woman meant it as a warning only...and an expression of anger.
She was right, anyway. Chandre had to be more careful. Half the women in this room could be cloaked seers...but Chandre guessed it to be more like a third. Unlike in Asia, where the exact opposite would be true, the vast majority of seers she encountered in the United States would, of course, be female. The split in Asia often ran about 90/10, with males in the firm majority.
Here it would be almost exactly the reverse.
In Europe, things tended to split a bit more evenly, but still leaning heavily towards females. Perhaps more like 70/30...or even 60/40, depending on the country. Japan was more like the United States. So was Germany. South America varied from country to country, seemingly with no noticeable pattern. Africa, like Asia, was predominantly male.
Chandre had never really figured out the discrepancies, but it made sense to her that Dehgoies would have chosen to live in London, rather than the New World, despite the added sexual potential of a predominantly female population.
One needed balance, after all...or a semblance of balance, anyway.
Even Chandre felt this over-abundance of female seers. This was in spite of her personal preference towards the company of females more generally.
Her thoughts drifted back to the Bridge, even as Dehgoies flashed through her thoughts.
Remembering how she left them in Delhi, she frowned.
The Bridge, or simply “Allie,” as Chandre couldn’t help but think of her still, might not be thinking of her all that fondly these days.
Chandre pushed that out of her mind, though. She had more pressing things to think about right then. She still hadn't made much headway on finding the source of that terrorist attack in Hong Kong, or even an ID on the exact substance used in those gas cylinders.
Even with the few leads she had, finding time to chase them down had proven difficult. The Registry job still complicated Chandre's life, given her day job with SCARB.
That had been the thing to send a shudder...then a convulsing spasm...over the human intelligence and military community. The Bridge had been caught in live footage throwing members of Black Arrow security through the windows of a forty-five story building in downtown São Paulo...right before she detonated enough explosive to blow out the top four stories in a column of fire.
Of course, few in the seer community could do anything but applaud.
That operation had effectively removed most seers from the racial ident tagging system and resulted in the overthrow of at least ten work camps. It allowed political prisoners to escape and resulted in the freeing of enslaved children.
It had, in effect, been a giant jailbreak.
Chandre herself had at least four close friends who owed their freedom, and therefore their lives, to the Registry op.
Less dramatically, but probably more importantly, the entire tracking grid went down.
All seers who weren’t under collar and the direct supervision of their owners became essentially untraceable. Alyson and her mate had single-handedly dismantled the system that controlled the movement and social interaction of seers, which also meant their sentience categorization and proportional citizenship.
Registration and implantation had been mandatory for seers since the decade after World War II. That system made it nearly impossible for seers to move under the radar without some contact with the human authorities.
It also comprised the method by which humans determined which seers were “owned” and which “free,” as well as their relative docility. It determined whether they were permitted to congregate with other seers, and in what numbers. It tracked the nature of their interactions with the human population, where they were allowed to live, whether they owned their own sexual rights, whether they had the ability to contract out their sight. It told the security trackers whether a particular seer could travel without a collar.
It essentially dictated the everyday lives of millions of seers.
Given all of this, Chandre, along with the rest of the seer world, assumed that Dehgoies had won the battle of ideology within his and Allie's marriage.
Clearly, they couldn’t stay apart forever.
Barely a month later, while Chandre still worked twenty-hour-days as SCARB recovered from the hit in São Paulo...everything changed again.
Rumors erupted that the rebels had been attacked by the Lao Hu out of China.
Those same rumors put Allie at the head of that attack.
Given all of the chaos occurring in Asia and elsewhere, Chandre couldn't help wondering if Balidor ever told Allie what Chandre herself was doing, working for Dehgoies. The Adhipan leader placed her in the Rebel camp deliberately. He figured, due to her friendship with Dehgoies and her own militaristic background, that Chandre would make a believable mole. Hell, Chandre wasn't even sure if she disagreed with Dehgoies half the time, while he worked ops as Syrimne, so she supposed Balidor was right. It was less of a stretch for her to flip sides.
Yet Chan wondered if she’d ever truly fooled Dehgoies. She knew he wouldn’t harm her, both because they were friends and because of her relationship to Allie. He also knew enough about Chandre's history in work camps that he considered her a sister in arms.
He just sent her away. He sent her to America.
Given that she hadn’t been privy to the op they’d run against Dehgoies in Asia, Chandre had to assume that Balidor remained wary about her true loyalties, as well. Perhaps that's even why he sent her away in the first place.
Chandre also had to assume that Allie might not know the real reason she’d left.
Anyway, it had been Dehgoies’ orders that initially brought Chandre here, to this place. It had been Dehgoies who wanted her to apply for a position within intelligence, and specifically the branch of SCARB operating out of Washington D.C.
Chandre was a reasonable choice for that work, as well. She didn’t advertise it...in fact, she couldn’t be sure whether she’d ever told the Bridge...but Chandre had worked for Seer Containment before. In fact, she'd done so as a mole for the Seven off and on for a number of decades.
SCARB itself had been convulsing ever since the demise of the last American president, Daniel Caine. Created by Caine himself after World War II to control and regulate seer powers, the bureau solidified its hold on free and owned seers in the 1970s and 1980s. Until recently, nothing had checked their expansion into all aspects of seer lives.
Daniel Caine, a.k.a. Galaith, hadn’t been anti-seer himself. Rather, he had been a realist. He knew humans and seers would never live easily side by side, so he provided structure to human fear and prejudice. He knew that humans would never be content with a simple leveling of the playing field. To assuage their fears around seer psychic abilities, the illusion of absolute control was necessary. Prior to the hit on the Registry building, SCARB had even been moving towards mandatory collaring in any public place.
Some even wanted seers collared in designated seer zones.
Collars were getting more and more sophisticated too...with certain abilities being blocked while others remained untouched. Varying levels of negative stimuli were programmed into the collars as well, including simply cutting the seer off from the light of other beings. Early collars had relied much more heavily on pain to keep seers out of the Barrier.
Of course, for most infiltrators, pain still remained a necessary component.
Yet, for the first time in over half a century, the power of the human racial police was being systematically rolled backwards.
As a result, the races hovered on the brink of war once again.
Or, they had, at any rate...until the Sword disappeared.
With his absence, the fear of the humans had been assuage
d, if only a little. Enough to keep them from nuking Asia unilaterally, for example...or starting an all-out war with the Chinese in an attempt to neutralize their exponentially larger population of seers. Although that respite would likely be temporary, too. Especially if Draya’s intel was correct about Revik’s infiltration team being forcibly recruited to the Lao Hu.
Hey. You’re not asleep, are you?
The voice pulled Chandre swiftly out of her thoughts.
Seeing the seer standing there, she frowned. She checked an imaginary watch.
“You are late, sister.”
“I have good cause,” Talei said, sliding onto the stool next to Chandre.
Chandre watched the Asian seer’s gold eyes as she motioned for the bartender, pointing at the drink Chandre still clutched in her fingers.
Still lost inside her own light, Chandre found her mind wandering. Her eyes marveled at the woman’s smooth skin, a pale beige in color, at least four or five shades lighter than her own. Her eyes and light took in the dark hair, replacing it with a deeper red. She remembered caressing a scar on a different face, the woman who wore it smiling at her, her light brown eyes sad.
Pain shivered in her light.
She clicked out. Fighting to keep her reaction invisible to Talei, she tried to push out the image of Cass and failed.
She found herself remembering her last conversation with the human then, and frowned.
Picking up her glass, she replayed Talei’s words, if only to distract herself.
“What is this cause?” she grunted a beat later, taking another drink of vodka. She averted her eyes from the seer’s questioning look, propping her elbows on the bar. “You should not look at me so much, Talei, when you are with lackeys like Draya. She will notice something is up.”
The Asian seer frowned. “Don’t be stupid. What is up? That I know you?”
“Yes, that you know me. What do you think?” Chandre motioned at the room, her mouth set in a grim line. “You pick a place filled with humans, where she is likely to be whoring, or meeting with one of her Washington friends...”
“What is your problem, sister?” Talei said. “I am not so late, am I?”
Allie's War Season Two Page 63
