Aiming the gun at one of the remaining panes in the wall of rusted metal, he fires. The rectangle of glass explodes, breaking into larger shards and a circle of powdered glass. Fighting to breathe, he is still staring up at the building, holding the gun. He considers firing again, then lowers it, so that it is pointed at the ground by his feet.
He finds himself thinking about the old man’s words again, repeating them in his mind.
But his mind rebels, too.
He has tried. He has tried everything...he has endured everything. For years, he has swallowed his anger, his want of revenge. He obeyed even when it meant beatings, even when he didn’t understand why. He took all of it, did everything they told him to do. He didn’t run away, didn’t kill himself. He did everything they asked of him...every single thing.
But he is done. He isn’t following orders anymore. He isn’t following the scripture, or his uncle, or Merenje. He isn’t listening to any of them anymore. If he is really meant to do this, then the gods would want it of him. They would tell him how to do it. They would tell him what he is supposed to do. But the gods are silent for him. They have been silent for years. They abandoned him, like everyone else, when his parents were murdered by humans in those mountains. The world behind his eyes is flat and empty, made of dead walls and smoked gray glass. There is nothing for him here...no purpose. He does not know what he is doing here. He doesn't feel anything. No matter what his uncle says, he feels none of it. It has no meaning to him...not anymore. It is gone. All of it...gone.
For nothing. He did all of this for nothing. He endured all of it...let them kill everyone around him, all for nothing. He can’t do what everyone tells him he must do.
He is weak.
Anger fills him.
“Fuck you, Bridge.” Raising his eyes to the clouds, he raises his voice. “Fuck you! Come here, if you want me! Come here and fucking help me!”
He stares up at a blue sky patterned with darker thunderheads. Pain fights to break open his chest but he can’t breathe past the anger. He can’t feel anything but that hard pain...the shell that wants to fight or fuck or hurt something...to keep hurting it until he’s broken something with his hands, smashed it until he can’t feel any of it.
Light ripples through his aleimi, making patterns he can’t see...that he might only be able to see through his uncle’s urele. He’s tired of parlor tricks too, though. He’s tired of using his light to win at fights against humans, to mind-wipe teachers and town authorities, coerce blank-eyed females to lie down with him...
Pain hits him harder, along with another realization.
He’ll never do it. Never.
They’ll never give him the ability, because every ability he has he’s only abused.
He’s not just impure...he’s corrupted.
The anger turns into fury, a pulse of grief he briefly can’t control.
It bursts out of him in a hard, bright stream of light. Somewhere, in the midst of all of it, his grief reaches up, feeling for something familiar...for anything he used to know. He looks for himself at first, that presence he used to know...some hint that the person he barely remembers still lives there, somewhere. But that is gone too, whispered away like so many dead leaves. That hadn’t been him, either. It had only been a covering, something to wear when the sun shone on him, when nothing lived there to tear it away from the bones of whatever remained.
In the briefest, most futile moment, he surrenders.
He gives in to death, to meaninglessness...to the hopelessness of his life.
He gives in to his own worthlessness, to how little power he really has.
He gives in to having been left alone...left to die.
He feels something in his light open, like the breaking of his heart.
He glimpses a golden valley, filled with red clouds. An ocean lives there, made of diamond light, and he is there, briefly, surrounded by liquid warmth. The sky is crimson and gold, the water and waves filled with so much light he can barely hold it in himself...
He knows this place. Gods, he knows it...it is so familiar to him it hurts.
The pain changes, turning into something closer to love.
He isn’t alone. He was never really alone.
The certainty comes from nowhere, but he cannot shake the feeling it leaves behind. Atoms vibrate the air around him...a pulse of living light he can feel in his fingers, electric currents that raise the hairs on his arms. He lets out a low gasp, feeling another presence there, a presence so familiar tears spring startled into his eyes. His throat closes as his chest catches, as his light expands, rippling outwards, stuttering in its rhythms...
And then he hears it.
A sound like the swell of an ocean wave.
He knows this. He knows this, too. It is familiar to him.
He knows that light from the golden valley, he knows it from other times, other places. He knows it so well it worsens the pain in his chest, and then his light is moving, flickering, changing, coursing down trails so familiar they bring tears to his eyes.
A folding sensation starts over his head, a feeling like a part of him collapsing inside, and it fills him with so much he can’t hold it all; he can’t feel even a portion of it. A jolt of hot light floods him without warning, forcing another gasp, and he has to let it out, he can’t hold it, can’t begin to want to hold it back...
He lets out a cry, a near scream as he looses the fist around his light...
There is a silence where every bird in the sky holds its breath.
Until above him, the sound of breaking glass fills his ears.
He opens his eyes, unable to see for the light...there is so much light, he is blind with it, but still he sees somehow, looking beyond it, looking past it and through it, through those vibrating strands...
...and he laughs. He laughs...
...as every glass pane in the rusted building in front of him bursts outwards in the same instant. Shards fly from the rusted metal frames. They cascade down around him in a rippling arc, raining down and out like a glass umbrella with the strength of his light. He watches them float, filling the sky like the calls of a thousand birds before bursting, one by one, into a shroud of fine powder, whiter and finer than sand...
And he is laughing, laughing...
Light fills every pore in his being. He can’t express all of the joy he feels...it bursts out of him in another ripple of light, a love that he wants to share, that he pushes out and away from him, to reach anyone it might touch. In it, he finds himself...a feeling of belonging, or rightness that is so strong he cannot help but see it as divine...
He is who he is. He is who he was always meant to be.
He is alive, and the world has not left him alone.
And in that moment, he loves her so much.
She answered him...she answered his call when he needed her most. He will wait for her. He will wait forever if he has to. All the rest of it feels trivial. All of it feels like nothing, a short path filled with muddy ruts before the longer highway stretched out before them...
13
LABORATORY
"YOU ARE SURE this is it?" Chandre said, unable to keep the skepticism out of her voice. "It does not look right, to be a complex like you are suggesting..." Her frown deepened. "...The security protocols are almost nonexistent. Apart from that fence..."
Varlan barely looked up.
"You are missing things, sister," he murmured. "There is more here than it appears at first glance..."
Faintly, Chandre could see in his eyes that Varlan was mostly in the Barrier, likely coordinating the final surveillance with the three seers across from them. They all stood on the same side of the low concrete wall bordering the hills around the substation nestled in a green, tree-filled valley. The wall itself likely marked the edges of the government property.
Their real barrier was the high, metal fence located a few hundred yards below. It stood at least twenty feet in height and surrounded the actual lot and gro
unds of the substation itself. Inside that heavier fence, an additional row of lower fences surrounded the parking lots and buildings, but they didn't have security codes or an electrified field surrounding them. They were topped with razor wire, however, and locked with heavy chains.
"Organics?" she said.
He shook his head, still staring down at the fence. "Look closer."
Despite Varlan's use of the Barrier, Chandre chose to remain outside of it. She spoke aloud to him as a result, if only to minimize the number of Barrier presences projected by their small team in the immediate vicinity. She did not know for sure if someone was watching, but under the circumstances, it seemed wise to take precautions.
Anyway, Chandre wasn't a rank 11 infiltrator.
Chances were, if anyone was listening, it wouldn't be Varlan they overheard.
"I appreciate your silence, sister," Varlan said quietly, answering her thoughts. "...it is most helpful. And the complex is designed to look this way," he added. "We are supposed to think it is nothing but a electrical power substation, not something the military is protecting. We are not supposed to see the secondary structures at all..."
He gave her a thin smile, that whisper of elsewhere still visible in his dark eyes.
"Were you expecting a sign, sister...?" he joked in that flat voice. "One that reads 'Human-killing virus to be found here,' perhaps?"
Chandre's frown deepened, but she didn't answer.
When Varlan handed her one of his organic rifles, she took it, examining the touch controls to make sure she was familiar with all of them.
It bothered her when she realized she wasn't.
Again, before she could ask, Varlan sent her the gun's schematics in a single, packed thought. She accepted the gift with a nod of thanks, but couldn't quite return the Rook's smile.
He'd been friendly to her, more or less, once Eddard got him to agree to bring all of them along on his job. The fact that Chandre wasn't interested in a cut of his contract probably had at least something to do with his cheerfulness, and his overall willingness to include her in his plans. She'd increased his team by two mid-ranked infiltrators, both of whom were cleared and licensed for full firearms use...and completely free of charge.
But there was no possible way to trust his motives. He was too skilled of an infiltrator for her to be able to trust much of anything he said, really.
She studied the scar on his face, recognizing the mark.
He was one of the ones who survived the camps run by the Germans. About halfway through the second world war, after collars had been developed and produced at high enough numbers, the Nazis began rounding up seers, not just killing them wholesale. They began by collecting them for training and use on the battlefield, but their interest soon shifted to include medical experiments, as well. Once they started housing them in Auschwitz and the other large camps, they also began cutting their faces.
As a result, a lot of seers had those diagonal scars.
The marks served as brands, so there would be no mistaking who was seer and who was not. Of course, for the few humans with similar facial scars, this could have had unfortunate results...but for the most part, the system had been effective in identifying the seers out of the humans, and a lot faster than the collars did alone. The Nazis designed a different set of ident tattoos for seers, as well...but the facial scars were immediate, impossible to hide.
Chandre knew Garensche had such a scar. He told her once that an SS dagger bearing the words Blood and Honor had carved it across his face. He got it while standing in a line of other seer prisoners, waiting to be assessed for use in medical tests.
Terian had branded Cass in such a way, too, only as a human.
Chandre had never told Cass about the significance of the mark, but she had heard via intelligence reports that Terian lost many of his family in the camps. She often wondered if the mark had been deliberate...to brand her like cattle, as had been done to so many of the Second Race. She kept these thoughts in the back of her mind, however, as she watched Varlan signal to one of his seers to keep an eye on the road.
"Five minutes," he told her, his voice lower than a whisper. "The human says they usually change shifts on the quarter hour, and that the guards arrive twenty minutes before that..."
Chandre nodded, not speaking.
By the human, she knew he meant Eddard.
Eddard, who had designed this approach, to save them time. Who had provided them with the employee schedules for the site, and a frontal approach strategy that shaved weeks off the plan initially drafted by Varlan and his people.
Varlan, like most infiltrators, was conservative. He'd wanted to infiltrate the structure first...and if possible, find a way in down below, that bypassed primary security systems altogether, particularly anything involving imaging or DNA scans.
Of course, that approach would have taken months of surveillance at the site, and probably required a few death to replace current employees with some of Varlan's people.
Eddard claimed none of that was necessary. Somehow, he convinced Varlan of the same, although Chandre still didn't know how precisely.
Looking over the gun she held and comparing it to the schematics Varlan sent, Chandre couldn't help but remember Dehgoies' scathing remarks about the antiquated equipment in use by the Seven...and even that used by the Adhipan. Varlan's toys seemed to put proof to Revik's words, in that everything she'd seen him use so far had been pretty much state of the art. Although she understood the funding differences between the Rooks and the adherents of Code, she couldn't help conceding Dehgoies' point. Really, how could they expect to win at anything if they weren't even competing at the level of basic equipment? She understood why Revik would have found it necessary to secure other means of funding the Rebellion...other than selling books on the seer religion and relying on donations from philanthropic humans, that is.
It always came back to the same problem...Code.
In their purest form, the Sark Codes eschewed violence of any kind...particularly that against what the Code considered 'less-evolved' beings. The basic tenets of Code instructed that seers could not use their powers in anything but a defensive manner, either in defense of themselves or of the race as a whole.
Those definitions had often been stretched, of course, under seer leaders less peace-loving than Vash. The Rooks themselves believed they were working in defense of the race...even for its very survival. The direct followers of the Dreng were, on the whole, even more dogmatic about that point than most of those who had lived under the Pyramid.
Chandre's own feelings on how she interpreted Code had gone through a number of changes of late, as well. In terms of the Dreng and the Rooks versus the Seven, she felt significantly less strongly about the tactics than she used to. In fact, all she really cared about anymore was what lights each aligned with behind the Barrier.
She wondered how many in Balidor's army might even feel the same way.
Dehgoies' light had always confused her the most. Perhaps because of Allie's influence...or perhaps simply because of something pertaining to his intermediary status. Supposedly there were those among the Seven who'd entertained similarly conflicted feelings about Galaith, even though he'd been the head of the Rooks' network.
In any case, the loss of Dehgoies to the Dreng was a significant one indeed.
Even beyond her own feelings about him, the voice of the Sword was one that many seers listened to...as much if not more than the Bridge herself, even under normal circumstances. It didn't help that Allie had been raised human, and thus was often viewed as brainwashed even by seers loyal to her. That Allie espoused the same basic peaceful doctrine of Vash didn't help, either. The seers had grown tired of hearing those words in the past decade. Nowadays, such sentiments actually angered a lot of seers, particularly after the destruction of Seertown.
The successes Dehgoies claimed by following a more offensive approach worsened the rift, even in his short time of leading the rebels.
It was almost time.
He sent her another packed set of schematics, this one of the layout below the substation itself. She'd already received those of course, the night before, along with the rest of them. Eddard had supplied much of that intel, as well. Even so, she nodded to Varlan once he'd sent it, refocusing her attention on the task at hand, which had been his real intent.
They were in California, a few hours inland from San Francisco.
Chandre couldn't remember the last time she'd been in California. It was strange to think that the Bridge had grown up only a few miles from where she now stood.
She looked down the oak and scrub-covered hill to the fenced clearing housing the substation. She looked for the details she had missed, what Varlan had alluded to when he said she was missing things. She had to assume, from his words, that the clues as to the station's real purpose were subtle, but present, even for someone of her own infiltration rank.
It wasn't long before she began to realize what he'd meant.
Most of her attention up until then had centered on the largest of the structures behind the fence, a two-storied complex of green buildings. Electrical towers and transformers with criss-crossing wires filled most of the air behind the tallest of the green-painted office buildings, but they'd already decided the night before, while looking over the schematics, that most of that area probably constituted a real substation, either for the complex below ground, or for cover.
The largest of the green buildings had a high wall in front made of glass, a security terminal for entry and what looked like bullet-proof, organic doors. The front windows were bordered by landscaped trees and even some parking spaces for higher-paid workers. Only three cars stood there now...a black SUV, a European sports car, and what looked like an antique American car that had been refurbished to run electric. Not the sort of cars one would normally expect to see in front of a substation complex for run of the mill engineers and low-level techs. Maybe the occasional project manager or higher up making the rounds would drive a car like that, but it struck Chandre as sort of unlikely.
Allie's War Season Two Page 86
