Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  Truthfully, they were the first real infiltration classes I’d ever been given. Revik had always been reluctant to train me outside of the basics. He said he wasn’t “qualified” to teach straight infiltration...that he’d been trained too haphazardly himself to know how to break it down into the appropriate steps. The truth was, I realized after awhile, he’d been trained by being beaten when he made mistakes.

  He never came out and said it, but I got flashes, here and there, of him using a similar method himself, training new recruits under the Rooks. As a result, the whole idea of training me, even without that as motivation, rubbed him the wrong way.

  Balidor focused all of his efforts on teaching me how to shield. He, too, seemed somewhat reluctant to teach me a lot, in terms of the more offensive skills. Tarsi taught me a few things, but mostly she’d just been testing me for my potential rank...and trying to educate me about my husband, although I hadn’t known it at the time.

  Wreg and the others gave me pointers when I lived with Revik as the Sword. Even Dorje, Maygar and Chan taught me a few tricks, when I asked them point blank.

  But I’d never actually been given lessons.

  Now, I found my brain close to bursting following every session with the Lao Hu trainees. Sitting with them in a circle around our teacher, an old female seer by the name of Cilap, could be a little embarrassing at times. Most of the other students looked like kids compared to me, although truthfully, I probably only had about five to ten years on any of them in actual age. Due to my more adaptable aging pattern as an Elaerian, I looked closer to my human age...but to most seers, I looked closer to fifty or sixty, if not older.

  In contrast, my classmates ranged in age from their late teens to mid-twenties, so looked anywhere from ten to sixteen years of age to my eyes, which still couldn’t help counting age in relation to humans.

  After the first day or two, I forgot to care. I was too busy trying to memorize all of the technical tricks Cilap taught us, or that I learned from the other students. Cilap had me focusing on the tracking mostly and blocking and Barrier-sparring with other seers, which I’d never really done apart from haphazardly in the mulei ring. The concept was familiar to me, as I’d watched Revik engage in these kinds of battles a number of times with Rooks, but other than a few tricks I’d learned in mulei, I’d never tried any of it myself.

  Straight Barrier sparring with other seers, I'd never done at all.

  It proved to be fun, if really difficult...closer to chess than sparring in the physical, even using sight tricks...and confusing from the multidimensionality of fighting inside the Barrier. The first time I tried it, I basically got my ass handed to me by a kid who looked about thirteen. He looked a little sheepish when the fight ended so fast, but then both of us were laughing and I promptly asked him to fight me again.

  Within a few days of this, I was hooked.

  In terms of shielding and concealing, Cilap had me show the other students a few things I’d learned from Balidor...and then a few things I'd figured out on my own.

  She didn’t touch the telekinetic stuff at all, which truthfully, was a relief.

  I still hadn’t gotten a straight answer on what Voi Pai knew about the human-killing disease that those terrorists had demo'd in Hong Kong. The most Voi Pai would tell me was that there had been some kind of hit at a lab in the United States that wiped out the disease and its antidote, all but for a small sample. When I asked who'd died in the attack, she pretended like she didn't know what I was talking about. As soon as I arrived in the City, Voi Pai seemed to realize I didn’t know anything about it and mostly pretended like she hadn’t asked me in the first place. When I pressed, I got the equivalent of “don’t worry your pretty little head, Esteemed Bridge,” and “we have experts looking into it.”

  When I pressed harder, she retorted that she thought I’d “quit” so what did I care?

  I tried asking Ulai, but he genuinely didn't seem to know any more than I did. In fact, he'd seemed surprised when I told him about the hit on the lab in the States.

  I tried not to care too much about any of that...it wasn't like I could do much with the information anyway. Voi Pai and I were at least in total agreement that it was better that the Adhipan not know my current whereabouts or any of the specifics of our agreement. As a result, I made one call to Vash to tell him I’d left China...and that was it.

  It was better if they thought I was off “finding myself” or whatever. The way I’d left things, I figured they would probably head for America, and not look in China at all. As long as Wreg kept his mouth shut, that is...and as long as Cass didn’t remember anything about seeing me.

  I tried not to think about Revik much at all.

  It was surprisingly easy...or, maybe just easier than it had ever been before. It was as if some part of me had just closed shop. It left me in an odd kind of limbo when it came to sex, or even just everyday relating with the seers around me, many of whom in the Lao who seemed to be trying to befriend me, or at least get to know me, now that I was living with them.

  A large part of me just didn’t care...about any of it. I knew, somewhere in all of that, that I should care, that the numbness I felt wasn’t exactly healthy.

  The problem was, I didn’t really care about that, either. It was as if that whole part of me had gone on vacation, and didn’t leave a forwarding address.

  I wasn’t depressed though...not actively anyway. I wasn't even trying to kill my feelings. I simply rested in a flatline of indifference...about everything but infiltration, which pretty much consumed my waking thoughts, and even a lot of my dreams. I enjoyed little things, like a hot bath, or a foot rub from Ulai, or the snow falling at night over the reddish lanterns. I watched the birds in the winter gardens, and watched Ulai design and paint more screens. I even painted a few canvasses myself, which I hadn't done once since I'd left San Francisco.

  But in some undefined way, I was gone. Not home.

  On that level, the whole selling sex thing didn’t even bother me.

  The truth was, I’d just stopped caring.

  About all of it.

  21

  WORKING

  THEY STARTED ME off with a human. Which made sense, when I thought about it, but it surprised me. After the seers I’d trained with, facing a human struck me as almost...easy. But I suppose that was kind of the point.

  I think Ulai was more nervous than I was.

  Well, maybe not. But he hovered over me through the whole lead-up process to the event and stood just inside the door during, so at least I didn’t feel alone through any of it.

  I’d spent more than four days with the wardrobe people the week before. The process probably would have made a lot of my girlfriends back in San Francisco really happy, but I found myself looking at the ornate clock on the high table by the window approximately every thirty seconds, waiting for the few hours I would be released for infiltration training.

  The wardrobe team, which consisted of three female seers and two males, seemed to find me almost superfluous, anyway...more so when I did such a terrible job of hiding my indifference around their endless tugging and pulling and wrapping and tying and hooking and buttoning and knotting and untying and mussing and playing. They dressed me up the way a child would dress a doll...or, really, how a department store staff probably dresses mannequins.

  They would put me into dresses and skirts and shoes and wraps and scarves and various kinds of underwear only to take me out of them...I spent as much of the day naked as I did clothed. I stopped caring about that, too. When it was clear they’d gone back to the drawing board for this or that, half the time I didn’t even bother to put the robe back on, which was hot in the heated rooms anyway. Instead I just plunked myself down on the plush chair, my legs crossed as I sighed as loudly as I could at the ceiling.

  Once they realized I didn’t give a damn, they talked amongst themselves more than they spoke to me, finding styles and colors that flattered my body and face, and that
mixed with what they knew of client preferences...as apparently a preliminary list had already been provided, to everyone but me. They also discussed which clothes would be most compatible with the expectations of the sex itself, in terms of how they came off.

  I suppose if I’d been in a different frame of mind, it would have had its fascinating moments...anthropologically speaking. The psychology of the whole thing had more to it than I’d ever really given much thought around before. By the end of the first day, I even found myself listening to them, here and there.

  I realized by mid-morning on day two that I was fighting to understand this for real.

  Some of it might have been pride. Jaden, my boyfriend of six or so years in San Francisco, told me once that I had no awareness of the male fondness for female clothing. He accused me of being a bit of a killjoy around that, actually. I knew all about the stereotypes around women manipulating men with that kind of thing, of course...but it was a power I’d never really learned how to wield, one that I’d frankly never had anything but contempt for.

  But the reality was, this was my job now. I could remain as contemptuous as I wanted in the background, but the truth was, I needed to understand something about this, and take it more seriously if I was going to do this work for real. Maybe it was stupid, but I intended to not embarrass myself with my new crap job, at least not more than absolutely necessary.

  I knew how dumb it was to get on a pride kick around that, but there it was.

  Also, it was easier in some ways to think of it as a job...like acting, or even waiting tables. I knew something else lived there, too...something different than just pride on its own, or even an attempt to distance myself. Something a little too close to how I’d left things with Revik than I really wanted to admit to myself fully.

  Despite the part of me that listened whenever the information struck me as useful in any way, when it came to watching them sew and assemble combinations of colors and swatches, I was bored out of my mind. I couldn’t keep my thoughts from wandering to infiltration. I even talked them into taking off my collar so I could practice while I waited.

  I guess for a female, even a female seer, I really was hopeless.

  I tried not to let my mind draw the inevitable conclusions about that, either...or to think too hard about the fact that the only two serious boyfriends I’d ever had both cheated on me with women who understood those games all too well.

  The wardrobe team seemed as unimpressed with my indifference as I was with their artistic vision. Instead of dealing with me directly, they had servants ply me with tea and little noodle dishes, fruits and finger-length cakes, picture books and antique kaleidoscopes and virtual reality devices of various kinds...just to keep me out of their hair, most likely. When I asked them if I could work on infiltration, all of them seemed relieved. The lead costumer even went personally to get special permission from Voi Pai to uncollar me for the duration of the fittings.

  They discussed me and my body without bothering to soften their voices, including what they saw as my “flaws” and my need for just about every beauty treatment under the sun. One of them seemed particularly affronted in regards to my hair, which shouldn’t have surprised me, I guess, given my lack of any real hair cut in the past year or so.

  They set their team of beauticians to work on me with gusto the following day, even as they retreated back into the racks to continue the work of designing and creating clothing and accessory combinations for me once they deemed my actual body presentable. I had my eyebrows plucked, my legs and bikini area waxed. I got multiple facials, a pedicure, a manicure, my hair cut and styled, about two dozen make up combinations applied to my face, some of which I found positively frightening.

  In the plus column, I also got a few massages. I had my skin buffed and covered in towels and hot rocks by four different seers. I was scrubbed and moisturized and finally rubbed raw and set in a steam room for over an hour...I had my feet rubbed.

  Then they returned me to wardrobe yet again.

  I suppose they all had their jobs to do. Pride and competition and saving face seemed as integral to the City as it was to anyone presenting their work on a runway in New York. They wanted the clients to at least be wowed by the presentation...whether or not they had their private doubts they’d be wowed by me. The problem was, they wanted an ecstatic, squealing, overjoyed client...blown away by the transformation they visited upon my previous shabbiness.

  Instead, ironically I suppose, I found my mind aligning more with theirs. I looked at myself critically, standing outside of myself. I noted flaws, tried to decide if they would make me unique or be detracting. I tried to imagine the various reactions my appearance might evoke, depending on how I carried myself, how I held my arms and legs. I tried to predict how different styles might impact most male humans.

  I tried also to see myself from a male seer’s perspective...or even a female seer’s. Imagining seer reactions to me was harder. I’d never known Revik’s thoughts on my looks really, except through observation. The Revik I married hadn’t said much, in terms of what attracted him to anyone, much less me. He’d told me I was beautiful once, but he’d also been trying to get me into bed. Syrimne had been more flattering, but it was all so caught up in his myth of the Bridge it never felt as personal as maybe it should have. I knew he was attracted to me, of course, but I had no idea what happened within that spectrum, or where I fit overall.

  Anyway, I had no idea if he’d been attracted to me before we fell in love.

  I had less experience with seers in general, at least those who would tell me the truth. From what Ulai told me, their reactions were invariably more complex anyway.

  And, well...better hidden.

  In any case, I saw my body and face as props, and as I looked around at the other props in the warehouse, I realized I wasn’t in a very good state of mind when I didn’t feel like I measured up to most of them.

  Ulai told me I was being ridiculous. It actually seemed to anger him...he thought Revik had done a number on my self esteem.

  Eventually, one of the wardrobe seers seemed to pick up on how I was viewing the whole thing. A female named Wahlu, she began speaking to me almost as a colleague. The others followed her lead, and by the third day, I could ask any one of them questions like what they were going for exactly with a particular color or style, what order I should undress in, how to hold my arms or where to stand to show off certain aspects of my body through the clothes. What male seers looked for, in terms of physical characteristics, and whether it was roughly the same as human men. Wahlu spent hours explaining how they designed the looks of different costumes, which pieces I should leave on, when and where I should discard others, what colors to use near my hair and skin. She told me a lot about male seers, even going over my body specifically, telling me what they would appreciate about it most...where I was still immature in some ways, in terms of how old I looked without clothes, and how to use that to my advantage or hide it, depending on the particular male.

  She approached me where I was at...which was closer to how I approached the infiltration training. The truth was, I didn't really care how I looked, per se. I just wanted to know what the hell I was doing. I knew I would have to make this personal, at least to a degree, or I’d never be convincing to either the humans or the seers...but even that struck me as something that could be learned. If it wasn’t faking precisely, I could at least use my light selectively to evoke that feeling of intimacy without letting it happen on its own.

  Something about me made the other seers sad.

  I suppose it was the bond thing, what they could feel through me. I noticed it with Ulai first, but saw it a few times in Wahlu’s eyes, too, and even some of my classmates in infiltration class.

  At some point, they must have taken Revik out of the tank. The separation pain had worsened gradually over the weeks I'd been there, until there was no way to hide it from the other seers. It got to the point where I was having trouble sleeping. I�
�d started dropping weight by week three or four. I could see from Ulai’s eyes, and even from a frown I caught from Voi Pai, that they’d started to worry.

  Then, one morning it eased.

  Somewhat, anyway...enough that I could keep food down. My breathing improved, and my light seemed to remember it belonged to my body. I even overslept that morning, probably because for the first time in over a week, the separation pain hadn’t woken me up off and on throughout the night, so I got a chance to catch up.

  My light grew easier to control again too, which seemed to reassure Ulai. He told me, only after of course, that he’d been worried about whether I would be able to see clients at all in that state. He and Voi Pai had met a few times to discuss what they would do, in the event I got worse. They’d even discussed attempting to bond me to another seer, as that was the only partial solution that had ever been found to the problem.

  Since that was a new one on me, I was a little surprised. I’d been told there was no cure at all for the bond.

  Ulai confirmed that was essentially true. Re-bonding was risky as hell, and often didn’t take. Even when it did, it wasn’t always enough to keep the other seer alive. They’d only ever attempted it before when a bonded seer’s mate had actually died, and they were trying to save the life of the other half of the bonded pair.

  When the pain eased, everyone around me relaxed.

  It didn’t go away entirely, of course.

  I knew it would probably remain about the same amount of bad indefinitely, at least if our previous periods of separation were any indication. It might even get worse, depending on what he started doing with his light on the other end.

  But it did stabilize. I could even control it when I concentrated.