Stars met the horizon in a cluster of pinpricks, creating a curved black bowl.
I blinked, tracing the swath of the Milky Way as I listened to faint music from other decks. A whisper from the Barrier showed me bars, casinos, hot tubs, restaurants, a dance club. I saw maps inside the construct I swam through, what might have been tracers of the various guards moving through the ship, some of them on duty, some off.
I didn’t care about any of it.
My gaze drifted a few balconies over, to where a lithe form stood alone by a painted rail. I glimpsed the telltale cheekbones of Chandre framed by thin, black braids. She stood unnaturally still. It wasn’t the stillness of a living being, but that of a boulder, or a parked car.
Then warm fingers touched my bare shoulder and I nearly shrieked.
Feeling him, I turned, relaxing even more when I saw his face.
I watched his gaze follow mine to the adjacent balcony. He stared at the other seer, and I wondered briefly if they were talking...then I remembered Kat and wondered something else.
His pale eyes shifted back to mine.
His fingers ran lightly down my arm, then wound around my hand.
“What are you doing?” he said, quiet.
I shivered, staring down at our joined hands.
Thinking about his question, I pointed up. His gaze followed mine and I saw his expression grow less hard as he took in the wash of stars. He continued to stand there, not moving. When the wind rose, I felt him shift the angle of his body so that it shielded more of mine.
Something in the warmth of having him near brought the emotions back without warning. I felt that kicking at my heart begin again, the feeling I’d woken to, mixed with a silent photograph of a decomposing eye staring through matted, dark hair I used to like to tug on with my fingers when I was a kid.
He wrapped his arms around me.
“You need to cry,” he said. “Why don’t you cry?”
I didn’t have an answer.
“Do you want someone else here? A female?”
“No.” I cleared my throat, then shook my head. “No, I want you here.” I gripped his arm tighter. “But I need something from you.” When he drew back, I studied his face. Seeing the taut look there, I smiled, but without humor.
It didn’t take much to arouse his paranoia, I’d also learned.
“Tracking,” I clarified, releasing his arm. “Shielding. I can’t stand being this helpless...and I’ll lose my mind for real if I spend another day in bed.”
I felt him think. Interest grew in his light.
“Tomorrow?” he said.
I nodded. I leaned into him again and felt him react, as he sometimes did...but he only tensed until the feeling faded in both of us. I knew I was taking advantage, letting things blur so much. I wondered if he’d even give me sex if I asked, if only to distract me.
I felt his breath pause.
“Is that what you want?” he said, low.
His words vibrated his chest against my ear, but I heard every one. I considered pretending I hadn’t.
“No,” I told him instead.
I felt him hesitate, but his relief was palpable...palpable enough to make me feel worse.
I let my embarrassment be there, knowing he felt it, unable to do anything about that, either. Pride became meaningless when everyone could read your mind; you could either accept being pathetic in hundreds of unexpected, unacknowledged ways...or go crazy.
He withdrew slightly from our embrace, then slid his light into mine as if to compensate, merging into me until I couldn’t move. I got lost there, like wandering into a vast space with no walls or corners. No sexuality lived behind it, nothing but warmth and light, like being immersed in steaming water. He relaxed more, willing me further in. I started to react but managed to dull it, aided by the fact that I didn’t feel anything from him other than calm as he leaned into me.
Later, I would remember clouds...giant clouds of light.
There is a valley between high mountains, a red and gold crevasse that opens out onto a sea of liquid gold and diamonds. Here, I’m never alone. My friends surround me, and the water caresses every worry from my mind. My mother swims in that light-filled ocean, open in a way I barely remember. She laughs, splashing me with her hands, and her dark eyes shine with a soft calm, in a way they never did when—
I jerked awake.
The sound of the ship’s prow pushing through water greeted me, along with the motion of his breath under my cheek from where he held me tightly against his chest.
He was breathing harder; I felt him fighting to control it. Without pulling away, I turned my head to gaze at the ocean.
Here, the water stretches only into black nothingness and cold.
Then, out of nowhere, he speaks.
“Allie...I lied to you. I remember my parents. I remember when they died.”
It is a clumsy thing to say. I feel his awkwardness as he looks for a way to re-express it, to give it meaning to me. Tears well in my eyes. He holds me tighter, and I feel his relief as I finally let some part of myself go.
I won’t see my mother again...except in nightmares.
In those dreams, as in life, I am always too late.
17
SCHOOL
REVIK STOOD BEFORE me, his height outlined in stars.
The night sky propelled me through its virtual folds, reconstructed in exacting miniature. I extended a hand to one of the fist-sized flames, feeling its warmth, wondering at the detail in the illusion.
“Where do you get these toys?” I said wonderingly.
Seer tech, he sent. “Are you ready?”
I nodded, gripping his shirt because it somehow helped with the illusion of flying.
Do not leave me, he warned. ...Not even a little, Allie.
Control freak. I smiled, tugging on his shirt to get him to smile back. “We’re just looking this time, right? A little psychic tom-peepery?” Feeling him hesitate, I shooed him with my free hand. “I won’t leave you.” I crossed my heart, saw his eyes follow my fingers. “Promise.”
“In Prexci, Allie.”
Thinking briefly, I switched languages. “I vow it!”
He continued to look doubtful.
I had asked for this.
We’d been eating breakfast the morning after that night on the balcony. We were halfway through plates of eggs and toast and ham when I reminded him of what he’d agreed to the night before. Instead of hesitating, or seeming disappointed, as I’d more than half-expected, he nodded at once, as if he’d been thinking about it.
First, though, he asked me what I wanted to learn.
“Everything,” I said, taking a bite of toast.
He smiled. “I’m not sure I can accommodate that—”
“Tracking,” I said. “Can you teach me that?”
A light sparked in his eyes. “Yes.” He leaned closer to me. “Where do you want to start?”
“Who ordered the hit on my mom?”
His pale eyes had immediately flattened, returning to the dull cold of an infiltrator’s eyes. He leaned back in his chair.
I got up when he didn’t speak, found a pen in the drawer of the inbuilt cabinet under the wall screen as I grabbed a sheet of the ship’s stationary. Plopping the paper down on the table in front of him, I bent over where he sat, sketching an outline of the Pyramid from memory. I took a few minutes, delineating the nodes that I’d seen change places, marking tiers I’d seen, too.
Revik watched me draw, shifting slightly in his seat, his arms crossed.
I circled the man sitting on top.
“Him. He’s the guy, right? Who is that?”
Revik met my gaze from less than a foot away. I could tell he was grudgingly impressed, but I wasn’t sure by what. He wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin, fingering the glass of juice by his plate. He gave a short laugh.
“D’ gaos, Alyson.” His pale eyes flickered up. “The best trackers in the Adhipan can’t answer that question.
If you want to learn how to track, start with something small, something you have a connection to. These things go in stages...”
“So you won’t help me?”
His eyes narrowed. “Did you hear what I said?”
“I heard you. It’s just that I really think I—”
“Alyson!” He gave another short laugh. “No!”
“But how is it different from tracking anyone else?” I persisted, leaning my palms on the table. “Personal connection, right? Or a connection to something that’s connected to him? How hard can that be? I met that Terian guy...and you two were friends, right? And aren’t there, like...a million Rooks? You must still be connected to a few of them.”
He stared at me, his eyes horrified, bemused...even a little wary.
Pushing me gently aside with one arm, he stood and picked up his plate, placing it on the room service tray, stacking it on mine with the covers.
“I’ll teach you tracking,” he said after another pause. “But you’re going to have to do it my way.” He glanced over his shoulder, surprising me by smiling. “...As far as the ‘everything’ request, I have some ideas. How open are you?”
Open, as it happened.
Partly to distract both of us, and partly because he had too much time on his hands—he was type A with a capital “A,” I was learning—Revik made me his project. I knew he wasn’t telling me everything in terms of his reasons, but then, after our little talk that morning, neither was I.
He pushed me to learn not one, but several languages, mainly the seer tongue, Prexci, and basic Mandarin. He also wanted me to learn Russian, Hindi and Sanskrit, but apparently wasn’t enough of a masochist to start me on those until I’d made some headway with the other two.
He lectured me on seer history, politics, culture, mythology, biology, law...especially law; he was big on law.
He obtained recordings for when he might be absent or asleep, covering subjects like the entire Sark Codes, a sort of bible for his people. He described the evolution of controls following the death of Syrimne, the only documented telekinetic seer...and let’s just say, Revik’s version differed substantially from what I’d learned in school. He explained how laws for seers under the Human Protection Act evolved to include mandatory registration, travel, employment and residency restrictions, forced implantation, sight slavery and how Seer Containment, or SCARB, grew out of a branch of the World Court.
He tested me, trying to gauge what I could do with my light. He didn’t pull any punches, either, pronouncing me worthless at blocking and not much better at reading, what he called “the basics.” He said my concentration had to improve about a hundredfold before I could do anything in the Barrier alone.
To teach me blocking, he’d taken to hitting out at me with his light when I wasn’t expecting it. A few times, he caught me off guard enough...and hit me hard enough...that I got a nosebleed, like he had in the car.
He also obtained permission to have Eliah, one of the Seven’s Guard, teach me mulei, the seer martial art. When I asked why he couldn’t just teach me himself, he mumbled something about how he wasn’t allowed. I heard the word “penance” muttered somewhere in that speech, but he didn’t explain to me what it meant.
The Seven’s Guard kept regular passengers and crew out of our part of the ship, which also meant seers performed all housekeeping and food delivery. They stripped one of the larger rooms of furniture to make an exercise arena where Eliah could train me in sparring, too. The sparring itself was damned hard—seers had faster reflexes, better hearing and vision, more intolerance to pain because they could detach their light from their physical bodies, and they mixed sight skills in with their physical fighting.
So basically, no matter how much I absorbed, I earned new bruises daily.
Revik taught me “normal” things, too.
Before I was fully awake that morning, he sat on the end of the bed, explaining semi-organic machines to me, and the basics on how they worked. Laying Barrier images over virtual, he also showed me the primary theoretical models or “breeds” of living machine. He explained how they arose from Barrier experiments by seers during that brief period of integration with humans in the early twentieth century, and how seers were banned from scientific research in the forties partly because a handful of renegade seers took to “persuading” the more intelligent organics to turn on their human masters.
He said Syrimne basically invented the wires, too, while experimenting with ways to both enhance and control seer powers using organics and semi-organics.
I’d never heard that version of history before, either.
Some of what Revik taught me was blatantly illegal.
Like how to break keypads and access locked computer networks, pulling passwords and bypassing firewalls with my sight. How to avoid racial tagging systems and blood monitors as well as closed-circuit cameras and other security surveillance. How and when to push humans into giving me things I needed. How to feel facial recognition software and other external scans with my aleimi, and how to fool a DNA, fingerprint or iris scanner into a false positive for human, or a false negative on an ID by my DNA, if I was wanted by SCARB or Interpol.
Others were relatively benign.
Like how to greet strange seers and the rules on asking other seers for help. Legal loopholes such as when and how to claim clan status to avoid certain searches and seizures. Etiquette in seer temples and homes. How to act towards older seers, especially family members or any other category of seer to whom respect or deference was owed.
Revik informed me I would get a new identity and a clan tattoo once we made it to Asia. The Seven would reclassify a dead seer with my stats, and presto...Alyson May Taylor would cease to exist.
I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.
Revik further explained how I could claim proportional citizenship if they set me up with a human sponsor. Meaning, if I gave up some rights of movement and association, including sexual rights, depending on the contract, I would get limited citizenship rights proportionally related to the contractual agreements with whomever I worked.
“Your world is terrifying,” I told him.
“We didn’t make it so,” was his response. He paused then, thinking. “Well. Mostly.”
He went on to explain that contractual citizenship was just one way humans pressured seers to work for the military and in other quasi-legal occupations. Civilian contracts could only grant rudimentary rights...rights which generally didn’t include travel or association beyond specified categories...”entertainment,” including prostitution, being one of those most easily granted.
The military offered, among other things, nearly unlimited freedom of movement when not on the job, coupled with moderate rights of association without the need to sell sex.
Not surprisingly, a big market for seer contracts also existed in organized crime syndicates. But, Revik noted wryly, the life spans of those seers tended to be shorter, and Rooks dominated that market almost exclusively. Even the mafia didn’t make a habit of killing seers indiscriminately, however; trained seers with high sight-ranks were far too valuable.
Seer mafias existed as well, according to Revik, mainly dealing in seer children and organic material, including blood.
I got flickers as he spoke, glimpses of Asian seers on donkeys, leading dirty, barefoot children with dark eyes across the snow, metal collars around their necks like those I’d seen on the prostitutes and other owned seers in San Francisco.
He’d also mentioned casually,
...Even if you are able to legally change identity, you should know that Sark females like you are not legally sentient to the seers, either. If your race were made public by the Council, I would officially be your owner. And if I forbid it, you cannot consent.
We’d been eating on the balcony, and he paused at this, taking a bite of apple as he waved his hand vaguely.
It can be good for us, for they cannot lie and say you have consented where duress was involve
d. Providing you trust me with this, of course.
I’d stared at that particular mouthful, not sure where to begin.
“Not sentient?” I said. “As in lacks sentience?”
He’d shrugged. “It is a legal fiction, to require ownership.”
“But why females, exactly?” I’d said.
“Not females,” he said, looking at me. You misunderstand. These laws are to control seers with telekinetic powers.
That took me another few seconds to process. Even so, I had to admit it made sense, given the Syrimne thing.
Finally, I shrugged. “So I’m a different race now?”
Revik had startled me, gesturing in the affirmative.
“Well,” he amended, glancing at my expression. “Not really...your blood is somewhat different, but other seers have this genetic anomaly who are not telekinetic. You can reproduce with us...as far as I know.”
He hesitated, looking up at me where I stood by the balcony. He seemed to pick up on the fact that I knew he wasn’t telling me something.
He added, Telekinesis is believed to be at least partly genetic...so with females it could potentially be passed to offspring. It makes you very valuable, Alyson, and in a way that is more real to those who may not care about your significance as the Bridge. It is unclear to me how superstitious some of the higher ranking Rooks are. Although it is believed that Galaith himself is religious...
“Galaith? That’s their leader, right?”
“Yes.” At my continued stare, his colorless eyes had grown impatient. “You must have known they would have recorded what you did in the diner...with Jon. You have no one to blame but yourself, Allie.”
But I’d been remembering something else. The bridge over Lake Washington. The way the guardrail seemed to fold into itself just before we hit. It occurred to me that I must have done that, too...and that the Rooks chasing us must have seen me do it.
When I glanced at him next, Revik’s stare had grown irritated once more. More than that, I got a flavor of angry puzzlement underneath.
Allie's War Season One Page 22
