He’d heard the bombs. That meant planes. Fuel.
The two sides worked together, but separate...on separate rails.
The know-how, so familiar now despite its years of absence, mixed with the military side of him, the part that planned the op to get inside. His fractured mind worked best with concrete goals.
It only really derailed when he thought about...
Pain tried to take over his light once more.
He had to find her. He had to convince her...make her listen.
The doors of the elevator slid open. He found himself facing the ground floor. He stood there, a heartbeat too long, and the doors started to close. A guard saw him when he stuck out his arm, stopping them before they could meet. As the organic panels reopened, the black-clad human raised an automatic rifle.
Revik concentrated, briefly...
...and the gun broke apart in the man’s hands.
The shell exploded backwards into his face.
The Sweep yelled as metal burnt flesh, but not for long because Revik broke his neck before he finished exhaling on the first scream.
He didn’t have time to feel this.
He felt another gun go up and scanned. He broke the firing mechanism before he snapped the owner’s spine, causing another of the armor-plated soldiers to crumple. He stood there, panting, staring at the two men lying on the wide, red carpet runner, their bodies motionless, like broken toys.
For a second, he hesitated, filled with doubt.
Then a kind of wonder came over him as he looked from one man to the other. He gave a startled laugh, and it sounded loud in the hollow hall.
Something new pinged his light, and his focus returned again, sharper.
He stepped the rest of the way out of the elevator, reaching up high into parts of his aleimi that felt so much like him his chest actually hurt. He remembered this!
Terian was right.
He remembered…
Epilogue
PAMIR
I SAT NEXT to Vash, cross-legged.
We were mostly alone inside an enormous cave, next to a fire that burned high and hot. I say mostly because the cave itself lay inside a vast network of other caves that wound deep into the Pamir range and beyond, between Tajikistan and China.
Since the incident in DC, those caves slowly filled with refugees from Seertown and other places as the political climate shifted all over. Refugees continued to trickle in from Europe and the Americas, and even Africa and parts of Asia...joining us in what was fast becoming the new (old) seer stronghold in Asia.
The circle really was revolving back to where it started, I guess.
Anyway, none of us were ever really alone in those caves, not anymore. Despite their vast size and complexity, the whole place was a giant construct. Once again, that construct was actively maintained by the Adhipan as they took on even more of their traditional duties in the wake of ‘the incident,’ as most of us referred to it now, or simply ‘the thing in DC.’
Fire illuminated the cave walls around us...including a tall mural covered in fading images of animals and people.
A turtle sat under the world, next to a king and a queen and a knight that weren’t from the chess board, and a dragon that swam through the ocean. The Bridge stood holding lightning in her hands, next to a laughing boy holding a blue-white sun, his eyes filled with joy.
I tore my eyes off the boy’s face, taking a sip of my cup of chai.
The cave was warm, surprisingly so, given how damp and dead-seeming the maze of tunnels had been just a few weeks earlier, when we first arrived. Already, power was available in over half of the occupied caves as well, with the others in some stage of progress as the techs scrambled to keep up with the influx of residents. Even with the technological advances, however, I knew we were only now rolling into the hottest months of summer. From what I’d been told, most of us younger seers were in for a shock when we hit our first real storm in the later months of that year.
Most of us in the Seven were settling in to stay, just like the seers had for millennia before us.
Tarsi even lived with us now.
Well, more accurately, with Vash. They shared one of the cave rooms together, which surprised me, I guess...as did Cass’ decision to bunk down with a giant Wvercian she’d met somewhere while I’d been held in captivity.
Actually, the Cass thing surprised me less, although I could tell there was still some tension with Chandre.
Even Jon seemed to be getting on better in the world of the seers. He and Dorje played chess every night in the largest of the now-occupied common spaces, and I’d seen him in the sparring ring a few times, too, learning mulei from Tenzin and Garensche and some of the others.
He was certainly doing better than me.
It was quiet there, living in the mountains, but it wouldn’t be for long. Nor was it particularly quiet in the world outside. I still had access to feeds, thanks to Balidor’s people and a number of pretty high-tech organic satellite dishes arrayed further up in the mountains and protected by weatherized covers.
The United States had locked itself down.
Martial law had been declared in most major cities as riots raged, mostly in seer-related businesses, but also against the Chinese, who were blamed for colluding with seer terrorists, thanks to Terian’s war-mongering of the previous year. The United States’ borders had closed to all seers and a large percentage of human foreigners; they’d installed mandatory DNA tests for entry into all government buildings as well as major banks and other businesses.
Those seers still living in the United States...those unable to leave in time, or to disguise themselves adequately...were already being rounded up. We didn’t have a lot of intelligence on the details yet, but we knew it was bad, even just from glimpses in the Barrier.
Washington DC remained a quasi-militarized zone. We were waiting for news, but preliminary reports didn’t look good.
No one in the Adhipan had managed to find Feigran, either.
His capsule set down somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean, but Balidor hadn’t been able to direct any of his people to his best guess at the coordinates in time; the heavy organics in the machinery made the exact location too difficult to pinpoint, and most in the Seven were fairly distracted anyway, even before the attack on the United States’ White House and later, its Capitol Building.
By the time ships made it out to where satellite images found it floating, the capsule either sank, or was no longer there.
In any case, while the fate of Feigran himself remained under debate by the infiltrators in the Adhipan and the Seven, all of the Terian bodies appeared to be gone.
Wellington had been found dead in his bunker along with the Secretary of Defense, Andrea Jarvesch. The young girl that the Wellingtons had adopted a year earlier, Melissa Wellington, died mysteriously, too. The unexplained deaths hadn’t stopped reverberating through the human world. Nor had the fact that I had apparently “disappeared” from under some of the heaviest security ever deployed to guard a single seer…and seemingly without a trace.
Everyone from the Chinese to homegrown insurgents to seer terrorists from the Middle East had been blamed for the attacks. The Americans dropped a second set of bombs on the White House after Tobias drugged me and carried me off the grounds. Apparently that second bombing had been done in response to the deaths of Wellington and Jarvesch, in a desperate attempt to destroy the last of the terrorist cell.
It hadn’t. By then, no one had been left inside, apart from corpses and the odd straggler from Secret Service. The Scandinavian Terian had been there, too, his body dragged out of the underground chamber with at least three bullet holes in his limbs. According to the coroner, however, it wasn’t the bullets that killed him. He’d died before the wounds could bleed out.
Instead, he was pronounced dead from “unexplained causes,” like the others had been...like Wellington and Jarvesch and the girl, Melissa.
The usual talk of conspiracies and
cover-ups made the rounds of the lesser-known feeds. There was talk of a new weapon, something developed with seer tech. They thought I might have done it, using telekinesis I guess. They thought Caine’s old terrorist buddies might have evened a score.
Elan Raven hadn’t resurfaced yet either. Nor had Maygar.
But I didn’t much care about any of that.
I found myself thinking, now and then, about Haldren, however…otherwise known as former United States President Daniel Caine, also known as Hraban Novotny in Eastern Europe, or simply Galaith.
It had occurred to me more than once that the name Galaith meant “Shield” in the oldest of the seer tongues.
The shield had certainly crumbled since his death. During his life, Galaith had managed to maintain treaties within both the human and seer worlds. He’d protected the Seven in his own way, by keeping the rebels in the mountains under control, and keeping human passions in check when some might have wanted a more aggressive stance against the free seers in Asia. He’d created SCARB as a means to assuage human fears of uncontrolled seers, and then infiltrated it with his own seers to keep them from getting overly zealous. He’d even done what he’d claimed to do all those years ago.
He protected the world from Syrimne.
“No one’s heard from him?” I said, unnecessarily.
“Since yesterday?” Vash said gently. “No, Alyson.”
“And you’re sure he got out of the United States before they closed the borders?”
“Quite certain, yes,” Vash said.
He looked at me, and I saw concern in those dark eyes, a near worry, for the first time since I’d known him.
“Now that he is whole,” he added. “…he cannot hide his light so easily behind the Barrier, Alyson. He is a beacon now...much more visible than even he probably knows.” Vash shrugged with one hand. “He’ll learn to compensate for this, I’m sure. Until then...we can monitor him, at least. Attempt to discern the progress of his reintegration, and its possible effects…”
I nodded, only half hearing him.
I wasn’t up to asking again, why no one had told me...or told Revik...who he really was. I could hear their reasons a hundred million times, and they still wouldn’t make any sense to me.
Nor would they change anything.
“It is dangerous,” Vash said softly. “What you are doing.”
I didn’t bother to ask him what he meant.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.
“You must be firm in your mind, Alyson. You cannot compromise on this. You cannot...you must see how dangerous such a fiction is.”
I nodded to that too. But I didn’t feel it.
Sometimes I think the whole of human...and seer...thought is nothing but a story about things we would have done anyway, explaining it all to ourselves and anyone who will listen, and always in retrospect.
“Alyson,” Vash said softly. “The man you knew as Dehgoies Revik...he is dead. You must accept this. You must feel it as true.”
He paused, likely waiting for me to look over.
I didn’t.
“...The other two personality configurations were always dominant,” he said. “At least since he was a child, since Menlim broke his mind...”
When I didn’t look over that time, he sighed, clicking softly in consternation.
Sadness whispered from his light, more of that worry that felt so different from how I normally perceived him. I felt guilt there, too, I realized. I closed my own light in response, squeezing my knees against my body, as if to block out everything else.
Vash clicked again, softly.
“We are running out of time, Alyson,” he said. “...Once he integrates the different sides more fully, he will be even more dangerous. There will be aspects of him that remind you of your mate, but he will not be your mate. He will never be again, Alyson. Never. You need to understand this...”
He sounded almost afraid now.
“Sooner would be good,” he added. “Tarsi said she told you. She warned you in the cave. You may have to kill him, Allie...it may be necessary.”
“It would be suicide,” I said, feeling my jaw harden.
He laid a hand on my knee. I don’t think he’d ever been so gentle with me.
“Perhaps not,” he said. “You did not fall in love with the other personalities, Alyson. I do not think his death means yours anymore...if it ever did. You married someone else. Someone who no longer exists.”
Sliding my fingers into my hair, I held my head in both hands, staring at the fire, trying not to think about his words.
He let the silence stretch...longer than I could.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” I said. “I can’t, Vash. Not now. And it doesn’t matter, anyway. He hasn’t come near me…”
“You cannot afford to wait,” he warned. “You have seen how dangerous he is. You must know, having seen who he was then…from spending time with the boy. He will only grow more dangerous, Allie. He is not a child anymore...but his mind still operates as one, in many ways. It may always, given what he was forced to endure...”
I let my eyes scale the wall once more, taking in the high mural of images. I focused on the painting of the boy, and my eyes blurred. The depictions looked just exactly as they had in my dreams, only the paint had faded.
There was probably some kind of metaphor in there somewhere, but I didn’t want to think about what it was.
Instead I climbed to my feet.
One nice thing about seers, you didn’t have to make up some kind of reason to leave.
You could just go.
I walked down a narrow passage that twisted between Vash’s cave and the wider structure. Reaching another turning, I veered right, taking the middle passage to make my way back to my own room...or whatever one called a part of a cave that looked like a room and had carpet and power.
It was furnished. It had a desk, a bed, a bookshelf, a lamp…even a comfy chair. The electricity came from organic generators, so didn’t tend to flicker or brown out like it had in India. The section of the caverns that I’d chosen for myself was closer to the outside entrance than any of my friends, a fact which drove Balidor crazy for security reasons.
And yet, the decision hadn’t been carelessness on my part.
Vash was right. I was being stupid.
And anyway, he wouldn’t be crazy enough to come here. Thousands of years old, the construct inside the caves made what I’d felt in the White House seem like a child’s toy. I’d nowhere-near figured out all of the complexities residing within it, either in functionality or in terms of the information stored in its folds; the construct contained more rooms and realities than the cave structures themselves. It housed places and memories that stretched back to the time of Elaerian...my people, or so Tarsi claimed.
Our people, I supposed.
The thought made my chest hurt all over again.
I’d already been warned that it might get pretty cold in the winter, if I didn’t find a way to shield myself from the wind through the openings to the outside mountain walls. That was in spite of the significant number of windbreakers and shields housed outside. Winters in the Pamir, so I’d been told over the past few weeks, put a whole new spin to the concept of “seasons.” Everything died outside the caves...everything that wasn’t artificially sustained in some way. In this part of the world, everything living was reborn every year, starting over again from nothing, from death itself.
But I’d already made up my mind.
I couldn’t stay here.
I put them all at risk if I stayed. And anyway, I’d already decided that I couldn’t just hide with the other seers. It was time for me to go back, to do something. I’d have to leave quietly of course; Balidor would have a fit if he knew I was even contemplating leaving the Pamir.
But that was a detail, really. I wasn’t someone who could just hole up in the mountains, waiting for Armageddon. I would go to the Chinese seers, maybe. See if they would
talk to me.
I was still mulling this over in my mind, nearing my segment of the caves, when I pulled up short.
Stopping, I listened.
Feeling my heart tighten in my chest, I stared up through the darkness, sure suddenly I wasn’t alone. I looked back from where I’d come, towards the torches lighting the mouth of the cave.
Nerves rippled through, but I couldn’t pinpoint their source.
“Cass?” I said. “Hey, this isn’t funny.”
No one answered.
Most of the other seers were asleep by then, and not many lived on that side of the settlement anyway. Generally, my only visitors were Cass and Jon, and occasionally Balidor. I missed my friends, but I understood, too.
I wasn’t much fun these days, not for any of them.
The truth was, I’d been mostly alone since we got back from Salinse’s stronghold, which was probably why Vash had asked to see me.
My friends tried their best...for the first few weeks, at least...but eventually I wore them down. It was exhausting being around other seers, too. I affected them, and I hated the look on their faces when they wondered about me, about what I would do now, given my options.
I took another step.
Holding my breath, I listened.
Before I could resume breathing, pain slid through my light, so powerful I couldn’t move, couldn’t see past the light that flared in my eyes. Maybe it was for all the reasons everyone told me it would get worse...the phase we’d left things, the fact that we’d both been alone for far too long, the fact that I still felt him sometimes, watching me, wondering about me...
I stood there, half-crouched, fighting past the flood of emotions that tried to sort themselves out behind my eyes, when he appeared beside me.
Shock flooded my light. I was sure I was dreaming...
Allie's War Season One Page 99
