Jon didn’t want to think about that, though.
He glanced back over his shoulder at Revik.
The Elaerian’s arm was curled around Allie, holding her flush against him as he looked out over the water. His clear eyes had sparked into life once more, glowing a pale green. Jon realized hers had, too, when he glanced down at Allie’s face. Her fingers gripped Revik’s arm and his back, her arms wrapped with surprising strength around him as they held one another.
When Jon glanced up at Revik’s face, he caught the seer looking at him.
“Now what?” Jon said through the link.
Revik’s gaze sharpened.
“Now, we go home, see our friends.” He slid a hand through Allie’s hair, pulling it carefully away from her face. “…and we wait.”
“Wait for what?” Jon said.
“For that bitch to give me a call,” Revik said, giving him a faint smile.
The smile didn’t touch Revik’s eyes, Jon noticed.
Watching the Elaerian lean down to Allie’s ear, speaking to her quietly, Jon realized he was staring again and looked away, swallowing as he turned over Revik’s words.
They actually made a perverse kind of sense.
Now that Revik had more or less succeeded in sealing Manhattan off from the rest of the world, taking out a good chunk of its defensive and offensive capability in the process, Cass, Feigran and Shadow would be forced to negotiate with him in some fashion.
That, or yeah––try to kill him.
Neither option struck Jon as more improbable than the other. He’d known Cass most of his life, but after everything he’d seen over the past six months, he felt completely lost when it came to predicting her next moves.
Really, Cass just seemed like a psychopath to him now.
Watching Revik lead Allie back to the line of Humvees, Jon could only give a low snort as he turned over Revik’s flippant response. He watched as Revik made a signal with one hand to Wreg, asking him to raise the bullet-proof glass to shield them from the street, right before he climbed into the long seat after Allie in the second of the three Humvees parked on the curb.
When he’d last been in New York, Jon still wanted to help Cass.
He’d wanted to get her away from Shadow, to save her.
He didn’t feel like that anymore.
Even in his worst moments as Syrimne d’ Gaos, Revik never turned on the people he loved, not even after Allie betrayed him. He’d been hurt, angry, vengeful, violent, manipulative, even psychotic… but it never felt like he was having fun.
What Cass had done felt intentional.
More than that––it felt like she’d enjoyed it.
Jon knew he wasn’t seeing the whole story. He could rationalize about her childhood, about her own self hate, her insecurities, feelings of powerlessness, the unfairness of her life. He could theorize about what Shadow might have done to her in Argentina and since.
Hell, he could tell himself all manner of stories to explain it.
He just couldn’t make himself feel it.
Her constant psychic attacks on Revik in his dreams, her ability to joke about seducing him after what she’d done to his wife––Jon couldn’t rationalize any of it. Hell, after what happened in the Caucasus Mountains, the fact that she could screw with Revik sexually at all was just beyond the pale.
Then there was the real issue: the fact that she’d left Allie nearly dead in the same house where Terian murdered their mother. The fact that she’d taken Allie and Revik’s child.
Even before that, she’d made choices Jon couldn’t convincingly explain away. Her choice to use Jon to get Allie out of the hotel––that couldn’t have been an accident, either. Her choice to give Revik, Jon and Maygar to Ditrini. Her choice to attack the hotel, knowing some of their friends would probably be killed.
The only reasons Jon could think of to do any of those things made him sick to even think about. Anger didn’t explain it. Hate didn’t, either.
What Cass had done was pure sadism.
He knew somewhere in all of this, even now, he probably still felt love for her. Maybe his own feelings even came closer to shock than hate, some kind of disconnect between the way Jon thought the world worked and the way it actually did. More than that, it made him question himself, his ability to judge or understand people in any way.
All he knew was, it was exhausting even trying to think about how Cass might be viewing all of this. It was also hard to care. As he followed Balidor, Yumi and Neela to the row of armored cars, Jon realized some things just felt simpler to him, more black and white.
Cass had to be taken out.
The rest was just noise.
He remembered that rush of light sparking through him as Revik patiently and methodically worked––eliminating tanks, planes, guns, boats, ammunition, docks, fences, warehouses, fuel tanks, missiles, flyers, armored vehicles, OBE transformers… people shooting at them.
As he did, he couldn’t help but smile.
He was looking forward to it.
Twisted though that was, he was looking forward to when Revik and Cass faced one another again. Well, not looking forward to it exactly.
Maybe fantasizing about it would be more accurate.
He wondered if that made him a psychopath, too.
27
THE SWORD
THE SURGE OF energy from working continued to vibrate Revik’s light.
He felt tired, sure, but the worst of that tiredness was wiped out by the influx of light Balidor funneled into his aleimi. At this point, that light still came from a single source––the makeshift feeding pools they’d set up inside the construct, drawing primarily on residents of New York, primarily in the wealthy areas of the city. That same construct was now tied to the one over the House on the Hill hotel, which gave it a lot more stability.
Revik felt the shift as soon as the change occurred, somewhere in the middle of their initial strike on the Central Park airfield.
Normally, he’d feel strange about taking light from humans. In this case, however, there was a certain karmic appropriateness. Even Balidor seemed amused when Revik floated this as a solution to his potential “light problem” in a major assault like this.
He knew that feeling of limitless power was illusory.
He also knew he couldn’t afford to grow accustomed to it, much less dependent on it, but his skin and aleimic structures vibrated from the excess light anyway. He and Balidor had discussed keeping his aleimi flooded with light as often as possible via the pools, even when he wasn’t working, on the off-chance that their feeding pools got cut off during a frontal attack.
Revik knew Shadow’s people would be searching for his light source even now.
He knew enough about the way Menlim thought––even Terian and Salinse––that he’d be shocked if it wasn’t their very first priority.
So yeah, he couldn’t expect to have that particular advantage for long.
From here on out, they needed to plan with the assumption that he’d have to rely on his own team for light, unless they could find some way to bolster their source from San Francisco or Asia. Even so, he’d likely lose the punch of that nonstop light supply; it would diminish their firepower significantly in the event of an actual firefight, where he’d need their own seers holding guns as much as he needed them in the Barrier.
Still, things had gone well––so far, at least.
He didn’t intend to rest on that fact, but he felt satisfied enough to wait for Cass and Shadow’s countermove while he proceeded to steal or dismantle whatever additional resources of theirs he could find scattered throughout the city.
He glanced out the window, glimpsing another brief, tail-end view of humans running down a narrow side street.
They’d stopped a few times already to steal working vehicles, and for Revik to take out surveillance and military flyers.
He’d used the telekinesis to crack open a few of the more tightly-shielded corporate and milit
ary buildings, too. Might as well give the locals a little room and incentive to do their work for them––a lot of the poorer humans must be running low on food. Anyway, Revik had zero doubt those shielded buildings belonged primarily to allies of Shadow.
More military vehicles, weapons and other resources would be stored underground. He wouldn’t be able to get to all of them, but he could diminish their numbers considerably.
Balidor’s initial estimates were that they should be able to disable or confiscate between forty and sixty percent of the remaining transport and offensive capability in Manhattan within the first forty-eight hours, depending on the accuracy of their maps of the city stores.
Declan and Raddi had been conducting surveillance runs for weeks out of the hotel, so hopefully they could give them better numbers by the end of the day.
No matter how fast they worked, it was unlikely they’d be able to keep all of Shadow’s allies on foot and weaponless, but they could do enough to distract them, and raise a fuck of a lot of security issues for whatever and whoever remained. From every report they’d gotten from the hotel, Shadow’s security forces were having population control issues already. Revik fully intended to exploit the fact that a lot of humans and seers were starving, and desperate enough to add to the chaos on their behalf.
He also intended to help as many of them out as he could.
To that end, he had zero qualms about feeding some of those same dirty masses out of Shadow’s own stores.
If he made a point of knocking out local and outside transmissions, as well as exploding every aircraft they tried to aim at that last remaining door in the OBE field, even more of Shadow’s followers would panic. More to the point, they would also start to doubt Shadow’s ability to keep them safe.
He knew Menlim.
Menlim would want to negotiate.
He would also be confident he could get Revik to see reason.
Allie gripped his arm and side tighter and he glanced down. She frowned, still holding his vest and shirt, almost like she’d heard his thoughts.
Stroking her hair, Revik sighed, sinking deeper in the Humvee’s bench seat.
He had a good idea where Menlim would start.
He would make promises around fixing Allie, to begin with. He might even go so far as to promise to return their child. He’d promise to keep Revik’s people safe inside the quarantine zones; he might even offer to give them a quarantine zone of their own. He would promise to stop killing humans and seers on the Displacement Lists.
Revik couldn’t bank on what Cass would do, despite the number of scenarios he, Balidor, Wreg, Yumi and Tarsi had run over the past few months.
With Menlim, however, he could guess.
Above all else, Menlim was a recruiter and a manipulator.
He was also patient.
If he could use their child to lure Allie and Revik back into the fold, he would. He’d assume he could control them via the kid and his own constructs, corrupting their light over time. He’d also probably try to program something into Allie’s light to make her more vulnerable to the light of the Dreng. Revik had zero doubt they’d done that to his daughter already.
Allie’s fingers tightened on him again.
Feeling a flicker of distress on her, Revik tugged her closer, wrapping his arm around her back and waist. He knew he smelled like sweat, cordite, smoke, probably blood, but she didn’t seem to mind. She snuggled into his side, then, seeming to want to be closer to him still, she slid the rest of the way into his lap.
Once she was settled, she curled her arms around his neck, stroking his hair with her fingers. Her face rested on his upper chest and shoulder.
Pushing off the pain that wanted to rise, Revik let his eyes drift back to the window.
He found himself thinking about Cass again.
Everything they had on her at this point was based on speculation. He had the opinions and theories of his team, and he had the contents of his dreams––that was it.
From the latter, he knew Cass harbored some delusion of being queen of this shit-heap she and Shadow had created. He also knew, despite her pretend flippancy, she had genuine feelings about his and Allie’s daughter. He didn’t know what those feelings were, precisely, but from talking it over with Yumi, Chan, Balidor and Jon, he guessed Shadow was using their kid to control Cass in some way.
Revik hadn’t figured out how to use either of those things yet, but he would.
He’d spoken to Wreg and Loki about it, as well as Tarsi, who stayed behind in New York. Tarsi seemed to think, even more strongly than Chandre, that the key was the child, that the child was what mattered to Cass.
Revik agreed. He still had trouble wrapping his mind around that fully, though.
That, or maybe he just didn’t want to.
Allie shifted in his lap, and he glanced down.
He knew he was reacting to her again. The telekinesis definitely didn’t help. He looked at her now, at the faint glow of green in her irises and shifted uncomfortably in his seat, aware suddenly of the lights of the other seers in the Humvee, and how attuned all of them were to the two of them, especially now.
Allie looked up at him then, and smiled at him, and Revik’s guard fell, almost without him meaning it to.
He smiled back, and she curled her arms more tightly around his neck, shifting deeper into the curve of his body where she leaned partway against the door. He found himself watching her look at him, feeling ripples of pain off her light as she studied his features in the daylight through the tinted organic glass.
He knew the other seers had watched him kiss her by the pier.
He struggled to care about that, too, or the fact that he didn’t know precisely what he thought about it himself. The thing was, he could convince himself he could feel more of her now––more of her in tiny increments every few days. He could half-believe it, even, and still know he might be deluding himself.
Hell, he probably was deluding himself.
He’d been warned about that very thing by Balidor and Wreg both, but the greater part of his mind clung persistently to the belief anyway.
She sat up in his lap, writhing a little on his legs. When she leaned her face down, kissing his neck, he closed his eyes, murmuring in her mind, hoping none of the others would hear it.
Come back to me. Come back to me, Allie, please. Please. I need you…
She touched his face, trailing her fingers down his jaw, making him shiver.
Please, he begged her in a murmur. Please come back to me. Please.
Her fingers wrapped around his neck, clutching him there briefly before she slid them under the edge of his shirt. He knew he shouldn’t be letting her touch him in front of the others, not when he felt like this, not with the ripples it created in his light––ripples he knew they could see––but he couldn’t seem to make himself care about that, either.
Not enough to ask her to stop.
She’d always been turned on by the telekinesis. He got off on doing it in front of her, as soon as he noticed the consistency of her reactions to that higher intensity of his light.
That had been before, of course.
Shifting again in the cloth-covered seat, he forced his eyes off her face, training his gaze out the window. Ignoring the careful, almost rhythmic touch of her hands and fingers––well, as much as he could––he tried to force his thoughts back down more tactical lines.
Over half of the seers who came with them in the Chinook split off after he’d cleaned out the airstrip in the park. The three remaining carloads were there to protect Allie more than Revik himself. As long as he had access to the feeding pools, and Jon, he could protect himself.
Jon had done an amazing job.
Truly amazing––better even than Revik hoped.
Anyway, he’d needed the rest of the seers to begin dealing with the military presence in Manhattan. Those who split off in the park were met by an even larger group of House on the Hill seers. Together, the sixt
y or so armed infiltrators had orders to make their way back to the hotel, taking out as many tactical targets as they could along the way.
Revik already heard back from Loki, who led that group.
Their success rate so far had been high––higher than Revik had dared to hope. As they were getting ready to leave the airfield after stripping it of remaining weapons and ammunitions, including in all the hides Revik and the other infiltrators mapped via the Barrier and their organic sensors, the secondary team immediately engaged another group of seers.
From all accounts, those had been Salinse’s people, led by Rebels that some of the fighters on Revik’s side recognized.
One of those seers had been Ute.
Rigor and Tan had been there, too, according to Loki.
Revik hadn’t seen any of those seers face to face since he gave them his ultimatum about leaving the Dreng if they wanted to continue to follow him. Ute had been the first to go. Rigor and Tan left shortly after, disappearing from that stronghold in the mountains, probably as soon as it sank in that Revik was serious.
Not for the first time, he sent up a silent prayer of thanks that Wreg hadn’t been one of those to leave. He’d done that about every other week since that day.
Turning his head, he glanced at Neela, then at Jorag, also both ex-Rebels.
It was difficult to remember what they’d all been like back then.
Their light shone so differently from the Barrier now.
Revik strongly suspected he wouldn’t have recognized this version of them back when he worked for Salinse. They’d all resonated with such a similar tone in those days, a single, droning note of the same musical instrument.
It was what happened under the light of the Dreng.
Allie slid her arm inside his open vest, massaging his side and ribs.
He’d scarcely even registered her unhooking the catches across the front of it.
Closing his eyes briefly, he remembered how sick he’d been back then, with Allie in China, working for the Lao Hu. He hadn’t known where she was––or who she was with.
The memory pounded behind his eyes.
Leaning back in the fabric seat, he scanned pieces of the construct to find out where his secondary team was now. He knew they’d decided to detour to hit a few buildings after they got the rest of the storage lockers in the park. He could feel now they’d added a side recon trip to the loop as well, for a larger garrison they didn’t expect to be able to take on their own.
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