Bridge_Bridge & Sword_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

The thing was pretty much a floating zoo.

  Somehow that amused me more than worried me, at least initially.

  I had to hand it to Balidor for his ingenuity. He’d found us another aircraft carrier, an unmanned one this time. While he and everyone else in San Francisco were getting ready to go after Cass, he’d spent months fixing it up and making it livable for us as a kind of moving base, until something more permanent could be constructed, likely in New Mexico or Colorado in the United States, or possibly further north, in Montana, Canada, or even Alaska.

  There’d also been some talk about Asia, even Northern Europe.

  The consensus seemed to be that north would be better, inland would be better, high ground would be better, caches of fresh water would be better.

  It was too soon to settle on anything final, but I knew we’d be looking.

  So yeah, I guess we were taking a page out of Shadow’s book.

  Or maybe it just made the most sense right now, to find a means of riding out the crazy on the ocean before we found a new resting place on land. Given the chaos that still reigned over just about every continent, we were better off on our own.

  Anyway, we needed to keep the humans under our charge safe.

  That meant disease-free, in the event the virus mutated, or somehow transcended that magical twenty-six percent immune barrier.

  Pretty much everyone in the passenger cabin of the Chinook spent the vast majority of the flight playing with Lilai.

  She still seemed pretty weirded out by all of us.

  She cried a few times, her light scattering with fear as she remembered Cass falling down in that high-end apartment. I felt her confusion, and her wariness of me.

  Since she was surrounded by cooing seers who flooded her with warmth and reassurance and light, the tears hadn’t lasted long, but they still cut at me. Most of the time she spent in Chandre’s lap, playing with her black braids, touching her high, angular cheeks. She seemed strangely fascinated by Chandre’s eyes, and stared into their reddish-black hues for minutes at a time without blinking.

  I let them all play with her, thinking they needed the downtime more than I did.

  Anyway, I would have as much time with her as I wanted, soon enough.

  Jon sat in the seat across from Lilai and just stared at her, stunned, for most of the flight. Maybe, like me, Lilai didn’t seem quite real to him. Or maybe she was a little too real, given everything that happened over the past few months.

  Cass remained unconscious.

  They locked her arms, elbows, wrists and ankles together, to one another, and to a metal bar over the emergency exit door on the back starboard side of the Chinook.

  Neela also put a second collar on her, which was a new one on me.

  I could feel a few of them wanting to do more, but I told them no one was to touch her––not now, and not when we got back to the ship.

  I promised all of them we’d deal with her. I also made it clear that wasn’t going to consist of the infiltration team taking turns beating the piss out of her.

  I had no intention of letting them descend into animalistic behavior, no matter how upset or traumatized they were. Not now. Not ever.

  At the same time, I couldn’t exactly blame them.

  As for Revik, I left him alone.

  I couldn’t help but be aware of him, pretty much the entire flight.

  I felt sparks of his light, here and there, but for the most part, the construct over the cockpit remained deathly still, with only murmurings from Jorag occasionally breaking that silence. I could tell Jorag tried to reach Revik a few times, as well; I could also tell he didn’t have much success.

  As for Revik himself, he didn’t direct so much as a whisper of thought towards me, or even towards Lilai. He felt locked inside a glass ball, completely outside of my reach.

  I tried to respect that distance. For the most part, I did. He only had to push me off him once, when I’d crept over into his light subconsciously, not even realizing what I’d done until I felt him flinch from the Barrier, asking me without words to leave him alone.

  After that, I did.

  The flight over New York was one of the more eerie experiences I’ve ever had.

  I’d never seen the city so dark––or so quiet.

  Lower Manhattan had flooded again, partly from the storm, but mostly because the fields failed in a few key points. The hotel, when we passed over it, was completely dark. The armored tanks Tenzi and the others reported on the streets had already gone, presumably because SCARB, FEMA, and the United States military found the hotel empty.

  Chinja claimed to have seen those tanks grinding their way up the west side of the park, aiming uptown as we left the North Meadow.

  New York harbor looked dark.

  I saw white crests from the wind and rain, but most of it looked like a dark blanket past the edge of Manhattan. We saw fires dotting the shores as we headed for the open ocean, but not a lot of artificial light.

  It felt like looking out over a simulation of some primeval world, a time before electricity, when everyone still used fire to heat and light their homes.

  It bothered me, yeah, but strangely, I felt hope in those glimpses, too.

  Life would overcome. Even here.

  Even among those who hadn’t the resources or the luck to get to one of the high-end quarantine zones, people were surviving the disease.

  Which was good, since I was pretty sure we were seeing the end of the quarantine zone over New York.

  It struck me as an odd place to build one anyway.

  I don’t know if they thought they could keep the waters back forever, or if they’d simply been arrogant enough to think that they could wait things out long enough to be able to return safely to the mainland. Perhaps they thought they could claim what they seemed to feel was their natural birthright once the danger had passed, reaping the benefits of a depleted population and with no major losses of their own.

  Either way, I suspected a lot of the “better class” of people who’d taken refuge in Manhattan would be leaving soon––assuming they still had the means to do so.

  I couldn’t help thinking, good riddance.

  I’d never liked New York all that much anyway.

  Maybe in its next incarnation, it would be a different kind of place.

  Or underwater. Whichever.

  Even as I thought it, though, I found myself wiping away tears.

  58

  COME BACK BABY

  I FOUND HIM where I expected to find him.

  Balidor explained what they needed of him, and he seemed to understand––as much as he seemed to be present for much of anything since we’d landed.

  In any case, Revik got the gist.

  He didn’t seem surprised, and really, why would he be? He’d been the one to discover the connection in the first place. Still, given the associations it must have evoked, he likely hadn’t been thrilled, especially since the requirement remained somewhat open-ended, at least until we got more eyes on his light.

  I knew I’d be pulled into that soon enough.

  On the plus side, we were ready for it this time, at least.

  Balidor spent months working on another version of the Tank, like where we’d kept Revik while we’d been deprogramming him from the Dreng.

  The infiltration team had quite a few side projects going I hadn’t been aware of––meaning projects they’d started long before I got knocked out by the wires. One of those even involved using wires to train humans to see the Barrier––a pet project of Vash, Balidor and Jon’s that pretty much got dumped entirely after they found me in San Francisco.

  Another of those projects involved recreating Galaith’s Barrier-containment tank.

  A few prototypes had already been tried.

  The first one lived in sub-basement four of the House on the Hill Hotel. It had been underwater since the first tsunami.

  The second was designed and created in San Francisco.

  For bo
th of those, Balidor, Vikram, Tarsi and Loki had been the primary architects. In the months where I was out of commission, those prototypes had been refined, improved, recreated, and finally replicated, utilizing two different test versions.

  A third, upgraded version was built inside a secondary cargo hold on the aircraft carrier, utilizing what they’d learned from the earlier designs.

  Balidor seemed confident they’d reached the level of quality Galaith attained with that first Tank we’d used to cut Revik off from the Dreng.

  In practical terms, that meant the current iteration of our tank had so few leaks, it could simulate a seer’s death––well enough to kill both sides of a bonded pair by cutting them off from the Barrier proper, and from one another.

  Balidor speculated their new tank might cut seers off from one another even more thoroughly than real death did, at least in the initial stages of a true biological passing between realms. According to him, in real death, a seer’s aleimi tended to linger for days, weeks… sometimes even months following the death of the body.

  Initially, Balidor and the other infiltrators wanted their own tank so they could better interrogate and identify agents of Shadow.

  After Dorje, the fear of leaks, sabotage and further assassination attempts had been high; identifying potential enemy agents still remained a priority in the minds of Wreg and Balidor. Tarsi helped them with elements of the design, with Wreg and Yumi serving as their primary testers, at least when either of them could be pulled.

  In San Francisco, they’d even used Jon as one of their test subjects, since he had strong ties to both me and Revik, and because he’d been used as a sleeper agent by Menlim already.

  Anyway, we’d learned a long time ago the value of being able to cut people off from the light of the Dreng, even temporarily.

  For the upgraded version on the ship, they actually built four tanks.

  Well, more accurately, they built one massive tank that took up most of the hold and then broke it into four separate and mutually-exclusive constructs. The complex was affectionately dubbed “T-cubed” by the seers working on it.

  As far as I could tell, the name stuck.

  Of course, Lilai had to be held in one of those four constructs.

  The security team put Cass in another.

  Revik was in a third tank.

  Maygar, the fourth.

  So already, our mobile, anti-Dreng constructs were at full capacity.

  There was some discussion about whether to house Jon with Maygar, at least until he’d been detached from Revik and me, but Balidor ruled that having Revik and Maygar in separate constructs from the rest of us should accomplish that goal well enough on its own.

  Balidor also mentioned that Jon’s nascent bond to Wreg should provide him some protection, along with the shielding skills he’d learned since he’d been infiltrated by Shadow’s people the first time. Balidor seemed to think any risk of Jon being compromised was low anyway, with Cass in our custody.

  He further assured me that he’d talked to Wreg, and that the military infiltrator had promised to keep a close eye on Jon’s light.

  Of course, Balidor said that last with a quirk in his lips.

  Anyway, that disconnection between the four of us––meaning me, Revik, Maygar and Jon––had already been scheduled.

  All of us, I think, felt some relief at the idea we might have a bit more privacy in our lights and thoughts once more. I also felt a not-subtle exhale of relief on Wreg when the subject came up in our one and only planning meeting since we’d arrived on the carrier.

  Wreg and Jon seemed pretty connected at the hip again, I noticed.

  I’d heard that hadn’t been the case for most of the time I’d been out of commission, so I was glad to see it. Even on the flight from New York, Wreg sat in the seat next to Jon, his tattooed hand wrapped around Jon’s fingers. Wreg hadn’t done anything else, really, just held Jon’s hand, the one that Terian cut the thumb and forefinger off of, but I saw the relief in the seer’s high-cheekboned face as he slumped in the adjacent padded chair, looking exhausted.

  If I’d had anything to drink handy, I would have gotten Wreg one, too.

  As it was, I just watched him sprawl there, irrationally touched by the utter relief I felt in his light. I knew that relief wasn’t only––or even mostly––because of me.

  He smiled at Lilai a few times, too, blowing light bubbles at her with the others.

  I knew without asking, things got pretty dark for everyone over those months I’d been gone. I figured I’d probably hear more about that, sooner or later, but for now, I was more than happy to leave it alone. I wanted them to forget, as much as me.

  We had bigger things to think about.

  More immediate, pressing things, at least.

  We knew Shadow could probably track us, tank or no. The tanks were more to keep our people’s light free of the Dreng, not the other way around; meaning, the tanks were meant to protect them––Revik, Maygar, Lilai, even Cass––not so much to protect the rest of us from them, or even from Shadow.

  Anyway, so that’s where Revik was.

  He was in his corner of the tank. The construct they’d dubbed “Tank 3.”

  Not surprisingly, perhaps, it sat adjacent to both “Tank 2,” where they held Lilai, and “Tank 4,” where they were keeping Maygar.

  No one wanted him anywhere near Cass.

  The other seers seemed to think Cass would be lucky to live out the month, once Revik had been cleared to leave his segment of the Barrier-containment field.

  I was less sure. But it was too early to think about that, too.

  In any case, when I went to find him, I didn’t knock.

  I didn’t even hit the intercom to let him know I was coming in.

  In fact, in the course of telling Torek to shut off surveillance in Revik’s portion of the tank, I specifically told him not to tell Revik I was outside, much less that I was planning to come in. Torek, who had the bad luck of working the security console right then, seemed less than thrilled at my request.

  But then, heck, so did Balidor, when I told him I was going to find Revik.

  I mean, I got it.

  On a certain level, going in there without giving Revik any kind of head’s up, much less asking his permission, was really rude. Husband or no, yeah, it was probably a boundary violation, maybe even a big one.

  Moreover, Jon informed me that it was presumptuous, domineering, borderline obnoxious, possibly bratty and definitely inconsiderate. I was essentially ignoring a loved one’s professed wants and needs in favor of my own.

  And Jon was right.

  I get that. I really do.

  The thing is, though, I already knew what Revik would say. More to the point, I felt pretty strongly by then that I needed to break through that stubborn wall of his in some way, even if it meant listening to him yell at me for the next hour or so.

  Or the next few hours.

  Or possibly, the next few days.

  Honestly, him yelling at me would have been a relief at that point. And really, maybe that’s what needed to happen. Maybe I deserved a few months’ worth of venting, anger and frustration given everything he’d been through.

  I certainly couldn’t blame him.

  I didn’t know what Tarsi had told him by then, or Balidor.

  Revik was no dummy, though––he must have deduced I’d interacted with his aunt in some way prior to this, before he knew I was alive. He must at least suspect I was the reason Tarsi recruited Anale, Dante and Surli, all without informing or including him.

  Granted, I’d done all of that more from the “Bridge” part of me than the “Allie” part of me, meaning his wife.

  Somehow, I doubted that would wash as an excuse, though.

  Whatever Revik did or didn’t know about how things went down, he probably felt like he’d been the last one to know, and during a time when he’d ostensibly been in charge. I knew whatever his rational mind told him, it would both
er him that I’d been running a secondary op alongside his, and behind his back.

  I knew it would bother him that I hadn’t told him I was alive, that some part of me deliberately deceived him, intentionally or not, in order to get in the back door.

  The fact that I’d done so to rescue our daughter may or may not have hit him yet.

  The fact that I’d done it from a somewhat less “Earth-bound” part of my mind and light may or may not fully make sense to that more emotional side of his, either.

  The bottom line was, whatever I told myself, I’d let him believe I was dead.

  To add insult to injury, that same part of me opted to include Surli in my plan, but not Revik himself. I honestly had no idea if that end of things bothered him, but I knew it couldn’t have helped.

  So yeah, to say I didn’t blame him for being pissed off was an understatement.

  Truthfully, I wouldn’t have been surprised if Revik told me to leave him alone for the next few weeks, if not months.

  I mean, I did try to talk to him as soon as it was safe. I tried to contact him as soon as I had Cass knocked out, and Lilai in my arms. The very second I felt him after that, I tried to tell him I was alive, that I had our daughter, that everything was going to be okay.

  But yeah, still. Going from thinking your wife is dead to hearing her voice in your head, especially after the nonstop headfuck he’d gotten from Shadow in that Tower––

  Did I mention that I really got it?

  I really, really got it.

  At that point, I didn’t even know for certain if he was angry per se, or more really confused and hurt and needing time to himself.

  I didn’t know if he saw all this as something I’d done from my “Bridge” persona, or if he blamed Allie, meaning me, his wife… meaning the person down here, on the ground.

  Truthfully, I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on in his head. I hadn’t known since I saw him stare at me from the open doors of that blood-filled elevator, a collar around his neck, his eyes glowing with light. I didn’t even know what he’d been thinking while he argued with me in that busted up lobby of the Tower.

  He hadn’t let me anywhere near him––or his light––to find out.