“Hey.” He waved a hand to get the seer’s attention. “Seriously, man. You let them go wandering around a U.S. military base, looking for shiny toys? Now? With all of this…” He gestured out at the storm, then around them vaguely. “…Going on?”
Balidor rolled his eyes. A smile played around his lips.
“Nenzi and Allie are with him, Jon. I’m sure Wreg will be fine.”
“There’s a friggin’ hurricane brewing outside!”
“Weather is unlikely to harm or deter brother Wreg,” Balidor said, glancing up at the ceiling and frowning at the metallic plinks of the rain. “Although I admit, I find myself glad we won’t be traveling by air anytime soon.”
He glanced back at the two female seers, his gray irises blurring.
Jon realized he was still reading one or both of them, tracking the details of their conversation.
The storage warehouse sat alongside the main docks, essentially a converted airplane hangar, or perhaps an old ship-building yard switched over at the end of World War II. Most of it now appeared to be filled with those forty-foot, rectangular storage crates, the same as got hauled on flatbed barges and hooked to the cabs of long-haul rigs.
Jon glanced around the cavernous space, noting again how eerily quiet it was, apart from the storm raging outside.
He knew Jorag and a number of the other security-bent seers were patrolling the perimeter, keeping curious humans and seers away from their party. According to Balidor, they shouldn’t have any trouble keeping this part of the docks free of either. He’d ID’d the whole sector as long-term storage, so it was minimally patrolled even under normal conditions.
Balidor and Chan had connections in the seer security contingent here anyway, which is how they got the passkeys to enter in the first place.
Even so, the silence made Jon nervous for some reason.
“Relax, brother… please.” Balidor’s words pulled Jon’s eyes back to his. “We could all stand to blow off some steam. Nenzi and your sister more than the rest of us. We still have no idea what we will find upon returning to the city.”
Jon felt his jaw harden. “You mean they did this for fun?”
Balidor gave him a sideways look. After biting back a smile, he shook his head, chuckling aloud, as if unable to help himself.
“You’d best get used to it, Jon. Wreg and Nenzi… they’re cut from the same cloth in many ways. In fact, your boyfriend has a few hundred years’ more military experience than your sister’s husband. So really, you’re fighting a losing battle there.”
Jon frowned. Even so, curiosity pulled at him, too.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he grew conscious of how he must look, given the oxygen mask and the mud-encrusted armor. Blowing it off, he shrugged.
“Yeah,” he said, glancing at Balidor. “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that. About that whole thing of Wreg being trained initially by the Adhipan…?”
“Before my time, Jon,” Balidor said with a dismissive wave. “Tarsi was in charge back then. You’d best direct your questions to her.”
“But you knew him back then, right?” Jon persisted, ignoring the reluctance he could see in the set of the seer’s mouth. “Wreg said he knew who you were. Weren’t both of you ID'd as Adhipan when you were kids? Allie told me that’s how they used to do it. That they pulled kids from families, based on their potential rank, or whatever…?”
Balidor sighed. Making a “more or less” gesture with one hand, he tilted his palm like a bird in flight. If anything, that reluctance in his mouth grew more pronounced.
“Yes,” he said, blunt.
“So?” Jon said. “Aren’t the two of you around the same age?”
Turning, Balidor raised an eyebrow at him.
“Not exactly,” he said, giving Jon a disbelieving look. “…You’re only off by about two hundred years, Jon. I was already running my own squads by the time Wreg showed up in the Pamir.”
“Which would have been… when?” Jon pressed.
“I don’t know exactly.” Balidor sighed, clicking a little in annoyance. “I didn’t have much to do with the new recruits back then. I got them when they were adults, Jon. They brought the new kids in when they were only around 14-15 years old.”
“So he would have looked around six or seven in human years?” Jon mused aloud.
“Approximately, yes.”
“So you never saw him? Not even once?”
“That was the 1700s, Jon.” Balidor’s voice grew flat. “If you’ll recall your human history, a lot was going on in the world.”
“So, you do know when it was,” Jon observed.
Balidor scowled. “I am proficient in basic arithmetic, Jon. Unlike you, I can also guess Wreg’s rough age from looking at him.” Sighing at Jon’s flat look, he combed a hand through his chestnut hair. “It was the 1700s, as I said. I had teams in Europe and the Americas at the time, and that was pre-First Contact, so we had to be damned careful about not being ID’d as non-human. Things worked a lot differently in the Adhipan back then, and not only because we had around twenty times our current numbers. If you think I had time to chase down every new recruit that gave their teachers a spot of trouble, you’d best think again––”
“He gave his teachers trouble?” Jon said.
Seeing Jon’s expression, Balidor let out a sigh, and what looked like an involuntary smile. Shrugging, he glanced at Chandre and her Thai-looking friend.
“Fine. I may have seen him one time, Jon… just one.”
Jon raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question.
Balidor shrugged. “I remember a young seer Tarsi brought me in to assess. Smart kid. Aced all his exams, even though he came from a modest background and had no clan sponsors to speak of. Had a particular knack for mathematics, as I recall… and art. But the kid was a troublemaker. A born leader, he used it mainly to incite mischief in the other recruits. He also didn’t respond well to authority figures.”
Jon grunted, smiling without meaning to. “Shocker.”
“Yes, well.” Balidor’s smile crept out further. “Not unless he’d made up his mind that they’d earned or ‘deserved’ his respect.”
Jon grunted again, nodding. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
Balidor added, “Tarsi brought me to see him, likely hoping I’d have suggestions on how to motivate him. Or perhaps some idea of where to place him…”
He laughed a little, as if involuntarily, his eyes distant.
“…When I got there, he was on the ceiling of the classroom, hanging from these bizarre, hook-like contraptions. They turned out to be cave-crawling gloves and shoes he’d made out of a bunch of old rifle parts along with shovel bits he’d sharpened and worn down to exactly fit his knees and hands…”
Balidor chuckled again, making a conciliatory gesture with one hand.
“It was pretty ingenious, really. But he’d gauged holes in a cave wall that had been carved around two thousand years before he was born.”
Still thinking, as if remembering the image, he grunted, breaking into a wider smile.
“…Tarsi was pissed. And a little embarrassed, too, I think, since she’d talked him up to me on the way there. He was a pain in the ass from day one, your Wreg.”
Jon flinched a little at his wording, but didn’t speak.
He watched Balidor’s expression change as he continued to stare off, right before it grew slightly pained. The look was there and gone, but Jon frowned.
“What?” he said. “What aren’t you telling me, Balidor?”
The seer only shook his head. When he turned, his gray eyes had darkened.
“No, Jon,” he said, clicking softly. “You’ll need to ask Wreg if you want to know more.” Shaking off whatever emotion lived there, he clapped Jon on the shoulder, his eyes losing that heavier cast. “You know, brother, I’m really not the person to convince you that you’re not completely crazy to be involving yourself with Wreg. If you want reassurance on that point,
I would talk to Nenzi. Or your sister. Maybe one of the other Rebels. Someone who knows him now, in the present.”
“Ex-Rebels,” Jon muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. “And Allie hasn’t exactly been part of the cheering squad for me and Wreg.”
Balidor’s smile grew warmer as he met Jon’s gaze.
“I think you have already made up your mind, Jon,” the Adhipan commander observed, his eyes shrewd. “Why unduly stress yourself, now that the decision is made?”
Jon nodded, hearing the logic of the other’s words, even as his jaw hardened.
He ignored the way the Adhipan leader’s eyes seemed to look through him, perhaps to his light, or to something else he saw.
Had he made up his mind? Supposing he had, what did that mean, exactly?
Despite what Wreg said to him before he left for Brazil, Jon wasn’t seer, not really. He didn’t have to make some life-or-death-commitment thing, like what Allie and Revik were faced with.
So why did it feel like he did?
Remembering Wreg’s words the one and only time he’d broached the topic, Jon couldn’t help frowning. Maybe he really did need to find out a little more about Wreg.
He wondered if he should ask Revik. Buy him a bottle of his favorite bourbon back at the hotel, get him drunk enough to start telling stories from the war. Jon knew his brother-in-law got pretty talkative when he drank enough.
Then again, maybe he’d get too talkative, end up telling Jon a bunch of things he really didn’t want to know. He could just ask Wreg, of course. But he wasn’t sure he was ready to have that conversation, either, especially knowing where it could lead.
Standing next to him, Balidor chuckled again, his expression openly amused.
“If you wanted someone easy and uncomplicated, I’m afraid you’ve made a questionable choice in mates, brother,” he said gently.
That smile remained visible in his gray eyes as he rubbed Jon’s shoulder. Balidor let him go an instant later, walking towards Chandre and the Thai-looking seer.
Jon watched him leave, still reacting to several words in the seer’s last comment.
He stood there long enough for Balidor to nearly reach the two female seers.
Resigning himself to let it go for now, Jon was about to walk after him, when something caught his eye, in the shadows along a row of khaki-colored cargo crates.
That whole area of the warehouse lay in near darkness.
The height of the containers blocked out most of the light from the overhead lamps before it could reach the narrow corridors between them. Jon smelled rust from the sitting containers, along with the fainter taste of brine and a mustier smell beneath both, one that reminded him of his grandmother’s attic when he and Allie were kids.
He squinted at a form standing there, sensing the presence with his light without being able to determine much of anything else about it. He couldn’t really see them with his physical eyes, either, apart from a basic shape. Whoever they were, they were shorter than him, by at least a few inches. That made it significantly less likely they were seer.
Had a human somehow slipped past Jorag’s perimeter?
He stepped towards the figure hesitantly, glancing around where he stood.
He couldn’t feel or see any of the other seers nearby. Balidor, Chandre and the seer in the SCARB jacket were the only other persons he even felt with his light.
“Hello?” he said into the dark. “Who is that?”
He glanced around again when the figure only stood there. Now that Balidor had moved out of earshot, he was pretty much alone.
“Hey!” he said. “Not funny, with the whole freak out the human thing. Are you part of our party, or not? If you are, show yourself!”
“Jon,” the shadow whispered. “Come here a second.”
Jon frowned. The voice was female, but that’s all he could discern.
“Come here, Jon,” the voice repeated. “I want to show you something.”
He still couldn’t feel them with his light. Why couldn’t he feel them with his light?
“Who is that?” he said. “Neela? Is that you?”
“It’ll only take a minute,” the voice said, soft, a warm caress. “It’s important, Jon. It’s about our sister, the Esteemed Bridge. There’s something you should know.”
Jon’s frown deepened.
He still couldn’t make out the face of whoever it was, or even much in the way of a body, other than the fact that they were female and on the small side.
Could it be Neela? Why would Neela hide in the dark, whispering at him? Why would she be so heavily shielded, if Jorag and the others were already policing the space? And, more to the point, why would she want to talk to him about Allie? Was she shielding herself to keep anyone else from hearing whatever was on her mind?
Jon glanced around, puzzled. No warning bells were going off, just the weirdness of a voice whispering at him out of the shadows of a row of camouflage-painted cargo crates. That, and the fact that Neela wore a shield unlike any he’d ever felt, in all his sight-training with Wreg.
When he glanced back at Chandre and the Thai-looking woman, they seemed perfectly at ease as they discussed strategy only a dozen or so meters away. So did Balidor, as he stood at a polite distance, his stance relaxed as he waited for them to acknowledge him.
Jorag cleared this place an hour ago. Whoever was whispering at him, it had to be one of theirs. Anyway, Balidor was one of the strongest seers alive. If anything weird was going on, the Adhipan leader definitely would’ve felt it.
Maybe Neela and the others ran into Allie out on the military base somewhere, and she and Revik and Wreg needed help. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into some kind of trouble and didn’t want Balidor to know, so they were pulling Jon in, instead.
Sighing a bit, and already irritated, Jon shoved his hands in his pockets, then walked towards the woman’s voice.
It wasn’t until he got within a few yards of her outline, that he pulled up short, staring at the woman standing there, sure at first that he must be dreaming.
He’d been so sure it was Neela.
He found himself remembering the funhouse mirrors of the Shadow house in Argentina, even as he glanced back over his shoulder, wondering if he should shout out Balidor’s name, warn them––or call them over here.
Something held him silent and in place, though.
He just stood there, staring at the woman in front of him.
“Hey there, Jon-boy,” Cass said, twirling the scarlet-red dyed tips of her hair in her small fingers. “Bet you’re happy to see me, huh?”
She gave him a teasing, eyelash-batting smile Jon remembered from high school, when she used to joke flirt with him all the time, even though she knew he was gay, or maybe for that very reason.
It took him a moment of silent staring to comprehend what was so strange about her appearance, even apart from the rest of it. Then it hit him.
The scar was gone.
The scar Terian carved into her face in that cell in the Caucasus Mountains while Jon and Revik screamed at the seer to stop––it was gone.
Someone erased it completely from Cass’s face.
Flawlessly smooth and pale, Cass’s skin was entirely unblemished, as perfect as a porcelain doll’s from her forehead down her nose, cheek and mouth, to the long lines of her neck. Candy-apple-red lipstick exactly matched the shocking red of her newly-dyed red and black hair.
The seductive smile toyed with the edges of her eyes and lips.
“…Miss me, handsome?” she said. “Or have you changed your mind, already?”
“Changed my mind? Changed my mind about––”
“Oh, let’s not rehash all that. South America was a lifetime and a half ago, little brother.” Her shockingly red smile widened. “Hey, Jon. I have a secret. Want to hear it?”
“Cass…” He stared at her, at a loss. “Cass, is it really you? Are you really here?”
“Does it really look like me, Jonatha
n?”
He frowned. Glancing over his shoulder, he nearly shouted for Balidor again, but something stopped him, brushing the idea from his mind. He looked back at Cass, taking in the coffee-colored leather pants that matched her eyes, the leather coat and turtleneck, high-heeled boots, wraparound headset, and the very expensive-looking handheld that coiled one wrist.
His stare paused on shimmering green, brand-new organic guns strapped to her narrow hips.
“Cass. What the hell––”
“––You want to know a secret, right, Jon? Of course you do.” She smiled wider, her expression unchanging, her gaze unmoving. “Everyone likes secrets.”
It was the last thing he heard before everything grayed out.
7
TALEI
BALIDOR STOOD PATIENTLY, a few yards from where Chandre and the other seer, Talei, continued to talk.
He must be more tightly shielded than he’d realized.
Truthfully, Jon made him a bit nervous these days, if only because Balidor hadn’t yet had time to assess what their “newest seer” could do.
He cleared his throat.
The two female seers looked over sharply, their eyes faintly surprised, and Balidor’s suspicions were confirmed. They really hadn’t felt him there. They must have been more absorbed in their talk than he’d realized, as well.
Seeing him now, they stepped out of their closer proximity to one another.
Chandre bowed, making the sign of the Adhipan before she motioned to openly include him in their two-person discussion.
“Talei is coming with us,” she said, as soon as Balidor made his way over to complete their three person triangle. She motioned towards the female seer in the SCARB jacket and dark blue business suit. “She thinks it would be better if she is present in person to assist us with the quarantine locks. There is a password system, but it is DNA-encoded, so risky for us to try to falsify without an agent with legitimate clearance.”
Balidor nodded without surprise.
He’d overheard that much while talking to Jon.
“I agree with sister Talei, and thank her for her offer,” he said, bowing. “It is better that the charts come with us, anyway. I would personally feel more at ease if not too many were in possession of these maps.” His eyes swiveled to the seer called Talei. “In truth, I would be very interested to know how many others have this knowledge now. Does our honorable sister, Talei, know this?”
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