The Defector

by J. C. Andrijeski

  If anything, it felt totally detached.

  Borderline clinical, really.

  “What did Kali think you were reacting to?” Dalejem said then. “If not her?”

  Revik felt his jaw harden more.

  He didn’t meet Dalejem’s eyes, but felt his chest close a second time, not so much in anger that time, or even shame, but rather in an almost overwhelming feeling of privacy, of not wanting them that close to him, not wanting them to know anything about this.

  “Brother,” Dalejem said gently. “We must know. Surely, you must see that?”

  Revik thought about his words.

  After another pause, he exhaled, knowing resentment still seethed off his light.

  He also felt defiance there, for the first time really, at least since he’d tried to order them out of his room.

  “Kali thought I was reacting to her daughter,” Revik said, his voice cold. “She thought it was her daughter that caused me to fixate on her. She wasn’t pregnant then, but she knew she would be. She claimed her daughter’s light already hung around her person.”

  Revik looked up.

  He knew his eyes held an open challenge now, if not an overt threat.

  “She seemed very certain that was the source of my confusion. She said her daughter and I knew one another. That we were…” His jaw hardened. “…connected. In some way.”

  Dalejem nodded, silent.

  Even so, Revik saw a kind of flinch in the other male’s eyes, as if Dalejem saw something in Revik’s face that made him cautious.

  After another few seconds of what felt like the rest of the Adhipan conversing with one another in the space around Revik’s light, Dalejem’s legs straightened smoothly, bringing him gracefully back to his feet. Once he was upright, he held out a hand to Revik, his face holding no readable expression at all.

  Revik looked up.

  He didn’t take the offered hand, not at first.

  He continued to gauge the other man’s face instead, trying to discern where things stood with them now.

  Seeing the look there, Dalejem’s expression relaxed, all at once.

  “It is all right, brother,” he smiled. “We will not send you to the firing squad on this day. I promise you.”

  “Then what?” Revik’s voice came out blunt, unmoved by the other’s attempt to lighten things. “Will you send me back? Back to the Pamir?”

  Dalejem shook his head at that, too, clicking softly, but with a smile as well.

  “No, brother,” he said. “Nice try. But no.”

  Feeling the pain worsen in his chest, Revik didn’t answer.

  He did take the offered hand that time, however.

  Once he was upright, Dalejem clapped him on the shoulder, gauging his face. He continued to hold him there for a few extra seconds, as if trying to determine if Revik could hold himself up under his own power.

  “Stay away from her light for now, brother,” he advised. “We can’t have you cracking your skull out here. And we still intend to make a move for extraction tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?”

  “It cannot wait,” Dalejem said, his voice businesslike. “She is very pregnant, brother. We cannot wait even for one more day.”

  Revik was already shaking his head. “I can’t go on that. Extraction. I can’t––”

  “We will work that out,” Dalejem broke in smoothly.

  Dalejem startled Revik then, sliding his fingers into Revik’s hair, gripping him tightly, right before he raised his other hand to his face, caressing his jaw and throat. He slid his hand lower when Revik didn’t resist or pull back, massaging his shoulder with strong fingers.

  He continued to stroke and massage his skin as Revik felt his light react.

  Then he was more than just reacting.

  Revik felt himself start to open under the other male’s touch.

  He fought to control it, tensing under Dalejem’s fingers, but he didn’t move, or try to evade his hands. He found himself leaning into him instead, opening his light. His breath started coming harder then, his heart hammering in his chest.

  Dalejem must have felt it.

  He released him at once, stepping back.

  “Sorry, brother,” he murmured, his green eyes shifting away.

  His mouth thinned to a line, but Revik couldn’t read the exact expression there, if it was anger, frustration, irritation that Revik had taken the affection how it wasn’t intended, or even embarrassment that he’d been misunderstood.

  Fighting not to react to his own uncertainty, Revik was still searching for words when the other male looked at him once more.

  “I cannot ask,” he said. “I cannot. You understand this, brother?”

  Revik nodded, but truthfully, he didn’t.

  Was he saying to leave him alone?

  Had he been pulling on Dalejem with his light?

  Fuck. Of course he had. He was pulling on him now.

  He was hard, just from five seconds of ordinary seer affection.

  Feeling his skin warm at the realization, Revik clenched his jaw, but didn’t look away from Dalejem’s face. He couldn’t trust himself to speak rationally to the other male’s words––he couldn’t even trust himself to ask a coherent question right then––but he didn’t want Dalejem to be angry with him, either.

  Confusion continued to shift around his light as the silence grew awkward between them. Revik felt the other male waiting for him to answer in some way, but he had absolutely no idea what Dalejem expected him to say.

  He got the main message. Wasn’t that enough?

  “I won’t rape you, either, brother,” he said finally, trying to make it a joke, and feeling it fall flat, even as he said it.

  When Dalejem arched an eyebrow at him, his eyes an obvious question, Revik felt his embarrassment worsen.

  After another awkward pause, he added,

  “…Although brother Balidor is welcome to post a guard by my tent, if it helps with camp morale. I won’t be offended.”

  Dalejem gave him an almost annoyed look at that, annoyance mixed with puzzlement, mixed with a frown, like he couldn’t quite comprehend what Revik had said… or why… or even what language Revik was speaking.

  He didn’t say anything, though.

  Dalejem just looked at him, and Revik couldn’t read his face.

  Frustration warred in Revik’s light and chest as the silence stretched, as he continued to study Dalejem’s high-cheekboned face, the long line of the other male’s neck, which didn’t seem to move, in emotion or anything else.

  He felt blind.

  He felt blind with these fucking Adhipan seers.

  He felt blind with all of them, not only Balidor. Not only Dalejem.

  Still, he supposed he understood enough.

  When he refocused on Dalejem’s eyes that time, the other male’s expression had changed again. That time, Revik saw only sadness there.

  He couldn’t look at that for very long, either.

  Eight

  Arguments In The Dark

  Dalejem kept him there for a few hours longer.

  Revik wondered afterwards if that had been mostly for his, meaning Revik’s, benefit––to allow him to put off having to face the others.

  Still, Dalejem made good use of the time.

  He tested Revik on more weapons, going back to the handgun before continuing on to automatic rifles, which turned out to be part of what he’d lugged through the jungle in that black, canvas bag. He’d also brought a number of laser-scoped things, as well as two organics-only guns that Revik had only ever used under the Rooks.

  When they’d gone through the entire weapons cache the older seer brought, Dalejem instructed Revik to sit with him, on a blanket on the jungle floor.

  For the next four-plus hours, the green-eyed seer assessed Revik’s sight abilities.

  He tested his shielding first, then his ability to discern different types of Barrier attacks.

  He moved on to complex offensive s
ight skills after he’d conducted a methodical spot-check of the basics, then ended on another set of defensive skills, primarily Revik’s ability to scout his environment while under the constraints of a hostile security shield.

  During all of it, Dalejem kept Revik’s light far away from where he’d ventured just before he passed out. Presumably, Guoreum lived out there, along with a thread to Kali’s light.

  Dalejem also filled Revik in on the basics of their extraction plan.

  They would be leaving tomorrow morning.

  Before dawn.

  Revik would be with Dalejem’s team, so he’d be right beside him for most of it. Revik wouldn’t be one of those to go in for the extraction itself, however, Dalejem assured him. They’d keep him stationed at a rearguard position, on the other side of the fence. Revik wouldn’t be asked to go inside Guoreum’s main security grid at all––meaning the military-grade Barrier perimeter––much less any of the slave paddocks.

  Revik couldn’t overstate his relief at that information.

  The idea of being inside Guoreum fucking terrified him, given his previous connection to the Rooks and their Barrier frequencies.

  Even so, he felt his throat close as Dalejem laid out the timeline, even as his mind began immediately to calculate how many hours remained before the op went live.

  He kept that clock running in the back of his mind for the rest of the afternoon.

  It was still running down, silently ratcheting up his anxiety, as he and Dalejem emerged back at the main camp a few hours later.

  By then, it was dark out.

  Revik knew the push was largely because of Kali’s condition. He felt something else driving their timeline, as well––something that felt more nebulous, although he suspected it only felt that way because he could only see parts of the construct they were using.

  At base, Revik was still a tourist here.

  “What role will I play?” he’d asked Dalejem, as they trekked back through the jungle.

  “Kali asked for you,” Dalejem reminded him.

  “I get that,” Revik said. “But what role will I play? With your team, I mean?”

  “Kali asked for you,” Dalejem repeated, as if that explained everything.

  More and more, Revik was beginning to think it did.

  He couldn’t imagine why Adhipan would have brought him out here otherwise.

  Still, he struggled to let it go.

  “Do you know why she asked for me?” he pressed. “Did she give any kind of reason? Anything that might tell me what I’m supposed to be doing?”

  He knew he likely wouldn’t get a satisfactory answer.

  Even so, Dalejem’s laugh frustrated him.

  “You will have to ask her that yourself, my brother,” the other seer said, glancing over his shoulder with a grin.

  Revik didn’t press him again.

  Still, the silence on that front made his anxiety worse.

  Now, as he sat with the rest of them in the dark, around an organic heater in lieu of a fire, Revik wondered again why they’d brought him out here. He was unable to shake that feeling of utter uselessness, of being far more of a burden than an asset. Moreover, the idea of holding a gun in a live op, of shooting it at actual people, made him sweat even just thinking about it.

  The fact that the idea scared him so much struck him as ludicrous, in a way.

  He’d spent most of his adult life in some kind of military capacity.

  He’d carried a gun most of his life, too.

  Now he felt like he’d stepped from one completely unreal world to another, with no transition space between the two states.

  He was pretty sure, out on the ground, in a live op, he’d freeze.

  “You won’t freeze,” the giant seer said from next to him, patting him companionably on the knee. “It’s like riding a bicycle, brother.”

  Revik recognized him as the male seer from the Jeep ride down from the mountains, the one with the Nazi scar on his face, with the dark hair and hazel eyes who looked like a pirate. The broad-faced seer smiled at Revik, handing him a bottle of what turned out to be churek, a seer drink with calming properties.

  Revik downed a few swallows of it, gesturing a heartfelt thanks, and the big seer next to him grinned.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said encouragingly.

  He smacked him on the shoulder that time, hard enough that Revik flinched, falling forward slightly, towards the stove.

  He listened to the others joke and talk quietly amongst themselves, even as he overheard some tactical discussions in the corners and edges of his sight.

  None of them bothered to try and include him in those more serious discussions.

  He didn’t mind––at all, really––but again, he wondered why he was here.

  He was still sitting there, more or less spacing out as he stared at the stove, finishing off the bottle of churek, when he heard his name, and turned.

  He stared into the dark, in the direction from which the voices had come, only to see Dalejem and Mara standing there. They huddled in a shadowed spot between two of the waterproof tents that had been strung up beneath the trees, talking quietly but with some agitation, both of them gesturing a fair bit, but not in seer sign language.

  Revik had examined the tents earlier, mostly to distract himself, and to give his mind something to do as the others worked and prepped for the op. The tents used a rigging he’d never seen before. They also stood taller than other tents he’d used in the field––tall enough that most seers, even him, should be able to stand up straight inside one of them.

  When Revik continued to stare, eventually Mara and Dalejem noticed.

  They turned, nearly in unison, and stared back at him.

  Revik realized only then that the two of them had been arguing.

  Feeling his face flush, Revik swiveled his head back towards the organic heater, making his expression as still as stone.

  He wanted nothing more than to rise to his feet, to retire to his tent for the night.

  Unfortunately, the tent he’d been assigned to share with four other seers happened to be the one right next to where Dalejem and Mara now stood.

  For the same reason, Revik remained where he was, staring into the glowing coils of the heater––pretending he could not feel that they were still arguing about him. His aleimi followed the whispers of charge and anger as they trembled his light, starting up the instant Dalejem and Mara resumed their heated discussion.

  He never thought he’d miss those caves, way up in the Pamir.

  He would have laughed at the idea, even a day earlier.

  Even so, in those long-feeling minutes while the argument persisted, he did.

  Miss them, that is.

  Nine

  Splinter

  Revik stood by a cluster of green-brown roots belonging to a dense grove of walking palms.

  Sweating.

  Fighting to keep his focus, to keep his light close to his body even as he scanned the nearby trees. Fighting to keep his mind locked to Balidor’s, who told him he’d act as Revik’s anchor to help stabilize his light out here.

  The reality of that blew Revik’s mind when he let himself think about it.

  Balidor was with the forward extraction team. That meant the Adhipan leader was probably two miles away from Revik right now, physically, not to mention protecting Revik from inside the Rook construct around the slave camp.

  They’d left him behind, just like Dalejem told him they would.

  Not by much. Not by very much at all, really.

  He still felt too close.

  He was less than three clicks from the perimeter fence, and well under two miles of the forward extraction team and the first of Guoreum’s main buildings.

  Revik knew from the smatterings of memory he had of this place, as well as the satellite images he’d seen on the way down here, exactly where those buildings were located. He even remembered with a decent amount of accuracy which buildings were used for
what. In checking his memories against the Adhipan intel, he’d remembered where the CIC lived, along with the medical labs, the high-security holding center, the guard and military barracks.

  Even out here, the familiar flavors of the Org construct clung to his light, pulling on him in ways that made it difficult to think.

  It sickened him and drew him and scared the fuck out of him, leaving a metallic taste in the back of his throat that simultaneously made him feel manic and reminded him of doing drugs, especially in those last few months in Vietnam.

  In Saigon, he and Terian had been high pretty much from the moment they dragged themselves out of bed in the morning until they passed out at night.

  Worse than any of that, he felt lights he recognized.

  Actual beings. Not just the construct structure itself, the flavor of the security grids, the Pyramid network, the overall taste of Galaith and the Barrier beings behind him––Revik recognized actual beings inside that grid.

  Despite his more conscious paranoia and anxiety, it hadn’t fully sunk in that he might run into seers he used to know out here.

  It hadn’t fully sunk in he might be shooting at people he used to consider friends.

  He could feel Balidor shielding him from a lot of that, even now.

  Even in the middle of an extraction op, Balidor was helping him.

  That fact both reassured him and ratcheted up his nerves, given how strong the pull felt even with such a highly-skilled seer protecting his light.

  Being out here alone both calmed him and made him more nervous too, in more or less equal amounts. He didn’t fully trust himself alone. At the same time, he worried he had a target on his chest from his resonance with the Org network; he didn’t exactly want other seers in harm’s way if he was as visible as he felt out here.

  Revik knew he was well outside the furthest edges of the main construct perimeter, but he still felt too much, which made him even more nervous about the inevitable pursuit they’d face once Balidor got Kali out.