Those eyes flashed at me again.
I felt, more than saw, his lips twist in a frown.
“…Perhaps, as you said, this is due to a perceived need by these Adhipan dogs to obtain custody of her before she could give birth,” he said, staring back into the dark jungle. “It does not explain who she is, however, that such a thing would be so dire.”
I nodded, unsure how to answer.
Hesitating, I ventured a question anyway.
“Who do you think she is?” I said. “The female?”
Terian didn’t answer.
I pressed him again.
“You know her, don’t you?” I said. “You think you do, at least.”
A dense, lava-like charge whispered through Terian’s light.
That time, I worried at once that I had pressed him too hard.
There was no mistaking the current of anger I felt. Maybe more than anger. Maybe something closer to hatred, something that seethed, burned and coiled like a parasite somewhere in the aleimi that wound around Terian’s intestines.
It needled him there, barely suppressed.
His voice came out calm when he answered.
“I believe I do know her, yes,” he said. “Well enough to know I should have killed her when I met her the first time.”
He paused, still staring out into the jungle.
He added, “That still does not adequately answer the question of who she is though, brother… or why she warrants two units of the Adhipan for her extraction and protection.”
I felt that charge in him twist deeper, growing bitter, filled with acid.
“Nevertheless,” he continued in that same, flat, distant voice. “If I could be certain I was correct in her identity to me… and if could be certain I would truly end her in the process… I might be tempted to carpet-bomb this entire jungle, my good brother, just to ensure I didn’t make the same mistake again.”
His voice grew openly bitter.
“…For I would quite happily send the bitch and her unborn maggot back to seek a new incarnation in a few hundred years. Regardless of whatever life debt I accrued from the crime. Even if the deed cursed my light for a thousand lifetimes.”
I fought to hide the shock in my light, and failed.
Terian must have felt it.
His anger shifted, twisting into a humorless smile in the dark.
“Do not worry, my brother,” he said, that smile reaching his words. “I won’t do anything so drastic. Not with Revi’ still running after her with a hard-on, trying to protect her from the big bad wolf. Presumably that wolf is me… just as it was five years ago.”
His full lips pursed as he gazed out through the trees.
“I still have hope for my friend,” he said, softer. “I have hope that he can be made to see reason again, one of these days.” He aimed another half-smile at me. “I am an eternal optimist where my friends are concerned, brother Quay… and I still have hope that this hard-on of his will wear itself out. That he will someday grow into a more adult version of himself.”
Giving me a wry smile, he added,
“Besides, Galaith would never forgive me if I ended his favorite son’s life for this worthless cunt… one who, in the end, means so little.”
That denser heat in his light coiled back around, the parasite gnawing once more into his words.
“Still, I confess… to see him still doing this, after five years… it pains me, brother. It pains me greatly. To see Revi’ still chasing her like a dog. Chasing her like she was his own mate, even with her pregnant with another male’s child.”
He turned, staring at me through the dim light.
“…She was mated, you know. Even then.”
I didn’t know how to answer that, either.
Eventually, in my silence, Terian looked away.
Exhaling, he clicked softly in the dark.
“Revi’ knew she was mated. He knew, but he was such a fool he managed to convince himself he could have her anyway. Even when she didn’t want him. Even when she couldn’t want him, when she was incapable of wanting him, given that her light belonged to another.”
Terian’s words faded, growing distant.
“And yet I understand him, in a way.” Without looking at me, he made his words softer. “I had a sister,” he murmured, his voice distant. “I had a sister, and I would have done anything for her. This is how I understand Revi’, you see. I remember her… and then I understand.”
I stared at him.
A sister?
I had read everything about him by then, everything I could get my hands on at my level of access and security clearance.
No where, anywhere in his records or biography, was there any mention of a sister. There were parents, of course, but they were long gone. Killed in one of the World Wars after they left their son to more or less starve in the mountains where they hid.
Looking at him now, through the darkness of the Barrier, I wondered if he was even fully aware of me, or what he had said.
I was about to speak to him, to ask, when his voice rose again.
“Revi’ is my family now,” the other seer said.
Frowning, I opened my mouth…
When he seemed to snap back, all at once.
Turning, he looked at me, staring at me with those amber eyes through the dark.
“It is disheartening, little brother.”
He surprised me then, leaning closer, and kissing me on the mouth.
“It is truly disheartening, indeed,” he said, massaging me briefly on the chest, right before he moved away, resuming his strides into the jungle. “But we all have our burdens, na?”
I hadn’t really tracked until then that we’d stopped walking.
Now, I watched him walk into the trees, unmoving for a beat longer.
A reaction turned painfully in my gut.
The feeling lived somewhere between jealousy and fascination, even as I fought to wind my way through the other’s words, through what I felt on his light. I found myself understanding the bare logistics of what he was telling me, without understanding much else of anything he’d said. Even understanding what I did confused me more than helped me.
“It’s her, isn’t it?” I said.
Jerking forward to follow him into the trees, I used the subvocals to speak to him.
Even through my headset, I could hear the dense anger in my voice, as well as hints of my more complex feelings behind that anger.
I also imagined I could hear my own jealousy.
“The female infiltrator,” I said. “The one they sent to pull Dehgoies out of the Org. The one the Seven used to separate him from us. It is her. Isn’t it?”
“Yes, brother,” Terian said.
His voice had gone infiltrator-blank, but I felt his anger resonate with mine.
Strangely, I found myself thinking Terian was glad I knew, relieved he no longer had to pretend he didn’t know. He seemed to want someone besides himself to know the importance of stopping this female from escaping, and stopping his friend, Dehgoies, from disappearing with her, into the caves of the Pamir or anywhere else.
Were they friends, though? Terian and Dehgoies? If not, what were they? What kind of family were they to one another?
The question ate at me.
I sometimes thought the question would consume me.
Terian went on in a harder voice.
“I cannot say for certain, of course,” he amended. “But it feels like her. It feels exactly like what I remember of her, and she had very distinctive light, particularly for one with no background in infiltration, and few visible trauma markers.”
Pausing, he added,
“She and I… we have an odd…”
Terian trailed briefly over the comm, as if thinking better of his words.
When I looked over, he made his tone shift, nearly a shrug.
“…Connection, I guess you could say,” he finished. “Nothing personal, mind you. The closest I got to her pers
onally was to bind and gag her naked so that we could try and get Revi’ to see her for what she was… and to act on his perverse impulses with her. We were still trying to reason with him, you see. We were trying to help him work out his unhealthy fascination in a way that might rid him of it. But there are some unusual similarities in our light––mine and that female’s. Things that are uncommon enough to be distinctive. Things I can see easier than most, perhaps, for they exist also in me.”
Blinking, I could only stare at that.
I fought to think, moving my legs and feet faster to keep up as he made his way through the dense jungle plants. Watching his back, I frowned.
I could feel him telling me something.
I could feel it there, without knowing precisely what it was.
I even felt the seer’s willingness to talk to me, something I knew I might not be able to count on later, depending on what wind blew through Terian’s mood. I also felt the part of him that believed he could not speak to me in full, not without censoring his words.
When the silence stretched on his side, it was up to me to break it, I realized.
I ventured one more question.
“Is there some key to this similarity between you?” I said, cautious. “Some signature I, or perhaps Varlan, should look for, sir? So we might look for her more accurately?”
A silence fell after I spoke.
I knew, somehow, that I had asked the wrong question.
I had somehow entirely missed the point.
Worse, I had somehow just shown him I didn’t understand any of what he’d tried to confide in me.
“No, brother,” he said, his voice dismissive once more. “No. You would not see it. I had to have it pointed out to me in my own light, to be truthful. ‘Blindness in the truth of one’s light,’ and all that…” he added, quoting an oft-repeated truth of infiltration.
“But wouldn’t it be better if more than one of us––” I persisted.
“No, brother,” Terian said.
His voice came out stronger that time, more final.
Moreover, he once more sounded like my boss, not a confidante or friend.
“Galaith will handle that end of things, Quay, if I need a second set of eyes.” I felt him glance at me in the dark. His voice grew paternal. “He has an interest in our mission here as well, as you have likely guessed. I have made him aware of exactly who and what we are tracking out here, and I update him frequently. He stays with me… with us… even now.”
I felt a tremor go through my light.
Such a thing hadn’t even occurred to me.
Galaith was watching over us out here? Now? In real time?
It was unthinkable… yet also entirely logical, once I turned the question over in my mind for even half a second.
But of course Terian would be in direct contact with Galaith.
He likely would have been in any case, much less now, for this mission.
Terian was Galaith’s successor now.
It was a sharp, embarrassing, and humbling reminder that I simply wasn’t used to dealing with seers at Terian’s level. Thinking about that now intimidated me, turned me on, excited my more ambitious side, made me feel small, and disoriented me, all in the same breath.
That was all before it had occurred to me that Galaith might have some individual awareness of me by now… as in me, personally.
The more I considered it, the more likely it seemed.
Given my proximity to Terian’s light, it was more or less a certainty.
Realizing in the same set of seconds that my conversation with Terian was now over, I filed my lingering questions away for a more opportune moment.
I couldn’t help feeling watched, though.
I also couldn’t stop myself hoping I would get a second opportunity to discuss these fascinating topics with the infamous Terian… and that I would ask the right questions the next time he tried to confide in me.
I would not let myself believe I had blown that opportunity permanently.
Fourteen
The Inevitability Of Weakness
28 clicks east of Rio Negro
343 clicks west-northwest of Manaus
The Amazonian Basin, Brazil
December 1, 1978
We continued moving more or less silently towards those shielded lights.
We walked through pitch-darkness now––in the physical, at least.
I and the others made some noise, of course; it was inevitable, even with the sound-deadening boots we wore, and our ability to move more quietly than humans through dense terrain, especially without visual-spectrum light.
We paused as a group only when we needed to hack through some impassable segment of jungle, or if we lost our quarry long enough that we needed to check in from several points, meaning more than simply via my link to central.
Usually it was Gregor, Dayven, and Jorel who worked the machetes, while the rest of us focused our attention behind the Barrier.
The light that felt like Dehgoies was close now.
The Defector and his rear-defense guard had drawn closer to the rest of the target group as the Org team drew closer to them. I found that interesting. Did Dehgoies do it in anticipation of a fight, to leverage more seers on the ground? Or had the primary team merely fallen further behind, forcing their rear-guard to close the gap?
Why had they sent Dehgoies back with the rear-guard at all? They must know he would interest us more than anyone else with them, including their extraction targets.
Was he merely another kind of decoy? A distraction from the female?
As it looked now, we would likely catch up with them sometime in the next three or four hours. What then? Would Dehgoies and his Adhipan friends try to fight us off? Try to kill us one by one? Try to kill Terian? Try to negotiate?
Or would they merely attempt to slow us down, so the female might escape with her mate and child? Was Dehgoies really so infatuated that he would throw away his life for another male’s mate and offspring?
And would Terian really kill a female seer with a newborn at her breast?
The idea fell beyond the pale.
The very concept of killing a newborn, or any seer pup, was beyond taboo. That had been true long before the population shortages since First Contact.
These days, it was an unpardonable crime.
Killing any seer, no matter what their age, bordered on unpardonable nowadays.
I could only think of a handful of exceptions to this rule: self-defense or the defense of a greater number of our race. Violation of a personal nature that exceeded what the average seer could be expected to tolerate, such as one who convincingly threatened one’s mate or family, committed rape of a child or a bonded mate. Certain types of torture or enslavement, medical experimentation like what the Nazis had done to pre-fertile seers…
Extreme circumstances, in other words.
Things that made the finality of death comprehensible.
Generally speaking, seers fought their battles through humans, not the lives of other seers. Even work camp bondage, with very few exceptions, was not meant to bring about the long-term imprisonment, much less death, of those of our kind.
I continued to turn over the information I had gleaned from intelligence as I walked behind the others. I continued to turn over Terian’s words to me, as well, wondering how seriously he meant them––if he really intended on killing the female and her child.
I had only a few more minutes to ponder my lingering questions, however.
Then twenty different lights pinged at mine, all at once.
Like the rest of my unit, I came to a dead stop.
I stood there, my aleimi lit up like a human Christmas tree––crouched, muscles tense, frozen from hard-won training to suppress my fight or flight reflex.
I strained, listening, standing at the edge of a dense cluster of trees.
Terian sent the first flare of instruction that reached me after the alarm.
Then
, with a bare millisecond of delay, the intelligence team invaded my light from Guoreum. I sent their flood of intel on to Terian, then, upon his signal, on to the others, even as Varlan hit me from up ahead, sending me more snapshots to send back to Central.
More pulses of intel and Barrier imprints flickered back and forth between me, Varlan, Terian and the rest of our team in disorienting and erratic waves.
I found myself fighting to interpret five or six sets of data simultaneously, even as I listened to Terian speak through the now-open comm.
“…They’ve got another team meeting up with them over that ridge,” Terian said in my ear. “It’s not small, my brothers and sisters…”
Images flashed behind my eyes from the infiltration team back at Central as well as the one in Guoreum. All of those images and impressions supported Terian’s words.
“…We’re getting hits on as many as two hundred ranked infiltrators. Extremely well-shielded. Galaith is saying Adhipan. He is trying to confirm those numbers now, but he and his personal infiltration unit are already warning us that the group could be even larger than our preliminary scans suggest. Galaith is adding two more infiltration teams out of Asia to support us, given the scope of this. He is also pulling two teams out of São Paulo to meet us here as well… and three more out of Buenos Aires.”
I frowned.
No one in São Paulo, much less Bueno Aires, would get here in time.
I didn’t speak that aloud.
Instead, I seconded Terian’s words.
“The team at Guoreum confirms those numbers,” I said. “They are also currently monitoring and assessing the new strike unit from the north. They believe deployment originated in Bogota. They are conferring with Central now to share and assess findings.”
Terian acknowledged my words with a ping, going on with scarcely a pause.
“We’ve also got a smaller team headed our way,” he said.
His voice came out as matter-of-fact and casual as before, but something in his light caused my eyes to jerk towards him.
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