BRIDGE
Bridge & Sword Series #7
by
JC Andrijeski
Copyright © 2017 by JC Andrijeski
Published by White Sun Press
Cover Art & Design by Damonza.com
2017
Ebook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official retailer for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.
SYNOPSIS for BRIDGE
“Up here, we are forever children...”
Revik, infamous Sword of the seer world, lost everything when his enemies destroyed the mind of his wife, Allie, and stole their unborn child.
Determined to fight the last battle, Revik hunkers down in a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, training seers and humans alike for that inevitable confrontation. Aware of the slim odds of his own survival, Revik longs to rescue his child from the clutches of the Dreng before he dies…even if that means killing her to prevent the pain and torment he endured as the Dreng’s slave.
Unfortunately, the Dreng know his weaknesses all too well. In a final confrontation, they force him to choose between saving his race but sacrificing his daughter…or betraying both races to keep the last of his family intact.
For my mom
Prologue
BETWEEN
“…And the lands between will swallow her for a time / Until she forgets herself, lost in death and drenching cold / In that place of ghosts / Only the one who carries half her soul / Can hold the light for her in the end…”
~ from “The Love Story,” Commentaries on the Final Days
I REMEMBER EVERYTHING now. Everything.
Every moment, every piece of my life.
Every thread of the tapestry that eluded me all of those years, that consisted only of random, disparate acts… of reaction and fear and lack of agency.
All those connections. All the resonances I glimpsed and missed. The moments in my life, powerful or not, that refused to add up into any kind of coherent whole.
I remember them all.
I remember, and I see the threads that run between them.
I see the image they form, that finely detailed painting that makes up my life. From here, it almost makes sense. It almost connects the me down here to those parts that know why I came to this world, what I’m even doing here.
It contains so much, this knowing, yet I see how small it is. My life is small. I am small within it, dependent on so many other people and things. Seeing that doesn’t make me sad; somehow, it only fills me with wonder. The feeling behind that remains elusive, but the glimpses I catch in those silences cut my breath.
Old and new, ancient and birthing––everything lives in this place. Timelessness lives there. Timelessness that is somehow beautiful by its very existence fills my every breath.
So much beauty lives here. So much hope.
Distant glimmers of heart and light promise to contain everything, the very meaning of life itself, and not just for me. For all of us.
It is not something I can truly comprehend. Not even here, where my mind feels its most all-encompassing, its clearest and least shadowed by my own hang-ups and misconceptions and fears and longings.
Not even here can I understand even a fraction of the things that live in that light.
I want so much here.
Yet here, I need nothing.
I slide over mountains, valleys.
One valley. One perfect valley, so beautiful it makes me cry, or I fervently believe it would, if I had any need to cry in this place. I believe it so strongly, that feeling blooms like a pain in my side, fighting against what body I have left.
That valley grows larger before me, filled with white and gold light so that I scarcely see the lapping waves. Details etch in marbled cliff faces, each grain of sand so clear and glass-like, I feel a thousand worlds living in each smooth surface. They reflect the light of one another, merging, yet separate, so beautiful and filled with so much meaning, more meaning than I can comprehend in a thousand lives such as these.
I know this place. I know it, but––
I can’t be here.
Yet I cannot leave. The part of me that can feel and think, it lingers out of reach.
So I remain. Half here, half somewhere else, I remain.
I feel the caress of those golden waves, the rough brush of sand on the bottoms of my feet and toes, the soft kiss of sunlight filled with presence and hope, like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy, but it doesn’t let me reach it… not really.
As a few hundred thousand years tick slowly by, without any sense of where or when, I watch that valley and ocean recede.
I am left behind.
Grief wants to overwhelm me again, to annihilate me anew.
It is too much, this grief.
I can’t do anything but let it strangle and rip apart my insides, without even a body to house them. My heart hurts, my head. My belly hurts, my intestines and throat. Yet there is nothing of me here, no way to house any of it. It’s as if someone locked me and everything I care about under glass. All that gets through is the image.
I am preserved there, a glass vase.
Empty…
Empty of him.
Here, I remember everything. Every single thing.
I can see him there, too, in the case next to me. A different glass cage, visible to me, but out of my reach. When I most need to feel his light, to let him feel mine, we are apart. He is lost to me, when I love him more than I ever have, when I know how badly he needs me.
Maybe I really am dead. Maybe the end will come soon, and then I have only to…
Wait. I will wait for him here.
Wait for both of them, maybe.
If I wait long enough, some part of me will figure out how to reach him––to reach her. Or maybe just to forget. Forget that I failed. Forget the pain I left for both of them.
Failure for me is nothing new. My course through lives could be tracked by the failures, big and small that attach to my name. The feeling matters. It is all that matters, that feeling.
I love them both so much.
I love…
Even that word feels inadequate.
That darkness destroyed me, but not. I still am, but not. I am here, but not. I still love. They haven’t taken that from me, even if I can’t breathe in this place, I still have my heart.
It beats somewhere, soft, but I hear it.
I can’t find him…
I try to hold on to her.
I live for those occasional glimpses. She teases me, pulls at me, just enough to remind me that I can’t get to her either, not now, when she is at her smallest and most vulnerable. She is lost to me, but I cannot stop myself from trying.
I can feel her grief, her loss. I cannot soothe her, cannot keep that promise, either. Nor can he. I feel his heart breaking, and I can only…
Watch. I can only watch them both.
I cannot bear that I left her there. I cannot bear that I left him.
Words live there, but they contain too much. Too much for me to hold.
Husband. Father. Daughter.
Daughter…
I hear his cries, too. The pain in his heart, as he tries to reach her. Those golden waves come when they want to come, leave when they want to leave, and I am only a shell in the spaces between. I am nothing here. I am all, but I cannot help them.
I am the empty vase.
I dream for her.
&nbs
p; I imagine innocent light, love and knowing of love, smiles and hugs and shining eyes, kisses and snuggles, warm sunlight and waves…
I cannot remain. I cannot be sure I reach her at all. I remember that person, who might have been me, once upon a time… that person whose light looks dirty to me now, confused and dim, but who once touched those golden shores.
I try to share that with her, my daughter. But the gear shaft is broken. All of the connecting points between no longer work.
This can’t be right.
Things can’t end this way.
Her being alone, without either of us… that can’t be right.
That grief over the golden waves…
The being alone…
This can’t be the way the story ends.
When I concentrate on him, I get only vague feelings, a pain I can’t control or categorize or make less. The reality of him, the certainty of him remains, a constant flicker in an otherwise empty expanse.
A voice. Soft, so familiar.
“…And in those ending moments, she will die. But it is not a quiet death, for a part of her will remain. It will stay and be lured back to the light, back to one final struggle against the dark. The birth comes from that death. The final form comes from its ending…”
I listen to him.
He reads to me, for hours sometimes.
Days. Maybe weeks.
I drift inside his words, lost there.
I try to understand, but the words disappear like a sand sculpture in wind, as gusts slide roughly across the face, turning features smooth and bland, empty of him.
“…The battle will not end this way. Death will neither bring it forth nor its end. Death will break the last hold of the spark into the fire, luring from the place of lost between…”
Some part of me cries, hearing his words. It cries and cries.
He doesn’t always read. Sometimes he cries there, with me.
I see him, from a long way away, holding a body I almost recognize.
…Don’t leave me, he says. Gods, baby… don’t leave me here alone…
I can feel that. I can feel his words. But not him, not his tears.
I cry, but I can’t move, nor crawl my way out of that dark.
I hear him, but I don’t know how to help him.
I remember, though.
I remember everything.
1
MOTHER
I FEEL HER there, alone. I feel the bite of that silver light.
I see the smoke-filled glass that corrupts her light, making it rigid in all the wrong ways, breaking her on the inside, cutting her off from her heart, from all of that love that lives above and around her. I feel how that aloneness terrifies her, forces her to shut down.
They are terrifying her. They are terrifying my baby girl.
There is no horror deeper than this.
It is beyond fear. Beyond loss.
The abyss beckons, pulling at her gently, promising her she will succumb.
She reaches for me, but cannot touch me here. She reaches for him, but cannot feel his light in all that dark. The dark tells her it is all that is. She reaches for the only thing she has left, the one hope, the one thing that seems to love her––
Mother. She has a mother.
The thought makes me scream inside.
I cannot let them have her. I cannot let them break her.
I cannot.
CASS SNAPPED OUT, frowning.
She felt whispers like that sometimes, closer to hallucinations than real thoughts.
The presence behind it felt real, but then, Cass had known Allie for over thirty years, so she could have done that part herself. Cass could conjure Allie’s presence just fine all on her own, no outside intervention required.
This seer business was still relatively new to her, though.
Uncle told her that picking up a flotsam of random impressions, resonances and information from the Barrier constituted part of her new normal.
It was part of being seer.
The construct over the ship shielded her from the worst of it, thank the gods, blocking or deflecting the majority of what would’ve hit her otherwise. Uncle assured her he would always protect her this way. He said she truly had nothing to fear––and she believed him, even as she struggled to adjust to the differences in her seer’s mind.
Still, she wondered what those weird, ghost-like whispers from Allie meant.
Could it really be Allie’s ghost?
More likely it was just her, meaning Cass herself.
It was her mind playing tricks. Some part of her imagined these dialogues with Allie to work out some unresolved conflict between them. Maybe Cass was compulsively continuing the argument with her ex-friend, knowing the other’s mind well enough to act out both ends of the stupid drama, even with Allie out of the picture.
Or was there some other, deeper-seated psychology operating there?
Was it some half-assed attempt on her part to keep Allie around?
Snorting a little, Cass shook her head.
Not bloody likely, she thought loudly, staring out over the ocean.
Still smiling wanly and clicking to herself at the thought, she leaned over the railing to look at the ship’s wake, feeling the deck below her feet roll up and down. It moved sensually, comfortingly, sliding over and under a series of long-appearing waves.
Those waves glided toward her in a kind of inexorable silence, their white crests visible all the way to the eastern horizon. She let her knees and weight grow loose, let her whole body conform to its rhythms, lulling her where she stood.
She shook her hair into a gust of spray from the tailwind, exhaling in a near-sigh.
She’d spotted whales swimming alongside the ship yesterday.
Even in so short a time, the whales seemed to sense that the threat from human predators had diminished significantly over the past several months. Whales had been protected for the past three decades, but poachers never bothered to read the fine print, especially given the lucrative market in whale meat in both Asia and North America.
Cass’s own family had been buying black market whale meat since she was a kid. She remembered Allie coming over for dinner once and frowning down at it, her nose crinkled.
Allie’s dad probably never brought home whale meat.
At the thought, Cass felt her face tighten in the wind. Her jaw ground her back molars, even as she fought to push Allie from her mind.
She was tired of thinking about that bitch.
She had no reason to feel bad.
Allie had done this to herself.
Shoving the Most Holy of Holies out of her thoughts, Cass fought to focus on the present, on her life now––as in, the life that actually mattered.
She was starting to itch for land again. Since leaving the East Coast of the United States, there’d been a number of excursions onshore, in Europe, Asia, and even the Middle East, but they’d left those land masses behind weeks ago. Given where they were, she knew she had a few weeks before they’d hit landfall again, but she was getting impatient.
Anyway, the quarantine cities had all been pretty cool so far. She was looking forward to visiting all of them over the next few months, so she could decide which one she wanted to live in full time. So far her favorite had been Dubai, although Zurich and Tokyo were pretty cool, too. She also had a blast the week or so they spent in Hong Kong, and all of the old buildings and art in Prague were extremely cool.
Her seer bodyguards, consisting mainly of Salinse’s people, along with several left over from Shadow’s protective detail in Patagonia, assured her that shore excursions would be limited to quarantine cities from now on.
Everywhere else, the human-killing disease continued to rage.
Of course, the disease wasn’t a worry for anyone on this ship. The few humans onboard had been vaccinated. All the seers had been vaccinated, too, on the slim, incredibly unlikely chance that C2-77 mutated into something seers could catch.
So yeah, the disease wasn’t the issue.
The issue was Revik.
For the past few months, a black hole lived in the Barrier where Revik’s light used to live. They’d lost their direct line to Jon, too, and through him, to Wreg. Cass and the others really only got glimpses these days––mostly of Revik himself, and mostly while Revik slept, as he had a tendency to wander outside his own construct at night, while he was unconscious.
Shadow smilingly called it Revik’s tendency to “hunt in his sleep.”
Cass thought that was kind of hot.
Unfortunately, none of those glimpses did much to illuminate Revik’s actual waking state, or help them much at all, really.
Shadow seemed to find that strange.
More than strange, perhaps.
He didn’t say why he found it so strange. He only commented that he’d never been so thoroughly cut off from Revik’s light, not even in those years when Revik’s light had been split by the Seven and Galaith. Cass knew he wasn’t telling her everything, but that was okay, too––for now, at least. She picked up enough to know Shadow’s concerns had something to do with Revik’s light, and the way Shadow normally accessed his old pupil.
As far as their inability to penetrate Revik’s mind while he slept, Shadow found that less unusual. Syrimne d’Gaos had been trained to protect himself, even in his dreams. He’d been trained to shield while he slept, to fight even while he lay unconscious. Cass and the others could feel him, mostly through emotional links and triggers of whatever kind, but none of them managed to translate those feelings into real intelligence.
For the first time in months, no one knew what Revik might be doing, or thinking about doing, or even what his exact mental state might be.
At the thought, Cass couldn’t help smiling, shaking her head into the wind.
Bridge Page 1