Bridge

by JC Andrijeski

Neither thing yielded much.

  Jon suspected Cass and Feigran were locked behind military-grade shields run by Shadow and his people by now. Resonance alone wouldn’t be enough to crack it. Jon also suspected Feigran and Cass resonated on pretty different frequencies these days––compared to when he’d known them, that is.

  Regardless, for those few, serious infiltration forays to which Jon had been invited, he took an utterly passive role.

  He was just… there.

  He lingered near enough to watch the others do their thing, but far enough away to avoid interfering with any of their light. Mostly, Balidor treated these as training exercises, instructing Jon to follow along as best he could, in the event they ever needed him to attempt something similar.

  Jon didn’t scoff outright, but he thought his scoffs loudly.

  He couldn’t even tell how successful the jumps were, not until the debriefing after the fact. As for following what Balidor did behind the Barrier, Jorag smiled when Jon told him he’d tried, clapping him sympathetically on the back. Jorag didn’t say much, but Jon got the message; he had about as much hope of following Balidor during a hunt as he did of flying off the roof of the four-story Victorian mansion by merely flapping his arms.

  Even before he closed his eyes, Jon realized this would be different.

  He wouldn’t be able to just “hang out” in the background for this one, letting seers scan him for resonances.

  Revik wouldn’t tolerate it, for one.

  Jon felt his nerves ratchet up a few more notches at the thought, right before Balidor’s voice rose in his earpiece, seeming to echo inside his very skull.

  “Ready for immersion?” the Adhipan leader said.

  “Yes,” Revik answered.

  “We’ll use the past jump hits, to try and speed things up with––”

  “Yes,” Revik cut in.

  Jon felt Revik’s impatience. It sharpened in the brief silence after he cut Balidor off.

  Jon didn’t have long to think about that, either.

  Everything around him––the feel of the worn leather chair, the sore ankle he’d twisted in mulei the day before, the soft bleeps of nearby machines, traces of Wreg’s anger and hurt still circulating through his light, the rustling of clothing and murmurs of the techs and other sounds Jon didn’t know he could hear until they disappeared––abruptly cut out.

  Jon fell.

  …HE’S NEVER BEEN on a jump with Revik before.

  That doesn’t occur to him until now, either.

  The darkness moves so quickly, he can’t orient himself at first, can’t make sense of where he is. He knows, of course––knew before they started, really––that Revik wouldn’t move through the stages of the Barrier jump with the usual 1-2-3 used by Jon’s trainers and dictated by standard jump protocol. Even so, he finds himself utterly lost in the span of seconds after he first notices the room fade.

  He can’t pull apart the resonances buffeting his light; he knows only that they come from Revik, that he feels familiarity in them, and familiarity from the other seers who have collected them. The resonances themselves remain fleeting, impossible to pin down.

  He feels something familiar in what is coming, too. He feels––

  Gods… Allie.

  He feels Allie.

  The pain that rises is unbearable. He fights to pull it back, to shove it into some recess of his heart before Revik can feel it––

  ––then he’s moving too fast, lost inside that wave of light, buffeted by more feelings of her, of Cass, of a strange flavor of his childhood, almost like a scent cloying in his aleimi, something so a part of him, he rarely sees it as a separate thing.

  Memories rush forward, things Jon hasn’t felt in years, things he forgot about, not all of them good or particularly nostalgia-inducing, but so damned fucking familiar and immediate. The intensity of it shocks him. He gets lost there, in those achingly clear-cut memories, the kind that only get stuck in one’s mind and light in that particular way during childhood.

  He remembers their father laughing, watching Allie chase the dog. He remembers their mother and the horrible shrimp tacos she made once, and her getting angry and cussing them all out when they wouldn’t eat them.

  He remembers later things. The hospital. The smell of death. The funeral.

  Mom drunk on the couch, helping Allie carry her.

  Allie hollow-eyed, blank, still drunk herself after they went out to drink on Dad’s grave.

  Younger than that, he remembers making cookies with their grandparents.

  Christmas with Cass showing up at their door, crying, Mom giving her a glass cat with her name on it and the beaming smile on Cass’s face.

  He remembers Allie fighting at school, that pack of assholes who would harass her, who wouldn’t leave her alone, led by Mickey, that prick who seemed to be obsessed with her, pretty much from the second he laid eyes on her. Mickey… jesus. Whatever happened to that guy? He’d been like four years older than her.

  They all made fun of him because he shaved.

  He disappeared at one point, didn’t he? Did he move?

  Before Jon can puzzle through this, before he can sort his way through images of Allie crawling on the carpet at age three and their mother wearing her uniform for the post office as she washes dishes and sings in a kitchen bright with a happiness he only dimly remembers, that still hurts and comforts him somewhere, in the softest, most vulnerable part of his heart, when their father was still healthy and still working as an engineer for Iridian Corp., coming up behind their mom to grab her and make her shriek in delight––

  Jon is standing on sand.

  Wet sand.

  He stares down, confused, unsure how he is here.

  The sand doesn’t leave when he blinks. It squishes softly between his toes.

  It shines a glowing white under Jon’s bare feet, finer than any sand he’s ever felt.

  He turns his gaze up. His eyes that aren’t really eyes focus somewhere further away, maybe a few hundred yards, maybe only a few dozen, maybe a hundred miles… maybe only twenty or so feet.

  A massive rock configuration sits buried in that fine, white sand, its sides steep and marbled green, red and black. Waves break at the rock’s base––waves from a glittering, gold-plated ocean––and it looks like someone dropped that giant piece of jagged earth, trees and birds and all, into the shallows near the shore, and left it there.

  Jon blinks up at the forest sitting atop that rough, wild-looking hill.

  Eagles soar and circle there.

  He sees more colorful birds, tropical and incongruous with the jagged appearance of the cliffs and their gold and green textures that remind him of the north Pacific coast back home. Sea birds nest there. Cormorants with their shimmering green-tinted black feathers, puffins with colorful beaks, seagulls of such a blinding white, Jon finds them difficult to look at––

  The sky arcs above, a perfect, cobalt blue.

  Clouds float up there, so white and high they don’t look real, despite the swirls of blue and gold that lighten and darken their dimples and crevices.

  The whole landscape looks like a breathing, living painting.

  Jon has never seen anything so beautiful, so completely filled with life.

  Everything has presence. Everything is presence.

  Everything is alive––not only the birds and dolphins he can see and feel, the latter jumping and playing in the surf of those gold-tinted waves, but every grain of sand, every feather in every wing, every drop of water and curling wave and breath of wind. The waves are alive, bleeding sunlight and teeming with fish, shining with diamonds.

  Every waving green leaf, every branch, every stone, every mist of white-foamed spray––

  It lives.

  Each exudes its own peculiar jumble of living frequency. Each contains a world of something else. Complicated, dense, meaningful… unique.

  Utterly beautiful.

  It is immediate. Immediate…
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br />   Jon can’t articulate it all to himself.

  He can only feel it. Feeling swells his chest; he is lost here, in the power of this place. Every part of him bursts into tiny, white-hot flames, shifting his vibration to some higher level he can’t comprehend, a sound maybe only the dolphins can hear. White light fills him, a feeling of stillness so profound he barely knows himself in it.

  Even as he feels he’s starting to adjust, to relax into being in this place––

  The scenery changes again.

  Detail floods his consciousness.

  Any one thing Jon focuses on grows so detailed he becomes lost in it.

  The veins in leaves shock him, showing tiny cilia and drops of water, insects with so much presence he feels a flush of guilt for every ant he’s ever crushed, every mosquito he’s ever slapped in thoughtless irritation, every fly he’s swatted with a shoe or hand.

  He sees the deep black eyes of birds. The depth there pulls him, beckons him to seek its source… but he only gets lost all over again, lost in something he can’t understand, in a mind moving too differently from his.

  A flutter of wings and the bird is gone; he can only stare after it longingly.

  He feels its puzzlement reflected back, its attempts to understand him.

  Jon tries to remind himself why he is here.

  He forces a wider perspective, a tenser focus on his surroundings.

  Staring back at the horizon, he notices the curling, iridescent waves; they make perfect, turquoise-glass tubes before crashing into white foam on the sand. Jon is overcome by their beauty; he loses himself there, staring into the blue-green waters beneath a slant of sunlight that coats the ocean’s surface, turning it molten gold.

  The sun is white. Young and white, eclipsed with a ring of rose fire.

  He sees her.

  She stands, waist-deep in the water, a single form, looking strangely small in the immensity of blue-green ocean and sky. Like a shadow, her reflection darts behind her as the water shifts and moves in gentle swells. When Jon continues to stare, that same reflection resembles an oddly-shaped fish teasing at her legs and back.

  She is alone.

  For the barest of seconds, he envies her.

  This place, this beauty, feels like hers.

  It belongs to her.

  It is a part of her.

  Dark hair coils and unfurls gently and languorously in the breeze, hanging down her back in a thick curtain. Strongly contrasting the color of her hair, a filmy, green-gold dress, low-cut in back, hangs off her gently curved form, seemingly with nothing worn under it. The dress floats around her like the single petal of a golden lily, moving gently in the passing swells without leaving her narrow waist.

  Before Jon can make sense of her, he sees another form plowing through the waves.

  The other form is taller. He walks with long strides, seemingly oblivious to the crash of water as it pulls him to and fro, teasing him, impeding his attempts to reach her. Jon watches the dark-haired man lunge towards her, oblivious as the tide pulls him sideways. He corrects without altering his gaze, walking inexorably towards the lone woman looking out to sea.

  He walks without hesitation, with an impatience Jon can feel, moving towards her in a straight, unswerving line––

  It is Revik.

  Of course it is Revik.

  Jon knows this, even before he knows.

  Revik doesn’t look at anything but her.

  He doesn’t look at his feet as he walks, or the water, or the sky. He doesn’t look at the rock formation and its small forest sticking out of the sand. He doesn’t look at the birds, or the dolphins that weave through the waves, circling him in concentric rings.

  Already, Jon can feel the other man’s grief.

  Grief mixes with a relief so palpable, it is somehow worse.

  The feeling Jon glimpses there closes his throat, cutting into his skin like sharpened glass. Revik appears to be walking towards her, but everything about him, everything Jon can feel on Revik or see in him, makes it clear that he is running.

  He is running towards her. He is running towards his wife.

  Jon understands now. He understands too well.

  He shouldn’t be here.

  He thinks it, even as Revik reaches her, as his long arms encircle her from behind, holding her tightly, but gently, as if she were porcelain instead of flesh and bone. He pulls her against his now-wet clothes, and Jon looks away, with whatever part of himself that watches this. Even so, he almost feels it when Revik leans down to kiss her neck and bare shoulder.

  Pain expands off the other man, a dark, dense cloud, discordant in this perfect land of water, sun and light. It buckles Jon’s knees.

  He might have fallen to the sand. He might have fallen, then and there––

  ––but Revik pulls on him.

  Demands him.

  For Jon, there is no dramatic walk through a Barrier ocean to greet her.

  Jon is simply there.

  He blinks, and he is next to the two of them.

  He stands waist-deep in crystal blue water. His Barrier body adjusts to the change––or really, his mind does, before Jon has a single conscious thought. His subconscious supplies him with appropriate clothes, the same blue and white flowered swim trunks he bought in Hawaii in his mid-twenties, when he’d gone there with his then-boyfriend Brett.

  Allie had been on that trip, too. She brought Jaden, and even though he made three times the money she did at her crappy waitressing job, Jon remembered she paid for the hotel, and for most of their drinks.

  Jaden was a cheap prick, even then.

  Feeling a strange guilt at the memory, Jon looks up to see Revik staring at him with clear, colorless eyes. They are reproduced almost exactly in the Barrier as they are in the physical, but for the added light that make his irises glow strangely.

  They reflect Barrier sunlight, even as they narrow at him.

  What can you feel? Revik asks.

  It is less a question than another demand.

  Revik doesn’t let go of his wife as he asks it.

  He seems unable to let go of her, unable to stop touching her, caressing her hair back from her face, holding her belly and hip with his other hand, even as he pulls on Jon almost angrily––even as he seems to resent Jon’s presence here.

  Jon feels all these things, and wishes he could be elsewhere, too.

  Goddamn it, Jon… Revik snaps.

  He jerks roughly at Jon’s light, and Jon winces in pain, closing somewhat.

  He looks reluctantly at Allie’s face.

  Immediately, pain slams his own light. It mixes with Revik’s enough that he has to fight to disentangle it, to pull them apart. He feels anger on Revik, too, impatience, a desire to be alone with her, to kick Jon out of his space.

  Gods, grief.

  So much grief.

  I’ll fucking kill you if you don’t help me with this, Revik says, gripping her tighter. Jon can hear the fear in his words now, a near panic, a longing so twisted it’s ceased to be hope, but feels closer to some kind of prayer. Jon, please. She’s never been this close. Forget about me. Look at her. Please, gods, look at her, and tell me what you feel…

  At the end of this speech, the longest Jon has heard from his brother-in-law since Cass did what she did, the grief and fear are winning out over his anger. Revik is begging him. He is begging for Jon’s help, and something in the reality of that pulls Jon’s light and mind sharply into focus.

  He steps towards her. This time, he doesn’t avert his gaze.

  Allie…? he sends, tentative.

  His Barrier fingers reach up, and although Revik flinches, his light exuding threats, exuding protectiveness, Jon touches her face, which looks so much like Allie’s face in the physical, it takes his breath.

  Only the eyes are different.

  A brilliant, jade green, they are clear as glass, but there is a vacancy there, one Jon doesn’t recognize. It occurs to him how full of life she is, how co
mpletely there and present she has always been, and again he has to fight to keep back his own emotions, his own feelings about the woman in front of him.

  Allie, he sends, softer. Where are you, Allie? Can you hear me?

  She looks at him.

  Her dark head turns, and she looks straight at him, that vacancy even more unnerving as she looks through him to the waves and the endless horizon on the other side of his Barrier form.

  She looks at him, and for a bare instant, Jon imagines she sees him.

  A rush of feeling hits him, feeling that morphs inexplicably into anger.

  Al! he shouts at her. Goddamn it, Al! What the fuck are you doing?

  He feels Revik tense, gripping her protectively.

  That time, Jon barely notices.

  Something in her stirs. He stares at that alone.

  Something in her is seeing him briefly, a flicker of spark, like flint struck on rock.

  Jon imagines he sees a flash of anger there. Anger and what has to be grief, a kind of fuck you, Jon he almost recognizes. It turns Jon’s anger into joy briefly, then abruptly back into rage, a kind of helpless fury.

  All the feeling he’s suppressed for days, weeks, months now, ever since they found Allie in their mother’s bed at that run-down purple Victorian on Fell Street––it all surges up. Everything he’s said and done, the way Wreg’s looked at him, the way no one will blame him to his face about what he did, the way no one talks about it, either.

  The way Revik looks at him.

  The way Revik looks like he wants to kill him sometimes, even though he won’t blame him to his face, either.

  All those things, the anger, guilt, self-hate––they boil in Jon’s chest like hot flames, blinding him to everything but those blank, green eyes, staring at him.

  So that’s it? he says. You’re just done now, is that it, Al?

  Those green, eerily vacant eyes don’t blink.

  You’ll just stay here, I guess? Hang out until the rest of us are dead?

  His anger sharpens, coming from so far inside him, he barely knows what he’s saying.

  This is it, isn’t it? Your happy place. What Revik told me about in the Tank. This is where you go when things get tough. Your “golden ocean.” Isn’t that what Revik calls it? Must be nice to just check out and play with fucking dolphins all day, Al––