When they finally left the room, guards had been posted outside the door.
Revik barely looked at them as he led Allie downstairs by the hand to make sure she ate before he finished making arrangements to get all of them to New York.
He hadn’t been able to look the others in the eye.
They seemed to be avoiding him, too, he noticed.
The kitchen pretty much cleared out the second they entered, with only Jon remaining there with them, and even he wouldn’t look at either of them directly, not for more than a second or two at a time. He’d talked about nothing, just rambled, filling space. Revik hadn’t even bothered to answer most of his words, but Allie watched Jon silently, a solemn if still stoned-looking expression in her pale green eyes.
Revik didn’t know how much of that night or morning the other seers felt.
He especially didn’t want to think about how much of it Jon and Maygar might have felt, given the connection between the four of them. Revik didn’t know if the others only heard him yelling at her. That might have been enough, really––hearing their commander lose his shit on a woman who wasn’t even mentally capable of understanding him, much less helping him manage that loss of control.
They must have thought he’d finally cracked.
They must have thought he’d lost his mind for real.
He especially didn’t want to know if they knew what he’d done after. The idea of the whole construct watching him fuck his mentally incapacitated wife was more than he could let himself contemplate.
At this point, he flat-out didn’t want to know.
Tugging a few strands of hair off one of her high cheekbones, he realized he was crying again. He only noticed that time when his vision blurred. Without looking up at the rest of the cabin, he wiped his face with the heel of his hand. He didn’t take the fingers of his other hand off of her, or stop caressing her skin. Her hands tightened on his leg, but her eyes didn’t open, and as he watched her expressions come and go under the wire she wore around the back of her neck, he couldn’t help wishing for an end to this.
He wanted this to be over.
He didn’t want to do this alone.
He never had, but things were different now, too different to go back in time, to view it as he had when he’d been younger and alone was all he knew.
He honestly wasn’t sure if he could do it alone, even if he’d wanted to try––and he didn’t want to try. He knew it was beyond selfish to think that way, to even let his mind go down that road, considering where he should be placing his focus.
He didn’t care.
His capability for self-sacrifice had been strained too many times over the years. In the last month, he found it hard to pretend those pulls meant anything to him anymore.
He would stay until he found their child.
He would stay until Cass was dead.
He would stay until Menlim was dead, too––really dead, this time. Dead by his own hands. Dead beyond question, refutation, or the faintest trace of doubt.
Revik intended to handle that end personally. His desire to do so wasn’t pride, or revenge. Those things didn’t meant anything to him anymore, either. He would do it himself because he couldn’t afford not to. He hadn’t spoken to the others about what he would do to make those things happen, how far he would go––but he knew it was far.
Really goddamned far.
Further than he’d ever gone, maybe, even at his worst.
He would die before he let what happened to him happen to Allie’s child.
He owed his wife that much, at least. Hell, he owed it to the world, to not visit upon it another being that had been molded and twisted and broken the way he had been, all those years ago. He couldn’t let Menlim use her to create another Syrimne.
Whatever else he did or didn’t know––of that one thing, he felt entirely certain.
22
LA GUARDIA
JON HAD NO idea what JFK International Airport looked like these days, but LaGuardia, where they’d landed, appeared to be stripped entirely of people, and almost entirely of planes.
He walked down the rolling staircase, de-planing along with the others as he squinted in the glare, raising a hand to look at the nearest terminal, which had lost most of its windows and a few walls in at least one massive fire.
Below him, a group of five seers were already emptying out the cargo area of the plane, working with that machine-like precision he’d often seen with military-trained seers. As he walked down the metal stairs, he saw the pile of luggage and weapons crates grow on the tarmac below the belly of the plane.
He could see and feel no one outside their well-armed group, yet somehow, he still felt overly exposed. He wondered if it was just paranoia, or if eyes really watched them from the distant buildings, or maybe from the sky itself.
He hadn’t slept much over the six-hour flight, which probably didn’t help.
Stepping out onto the tarmac after Neela and Jax, he looked around.
He saw only a few commercial jets parked against the nearest terminal, leaning against those accordion-like walkways like large land animals turned to stone. Glancing around the expanse of runway, then at the water and buildings on three sides, what struck him most was the silence.
Seagulls called in the distance, somehow making that quiet more marked.
He could almost feel the ocean encroaching on the land here. Or maybe it was just waiting, patiently, for when it would cover that land for real.
None of those cart-drawing trucks cruised over the tarmac. Jon saw no mechanics, no baggage handlers in their dark-blue jumpsuits. He didn’t see guys with giant headphones waving tube-like lights to guide planes to the concourse and out to the runways. He didn’t see any bodies moving through the reinforced glass of the undamaged sections of the terminal building.
Apart from the wind and the occasional bird, nothing apart from them moved.
Of course, the scene at San Francisco Airport hadn’t been much different. Some part of Jon balked more at seeing it here, though, for reasons more emotional than rational.
This was New York, for fuck’s sake.
This was the city that never sleeps, depicted in a million romantic comedies, action movies, television shows, mobster films, disaster movies, the whole time Jon grew up.
In none of those depictions had it looked like this––like a graveyard.
Like dead history, instead of the living kind.
Shoving his hands into the pockets of his vest, he shivered, zipping up the front. Even the air wasn’t right. Despite his momentary chill, the air was too wet, too muggy. It felt like he was in the tropics, not the East Coast of the United States.
He glanced up at the sky, remembering that laser cannon that nearly killed Dante in Times Square. Revik seemed to think they’d dealt with that particular threat, for now at least, but Jon couldn’t help being nervous. Garensche managed to knock two of those cannons out by hacking the organic interfaces––including, he thought, the one that nearly killed Dante.
Gar fully admitted he didn’t know how many more might be up there, though.
Realistically, Jon knew the bigger threat they likely faced, at least right now, came from the ocean itself, and the failing containment fields.
Dykes and remnants of those fields kept the worst of the rising waterline off LaGuardia itself, but everyone knew those couldn’t possibly last, given the grid issues, and the utter lack of maintenance. From the plane’s cockpit, Jorag pointed out the failing dykes as he circled La Guardia from the air, trying to determine if it was safe to land.
He’d also pointed out a sinkhole on the edge of one runway. It was too near the ocean to render the runway useless for a landing, but it wasn’t good.
In a few months, maybe more––maybe a lot less––it would be as if LaGuardia International Airport never existed.
Jon turned his head, gazing at the skyline of Manhattan, feeling the beginnings of a headache throb the back of his
skull.
He wondered if he would even recognize the city this time.
At the thought, he glanced at Allie, unable to help himself.
She stood next to Revik, her side pressed into his, but her eyes faced the other way, towards the open ocean.
Revik held her hand, talking to Wreg as the wind over the tarmac ruffled his black hair. That same gust caught hold of Allie’s hair, too, sending it streaming away from her face and off her back. Jon saw that faraway look in her eyes, but imagined for a second that he saw the real Allie in it, too. She slid deeper against Revik’s side as he watched, and Jon saw the tall seer rearrange his grip on her fingers, holding her more tightly.
Looking away from the two of them, Jon cleared his throat, glancing around at the other infiltrators as they milled over the tarmac. They’d already finished unloading the plane.
He could feel everyone waiting, but he wasn’t sure for what.
He hadn’t been briefed on this part of the plan, meaning how they would get inside. He only knew it wouldn’t involve a submarine––not according to the jokes he’d overheard at Wreg’s expense, since the ex-Rebel commander had a phobia of the things.
Whatever they’d be using, Revik would have it mapped out in minute detail. He wouldn’t risk his one and only shot at Cass by letting them get taken apart by OBEs before they’d entered city limits. He wouldn’t risk his one and only shot at getting his kid back, either.
Then again, Revik never actually talked about their child.
Jon hadn’t heard Revik mention her even once, in all their planning sessions.
Balidor told him Cass taunted Revik in dreams, claiming his daughter looked like him, that she had his eyes, his features, aspects of his personality. Yet, as far as Jon knew, they had no real confirmation the child was even alive.
He did notice that, on the rare occasion anyone mentioned Revik and Allie’s baby, they always referred to it as a “she” or “her”… never a “he” or “him.”
Jon knew Revik and Balidor must have discussed rescuing the child behind closed doors.
They had to have discussed it, minimally, at least.
Revik would’ve wanted all the same analyses done around extracting the child as were done for every other aspect of the operation. He’d want to know the risk factors, the best means of attempting rescue, odds on whether they were likely to get the baby out alive. Even imagining the content of those discussions made Jon sick.
Truthfully, he was glad he hadn’t been invited to any of them.
Even so, the whole silence around Revik and Allie’s daughter constituted one of the more unnerving elements of this whole operation. Knowing Revik, the topic fell into another of those black hole, no man’s lands where Revik just couldn’t go––at least, not yet.
He likely wouldn’t go there until this was all over.
Jon had done the math, looked up gestation cycles for seers.
She wouldn’t have been born at all yet, if Allie followed a Sark timeline for her pregnancy, since those lasted a full fifteen months. The baby could only have been around six months old at most when Cass took her out of Allie, so unable to survive outside the womb.
Jorag said Rebel scientists had already been experimenting with ways to accelerate the development of seer fetuses before he left Salinse. He also told Jon, told all of them, really––well, all except Revik, who presumably knew this and didn’t want to think about it in relation to his own child––that those experiments had been extremely well-funded.
No one had more than one guess as to who might have funded them.
Revik hadn’t known about Shadow back then.
Even so, Jon couldn’t help wondering if his brother-in-law ever wondered exactly where the money came from, back when he worked for Salinse. Of course, knowing Revik’s penchant for detail, he probably thought he did know.
He just hadn’t known what he was looking at.
Thinking about that now, Jon glanced at Wreg.
Those obsidian-black eyes shifted away as soon as their gazes met, but Jon saw a frown touch the infiltrator’s lips just before he turned back to face Revik.
Jon watched as Wreg nodded in agreement to something Revik said, making a respectful gesture in seer sign language. It struck Jon as oddly Wreg-like that one minute, he could punch his commanding officer in the face, the next, he could follow him without question.
Revik seemed to expect nothing different.
Exhaling, Jon stamped his booted feet on the tarmac, fighting to focus, to clear his head.
Instructions, plans, code words and contingencies cycled aimlessly in his thoughts. The words remained, like nails hammered in his brain, but Jon could scarcely make sense of their meaning at this point. Like all of them, he’d spent most of his waking hours for the past two weeks thinking about and memorizing all the intel he’d need for this op.
He had maps to Allie’s light, somewhere in that tangled mess.
He carried pass codes, code words, personalized hand-signals.
He’d memorized a separate set of instructions for every level of the operation in which he had direct involvement, including every type of contingency, along with a number of variables Revik and Balidor trained him to look for in the event things really went sideways.
He’d been given a dozen different contingencies for if the New York construct knocked out Maygar and/or Revik’s telekinesis, another half-dozen for if it impaired Revik or Maygar’s ability to connect with Allie, five more if their mobile construct broke, got hijacked, or somehow triggered the New York construct to block their ability to use the Barrier.
He’d been given contingencies for if any one of the three of them––meaning Allie, Maygar or Revik––were killed. He’d been given contingencies for finding Cass and Feigran on his own and what to do if he found himself facing either of them alone.
He’d been given contingencies for if Revik or Maygar’s light got corrupted, or if someone else on the team turned on them unexpectedly.
He’d even been given instructions for retrieving his niece or nephew, in case he was the only one who could make the attempt.
He just hadn’t gotten the last of those from Revik.
Despite all the different plans, counter-plans and contingencies floating around in Jon’s head, he knew he only held a fraction of the contingencies out there, for the same reason he strongly suspected a fair bit of false information had been fed to him along with the good.
Jon was fine with that.
He knew he was a tiny piece in a much larger and more complex puzzle, and he was fine with that, too. He took seriously the warnings not to minimize his role, or to assume the plan could succeed without him, but he knew he was a tiny cog, all in all.
Or maybe it was simply easier to think that way, since the alternative had a tendency to bring on a debilitating kind of panic.
When he thought about Cass, about seeing her again, he felt calmer.
When he thought about Cass having his niece, he felt calmer still.
The idea of Shadow raising Revik’s child, after what had been done to Revik growing up, had a tendency to remind Jon why he wasn’t asking Revik a lot of questions about means versus ends. It also served as a chilling reminder of why Revik might not be eager to talk about what might have been done to his daughter already.
Six months had passed, since they found Allie in their mother’s house in San Francisco.
Six months, nine days, roughly twelve hours.
Jon glanced over his shoulder at the others right as Revik finished speaking to Wreg. He watched Wreg make that half-salute the Rebels used, the one containing an abbreviated version of the gesture of respect specific to the Sword. Even as the Chinese seer completed the motion, Jon heard beating rotors echo across the tarmac.
They sounded like the thuds of a giant heart.
By the time he faced the right direction, the dark shape of a twin-rotor helicopter was rising over a hangar opposite the terminal, its nose tilt
ed at a slightly downward angle.
The black bird looked massive to Jon.
A modified Boeing CH-47 Chinook, it wasn’t an attack model helicopter, or even a rescue model, like those Jon had ridden in with Revik in the past. The thing stretched over one hundred feet in length, and had specifically been designed for combat cargo drops.
There would be no surprise landings, not in that thing.
Jon saw Revik and the others turn. They watched the Chinook approach low over the empty expanse of runway lanes.
Only Allie didn’t change the direction of her eyes.
She continued to look out over the wave-crested ocean, and beyond––to the dark, massing clouds hovering near the horizon.
For a bare instant, Jon thought he glimpsed her there again, hiding in that thousand-yard stare, a sharper glimmer in her green eyes.
As soon as Jon saw it, it was gone.
23
CHINOOK
JON’S HEART THUDDED painfully in his throat and chest, deafening him.
He watched the row of steel and glass buildings grow larger as he stared out the nearest window, sitting alone in a two-seat row at the back of the Chinook.
The Chinook must have been used for commercial purposes, once upon a time.
Instead of combat-drop benches, it had seats like an airplane, if smaller and narrower than those that came with most commercial jets, and with old-fashioned looking headsets linked to the pilots’ comm. Organic panes had also been fitted to the Chinook’s fuselage, panes that appeared transparent when aligned with the outside image capture skin, allowing Jon and the rest of the passengers a near-360 degree view as the helicopter rose into the air.
From where Jon sat, he could see most of the others.
Allie sat in the front, nearest to the pilots.
Revik sat with her. Yumi and Balidor took up the two seats across the aisle from them. Wreg sat with Jax just behind them, across from Chinja and Neela.
Behind them sat another row of heads, and another.
Jon didn’t try and identify most of them.
The cabin remained silent, but for the beating rotors.
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