Jon only noticed then that Revik hadn’t gotten into the Humvee next to him; he sat up front with Allie, along with their driver, Chinja, and Yumi, who sat to Allie’s left.
Jax sat next to Jon instead, with Loki, Garensche, Maygar and Neela on his other side. The five of them shoved Jon up against the window and the metal door, pulling the seat back until the row in front of them filled with just as many seers.
The door slammed, and the worst of the smells got cut off.
Now all Jon could smell was cordite and sweaty seer, with a faint hint of blood.
Before he’d pulled his mind back together, he got claps on the shoulder, his hair ruffled, even a kiss on the cheek from Jorag, who clasped his arm from the seat in front of him, turning around halfway to grin at him.
No one spoke.
Unreality descended over him as he stared back out through the tinted windows of the Humvee, taking in the row of smoking planes. Trees continued to burn at the edges of the meadow. Jon saw a standing gun aimed at the sky, half-crushed by a jet engine.
Jax slung an arm around him, squeezing him in a sideways hug.
Chinja started the Humvee’s engine, revving it briefly while Jon continued to stare out the window, half in awe, half in disbelief.
He was still staring out when Jax murmured in his ear.
“Be thankful you’re behind that crazy-ass shield with your sister,” he said, grinning. “You should hear the damned screaming in the main construct right now. Losing their fucking minds.” Jax made a swooping gesture with his fingers, chuckling. “The hand of God just came down on them, my brother. The hand of God. Long live the Dragon!”
Still grinning, he clutched Jon’s hair in his fingers.
“You did good, brother,” he whispered. “Really damned fucking good. Most of us couldn’t even see the boss. In fact––”
“Quiet,” Revik spoke up from the front. “Don’t distract brother Jon.”
His voice was low, and he didn’t turn his head, but every seer in the back went utterly still, holding their breaths. Revik glanced back, looking over the arm he had around Allie.
“Op’s not over yet. Wait until we’re back at the hotel.”
Jax nodded, making a solemn hand gesture––half-apology, half-salute.
Jon barely comprehended either seer’s words.
He did feel the screams Jax mentioned. Now that he let himself see it, panic lit up his aleimi in sharp waves as fleeing humans and seers realized who Revik was, what they were fighting.
Truthfully, though, Jon couldn’t make himself care all that much.
The vast majority of his mind remained focused on holding that shield.
He checked the connections even now, running through the threads tying him to Maygar, to Revik, to Allie, to Balidor, making sure nothing was damaged or being siphoned or compromised in any way. Getting an affirmative from both Balidor and Revik in the space, he relaxed slightly, but kept the majority of his attention on the shield.
The part of him left over didn’t think too deeply about what he’d just witnessed.
The more tactical areas of his mind even documented their enemies’ reactions as good, as being what they intended, in terms of sending a message. Jon couldn’t really be happy about their success, any more than he could be upset about what it had cost. The feeling was closer to satisfaction than anything.
His mental summation was brief, wholly practical.
First strike complete. Successful deployment. No problems. Time to move on.
Realizing he had to be channeling Revik in this, at least in part, Jon found himself recognizing the coping element there.
For the first time, he also found himself truly understanding it.
When it came to casualties, Jon couldn’t go there, not now. He couldn’t even make himself want to go there. It would’ve been easy to blame that on his brother-in-law, too, but Jon doubted that distance he felt stemmed wholly from Revik.
Only when he looked at Allie, sandwiched tightly between Revik and Yumi, did he get a vague flash of why this had to happen.
He knew that was partly an excuse, though, too.
26
REVOLUTION
MANHATTAN IS A big island in some ways, at least when you’re taking it apart, piece by piece, on foot or even by car.
Jon knew that––theoretically anyway––but he hadn’t really tested that awareness in a long time. Truthfully, compared to all the driving he’d done around the Bay Area growing up, Manhattan always felt pretty small to him, geography-wise.
He’d walked the streets here before, though––with Allie, and on his own.
He knew Manhattan could be deceptively complex, particularly for such a small area of land. It had grown even more complex after the number and height of the skyscrapers exploded in the past ten years, along with the sheer density of holographic ads, robo-taxis, virtual billboards and even artificial people, which made it harder to navigate the commercial areas.
The city constantly evolved, so that was part of it.
Manhattan also hid a lot in its cracks and crevices, and even down blind alleys, despite the increasingly commercial and overrun downtown and mid-city areas.
Now most of the virtual ‘bots had been shut off, as well as the talking billboards, robo-taxis, virtual-skin buses and holographic storefronts. The city streets, as a result, had gotten a lot quieter, especially in the heavily commercial areas like Times Square and near the park. Those virtual salespeople who used to follow Jon and his friends up and down the Avenue of the Americas no longer ghosted along the sidewalk, looking for barcodes to scan and marks to target to sell their high-end crap.
When those vanished, it must have felt like the city’s population decreased by half, even before the deportations.
Now the city was slowly being stripped down to its bare bones.
Grocery stores, restaurants, bars, wine and beer shops, gun shops, convenience stores, clothing and shoe shops, electronics, appliance, hardware and jewelry stores were the first to be plundered. After that, the residents gradually cleaned out everything else––from sex and fetish shops, art supply stores, flower and beauty shops, boutiques, stationary, book, pet, gardening, sports equipment, and antique stores.
A few of the higher-end businesses owned by large corporations, as well as a number of the bigger banks, government and office buildings, especially down on Wall Street, remained intact via high-tech security measures and shock- and fire-proof paneling. The ones Jon glimpsed looked more like blank steel walls from the street.
The House on the Hill was one of those fortresses.
Eventually those walls would come down too, Jon guessed, starting with those guarded only by automated security systems, versus actual people. Already, Jon saw a few that had been broken into due to what looked like structural damage from one of the tsunamis. He’d also seen scorch marks from small to medium-sized bombs.
As they passed in the first of four Humvees, Jon noticed a small herd of horses grazing in a paddock created from a downtown historical graveyard.
He wondered who they belonged to. He figured it must be wealthy humans, given the security measures he glimpsed as they passed, including a high fence with razor wire and guards carrying automatic rifles. He knew they had to be there to discourage scroungers from barbecuing someone’s favorite pet, but Jon couldn’t help thinking the horses were likely doomed to end up as food, regardless.
Eventually, hunger and necessity would win out.
The rules of this post-apocalyptic New York were simpler and harsher than the old version, but ran on similar principles. Those with the strength, firepower and resources still protected what they had, by any means necessary. Those who didn’t have those things either worked for those who did, or scavenged what they could from the leavings.
Jon wondered how long it would be before it was just as difficult to leave New York as it was to get inside.
Then again, Revik just made both things a lot more dif
ficult.
Like he told Jon, he took out the OBE gate in the north first––the only way in or out of the city by land.
Since it was the second most heavily-fortified of the gates, that one took a good forty minutes. Revik spent probably thirty minutes of that setting fire to the warehouses on either side of the OBE gate, along with detonating long-haul trucks, armored tanks, stationary guns, guard towers, the quarantine checkpoint, and two different armories.
Taking out the OBE gate itself took him maybe thirty seconds.
Manhattan’s remaining working docks were next.
Only a few docks were left operational post-quarantine. All ferries, cruise ships and private harbors along the southern tip of Manhattan and up the Hudson River had already been shut down. The remaining few in use, post-quarantine, were owned by the military. They were also heavily manned by SCARB, FEMA, NYPD, INS and Home-Sec agents, all of whom were well-armed and didn’t need much justification to shoot anyone who pissed them off.
Jon had been pretty appalled before, by the draconian approach of law enforcement under the city’s quarantine. In their fear of C2-77, they’d gone full-blown military state.
Right now, however, that worked to their advantage.
It meant a lot fewer doors for Revik to close.
Shadow’s people had already done over ninety-five percent of Revik’s job for him when they blew up or walled off all but a handful of shore access points.
Of course, a chunk of coastal access had been obliterated more than a decade earlier, when city planners blocked over half the original shoreline to build hundred-foot-tall transparent levees to prevent damage to buildings from rising tides. Jon remembered the city before that happened, and how shocked he’d been when he’d visited a few years after.
Despite their transparency, the levees created a disorienting fishbowl effect at times, one that could be claustrophobic, even with the virtual panels showing views of the river and the opposite shore. The planners built parks by the largest of those walls, but it didn’t really help.
At the moment, Jon felt pretty superfluous.
Even so, he kept the vast majority of his light obsessively focused on maintaining the shield over Revik and the rest of them.
He didn’t want so much as a hairline crack to show in that damned thing.
Crouched behind a concrete wall, he watched silently with his light and his hand-held as Revik obliterated the fourth and final dock, on East 34th Street. During an intense gun-battle between Wreg’s people and the local Home-Sec and SCARB contingent––probably because they’d been tipped off to why they were there––Revik went after the dock itself.
It was one of the more fascinating feats Jon had yet seen, in that Revik somehow took that massive structure of steel, iron and organic composite and twisted it beyond recognition, as if it were a piece of paper he’d crumpled in his hand.
He ignited charges brought by the Adhipan in the warehouse a few minutes later.
By then the gun battle was dying down.
The boats were easier, as all of those were gasoline powered and could be ignited from a distance.
Storage tanks of natural gas, propane and gasoline made the warehouses easy too, if a bit unnerving due to the sheer volume of the explosions. Jon crouched beside Revik through all of it, immersed in the nearness of his light, holding the shield as the Elaerian shifted his focus to the quarantine and racial checkpoint center, then the security apparatus along the waterfront itself.
He made short work of all of it.
Just like he had in the north, he took out the OBE gate last.
He did that methodically, too––taking out every connecting point, field generator, magnet and control panel that had anything to do with operating the gate.
By the end, Jon heard very little firing from Wreg and Neela’s teams at all.
As for Revik himself, he seemed almost high on light and the telekinesis by then. Balidor kept having to grab him by the arm, and yank him down behind the cement wall separating the quarantine center from the main road.
Otherwise Revik would just stand there, aiming his light with his eyes alone, a serene expression on his face.
Maybe he was too high in his own light to remember they could kill him.
Either way, Jon got why Revik always had “handlers” during WWI, who helped him when he was like this. Not only did he need the shielding, he was like a really stoned laser cannon by the end––machine-like in precision and focus, but deeply spaced-out, too.
When he finished exploding the last set of transformers on the gate, his eyes finally dimmed, flickering and eventually fading from that sharp, blinding green to the clear, colorless tint of his normal irises.
He looked at Jon first for some reason.
Quirking a dark eyebrow, he let a small smile tug at his lips.
“Think that got her attention?” he said.
Jon couldn’t help himself––he laughed.
He stopped when a minor commotion near the parked Humvees pulled his attention back towards the road.
In the middle of that commotion, he saw Allie.
She was fighting her way free of a protective scrum of infiltrators, including Yumi, Wreg, Jorag, Illeg and Neela. Revik motioned them off, a faint frown touching his lips, and Allie half-ran up to him, coiling her body around his in a way that caused Jon to avert his gaze, flushing a little, in spite of himself.
He could feel through the mobile construct, just like most of the seers probably could, that she was reacting to Revik using the telekinesis in a not-entirely asexual way.
For his part, Revik didn’t seem immune to it, either––or to her.
When the reactions between them got amplified through his own connection to the two of them, Jon backed off, both physically and with his light.
Walking away as casually as he could, he rejoined the group of seers standing next to the Humvee, but not before he saw Allie tug on Revik’s hair, openly asking for a kiss.
Jon looked away even as he saw Revik start to acquiesce.
When he reached the other seers, most of them were also gazing blandly and discreetly in different directions, pretending not to notice. Jon looked down, adjusting his armored vest, conscious suddenly of how sweaty he was. His shirt stuck to his back and chest; he could feel sweat trickling down his back in the muggy air.
He fought to pull his light even further from the two Elaerian when he felt more heated pulses off their light. It was getting increasingly difficult, though––especially since he still had to hold the shield over both of them.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he walked closer to the water, looking out over the East River and trying to clear his head.
He still stood there when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, causing him to jump.
He’d expected Wreg again, or maybe Jorag, but instead found himself looking at the strangely human-like features of Balidor. His gray eyes studied Jon’s, the expression on his handsome face difficult to read.
Jon couldn’t help noticing the Adhipan leader looked more rakish than usual, with beard scruff, ruffled chestnut hair sweated to his neck, smoke on his forehead, leather gun gloves and a bandolier of grenades around his chest. He smelled faintly of smoke and singed hair.
Jon fought a smile; usually Balidor looked like he’d just gotten a haircut, shaved and walked out of the shower.
Some kind of career military thing, Jon always figured.
Today, he looked more like one of those old vurt ads aimed at bored corporate executives––the ones depicting a handsome, middle-aged guy who raced motorcycles on the weekends, when he wasn’t cruising around with bikini models on his private yacht.
Balidor let out a low snort.
Jon flushed, realizing the seer had heard him, but the smile on the Adhipan leader’s face didn’t lose any of its warmth.
“Go easy on them,” he advised, squeezing Jon’s shoulder. “Him, especially.”
Realizing who he meant, J
on shook his head, feeling his jaw tighten. “I wasn’t thinking anything, ‘Dori––”
“Bullshit,” Balidor said pleasantly.
A dry, knowing kind of humor lived in his words when he added,
“We have all been thinking things, brother… and wondering, and speculating, and yes, gossiping. Me, as well as the rest. But Nenzi is judging himself a lot more harshly than the rest of us, I suspect. The truth is, he’s damned confused. For a lot of reasons.”
Balidor focused directly on Jon’s eyes.
“I know you know this probably better than any of us,” he added. “But The Illustrious Sword’s ability to think clearly and logically around his mate has never been one of his strengths. Regardless of her mental state. Or his own.”
Jon nodded, swallowing.
He knew Revik was confused.
More than just confused––Revik had been teetering on that edge for a while now.
He’d managed to focus his crazy better this time than he had in the past, maybe because he had a child out there now. That, or maybe revenge was fueling him––a refusal to lose control until he’d dealt with Cass and Shadow.
Thinking about it now, Jon realized something had changed, though. Even since Revik decided to let Allie accompany them to New York, something was different.
Maybe it started before then, when the four of them created the light bond.
The more Jon pushed it around in his mind, the more he was forced to admit that Allie being conscious improved Revik’s mental state immeasurably, and not only because Revik hadn’t showed up dead drunk at Jon’s door since––or tried to kill him.
Revik was better now.
Not exactly jumping through the tulips better, but he was definitely more himself than he had been in months. Maybe seeing his wife awake and moving around, even with that empty look on her face, had simply given him hope.
Of course, it also might have something to do with whatever changed after she’d bullied him in that basement in San Francisco. Or after Revik spent an hour or so yelling at her in their upstairs bedroom before everything grew unnervingly quiet.
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