by SM Reine
The second reflex feels weaker than the first, though, almost like a muscle atrophied from lack of use.
I stumble towards the road, stub my toe on a rock and half-fall, pick myself up.
My limbs move muddily but I force them faster, fighting the rising sickness in my gut as his light reaches for mine, strangling some part of me I can’t see, making it hard to move. I make it to the road when the scene around me vanishes...replaced by dark blue clouds.
Blind, I try to manage my limbs, can’t.
Out of nowhere, a hard thud collides with the meat and bone of my physical body. Pain rockets up my leg, pools in the point of contact until...
I snapped out.
...and found myself staring into the chrome grill of a car, on my knees, holding my stomach. Nearby, a car door opened, and the sound is so loud it deafens me. I stared at the dotted dividing lines in the road, garnished with yellow reflectors.
“Get out of the road!” a man yelled at me.
A whisper of hope lifted my eyes.
And if you are the terrorist? the voice says. Will you still run to them to save you?
“Are you crazy, girl? Trying to kill yourself?”
Are you really so sure you’re not one of us?
Fear lurched me to my feet. My knees were bleeding but my first thought was that he was coming, that he was in my head, and even if he wanted to, this old man with the angry face and the bushy white eyebrows couldn’t save me.
I pushed past him, seeing his expression change as he took in my appearance, my hair matted with blood and dirt, my cut feet and hands, the ripped up waitress uniform and handcuffs.
“Girl.” He called after me. “Hey...girl! Are you all right? Where are you going?”
I looked back, but not at him.
The tall, black-haired seer had reached the bottom of the hill. He slid down the last of it on leather boots through dusty gravel and broken glass.
I ran, feeling each bare foot hit hard at the pavement. I darted into traffic, aiming for a nearby gas station, and again cars honked, swerved to avoid me, only now I tried to wave them down once more, too desperate to think about whether they could help me or not.
I pounded on the hood of a red compact when it screeched to a stop.
“Help! I’m being kidnapped! Please, help me...!”
The woman inside stared up at me, wide-eyed.
“Please!” I screamed. “Get me out of here!”
The woman flinched, cowering behind the steering wheel.
I ran on. People on the sidewalk reacted slowly, staring as they realized something unusual was happening, something they probably shouldn’t ignore. Someone might have called the cops by then, but he was right, I couldn’t be sure if they’d come to help me or to take me away.
Then, before I could decide what to do next, he took me down.
He watches her from the Barrier, calculates how best to proceed.
He has frightened her, broken her trust with his honesty about the Rooks, or at least his refusal to lie. He is glad he chose to tell her less rather than more about them and the being, Terian, who Revik knows he did not really kill in San Francisco.
He does his best to shield her light, to keep her in her body, out of the Barrier.
When she runs into the street, he sees interest dawn on the faces of watching humans. It is too many for him to push. Worse, her light sparks in panicked waves that remind him that she is the Bridge, not just some fledgling seer with poor light control.
Although she is that, too.
When she starts pounding on car hoods, interrupting traffic, he splits his consciousness, leaving a lesser part to steer his physical body and jumping the rest out.
His aleimi leaps ahead, flashing across the road’s meridian to knock her out of her body.
Like any fledgling, she cannot yet split herself...and collapses.
Revik checks his own physical body, sees it running across the road, dodging cars with only slightly slower reflexes. Then he sees the truck, and lands more of himself in the physical to speed his legs...
...Time lurched back, bringing him along its narrower lines.
The driver saw him and then her and slammed the truck’s brakes, careening cab and cargo to a slanted halt a few feet from them both.
By then, Revik crouched over Allie, his arms outstretched, protecting her, his eyes glowing a pale white the human wouldn’t see.
The driver leaned his bulky form out the driver’s side window.
“Hey! Wiseass! Get your damned girlfriend out of the road, unless you want to scrape her off the pavement with a spatula!” He paused, looking down. “And put some clothes on her, while you’re at it! Where the hell do you think you’re doing, with the...”
Trailing, he took in Allie’s crumpled form.
Her handcuffed wrists had welts on them from the two days of driving, made worse by her fall down the hill. Her small hands folded together in a neat gesture of prayer. The ripped up uniform with its low-cut blouse and short skirt was now decorated with splotches of blood and caked in mud and dirt, as were her hair and feet. She had a bloody nose from hitting the pavement, fresh cuts and scratches from the fall and she looked pale, overly thin without her light. Looking at her, Revik realized she looked bad. Really bad.
He was struck again by how small she was physically.
She moaned as he thought it, and he felt his body react, so that he had separation pain to deal with on top of everything else.
“Help me,” she murmured. “Help...”
It was soft, but Revik heard it. He also saw the truck driver watching her moving lips. The man’s eyes widened, as he seemed to put two and two together.
“What the hell—”
“Police!” Revik said. He pulled a flip ID with badge from his pocket, miraged it into a local configuration from memory. “Stay in your vehicle! This woman is in my custody!”
Revik felt the worst of his tension dissipate as the man’s face calmed.
He had blundered, but he’d contained it. He felt other humans around him start to relax as well, as soon as they saw the badge and heard his words. She had gone from fleeing kidnap victim to suspect fleeing police custody. Even so, Revik knew he didn’t have a lot of time. He shoved the ID back in his pocket, gave another look around before he bent his knees, crouching down beside Allie. When he glanced up next, the truck driver looked almost blank.
Something about the expression there made Revik pause, however.
Then Revik saw the man’s eyes roll up in his head, flashing with a silver light.
Fuck. They were no longer alone.
Without waiting, Revik looked back at Allie, shoving his arms under her jointed limbs, lifting her ungracefully to his chest before he straightened abruptly to his feet. He saw the truck driver reach behind him as he completed the motion, glimpsed the wooden stock of a worn, pump-action shotgun.
Seeing that much, he turned without wasting another breath.
He didn’t let himself feel, to second guess, or even think.
He gripped her tighter and ran, flat-out for the car.
8
FLIGHT
Revik sprinted down the sidewalk, holding me against his chest.
Unerringly rhythmic, his feet impacted the sidewalk as if he counted steps alongside his well-regulated breaths. He held me close, and that felt calculated too, as if he’d practiced with potato sacks approximating my weight. When he reached the gravel-strewn hillside, he barely paused before vaulting up the steep bank, sliding in its shale folds at each step but not stopping as he fought his way back up the steep slope.
I felt sick, dazed, unsure on which side I lived.
It becomes clearer as images around me flash in negative...then the Pyramid is everywhere, all around us. Its silver threads shine like bright wires in rose-lit clouds. Tarnished silver entangles the lights of people I can see around us on the sleepy Washington street.
Red eyes surround me, bodies made of wire...
Laughter brings my own gaze higher.
A face hovers below the Pyramid, and I recognize it as a ghostly version of the man from Golden Gate Park. His face morphs in Barrier wind, distorted by silver light. There is symmetry to those flickers of light, though, like film stuttering in a projector. The Pyramid’s shifting cells split and reconfigure, moving on gliding rails like a carnival fun house, and I feel sick from the motion. I feel both out of control and strangely suffocated under that crushing weight as it strangles my light, fighting to insert itself deeper into my mind.
I see you! Pretty bird! Do you know who carries you on such swift wings?
I feel my chest clench.
My mother calls me her bird. She has since I was a kid.
I feel Revik again, his arms around me, the steady beating in his chest. No one has ever felt so much like me. But the other presence feels me thinking that, too.
Terian’s laugh rises. I could tell you such stories about your new friend! Do you know what he used to like to do for fun?
Images start to coalesce, movies that start once I focus directly on them. They draw me in, until I want to see, until I cannot help but look. I feel Revik there, and I know a part of my fascination comes from him. He and Terian stand in a cell-like room with no windows or furniture. On the floor sprawls a young girl with blond hair and inhuman, gold eyes, a beautiful face and Revik is watching her, his own eyes hard, calculating.
The predator is there, but he lives in silver light—
A jarring contact met my head and back. I gasped.
Pain brought the physical world into focus.
Staring down at me is Revik’s sweaty face. His eyes are still glass shards, but the silver light is gone, and the predator is, too. Fear lives in his face instead, faint but visible. I realized then, where we were...where I was. He’d laid me roughly on the hood of the GTX.
My back hit the protruding air vent on top, snapping me out, hard enough that I wondered if he’d done it on purpose.
Either way, the pain yanked me away from Terian’s mind.
I struggled to sit up as Revik walked to the rear of the car, opening the trunk with the keys and pulling out a black gym bag filled with something heavy. He reached inside the driver’s side window to unlock the door.
“Allie!” he said, jerking it open. “Now!”
I rolled over the top of the hood to the passenger side while he leaned over and opened my door from the inside. By the time I got in, he was already ripping open the black nylon bag, and it struck me that the line of cars behind us had resumed honking.
I watched Revik jam the key into the ignition, holding a gun against the steering wheel.
“Put on your seat belt!” he said.
I fumbled with the strap as the GTX’s engine rumbled to life, but I couldn’t quite work it with the handcuffs. Revik put the car in gear. Then a voice emerged above the sound of the car’s motor. It took me a second to realize it was real...that it wasn’t his, or something from inside the Barrier.
“What in the name of Mary’s tits...”
Jerking my head around, I forgot the seat belt and crouched down, looking past Revik and up through the driver’s side window. Two cops stood there. Behind them, a black and white slanted down the bank beside the fisherman’s truck.
The cop who’d spoken stared at the gun in Revik’s hand.
“You got balls, buddy,” the second cop said, unholstering his sidearm. He raised the gun, aiming it at Revik’s face. “Now toss it out the window. Real slow.”
“Sleep,” Revik said. “Now.”
Both cops collapsed on the onramp without emitting a sound.
I sucked in a breath, shocked at the clean indifference of the act.
The one holding the gun wasn’t much older than me.
I didn’t have time to think about that, either, though. In the rearview mirror, I saw movement in the space by the fisherman’s truck. I turned my head right as another policeman emerged.
My voice burst out of me.
“Revik!” I yelled.
The third cop pulled his sidearm. I saw the brown eyes flash silver as he raised the gun.
“Seer!” I yelled.
“I know,” Revik growled.
His hand clamped roughly around the back of my neck, forcing me down past the bottom of the seat and under the windows. He took his foot off the brake in the same instant and the car lurched forward as the cop squeezed off his first round.
The sound of the shot seemed to come late, a second after the soft plink as the bullet went through the rear driver’s side window. I turned my head, staring at the hole in the upholstery until Revik shoved me down even further on the seat.
I crouched on the mat when I heard the GTX’s engine roar back to life.
I sat on the floor as Revik threw the car into reverse, slamming into the truck behind us. By then he had aimed the handgun and fired at cop number three. He hit him in the chest on the second shot, knocking him backwards into the police car so that the man’s arm and shoulder broke the passenger side window.
The cop’s partner emerged, firing wildly.
Screams erupted on the street.
I peered over the edge of the window, watched people run and duck in fear, eyes wide, and for a moment, I see them through Revik’s eyes, a flock of birds scattering...then Revik swiveled the gun towards the fourth cop, narrowly missing the man’s head.
He stepped on the gas...
But his foot slipped.
The engine’s rev faded.
Bewildered, I looked up, then saw Revik slumped in the seat as the car continued to roll. I froze, seeing his eyes glaze as the car veered towards the edge of the road. I threw myself up and into his lap, hauling the wheel to the left with my cuffed hands, trying to get my foot down to his, to keep the car from stalling, or worse, careening off the onramp and down that weed-choked slope onto the street below...
...when just as suddenly, he was back.
I felt it just before he raised his head, jerking back into life.
The gun rested on his thigh, pointed at his feet from where he’d slumped in the cloth seat. He stared at my handcuffs in front of him where I gripped the steering wheel, blinking at them as if he didn’t know what they were. When I looked back at his face, his eyes narrowed on mine, and for an instant I saw the predator there again.
“Revik!” I screamed. “Snap out of it!”
His eyes clicked abruptly into focus.
Reaching around me, he caught hold of the wheel, gripping the gun where it had loosed in his fingers. Without looking over, he moved one arm long enough to push me out of his lap.
He returned to the Barrier as he did it, and either I am too close, or something else drags me right along after him...
Revik hears Terian’s laugh before he locates him among the metallic bodies.
Terian throws another cluster-fuck of silver, spinning lights at Revik’s head once he does, a Barrier structure that makes the orange sleeper Revik lobbed at me earlier look like a blown kiss. Revik makes his energy flush with the background and disappears, something he can do even with a part of himself operating on the ground, and I wonder where I am, if I am with him in this space...but he melts sideways and reappears, too late for Terian to redirect.
The silver spinners disappear into the empty nothingness of Barrier space.
I’ll kill her, Revik tells Terian.
No, Terian says. You won’t. That’s the beauty with you, Dehgoies. By the end of this, we will have not only her, but you as well. You’re only a half-step from falling willingly, my friend. We can be brothers again...
Revik focuses on me.
He knows I am with him, somehow, but he can’t see me here—
You will help us train her, Terian says to him. Breaking in newbies was a particular talent of yours, as I recall. Especially the females...
Terian sees Revik starting to withdraw and calls after him.
...I will let you have
her, my brother!
In that heartbeat of Revik’s hesitation, Terian lobs another cluster...this time of images, sensations. In it, Revik sees my body under his, our lights merging as I open to him. It is a mirage, a lie, but it catches both of us off-guard and briefly he is forced to untangle it.
He snaps the connection and is met with...separation pain, he calls it...that nausea I’ve been feeling with him, what I struggled with just that morning. Unlike with me, the feeling is familiar to him, though, something he understands. But with me, it bothers him more, creates a resonance with some younger version of himself, a place and time he wishes to forget.
Anger briefly suffuses his light, then reason.
He’s let it go too long, he thinks.
He will remedy that, in Seattle.
At the thought, heat flushes his belly, a flicker of sensual memory. I glimpse bare skin, a seductive smile, and this time it has nothing to do with me...
The Rook laughs. You lie, Revi’! I know you...even if your clan friends do not! I see how empty this new life of yours is! Terian’s smile turns friendly, and Revik recognizes that too; I feel the part of him that succumbs to that pull.
She will be my gift to you! Do you think your clan elders would offer you such a prize? Access to their precious Bridge? Do you, Revi’?
There is only the barest pause before Revik makes his light disappear, but Terian’s laugh follows him out of their connection.
I saw you thinking about it, brother! I saw you!
The clouds fade as Revik wills himself back.
Back to the car, back to me.
I saw him come out of it.
Crouched on the floorboards of the GTX, I watched him warily, wondering how much of what I’d just seen and heard really happened.
My handcuffed wrists rested on the seat in front of me. I watched his face as he fired out the window again, his light focused on his targets. I heard the crash of breaking glass, felt him hit something he’d aimed for, wondered why he wasn’t driving away. Even as I thought it, he slammed his foot on the gas, his hand holding the gun falling to the manual gear shift.