Again, confusion filled Jon's mind, the beginnings of what might have been an argument.
"It's too soon," Wreg repeated, firmly. "We won't talk about it now. All right?"
Still stunned, Jon eventually nodded. "Okay."
"Fine," Wreg said, pulling himself up.
Jon watched as the tattooed seer looked down at his clothes, his face concentrated, as if to distract himself. Wreg clicked a little, rubbing at his shirt tail with his fingers where he'd gotten what was probably come and lubricant on it.
Glancing at Jon again, another flicker of nerves crossed his high-cheekboned face. Something in the expression only brought more pain to Jon's light, though, enough that he found himself averting his gaze.
"I need to change," Wreg said. "Do you want to come with me?"
Jon glanced up, confused once more as he tried to process the question.
"I want to take a shower," Wreg clarified. "I want to fuck again in the shower...if you want." Pain rippled off his light, strong enough that Jon felt it down to his feet. "...Maybe more than once."
After another pause, Jon nodded.
Pulling himself up off the table, he still felt dazed as he tugged up his jeans, refastening the buttons and hooking his belt. While he dressed, Wreg found a sponge, water and some cleaner by the alcove sink on one end of the room, and wiped down the table. It smelled like sex, even with the surface cleaner.
"I'll take care of it, brother," Wreg said, sending him another pulse of heat.
Jon only nodded, not sure what he meant exactly, but silent as he watched Wreg dump the sponge in the trash and return the cleaning fluid to the cabinet.
Then Wreg seemed to be waiting for him by the door, his expression faintly worried once more as his dark eyes followed Jon. He could feel Wreg kicking himself for what he'd said, wishing he hadn't said it. Jon felt him remembering about Dorje, too, about how little time had passed...and the fact that apparently Revik had already asked Wreg to slow things down between the two of them. Twice.
When Jon met him by the door, he reached out to catch hold of Wreg's arm.
Jumping a little, the seer met his gaze, his dark eyes nervous still.
"What should I be thinking about?" Jon said neutrally. "For this agreement?"
Pain once more left the seer's light, seemingly seeping into Jon's fingers where he held him. Keeping his reaction off his face, Jon just watched him, waiting.
"Anything you want from me," Wreg said, keeping his voice equally matter-of-fact. "Right now, I mean...we can modify it any time we want, if anything changes for one of us." Still studying his eyes, the seer hesitated, shrugging once with his free hand. "It's better all around if both of us are as honest as possible..."
Jon nodded, still looking at him.
When Wreg met his gaze that time, his own a bit wary, Jon felt another flicker of that emotion, along with a vulnerability he'd never seen in those dark eyes, that showed nearly on the surface. Wreg seemed about to look away again when Jon leaned up and kissed him on the mouth, wrapping his fingers into his black hair. They stood there, kissing for a few moments, when Wreg finally pulled away, holding his arms as he took a step back.
"We need to get out of here," he said, his voice gruff.
That time, Jon just nodded, his mind close to blank.
Or not blank exactly, but maybe still lost in that deeper layer of disbelief.
While Wreg yanked open the door, Jon just stood there, glancing back at the conference room table. He wasn't letting himself think about any of it really, not then...but that faint wonder lingered, making it difficult to think about anything else.
21
SAN FRANCISCO
WE ENDED UP with a smallish team, really.
Revik and I, along with Jon, Neela, Jorag and Yumi.
I knew that Wreg wasn't happy about Jon coming with us. Hell, everyone knew Wreg wasn't happy about it. He hadn't bothered to hide that fact for a single minute of our planning meetings prior to our leaving. But the truth was, we needed Jon. The more we worked on the plan, the more that much became clear, even to me.
I also knew most of the others weren't thrilled about me and Revik going together, especially those who'd heard the recordings of Surli telling me it would essentially be suicide to do what we were doing. I also knew Wreg tried to badger Revik into letting him come along to San Francisco with us, but Revik was adamant about needing Wreg to lead the team in South America. He wanted Balidor to remain in New York for as long as possible, since the hotel would be vulnerable in our absence as well, and both field teams would need coordinated infiltration support outside the hot zones and in a well-fortified construct.
I knew the size of our team going to San Francisco didn't reassure anyone, either.
We needed a small team, though. It would make getting through quarantine easier, and that would be a trick, no matter how we did it. Anyway, we should have at least four more seers once we arrived on the other side...Garensche, Illeg, Deklan and Poresh, along with whoever they'd managed to collect behind the quarantine lines.
We were going in blind to a large degree. In the last week, communications went down entirely between San Francisco and the outer world, even via the pirated feeds. We didn't want to risk alerting anyone to our plans or the fact that we had operatives there already until we had to, so that pretty much eliminated the Barrier as an option.
As a result, we hadn't had a real news brief from behind that wall for more than four days. We managed to get one, extremely short message to Gar via Balidor's infiltration team, to set up a rendezvous point and let them know we were coming. Otherwise, we had to assume Gar and his team were still doing what we'd asked them to do, searching addresses and trying to match bodies to the names on the lists we'd provided.
The clock felt very short on those lists, too.
Balidor had done the best he could with the names that could be traced back to Asia, via his remaining seers in the Pamir and the refugee camps there and in India, but everyone had to move carefully because we'd discovered our overseas contacts were being watched, too. At least four humans and two seers had been killed already during extraction attempts in Asia and in other parts of the United States. In theory we still had the best chance in the United States, but that remained a guess as well. We still had no idea what resources Shadow really had at his disposal here or anywhere else, really.
They'd actually already started putting Dante to work, too, in her guarded hotel room on the fifty-eighth floor. Jon had been working with Vikram and some of the other techs to get her involved with some of the hacking work they'd been doing, trying to trace ownership of the landholdings in Patagonia...as well as the real owner of that security box we'd broken into at Heinrichter Global Bank. Balidor thought, and I agreed, that it was pretty imperative that we find out if Shadow had a copy of those names.
Given what Wreg and Revik knew of the assets owned by Salinse, along with who had been killed in the Lao Hu raid or in work camps, and who had defected to our side, we could guess Salinse walked away with seventy to eight-five infiltrators ranked above a 2 or 3. From what I knew of the Lao Hu and their usual deployments, we probably faced at least a hundred in their military arm alone...with a similar if not greater number in their infiltration arm under Ditrini. They also had access to infiltrators who worked directly for the Chinese government, like Surli, which might leave them with another fifty or sixty as a reserve pool.
Given the fact that we only had about fifty-five...maybe sixty...high ranking infiltrators total, across all continents, along with a couple dozen low to mid-rankers, we had to assume they would feel pretty comfortable splitting their forces up into at least three different groups. All of the 'military-types' (meaning Revik, Balidor, Wreg, Jorag, Tardek, Neela, Yumi, Loki, Chinja and so forth, who had fought in one or both of the wars) agreed that they'd likely try to cover, at minimum, New York, Asia near the refugee camps, San Francisco and South America...with South America getting the bulk of the mi
litary forces on both sides.
That left us with a conservative guess that we could be going up against as many as sixty fully-trained infiltrators in San Francisco alone. That meant on the ground operatives, not simply those watching the Barrier construct around the quarantine zone from a distance. It meant seers who could actually react, in real time, to whatever they caught us doing once we got inside.
It also meant we couldn't plan on sleeping much while we were there.
We flew in to San Jose International Airport, since that was the only airport north of Santa Barbara and west of Reno that remained open. Even then, we flew commercial under aliases, and left the airport without going through security. We did that mainly to avoid implant and barcode scans...not because we couldn't fool them, but more because we didn't want anyone to notice the tamper with the machines. Revik said they'd likely have at least a handful of seers watching for evidence of seers sliding through the security stations, so we were better off going around those entirely. Instead, Jorag and Neela pushed a number of airline workers to fill our empty spaces by going through security using our aliases, so the numbers would even out in terms of passengers to scanned implants.
Outside a private hangar on the other side of the commercial runways, we were escorted into a waiting sixteen-wheeler truck sent by Arc Enterprises to meet us outside the private terminal. Although loaded with enough organic equipment that we probably could have set off a bomb between our legs and no one would have heard it from the driver's seat, much less from another vehicle, the truck looked pretty normal on the outside. In fact, it resembled pretty much every commercial transport vehicle I'd ever seen, down to the colorful advertising morph covering the trailer's outside skin.
It wasn't until we were traveling up the 101 freeway north towards San Francisco that it really hit me that I was back on my home turf. I found myself watching the landscape go by on VR wall panels whose feeds were attached to cameras on the outside of the truck, feeling like an alien who'd just been transported back to her home world. Everything I could see was heart-stoppingly familiar, yet eerily distant from my present reality, much less what I remembered.
I knew some of that was me. I'd changed, in ways I'd stopped tracking at that point. I'd seen some of that in my friends' and family's faces at the wedding, but something about being here really brought that feeling home.
The place had changed, too.
The sheer lack of traffic on the highway threw me first. Quickly following that, I noticed row upon row of empty buildings where once the corridor cities had pretty much strained the edges of the freeway along either side. The buildings were still there, so the change was subtle at first...but again, there were no cars on the streets, all the shops and gas stations appeared abandoned and boarded up, no roving gangs of kids wandered the road, talking and laughing with their friends. There were no cop cars, or even military vehicles. I didn't see a single person looking out a window onto the highway, or anyone standing on a balcony. I saw smoke in a few places, further from the freeway barricades than the camera could capture, and further away, helicopters patrolled the skies. We even saw jets streak overhead a number of times...but other than that, the place looked really and truly dead. Curtains flapping lifelessly in windows provided the only movement for what seemed like miles. Piles of trash littered the street like they'd been left there weeks ago and no one had ever come to pick them up.
I'd read the feed reports and seen the altered images, so I knew a lot of people left the areas around the actual quarantine zone...afraid of infection, probably, but also in response to the chaos that broke out when news of the disease first hit.
Even so, seeing it now, I struggled to take it all in as real.
It was as if the South Bay had been transformed into a series of burnt-out ghost towns, one after the other in a fifty-mile stretch. For me, since I hadn't been back in almost four years, it also felt like it happened overnight.
Of course, on closer inspection, the streets weren't entirely devoid of people.
Jorag pointed out and rewound the recorded feed to show us glimpses of gangs roaming the streets through the cameras set at the topmost point on the truck. In the replay, I saw weapons in more than one hand, and what might have been a hostage situation with a young girl. For the most part, those weapons were unsophisticated, and the gang members were under twenty-five and human...they brandished tire irons, baseball bats, broken pieces of pipe, knives and in one case, what looked like a board dotted with nails.
But Revik also pointed out handguns, and I saw shotguns once or twice. In one of the replays, Yumi exclaimed and had Jorag roll back footage to a group of older humans wearing non-standard-issue armor and carrying bandoliers of grenades, with sub-machine guns strapped to their backs.
Martial law had been declared over most of Northern California when the disease hit, but they no longer had enough law enforcement, or even military, to really keep the streets free of looters, gangbangers, or these quasi-vigilante groups that seemed to have taken over cities in the absence of any legitimate rule of law.
Closer to the city, I actually saw a number of people in real time, including someone bashing in the windshield of a car parked alongside the road when we rode on an overpass on a slight rise over East Palo Alto, or maybe Los Altos. Most of the storefronts I saw by then were surrounded by broken glass and splintered wooden boards. Merchandise littered the streets for several blocks in each direction, everything from broken feed monitors to strings of clothing, broken bottles and washing machines, toaster ovens, electrical cables, kitchen items and tires. Once we could look down and see more of the city streets below, I saw smoke from more fires, including in parked cars and what looked like an outdoor bistro. I was pretty sure we were passing through Redwood City at that point...but I couldn't remember where the dividing lines fell exactly. We also saw a group of people beating on someone or something else in a ring, looking more like animals than human beings. That time, I couldn't help it...I looked away.
I glanced at Jon, strapped to the seat next to me.
Unlike me, he hadn't been going out of his way to look at this bleaker version of our old neighborhood. He'd ignored the rest of us talking and the images almost completely while we rolled back feeds and discussed what we saw. He'd mostly been reading a book on his portable monitor, and now he just seemed to be dozing, leaning back in the padded seat.
He looked pretty exhausted, so maybe that was part of it.
The seats faced inward, with padding between each one and a kind of jump harness, maybe in case we got into some kind of military conflict. Between our section of the cargo hold and the boxes of food and other staples being delivered to the quarantine zone itself, a wall made up of complex VR sensors stood, made primarily of organic components. Normally, sitting facing inward like that might have made me car-sick, but the motion modification of the seats made the ride smooth. So much so, in fact, that it was easy to forget we were moving at all.
Jon seemed to notice my stare and turned, raising an eyebrow.
"What?" he said finally. "You're back to this now?"
"Back to what?" I said.
"Well, the outside view of the apocalypse managed to distract you for a full..." He checked his watch. "Forty-eight minutes. You've been staring at me going on..." His eyes rolled up, as if he were counting. "...Eight hours now, Allie."
"No, I haven't," I said, but found myself thinking about his words anyway. "...Have I?"
Jon gave me a harder look, as if the question were beneath us both.
Crossing his arms in front of his chest, he settled his back deeper into the padded seat.
"Are you going to ask whatever it is that you want to ask?" he said. "Or are you just going to keep trying to read it off my light like an overprotective and creepy weirdo?" At my amused smile, he clicked his tongue, clasping his hands between his knees as he leaned forward to rest his forearms on his thighs. "...I swear to god, between you, Wreg and Revik, I feel like I'm going to
lose my fucking mind. Why did you bring me, if you think I can't handle this?"
"I know you can handle it," I said, surprised.
"Then what is your problem?"
I glanced at Revik, who gave me a bare glance in return. He was working through scenarios in VR with Yumi and the others, so I averted my eyes when I realized they were busy. It didn't occur to me until a few seconds later that Revik had done that on purpose, that they were all deliberately giving me and Jon a chance to talk. Sighing a little as it occurred to me that they were probably right, that we needed it, I met Jon's gaze.
"Okay," I said. "It's about Wreg."
"What about Wreg?" Jon said, his jaw hardening visibly.
I saw the defensive light that had already risen to his eyes and bit my lip.
"Are you going to tell me what the hell's going on there?" I said, exasperated. "Or am I just supposed to guess?"
Jon's looked away, clicking his tongue in annoyance. "Is that an order?"
"An order?" I felt my fingers clench around one another in anger. "Jesus, Jon. We used to talk about things like this. What's the big fucking deal? Are you still mad at me because of all those things you said in the dressing room that day?"
There was a silence. Then Jon exhaled, running his fingers through his hair. Some of the hardness left his features.
"No," he said. He laid his hand on mine, and I felt an apology in his light. "No, Al. I'm not mad about that stuff. I said I was sorry about that...I meant it."
"Then what?" I said. I bit my tongue again, and almost didn't say it, then did anyway. "Is it because of that stupid thing in the restaurant that morning? Just because I happened to notice he looked good?" Seeing Jon's expression harden, I clasped his fingers tighter. "Jon...the only reason I even noticed was because I knew you were sleeping with him. I was kind of thrown by that whole thing. I was trying to wrap my head around it..."
Jon turned, giving a disbelieving laugh. "Wrap your head around it?" he said. "How? By thinking...loudly, I might add...that my boyfriend is hot?" Glancing suddenly at Revik as if remembering he was there, he shook his head in irritation, lowering his voice. "I'd love to see how you'd react if he did that to you sometime..."
Allie's War Season Three Page 58