Revik nodded, clicking his fingers for me to hurry up. He glanced at his watch. "Come on. I told Balidor we'd be quick. Anyway..." He motioned overhead. “There’s a storm coming. We should get moving.”
"You know when I gave you permission, this wasn't exactly what I had in mind––"
But Revik went on as if I hadn't spoken. "...and Wreg's right. We might need manipulation as a back-up, especially if we're going to do this as quietly as I promised 'Dor."
"That is a flimsy, flimsy excuse," I informed him, clicking sharper. "Even for you. And a total abuse of your authority..."
He only grinned at me, motioning more emphatically for me to leave the armored vehicle. "Stop whining and come on. Let's manipulate things, baby.” He grinned wider. “You can work out your anger at me back at the hotel..."
Feeling a curl of heat off him, even through the distance between us, I glanced up at the cloud-darkened sky, frowning. I watched Wreg grin at me, too, right before he tugged his shorter-than-before but still long hair back in a ponytail and wrapped an organic clip around it. I glanced back to where Jon slept, wondering if I should wake him. Before I'd focused on him fully, I remembered the disease with a jolt. Realizing my door hung wide open, I tensed until I saw that Wreg had already put the oxygen mask over his face. It fogged mildly with each of his breaths, but his eyes remained closed, his hands resting by his face on the long bench seat. I wondered how Wreg had managed to do all of that before Revik opened the door.
Maybe I was a little okay with Jon and Wreg being together.
Wreg snorted louder at that.
"I'm honored, princess." He motioned me out of the car, too, his gestures more impatient than Revik's. "Come on. It’s fucking freezing out here. Your brother is fine. Jorag knows I'd kill him, if he acquired so much as a new scratch while we're gone..."
He raised his voice for that last part, and Jorag tapped his middle finger pointedly against the driver's side window, one of the few that wasn't shaded out.
Glancing back, the dark-haired seer winked at me as he did it.
Laughing in spite of myself, I gave in, climbing down from the Humvee and slamming the heavy, organic door behind me. As soon as I did, another blast of cold air hit me, making me suck in a breath. Wreg really hadn’t been kidding.
“No,” he said, blowing on his hands and stomping his feet. “...I was not, princess.”
Since none of us had changed clothes since that field op in Argentina, we didn't really look all that different from the soldiers running into and away from the cutting wind, scattered like black ants across different segments of the tarmac. They’d probably just dismiss us as private contractors if they saw us, unless we got caught in the actual act of stealing something. Yanking my hair back in a ponytail of my own, I tied it off using a rubber band instead of the clip traditionally worn by seer males, which at least kept it from whipping at my face. By the time I reached Revik's side, the Humvee with Jorag, Jax, Neela and my brother had already left us behind, rolling down the flat expanse of asphalt after the others, until it blended in with all the other armored vehicles.
"So what are we stealing, boys?" I asked the two of them, relieved to be out of the car in spite of myself. "Do we flip for first pick?"
Revik, who'd still been looking at me with that predatory glint in his eyes, smiled. Smacking Wreg on the chest, he walked in the direction of the nearest set of buildings, his gait falling into that curious, cat-like stride that I couldn't help following with my eyes.
Resigning myself that this was Wreg and Revik, and that this was their idea of fun, I followed with a sigh.
"WHERE ARE THEY?" Jon said, his voice distorted through the oxygen mask. "I mean, you're kidding, right? You didn’t really give Revik the thumb's up on this?"
Balidor shrugged with one hand, his eyes distracted, and still focused on Chandre. Wind howled outside the thin, organic plating of the hangar-like storage area, rattling the metal surface even as it created an eerie, echoing moan that lengthened into whispering cries as it traveled through the high-ceilinged space. Where Jon and Balidor stood was protected from that wind and relatively quiet, but still, Jon found himself glancing periodically out the tall doorway, squinting to see the growing squall in the dark. The air felt charged, as if heavy with unexpressed electricity. He could almost taste the copper in his mouth.
“We can’t turn down free supplies, Jon,” Balidor said after another beat.
“Free?” Jon snorted. “Free to who?”
“Free to us.”
Balidor said the last without inflection, still watching Chandre.
Jon followed his gaze to the East Indian-looking seer, who stood about ten meters away, hands on her slim hips as she listened to a woman in a SCARB jacket. The new woman, the one Jon didn’t know, had strongly Asian features and wore a dark blue skirt suit under the oversized windbreaker, accessorized with a designer watch, hoop earrings and Italian high heels. The woman's high-cheekboned face and gold-colored eyes marked her as a seer pretty much right off, but something else about her features made Jon stare, too. It took a moment longer for that secondary association to click. Then it did.
The seer looked like Cass.
Feeling a harder emotion get lodged somewhere in his chest, Jon looked back at Balidor. Waiting for the seer to turn, he shivered from another gust of icy wind from the open doors, even wearing the thick, armored vest and combat pants. Rubbing his arms, he glanced up as the patter of rain started again, hitting the upper roof and echoing like shots from a few million nail guns on the organic overhang.
"Hey," he said, waving a hand to get the seer's attention. "Seriously, man...you let them go wandering around a U.S. military base, looking for shiny toys? Now? With all of this..." He gestured out at the storm, then around them vaguely, although at what, in the latter case, he wasn't sure. "...Going on?"
Balidor rolled his eyes. A smile played around his lips.
"Nenzi and Allie are with him, Jon," he said. "I’m sure Wreg will be fine."
“There’s a friggin’ hurricane brewing outside!”
“Weather is unlikely to harm or deter brother Wreg,” Balidor said, glancing up at the ceiling. “Although I admit, I find myself glad we won’t be traveling by air anytime soon...”
Looking back at the two female seers, his gray eyes blurred slightly. Jon realized he was still reading one or both of them, tracking the details of their conversation.
The storage warehouse stood right alongside the main docks, essentially a converted airplane hangar, or perhaps an old ship-building yard switched over at the end of World War II. Most of it now appeared to be filled with those forty-foot, rectangular storage crates, what got hauled on flatbed barges from overseas, and hooked to semi trucks to transport cargo across the country. Jon glanced around the cavernous space, noting again how eerily quiet it was, apart from the storm raging outside. He knew Jorag and a bunch of the other security-bent seers were patrolling the perimeter, keeping the humans out and anyone else who might get nosy about the Humvee convey that just arrived, but the silence still made Jon nervous.
"...Anyway," Balidor added, pulling Jon’s eyes back to him. "We could all stand to blow off some steam. Nenzi and your sister more than the rest of us, I would wager. We still have no idea what we will find upon returning to the city."
Jon felt his jaw harden. "You mean they did this for fun?"
Balidor gave him a sideways look, chuckling aloud that time.
"You'd best get used to it, Jon," he advised. "Wreg and Nenzi, they're cut from the same cloth in many ways. In fact, your boyfriend has a few hundred years’ more military training than your sister's husband. So really, you're fighting a losing battle there..."
Jon frowned. Even so, curiosity pulled at him, too.
"Yeah," he muttered. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he grew conscious of how he must look, given the oxygen mask and the mud-encrusted armor. Blowing it off, he shrugged. "Yeah," he said again, glancing at Balidor. "I've
been meaning to ask you about that. About that whole thing of Wreg being trained initially by the Adhipan...?"
"Before my time, Jon," Balidor said with a dismissive wave. "Tarsi was in charge back then. You'd best direct your questions to her."
"But you must have known him back then," Jon persisted, ignoring the reluctance he could see in the set of the seer's mouth. "Weren't both of you ID'd as Adhipan when you were kids? Allie told me that's how they used to do it. That they pulled kids from families, based on their potential rank, or whatever...?"
Balidor sighed. Making a 'more or less' gesture with one hand, he tilted his palm like a bird in flight. If anything, that reluctance in his mouth grew more pronounced.
"Yes," he said, blunt.
"So?" Jon said. "Aren't the two of you around the same age?"
Turning, Balidor raised an eyebrow at him. "Not exactly," he said, giving Jon a disbelieving look. "...You're only off by about two hundred years, Jon. I was already running my own squads by the time Wreg showed up in the Pamir."
"Which would have been...when?" Jon pressed.
"I don't know exactly," Balidor sighed, clicking a little in annoyance. "I didn’t do a lot with the new recruits back then. I got them when they were adults, Jon. They brought the new kids in when they were only around 14-15 years old."
"So he would have looked around six or seven in human years?" Jon mused aloud.
"Approximately, yes."
"So you never once saw him? Not even once?"
"That was the 1700s, Jon," Balidor reminded him. "...If you'll recall your human history, a lot was going on in the world. I had teams in Europe and the Americas at the time, and that was pre-First Contact, so we had to be damned careful about not being ID'd as non-human. Things worked a lot differently in the Adhipan back then, and not only because we had around twenty times our current numbers. If you think I had time to chase down every new recruit that gave their teachers a spot of trouble, you'd best think again..."
“He gave his teachers trouble?” Jon said.
Seeing Jon's expression, Balidor let out a sigh, and what looked like an involuntary smile. Shrugging, he shifted his eyes back towards Chandre and her Thai-looking friend.
"Fine. I may have seen him one time, Jon...just one."
Jon raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question under the oxygen mask.
Balidor shrugged. "I remember a young seer Tarsi brought me in to assess,” he conceded after another pause. “Smart kid. Aced all of his exams, even though he came from a modest background and had no clan sponsors to speak of. Had a particular knack for mathematics, if I recall...and art. But the kid was a troublemaker...a born leader, he used it mainly to incite mischief in the other recruits...and he didn’t respond well to authority figures.”
Jon grunted, smiling almost without meaning to. “Shocker.”
“...Yes, well.” Balidor’s smile crept out further. “...Not unless he’d made up his mind that they ‘deserved’ his respect...”
Jon grunted again, nodding. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.
Balidor added, “Tarsi brought me to see him, likely hoping I'd have suggestions on how to motivate him. Or perhaps to give her some ideas on where to place him..." He laughed a little, as if involuntarily, his eyes distant. "...When I got there, he was on the ceiling of the classroom, hanging there from these bizarre, hook-like contraptions. They turned out to be cave-crawling gloves and shoes he'd made out of a bunch of old rifle parts along with shovel bits he'd sharpened and worn down to exactly fit his knees and hands..."
Balidor chuckled again, making a conciliatory gesture with one hand.
"...It was pretty ingenious, really."
Still thinking, as if remembering the image, he grunted, breaking into a wider smile.
"...Tarsi was pissed. And a little embarrassed too, I think, since she talked him up to me on the way there. He was a pain in the ass from day one, your Wreg."
Jon flinched a little at his wording, but didn't speak. He watched Balidor's expression change as he continued to stare off, thinking...right before it grew slightly pained. The look was there and gone, but Jon felt himself frown.
"What?" he said. "What aren't you telling me, Balidor?"
The seer only shook his head, his eyes hardening to the color of iron.
"No, Jon," he said. "You'll need to ask Wreg himself if you want to know more." Shaking off whatever emotion lived there, he clapped Jon on the shoulder, his eyes losing that heavier cast. "You know, brother, I'm really not the person to convince you that you're not completely crazy to be involving yourself with Wreg. If you want reassurance on that point, I would talk to Nenzi. Or your sister...maybe one of the other rebels. Someone who knows him now, in the present."
"Ex-rebels," Jon muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. "And Allie hasn't exactly been part of the cheering squad for me and Wreg."
Balidor's smile grew more warm as he met Jon's gaze.
"I think you have already made up your mind, Jon," the Adhipan commander observed, his eyes shrewd. "Why unduly stress yourself, now that the decision is made?"
Jon nodded, hearing the logic of the other's words, even as his jaw hardened.
He ignored the way the Adhipan leader’s eyes seemed to look through him, perhaps to his light, or to something else he saw in him.
Had he made up his mind? Supposing he had, what did that mean exactly? Despite what Wreg said to him before they left for Argentina, Jon wasn't seer, not really. He didn't really have to make the same life-or-death-commitment-thing that Allie and Revik had been faced with.
So why did it feel like he did?
Remembering Wreg's words the one and only time they'd broached that topic, he couldn't help but frown. Maybe he would need to find out a little more about Wreg.
He wondered if he could ask Revik. Buy him a bottle of his favorite bourbon back at the hotel, get him drunk enough to start telling stories from the war. Jon knew his brother-in-law got pretty talkative when he drank enough.
Then again, maybe he'd get too talkative, end up telling Jon a bunch of things Jon really didn't want to know. He could just ask Wreg, of course. But he wasn't sure he was ready to have that conversation, either...especially knowing where it could lead.
Standing next to him, Balidor chuckled again, giving Jon another openly amused look. "If you wanted someone easy and uncomplicated, I'm afraid you've made a questionable choice in mates, brother," he said gently.
That smile remained visible in his gray eyes as he rubbed Jon's shoulder a last time, then let him go, walking towards Chandre and the SCARB seer.
Jon watched Balidor go, still reacting to several words in the seer's last statement.
He stood there long enough for Balidor to nearly reach the two female seers.
Resigning himself to let it go for now, Jon was about to walk after him, when something caught his eye, in the shadows down the nearest row of forty-foot-long cargo crates.
That whole area of the warehouse lay in near darkness, the height of the containers blocking out most of the light from the overhead lamps before it could reach the narrow corridors between them. Jon could smell the rust from the sitting containers, along with the fainter taste of brine and a mustier smell beneath both, one that reminded him more of his grandmother’s attic when he and Allie were kids.
Jon squinted at a form standing there, sensing the presence without being able to tell anything about it. He couldn’t see them well enough to discern much, either. He stepped towards them hesitantly, right before glancing around himself again.
“Hello?” he said. “Who is that?”
He glanced around again when the figure only stood there, but now that Balidor had moved out of earshot, he was pretty much alone.
“Hey!” he said. “Not funny, with the whole freak out the human thing, okay?”
“Jon,” the shadow whispered. “Come here a second, okay? I need to show you something!”
Jon frowned.
; “Who is that?” he said. “Neela? Is that you?”
“It’ll only take a minute!” the voice said, urgent. “Please! Before Balidor comes back. I need to talk to you. It’s about our sister, the Esteemed Bridge...”
Jon’s frown deepened.
He still couldn’t make out the face of whoever it was, or even much in the way of a body, other than the fact that they were female and on the small side.
Could it be Neela? Why would Neela hide in the dark, whispering at him? Why would she be so heavily shielded from him, if Jorag and the others were already policing the space? And, more to the point, why would she want to talk to him about Allie? Was she shielding herself to keep anyone else from hearing what was on her mind?
Jon glanced around himself again, puzzled. No warning bells were going off, though, just the weirdness of a voice whispering at him out of the shadows of a row of brightly-painted cargo crates that had faded to muted blues, grays and whites. Well, that, and a voice Jon almost recognized, but not quite...and the fact that Neela wore a shield unlike any he’d ever felt before, in all of his sight-training with Wreg.
When he glanced back at Chandre and the Thai-looking woman, they seemed perfectly at ease as they discussed strategy only a dozen meters away. So did Balidor, as he stood at a polite distance, his stance totally relaxed as he waited for them to acknowledge him.
Jorag cleared this place out an hour ago. Whoever was whispering at him, it had to be one of theirs. Anyway, Balidor was like, one of the strongest seers alive.
He would have felt if anything weird was going down.
Neela said she wanted to tell him something about Allie. Maybe she and Jorag and the others had run into Allie herself, out on the military base somewhere, and she and Revik and Wreg needed help. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into some kind of trouble and didn’t want Balidor to know, at least not yet, so they were pulling Jon in, instead.
Sighing a bit, and already irritated, Jon shoved his hands in his pockets, then walked towards the woman’s voice.
It wasn’t until he got within a few yards of her outline, that he pulled up short, staring at the woman standing there, sure at first that he must be dreaming.
Allie's War Season Three Page 82