He’d been so sure it was Neela. He found himself remembering the funhouse mirrors of the Shadow house in Argentina, even as he glanced back over his shoulder, wondering if he should shout out Balidor’s name, warn them...or call them over here.
But curiosity held him in place, staring at the woman in front of him.
“Hey there, Jon-boy,” Cass said, twirling the bright red dyed tips of her hair in her small fingers.
She smiled up at him coyly, giving him a teasing look that Jon remembered from high school, when she used to joke flirt with him all the time, even though she knew he was gay, or maybe for that very reason.
It took him a moment of staring to realize what was so strange about seeing her like that now, even apart from the rest of it, when it hit him suddenly, that the scar Terian had carved into her face in that cell in the Caucasus Mountains was gone.
Smooth and a pale beige in color, Cass’ skin looked entirely unblemished, as perfect as a porcelain doll’s from her forehead down to the long lines of her neck. Her candy-colored lipstick exactly matched the shocking red of her newly-dyed red and black hair, that seductive smile still toying with the edges of her eyes and lips as she looked him over suggestively.
“...Miss me, handsome?” she asked.
It was the last thing Jon heard before everything around him grayed out.
BALIDOR STOPPED WALKING, pausing only a few yards from where Chandre and the other seer, Talei, continued to talk.
Both looked up as soon as Balidor halted, stepping out of their closer proximity to one another, noting his polite pause just long enough to openly include him in their two-person discussion.
"Talei is coming with us," Chandre announced, as soon as Balidor took the last few steps to complete their three person triangle. "...She thinks it is better if she is present in person to assist us with the quarantine locks. There is a password system, but it is DNA coded, so risky for us to try to falsify without an agent with legitimate clearance..."
Balidor nodded without surprise.
"I agree with sister Talei, and thank her for her offer,” he said, bowing slightly. “It is better that the charts come with us anyway," he observed. “I would personally feel more at ease if not too many were in possession of these maps. In fact, how many others have this knowledge now? Does our honorable sister, Talei, know this?"
Balidor turned to the Asian seer politely.
"Few," the SCARB seer, Talei, said.
She looked Balidor over unapologetically.
Balidor could feel that she used more than her eyes. She was decently good at hiding her scan, but he wondered why she would think he would not notice, given who he was.
Arrogant, then. Or deluded, perhaps.
She obviously was unused to working with seers who did not function in any official capacity for one of the human hierarchies. Balidor had seen this tendency before, in career SCARB infiltrators. A percentage of them seemed to forget that theirs was an insular world, and that the seers living outside of it didn’t necessarily care about their internal pecking order, or the fact that they were ‘someone important’ within it.
The female seer finished her assessment, then grunted a little, her eyes level on his.
"Most of the others with access to the maps, I cannot influence," she added, her voice slightly more subdued. "They are contracted above my pay grade...mainly by private interests. They are not people I can influence through the usual channels..." She gave Chandre a slightly harder look. "...They are, sadly, out of reach of my bed, too."
Chandre gave her an irritated look.
Balidor did not bother to react to the personal interaction between them.
He’d already picked up on the fact that they’d had a sexual relationship at one point. One that might still be going on, but clearly in a one-sided direction. Balidor wondered with an internal sigh, if Chandre would ever be capable of letting go of the thing with Cass. He liked the East Asian seer very much, so he hoped she would, and sooner rather than later.
Even as he thought it, Chandre’s dark red eyes shifted to his face, shining and flickering with reflected light from the chained overheads swinging in the wind.
From her frown, he might have thought she heard him, almost.
"We have to assume some of these are Shadow's people," Chandre said. "Talei is not just being cute. Most of those with information on how to access the city are well-guarded. They have private constructs run by dozens of seers. It is a miracle she got us this information at all. We are very lucky to have it."
"And don't you forget it," the Thai-looking seer muttered.
"We will have company in New York," Chandre added, ignoring the shorter seer and speaking to Balidor alone. "...Of that, we can be certain."
Balidor nodded, his gray eyes again holding no surprise. "Is it possible that Shadow arranged for us to get a copy of these charts?" he said, careful that no hint of accusation reach his voice. "Can we be certain of their authenticity?"
"They are real, old man," Talei said, curling her hands into fists under her folded arms. "Would I risk my life, coming with you, if I was not certain of that?"
Balidor just looked at her that time, his expression unmoving. After a suitable pause, his eyes shifted back to Chandre. Not an overt insult, but an implied one. It would be better if this seer learned quickly that he valued the word of his own people more than hers.
"Is our transport available?" he asked Chandre politely, folding his hands at the base of his back. “It would be better if we could get all of the seers inside before we take chances on moving the humans into quarantine..."
"We have capacity for 200, with minimal crew..." Talei began.
"We'll crew it ourselves," Balidor said, glancing at her. "We have sufficient numbers and skills for that. It will free up space for more of us. Between the infiltrators Wreg freed from Manaus and that other camp, our numbers are great."
Talei made an indifferent sound, as if it was no consequence to her. Balidor hid a smile, however, when it occurred to him that she’d picked up on his lack of interest in her ‘importance’ and that it had managed to intimidate her.
"That brings it to 350," Chandre added.
Balidor felt himself relax.
"That should be sufficient," he said, smiling more genuinely that time. "We can still make more than one trip, if need be, but I would prefer not to risk them changing the sequence. Also, with this storm...” He trailed, indicating overhead.
“Yes,” Chandre muttered, also glancing outside the door. “The feeds are quite hysterical on the subject. There is some fear the water containment fields could fail around the island, as well as at several other points along the coast. It could complicate things on the other side...”
“Overly?” Balidor pressed.
“No, I do not think so. If anything, it will––”
"Where did your human go?" Talei broke in. She stared behind Balidor’s back, a mixture of curiosity and irritation on her face. “He is no longer there. Where is he?”
Balidor glanced behind him, but only quirked an eyebrow when he confirmed that Jon no longer stood there.
“Is that relevant to our discussion, sister?” he said politely.
“You let him roam about free like that, when he could bring the disease with us to New York, infecting all the others...?” she said, frowning harder. “Why is he not in his cage, with the rest of the worms?”
“He is immune to the disease, sister,” Balidor said.
“Just like that?” Talei made a sharp gesture, her eyes narrow. “...He is immune? So why did you have him in the oxygen mask, if you are so certain?”
Chandre and Balidor exchanged a look.
Balidor picked up within Chandre’s very faint thoughts that she deliberately hadn’t given Talei a lot of information about Jon, nor his relationship to Allie and the Sword, nor about the Displacement lists more generally. Hearing her quiet message, Balidor couldn’t help but feel relieved. Whatever her taste in sexu
al companions, Chandre was no fool.
"He has been with us longer than some of the others,” Balidor said simply, looking back at the Thai-looking seer. “He can be trusted, sister."
"No human can be trusted," the other grunted. "No matter who he is. If he is human, he can be manipulated by our enemies...or read by them, at any rate..."
"...He is also well-protected," Balidor assured her.
Chandre glanced at him, clearly noticing that Balidor hadn’t offered a lot of information about Jon, either. Balidor knew that news of the lists had already hit the black market feeds, including the Rynak, where bounties to obtain a copy were in the billions of Euros by now. More than that, though, he didn’t want anyone knowing anything about Jon’s unique role on those lists. He still couldn’t be sure if Shadow’s people had any idea how important Jon was, but he suspected not, or Jon would likely be dead by now.
Shadow wouldn’t have missed an opportunity to eliminate him, not while Jon had been been trapped inside that chateau in Argentina with the others. In fact, the more Balidor thought about it, the more he realized how completely foolhardy it had been to let Jon go on that trip in the first place.
Sighing a bit internally, Balidor found himself thinking he would need to change Jon’s security status, as soon as they reached the city. Jon wouldn’t like it, of course, but that was just tough. He didn’t think it would be difficult to convince Nenzi of the need, much less Wreg.
"There’s no doubt the human is cute," Talei observed, looking Balidor up and down with shrewder eyes. Balidor felt a curl of her light around his and frowned until she backed off. "...His light is...strange. Who is he? Is one of you bedding him?"
"He is very much spoken for, sister," Balidor said flatly. "Although, it is not I who is honored to be that companion to him, if that is what you are asking. As for who he is, I'm afraid that's a much longer story, one that will have to wait until we are on the other side of the river. Suffice it to say..." Balidor added, his voice slightly sharper. "It is crucially important that you treat him with respect, and not take liberties with him, sister...sexually or otherwise."
Talei smiled, her gold-colored eyes flickering up to Balidor’s face. "Understood.” Pausing just a half beat, she widened her smile, inclining her head toward the hangar doors. “...Well, then. I guess it's time for a tour of our transport?"
Balidor made a 'lead the way' gesture with one hand.
Chandre gave him a puzzled look once the other seer was no longer watching either of them. Realizing what the look probably meant, it occurred to him suddenly, that Chandre hadn’t seen very much of their interactions together as a group since she’d first left them to work as a double-agent under Salinse.
Spoken for? Chandre sent softly, still staring at him. I thought Dorje was dead?
Grimacing a little, Balidor didn't answer at first.
He avoided Chandre’s gaze while he thought about her words for a few beats longer, following the petite Asian seer as she led them from the florescent-lit warehouse into a cutting wind at the dark edge of foaming, storm-churned water.
The weather had grown progressively worse over the last few hours since they got here, bad enough that Balidor found himself thinking they might have trouble docking on the other end, after all. In either case, if the water containment system around New York failed, navigating the quarantine protocols of FEMA and SCARB could be the least of their problems, given the problems the coast had been experiencing for the past month. He knew the hotel might have its own emergency system for just such an event, but to say it would pose logistical problems would be an extreme understatement.
Despite the bad weather, and the reminder about Vash and Dorje’s deaths, Balidor found himself smiling a little as he thought over Chandre’s question, especially coupled with the near-interrogation he’d gotten from Jon about Wreg’s past.
Chuckling, he gave Chandre a friendly slap on the shoulder as she continued to stare backwards at the section of warehouse where Jon had stood, seconds before.
There is a lot we must catch you up on, my dear sister, he told her softly. So much, in fact, that I might only get myself in trouble if I were to attempt to do it alone...
Chandre’s frown deepened, but that time, she only nodded.
Still smiling, Balidor glanced behind himself as well, wondering vaguely where Jon had wandered off to, even as he followed the other two out to the docks.
THE SUN MUST have already been above the horizon to our right as we made our way down to the main docks. I say ‘must have’ because there was no way to see it in the black clouds that swirled over the tarmac by the time we left the storage warehouses from our pillaging.
The only way I could tell that the sun had come up at all was that I could see the tarmac now, along with the water just past the cement lines of the pier.
I saw the rows of vehicles without artificial light, too, and even a few ships where they bobbed crazily in their moorings, slamming into the docks and one another with just about every series of waves. White-tipped swells crashed and buffeted the invisible containment fields as we got closer to the water itself, making for a dramatic view, if a somewhat alarming one, when it occurred to me what would happen if any one of those fields failed. So far they seemed to be holding, even restraining the ocean in the nothingness above the land itself, where the lines of water didn’t really recede all that much with each passing wave.
But yeah, I couldn’t see any part of the actual sun.
Despite our location, I also couldn’t glimpse so much as a single skyscraper in Manhattan itself. Really, it didn’t get ‘light out’ at all, in the conventional sense. I could see, yeah, but only while I wasn’t being blinded by wind or rain or both.
My face felt raw from rain, actually...and a wind that still smelled like smoke, in spite of the briny smell and wetness that should have overpowered it.
Revik had gotten an earful from Balidor when he called in to confirm the rendezvous, but despite that...and the typhoon that now raged around us...the three of us remained in relatively high spirits. We'd commandeered a jeep-like vehicle with a long storage bed for carrying all of our booty. Revik cranked that thing up to around sixty miles per hour on the straightaways, so we weren't all that long in making the distance across the length of the monstrous-seeming forward operating base, or ‘F.O.B.’ as Wreg and Revik kept calling it.
We were soaking wet by the time we arrived, though, and shivering like dunked dogs, even though we’d been crouched behind the windshield to avoid the worst of the slanted sheets of rain. The flat-bed’s jeep had only that low windshield and no roof at all, though, so was basically useless against the elements.
We were also late, so, there was that.
Revik initially told Balidor that we'd be back before dawn, so I could understand why he might be annoyed. I knew Jon would be more than annoyed.
He’d probably be furious. Especially with me.
He'd expect me to be the rational and responsible one of the three of us, and fair enough, I guess. I owed him about ten times over in that area, and both of us knew it. Complicating that, he’d view it as a betrayal of sorts that we’d left him behind in the first place. He could be awfully touchy about the human versus seer thing, and still saw himself very much as ‘human.’ Which was funny, really, since I’m pretty sure he was the only one who did.
So yeah, I knew I’d be in trouble with Jon, even before.
After Wreg got shot, I knew I was totally screwed.
It didn't help that Wreg and Revik kept looking at one another and saying, "It's just a flesh wound!" in falsetto British accents as they laughed like idiots.
I still couldn’t quite believe it even happened, truthfully.
Revik, of all people, had been acting as our lookout.
Despite that, he’d...one...somehow not felt the approaching military patrol of seers in the first place and...two...allowed them to get close enough to fire the first shot once they must have ID’d us as no
t belonging there, either as soldiers or private contractors. Granted, they appeared to have decent sight rankings, all three of them, and even Wreg conceded that some kind of unusual shield protected their light. Nevertheless, he didn’t let up the whole way back in giving Revik crap for being a ‘horny, easily-distracted youngster.’
And yeah, it was weird.
Weird enough that it made me worry a bit. About Revik, that is.
Revik himself pretended to blow it off, but that could easily have been for my benefit. He groused at Wreg instead, accusing him of making too much noise and spending too long in the warehouse picking through experimental tech when he knew they’d be able to ID tag our aleimi as not belonging now that we were operating outside the mobile constructs they’d been using around the Humvees.
I wasn’t buying it, myself.
The damage to his aleimi must have been worse than I’d been admitting to myself...or maybe worse than Balidor, Yumi or Poresh admitted to me. Either way, he shouldn’t have missed three seers to the extent that they walked right up on us like that, and even got off a shot.
Luckily, his proficiency with a gun didn’t seem to be hampered at all.
He got two of the three seers the old fashioned way, meaning by shooting them in the legs and shoulders as soon as he turned. The third he fought hand to hand, and had him out in about five minutes, although it felt a lot longer than that while I watched him.
Meanwhile, Wreg's shirt was soaked with blood from the bullet that Revik dug out of his arm with a knife and "probably ruined his favorite tattoo," as Wreg grumbled to me at least three times. After I finished knocking the remaining two seers out with my aleimi, Revik did his best to clean Wreg up, then showed me how to fashion a makeshift tourniquet on his upper arm. Minutes later, we were back to doing crime, only now with Wreg moving a lot slower, and three strange seers in military uniforms asleep on the hangar floor.
Revik had me experiment with the whole ‘healing ability’ thing, when Wreg's pain became an issue. Revik and Balidor were both convinced I'd started to develop some kind of special skill in that area, so Revik was eager for me to use it, presumably so that I could both test the ability and begin to hone it for use in the field. Personally, I had my doubts it did much, although Wreg insisted he felt better.
Allie's War Season Three Page 83