"Allie," Jon said, his voice sounding impatient that time. "I couldn't reach you on your headset. Did you turn it off?"
Nodding dumbly again, without really comprehending his question at all that time, I glanced back through the window of the security booth, where I could see Revik and Maygar arguing about something. I couldn't make sense of any of their words.
"ALLIE!" Jon said, yelling that time.
I turned my head. His frown deepened, bordering on anger now, or maybe some kind of anxiety that looked a lot like anger.
"Can he spare you down here?" Jon said. "Revik. Can he spare you? We need you upstairs, Allie. Now. As in right now..."
I stood up, but my legs didn't seem to want to work right. Gripping the back of the chair, I nodded. "Yeah," I said. I blinked, trying to force myself to get out of whatever weird dead zone in which my brain had decided to hide. "...Yeah," I said. "What is it? What's wrong?"
But Jon seemed to have given up on talking to me in the usual way.
Walking over to me, he grabbed hold of my arm. Pausing to lean over the console, he hit a switch, speaking into the microphone on one edge of the smooth organic.
"I need your wife," he said, curt. "Not an emergency, but it can’t wait. You can find us upstairs when you’re done. At the bar...no hurry, okay?"
Revik looked over, his eyes narrow, and slightly hard from whatever was going on between him and Maygar. He seemed poised on the edge of a question...maybe more than one...but changed his mind in the last instant, nodding to Jon instead.
"Ten minutes," he told Jon.
"That's fine. We need her now," he said.
Revik nodded again, but his expression remained wary, bordering on dangerous, really. I could tell without being able to read anything off him at all that he didn't want me leaving the rough area of his proximity, especially after what he'd just told Maygar. I found myself understanding why now, too.
In fact, I found myself understanding a lot of things suddenly.
But I couldn’t let myself go there, either. Not now.
"Are you sure we don't need him?" I asked Jon, feeling my focus beginning to return as I fought to wrap my head around the present. "Why me and not him?" I said.
"It's Cass, Allie."
At that, and maybe at the look on Jon’s face, my mind finally decided to click into gear. I got up from the bolted-down chair, leaning down for my hand-held and configuring it to wrap back around my wrist. Jon watched, me, stepping back to give me space.
"...And yeah," Jon added. "We do need him. We're going to need everyone in this pretty soon, but right now, just you. Wreg's not even in on this yet...I left him asleep upstairs. He’s still having problems with his shoulder, and he pushed it again yesterday..."
"So who is there?" I said.
“Just you and me,” Jon said promptly. “More are coming. We're meeting on sixty-two."
“That high?” I said, puzzled. “Why? I thought that was all storage now?”
“It’s secure,” was all Jon said.
Giving him another puzzled nod, I didn't bother to question him further. I saw his eyes dart to Maygar and Revik another time, but I couldn’t read anything into that expression, either. I guess, if I’d thought anything, I just assumed he was just wondering if they had something to do with my not hearing him earlier, when he first entered the control booth.
I didn't tell Jon what he’d walked in on, in any case.
Regaining my feet, I headed for the door to the corridor instead. Jon followed me without hesitation. We walked in silence to the elevator, and I don’t think I even looked at Jon again until he leaned down to punch the button for the sixty-second floor. After the round key lit up, Jon glanced at me, his hazel eyes sharper than usual, almost wary.
Maybe to head off the question I saw there, I asked him one, instead.
“So you’re not going to tell me?” I joked. “What’s up?”
He shook his head, shoving his hands into his pockets. “No need,” he said, giving me a faint smile. I noticed it didn’t touch his eyes. “...You’ll know, soon enough.”
Something else hit me, though. “Didn’t you tell Revik we’d be at the bar?”
“We will be, by the time he meets us.”
Puzzled, I didn’t argue, but found myself turning over his words anyway. It would take a few minutes to get up to sixty-two, then another few to get back down to the bar. Revik had said ten minutes...it didn’t really add up, but for some reason, I didn’t press the point with Jon.
After another pause, I did send our preliminary destination to Revik, though, in case we didn’t finish up there before he headed to the bar, looking for us.
Apart from that, I stayed away from Revik’s mind, though.
I wasn’t particularly surprised when he seemed to want to do the same to me. I felt flickers of his irritation at Maygar, what might have been worry aimed at me, but not much else. Neither of us was ready to talk about the other bomb he'd just dropped on me.
Which, given the look on Jon's face as he watched the numbers light up on the elevator terminal, was probably for the best, at least for now.
Even so, I would remember later that that last, direct glimpse I had of Revik’s light and mind had hardly been an intimate one.
BALIDOR STOOD ON one edge of the white-walled room, staring past heads and bodies up at a monitor that covered the entire opposite wall in the rectangular-shaped conference room. The room itself continued to fill with more and more seers as Balidor stood there, unmoving.
He found himself faintly grateful that Nenzi hadn’t joined them yet...although he knew they would have to pull him into this, and soon.
The thought only registered on the palest of backgrounds in Balidor’s mind, however.
The face that took up most of that monitor’s screen absorbed the other ninety-nine percent of the Adhipan leader’s attention. The features there held him in thrall, in fact, glueing the vast majority of his attention and aleimi to the being behind them, such that he practically held his breath as he continued to stare at the image of the man standing there.
It was Menlim.
Menlim of Purestad. Nenzi’s childhood guardian, and infamous creator of the deadly Syrimne d’ Gaos. It was the seer who had nearly brought the Displacement single-handedly, and over one hundred years too soon.
A seer who all of them, until now, had believed to be dead.
Balidor would have sworn to it was him, though, even after that hall of mirrors debacle in Argentina. Even after all of the games they’d endured at this Shadow’s hands until now.
Balidor fought to keep his attention focused on the live telecast and no where else, to keep his mind off what everyone around him was saying, which wasn't exactly easy as they argued back and forth across the polished wood table...a wood table that must have cost a fortune, given the cost of hard woods these days. Staring at the images on the monitor itself, and the source of all of this disagreement as the seers around him reacted and shouted at one another, Balidor tried again to push on different aspects of what were probably some of the densest Barrier shields he'd ever encountered, if only to feel the beings behind them for himself, perhaps for personal reasons as much as strategic ones.
Those beings pushed him off as easily as if he were a buzzing mosquito.
Balidor remembered Menlim the man, although they’d only met once.
That wasn’t the real reason Balidor believed it, though...meaning why he believed Menlim was really standing there, on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington D.C., and not just some illusion created to mess with all of them once again.
No, it was something else. Something Balidor could sense behind that outline of form, maybe because he was older now, and his sight had grown slightly more refined over the years. Or perhaps it had more to do with what he’d seen over those same years, including inside the mind of Menlim’s greatest creation, the mighty Syrimne himself.
Either way, most of what Balidor felt came th
rough in glimpses, mere tastes.
He couldn't get much of anything specific off of Menlim himself...meaning, the seer behind the facade...even though he would have sworn it was a real face and aleimi he saw, not an avatar that filled most of the monitor’s space.
Given who it was, that didn’t particularly surprise Balidor, either.
He’d already come to grips with the fact that somehow, this had been possible. Whether Menlim was truly a seer, or an intermediary, or even a reanimated corpse, like so many of Feigran’s bodies as Terian, Balidor genuinely did not know, but he suspected the truth lived in some other explanation, something they had perhaps not yet seen.
What did surprise Balidor was the fact that, although he had known somehow, even before the Bridge made her case, who Shadow really was, some part of him hadn’t quite believed it.
Not until now.
Next to the tall, skull-faced seer, Feigran stood in a casual but alert pose, something in his eyes familiar yet foreign, too. That mad light that seemed to shine from within had disappeared from the Rook’s face, but so had the gentler quality Balidor remembered, from when Feigran had been a captive in the hotel. Some element of Terian lived there again.
Balidor couldn’t put his finger on the exact difference, or even say for certain what it meant, in terms of whether it had resurfaced through the re-splitting of Terian’s personality or not...but that darker feeling worsened the longer he stared at those yellow-tinted eyes.
Feigran’s light hung protectively over the older seer’s, almost slavishly. Balidor could sense that much, even through the shields, and the implications of that relationship disturbed him even more than what he’d heard about Cass and Feigran in that chateau in Argentina. In any case, something about Feigran’s energy and face carried sanity again, even if that came coupled with significantly less heart in those sharper eyes.
The words that came out of Menlim’s mouth seemed to be from another era, evoking memories that Balidor would have preferred to stay repressed. He recognized the flavor of those words, as well as where they originated, even though the first time he had heard them, it had been from Syrimne himself, back during the worst fighting in World War I.
Balidor still hadn’t seen any sign of Cass.
"...My friends," Menlim said smoothly, laying white, bone-like hands on either side of a steel-colored podium.
His words echoed, amplified over the concrete pillars down to the plaza itself.
"...We are at a critical moment,” he said, his light eyes shining in a round circle of stage lights over the raised platform. “All of us, we know we are likely seeing the end of our precious species here and now. We are watching the fall of the human race itself, and the civilization it carved out of the earth and stone caves of our ancestors. We are watching this terrible thing happen. We are watching and doing nothing...even though we know the probable, if not certain source of this disease. A disease that is killing our species by the millions...soon to be billions. With more of us dying daily. Hourly. Every minute..."
Frowning, Menlim turned to stare at the camera directly, his sallow skin sweating lightly in the glaring lights and video feeds from the network station reporters that stood around him in a ring. Balidor watched him stand there, adopting the mannerisms of an old human, down to a kind-seeming smile to the reporters...or one that would seem kind, if one didn’t have the sight and couldn’t see the metallic strands that strangled his aleimi.
Briefly, Menlim paused, looking out over the crowd, as if in grief.
Anger stood in his eyes, along with a frustrated grief that almost felt real, but for the complete wall around the being’s aleimi, and the hardness of the light that reflected back, pulling on the crowd without them being aware of their being pulled. Balidor felt that pull, too. He recognized it, knew its power. It had frightened him, that power, when he first felt it in the trenches during World War I. It frightened him now, even though he only tasted the edges of it. He remembered how it had affected his own men, confusing them as they fought, sometimes even making them turn on one another. The amplification of that network terrified Balidor briefly, if only because he could feel a part of himself that could get lost inside it, that could get lost and never climb out.
"...Whatever the reasons given for this horror, do any of us really care anymore?"
The crowd shouted a no, even some of the reporters. The voices rose, even as Menlim’s rose right along with them, lifting to be heard above the cries of the grieving and afraid.
"Whatever those reasons might have been, they don't matter anymore. All that matters is this: It. Must. Stop..."
More yells rose, briefly drowning out the rest. Still, Balidor’s eyes and attention scanned the faces, looking for Cass, looking for any hint of her in the bodies pressed up against the ropes around the podium. He felt his mind skirt around Menlim again, getting close without letting that metallic light pull on him, without letting it tug him in. He glanced at Jorag with a frown, even as he thought it, and saw fear in the taller seer’s eyes as well.
“We’re recording all of this?” Balidor muttered, glancing at the others.
A few heads nodded.
Only then did Balidor notice the silence.
All of them stared now, their arguments forgotten. None looked away from the screen.
"The Bridge will get her war,” Menlim said, his light eyes shimmering with a harder pulse of that metal light. “She wanted this...or so the iceblood scripture tells us. She wanted this war. She wanted us to rise up. To evolve. To change. She wanted us to be afraid. She wanted the human race’s back against the wall...”
Menlim paused for a weighted beat, eyes lingering on faces as the light above him brightened, descending down over the crowd like a snaking, sparking cage.
“Well, Esteemed Bridge...” he said, softer, his voice lulling, cajoling. “Our back is to the wall. But you may find you don't like us in this state as much as you think..."
More yells erupted through the crush of the crowd, now holding more pride, more of an angry war cry as Menlim tightly gripped the edges of the podium.
"Yes,” he said, letting his voice rise once more above the swell. “...The infamous Bridge and her brainwashed band of cowards will get their war...at last. She has forced us to take a stand, so now, we are all in. She has taken all we have, so now, we have nothing left to lose. With our president and leaders recently fallen from this cursed disease, we do not even have law and order to restrain our demand for justice. We are our own people still. Alone, but brave. Frightened, but immovable. The last remnants of a free world...”
Jax’s eyes shifted to Balidor. "Is that true? Is Brooks dead?"
Balidor shook his head, but not in a no. "We have been unable to confirm or to refute that assertion,” he said. “We're trying to get eyes into the security bunker below the White House, but the construct is complex, to say the least. We had a hard enough time breaching the main construct before, when talk of war with China began...now they have reinforced it at the lower levels, which is where the medical center is located..."
"Reinforced," Jax muttered, staring back at the wall monitor.
"We have to assume Shadow is behind that also, yes."
"We've lost our link to the White House," Yumi said, more blunt. She glanced around at the other infiltrators, her brow furrowing and wrinkling the tattoo on her face. "Which means we’ve lost the ability to influence the humans in regards to China, too."
Her words brought a deeper silence, and a few paler faces, Balidor noticed.
He didn’t insult any of them by trying to deny what they already understood.
Menlim’s voice rose again into that silence, charged and alluring with silver light.
"We do not believe that it is unreasonable, to ask that the person responsible for this...carnage...” he spat, curling his lip. “...To answer for her crimes."
Mutterings of agreement swam through the crowd, a few angry yells in the background, although Balidor found
he didn’t bother to make out the precise words. More of that righteous fury rose to Menlim’s face after he’d allowed for a pause, even as he retained that calm, masterful demeanor, enhanced by the silver light.
"...We do not think it is unreasonable to ask that she explain herself,” Menlim added, his voice rich and deep with emotion. “We do not think it is unreasonable to want to know why she has perpetrated these horrific crimes on our people and hers. In fact, we demand that she do so. If this ‘Bridge’ wishes to prevent a further catastrophe for her race, she must come out of hiding and accept the judgment of the world she has condemned...”
Angry cheers rose in the weighted pause as he looked around at all of them again.
“...If this self-proclaimed 'Bridge' and her army of terrorists do not agree to surrender themselves for this judgment, we will be forced to act to protect ourselves and the remainder of our race to the fullest extent of our powers..."
More triumphant and vengeful yells rose up in the crowd that ringed him in a densely-packed mass on the steps of the Capitol Building. Balidor saw lights flash as more recording devices switched on, trying to get different angles on the seer where he stood. Watching the aged Menlim stand there hunched in an expensive suit, waiting for the emotional impact of his words to abate, Balidor swallowed, again feeling an unreal kind of déjà vu.
That time, it wasn’t only of World War I.
More than anything, Balidor found himself reminded of the Barrier records he’d seen from the time of Kardek, the first so-called 'Bridge,' who lived during the first recorded Displacement on Earth. Back then, the enemy of the world had been the Bridge, as well. His accuser, an Elaerian named Haldren, had orchestrated Kardek’s public execution in the wake of the wars and disease that constituted the Displacement of the time.
Something about the thought sickened Balidor now. It also made him wonder if perhaps those records had not been interpreted entirely accurately in the time since.
More than just vengeance, that desire for a savior, for that one person who would bring them out of death and chaos, scared him. That fevered desperation and hope hit a note that Balidor recognized from too many time periods to count, albeit usually not with so much at stake.
Allie's War Season Three Page 116