The instant he did, four of the six seers standing behind Dehgoies dragged him roughly backwards, thrusting him behind them as they stepped forward, guns raised, forming an uncompromising wall. They aimed their guns expertly, covering the entire clearing, and I couldn’t help but be impressed with their reaction times, as well as the shield they threw up around Dehgoies’ light, blocking him from all of us, but especially from Terian himself.
The moment had passed.
They wouldn’t let anyone in Varlan and Terian’s group get so close to the ex-Rook again.
In fact, I found myself thinking that would be the last time they would let Dehgoies play the role of the diplomat where Org agents were involved.
Terian himself barely seemed to notice, however.
I watched as the red-haired seer sheathed the knife he gripped in one hand, leaving it bloody as he shoved it back into place at the small of his back. Terian’s jaw remained hard as he turned away from Dehgoies and the other six Adhipan seers entirely.
When Terian spoke next, he didn’t turn his head, although I and everyone else standing there could tell his words were aimed at Dehgoies, even before he’d said his name.
By then, the Adhipan seers were moving backwards in a fluid, synchronized set of precise movements. Dehgoies himself was already being disappeared into the shadow of the trees that stood outside the dual rings of greenish light thrown by the sparking yissos.
“We’ll meet again, Revi’,” Terian said, still facing the opposite way. “You know we will. In this life... or the next.”
My eyes darted to Dehgoies, who had a long-fingered hand pressed to the cut on his throat. His eyes looked cold once more, angry, but he didn’t answer Terian at first. He’d already finished re-buckling his belt by the time he allowed himself to be led back into the dark by his armed escorts.
Just when I thought he wouldn’t speak at all, Dehgoies raised his voice.
“Stay the fuck away from her, Terry... and me,” he said. “The next time, I’ll kill you. Penance or no, I’ll fucking kill you, Terry, if you come near me or mine again. Assuming your precious ‘Org’ doesn’t do it for me...”
Terian smiled at that, turning his head.
But Dehgoies, along with his Adhipan escort... was already gone.
I THOUGHT THAT would be the end of it.
I really did.
I was already lowering my gun, exhaling again. I heard the retreating footsteps grow faint quickly as the Adhipan and Dehgoies must have broken into a run once they’d reached the furthest edges of the illuminated clearing.
My light had already started to cycle down, to pull itself off of high alert.
Therefore, I flinched as violently as the rest of them when a shot rang out in our small clearing.
I barely registered who’d pulled the trigger until it was already over.
I saw it happen, though. I was staring straight at his profile when the bullet from Varlan’s rifle blew out the back of Terian’s skull only a few yards away from where I stood.
I leapt back, crying out in shock.
My aleimic light coiled out in a hard arc, densifying into a shield separate from the construct over our strike team. I acted out of rote, even as shock pooled in my gut, tightening every muscle in my chest. I pinged the light of Central, as well as that of the infiltrators back at the work camp in Manaus. I did all of that, even as I swung my own rifle back up, aiming it at the tall, violet-eyed seer who stood there, his long, antique-looking rifle still smoking in the stark light of the yellow-tinted yissos that surrounded where we stood.
Varlan didn’t move, though.
He just stood there, his violet eyes calm, but holding a dense vibration of silver light, light that even I recognized as Galaith’s, if only because that same frequency had been all over Dehgoies’ light, only a few moments before.
I imagined I saw regret there, too.
Or maybe I felt that from the silver light as well.
Then my eyes shifted downwards, taking in the sight of Terian crumpled on the jungle floor. Somewhere in that, the reality of all of those images and sounds met in the forward area of my mind, and I suddenly understood what I was seeing.
I screamed in disbelief, lurching towards the red-haired seer’s broken body, the face now flecked with blood and bone chips, and...
... but Terian already lay motionless on that dark earth.
Well, not motionless entirely.
He lay there, his irises flattening rapidly, his light lifting up from a body that I had only just begun to get to know. I watched that body twitch as it bled in erratic bursts, as those eyes lost more and more of their light, as the handsome face went slack, not even holding surprise anymore, or that sharper thread of anger and confusion and humor.
The rest of the pod stood silently too, among the ferns and clumped grasses.
I could barely see them, though, or feel them with my light.
I could only stand there, watching in disbelief, as Terian breathed his last.
6
FOR THE GOOD OF THE RACE
I STOOD AT the edge of a teeming crowd, in a different work camp, in another part of the world.
Months had passed since I left South America.
I ran my own pod now.
Even so, I hadn’t been to a work camp since that time, and some part of my light recoiled at being here now, sickened by it. I’d done everything I could to get that taste out of my mouth, to forget those scenes burned into my brain from that jungle outside of Manaus, but somehow, the scents lingered, cloying, impossible to disentangle. I dreamt of Terian’s hands on me, his mouth, his light. I even imagined I could feel that light sometimes... out here, in the edges of the network while I hunted, woven into mine when I woke up with an erection.
I’d seen worse things as an agent of the Org.
Why those few days in Manaus remained so firmly stuck in my head, I could only hazard theories... everything from an unrequited and unsatisfied fixation to feelings that lurked deeper in my psyche, things from that first work camp where I’d been found, the one outside of St. Petersburg with Krikev and me as a helpless child.
I wondered if the resonance truly lived there, stronger than my light could acknowledge, at least in the more conscious areas of my mind... things that had been burned into my aleimi and memory in those early years... by Krikov’s oversized hands, by the humans who passed through the camp, looking for diversion when I was too young and too weak to fight back.
I could still taste Terian’s light. I could still see it, along with Dehgoies’, resonating in those higher strands, twisting through regions of the Barrier that I myself could only glimpse, but never fully understand, never really see.
Pushing that from my mind, too, I felt my jaw harden.
I watched as unwashed bodies slammed up against the chain-link fence, shouting, wearing worn furs and sheepskin vests and in some cases not even that much. I’d seen a number of females who were as good as naked... and countless more scarecrows of all ages and sexes wearing little more than cotton trousers and shirts despite the snow and frozen earth, shivering without shoes or huddled in groups inside windowless shelters on the both sides of the wide exercise yard of frozen, bare, black earth.
Some talked or bartered their way indoors to the heated, brick housing units, I knew, to keep the guards warm at night, along with themselves. Some of the more attractive camp rats, male and female, found their way into the seer’s officer’s rooms on the worst of those cold nights, too.
Most fended for one another via body heat and less savory forms of trade, however.
I knew all of this. No part of the situation here was new to me in any way, but for some reason, it bothered me more now.
The crowd shrieked louder as I frowned at the beleaguered fence.
Their voices shouted at me, spewing insults that blurred to a hum of incoherent aggression and desperation. They continued to threaten and cajole in my direction until a sudden panic at one end o
f the fence had them scattering like flightless birds.
I turned in time to see one of the guards tasering bodies and exposed skin with a long-handled prod through the holes in the fence.
I glanced up at the snow-covered peak in the distance, frowning at the glare of sunlight glinting like diamonds just above, even as the UV protection of my goggles kicked in, shading that glare through a polarized lens that saved my eyes.
The nearest town out here was Candar, I remembered. It was a poor city, a trader’s city, and even smaller than its sister city of Mestia in Upper Svanetia. The mountain above was... I clicked through names in my seer memory, aligning them with images. Seer memory is nearly photographic, but still requires recall...
“Mount Shkhara,” I muttered. I blew on my gloved hands.
Weirdly, the snow and ice had gotten worse in this part of the world as the climate patterns shifted. Most parts of the world had gotten hotter, but not these mountain ranges attached to the Himalayas on the Western edges of Asia. They’d turned into frozen deserts, dry but colder than the coldest hells, and with even less to eat.
Their winters, especially, had turned brutal in the past ten or so years.
We were technically in the ex-USSR state of Georgia, about fifty miles west of Dombay.
It was damned cold here, that was for sure. Then again, I’d just spent the last four months in Southern India, so maybe my body was just in shock.
Despite the freezing air, some part of me liked the landscape here, though.
The sky shone a crystalline blue overhead when I crawled out of the jump seat that morning, and I couldn’t help taking deep breaths as I stood there, relieved to be out of the crowded and dusty cities for a change. We’d spent the last six months quelling unrest in Mumbai and then Cairo, where race riots raged around some bullshit prophecy being put forth by a new group of Mythers who called themselves the New Evolutionists.
Everyone seemed to be talking about intermediaries these days, though... especially those who awaited the return of the Bridge, the harbinger of the Displacement.
Or maybe I just noticed it more now, after that craziness in Manaus.
Again remembering a taste of Dehgoies and Terian together in that jungle, I grimaced, right before I shoved the thought from my mind.
This new strain of religious fanatic, the New Evolutionists, appeared to be well-funded, although none in the Org had managed to trace that funding to a targetable source. I had no doubt we’d find that source eventually, but the fact that they hadn’t yet was unusual enough to have created a bit of a stir over at Central.
As far as I could tell, the problems here were specific to the camp itself, though.
They’d been experiencing sustained and methodical construct and perimeter breaches over the past two weeks. Those breaches had mostly just been causing unrest in the stock, which seemed pretty evident from everything I’d seen and heard since we arrived.
The guards told me they’d caught a number of would-be rebels up in the mountains a few weeks back. They thought it likely that the problems stemmed from their comrades trying to free them, in part by cracking the construct periodically and inciting violence from within.
The seer guards also feared the imprisoned rebels were taking the opportunity to recruit new members from among the other sight-ranked seers within the work camp itself.
So yes, a potential disaster, and one that definitely could have been avoided.
In fact, I pretty much placed the blame squarely on a handful of greedy hunters and slavers who appeared to be working the camps on the fringes, trolling for their own stock and recruits while paying off the local guards. I knew exactly what those fuckers had been doing up in rebel territory... they’d been trying to pull a few extra commissions to fatten their coffers by dragging in ranked stock. I couldn’t exactly blame the rebels for fighting back, and for wanting to pay back the insult in kind.
Fucking slavers didn’t give a damn about anything. Particularly the Wvercian scum who seemed to dominate a lot of the trading this part of the world.
The rebels had grown increasingly bold lately, anyway... showing up both in Mumbai and Istanbul in just the last few months. Between them and the Mythers, the fringe elements seemed a lot better organized these days... and a lot louder.
According to the official briefing I got, Galaith wanted the rebels placated, however. He wanted me to find all of those who remained in the camp, and release them as soon as possible. Apparently he’d been in negotiations with the rebel leader working out of this part of Asia off and on for years, and he was trying to keep those relations civil.
Galaith had an amazing talent for keeping the wackos appeased, I knew, but lately, I wondered if it would be enough. It seemed that everyone wanted to claim to be the true voice of seers these days. Stroking egos and throwing them the occasional political bone to make them feel relevant might not cut it for some of these fanatics.
“Over here!” Cat called, jerking my eyes and head to the right.
I wondered why she hadn’t used the Barrier.
Then I felt it.
Whoever was helping incite the riot within the camp walls had breached the construct again. Cursing, I began walking towards Cat’s side of the fence.
Cat was my second-in-command.
Sight rank 8.6, potential. 6.9 actual.
She was good with a gun, too, and had a natural affinity for tactical. Spoke at least six human languages. Could pass with contacts. I’d even checked IQ scores, and Cat had been the clear front-runner. She’d also clocked almost twice as much time in the field as the next runner up, despite her relatively young age of 175 years.
Frowning, she pinged my light, pointing at the upper fences.
The fences outside the main perimeter were electrified and had razor-wire above and below to prevent tunneling or climbing in the event of a power outage––which wasn’t likely anyway, given the number of generators running as back-up behind the main barracks, which were also protected by razor wire and high-voltage fencing. A number of traps stood even beyond the perimeter, including live-capture variants.
I could feel what Cat wanted me to look at, though.
The construct had a line to it.
Even as I focused on it, though, it vanished.
The construct itself, despite the unimpressive locals, was maintained by a cadre of Black Arrow infiltrators at a distance, and most of the time, it showed. The Barrier defenses were dense, multilayered, and filled with a number of dump-trips that could down a full-grown seer instantaneously, merely by flooding their structures with toxic frequencies of light.
But someone had figured out a way in.
Frowning, I motioned to her in sign language to collect imprints with Whalen.
Security here should have been tight, even apart from the construct.
As of six months ago, the new ID chips all came equipped with an explosive charge that could rip apart a seer’s spine. Every seer at the camp got one implanted within weeks of the upgrade, and all new inmates got chipped before they even stepped foot on the grounds.
Exploding that charge was a last resort, but an effective deterrent. The seers wearing them got detailed explanations of the upgrade; they knew exactly what would happen to them, or to their loved ones, if they tried to flee with one of those suckers activated. The charge itself could be triggered remotely by any one of the guards, or even by the construct itself, which served as a hard-stop perimeter trip in the event of a large scale break out.
The ID chips got coded to a single handler, too, like a sight-restraint collar. So even if these jokers got access to the right equipment––which was highly doubtful––they wouldn’t be able to deactivate the charge long enough to extract it.
Looking around at the screaming, dirty faces, I felt that sickness twist back through my gut.
I’d consulted with Paulo, Cat, Ringu and Jaela and we all agreed, something about this facility felt like black ops, meaning blacker than us. Like,
off-the-grid black, no-names, erased identities, people who didn’t exist in the registry at all black. This was one of those places where a certain percentage of the prisoners simply disappeared.
Thinking about the medical facility I’d seen on the site specs, only a few clicks away from the main pens, I brushed that thought aside, too.
Even so, images flicked in the darkness behind my eyes for a few brief seconds.
Varlan and I, carrying Terian’s body back to camp.
He’d been gone. Really gone.
His light left faster than I had ever seen with one so recently dead.
I didn’t feel him at all in the immediate Barrier space, not even in those few seconds of silence following the shot that cracked open his skull, splattering pieces of bone and brains onto Karenti’s armored shirt. Immediately following physical death, a period of blackout took place, sure, but there was almost always at least some contact in the Barrier before and after that blackout, especially with any seers present for a violent death.
With Terian, I experienced neither.
I wasn’t told anything about whatever rituals got conducted by Central, either. I tried not to take that personally. Really, I’d only known him for a few days, so in terms of whoever handled the particulars, I understood why I hadn’t been invited.
Even so, it hurt. Not the status part so much... the silence.
No one in the pod talked about what happened. Well, not apart from our individual debriefs and interrogations directly following the incident, but that was with Central.
Terian’s name never came up as deceased in the feeds.
I never even heard rumors, not about that... and that was surprising, too. Among seers, Terian’s name was well-known. Clearly, Central decided to keep quiet about his death for political reasons, but it was surprising to me just how effective that blackout was. Maybe it was too much, with Dehgoies’ defection only five years previous, and no other contenders for that top spot, at least no one young enough to be interesting to the vast majority of Org recruits.
Allie's War Early Years Page 40