Allie's War Early Years

by JC Andrijeski

  I swallowed harder, fighting to speak.

  When I finally did, it came out in nearly a whisper.

  “Terian?” I said, my voice soft. “Gods, brother... is that you?”

  The male looked up at me, his amber eyes growing suddenly wary.

  He stared up at my face, his mouth curled in a subtly expressive frown, his eyes holding a strange blankness that occasionally phased into that denser amalgam of emotions, flickering over and past the silence that stood there, too quickly for me to follow.

  I found I was holding the other man’s shoulder now. I fought to breathe, and realized tears had filled my eyes, that I could scarcely see because of them.

  “Terian... brother...” I swallowed, at a loss, trying to see the other man in those alien features. “Is it really you? How?” I choked on the word. “...How is this possible?”

  Terian blinked at me.

  Behind that gaze, something clicked forward, then back.

  I saw it in the man’s face, like a recording being spun backwards on a cassette tape, right before it started up again once it hit the correct prompt.

  “You’re not Revi’,” the seer said. His frown deepened. “What have you done with him?”

  I shook my head, still fighting to breathe.

  “He’s not here, brother,” I said, as gently as I could. “He’s not here. Don’t you remember?”

  Terian’s frown deepened. Then a kind of horror shifted past his gaze, some denser pain. I watched as one of those bare hands clenched into a fist, pressing against the narrow chest. He seemed to be gasping then, and I gripped the male’s shoulder tighter.

  “Brother...” I choked.

  Terian shook his head. “No. No, no, no... don’t bring me back. Please...”

  “Brother,” I managed. “No one will hurt you...”

  “Lies,” Terian muttered, shaking his head. “Lies... they always lie... lying liars...”

  “I’m not lying to you brother. I’m not...”

  “I will be punished. Punished for defying him. Punished...”

  The amber-eyed seer yanked at his own clothes, especially the thicker edge of that incongruously white t-shirt, and I felt my throat tighten more. I glimpsed bruises under that thin covering, cuts on the seer’s back. Blood from a few of those cuts had seeped through the back of the white shirt. I just hadn’t seen it, with the seer’s back facing the other way.

  I swallowed, staring when the seer turned enough for me to glimpse more.

  They’d been beating him.

  Someone had been beating him with a whip, maybe a cane.

  “Gods, Terian...”

  “NO!” the seer screamed, turning on me. His eyes were wide now, like yellow-orange lamps in that narrow face. He jerked his arm and shoulder out from under my hands. “NO! You can’t! You can’t bring me back! You haven’t the proper paperwork...”

  “Brother...” I began, holding up my hands in a peaceful gesture. “Calm yourself, brother. Please... I want to help!”

  “No! I’ve been punished enough! No more! No more! You said it was finished! You promised me! You said he wouldn’t do any more! That I learned my lesson!”

  “It is finished, brother,” I said. “It is. I promise you...”

  “No! You are lying! You would not be here, if it were truly done...” The auburn-haired seer’s voice grew harsher, but held so much fear that I flinched, holding my open palms higher. “They promised me a new one, you see, brother,” the seer explained, his voice strangely patient but low, darkly insistent. “They promised me a new one, first. This one is damaged, Revi’. Sub-standard. It cannot be recycled... it is too late, my brother. I must have a new model...”

  “Terry...”

  “No!” the seer snapped, staring at me. “I want a new one! I mean it! I want what was promised to me! Or I won’t cooperate! I will not!”

  I felt sick with the pain I felt in the other male’s words. I fought the reactions in my own light, wanting to reach for the other man again, if only to comfort him, soothe him in some way, but I only stood there, my palms held forward in a gesture of peace, as if trying to suppress the fear I saw seething through the other male’s light.

  “Terry,” I began softly. “Terry, please... listen to me...”

  “No more listening! No more lies! Lying liars with lying eyes...”

  “We’re here to help you...”

  “No. I want the new one! The new one!” the seer yelled. “I won’t speak to anyone until that has been delivered to me! It has been promised!”

  Next to me, one of the guards, Cat, extended her baton, snapping it out to full length. Glancing at her, I saw that she’d slung her rifle over her back. I saw pity in her eyes as she looked at the male seer, what might have been some wariness as she stared between the barefoot male and me, but under that, I saw only purpose.

  Duty.

  She’d heard our orders, along with me.

  “Wait,” I said, turning to her. I held up my hand again, that time towards her. “You don’t need that. Just give me a minute to calm him down first... okay?”

  Cat gave me a slight frown. “Sir? The order came down. They want us to subdue him. Now. They authorized the use of stunners...”

  “Okay,” I said, hearing the edge creep into my voice. “Great. Fine. But give me a minute to talk to him first. Please. You won’t need that...”

  “A minute, sir? But we’re under order to bring him in right––”

  “A fucking minute, first!” I snapped, glaring at her. “Stand down. That’s a fucking order, agent. Follow it, or I’ll have Paulo shoot you for insubordination in the field...”

  Cat blinked at me, her eyes showing a faint bewilderment that time.

  In seconds, the look there smoothed to glass.

  Gesturing in respect, she gave him a slight bow.

  “Of course, sir,” she said politely, stepping back with the baton.

  Sensing the undercurrents flowing back and forth between her light and that of the rest of the pod, I felt my jaw harden.

  Even so, I shoved it aside. For now, anyway.

  Turning, I faced the male seer, watching him shiver in the snow in his bare feet, his arms once more wrapped around his narrow body. The look in his eyes had changed again, I saw. He looked almost wistful now, staring out over the snowed grounds of the pens on the other side of the chain-link fence.

  I hesitated, wondering again what I was doing.

  I should have just let Cat taser him to the ground. I should have just wiped this from my mind, let them drag the red-haired seer back to whoever owned him in the labs.

  Even as I thought it, I looked at the seer’s neck, staring at the collar that hung there. I’d somehow missed the unusual, light-colored metal, maybe because I’d been too busy staring at the seer’s angular face.

  Maybe because it didn’t look like any organic collar I had ever seen before, and certainly not like the ones worn by the prisoners on the other side of that fence.

  I was still staring at the thin, white-green metal of the ring around his throat, wondering at the fact that I could see the seer’s light so clearly, in spite of it, when I felt another ping in the Barrier. Tensing, I found myself looking around, remembering that we still might not be alone out here, that there still might be a rebel cell operating in the vicinity, too.

  Had the rebels come for this... thing? Whatever it was?

  Stripping my mind of emotion, I tried to look at the other male objectively, to bring back my infiltrator’s cloak and eyes.

  His light, though... I kept getting tripped up on the other male’s light.

  I’d never felt light like that anywhere else... not in any other seer I’d encountered.

  I was about to try and speak to it again, when the seer’s voice rose, quiet as a whisper, yet oddly loud in the silence of our corner of the desolate landscape.

  “Why would he leave me?” Terian said, his eyes unfocused. “Why?”

  I frowned, feeling tha
t pain in my chest worsen. Feeling bitterness coil into and lace my thoughts, changing their colors in the Barrier space.

  Dehgoies.

  I knew without knowing... without even knowing who or what I was looking at precisely, I knew. For Terian, it always came back to that fucker. Always.

  Even as I thought it, Terian turned, looking up at me with those amber eyes.

  “Revi’,” he said then, seemingly forgetting all over again that I wasn’t him. “I should have told you. I should have told you before.”

  “Before what, Terry?”

  The seer’s lips pursed. “Before things got so... wrong.”

  I clicked at him, my light growing colder, angrier. “Told him what, Terry?” I said. “What should you have told that craven, defecting prick of a worm-lover?”

  “That I love you,” Terian said sincerely, his light open that time.

  I winced in spite of myself, feeling my jaw harden to granite.

  Still, the openness of the other male’s light affected me.

  It affected me enough that I took a half-step backwards, fighting a stronger reaction in my own light, a dense pain in my chest... along with an anger that briefly choked me. The other male only watched me, that confused openness snaking around his own light, still.

  Forcing my eyes off that face, I closed my light.

  I took another step away from the other male, exhaling a sharp breath. Fighting back that pain that wanted to slide deeper into my chest, I shook it off, wiping my eyes angrily.

  Then I turned, giving Cat a hard look.

  “All right,” I said, not answering the question in her eyes, or that of Paulo, or Jaela, who stood next to her. “Do it. Knock this piece of shit out.” I looked at Ringu. “Make sure you get a decent scan of those seers he was talking to. Bring the big fucker in for questioning... unless you get orders not to. I’m heading back in.”

  Turning on my heel, I didn’t even look back to watch my orders being followed.

  I didn’t have to, I told myself.

  I already knew they would follow them.

  8

  SECRETS

  I WAS DREAMING.

  I knew I was dreaming, but it didn’t make the images feel any less real.

  “Rot in the dregs of the Barrier, you parasite!” a kid hissed at me, spitting.

  I used a dream hand to wipe the spit off of my helmet’s visor with one gloved hand. My dream lips barely tightened in a frown.

  They hated me. They all hated me.

  It was exhausting, being hated.

  I could drop any one of them via their collars with one signal to my headset. The kid would be on the ground, screaming in pain... right before he puked his guts out, likely losing control of his bowels in the process.

  And for what? Did he really think I hadn’t heard this shit a few thousand times before?

  Standing behind the kid was a face and body I recognized.

  Krikev. He would sodomize the boy after I left, I knew.

  The world didn’t change.

  Whatever we did, it didn’t change.

  Perhaps it was natural selection, like the worms claimed––weeding out those of the race too dumb to learn the fucking rules. The stupid ones either wised up or ended up dead, sacrificial lambs from which the rest were meant to learn. They served as training tools... and as catharsis for both human and seer.

  I felt a surge of separation sickness, even as I thought it.

  I didn’t want to be alone. I didn’t know anything else, though.

  My parents... a distant memory.

  I’d had lovers. All of those faded, too.

  Too many faces, one face.

  I was young for a seer. Too young. The years stretched before me... more work camps. More body parts, chopped up for machines. More labs. More collars. More humans making money off of seer children, keeping them as pets...

  Entering the enclosure felt eerie.

  I must have left my plexiglas shield outside the enclosure walls. The reddish brick of the workers’ shed loomed closer now. I paused briefly on the gaping black of the glass-less windows, but I could see nothing through those dense shadows.

  A baby...

  ... I could hear a baby crying.

  I had to fight not to cover my nose. I realized why as we passed the pit the inmates dug to provide themselves a crude outhouse next to where they slept, so they wouldn’t have to venture out in the cold. So fucking cold... it was so cold here, a form of hell... like Manaus had been the hot hell, this one was the cold. The smell in Manaus baked under the buzzing flies and the hot, tropical sun, assaulting my nose like a solid object. Here the shit and piss froze, but the smell still lingered, and new leavings melted through the old.

  I couldn’t look at it.

  The outhouse did force a break in the crowd, however, allowing me to trudge through the snow to the entrance to the cement bunker.

  I could hear...

  ... The baby still cried. I wondered if that was a memory, too.

  Another dream.

  The ground inside the cement structure was packed as hard as cement.

  Even apart from the outhouse, I could smell the crush of unwashed bodies, urine, feces and bad water, the densely sweeter smells of rotting camp food mixed with the distant smell of the officer’s mess wafting coffee, smoke and cooking meat, making my stomach growl and churn with nausea in equal amounts.

  I reached the doorway to the shed after what seemed like an eternity.

  By then, I had totally blocked out the shouts and yells from the work camp seers. Most of them continued to follow but kept their distance. I couldn’t help catching flickers of angry stares and muttered curses––or fail to notice the hatred in those grimy faces and drawn-in cheeks, especially in the eyes but also in the sets of their mouths, clenched hands and rigid bodies. When I entered the pitch-black opening to the shed, however, it grew silent.

  I forgot all of them, too.

  I paused inside the doorway for only a bare second, just long enough to let my eyes adjust.

  The space was open, with no interior dividing walls, and it smelled of mold. The lighting was poor, provided only by the windows lining the wall on one side. Dust motes twisted lazily in the sun’s few rays, defying the freezing cold air.

  My fingers tightened on the handle of my gun, a non-regulation, organically-enhanced Desert Eagle I’d carried since our last op in Israel. I felt my fingers slide closer to the trigger. Taking a step deeper into that darkness, I glanced around where I stood.

  Dead bodies lay everywhere.

  Stacks and stacks of dead bodies... too many for me to count.

  My eyes found a floor pallet in the center of all of that death.

  There, an unknown seer sat cross-legged on a foam mattress, its cloth cover streaked with black mold. My gaze slid higher, to the bundle she carried in her arms, then up to her face, and the slanted, shrewd, emerald-green eyes, long black hair and high cheekbones that stood out even in the dim light. The female seer sitting before me had to be at least a few hundred years old. She held the bundle in her lap with a fierce yet somehow utterly still look in her eyes, one that forced me to pause, to try and speak to her, in spite of myself.

  “Who are you?” I said.

  “My name is Kali.”

  “Clan affiliation?”

  The woman remained silent.

  “Why are you here?” I said.

  Again, the woman regarded me silently.

  I attempted to reach my back-up infiltrators in the tower, using my headset, but I hit nothing but static. I needed to kill the child. I could feel that, with all of my heart, but I had no gun. My weapon had disappeared right out of my hand.

  Standing over her now, a gray-eyed seer stood, holding a gun on me.

  “Balidor...” I murmured.

  My eyes shifted from the Adhipan seer back to the woman on the pallet, who was now slowly rising to her feet, the bundle in her arms held tightly to her chest. She straightened to h
er full height, and then she just looked at me, her eyes now full of sympathy.

  “I’m sorry,” she told me gently.

  I swallowed, feeling more helpless than I ever had in my life as I stared at the bundle being cradled by the green-eyed woman.

  I knew now, what it was.

  It was the end... for all of us.

  Feeling my throat constrict sharply as the thought penetrated, I fought to think, to decide what to do. I looked at Balidor, and now the gray-eyed seer watched me sympathetically, too, compassion and understanding in his sharp, gray eyes.

  “Please, brother.” I heard the genuine pleading in my own voice. “Kill it, while you still can. Please, brother... think of your people, please...”

  “I am thinking of my people,” Balidor said. “And I am sorry, my brother. Truly. If only the gods had given me another way...”

  In those few seconds, the Adhipan leader’s apology suddenly took on a different meaning.

  “Gods,” I said. “Gods, I can’t... please. Please––”

  I had time to see Balidor take the woman’s arm, even as I fell to my knees in the packed dirt, my hands clasped over the hole in my chest. My hands were already warm.

  She stared at me from the black-haired woman’s arms.

  Her eyes glowed, sharp and pale green in the near-darkness, causing me wonder despite my pain, despite the knowledge that I was dying. I watched as Adhipan Balidor cooed to her, even as the woman with the black hair held the child more tightly to her chest. The whole thing happened slowly, in a kind of sepia-toned silence, the only color reaching me being the sharp, incongruous light from that small face, and the feeling that somehow I knew her.

  ... I knew this small being.

  The thought came through, sharp, clear, weirdly certain... but my mind faded before I understood it. Then another face hung over mine.

  The fox-faced seer smiled down at me, standing barefoot in the snow under a high, jagged peak that marked out black and white lines against a wintery sky. That sky shone blue now over Terian’s head, and contained no clouds; the air felt cold. Terian held the same child in his arms as the woman. His back bled freely where he stood, running down the thin fabric of the scrub pants he wore, leaving drops of blood in the pure white snow by his feet.