“Did you just open the fucking door?” Dalejem said, incredulity in his voice.
“Sort of,” I muttered. Feeling Dalejem’s attention sharpen on my light, I sighed. “Feigran did. But he used my light to do it. Don’t ask me how.”
Dalejem stared at me, then at Feigran. I could feel him frowning between the two of us in the dark and I sighed again, motioning with my gun for him to open the door.
“It’s done now,” I said.
I felt him trying to decide just how stupid this really was…then he reached out, grasping the metal wheel in the center of the door with both hands. After another bare pause he cranked it hard, counter-clockwise. I could almost feel the seal as it let go.
The Barrier field shifted around us…
I felt Dalejem jump, right before he looked back at me, panting.
“Did you feel that?” he said, his voice heavily accented. “Fuck.”
Fighting to keep my own mind level, I tried to place the accent…couldn’t. Something Asian. If Chinese, then not the accent I usually heard from seers born in China.
“What the fuck was that?” he said again, his accent worsening.
“Barrier containment field of some kind,” I said. Blowing a reassuring warmth over his light, I kept my own voice nonchalant. “It’s okay, brother. I already figured that much out. That’s what Feigran referred to before.”
Despite my words, I held my gun up again, two-handed.
I also focused only on the door as I spoke.
“Like the tanks,” I finished, gesturing vaguely with one hand, still gripping the gun with the other. “…You know.”
I felt his understanding, even as his light calmed slightly.
“We’re going ahead with this?” he said. His voice held skepticism again, yet his hand still rested on the L-shaped door handle below the wheel. His fingers looked strangely white through the virtual infrared image of my headset.
“Yes,” I said, nodding.
Too late now anyway… my mind muttered unhelpfully.
Dalejem gave me a look, but he was already pressing down on the brushed metal door handle, balanced lightly on his toes in a semi-fighting stance. He gripped the rifle tightly in his other hand, balancing the stock on his shoulder and aiming it at the opening.
He opened the door so softly I barely heard the click.
The corridor was immediately flooded with light.
My infrareds switched off, adjusting to the change.
The scene flipped in the same set of seconds, negative to positive, and I blinked, fighting to make sense of the images in front of me.
It was like blacking out…then whiting out in the same millisecond.
The pause had to have been really short. Like, less than a second short. Even so, it felt long. Probably because this immediately felt like a combat situation.
A second meant something totally different in combat.
When my eyes refocused, no one was firing at me, though.
Dalejem and I faced a perfectly round room with high ceilings. Something about the circular shape immediately threw me. Or maybe it was the weird layout.
We stood on a meter-wide walkway elevated at least ten feet off the next highest level of the room. Our level––if you could call it that––circled the entire rim of the room, as did the other steps between us and the center circle on the bottom. Ladders on the far end appeared to be the only way down. It looked like a steep amphitheater, only with no seats. Or maybe one of those zoo cages for bears and lions I remembered from before they modernized that kind of thing.
The bottom level lived below a much steeper step than the one right below us, like a pit surrounded by a few rings of what might have been observation decks. I didn’t see a ladder on that one either, which made me wonder if it was something you needed a passcode or some other security measure to extend.
The steep drop both accentuated the circular shape and did something strange to my depth perception, making it hard to get my arms around the size of the room itself.
It was big though. And it did absolutely nothing to dispel that whole “rats in a cage” vibe.
For a few blinks I felt almost like I might lose my balance and fall.
Despite the weird layout, I saw more or less what I’d expected to see at the end of Feigran’s twisted scavenger hunt. Meaning, below me existed clear signs of a version of the creepy lab I’d seen in my head while we descended that stairwell.
Green mirrored organic walls shone from all of the levels, reminiscent of the original tank where we’d held Revik. I didn’t see metal cages with bars, but I did see walled compartments with transparent dividers and windows in my glimpses of those lower levels, kind of like human-sized display cases or really big pet store tanks. Each appeared just big enough to act as a prison cell for a single person, if a brutally small one. An average-sized adult human could maybe take two full strides in any direction before they’d smack into one of the walls, and the ceiling was just high enough that most could have stood upright.
I saw what might have been human or seer shapes inside a few of those, too, although it was hard to tell from the angle where we stood. All of those I saw appeared to be lying on the floor, not moving.
I found myself thinking they were dead.
As if to confirm my suspicion, I noticed blood on the floor outside several of those cells and on the transparent walls of the cells themselves.
Alarm bells kept ringing in the background of my light, impossible to ignore.
Something definitely wasn’t right here…well, something besides the obvious.
The place was too fucking quiet. I didn’t see or feel anyone here working in an official capacity. No guards. No creepy doctors. No tech-guys or “scientists” of any kind. I didn’t feel any real security features, either…none that triggered any level of my aleimi. The place felt like it had been broken in some way, stripped from its original purpose.
Only the inmates remained in the asylum now.
Did their keepers intend for them to die down here, like Feigran said? Just starve to death quietly and out of view? Or were they meant to be preserved at the basest level, like the trees in that frozen city? Just another form of biological machine maintained via timed irrigation and fertilizer and fake sunlight?
As I thought it, my gaze returned to the center of the room. A single raised platform stood there, like a stage set in the middle of that circular floor.
My eyes had glanced over it as I cased the room, a fraction of a second’s pause after we walked in. Now, when I finally went there for real, I realized the platform was covered in yellow-tinted spotlights. A man stood there.
He was staring at us.
Actually, he was staring at me.
My mind stuttered briefly when I met those clear eyes.
Colorless, like faintly tinted glass.
His face blurred to me, lost in shadow and indistinct boundaries, but those eyes glowed up at me, like twin points of living light.
Some part of me got lost there. The familiarity hit me like a punch to the gut. I doubted it even as I saw it…the way I got lost in details on other faces and bodies, sure I saw Revik in every one of them. The same thing happened to me in those months trapped in the Forbidden City, where a certain kind of deep-toned male laugh could get me to freeze, scanning faces and bodies until I’d determined the source and knew it wasn’t him.
Lately I saw pieces of Revik in everyone, in the way some of the mulei fighters moved, in gesturing hands and narrow mouths, black hair or light eyes or even just an infiltrator’s stance, a too-long stare…the way someone clicked at me or carried a gun.
But the instant I felt this other male’s light, I knew it wasn’t Revik, no matter how much I could see him in those eyes.
My eyes shifted down the rest of him then, really taking him in.
Even so, most of my attention remained on his light.
I felt the charge there, an intensity that ran through my aleimi like live
current, sparking the higher structures in my light, nearly dragging me out of my body. I saw geometric shapes rotating silently above his head, multicolored like Revik’s…but unlike Revik’s or my own in ways I couldn’t even begin to catalogue.
He had structures I’d never seen before, yet enough base similarity lived there with Revik and I, with the telekinesis and whatever else, that again, the resonance caught my breath.
I fought to pull myself together, to control my light…
Dragon.
This had to be Feigran’s Dragon.
He hadn’t looked anywhere near so much like Revik in Feigran’s drawings, but as soon as I thought it, I knew I had to be right.
Instead of being covered in burnt and frayed combat clothes and boots like he had been in the drawings, this Dragon was entirely naked. His body looked disturbingly like Revik’s too, but also not. He was bigger, closer to the size Revik was when he worked for Salinse, without Revik’s tattoos or the scars I knew, without the same way of standing or holding himself at all. His skin was darker, but I suspected that was from dirt and sweat. He had a scar along one leg I’d never seen before; it looked almost like his leg had been split from his calf to his thigh.
So yeah, definitely not Revik.
Even so, the similarities were enough to throw me completely for those few breaths.
A bare handful of seconds had gone by since I’d first locked eyes with him.
Still lost in that frozen moment while he watched me look at him, I returned my gaze to his a second time. That time, I looked at his whole face.
I realized only then that the blurriness I’d caught around his features came from most of his face being covered…in that sense, he looked almost identical to Feigran’s depictions. A dark organic muzzle fitted around his mouth and most of his lower jaw, wrapping around the back of his head. It looked like something alive, but also like a helmet, leaving his eyes shining at me from beneath an uneven shag of black hair and only slightly less dark skin. I’d scarcely seen the mask, it blended in so well with his face…and the shadow where he stood.
His clear eyes continued to watch me, holding an intensity I knew, but so different in flavor than Revik’s I could scarcely make sense of it. His eyes blazed up at me with an inner light, but something in that light held chaos instead of stillness…a profusion so intense I couldn’t hold his gaze that time, either.
I had to look away.
It was only then that I noticed he wasn’t alone.
Another person lay on the raised platform in front of him.
When I looked down at her, I also realized he had an erection. My mind fought not to notice how similar he looked to Revik there, as well.
She stared up at me, gagged with a strap, her light blue eyes wide in her face. Emotion hit me as soon as I met her gaze, even before I saw the pleading, begging look in her eyes. Physically, she looked like a seer with Asian features, light-colored irises and long limbs…but her light was strange.
Looking at only her light, I couldn’t tell for sure what she was.
I supposed, under the circumstances, it didn’t matter.
Covered in blood that appeared to be hers, she’d been tied down with organic bindings that wound out of the platform itself. On one edge of that platform Dragon leaned a hand holding a long, curved knife that dripped blood from the blade to his hand. Sporting a nine-inch, glass-like blade, the knife itself looked ceremonial, an impression strengthened by the elaborately carved green handle that might have been organic. The green of that handle, unlike the green of the walls and floor, made me think of jade. Carrying a softer luster than the walls, it looked old, and I realized the design on it may have been a dragon as well.
Next to me, I felt Dalejem suddenly.
Fear plumed off his light, a disbelief that mirrored mine. I felt him recognize the being’s eyes too, along with the rest of him, which made me flinch again.
I had an absurd desire to tell him to leave…to take Feigran and just go…but for those few seconds, I couldn’t speak, or tear my eyes off the scene in front of me.
I was still staring at the other female’s terrified face when Dragon lifted his arm. He moved swiftly, liquidly. Gracefully, also like Revik did…but in a rhythm that was utterly different. Before my mind could catch up, he plunged the curved, glass knife into the middle of her chest.
I sucked in a breath.
Briefly, my mind reeled, torn with helpless shock.
I found myself breathing hard, watching in a stunned paralysis as he cut into her sideways then jerked the knife up and out of her ribcage. He grunted with effort as he unhooked it from where it got caught on something…probably one of her bones.
That time, my aleimi ignited instinctively.
I watched Dragon wipe the knife off on the female’s bare leg. I watched the light drain out of her body. I stood there, watching her go, feeling even more helpless as that denser anger grew in my light. Next to me, Dalejem muttered an angry curse.
Or maybe a prayer…I didn’t try to make it out.
I also didn’t take my eyes off Dragon’s face, or the glitter of emotion I saw in his clear eyes. From the greenish distortion of my view of him, I knew my own eyes were glowing.
When his irises ignited, too, my muscles tensed to marble.
His eyes shone…a darker green than Revik’s.
Even so, I knew that light. I felt the trail slide up from his lower aleimic into those geometric structures, watching them move and shift and reconfigure. More of those structures lit up as I watched, intensifying the flight or fight response in mine.
“You need to get out of here,” I told Dalejem, without looking away from Dragon.
“Respectfully,” Dalejem growled back. “It’s a little fucking late for that, sister…”
Barely a handful of seconds had passed since we’d walked through that door.
Your soldier is right, a voice said in my mind.
It was loud. Shocking in its immediacy.
Whatever the purpose of that organic muzzle, it reached me directly, without interference.
It also sounded like Revik.
Behind us, the door we’d just entered through slammed shut.
Dalejem and I both jumped at least a foot. Only Feigran didn’t flinch. He stared at the male seer on the platform with a look of utter adulation in his eyes.
“Brother…” he whispered softly. “Beautiful, beautiful brother…the dark behind the stars…”
I gave him a look, maybe just to get his attention.
Or maybe to shut him up.
Whichever it was, it didn’t work. I don’t think Feigran even remembered I was there.
“Beautiful, beautiful brother…” he whispered, love in his eyes.
“What do you want from us?” I said, turning back towards the seer on the platform.
I realized only then that he was looking at Feigran, too. It hit me in the next breath he was probably talking to him as well, given the expressions on both of their faces. I studied the slight glaze I could see in Feigran’s eyes and frowned.
Goddamn it. I’d been led here.
I’d been fucking led here.
Feigran brought me here because Dragon asked him to. I’d been too stupid to see what was staring me right in the face.
Dragon looked back at me. Despite the mask, I could feel him smiling.
You would have come for me eventually, my loving sister… he whispered. We are one. You are a part of me. I breathe and you fly…
That time, his light followed his words, flooding into mine before I could make sense of what he’d said. His light blinded me, creating reactions too multifaceted for me to name before they disappeared or morphed into something else.
I felt confusion, an intense profusion…voltage that drew me…
More disconcertingly, I felt his presence in the light structures I shared only with Revik during sex.
It was something I’d never even talked about with anyone else.
When Revik and I were at our most intimate we would lose ourselves there, in what always looked to me like twin light tails. They twined into one another when we were together, pulling us out of our bodies, driving me out of my fucking mind…driving Revik out of his. There were nights when most of our sex involved one or both of us holding that off, since it generally made us lose control in a matter of seconds.
No one else had ever touched that part of my light. No one.
Dragon coiled into that part of me effortlessly, however…and pulled.
He pulled really fucking hard.
So hard I couldn’t get out of the way.
I let out a choked cry as I fell abruptly to my knees. It hurt like hell when they impacted the hard floor, but I couldn’t slow that down, either. Next to me, Dalejem lunged, grabbing my arm without lowering his gun.
“Bridge!” he cried. “Bridge! Are you all right?”
His fingers tightened on me like a vise.
“We have to get the fuck out of here!” he shouted.
I couldn’t answer.
Pain flooded my light…so much separation pain I couldn’t see.
I felt Revik in that. Revik…it always came back to Revik, no matter how much I tried to let him go, to block him out of my light. Everything I’d been holding back for days, weeks now. It all came ripping out of me. I couldn’t answer Dalejem. I just knelt there, gasping, my head hanging, blinded by that longing. Grief rose in me in those blank spaces. I thought of Lily and the pain grew beyond where I could stand it, forcing out a choked cry.
I fought to pull my light back into myself…to control myself. It seemed to take forever. I don’t know how long it actually took. Minutes. Hours.
I don’t know. I just know I wasn’t the one to finally end it.
He did.
I felt a pulse of satisfaction in that multi-colored aleimi as he withdrew.
For what might have been a few seconds more, all I felt was relief.
“Alyson!” Jem was still gripping my arm.
I realized it had to be closer to seconds rather than hours, when I saw the look on his face.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 28