Allie had been right. He shouldn’t have come down here.
That fear grew more visceral…darting around his skin, tensing his muscles as he remembered what he’d felt in that room the first time.
Sixty-one minutes, twelve seconds…
He was already inside the thirty he’d allotted to get back to the surface.
He wouldn’t make it to Tiananmen Square.
Clearing his throat, he nodded.
“Yes,” he said, choking on the word. “All right, brother. Of course.”
He walked to the edge of the podium and rapidly descended the steps.
He moved fast now, maybe because it was the only thing left he could control, the only hope he could hold on to, that it might let him out of here if he cooperated, if he did what it wanted of him. Even so, his body fought with itself, pushing him down the stairs and across the floor in jerking, ungraceful steps, like some part of his light forced each limb.
He tried not to look at the bodies as he passed.
He didn’t really focus on anything until he’d reached that far wall, and then he was surprised to see the door open, almost like how he remembered it from the last time he’d been here. Inside the room, light coiled and sparked and seethed in circles around a cross-legged form who faced Revik from the middle of the concave surface.
“Hello, brother,” the being said, smiling at him.
The fucking thing really did wear his face.
It couldn’t be a biological brother, or even a cousin, not unless he’d been a twin. The similarities were too exact, even with the different scars and other body marks, and the different amount of bulk on the rest of him.
It had to be a clone.
The body, at least.
The familiarity hit Revik differently this time, now that his mind was more or less working. It didn’t just disturb him…it unnerved him entirely. Like some part of him had been stolen. Like this being had actually stolen his body from him…stolen it as he slept.
“Gaos…” he muttered, staring up at the lightning sparks that coiled around his form. He watched them crash into the wall and dissipate like liquid, only to reform.
Somewhere in that seething light around his skin, he felt Dragon smile.
“One of them, I suppose,” the voice said, aloud that time.
Humor lived in those words.
Revik looked over sharply, feeling that fear amplify in his heart when he saw Dragon looking at him. It took a moment longer for Revik to understand what he’d said.
“The Old God…” Revik muttered, remembering.
Dragon smiled.
His clear eyes filled with light––a darker, more earthy green light than what Revik saw in his own eyes when they glowed from those higher structures, or in the eyes of his wife, which looked to him like ethereal pale emeralds.
But the thought of that only brought his pain back again.
Revik was still trying to force it back, to force back the images that wanted to come with it, when Dragon smiled a second time.
“…It could be argued one of them, most certainly,” the intermediary said.
“What do you want from me?” Revik said, staring at him. “What is it you want from either one of us? From Allie? From me?”
“Nothing, brother. Nothing. Not anymore…”
“Then let me go––” Revik began, his voice harder that time.
But Dragon spoke as if he hadn’t said anything.
“…You’ve already done what I wanted,” Dragon said, that smile once more touching this narrow lips. “She did before. You have now…and I appreciate it, brother. I truly do. Unfortunately, I do not have the time to show you how much I appreciate what you have done, as I tried to do with her…but know that I love you too, my brother. As much as I love our beautiful Bridge. Know that I left a gift for her…a gift for both of you.”
Revik frowned. He fought to think through his words, to make sense of them.
He couldn’t.
He could feel something with his light, something that pulled at him, lingering at the edges of his awareness. Some part of himself that he could feel Dragon tugging on, tasting with those lightning-like sparks of his aleimi, making his own.
“And what is that?” Revik said, gruff. “What did we do for you?”
“You set me free.”
Revik continued to stare at him.
As he did, the figure sitting in the middle of that dark green room grew brighter, those flaring, lightning-like shards twisting around him in more violent and colorful sparks, blindingly bright now, raising the hairs on his arms, sucking in his breath…
The lights whipped through that space faster, turning green and red, orange and light blue and gold, crashing into and around him, turning the form in the middle into a glowing triangle of multicolored flame.
Revik held up a hand, shielding his eyes, feeling that pain in his chest worsen.
Then, abruptly and yet without fanfare, given how it began, it ended.
The light flashed once, blinding him for real.
By the time Revik could see again, lowering his hand…
Dragon’s body had entirely gone.
He was just…gone.
Frowning, Revik stepped forward. Without thinking about what he was doing, he entered the room, crossing the threshold almost without noticing he’d done it. He didn’t pick up on the significance of that either, not at first…not until he was wholly inside those mirrored walls.
It wasn’t just Dragon.
The room itself…the sentient machine. It was gone, too.
That pulsing life, the alien mind that had made the room what it was had been stripped unceremoniously from every millimeter of its physical form. The dark green complexion from the organic itself had even gone. Without it, the walls, ceiling and floor shone with a steel-like brushed metal glow.
Devoid of life…devoid of even the most rudimentary of consciousness.
What remained was dead. Mineral and stone.
Holding his breath, Revik walked in a small circle, fighting to make sense of what he’d just seen, what it might mean. He looked around at those blank, lifeless walls, fighting a different kind of fear that wanted to crawl over his light.
The thing was gone, though.
The sentient machine…that alien intelligence…
It was just gone.
He honestly couldn’t decide whether to be relieved.
Even as he thought it, the lights around him flickered, then died.
Revik found himself in a darkness so complete, it felt like he’d been buried alive.
Panic exploded in his chest, so much he couldn’t breathe at first. He reached out with his hands as his light darted out of him, looking for contours, looking for any way––
Then a voice broke that quiet...strangely close, almost tentative.
“Revi’?”
Not Dragon.
Revik exhaled, feeling a relief so palpable his heart started back up in his chest. He honestly didn’t know why at first, if it was from the realization he wasn’t alone, or because of the identity of the person themselves.
“Feigran,” Revik said, the word a gasp. “Feigran?”
“Yes, brother.”
There was a pause.
Then Feigran’s voice grew closer.
Revik felt his relief intensify when he realized he could hear him approach, meaning his physical body. Feigran’s light steps even now echoed slightly against the dead walls.
“You’re really here, Feigran?” Revik said.
“Yes, brother,” the other seer said.
“Come here. Come here, brother…”
“All right,” the other said agreeably. “But we really should get out of here now,” he added solemnly, as if to convince Revik of the seriousness of his words. “They’re going to try and kill us soon. Well…” the seer amended, exhaling in a soft, purring kind of sigh. “They are trying to kill us already, brother. It is on its way here…some part of it, at
least. But we should go before it arrives. I would prefer that, I think. Very much…to staying down here.”
Revik’s mind spun over the other’s words.
“What?” he said, alarm back in his voice. “What’s on its way?”
He flinched, jumping in spite of himself when the smaller seer sidled his body closer, grasping Revik’s arm in his hands. Revik didn’t move away when Feigran pressed into his side. Instead a strange surge of relief came over him at the contact.
“The bombs,” Feigran said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.
“Bombs?” Revik said.
His alarm sharpened, even as he reached out with his hands and light, clasping the other seer’s cold fingers.
“What bombs?” he said. “Who’s trying to kill us, Feigran? The Americans?”
“Everyone,” Feigran said, matter-of-fact, purring as he stroked Revik’s hand. “Everyone, brother. They will all come after us now…”
34
THE BEACH, REVISITED
It was Revik’s idea.
Most of the truly crazy plans we came up with were. The ones that required us to turn ourselves inside-out, to maybe tear some part of our souls apart in the process.
But desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes.
These were desperate times.
Moreover, my husband might be a romantic at heart, but when it came to military ops, his brain was in charge. His brain was a cold-hearted bastard pragmatist, through and through. He’d warned me about that much back when I first met him.
Of course, he’d often accused me of the same.
I told myself all of those things again now, like I had been for the last eight months.
I told myself those things even as I fought to control my heart rate, sprawled on grainy sand in a ripped up silk gown covered in smoke and powder burns, panting, sand stuck to my face, sand in my mouth and fingernails and hair. I could see trash littered across the edge of the river, including around where I lay. I felt the screaming flare of injuries on different parts of my body. Burns, cuts, scrapes, bruises…and at least one bullet that found its mark with my lack of armor. I hadn’t scanned yet to check, but I was pretty sure the metal passed through.
I knew that wouldn’t matter, either.
I was already dead…I had only to wait out the finale.
I lay there, fighting the exhaustion that penetrated my bones. I told myself this had been Revik’s idea, that the plan had been his…that it wasn’t my fault.
None of it felt very convincing.
And anyway, in the end, the fault had been mine. At the decisive moment, it had been me to pull the trigger…or not pull the trigger, as the case may be.
I’d let him down. I’d really let him down…all of them, really.
The humans too.
Maybe the humans more than anyone.
In the end, it all hinged on timing, and my timing, as usual, completely sucked. No matter how carefully I tried to plan things in the end, I hadn’t gotten out in time.
I hadn’t gotten out in time.
I hadn’t even been close…
I opened my eyes, gasping.
It hit me only then…I’d been on the verge of falling asleep.
Well, passed out would probably be more accurate.
Remembering where I was, I forced myself up, sitting up on the sand in the ripped apart dress, even as I winced from the injury to my leg. Looking down, I realized whoever had shot me among Ute’s people, they’d gotten me in the opposite leg as the one Dragon branded.
Remembering Lily, I forced myself up, to my feet, gasping from the pain.
I had to get to her. I had to detach her from my light, before she died with me.
I’d been thinking about that for what felt like hours now, ever since I saw those bombs streaking down in the sky, heading towards the Forbidden City.
It was the least I could do. For Revik…for Lily herself.
I already had a plan of sorts. I would try to connect Lily’s light to that of my biological parents. Kali was an intermediary, so I was pretty sure I could do it. If I needed to, maybe I could get Maygar involved, too…even Stanley, if I needed to try something with another intermediary’s light.
The thought hurt me somewhere, deep down in my light…but it felt right, too.
Whatever my biological parents had done to me, they wouldn’t do it to Lily.
I knew that somehow. What happened to me was because I was the Bridge. Even as an intermediary, Lily wouldn’t have to suffer the same kind of fate.
Anyway, I knew Dalejem wouldn’t let them.
I doubted Maygar would let them either, come to think of it. I could trust the two of them, even if I still had too much pain around my actual parents to be able to see them clearly.
I’d barely made it to the river.
They’d chased me through gutted and burnt-out buildings once I hit the streets on the other side of the wall. I’d been forced to hide, then to backtrack, trying to lose them again inside the grounds of what looked like some kind of ancient palace by a lake, although gutted now like the rest of the buildings and with garbage and Chinese graffiti all over the walls. I’d crossed through the backyards of yet more opulent-looking houses by the lake until the lake itself started curving too far west, and I had to find my way back north.
They found me again when I reached the edges of another park on the north side of that lake…and I had to try and lose them again in another set of buildings when I ran through alleys to correct my course to due north.
By then, the drug had been slowing me down. A lot.
Enough that I’d been getting pretty damned worried.
In the end, I’d been forced to break from cover, sprinting across an abandoned highway littered with broken-down cars to get to the edges of the canal.
That was when one of them shot me. Right before I leapt over the concrete barrier on the other side of the highway and jumped into the river.
Again, I don’t know why I’d been so determined to do it. Instinct, maybe.
Or maybe stupidity.
The river was swollen from the heavy monsoon rains.
Jem and I had received local reports from some of the Chinese seers about how dams had been giving way in areas outside the city, adding water to the already overtaxed waterways around Beijing itself. Most of those waterways had been expanded in the past forty or fifty years, from what Jem told me, and often more for aesthetic than purely practical purposes when it came to the waterways around the city of Beijing itself. In a water-poor world, waterways had become a sign of prestige for the richest citizens of a lot of cities, not only Beijing.
It was strange to think how much the water situation had changed in just one short year. Now it seemed to rain all over, all the time.
Water was still a problem, just in a totally different way.
Jem said the seers had even been an influence on the building of those canals to a degree, in that many were modeled after the canals, waterfalls and other waterways inside the Forbidden City. Those same canals had been expanded significantly under the Lao Hu, again mainly for aesthetic reasons. It was an image that the Communist Party leaders had been eager to emulate as they redesigned Beijing––not only because it projected success and status to the outside world, but because it served as an obvious, inescapable reminder of the close ties they had with their warrior caste of seers who protected the ancient City.
I remembered that from when I’d lived with the Lao Hu, too.
The relationship between the seers and humans of China had long contained a quasi-mythological element in terms of how it was seen by both parties. That perception and relationship had been cultivated strongly on both ends…that of the holy warrior seers who loyally protected their benevolent human masters.
When I lived there, I grew to realize that the symbolism surrounding that symbiotic relationship had elements of religious fervor around it.
That mytholog
y got cynically wielded at times too, of course, by both sides of the racial divide. They even used it against one another when it was politically expedient, as a part of the negotiating strategy in terms of roles and responsibilities of the different races and castes.
But a hell of a lot of them seemed to buy into it too, both among seers and their human cousins. Voi Pai believed it; I was sure of it. I can’t say I ever fully understood all of the nuances there, in terms of how they’d blended the seer Myths and the original religions and cultural histories of the Han Chinese, but the relationship didn’t feel wholly fabricated to me.
It was even kind of beautiful, in its way. It certainly beat the models of seer-human relations that grew up in most parts of the world.
It hadn’t fully sunk in for me yet that all of that was gone.
So was most of Beijing.
At the time I’d jumped into the river, I hadn’t known any of that, of course.
I’d hit the water, hard, and immediately got slammed into by the trunk of a tree.
Parts of houses had been crashing into one another in that same bloated stretch of river, along with signs and store-fronts and metal poles.
For the first time, I’d been damned glad the electrical grid had already gone down.
Even so, as soon as I hit that water and got slammed between the ripped up wall of a food stand kiosk and that tree, I’d been pretty sure I’d just made a huge mistake.
Then bullets started whizzing by my head.
I’d been forced to duck down fast, taking a mouthful of air before using the debris to pull myself around the edges of the clapboard and metal kiosk and away from the river’s banks. I managed to crawl around the edges of another log before I got past the metal roof of the kiosk itself. Coming up for air with a gasp, I hid behind the thickest part of the trunk and a piece of corrugated metal from the kiosk roof, just in time to hear the ping and crack of more bullets embedding themselves into the wood and ricocheting off the corrugated metal next to my hands.
I’d barely had time to look up at where Ute and her Dreng soldiers fired down on me from above the water line.
I saw Ute there, briefly, holding a rifle to her shoulder, her eye on the sights, her face twisted in a hate-filled scowl.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 67