Revik

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Of course, Kali strongly suspected the real Dehgoies Revik was dead.

  She knew a blood tie still existed there, but likely, it was a more distant one.

  Regardless of that tie, she also strongly suspected the adoptive family of the new Dehgoies Revik, the one who took their nephew’s place, did not want him.

  Kali wondered how much the new Dehgoies Revik knew or remembered about any of those events or their aftermaths. Truthfully, she wondered how much the man she’d just witnessed at that meeting hall in Saigon knew about himself, period.

  Whatever he knew or didn’t know, in her perusal of the Barrier records, she’d detected more than a small amount of bitterness on both sides of that forced adoption.

  Both of Revik’s new “parents” appeared to try to do their duty to the relationship, in their own, limited ways. From looking at those same records, however, it was clear Revik’s adoptive family was neither kind to him nor overly committed to him, emotionally or otherwise. Kali strongly suspected Revik’s adoptive father constituted simply another “uncle” in this Dehgoies Revik’s life… another alias and another lie he had to tolerate for the greater good, whether he knew the specific reasons behind that lie or not.

  Whatever he knew or didn’t know, the current Dehgoies Revik picked up quickly that his adoptive family only resented his presence. While they didn’t abuse him outright, their silence spoke volumes about their opinion of being saddled with him, and with having to add him to their (in their view) previously unblemished family name.

  For the same reason, Revik did not look to them for anything at all in terms of emotional support––not even his adoptive siblings, who at least tried to provide him some means of love and connection, particularly his older stepbrother, Whelan.

  Then again, Kali wasn’t entirely certain that this “new” Dehgoies Revik looked to anyone for those things… not specifically.

  It made him strange for a seer.

  Or stranger, perhaps.

  It also gave her a much-needed reminder of the compassion she might have owed this being, regardless of who he’d let himself become.

  Kali walked down the dusty street, ignoring the stares she collected as she made her way back to her own hotel. Most of those stares came from Americans and other foreigners, and not only because she was still in the district of Saigon taken over by journalists, expats, diplomats and military contractors as a consequence of the war.

  A handful of quieter stares originated from Vietnamese pedestrians, too, as well as locals riding by on rickety-looking bicycles or motorcycles that might have been more accurately described as collections of spare parts held together by some kind of engine, a ripped-up seat, duct tape and handlebars.

  The occasional bicycle-drawn rickshaw tottered past on rusted, bent rims. Dust-covered cars, jeeps and trucks, and the occasional bus drove by as well, kicking up even more dust. Cleaner, newer cars remained relatively rare; most of them looked to be driven by foreigners or members of the military.

  The straw hat Kali wore made it easier to hide her own Asian-splashed features, but she looked too white to escape notice here, even apart from her height, which stretched a good five inches taller than the majority of human Vietnamese women she’d encountered.

  White women, even half-white women, were rare here.

  Her dark brown hair might have helped to camouflage her, if not for the fact that it hung in loose curls down her back and contained lighter highlights from the California sun, further calling out that she didn’t belong here, that she wasn’t one of them.

  She had done her best to minimize the impact of her hair and figure, wearing the same simple dresses with slits up the calf and clog-like sandals as the locals, but she doubted that helped much, either. Even the way she walked was distinctive, to the extent that she had to remember to walk at least like an American human woman while here, if she couldn’t quite imitate the Vietnamese gait well enough to pass.

  Her eyes drew stares, too.

  A light green, they barely allowed her to pass as human, and wouldn’t have, most likely, if more humans here knew about seers.

  Combined with her height and her “incongruous” Asian features, she likely would have been marked as seer by anyone who did know much about seer physiological traits.

  That would be particularly true of other seers.

  Right now, too few ordinary humans outside of China, Northern India, and Tibet knew what to look for in identifying seers from their own populations.

  Moreover, any who knew would be looking for specific seers most likely, if they looked for seers at all.

  In terms of the infiltrator world, Kali was a nobody.

  She had none of the tell-tale markers in her light for infiltration. She was totally unknown in Seertown, in the Org, and as a freelancer of any kind. She’d never worked as a paid infiltrator or in the human world at all, nor had her husband. She’d never even worked as an unwilling, so she didn’t have any of those markers in her light, either.

  At best, she would be a curiosity.

  Given everything going on in this part of the world, likely not even that.

  Kali wondered how much longer that would be true.

  According to her dreams, not for very much longer.

  Kali wished at times she didn’t dream so much… or so vividly.

  She wished so many of those dreams didn’t come true.

  Most days, she accepted the role she had to play. She even accepted, on some level, the pain and anguish that came with it, not to mention the sleepless nights, the convulsions, the seizures, the headaches, the worry and stress she inflicted on her mate.

  But she couldn’t say she liked any of it.

  She couldn’t say she never resented it.

  In that, she suspected she had more in common with Dehgoies Revik than he would ever know. Revik had a role to play too, much as he might wish it otherwise.

  Kali wished she could talk to him about that part of who he was, and who she was––who both of them were––but she knew how impossible that was.

  She also wished, in a quieter, more secret part of her mind, that she’d allowed Uye to come with her for this, as he had very much wanted to come.

  Uye remained behind in California, though, after a fair bit of argument and strong words between them, most of them involving Uye expressing various manifestations of his personal fears for her safety.

  She and her bonded mate had been living on the west coast of the United States for the past twenty or so years, and remained quite happy there.

  Unlike many places they’d lived in the last one hundred or so years, they were rarely bothered by the local humans in California, despite the encroaching communes up the coast, and more and more immigrants moving in from the eastern United States.

  It remained a part of the country where eccentricities were still honored, even protected. At the very least, they were seen as no one else’s business.

  That would change, Kali knew.

  For now though, California was a haven for the two of them.

  It was also a quiet, beautiful place, dense with animals, plants, even a freshwater stream in their backyard. Once the morning fog burned off, Kali walked under blue skies and high clouds for the rest of the day, winding her way through the redwood forest behind their house. Temperate weather made most days outdoor days. Their house was surrounded by green grass, moss and ferns. They had goats, chickens and two horses in a small coop and barn.

  They currently owned a large cabin in the Santa Cruz mountains, in a hillside town about thirty minutes inland from the town of Santa Cruz, and surrounded by some of the quietest lands she had ever known.

  The land remained wild enough that they could even be relatively self-sufficient, only venturing to town for staples and to poke their heads out for a view into the human world and its doings, including via the occasional newspaper or magazine.

  At home, they got some limited television, which kept them from losing track of the
wider world altogether, even if they weren’t always attentive to all of the details. Being unable to associate easily with their own kind, she and Uye had been forced to improvise over the years.

  Uye tolerated a lot, really, in deciding to remain with her.

  Kali knew that. She never forgot it.

  She loved him all the more that he never complained about that fact, even though the isolation must weigh on him at times.

  Despite his normally easygoing nature, however, Uye had hated everything about her reasons for coming here. He particularly hated that she felt the need to do it alone. She could feel through the bond connection they shared that he would have much rather if she hadn’t come to this part of Asia at all… much less during wartime… much less without him. The fact of who and what she’d come here to confront made all of that far, far worse.

  Kali suspected that would have been true even if the war had already ended.

  Truthfully, she suspected the war had very little to do with Uye’s misgivings at all.

  Her husband knew the precise instant when she decided to come. He knew the precise instant she began doing the Barrier work to prepare. He even helped her––as much as he could, and despite his misgivings. He’d researched, read and witnessed almost as much about her quarry as Kali had herself over the years.

  Unfortunately, most of what he’d found and seen made Uye do the usual thing he did when he was angry, which was grow very quiet and bite his lip a lot.

  He’d been horrified at the idea of Kali being alone with this young seer.

  Even for an errand such as this, even though both of them knew it to be necessary, he positively hated the idea. He was more than half-convinced Dehgoies might hurt her simply for his own perverse pleasure.

  Uye didn’t trust anything about their daughter’s one-day mate, whatever Dehgoies Revik remembered or did not remember about his own past. Kali strongly suspected that if their daughter had actually been born yet, Uye would have reacted even more strongly.

  He might have even tried to thwart this direction in her timeline, futile though his actions would likely be.

  As it was, Kali could tell Uye was keeping his reactions about their daughter’s very probable future very carefully in the abstract.

  What Kali and now Uye knew about Dehgoies Revik could get both of them killed, of course. Kali was so accustomed to living below the radar at this point, she scarcely gave it a thought before coming, but now that struck her as a real risk, too.

  Saigon was crawling with operatives of the Org.

  They wouldn’t know anything about Dehgoies either, but they were tapped into a network that knew a great many things, even if it shared few of them with its servants. That same network might figure out Kali’s own true identity.

  In some ways, that would be worse… after all, Kali hadn’t yet had her child.

  For the same reason, no one could know what, much less who, she was. The reality of even just her biology, of being different from other seers, could get her killed on its own. Or, more likely, enslaved in some human or seer laboratory.

  Kali risked everything even getting near an operative of the Org, much less one with such a high standing within their hierarchy.

  The reality was, Dehgoies––understandably perhaps––was a bit of a pet of the Org’s leadership.

  At the very least, he was a trusted lieutenant.

  Kali’s differences as a seer were the reason she’d avoided most other seers over the years, consistently living in areas populated primarily by humans, and then on the fringes.

  She’d been forced to do that her whole life, pretty much from the day she was born, when her parents first hid in South America to give birth to her, hoping it would keep the Seven and the Adhipan from ever knowing she existed.

  This man, their future daughter’s future husband, hadn’t been so lucky.

  Kali knew that.

  She knew some of the difficulties of his life.

  Being more or less cut from the same cloth perhaps made his personal history more, well… real to her, than it did to most seers.

  He was not myth to her. He was flesh and blood.

  He was her flesh and blood, in a very real sense.

  She knew that fact alone made him more real to her than to Uye even, or any seer who had been raised in the old ways, where so many of Dehgoies Revik’s actions and emotions would either be venerated to mythical status, or be viewed as inexcusably vile––in both cases, regardless of his reality as a living, breathing, flawed and contradictory individual.

  Kali herself couldn’t view things in quite so black and white of terms.

  That being said, she had sympathy for Uye’s point of view, of course. The idea that this man could be forgiven for what he had done over the years, given the gravity and agency there, struck Kali as both childish and almost heartbreakingly naïve.

  Even so, she could not hate him. Not in the way that Uye could.

  Certainly not in the way most of their kind would, who would see him as the worst kind of traitor to the most important principles of their shared culture.

  Kali couldn’t even feel compassion for Dehgoies in the same way as her elders did. Rather than an abstract horror and fear for his soul, she found herself lost only in the sadness she could feel emanating off him, even at great distances through the Barrier.

  She knew who he was. She was not blind to the reality of him.

  She knew that, on some level at least, he had chosen this.

  Her and Uye’s daughter would choose her own path, as well, whenever she was conceived… which wouldn’t be long now, Kali knew.

  Again, Kali wished sometimes she didn’t see so much.

  She wished she didn’t understand so much.

  Even so, that knowing and feeling of her daughter’s impending conception and birth formed the real reason why she could not wait any longer to try and reason with this young seer. Once the blindness set in from the pregnancy itself, she could not afford to travel, much less be away from Uye for more than a day or two at a time.

  It was now or never.

  Anyway, apart from her more frightened and personal wishes, and as much as she loved him, Kali did not want Uye here for this.

  Uye would want to protect her, and that would make him aggressive.

  His feelings about this male seer’s disruptive effects on his life and his wife would further cloud the issue, beyond what Kali could possibly correct through her own understanding. Uye would not be able to hide his animosity from this hot-headed youth, and it would only alienate Dehgoies from Kali even more.

  Or worse, it would cause him to refuse to speak to her altogether.

  She did not need Uye’s protection in this. She rarely needed it truthfully, but she knew he could not help himself in trying.

  What worried Kali far more than her own personal safety was the rules imposed on her, in terms of what she could and could not say to him.

  That, combined with the intense certainty that she needed to find some way to reach him, made her very nervous indeed.

  There was some chance, after all, that Uye was right, and that Dehgoies would attack her. If she could not convince him of the truth of her words––or worse, if he recognized her for what she was––she might be put in a very precarious situation indeed.

  She had to believe the risk was small, however.

  She took comfort in the fact that she had seen the dreams about her daughter so many times that they felt practically written in stone.

  Not being pregnant now, she had to assume she’d make it back to Uye, too.

  She walked into the hotel’s lobby as her mind spun over those same images.

  As she did, she scarcely saw her own surroundings.

  Still, she had some faint awareness as she passed into the portal of the hotel’s glass doors and into the cooler air within, pushed lazily by more fans overhead and scented faintly with rose petals and mist. She passed potted palms, a lobby with a dark-wood desk
and another, smaller, stuttering fan on the counter.

  The man standing behind the registration desk nodded to her in greeting, smiling faintly as he watched her pass, and she nodded in return, giving him a single look before continuing to walk towards the back end of the lobby.

  There, a piano stood in the shade away from the window. Americans and Europeans lounged on cushioned seats with drinks sweating from ice on the small tables beside them. Nearly all of them were men. A number were reporters, she knew, and they watched her curiously, as usual, wondering who she might be.

  She had tried to find a hotel where her foreignness would be more at home, but it only worked to a degree. They all assumed her to be the mistress or wife of one of the others of their ilk, but she wondered how many they’d asked already to find out whose, and if they would grow more curious as time passed, instead of less… particularly if they couldn’t identify whose consort she was.

  Kali knew she was continuing to avoid her main problem, however, even now.

  Namely, how would she approach him at all?

  How would she get him to talk to her?

  But, as ironies sometimes did emerge in her life, it turned out that ended up being the one problem Kali did not have.

  For, when she walked out through the restaurant at the back of the lobby and to the deck surrounding the pale blue pool behind the hotel, a shadow fell over her face and eyes, forcing her to look up.

  Dehgoies Revik stood there.

  “Who are you?” he said, frowning at her.

  He took a step closer, looming over her even more, close enough that she could smell the sweat on his skin.

  It was an aggressive act, almost without seeming to be one.

  “Who are you?” he said again, his voice colder. “And why are you following me, sister?”

  Four

  First Meeting

  HIS VOICE WAS blunt, deeper than she had imagined it.

  She heard the trace of a European accent, lost somewhere in the syllables, present even in their blunt cadence. Something Germanic from the hard edges, and familiar from when Kali lived in that part of the world.