Revik

by J. C. Andrijeski

  “…We ran into some Americans,” he said. “Mercs, maybe. Ex-C.I.A. We gave them a turn on the females, but there was some trouble––”

  “Trouble.” Dehgoies felt his jaw harden more.

  “Yes,” the seer said, his expression still indifferent.

  “What kind of trouble would that be, brother?” Revik said, his voice flat. “You mean like mates watching their wives and girlfriends get violated, while a brother seer collected money on the sidelines? That kind of trouble?”

  Pausing, he gave the male a harder stare.

  “…Or do you mean parents watching their pre-adolescent daughters get sodomized by worms, also under their brother’s watch? That kind of trouble? Is that what you mean, brother?”

  “Dags,” Raven warned, from the other side of the pen.

  Dehgoies glared at her, too, only angrier when he saw the harder meaning in her eyes.

  We need this rat-faced piece of shit, she reminded him from her mind, shielding her thoughts from the Viet Cong seer. li'dare. Calm down, for fuck’s sake.

  You’re okay with this? Dehgoies sent back. Really, Elan?

  I didn’t say that–– she began angrily, but he cut her off.

  You know he killed them, right? he sent, barely restraining his anger. They didn’t just “run off.” That’s probably the same dugra a’ kitre smell we walked up on in the road. He didn’t even bother to bury them, much less conduct the rites.

  Raven’s turquoise eyes grew incredulous.

  She stared across the dirt between them, like she didn’t know him.

  Rites? Are you kidding? What… are you a fucking kneeler now, Dags?

  His jaw hardened to granite.

  Seeing something in his face, she backed down with her light.

  It doesn’t matter what I think, she sent, her thoughts still a warning. Galaith wants this asshole to run the trade in the area after we pull out. He picked him. Not us. So cool your shit down, Dags. Now.

  At his angry clicking, she smacked Dehgoies harder with her light, forcing his eyes back to her face.

  Jesus, is it the coke, or what? What is your fucking problem?

  What is my problem? His thoughts turned harder still. D’ gaos, Elan. Only you could ask me that. I guess if you had to deal with it “back in the day,” the rest of them can just suck it up, too, right?

  That’s not what I meant––

  The hell it isn’t, he cut in angrily. You’re a heartless fucking bitch, Ray. You always were. Don’t think I don’t remember you back then, too.

  His thoughts turned into a harder growl.

  Gaos, I hope none of what we did last night sticks. If anyone would eat their own fucking young, it’s you. One of these seer pups would make a better mother…

  Raven blinked at him in surprise, her turquoise eyes widening as the meaning of his words sank in. For a few seconds, she seemed more bewildered, like she couldn’t believe what he’d said.

  When Dehgoies continued to stare at her, unapologetic, her surprise faded, turning into a harder, more predatory anger.

  What is your goddamned problem? she said, folding her arms over the armored vest.

  You really need to ask me that? Now?

  Yeah, she retorted. I really do. And I’m not the only one. Ask your pal, Terry. You’re acting really fucking weird, Dags. I thought you got over it when you started playing with that human last night… but ever since you got up this morning, something’s been up with you.

  Dehgoies glanced over at his friend.

  He caught Terian watching them surreptitiously, his amber eyes and strong-featured face expressionless as he pretended to be inspecting the group of seers tied together in the make-shift corral. Noticing Dehgoies’ stare, Terian gave him a wan smile, shoving his hands into the pockets of his army slacks before averting his gaze.

  Letting his smile widen, he whistled softly as he aimed reassuring looks at a few of the younger seers who watched him look at them.

  “It’s all right, loves,” he murmured to them. “Almost home now… almost home.”

  Averting his gaze from the scrutiny he still felt there, Dehgoies felt his jaw harden more as he stared back at Raven.

  What are you asking me, Raven? he sent.

  Asking you? she sent incredulously. Seriously, Dags. You’re acting completely bizarre. Your light is all over the place… and it’s not just the drugs. You’ve been off ever since that kneeler cunt first started to follow you…

  Seeing something in his face, Raven seemed to think better of what she’d been about to say, letting the thought trail.

  Get your head in the game, all right? she sent, hitting at him with her light again. We’re here to do a job. Stop moralizing and pay the man, so we can get the hell out of this stinking pit. We’ll clean them up at the ship, okay? Hell, if you want, dock him for the damage. That’ll teach him to think twice about pulling this crap in the future. Okay?

  Dehgoies felt his anger worsen.

  He gave her a harder stare, right before the man in the Viet Cong outfit spoke aloud, forcing Dehgoies’ eyes back to his scarred face.

  “Is there a problem?” the seer asked in Prexci.

  The man’s small, dark eyes darted between the three of them, wary.

  The look Dehgoies saw there shone more calculating as he seemed to be trying to read their light, but also held a tinge of anger that Dehgoies felt in the male’s aleimi. The combination made him look and feel even more vermin-like than before.

  Glancing around at the palm trees and sweating jungle, Dehgoies made his own face as cold and blank as Raven’s.

  “A problem?” Dehgoies let his voice turn openly caustic. “No, brother. Why would there be any problem? My colleagues and I were simply trying to decide how much to charge you, for abusing our new recruits.”

  “Charge me?” The man’s dark eyes grew openly angry. His voice blurted out in a hard rush, louder than before. “Charge me? You can’t be serious! What for?”

  “Well, we should get our cut, right?” Dehgoies said. “From the Americans?”

  Letting his words linger in the air, he took a step towards the shorter male. The seer, maybe seeing something in his face that time, or finally hearing something in his voice, stepped back, looking up at him even more warily.

  There was no shame in that face.

  All Revik saw was anger.

  Revik couldn’t help but hear the bitterness in his own voice when he went on.

  “You rented out stock we paid for,” he said in Prexci. “You lost us the males. You made double your money on them, right, brother? And so far, you haven’t offered us any of that.” He paused, his eyes motionless. “Shouldn’t we get our cut?”

  “There is no cut,” the man spat angrily, staring up at him.

  “But there is, brother,” Dehgoies said. “We’d paid you half up front for this shipment. Half for fifty, as a matter of fact. Not thirty and change. Money had already changed hands.”

  “I brought you what I could,” the man said, still angry.

  Fear touched his light, though, enough that Dehgoies suspected the man knew who he was, regardless of the aliases they’d used. The seer’s dark eyes watched Dehgoies’ warily, like he’d heard about “the ghost,” like he knew the rumors about the tall, black-haired seer with the glass eyes who took baby seers from humans.

  Whatever the male knew or didn’t know, he stared up at Dehgoies with an angry defiance, as if he were a dangerous animal.

  “I told you,” the man said. “There was trouble. I contacted Galaith. He said he understood––”

  “Sure, he did.” Dehgoies continued to stare at him, his face unmoving. “He understands. But these seers were ours, brother. Including their virginity. Such a thing has value. Even apart from as a bribe for rapist worms.”

  “I didn’t make any money off those davos upara d'kitre!” the seer snapped, his dark eyes abruptly furious. “The worms take what they want! It is tax to pass through these lands! You want
to charge someone? Go find those American ridvak who fucked them. Charge them, if you want more money, brother. Do not take it out on one of your own people!”

  Dehgoies felt his jaw harden back to stone.

  “One of my people?” he said. “You really think you deserve to call yourself that? After what you let happen to our own children last night…?”

  “Do not pretend you are better than me!” the man snapped, spitting angrily on the dusty ground. “You are no better than me! You buy and sell them, same as me! You are slave-trader, just like me. People like me would not even exist, if brothers like you did not buy what I take. You are me, brother. You are my creator, my reason for existence––”

  His words cut off.

  Before he’d let himself think, Dehgoies’ gun was already out of its holster and smoking in his hand.

  He didn’t even hear the shot.

  He had no memory of making any kind of decision.

  He stood there, trembling after he’d done it, staring at the gun in his hand. It looked foreign to him. For a long-feeling moment, he couldn’t comprehend how it had gotten there.

  In slow motion, everyone around him started to react.

  Raven let out a startled cry, stepping back in alarm.

  Terian froze, staring at him, then down at the Vietnamese-looking seer.

  After a stunned silence, the young seers in the corral cried out too, shouting in fear and crushing themselves backwards in a group on the dirt, dragging one another off balance and backwards with the rope that tied them all together.

  They continued to cry out and gasp as they fought to get away from him, and away from his gun. He watched uncomprehendingly as they fought to hide in the shadows by the bamboo and plywood shed.

  There was no place for them to run.

  They huddled together, naked, in the middle of the jungle under a muggy sky.

  Terian continued to stand there, his expression frozen in a kind of blank shock.

  Revik stared down at the seer he’d just killed.

  He focused on the bullet hole in the man’s face, the scorch marks from firing at such close range. The blood had already stopped flowing, assuming it had ever started. Revik could only stand there, numb, watching the aleimi evaporate from around the male’s body.

  He’d just murdered another seer.

  When he glanced at the seers in the corral, he found them staring at him with wide eyes, the look on their faces an undisguised terror.

  In that brief instant, he could see what they saw.

  He could see it in their faces, as he stood over the dead seer.

  They looked at him as if he were an animal, some kind of unchained beast.

  They looked at him, and saw a murderer.

  Ten

  Be Afraid Of Me

  KALI WASN’T SURE, exactly, when she realized he was following her.

  She didn’t know the precise moment that knowledge reached her conscious awareness, although she was fairly certain, by the time she admitted it to herself fully, that he had been there for some time.

  By then, she knew his light well.

  She knew it––she could also feel it changing.

  It unnerved her in some ways, and also made her feel vaguely responsible, when she realized how much it was changing, and just how unstable it was making him.

  Inadvertently, just by contacting him, she may have made him even more dangerous.

  She also may have activated things in his light she had no way of reversing.

  That last worried her on several fronts, in terms of how much of a target she’d just painted on not only her own chest, but potentially on Dehgoies Revik’s chest, as well… not to mention her mate’s, and her future child’s.

  When she finally admitted to herself he was following her, she also had to admit that she’d been feeling him for a number of days now––not all the time, but off and on, sometimes stronger and sometimes only the faintest whisper of his presence at the edges of her light. She’d felt him hovering around her aleimi, connecting with her and then disconnecting, possibly without even knowing he did it.

  From those touches, she got vague glimpses into the young seer’s mind.

  She’d felt whispers of his thoughts, violent urges, spikes in emotion that accompanied those changes in his light, flashes of what he was doing, flashes of who he was with, flashes of the presences that watched over him.

  Now that she was letting herself look at it squarely, and as she had while hiding in her hotel room––where she framed the whole thing more as a distant philosophical problem––she could admit to herself that she’d been feeling him more and more strongly, more and more invasively in her light, ever since their aborted conversation beside the pool of the Grand Hotel.

  In that, he felt increasingly volatile.

  He felt increasingly demanding with her light.

  He also felt increasingly desperate.

  She felt him fighting with his friends. She felt him fighting with his girlfriend. She felt the two of them watching him warily, knowing something had changed, knowing something was tilting him off his axis, and not understanding what it was. They felt Revik distancing himself from them, not so much emotionally, where he was never all that close, but with his light.

  She couldn’t hear their thoughts on what this meant.

  Through Dehgoies Revik himself, however, she sensed his friends talking about it when he wasn’t in earshot. Revik felt their murmurs about his odd behavior, and about him, despite their usual rivalry. He could feel them trying to decide whether to report him to the hierarchy, and what they should say to Galaith, if they did.

  She felt other things on him too––grief, sexual frustration, anger that more often tipped into rage, confusion, anxiety, restlessness, an ongoing hunger for distraction.

  Woven into all of that, Kali felt a longing on him that only seemed to be worsening. It cut her breath at times. At its worst, it made it impossible for her to sleep, to concentrate on anything at all outside of it.

  Inside that longing, she felt a kind of suffocating loneliness.

  She didn’t think she’d ever felt a loneliness so intense on any living being before, human or seer. She had never experienced anything like it, not even in her visions.

  She truthfully didn’t know how long he would be able to deal with what she felt on him, at least not without suffering some kind of emotional break.

  During these past few days, Kali felt eyes on her too, more than once.

  Not all of those eyes had been Dehgoies.

  Despite all that, despite nearly a week of hiding in her hotel room without fully admitting to herself that she was hiding, Kali didn’t actually feel him behind her physically until the day she finally forced herself to venture outdoors.

  She left early that morning, the impulse strong enough to get her out of bed while it was still dark outside.

  Her mind rationalized her pull to step outdoors.

  It told her she was tired of hotel food, that she needed to stretch her legs, that she needed to feel other living lights––but the truth was, she felt strongly pushed by some outside force to leave that day.

  Now she worried that push––or pull––had come from Dehgoies Revik, too.

  She worried even more that it might not have come from him at all, but had come from his masters, or perhaps one or more of his friends.

  She’d changed hotels after their talk by the pool.

  She’d done it to put some distance between herself and Dehgoies Revik’s friends, rather than Dehgoies Revik himself––particularly the female with the turquoise eyes.

  Through Uye, Kali had now ID’d that female seer as Elan Raven, another infiltrator and hunter for the Org. Unless Revik had someone stationed in another part of the world, someone Raven didn’t know about, she had to be the same “girlfriend” Dehgoies mentioned in his one, clumsy attempt to seduce Kali by the pool.

  The thought was disturbing––to Kali, at least.

&nbs
p; She couldn’t help flashing back to the seer’s unapologetic rage at Revik in that road, her willingness to hurt him, her possessiveness and outright ownership over his light.

  It was no wonder, really, that Revik had expressed some ambivalence about his relationship with her the one time Kali spoke to him.

  Whether Elan Raven was the girlfriend or not, Kali felt the presence of the Rooks on the blue-eyed seer’s light even more strongly than she had on Dehgoies Revik. Between that, the female’s jealous streak and her impulse-control issues––at least regarding Dehgoies himself––Kali felt strongly that the woman was a threat to her.

  Given how Raven reacted to her and Dehgoies speaking together for less than twenty minutes by that pool, she might even be an immediate threat to Kali’s life.

  In any case, moving hotels seemed prudent.

  Kali now stayed further from the river, at the Caravelle, another of the large and more expensive accommodations crammed with foreigners and war correspondents.

  Although the hotel was famous, and a landmark in the city, particularly for foreigners, she knew she needed a place to stay where being a foreigner itself wouldn’t garner stares. She also wanted accommodations high-end enough to provide decent room service, preferably located far enough from the river to allow her to disappear more easily into the city proper.

  Even compared to the Grand, Kali felt inconspicuous at the Caravelle.

  Her anonymity there had been a relief, and not only because of Dehgoies’ friends.

  Most of the eyes that watched her there, meaning at the Caravelle itself, appeared to be human, unlike those who had noticed her on those smaller streets near the Majestic and the Grand. Those who looked at her did so for the usual reasons, not for anything to do with her race, or with Dehgoies Revik, or even with Kali herself.

  Even so, she’d scarcely left her room for those seven or so days.

  She hadn’t really let herself think too clearly about why.

  In all of that time, her awareness of Dehgoies Revik never really faded.

  For the same reason, she knew he was still in the city. She knew the one time he’d left, presumably for work. She felt when he returned. She felt him look for her, seemingly the instant he got back. She felt his frustration and relief that she was still there, in Saigon, that she hadn’t left.