Kirev's Door

by JC Andrijeski

  Kirev nodded, making his expression and light repentant. “I understand, sir. If I have done anything at all to cause offense…”

  But Dan was already waving him off.

  “No, no…you’re fine, Kirev. You’re perfectly fine. I meant it as a caution, only. While we’re getting to know one another still.”

  Dan smiled at him then, almost shyly. Something in that expression made Kirev wince, on the inside at least, even before the human next spoke.

  “You’re more than fine, Kirev,” he said, softer. “You’re perfect…absolutely perfect.”

  Kirev didn’t have any answer for that at all.

  Even so, when he used his light to pulse a warmer flush of affection at the human standing next to him, he almost meant it.

  Really, how could he truly feel anything but pity for a creature such as him?

  Sometimes, Kirev didn’t know how to even be angry at them.

  KIREV FELT SEVERAL sets of eyes on him as the older male seer swung open the door in front of him. That same seer made a polite gesture in seer sign-language with one hand for Kirev to enter the fire-lit room.

  Kirev couldn’t help staring at those midnight-blue eyes, or the tattoo that covered one half of his scarred face. He knew that diagonal scar.

  Many of the older seers had it from the camps during the war.

  Realizing his stare bordered on impolite now, Kirev jerked his eyes off the other’s face, noting the nondescript black suit before he forced his attention on the room he currently entered. He heard Dan make a few friendly remarks to the other two seers standing outside that door, but Kirev didn’t hear those seers answer him.

  They didn’t feel like owned seers in the usual sense…and they wore no collars.

  Kirev guessed mercs owned by Black Arrow itself. Not stock, but actual assets. It put them in a different category than the seers like Kirev, who were either too young or too unskilled or both to be used in such a way.

  Kirev stood just inside the door, looking at the high-backed leather chair in front of the fire, and the legs stretched out in front of it. He saw leather slippers on those feet, with sheep-skin linings. He also felt as much as saw another seer there, without reaching out at all.

  Swiftly, he cased the room.

  Two more guards in here. Human. Armed.

  They wore their guns openly, hands clasped in front of their bodies where they stood by the velvet-curtained window on one side and a long bookcase on the other. Kirev wondered at all of the security, even as his eyes scanned over the spines of hundreds of leather-bound books, tinted a reddish hue from the fire. On the mantle over the fire itself, Kirev’s eyes stopped on an ancient-looking stone relic that depicted the sword and sun.

  A religious symbol of the seers, and likely original, from the look of it. He wondered if that had been plundered from the Pamir itself.

  The thought hit him with a dense flush of anger.

  Dan walked in behind him and the door closed.

  Clapping his hand on Kirev’s shoulder, Dan spoke to whoever sat in that leather chair.

  “Sir? I hope you don’t mind us bothering you. Kirev wanted to meet you…and I wanted to thank you personally for the honor you showed me, sir…”

  Dan sounded nervous, Kirev noted. Moreover, he sounded unsure if his visit would be welcome, now that he was here.

  There was a slight pause before the man in the chair answered. In it, the guard by the bookshelves motioned for Dan and Kirev to move closer, to get within visual range of the man in the chair.

  At the human’s prodding hand, Kirev moved in that direction, stopping once he was just in front of the leather chair.

  He found himself looking down at a human older than any he had seen downstairs, maybe sixty-five or seventy, again assuming Kirev was accurately estimating human ages in chronological years. So nearly twice Kirev’s own age, although for a seer to look like that, they would need to be past the six hundred year mark.

  The human looked up at him, holding a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other, a bottle and an ashtray sitting on a low, ivory-inlaid table to his left.

  A female seer knelt at his feet on the carpet, entirely naked.

  Kirev flinched a little when he saw her, stepping back before he could control his reaction. The seer herself, however, did not move. Her head remained slumped, dark hair obscuring her face where she leaned against the leather chair. He could plainly see that she was naked however, even apart from her unclothed back. Her breasts were just visible in the shadow by the chair along with the V where her legs met where she knelt.

  When Kirev glanced up at the human’s face, he saw those milky blue eyes watching him, a thinly veiled scrutiny living there as smoke coiled up from the end of the cigar.

  He also saw a bare thread of amusement.

  Kirev noted that the human wore only a robe. He looked to be naked under it.

  Kirev wondered if he was excessively drunk to receive them like this…or perhaps high on some harder substance.

  Then he realized that the human simply did not care.

  In either case, it was definitely the same human whose image he’d been made to imprint in his light, the one he’d spent most of the earlier part of the evening looking for among the crowd downstairs.

  Now that he stood so close, Kirev recognized his light, even apart from his features.

  Taking a breath, Kirev let out a soft ping, hoping like hell Wreg would feel it past all of the seers standing outside that door…hoping like hell it wouldn’t be noticed by those same seers.

  The human’s eyes slid from Kirev’s face, even as he did it.

  “It is good to see you, Daniel,” the human said, taking a drink from the glass before setting it on the low table. “So this is your new prize, eh?”

  He folded his arms, his eyes drifting back to Kirev. He looked him over with an appraising eye, crossing his ankles in the slippers.

  “He looks very…fit,” he said presently. “Do you know his sight rank?”

  Dan nodded, his voice still nervous. “Yes, sir. Well…the approximate they could give him, considering his young age. They believe his potential is quite high. At least a 7. Actual they gave him a 2 ranking, but they said he could be trained up fairly easily once he’s fully of age…”

  “Seven?” the man in the chair said, exhaling smoke from where he’d been puffing on the cigar. “That’s high for the pens. A little too high, frankly…I might have to have a talk with my acquisitions specialist.” He gave Dan a harder smile. “You sure you chose from the regular stock, Daniel? You didn’t pillage my premier holdings?”

  “No, sir!” Dan said, his voice sounding shocked. “No, sir, of course not! I was surprised too, but they had him in with the others. I thought perhaps his age accounted for it…”

  The man in the chair smiled again, but that harder look never left his eyes as they slid back in Kirev’s direction. “Well, he is pretty, Daniel. I’ll grant you that.” His mouth thinned, even as his voice turned shrewd. “Let me know how he trains up. A rank that high, I could use. I might want to contract him out on occasion…I’ll even throw in the training sessions, if you’re willing to have it done at the main campus in Palo Alto.”

  “Of course, sir. Of course…”

  Dan’s voice sounded openly relieved.

  Glancing at him, Kirev found himself thinking he’d been afraid the man in the chair would take Kirev from him altogether.

  As for Kirev himself, his heart pounded in his chest, even as he fought not to fidget. He had no idea if Wreg had heard him…if he should send the ping again, or even how long he should wait before trying something more drastic. He knew he couldn’t let them see him react, particularly not in his light, not where those seer guards might feel it.

  Shoving the thoughts out of the forward part of his mind, he refocused on the gray-haired man in the leather chair, feeling his eyes on him again. That time, Kirev couldn’t get out of the way of a flicker of the human’s thoughts.
He was thinking about putting Kirev with the female seer…the one on the floor. He wanted to do it as much to screw with Dan’s head as anything that might titillate him personally.

  It was a power play. It was also a way of putting Dan in his place for taking a seer out of his price range.

  The old human had no way of knowing that Kirev had been strategically placed in those pen groupings by Wreg and his people. Dan himself had nothing to do with it.

  The old human was also a sadist, from what Kirev could feel.

  Kirev felt a distinct pulse of anticipation and enjoyment not so much around the idea of witnessing the sex but the look on Dan’s face while it happened. He also liked the idea of Kirev being forced to take the female seer, who he’d already injured earlier in the evening.

  He’d felt the squeamishness on Kirev around her condition already.

  The combination of all of these things, hitting Kirev at once, made him nauseous almost to the point of being unable to hide it from his face. Remembering Wreg’s warning, he bit the inside of his check, forcing his expression smooth even as he aimed his stare towards the burning logs in the giant fireplace.

  As he did, he heard the human in the leather chair chuckle.

  “I think he might be shy, your new friend,” the man in the chair remarked shrewdly. “What do you say we help him overcome that shyness a little…?”

  Kirev felt his shoulders tense.

  He made up his mind to ping Wreg again, to hell with it…

  When the door to the corridor slammed open.

  The loud noise made him jump, and Dan jump next to him.

  Both of their heads swiveled towards that door.

  “No one fucking move!” a familiar voice growled.

  Kirev could have cried out in relief.

  Instead, he flinched violently again when Dan collapsed into a heap on the carpet next to where he stood. The human fell silently, his eyes rolling up as he collapsed without fanfare right before his head cracked audibly against the stone hearth. Although the sound made him grimace, Kirev barely managed to suppress his grin as he turned back towards the door, seeing three suit-wearing male seers standing there, along with a fourth seer who walked in last, a female.

  “You okay, little brother?” Wreg asked him.

  Kirev nodded, exhaling his relief.

  “You have no idea how good your timing is, brother,” he said in Prexci.

  The two human guards were already down, one crumpled at the base of the wooden bookcase like Dan, while the other lay next to the heavy velvet drapes covering the largest window, his body in an awkward tangle.

  Kirev watched as Wreg clicked his fingers at the last seer to walk in behind him, indicating for her to frisk the humans, and likely, to take their guns.

  Through all of that, Kirev had forgotten about the old human in the chair.

  Well, he had until the gun went off.

  5

  BROTHER

  “GAOS!” KIREV CRIED out, jerking sideways even as Wreg lunged towards him.

  The big seer reached him in a heartbeat, shoving at his shoulder, hard.

  The bullet slammed into Kirev’s arm even as he spoke the word, then must have gone right through him before Wreg’s big hand met his shoulder. Kirev felt more than heard the bullet leave him; he let out a gasp as a second shot whizzed by his head and ricocheted off something metal behind him.

  He barely had time to process any of that before he was on the floor, panting, not far from the fallen body of Dan.

  He let out a groan when the first wave of pain hit, clutching at his arm.

  “Fuck,” he hissed. “Fuck, fuck, fuck…”

  Wreg, who had been leaning over the human by then, turned, grinning at him.

  Before Kirev could yank himself up to a seated position, the larger seer knelt beside him, his fingers feeling over the wound in his arm.

  Kirev could see over Wreg’s broad shoulder that the gray-haired human had been incapacitated by the light of the other seers, although not knocked out, as Dan had been.

  “Gaos…” Kirev gasped. He fought to get his arm free of the other male, but the big seer wouldn’t let him go. Eventually he just had to lie there, enduring it.

  “You’re all right,” Wreg pronounced, even as Kirev groaned again from his prodding. “It passed through clean. Put pressure on it, and we’ll bandage you up when we get out of here.”

  His voice was gruff.

  Kirev saw the big seer avoiding his eyes when he added,

  “Sorry, little brother. That was my fault. I should have warned you…we can’t knock this fucker out. We need him awake…for this part, at least.”

  Still gasping, fighting to control the pain writhing through his whole upper body like fire, Kirev only nodded. It felt like someone had taken a blowtorch to his arm, but it was sinking in that he wouldn’t die from the wound, or even be seriously incapacitated.

  “I’m still coming tonight,” he managed, gasping.

  Above him, one of the other male seers chuckled. When Kirev glanced up, the seer grinned at him, ruffling his hair affectionately.

  “We’ll bring the pup,” that seer said, his gold eyes still smiling at Kirev’s face. “He’s earned that much, hasn’t he, brother Wreg?”

  Wreg only grunted, noncommittal. He rose gracefully back to his feet.

  Kirev watched as him and another male seer bent over the gray-haired human slumped in the leather chair. He noticed again that they’d taken over his light, that the human’s expression had gone slack-jawed, his blue eyes blurred out of focus. Kirev stared at his limp arms and the smoldering cigar where it burned a hole into the expensive carpet until he felt a different set of eyes on him and looked up. The naked, female seer who had been leaning on the chair was staring at him, her eyes showing her to be confused, also in physical pain.

  Looking at her face, he could tell also that she had been drugged.

  “It’s all right, sister,” he assured her. “We’ll take you out of here.”

  Wreg and two of the other seers gave Kirev a look. Then Wreg’s mouth pressed into a grim line as he looked at the female seer, right before he nodded.

  Kirev felt a rush of relief, even as he looked back at the female.

  She didn’t look good. Not at all.

  “You’ll be all right, sister,” he told her again.

  She didn’t answer him.

  He felt nothing on her light at all. It was inert, completely devoid of emotion.

  The fact that this piece of shit had wanted him to molest her again made him physically sick.

  “Yes, he’s a nice little human butcher, aren’t you cousin?” Wreg muttered, hefting the human up higher in the chair by the robe to keep him from sliding to the floor.

  Kirev watched as Wreg and the other two seers standing over the chair all went silent. He saw the irises of the one facing his direction slide out of focus as the three of them receded into the Barrier to begin working on the human.

  Kirev just lay there, fighting to control the pain in his arm as they worked.

  He was close enough to get glimpses, despite the fact that they were using higher levels in their light than Kirev could yet access in his own. He got flickers of structure, of dimensions…mathematical equations. Whatever it was, it didn’t all feel abstract. There was a physical component of some kind, beyond simply pass codes and security protocols…

  “Blueprints,” he muttered.

  Kirev felt understanding bloom in his light.

  “Gaos…you’re getting the full layout of the lab,” he said next.

  The seer who stood guard for them, holding one of the guns she’d pulled off the human security agents, let out a low snort, arching an eyebrow in his direction.

  “Of course,” she said, tossing her black hair back over her shoulder.

  The female seer wore a blue dress, one more like what the human women wore, Kirev noticed, not like the seer he’d seen downstairs.

  “…How do you expect
us to find it, brother?” she said, her voice holding scorn. “Or did you think they would have a map to their illegal experiments in the front of the building?”

  “Find what?” Kirev said, genuinely puzzled. “What experiments?”

  “Shut up, Ute,” Wreg said, giving her a hard look.

  Kirev fought with the questions rising in his light.

  Seconds later, he decided to remain silent.

  He wanted to come with them.

  If he didn’t anger them or ask stupid questions or otherwise make himself a liability, they might still bring him, even injured. He was left-handed, after all; the gray-haired sadist hadn’t even gotten his gun hand.

  Still, his mind turned over the female hunter’s words. He’d assumed the point would be to get rid of the lab as a whole, to destroy all of the biological agents and weapons they designed there, as well as the experiments they conducted. He’d thought the point was to hit them where it hurt…financially, at the very least…that it was more about Black Arrow being one of the largest defense contractors in all of the Americas, possibly even the world.

  But that female seer made it sound like they were looking for something more specific than that. Biting his lip, Kirev remained silent as he thought about what that might be.

  Illegal experiments. Could they be experimenting on seers?

  The thought made him sick, but it also felt plausible.

  The three seers continued to scan the blue-eyed human’s light as Kirev lay there.

  He noticed they pulled information off his human mind without being particularly gentle about it. Kirev even winced involuntarily a few times as they forced their way through blocks on his light, things that his seer security teams likely put on him in an attempt to hide information. He knew some of those breakages would likely be permanent.

  Even so, Kirev could feel that Wreg and the others could not get past all of those blockages either, no matter what they broke.

  His security team must be very good. But then, of course they would be. Bilford was one of the richest men in the United States.

  “Did you find it?” Ute asked, apparently as impatient as Kirev felt.