Dragon_The Final War

by JC Andrijeski

  She was thinking about him leaving then, on him going on his mission for the Bridge and Sword, and that fear in her light worsened.

  He bit his lip when her fingers began massaging the front of his pants again.

  “Are you really leaving tonight?” she said.

  Loki hesitated, then nodded. “Yes.”

  She bit her lip.

  Loki winced, but didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t lie to her about it. But he wished now he had avoided telling her that, too. He didn’t want her to think he was doing this because he would be going. It wasn’t the reason. Not the only one, anyway.

  He fought with what he might say.

  Before he’d managed to come up with the right words, he glanced down at her.

  Gina was crying. Her dark eyes had filled with tears. They ran down her face, running a small corner of her make-up, softening her heart-shaped face.

  Loki felt his light open, hurting him even as he unshielded. His pain flared in the same instant, so intensely that he couldn’t speak at all at first. He hung over her, his shirt open, feeling helpless for a few beats more. Then he bent his arms, dropping his weight so he pressed the length of his body against hers. He had her in his arms before he let himself think about what he intended, cradling her against his chest, pouring his light over her.

  They were kissing then, and he felt his pain worsen.

  He’d never had any human react to his pain like Gina did. She had her hands inside his shirt before he could take a breath. He let her shove the shirt off his shoulders, and the aggression behind it had him gripping her tighter, nearly losing control of his light for real.

  She had her hands on the fasteners of his pants next.

  That instant seemed to stretch, to pull at him. Feeling a sliver of fear run through his aleimi, he realized something else.

  He’d been using Dante as an excuse.

  The truth was, he was terrified of this.

  His mind fought with the reasons why, even as those few seconds stretched, as the brief confession to himself triggered a deluge of smaller confessions making up his specific fears.

  Humans died so easily. They lived such a short time.

  Gods, what in the hells was he doing with her?

  He could get her killed just by having her here with him. He would be leaving her now––leaving her unprotected. She should not be so close to the front. She should not be so close to the Bridge and the Sword. She should have gone with the other humans, with the civilians taken by the Bridge’s biological parents to whatever safe haven they were carving out in this new world.

  She shouldn’t be here with him.

  He let out a low groan when her fingers got the front of his pants undone.

  He’d been stalling for his own reasons, not only because of her daughter. He understood in the same set of seconds that Gina had every right to be annoyed with him about this. He’d been hiding behind Dante, when the real issue had been him all along.

  The longer he thought about it, the more he realized how childish it was.

  He also realized he was done with it.

  Whatever his fears of being hurt, of being abandoned, of needing one so different from him, of vulnerability to a female with a lifespan significantly less than his––wherever those fears lived or had been born, he was finished.

  He had committed to this thing, for better or worse.

  He would see it through to the end.

  6

  DRAGON

  HE DREAMS IN magentas and indigos and grays.

  He is the fire.

  He is the no one.

  He is the tapestry behind the light.

  He fills the cracks between light and dark. He is the lasting image, the black and white photo tinged with crimson and jeweled strands. Streaks of color live on either side of his line, but he is the black line, the hair’s width, the mind the gap––

  He is the singularity.

  He is the silences where all sounds overlap.

  He is the no thing.

  He is the everything, too.

  He is that which lives in the spaces.

  Between dark and light.

  Between Barrier and not.

  Between Barrier and beyond.

  Between living and death.

  He watches the currents go by, lights like party boats in water rolled over by dark clouds. He watches the distant stars as they rotate in the sky. He coaxes and teases. He pulls at the currents, bringing them closer, blowing them further away. He feels… so much.

  He feels nothing.

  It is smoke and glass. It is death. They rebuild it again and again, flimsy diversions in flickering shadow and pale lights.

  He is a slave.

  He is the puppet master. He owns them all.

  In through the out door…

  Out in the open now. Revealed. She feels him there, although she cannot yet name him. She sees him in dreams although she does not yet recognize him. She looks for him, for who he might be next, knowing only that it will be someone she loves.

  She will come here.

  She cannot ignore him forever.

  She will embrace him, as it is written.

  Together.

  Together, they will watch the world burn.

  Together they will close all remaining doors.

  I FOLDED MY arms, nodding as I stared out over the horizon of shadow-darkened buildings framed by aging sunlight.

  The view I gazed at wasn’t real.

  Well, it was real, essentially––but I wasn’t looking at it from the top of the high-end apartment building, like I had been before. Rather, the view was being projected into the space around us via some virtual hook-up of Dante and Vik’s.

  It was easy to forget that, as I watched the sun sink closer to the horizon.

  The hole in the far enclave wall still smoked in the distance.

  I could smell the smoke in fleeting whiffs carried to the rooftop by a humid wind.

  I could hear the echoing sound of occasional bursts of automatic gunfire.

  The red-hued sun reflected on a shimmer of the river. I could see its glare bounce off the tips of buildings, including the holy Wats situated in the oldest part of the city.

  Clouds gathered at the edges of that horizon, tinted pink, red and orange with indigo painting subtle shades in the background.

  I couldn’t see any stars straight ahead of me yet, but if this were a real view, they’d be starting to appear in just a few minutes if I just looked over my shoulder.

  A stray thought flickered through my mind.

  It wasn’t an unpleasant thought, but it was unwelcome right then.

  I remembered Revik and I sitting on a different roof, in a different city on the other side of the world, back when airplanes still passed overhead and the neon of the city buildings and people passing in crowds on the street below had their own form of civilized beauty. We’d been lounging in the roof hot tub a few days after our wedding ceremony at that restaurant in Central Park, discussing having a honeymoon on the beach.

  Revik had tasked me with finding us a place.

  He brought it up again in San Francisco, right before we went live on that op to extract List humans out of Jaden’s house by Golden Gate Park.

  Both times, Revik teased me that it would be my job to choose our honeymoon spot since he’d staked out that cabin in the Himalayas. Garensche later joked that he fully intended to come with us, since he’d been snubbed for the wedding itself.

  The thought of Gar closed my throat, too.

  He’d joked about that wedding a lot, but I knew missing it really bothered him.

  And yeah, I had, too––picked out a spot, I mean.

  Fiji.

  I had no idea why I wanted us to go to Fiji, except it came with the best pictures in my head. Whether I’d made those pictures up wholesale or they came from some subconscious memory from the feeds back from when I’d been a kid, I had no idea.

  I just got picture
s of turquoise blue water, grass huts and white sandy beaches.

  I had no idea if Fiji even existed anymore. That rash of tsunamis in the Pacific could have obliterated it totally off the map.

  Even our talking about it felt a million miles away now.

  Forcing my mind back to the present, I turned to look at the seer with whom I shared the virtual space. Studying his amber eyes, I refolded my arms across my chest.

  “You’re sure?” I asked him. “You wouldn’t lie to me about this, would you, Feigran?”

  His eyebrows merged together in a puzzled stare.

  That stare didn’t appear to be focused on me, of course. Instead it focused somewhere about a hundred yards past me. Or maybe a thousand.

  It could be a million, knowing Feigran.

  He sat on the floor, his lean body huddled around a large drawing pad. He’d lost weight since the last time I’d seen him. He seemed to lose weight the longer he was divorced from Menlim’s construct, but the medical techs assured me he was perfectly healthy.

  He fidgeted with a row of charcoal sticks and pens arranged around him in some precise manner that only Feigran understood.

  It clearly was a kind of order, though.

  I could sense that order, even amidst the randomness.

  Focusing back on Feigran himself, I noted the visible outline of his ribs under his open pajama top. Taking in the smoothness of his pale skin, the darker, almost reddish nipple and hairless chest, I winced, feeling invasive for staring.

  The reaction wasn’t to his body, but to what I’d walked in on when I came down here.

  Apparently the move had “upset” Feigran.

  Lately, Varlan had taken to soothing Feigran’s emotional ups and downs, utilizing methods that had worked on him back when Galaith had been the fractured seer’s keeper.

  Primarily that occurred through sexual gratification, I was learning.

  Although affection was a part of that, too, I guess.

  And yeah, it worked––better than anything we’d tried on him, for sure––but it disturbed me. Feigran was so childlike and dissociated in some ways I struggled not to see Varlan as taking advantage of the half-crazy seer. At the very least, it felt closer to conditioned abuse than anything my mind could call truly consensual.

  Varlan had been matter-of-fact about it. He claimed Galaith had been managing Feigran in such a way for decades. It was how Feigran had been conditioned to find comfort.

  I knew Varlan wasn’t doing it to hurt Feigran, but… yeah.

  There was no possible way that could feel “right” to me.

  Therefore, when I glimpsed the two of them together through the portal window earlier, I’d given Revik a disbelieving look that shifted into something closer to anger. Revik hadn’t looked all that happy about it, either, but he only shrugged, telling me bluntly,

  “He asked for him.”

  I knew he must mean Feigran asked for Varlan, but knowing that didn’t help my reaction much. That one glimpse of Varlan getting blown by Feigran, stroking the seer’s long red-brown hair as he got off, would probably be burned into my retinas forever.

  Still, there wasn’t a lot I could say.

  Long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, black ink pen. Long piece of charcoal, short piece of charcoal, blue ink pen, orange crayon. Long piece of charcoal, green ink pen, yellow crayon, black crayon…

  It went on like that, fanned out in front of him in an impressively symmetrical half-moon pattern that he’d spent a good two hours arranging, according to Balidor. He’d started the instant the construct tank had been locked down onto the bed of the armored truck.

  When he finished with it, he’d asked for Varlan.

  They’d offered him food, sims, but he hadn’t wanted those.

  He wanted Varlan.

  I knew Cass was in here, too, somewhere. They’d found a way to split the construct on the inside of the tank, although they still shared the same overarching Barrier space. We only had room for one tank on this ride, so we couldn’t separate them totally, but we could keep them from interacting.

  For this interview, Revik took the further precaution of knocking Cass out.

  I’d already made a mental note to have someone else knock her out next time.

  I knew he wouldn’t kill her on purpose.

  Well, I was pretty sure he wouldn’t.

  Since we hadn’t been able to use Cass to fix Lily’s light, it was getting harder to find reasons to keep her alive. I’d talked Revik down more than once already, telling him I was relatively sure the problem was, as always, Menlim. We’d tried putting Lily with the Four––meaning me, Revik, Feigran and Cass––in a single compartment of the tank. We hadn’t been able to effect any real change on Lily’s light, but Balidor and Tarsi thought it probably had something to do with problems and disconnections in Cass’s light, and in Revik’s.

  No one had any idea about Feigran’s light, since it was so strange to begin with.

  The problem was, there was no way I could fix Cass’s light well enough for us to try the experiment without that crippling influence of the Dreng––not while Menlim’s network was still in operation. We couldn’t even let her out of the tank, not the way her light was now.

  I’d “fixed” Revik’s and Lily’s light to a degree by tying their light to mine, making the three of our lives interdependent in the process. I wasn’t about to make Cass’s light interdependent on Revik’s, or my own––much less Lily’s.

  It was completely out of the question.

  Balidor and Tarsi theorized that the Four would likely be crippled as a unit until we’d fixed the problem with Cass––and possibly the “backdoor” problem on Revik. That meant eliminating the Dreng network, or at least severely weakening it in some way.

  As a result, for now, we couldn’t do much for Lily.

  Lily’s light remained broken. So did Revik’s.

  Worse, if something happened to me or Revik, it would kill Lily too––at least until we’d fixed whatever was wrong with her light.

  Pushing that from my mind with a sigh, I looked back at Feigran.

  His drawing pad lay open below my eyes, appearing to rest on a stretch of white cement that rimmed the swimming pool housed on the roof of the apartment complex. The complex itself was the same one we’d been using as our headquarters.

  In real life, it stood just northwest of Silom, what used to be Bangkok’s business district.

  Feigran had his bare leg dunked in the virtual swimming pool, a pale white with dark-red hairs. As soon as the projection appeared around him, he’d happily hiked up his pajama leg and stuck his leg and foot in the blue water.

  He swished that same leg around periodically, a smile ghosting his sculpted lips.

  He’d dunked his hair carefully in the water at one point too, squeezing it out even more carefully, presumably so he wouldn’t get water stains on his drawing.

  The illusion was compelling, down to the wind ruffling the top few pages of Feigran’s drawing pad so that he had to smack them down with his fingers and palm to keep them from ruining the charcoal lines as he drew.

  In truth, however, I wasn’t even in the tank… much less lounging with Feigran by a crystal blue swimming pool, looking at a smoke-filled, late afternoon sky. I couldn’t be in the tank for the same reason Revik couldn’t be in the tank. He, Lily and I couldn’t be cut off from one another’s light, or we’d die.

  So I did this.

  “I would not lie,” Feigran said presently. He held the paper down on his pad, swishing his foot in the pool thoughtfully. “Do you think I would lie to you, sister? Even now?”

  I glanced at the VR reading, feeling it shift as he thought about something.

  I couldn’t really feel Feigran’s thoughts or feelings, of course, but Vik and Dante did an eerily good job of translating the Barrier signatures. It didn’t work for more subtle meanings––especially with Feigran––but it was pretty straightforward when the thoughts
themselves were.

  This time, Feigran’s thought was crystal clear.

  Feigran was hoping I would offer him a drink.

  I smiled. “Alcohol doesn’t generally do you any favors, Fig.”

  “But it would be nice up here… so nice. For the pool.”

  I nodded noncommittally. “I understand. It’s still not a good idea, brother.”

  “How about a slushy drink?” He lowered his voice to a mutter. “Fire water better, but slushy is good. Can pretend it is sunlight. Boats and pretty skirts. Light wind––”

  “Not right now. And no,” I added, answering him belatedly. “I don’t think you’d lie to me. Not on purpose. But you might do it on accident.”

  Grunting, Feigran focused back on his drawing.

  I couldn’t tell if the grunt was about my refusal to get him a drink or if it related to the second thing I’d said.

  He muttered to himself as he sketched on the open sheet of paper, still holding it in place with his open palm and now the foot of his that wasn’t dunked in the pool. I strained to make out his words above the sound of the virtual recording of wind.

  “He tried to find out,” he muttered. “He tried, beloved sister… he tried. Yes, he did. Most diligently he did. Over and over and over.”

  In some respects, Feigran hadn’t changed much since we’d last held him in New York.

  In others, he was significantly different.

  A lot of the latter remained nebulous to me, however, at least in terms of what I could describe with words. His light was different––really different at times. It also struck me as somewhat less broken and scattered than I remembered from New York.

  I strained to hear him as his voice grew lower, using the virtual translator.

  “He tried to find out,” Feigran repeated. “He could not. Many many secrets inside the dark place. He is persistent. He tried. Nibbles and bites. Big things. Little things. Details. Not details. They live underground. In the dirt, sister, where he won’t go.” He shook his head, clicking. “He is sneaky. Very sneaky. But so is father. It is like chess, yes? Like chess. Father likes to win.”