Dragon_The Final War

by JC Andrijeski

  When I spoke, my voice was gruff, almost too quiet for me to hear.

  “What if I can’t?” I fought the tightness in my throat. “What if I can’t do it?”

  “You can,” he said, his voice equally quiet.

  I shook my head, but I didn’t try to argue with him.

  There was no point.

  “It’s not about the sex,” I told him.

  “I know,” he said, softer. “Allie… I know it’s not.” His voice hardened. “Even when I want to kick you out of our room for kissing other seers.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my voice close to a whisper. “I’m so sorry, Revik. I had my reasons for going there to talk to her. I wish I could just tell you––”

  “You can’t.”

  I nodded, feeling the warning in his light sharpen.

  He sent more warmth into me then and I closed my eyes. A few seconds later, I looked up at him, trying to think, to see past both of our shields, knowing even now that either Tarsi or Balidor might be monitoring Revik’s light.

  “I want you to trust me,” I said. Biting my lip, I shook him a little, gripping his back. “Trust me, damn it. Please. Please trust me.”

  He nodded. I saw tears in his eyes again, but he only nodded a second time.

  “Do you mean it?” I said.

  He clicked at me softly. I saw emotions flicker behind his eyes, indecision, but that warmth coming from his chest strengthened.

  “I do.” He exhaled as he said it, almost in defeat. “I do mean it, Allie.”

  Relief flooded my light, even as I gripped him tighter.

  “I love you,” I said, my voice fierce. “I love you and Lily more than anything. No one will get in the way of that. Not for me. Not ever.”

  I felt him relax still more.

  That time, he met my gaze. “I know.”

  I swallowed, closing my eyes as I pressed against him. Feeling him stiffen, starting to close his light again, I looked up.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been pressuring you.” I swallowed, watching his eyes. “I mean it when I say it’s not about sex. Not in that way. It’s just… we all have to leave here soon. All of us.”

  I stopped, realizing I didn’t know how to say what I wanted to say without saying too much. I shook my head, fighting tears. Looking down, I pressed my face against his chest, closing my eyes.

  “Are you really not going to be with me at all?” I asked him, softer still.

  I didn’t say the rest of it. I didn’t add that we both knew we might not have the chance for much longer.

  I didn’t have to add that part. He knew what I meant.

  I felt it on his light as soon as I spoke the words.

  He still seemed to be turning over my words when his whole body tensed. His fingers tensed, his hands. Even his legs tensed against mine, his shoulders, his chest. I felt that grief worsen briefly, but I could also feel the fear there, the holding back, all of the things he wasn’t saying, that he wouldn’t say to me right then.

  Something in that must have gotten me to open more too, because suddenly his light was all around me, suffocating mine. I could feel the conflict on him, the decisions wavering in all different directions––that fear that wanted to choke my throat.

  I felt the love there, too.

  Love for me. Love for Lily. I felt the intensity behind that.

  I felt his determination. I felt the will he’d already hardened towards protecting the two of us, no matter what that ended up meaning.

  Something in that resolve, maybe just the sheer amount of him I could feel behind it, scared the shit out of me.

  I felt another warning pulse off Revik’s light, even as he caressed my hair with his hand and fingers. He stopped long enough to grip me harder, holding my head against his chest. Again, I felt so much love off him I thought my heart would break.

  “I hate this,” I mumbled into his shirt.

  He held me tighter.

  I felt another pulse of that warning, but softer that time.

  I felt misgiving too, and what might have been… I don’t know. Indecision? The longer I felt it, the more I realized that in addition to everything else, he wanted to talk to me about something. Maybe ask me something. Something that definitely made him nervous.

  Even so, it was something smaller than what was bothering me.

  When I felt another plume of nerves off his light, I looked up.

  “What?” I said.

  His light eyes studied mine. Glass-like. Or really, like lightly-tinted crystal.

  He’d told me once that some people found his eye color unnerving, even off-putting. Lovers of his had found them difficult to focus on. He’d been told they were cold, lifeless––dead-looking. Machine-like.

  I thought they were absolutely beautiful. I always had.

  He closed them after I thought it, longer than a blink. A plume of heat came off his light, along with more pain than he’d let me feel since he woke up from Dubai. It was enough to stop my breath, and maybe my heart, for a few beats at least.

  “I want to have sex,” he said, gruff. “I want to so badly I know I should let you go right now. I should leave, Allie. Now. Before you start trying to seduce me for real.”

  He said the last thing almost like a joke. Trailing, he looked away from me, staring at the far wall. Then he exhaled a longer sigh.

  I saw his jaw harden, right before he looked back at me.

  Whatever the decision had been, he’d just made it.

  “I might have… a solution,” he said, cautious.

  His accent was stronger again. I felt my light open. As if he’d heard me, or felt the change in my light, he added,

  “…You might not like it. My solution.”

  Taking a breath, I nodded, letting him feel I’d suspected that.

  He hesitated. I could feel him toying with words, then wrestling with them in his head, trying to decide how to ask. I kept my thoughts in the background while he did, although some part of me already suspected where this might be going.

  In the end, he didn’t say anything at all.

  He showed me pictures, instead.

  Even those pictures came at me with caution. And jealousy. I felt his jealousy, and his anger at me for making this harder on him after the thing with Chandre.

  Some of what I saw and felt were memories.

  Not just his memories––memories I shared with him. I saw the Rebel fortress in China, what happened in the common room after that mission in São Paulo. I saw us in New York, a conversation we’d had in the Third Jewel after we got back from South America.

  After he finished sending me memories, he sent a stream of additional information, flooding my light with words, emotions… more pictures.

  He sent his worries about my reaction to him asking, the fact that Balidor had suggested it, that Revik would talk to Jon for me but he really wanted Wreg and Jon involved if we did it, along with Balidor and Yumi and most of the infiltration team.

  Except Chandre. Her name had been excised from the list.

  Revik made that really damned clear, too.

  He told me there was no way in hell he’d let Kat or Ullysa anywhere near it, either, or anyone else I didn’t want involved––with the exception of Jon and maybe he’d even bend on that but he felt pretty strongly Jon and Wreg should be there. He definitely wanted Wreg there. He couldn’t expect Jon to be okay with Wreg being involved without him since they were married, and anyway, Revik wanted Jon there.

  And so on. It went on for awhile.

  And yeah, there was more, but those were the highlights.

  When he finished conveying all that, he just waited.

  He didn’t let go of me. He also didn’t speak. He watched my face, holding me tightly while I turned over his proposal in my mind.

  I already knew I’d agree to it.

  If this was Revik handling me, if he’d maneuvered me here in some way of his, even using my guilt about Chandre… well, I couldn’t make mysel
f care about that, either. He’d finally worn me down to the point where it wasn’t enough to make me say no.

  And I didn’t really think he had maneuvered me, anyway.

  I knew we still might end up regretting it. And yeah, I hated the idea of Jon and Wreg being involved. I hated the idea of Balidor being there, too, mainly because I knew it would bother Revik more than he’d ever admit to me.

  I knew all that, yet I knew I’d agree to it anyway.

  So I only nodded.

  “Okay, Revik,” I said. “Okay.”

  10

  THE END OF A RACE

  SECRETARY OF DEFENSE Johan (“Jo”) Sathorn glanced up at the giant feed monitor that covered one full wall of the meeting room. Once he focused on the screen he found he couldn’t look away. He was so transfixed by the images there, he’d already gotten most of the way into the room before he looked down at the table itself.

  Once he had, he flinched.

  A woman sat there. Alone.

  She stared at him with small but oddly bright, dark eyes, her wrinkled face immobile below a helmet-like covering of iron gray hair. Those eyes shone nearly opaque, like wet river stones embedded in her skull sockets.

  Sathorn blinked at the intensity of her stare, then forced himself to relax.

  She was a creepy old broad, for damned sure, but she had no power over him.

  Definitely one of those who came to power via appointments and back-door dealings, she had zero ability to charm or even relate to normal people. She was probably connected to the donor class in some way, or someone important’s family.

  No way would anyone ever elect a face like that.

  He forced a smile, mustering as friendly of a wave as he could manage.

  “Are we the first ones?” he said. “And here I was, worried I was late.”

  “You are,” she said.

  Her voice was curt. Nothing in her demeanor acknowledged his smile in any way.

  Weirdly, Sathorn also caught the barest hint of a Germanic accent. He’d thought he heard that before in her voice, but never so prominently. Where the hell did she come from, really? And why was she hiding it? There was no natural-born-citizen clause to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, not that he knew of.

  The accent was a weird one, in any case––a mish-mash of Germanic European and something he couldn’t identify. Sathorn had German in-laws. He knew the difference.

  Was she Swiss maybe? Was German a second language for her, too?

  Whatever it was, the accent he suspected was real openly mocked the Midwestern American cadence she normally pretended.

  “The meeting is canceled,” Novak said, equally blunt.

  “Canceled?” Sathorn raised his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “She had something else come up. Something that couldn’t wait.”

  By “she,” Sathorn knew Novak meant the President.

  Nodding, he turned over her words. If the old woman wasn’t in there with Brooks and the others, it had to be something military.

  He wondered why he wasn’t in there.

  After all, he was the damned Secretary of Defense.

  Glancing back at the feed monitor, he watched images rotate past in a strangely uniform blend, one city into the other. All were burning in various ways. All had been hit by nature in some way, as well––whether by earthquake, tornado, high tides, monsoon-like rain and floods, out of control fires pushed along by winds, or even, in a few cases, deadly hailstorms.

  Mostly cities in the United States were depicted up there––all but the blackout cities of New York, Anchorage and Salt Lake City. In other rooms, monitors depicted other parts of the world, but this room focused mainly on what remained of the United States.

  Los Angeles filled one screen––now, mostly deserted.

  They’d air-lifted some to higher land, mostly in New Mexico and Colorado. The majority of the coastal areas, including a long swath of Highway 1 and Highway 5 where it twisted towards the coast, were flooded due to failing containment fields and ever-worsening storms. Venice Beach and Long Beach, along with parts of Malibu and most of downtown San Diego were several feet underwater, although Sathorn saw signs of life here and there, even now.

  Boats paddled down wide streets. Smoke from controlled fires drifted from open windows in upper story buildings, signs of survivors trying to keep fed and relatively dry.

  Miami was nearly wiped out by tides altogether.

  Chicago lost a lot of their infrastructure to fire. They got hit by dry lightning and tornados, followed by a number of cold snaps that were dangerous as hell with the power grids down.

  Phoenix seemed to consist mainly of well-armed, roving gangs in cars cruising and patrolling the streets. They had a kind of order there now, if only because those groups had an established pecking order, but the price in terms of human on human killings had been high and continued to climb. Moreover, they were running out of water.

  San Francisco, like Phoenix, had broken out into quadrants and zones all along the city streets, each owned by different and competing vigilante and paramilitary groups. More seers lived in San Francisco than Phoenix, but otherwise, the two regions established similar methods of order and control post C2-77.

  The list continued.

  Atlanta. Washington D.C. Houston. Seattle. St. Louis. Philadelphia. Memphis. Detroit. Las Vegas. Cincinnati. Pittsburg. Albuquerque.

  Sathorn gazed across the flickering three- and two-dimensional images, still unable to see them as fully real. Something about being underground and removed from life outside the NORAD bunker made everything on those screens look and feel like fiction.

  Reality, such as it was, had become akin to a dystopian movie with too many extras and disturbingly good effects.

  Looking away from the screen, he frowned, contemplating the woman with the iron-gray hair. He wondered again why Brooks hadn’t invited him to whatever was occurring downstairs and considered just slinking out, trying to find answers on his own.

  Thinking a bit more, he changed his mind.

  Whatever he thought of the old lady personally, she definitely had the President’s ear. She also likely knew more about what was going on than anyone he might find roaming the halls, even if she hadn’t been directly included.

  Chief Justice Novak’s influence over the Executive Branch was infamous.

  It hadn’t started with Brooks––it started under President Wellington––but it baffled every cabinet member under both presidents since.

  Before Wellington, no one ever heard of a member of the Supreme Court being involved in decision-making inside the Oval Office. If asked prior to Wellington’s presidency, Sathorn would have thought such a thing must be illegal, given the supposed objectivity of the courts along with the separation of powers––but Wellington started inviting this old fossil to planning sessions soon after he took office.

  When questioned, Wellington used national security as his excuse––something to do with needing all three branches of government aligned after the nightmare of Caine’s treason. Rhetoric in those years discussed “the need for the Courts to be more aware of the wider contexts relating to the legality of specific actions taken in the name of national defense.”

  Which was pure spin-politico-bullshit, of course, but no one outside the White House really questioned it. Most thought Wellington had done it to pave the way for his all-out war against China, and since no one in the administration particularly disagreed with that aim, no one really stepped up and argued the point.

  Then Wellington and a portion of his cabinet got murdered.

  The telekinetic, “Syrimne,” while never officially blamed, appeared on the scene shortly after. He began running a seer terrorist camp out of a bunker in a corner of China’s Asia.

  Many still muttered a seer coup had taken place.

  Whatever the various theories floating around, no one disputed that everything went to hell in a hand basket not long after.

  At the time, it all
happened too damned fast for anyone to be able to stop it. The government gears simply moved too slowly, even apart from the monumental amount of bullshit that went into decision-making at the Federal level. Many blamed Brooks, of course. They said she lacked the single-minded conviction of Wellington when it came to addressing the dual threats from China and the seer menace.

  Those screams got a lot louder after C2-77 hit.

  Those same screams continued now, more or less unabated, even with the remnants of the United States government living primarily underground. Sathorn didn’t disagree with all of those critics. After all, seers practically annihilated the human race and Brooks still hadn’t ordered any major offensives against either the terrorist seers themselves or their human masters in Beijing.

  Sathorn had no fucking idea what nuclear weapons were even for, if they weren’t going to be used in a situation like this.

  Yet, despite his personal criticisms about her soft response to China and the seers, Sathorn knew Brooks was hardly a wimp. In their private talks, Brooks seemed less afraid to act than frustrated and skeptical of the intelligence information she’d been given.

  Given what he’d witnessed these past months, Sathorn was beginning to see her point.

  That feeling of invisible enemies was one of the strangest aspects surrounding Brooks’ presidency, though––and there had been a fuck of a lot of strange things.

  Then again, Brooks was granted the dubious honor of very likely being the last President of the United States. Fate or some other force had chosen her to be the one to ride the ship down into the depths of the C2-77 ocean.

  Not that he blamed her for what had happened.

  How could he?

  If anything, he blamed the half-dozen leaders who came before her, who compromised with the icebloods and their supposed “peaceful leadership” despite the terrorist fringes they couldn’t seem to control, and that seemed to grow in number year after year. The State Department wasted years signing treaties with those impotent monks and figureheads when they probably should have been wiping the whole damned infestation off the face of the Earth.

  But hindsight was always 20/20 when it came to war.