Balidor folded his arms, frowning as he exchanged looks with Cass.
He’d released her hand, but she still had an arm wrapped around his waist.
After what was clearly some kind of exchange between them, Cass spoke up.
“I agree with Allie,” she said. “That makes the most sense. Anyway, all our people are in the States already. We should go to them. Strength in numbers. That way we’d have all the skill sets we need in one place.”
I frowned faintly, maybe more out of surprise that Cass was the first to agree with me.
“I agree, too,” Balidor said. “I’ve felt we needed to go there anyway.”
Looking at him, I let out a breath I hadn’t known I’d held.
Glancing at Revik, I saw him nodding too.
I also saw the relief in his eyes.
“Yes, wife,” he said, raising my hand to his lips for a kiss. “I agree.”
When no one spoke for a few seconds more, I glanced at Feigran, who appeared to be oblivious to this whole discussion. He wandered the far side of the womb-like cavern, stroking the silver walls with the ends of his long fingers. In his other hand, he still gripped the hilt of Varlan’s short sword close to his chest.
Feeling my eyes on him, he turned in my direction, smiling.
“I agree, too, beautiful sister.”
Sighing, I looked back at Balidor and Cass.
After a longer-feeling silence, I cleared my throat.
“We have another question we need to answer at some point, too,” I said. “Although I’m the first to say, now is definitely not the time.”
Balidor frowned. “What question is that, Esteemed Bridge?”
I let out a wry grunt. “The million dollar question, of course. Where did they all go?”
At everyone’s blank stares, I motioned around at the silver metal.
“The telekinetics. Dragon. Possibly Varlan. Whatever kind of being this door used to be. Where are they now? What happened to them?”
Still gripping Revik’s hand, I rested my other one on my gun holster.
“We’re still assuming they went to another world, right?” I said. “Or another dimension? Another time? Are we assuming they all went to the same place? Or different places? Or maybe half and half, with different doors leading to different places?”
Looking around at all of them, I pursed my lips.
“How do we know which door is the right door?” I added.
Revik frowned, exchanging glances with Balidor.
I could feel both of them thinking about my words. All of us looked around at the silver cave, remembering what we’d felt when those presences began to recede.
In the end Balidor exhaled, voicing what we’d probably all more or less thought.
“It may be like death in the end, Esteemed Bridge,” he said. “We may not know, not until we walk through that door ourselves.”
I quirked an eyebrow at him.
“That’s pretty fatalistic, ‘Dor,” I said, smiling faintly. “Even for you.”
Ignoring my humor, he answered me seriously.
“I just mean…” Hesitating, he glanced at Cass. Taking her hand, he squeezed it in his fingers. “In the end, it might be an act of faith. For all of us.”
WE LEFT THE womblike opening a few seconds later.
Outside that smaller fissure in the rock, Dalai and Illeg continued to stand guard, guns raised. Stanley and Holo waited for us by the rock wall. When we told them we were leaving, they looked nothing but relieved. When I said we’d be going to the United States to meet up with the rest of our team, I thought they might break out into a cheer.
It was the most relieved and happy I’d seen any of them in weeks.
Better yet, no Mythers were yet knocking down our door. No one had been waiting for us when we left the cave––or the stone corridor after that.
The waterfall pounded on, oblivious.
None of us saw anything with our light, or picked up any new presences watching us.
Even so, I felt the absence of Varlan’s light keenly as we all climbed back on the raft.
Now we were pulling ourselves back across the lake in the dark. I wiped the last of the blood off Revik’s face, and he held my hand. None of us had spoken much since we boarded the raft. Stanley, Illeg and Holo did most of the work pulling us across the lake. Dalai sat at the front, our one working rifle raised to her shoulder and aimed towards shore.
Through Revik’s light, I saw Balidor and Cass doing more or less what Revik and I were, with Balidor cleaning up cuts and scrapes on Cass from where I’d been forced to drag her across the cave floor, and Cass looking him over for injuries in the dark, her fingers careful as she explored his face and chest.
Again, I didn’t notice I was watching them until someone broke the silence.
“Where are we going now?” Holo said, slightly out of breath. He didn’t stop pulling hard on the rope, bringing us closer to the far shore as he spoke in a clipped voice. “I don’t mean America. I mean right now. Do we find Atwar and his people? Or just look for a boat or a plane and get the fuck out of here?”
Pausing, I felt him looking at me and Revik in the dark.
“We don’t need to stay here anymore, do we?” he said. “I mean, what good is intel on the Mythers? We already know what they want. They want us dead. They’re trying to end the world. They want to kill everyone who’s not part of their fanatical religion.”
Via Revik’s light, I saw Holo’s muscles strain as he yanked on the rope.
I’d already noticed we were heading back over the lake a lot faster than we’d gone in the other direction. Holo, Illeg and Stanley definitely felt motivated.
Feeling flickers of claustrophobia stealing back over Revik’s light, I knew they weren’t the only ones. All of us wanted to get out of there, truthfully.
But that didn’t exactly answer Holo’s question.
I looked at Revik through the dark, feeling him frown, feeling him think about Holo’s words. I felt him trying to separate out his more analytical mind from what he wanted to do, which was to get the hell out of Rome, now, and go find our daughter and his son in America.
I was still looking at him when Balidor spoke.
“We can’t leave,” the Adhipan seer said, directing his words at all of us, but mostly at me and Revik. “I know we all want to. I want to.”
I felt him grip Cass tighter before he looked at me through the dark.
“But we cannot,” he said simply. “Not until we know who they have in their prisons here. If they’re murdering Listers in other Myther towns and cities, like Loki said, and they’re doing it publicly and ritualistically, then they’re probably murdering them here, too. We have to at least check. We can’t be this close and just leave them.”
I frowned, still holding Revik’s gaze in the dark.
Realizing Balidor was right, I nodded, once.
“Yes,” I said, seeing flickers of Kali’s vision behind my eyes. “We don’t leave anyone else behind. Not if we can help it.”
Feeling a pulse of emotion off Revik, I leaned my cheek against his chest, closing my eyes, even though it was just as dark with them open.
He gripped my fingers tighter in his.
“Yes,” he said simply. “I agree.”
I hated the idea of staying. I knew Revik did, too.
But Balidor was right. We couldn’t leave any more of our people behind.
I’d just raised my head from his chest, when, out of nowhere––
The lights came on.
It wasn’t a gradual raising of illumination.
Floodlights came on with a resounding click, washing out the cavern with light, washing out the dark water, the raft, all of our faces, the waterfall, the rocky embankment and wall behind us. All of us winced and raised our hands against the onslaught, squinting and blinking in the blinding shock of light.
My eyes jerked irresistibly to the shore.
The sound and light came from
there.
Before I could see past those round beams of blinding, blue-white light, which seemed to cover the entire length of the rocky beach we’d been aiming towards, I’d already ignited the telekinetic structures above my head. I felt Revik do the same.
A voice rose on loudspeaker, echoing over the water.
It spoke English, with a heavy Italian accent.
“Halt, enemies and blasphemers of the One God,” it intoned. “You and your party are under arrest, by order of the Holy Trinity of the Republic of Rome.”
35
MILITARY DECISION
I STARED OUT over the twenty or so yards of water between us and the rocky shore. Under the floodlights, the water looked eerily clear and blue, like it came directly from ice-melt, not from under a thirteen hundred year-old city.
Now that my eyes had adjusted, I could see what waited for us on that shore.
It was completely covered with people.
Basically, we were looking at a near-army of what must have been close to a thousand troops in black armor, with the triskele symbol, the three spirals, embroidered on every white and black armband I saw on every arm.
They held automatic weapons.
I noticed a few seers wearing those bleeding collars, their expressions blank, unmoving.
A strong aleimic shield must have separated us from that shore. Even so, I was stunned that so many humans could be so close without anyone on our team feeling, hearing or seeing them––not even Balidor or Revik.
I focused back on the seers with their bloody collars.
That’s why they were there. From what I could tell, the Mythers didn’t use seers for combat purposes, maybe because that would require them to be armed. They used seers for protection from other seers. They build constructs, shields, illusions.
I glanced at Revik, who was taking in the facts clinically with his eyes and light.
I could already feel his mind in that higher place, running scenarios.
I felt the intensity behind that, and clenched my jaw.
We couldn’t be taken alive. We couldn’t be.
He glanced at me, his crystal-like eyes hard as glass.
Revik knew that. He knew it even better than I did.
This was no longer just about us.
My eyes sought out the person who’d spoken to us through the loudspeaker. A male human stood roughly in the center of those lines of troops, and just in front of them, near the lapping water of the lake. Unlike the soldiers with their armbands, black uniforms and guns, he wore a dark monk’s robe with a hood.
He also appeared to be unarmed. The symbol of the three spirals was woven in white thread at the front of his robe.
Then I noticed the person standing next to him.
Atwar stood there, hands on his hips, eyes on our raft. Behind him stood his mate, Jusef, and that ex-Adhipan seer who’d bothered Cass so much, Kalashi.
The voice on the loudspeaker grew louder.
“You are being charged with crimes against a superior race,” the monk-like human intoned. “You are being charged with crimes against God, and irreparable damage to a holy site of the Roman Empire… one with a function ordained by the highest sages of our order.”
He paused, his words echoing over the water.
Raising his voice, he hammered out his next words.
“You should know, we have the ability to neutralize your unnatural and illegal powers. Please do not make any threatening or aggressive moves, or we will kill every person in your party. Before you assume that is not possible, or that you might be able to overpower us, we can prove our words.”
Again, a meaningful pause.
“We offer––a demonstration.”
Before my mind could wrap around his words, a blood-curdling scream rose from behind me. My head wrenched around. I recognized the voice.
Cass screamed again, louder.
Writhing in agony, she slid into the bottom of the raft, clawing at her own head.
Balidor fell astride her, catching hold of her wrists.
Her scream grew more desperate, more panicked, like an animal caught in a snare. She fought Balidor’s hold, her body bucking and writhing under his. Her features contorted in more pain than I’d ever seen in anyone’s face––at least outside of the Barrier. Her light flashed out and she screamed again, her eyes rolling up in her head.
Balidor gazed down at her helplessly, his light panicked, flashing out of him in hot pulses of terror. He held her down, trying to soothe her, but it was clear it was having no effect.
He looked at me, eyes frantic.
“Allie! Help her! Help her, goddamn it!”
I stared at him, then down at her.
“ALLIE!” he screamed. “ALLIE, DO SOMETHING!”
My light snaked out, looking for the source of her pain.
I could feel something lodged in her head, something that felt organic. It flared brightly in the darkness of her skull and brain, flashing a bright red with electrical-like pulses. It was small, so small I could see how our techs missed it.
It looked the size of a ladybug––or a tick.
Also, it was clearly organic. I might’ve thought it was part of her until it activated.
Menlim. He must have put it in her.
Maybe it was his insurance policy, in case she ever flipped.
I looked at Revik, feeling a darker flush of fear. Had Menlim done the same to him? He’d more or less been his puppet for over a month in Beijing.
“ALLIE!” Balidor shouted. “You need her! We all need her!”
I knew he was right.
Even so, I struggled to think, to decide what to do. If I tried to break that thing in her, it might kill her. I didn’t know enough about organic machines. It might have an explosive charge of some kind, and then she’d really be fucked.
I was still staring at her helplessly…
When Revik rose slowly to his feet.
His height and weight rocked the raft, forcing Holo and Stanley to grab at the organic cable to keep us from capsizing. They gripped it under their arms, gaping up at Revik.
I followed their stares.
Revik’s irises pulsed with light. I felt a flush of fear at his sheer physical vulnerability, standing there, until it occurred to me it didn’t matter. Given the number of soldiers aiming guns at us, they could have killed all of us in the dark, long before we’d felt them there at all.
They obviously meant to take us alive.
Probably so they could kill us as publicly as possible.
I was still staring up at him when I realized I knew exactly what he was going to do.
My mind clicked back on, sharper than it had been until then.
“Balidor!” I snapped, turning on him. “Light! Get him light… NOW! As much of it as you can!”
He stared at me, bewildered. “What? Allie, Cass––”
“Get him light, goddamn it, or she’s dead!”
Without waiting to see if he understood, I yanked on the structures over my head, pulling a shield down over the raft as rapidly as I could.
I was only about halfway there when the first explosion rocked the shore.
WE HAD NO CHOICE, I told myself.
We couldn’t have let them take us alive.
The thought repeated, echoed.
The time for compromise was over. This was endgame now, for all of us. We couldn’t allow anyone in the Mythers or their minions to take us alive.
Revik understood that, better than any of us.
I held the shield over him, over all of us, watching him work, half in awe and half in fear, and I repeated that understanding in my mind.
I don’t know which of us I was trying to rationalize things for. I don’t suppose it really mattered. In this, Revik and I worked as a single organism.
Even so, watching him now, I realized I didn’t really know my husband at all.
He did things I’d had no idea he was capable of. He did things I’d never seen any
seer do, not even in the few memories he’d shown me of the war. I realized there was so much he hadn’t shown me––whether out of fear of my reaction, fear of my judgment, fear of my fear of him, or even some kind of twisted modesty.
Some of those things, I’d read about in history books in school, half-believing them and half-not, even then.
After meeting seers and meeting Revik, I assumed a lot of those stories had been exaggerated: due to racism, for political reasons, because humans had a tendency to exaggerate anything to do with seers. Stories of him raining fire, of him vaporizing people just by looking at them, of him creating giant monsters made of light––I figured none of that ever really happened. Most of it had to be bullshit.
I watched now, and realized those stories had been true.
He lit the air on fire.
Coiling, green, sparking, alive-looking flames exploded through the cavern like a dragons’s breath from a fairy tale. He incinerated a line of humans in an exhaled breath. I watched them turn to ash before I could make sense with my eyes and light what he was even doing.
I gasped when I felt the atoms crackle around where he stood, where I felt another coil of that living light expand out of him.
I felt Balidor feeding him light––sending him a steady if lessening flow of aleimi from the very humans he was killing, right before Revik exploded one of the spotlights in a cloud of blue-white fire, killing humans in a ring around where it stood.
Cass was still screaming, writhing at the bottom of the raft.
I had no idea how much time had passed.
It felt like time had stopped entirely.
I held the shield over us for dear life, making it thickest around Revik, who continued to stand in the raft as he worked. I diverted bullets aimed at his head and heart, not trusting the shield to hold, even after I missed a few and it did. They came at him so fast and hard, I couldn’t get all of them, so I ended up putting most of my light behind the shield instead.
Seconds later, I exploded something larger, something that flew off the end of some bigger type of ordnance. Whatever it was, missile or RPG, it created a fireworks display of white and orange over the clear blue water of the underground lake when it detonated.
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