If he noticed, I couldn’t see it on his face.
He looked down at me, still breathing hard, his eyes glazed.
I felt him wanting to fuck.
I felt every part of his light pulling on mine, wanting that, wanting to ask me for it. I felt that vulnerability there, his lingering doubt from the confrontation with Jem. I felt him doubting himself for inserting himself, for pulling Jem out of the tent.
“Hey.” I stroked his face and jaw, kissing his throat. “Hey, don’t. He was out of line. You might have lost your cool, but you were hardly unprovoked.”
He shook his head, jaw hardening.
“I don’t care about him,” he said, gruff. “I don’t give a fuck about him, Allie. I was out of line with you. I shouldn’t have done it. I should have left you alone.”
“Well, you could have left me alone,” I conceded, still stroking his skin. “I was in the process of kicking him out anyway.” Studying his face, watching him avoid my eyes, I frowned. “Revik. You didn’t break up some intimate conversation between me and Jem. He woke me up. Truthfully, he scared the hell out of me. I couldn’t feel him at all, and––”
“It sounded intimate,” he said, gruff.
“You might have come at a bad time––”
“Allie, I was wrong to intervene. I was wrong to listen, and I was wrong to intervene. I was wrong, okay? I should have at least asked you if you wanted my help.”
“I didn’t mind,” I said. “I knew why you did it. I get it, okay?”
He shook his head, clicking under his breath.
“Don’t make this noble,” he muttered. “It wasn’t some reasoned-out protection of you… my pregnant wife. I lost my shit and attacked him. I felt threatened because another man was professing his love to my wife and I attacked him, Allie.”
I fell silent, watching his face.
I didn’t want to argue with him about it.
I also knew in a sense, he was right.
On the other hand, I could tell he was likely still reading things into what he’d overheard that hadn’t been there. A part of me still wanted to set him straight, to get him to let go of whatever it was he thought he’d heard.
At the same time, given what we were about to do, it probably didn’t matter.
When he didn’t quite meet my gaze, I stroked the hair out of his face, pushing it over his shoulder. I combed through it with my fingers, realizing again how long it was.
His shoulders looked big to me. I’d seen him doing pushups and pull-ups most mornings, given the lack of gym equipment. I’d even seen him working his muscles on Atwar’s boat, trying to keep his body as close to optimal functioning as possible, even out on the ocean.
Massaging his shoulder and chest, I wrapped my other arm around his neck.
“I told him the baby wasn’t his,” I said. “So there’s that. I’m thinking that’s about the only good that came of the whole thing.” Grunting, I glanced up at his face. “I admit, I was a little pissed no one told him. It’s a little more logical he’d still be freaking out about the whole thing, if he thought I was cutting him out of parental rights.”
Revik nodded, still not quite looking at me.
I felt questions whispering around his light.
I felt anger there, too, but it didn’t feel aimed at me. Anger may not have been the right word for what I felt, in any case. Confusion, frustration, pain, regret. I felt guilt on him, the part of him that still held himself responsible.
“I am responsible,” he said, voice short.
I shook my head, clicking softly. “Revik. We’ve been through this––”
“No.” He shook his own head. “Your father’s right. I’m right. On this one thing, you’re not right, wife.” He leaned back on the pallet, combing his fingers through his hair to get it out of his face. “You’re not right about this, Allie.”
Watching his profile, I gave in with a sigh. “Okay. I don’t agree, but okay.”
There was another silence.
I saw him close his eyes, longer than a blink.
“I know what I need to see,” he said. “I don’t want to, but we need to look at it. We need to look at all of it… and we need to do that first. We can go back and look at other things after, if you want, if either of us feel there are still unfinished things in other parts of our life together… but I think we need to look at this before we do anything else.”
He turned his head on the cow skin, his clear eyes serious.
“…I want to look at it before we run out of time.”
Studying his face, I nodded slowly.
I was glad he didn’t say, “before we’re both dead” that time, but I knew that’s what he meant. Both of us knew that’s what he meant.
That time, I was able to face that truth without getting angry at him, though.
Snuggling down into his side, I rested my head on his chest, closing my eyes.
He didn’t ask that time. He didn’t even tell me he was about to do it.
On the other hand, it was his turn to go first.
Almost gently, he pulled me into his light and mind, bringing me back to a night over a year ago in Bangkok, where we were together on the roof of an apartment building overlooking what remained of the human city.
A lit pool and hot tub steamed on the level below where we sat with most of our friends around us, around a table loaded with food and alcohol, and covered in candles.
We’d known at the time it would be our last night together, maybe for a long time.
Like tonight maybe, we knew it might be our last night together forever, if things went badly.
Feeling him there, seeing the scene coalesce around me, I didn’t fight it.
Resignation may have lived there, but I surrendered to that, too, opening my light, letting him take me back to that night, back to the hours before I woke up on the roof of that same apartment building and found my husband gone.
THE GUN WENT OFF…
My eyes jerked open.
I lay there, panting, paralyzed, fighting to catch my breath, staring up at the flickering light of the organic yisso torch still resting in its bracket by the door. Closing my eyes, I wrapped an arm around my belly, fighting to breathe, to get enough oxygen into my lungs.
The image of that little girl’s head splitting open echoed in after-images behind my eyes.
I groaned again, not wanting to see Lily in that little girl’s face, in her light, but unable to not see it, just as Revik saw it in the moments and seconds before she died.
Sick with pain, with a kind of debilitating hurt aimed at everything and nothing, I could only lay there, fighting each breath in and out of my lungs. Following Revik during his time with Menlim, for however long we were in that place, was like being in a kind of hell. I felt like I’d seen too much, like I’d seen and felt more than my body, light or mind could take, or even process, at least in that short of a time period.
He fucked Charlie.
For some reason, that shocked me more than the parade of others he’d slept with while locked inside the Forbidden City. I felt her trying to ease things for him. I felt her compassion for him, her guilt about what had been done to me when I lived behind those walls.
She’d known who he was, of course.
She knew who his wife was.
I closed my eyes, feeling a grief that nearly overwhelmed me.
She’d been one of my only real friends when I lived there, in the Forbidden City. I’d known her daughter, if only in passing. She’d been younger when I knew her, but I knew her. I remembered her shy smile, her asking me to color pictures with her, holding my hand when we walked around the gardens behind the concubine’s quarters.
The idea that Charlie’s little girl was dead, that they were both dead now, was almost more than I could bear.
I felt him knowing on some level that we knew one another, me and Charlie. I felt him not wanting to know. I also felt him desperately using that very thing to connect with me.
; By then, he was well and truly desperate.
Throughout those memories, he felt terrified. Terrified he’d lost me. Terrified he’d lost Lily. He feared he’d never escape, which meant he’d also lose his life––killing us even after he’d lost us to Jem, to the Dreng, to his inability to outmaneuver Menlim.
He hadn’t found an opening when he laid down with Charlie for the second time.
He hadn’t found anything believable he could use to convince Menlim to hook him into the network. He hadn’t found any believable line he could cross that would make Menlim forget other reasons Revik might want to be in that network.
He’d been running out of ideas.
Making it harder to think about any of that was me.
That same morning, while he was half-awake and hung over, he felt me open my light to Jem. He felt us in the middle of sex, and he felt me open my light. He felt Jem’s reaction. He felt my reaction. He felt that opening change things between us.
He tried to talk to me through our bond.
He tried, but I forced him out of my light.
He blamed himself for that. He blamed himself for not being able to control himself, for coming at me too aggressively. He was angry at himself for acting like a fool, for not being able to control his jealousy, for pushing me away.
He felt how confused and sad I was––about Jem, about what we were even doing anymore, about Revik himself. He felt how far into Jem’s light I was already. Maybe on some level he even felt the pregnancy.
He felt himself losing his wife.
He lost it, just like he told me he would. He’d nearly killed Raven, Maygar’s mother, when she needled him about me and Jem. He’d lost it for the second time that morning, thinking he was losing everything he gave a damn about.
He’d been desperate.
It was Charlie who gave him a way out. It was Charlie who gave him the final thing he needed, telling him about the bunker under the Forbidden City. Charlie saved him. She saved all of us in a sense, by giving me and Revik the one thing we needed to bring down the Dreng network. She’d given him an excuse to break Menlim’s rules.
She’d given him a real excuse, one Menlim might actually believe.
She died for that. She sacrificed her only child for that.
Revik, in his panic, hadn’t thought through what would happen to her, or how easily Menlim would trace it back to Charlie herself. He hadn’t thought about what Menlim would do to her, to get to him. Or maybe Revik had just been too panicked to let the idea in.
Whatever the truth of it, he got Charlie killed.
He got Charlie’s little girl killed.
Indirectly, I got them killed, too.
I got them killed by being the reason Revik couldn’t think clearly enough to cover his tracks, to wait a few nights to distance himself from the Lao Hu consort. Of course, knowing Menlim and surveillance he likely had Revik under at the time, the Dreng would have traced it back to Charlie anyway, but he could have tried.
I got them killed in another way; Charlie helped Revik because it was the only way she could see to help me.
She helped Revik because she’d never helped me––with Ditrini, with Voi Pai.
The scream Charlie let out when Menlim’s people put a bullet in that little girl’s head echoed somewhere in the recesses of my mind and light, killing some part of me. I felt it kill some part of Revik too, both while he watched it happen in real time, and now, watching it with me again. His scream had been silent, but it hadn’t stopped since the night he’d watched both of them murdered while he knelt on the grass.
He hadn’t told me.
He hadn’t told me because he knew I’d blame myself.
The whole thing was such an unbelievable headfuck mess.
Lying there on the makeshift bed in the floor of that cave, I fought to breathe, tears running silently down my face. I felt my mind and heart being torn apart as I watched him there, acting the part of the degenerate with no self-control. I saw him with the consorts there, running ops, designing constructs, being ridiculed, seduced, harassed, spat on by the other Dreng seers, drinking himself into a near-coma every night, even when he was alone.
I watched him run through that underground bunker below the Forbidden City.
All of it was so much stronger this time.
The memories were so much clearer, so much more visceral, so much more there. I didn’t feel like I was seeing memories through him. I didn’t even feel like I was experiencing those memories with him.
I felt like I was him––not now but then, while it happened.
I couldn’t separate us out enough to make sense of myself as a separate person. I couldn’t force a distance through time, through his reflections on what occurred since. Instead I felt like I was inside those nightmare scenarios, living it with him.
I wondered if some of that was from the energy here, at Ship Rock.
While we rode here on horseback, one of the tribal elders told me there was “deep magic” in this place. He said it had been so for thousands of years, since their ancestors spoke the first incantations over these red rock formations. The name they had for the bunker here, built by those same ancestors, literally translated to “Cave of Dreams.”
Revik and I were inside the Cave of Dreams.
Closing my eyes, I raised a hand to my forehead, jerking it back when it came away wet.
I was drenched in sweat, even with the skins and blankets thrown off me.
I hadn’t realized that, either.
I felt Revik stretched out next to me, watching me. I felt his caution as he studied my face, his indecision about whether I would want him to comfort me or not. I felt him studying my light and face, unsure how I would react to him, given what he’d just shown me.
Most of that, I realized in retrospect.
At the time, I was lost in a tilting flush of light, enough light to make my vision blur, to make me question where I was. I could barely feel the pallet under me. Despite how immediate, how raw everything in his memories felt, here, I felt half out of my body.
I was completely drowning in light.
I felt so much of Revik in that, it took my breath.
It didn’t feel gradual this time, the change to my light. It didn’t feel the way it had with some of the other memories we’d looked at, where I wouldn’t notice a difference right away. Most of those times, it took hours, days… sometimes longer for me to recognize the shift.
This time, that difference was immediate.
I felt his heart beating around mine. I felt his slower breaths stabilizing mine, his light encasing mine somehow, calming it gradually as I let myself fall into it. I felt his pain, which was bad enough now to make me feel like I was inside his skin, feeling the nerve endings complain, feeling his heart beat harder as he looked at me, naked and covered in sweat.
I felt his guilt at his reactions to me, a kind of visceral, younger Revik’s guilt, like there was something wrong with him for not being able to act like an adult when it came to sex, particularly when it came to me.
I felt his dread at what came next.
Remembering how he’d felt at the time, remembering seeing and feeling me open my light to Jem, even that small taste of it, the barest glimpse––it was enough to remind him how badly he didn’t want to see any of it.
I felt his dread at watching me and Jem’s relationship unfold in real time.
I felt his dread at seeing what Dragon had done to me in that underground city beneath the Denver Airport. I felt his dread at feeling me react while he was with other people in Beijing.
Even as I thought it, he moved closer to me.
His fingers combed through my hair, seemingly oblivious to how damp I was from lying there, sweating. He kissed my face, then my neck, pulling me nearer to him.
“Can we fuck now,” he murmured. “Can we do it before?” Pressing his face against mine, he nuzzled my cheek and neck, lowering his voice still more. “I might not be able to handle it
later. I might not be able to, Allie.”
Thinking about his words, I felt my jaw harden.
Still breathing faster than normal, I shook my head.
“No,” I said. “You can handle it, Revik.”
“I really might not be able to––”
“You can.” I turned my head, looking at him. “We both can. We’re not side-stepping this. Not now. I want you with me on this.” Tears came inexplicably to my eyes. “I want you with me on this. Understand?”
There was a silence.
Then Revik nodded, slowly. “I understand.”
Holding my gaze, he continued to study my eyes for a few seconds longer. Something in the way he looked at me told me he was noticing the difference in both of our lights. He’d been so lost in guilt and pain before, he hadn’t been paying attention.
The longer he looked at my light, and at me, the more I felt his resolve strengthen.
After another pause, he nodded a second time, his jaw firming.
He kissed my mouth, pulling on me with his light until my lips parted.
His tongue was hot when he deepened the kiss. He wrapped his fingers into my hair, leaning his weight on me, pressing down harder when I wound my arms around him. I felt his pain grow unbearable as he kissed me again, sliding his other arm around my waist and back.
That pain didn’t ebb when he raised his head, his eyes back to studying mine.
I was breathing harder again, wincing against my own pain, fighting the tightness in my chest as my fingers clung to him.
Looking up at him, his long, black hair hanging down one side of his face, his mouth grim as he studied my face, I felt my pain worsen. He was so beautiful. Everything about him pulled on me, more now than it ever had. In some ways, I was still in disbelief he wanted me at all––much less that we were married, that we had a daughter together.
After everything of the past year, he felt like a new person to me all over again, enough that I felt almost nervous as I studied his face.
Maybe I was just seeing him more clearly. Maybe I was realizing all the ways I hadn’t seen him clearly in the past, or I’d made assumptions about him that were wrong.
“Are you ready?” he said, gruff. “I don’t want to wait any more, Allie.”
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