Sun

by J. C. Andrijeski

  Both of us slowed down, taking our time, going so far into each other’s lights, I felt drugged for real. I got lost there, in the muscles and bones and skin of his body, every detail of his light, the micro-expressions of his face as he angled into me, getting more and more precise the longer we went. For what felt like hours, I hung there, drowning in that edge before orgasm, feeling so much pleasure on him, so much relief and wanting and just fucking relief and pain and intensity of pleasure… for a long time, I lost all sense of where we were.

  I have no idea how long we did that.

  I know it felt really, really goddamned good.

  It felt better than I thought anything could feel, better than I’d thought sex could feel.

  We talked through a lot of it.

  I remember every word he said. I remember everything I said.

  I remember how important it felt to say it.

  Even so, I doubt I made sense most of the time, at least not in the usual way.

  It didn’t fucking matter. None of that mattered, at all.

  All that mattered was, the time of being alone had passed.

  It had really passed.

  49

  THE FINAL WAR

  “CHECK THE LATEST feed stream,” the golden-eyed seer said grimly, wiping his face of red dust and sweat with a silk handkerchief. “We have everyone down here at least, thank the gods. It was close, though. It is fortunate we arrived here when we did… and managed to pilot through that mess over Europe without being shot from the sky.”

  Gritting his teeth, the seer looked around at the rock ceiling and walls of the long, honeycomb-like cave they were using as a command center. He gave a longer stare around the cavern’s dim contours, broken by pillars and filled with working seers and humans.

  “…Not like it will save us in the end,” he added darkly in accented Prexci. “Gaos arendelan ti' a rigalem. We really are coming full circle, are we not? Hiding in caves like our Ancestors while the human hordes come for us.”

  Jon frowned, looking between Wreg and the strange handsome seer.

  He knew who the seer was.

  This was the infamous seer “Atwar” he’d heard about from Allie and Revik’s adventures in Croatia and Rome. The tall, well-dressed seer with the gold, dappled eyes looked tired, wrung out, worried. He’d only just arrived a few minutes earlier, although his people had been filling the caves under Ship Rock for the past two hours.

  “Have you eaten?” Jon said. “We can bring you something in here. I’ll have Jorag, one of our seers, see to your people––”

  Atwar waved him off, but sent him a pulse of warmth for the offer.

  “No, brother,” he said. “Thank you, but no. I’ll find something after this. I was hoping to speak with the Bridge and Sword before I took care of such trivial things.”

  Wreg and Jon exchanged looks.

  “We’re working on bringing them up now,” Wreg said, looking back at Atwar. “We sent someone as soon as we got word of your arrival. It might be a little while, however. They’ve been indisposed for a number of days.”

  “Balidor, then,” Atwar said at once. “While I wait.”

  “He’ll be back soon,” Jon assured him. “He went down to check on the Barrier shields we’re erecting in several of the longer tunnels.”

  Atwar nodded, his eyes studying Jon briefly in some curiosity before he returned them to Wreg. He seemed to have some awareness of Wreg in terms of who he was, although Jon felt from his mate that the two seers hadn’t met in person before now.

  “Do you have the flyer feeds?” Atwar said, his words clipped but polite. He stuffed the handkerchief in his pocket, rubbing his nose with his fingers. “If I were you, I would not wait for the Bridge and Sword for this. I have my own military seers on standby, given what we saw on the way in. I assumed you would want to integrate our fighters and infiltrators into your ground plan as soon as possible.”

  Wreg nodded to the Croatian seer grimly, clicking his fingers at Dante and motioning something to her in seer sign language. At whatever she signed back, he nodded, then unrolled a portable console on his lap. Resting his weight on a shelf of dark-colored rock, he flipped on the virtual screen, manipulating controls.

  Jon leaned over his mate’s muscular shoulder, staring at the projected visual images Wreg pulled from the latest set of flyer scans.

  When the images first surfaced, Jon could only stare.

  A shot of fear ran through his light once he made sense of what he was seeing.

  “That can’t be right,” he muttered.

  “Oh, it is assuredly right, young brother,” Atwar grunted. “I saw it with my own eyes. Like a swarm of locusts coming for us in the human Bible.”

  Frowning, Jon looked at Wreg.

  His mate didn’t appear to be listening to them, though. Wreg’s near-black eyes were focused across the cavern. The Chinese seer flickered his fingers then as Jon watched, motioning for someone to join them.

  Jon turned to see Balidor crossing the dim space, heading in their direction.

  Balidor’s expression was already almost as grim as Atwar’s.

  “This place truly is a maze,” Balidor said as he approached. “I don’t think we’ll have enough OBE generators in the end to protect all of it.”

  Balidor saw Atwar standing there then and broke into a smile. He clapped the tall, gold-eyed seer on the shoulder when he got close enough.

  “It is good to see you, brother.”

  Atwar turned, and the two seers embraced, surprising Jon a little. The relief he felt on both of them was tangible, and completely genuine.

  “Your people are safe?” Balidor said, once they’d pulled out of the embrace. “We certainly have the space for all of them. I’m beginning to think we could house all of Croatia down here.”

  Atwar grunted in some humor, giving him a single nod.

  “We are all here. We were lucky. We managed to arrive just ahead of Deifilius and his people.” He nodded towards the virtual screen Wreg still had up, the moving images on the rock wall. “We were damned lucky,” he muttered. “Gaos above, I still cannot believe all of this. But my people are here, thank the gods… and at your disposal.”

  Balidor gave him another rough pat on the shoulder.

  “We are happy to have you,” he said. “The Bridge and Sword will be most pleased to see you here, brother. Most pleased.”

  Jon was staring at the images again.

  “How many is that?” he said, prodding his mate with his light and pointing at the projected image. “That’s got to be more people than we’ve seen them use up until now, right?”

  Wreg exhaled, looking up at him.

  “I don’t know, ilyo,” he said, his voice grim. “Four hundred thousand? Five hundred thousand? And yes. We’d only mapped about half that in the deployments we’ve seen them use in the Middle East and Asia. And no where near as many large weapons.”

  Atwar nodded, turning from Balidor to look at Wreg and Jon.

  “We guessed roughly that, too,” the tall seer said. “Five hundred thousand, depending on what they have in those trucks.” He pointed at the virtual images. “They’re coming from the north. From the directions, we assumed they must have landed at Salt Lake City.”

  Wreg nodded, not taking his eyes off the virtual screen. Still staring down, he zoomed in and out, clicking between cameras in the various flyers deployed in that part of the desert.

  “How soon will they be here?” Jon said.

  Atwar answered that time, as well.

  “Eight hours,” he said at once. “Half a day at most. We might have visuals from here by morning, the rate they’re traveling, and depending on line of sight.” Staring down for a few seconds longer, Atwar gave Balidor a grim look. “The Mythers have moved their base to Switzerland, following what the Bridge and Sword did to Rome. They have also taken over more of the Shadow cities in Europe. Oslo. Prague. The Hague.”

  Balidor frowned, but only nodded, patting
Atwar’s shoulder affectionately again.

  Wreg muttered, “They must know about the door here. Maybe that’s why it took them longer to get here than we’d planned. It’s possible they considered just nuking us, like the Bridge said. That, or they wanted more of the Shadow cities under their control before they routed resources here.”

  A cold feeling settled over Jon’s gut, listening to his mate talk.

  He swallowed, then forced himself to shrug.

  “You think it’s really that big a deal to them?” he said. “One door?”

  Wreg shrugged, his eyes still on the virtual screens.

  “Nenz sure seemed to think so,” he grunted. “He said Menlim would freak the fuck out if he knew there was a door down here his people missed. It’s why he wanted the nuclear option on the table with Brooks right away. He wanted to at least be able to telegraph that we could retaliate, if they decided to hit us that way.”

  Glancing at Balidor, he added grimly,

  “It’s possible they won’t go that route until they have all the cities locked down first, and adequate people in the various bunkers to power the telekinetics. Once they do, we might be in trouble. It’s possible the army is just meant to distract us until that time.”

  Balidor nodded. From the look on his face, Jon got the sense that had occurred to the Adhipan leader already.

  But Jon was stuck on the first thing he’d said.

  “Why didn’t they find it?” he said, frowning. “The door. They found all the others, right?”

  Balidor nodded, glancing from the images to Jon. “That we know of, yes.”

  Wreg’s dark eyes continued to scan readouts to the side of the flyer feeds. Seeming to hear Jon’s first question belatedly, he shook his dark head, clicking softly.

  “Why did they miss it? You can thank the humans here for that,” he said, giving Jon a sideways look. “…and their ancestors.”

  Exhaling, he straightened, combing both hands through his dark hair.

  “The non-religious leader of theirs, the young one with the long braid, Tawa, he tells me this construct’s been here for thousands of years.” Wreg motioned around the space, his dark eyes scanning the cavern. “Several tribes have been sharing the responsibility of protecting it all this time, starting before seers or other humans made it to these lands. Because no seer ever expected humans to be able to create something like this, we think the door just got ‘missed.’ It never made it onto any of the maps. Even during the heyday of the Rooks, Galaith never found it.”

  Wreg met Jon’s gaze, his mouth grim.

  “It helps that the tribes managed to hold on to all of this as reservation land. Tawa seemed to think there may have been some psychic meddling by his people behind that, too… although he called it ‘magic.’”

  Wreg’s dark eyes returned to the screens.

  “Truthfully, their seeming insignificance might have been their biggest protection. In general, the Rooks weren’t all that interested in subjugated minorities with no real power in the human world. They likely didn’t come out here much.”

  Shrugging vaguely with a hand, he added,

  “That was even more true for the Rebels. We considered humans like these the least corrupt of their kind. They got screwed over and cheated by the same humans who made the Seer Codes, who signed bogus treaties with our elders, experimented on us, etc. As far as we knew, they’d never killed us or tried to enslave us. They didn’t fuck up the planet too much or try to steal our children. If anything, we considered them cousins-in-arms.”

  Next to Balidor, Atwar nodded in agreement, gesturing in seer sign language, he speaks truth. Glancing at Atwar, Jon nodded, as well.

  Wreg’s words made sense.

  It still confused his sense of right and wrong that so much of the ideology of the Rebels he actually agreed with.

  It also made it easier to understand how Wreg could have fought for them for so long. In terms of light and dark, it really did seem to be more about energetic connections than ideology per se, although there was a fair bit of overlap. The Dreng twisted the light of every seer working for them over time, including Wreg.

  It bothered Jon, even now, how they’d taken seers who genuinely were trying to do good and used that desire against them.

  Wreg rubbed his shoulder, sending a flicker of heat at his belly.

  Gaos, I love that you cared about such things, brother, he sent, kissing his face. That heat reflected in his thoughts. Even when you were a human, you cared more about what went on in the world than most seers. It gives me a fucking hard-on, even now, thinking about that. I want to see more about how you were back then, when you were a youngster.

  Jon clicked at him affectionately.

  I’m still a youngster, he reminded him.

  Wreg winked, raising his eyebrows suggestively. Believe me. I know.

  Jon grunted a laugh.

  His worry returned as he looked back at the three-dimensional images projected by the console, moving and breathing in the darkness of the cave.

  It occurred to him that there might not be a lot of time left to share memories with his mate.

  Shoving the thought from his mind, he gritted his teeth.

  “How far out are they?” he said. “You sent the drones pretty far, didn’t you?”

  “According to the log, we picked this up via satellite. Well, the kid did,” Wreg added, jerking a chin towards Dante. “She sent drones after, to check it out. These are the first images from that second wave of surveillance.”

  “How far?”

  “Five hundred miles? Roughly.”

  Behind him, Atwar looked over from where he’d been talking to Balidor quietly. “Yes. Five hundred miles sounds right, based on where they were when we passed overhead.”

  Jon’s stomach grew colder.

  “Could this be bullshit?” he said after a pause. “The numbers, I mean. They have telekinetics with them, a hell of a lot of them. Could they be projecting illusions? Like what Revik’s been working on with Maygar and the others?”

  “No.” Wreg shook his head, grim, releasing Jon’s shoulder. “No, I don’t think so. Not unless they’ve hacked us. Even if they managed to fool the image captures and Atwar’s people, Dante programmed all the flyers we’ve got out there now. Nenz worked with her on which scans to use to see past any telekinetic illusions, so unless they hacked us to fuck with the data––”

  “It can’t be right.” Jon shook his head, frowning.

  When no one spoke that time, not even Wreg, Jon gazed around at the pale faces and wide eyes now aimed at the same virtual images coming from Wreg’s console.

  Even Dante looked up from her work over a separate set of consoles about fifteen feet away, near one of the stone pillars supporting the roof of the giant cave.

  He’d never seen her look so pale.

  Exhaling, Jon looked around the rest of the underground cavern, hands on his hips.

  The cave where they’d chosen to set up operations was huge.

  Maybe it wasn’t big compared to the Denver bunker, or what Revik told him about the one in China, or even that underwater lake cave they’d described under the Vatican––but it still struck Jon as huge, especially given the density of the building materials.

  The latter seemed to consist primarily of a layer of hard, igneous rock.

  Jon identified huge veins of basalt, nepheline and granite in different parts of this room alone. He’d also seen carved out rooms and veins that appeared to be pure obsidian.

  He couldn’t help wondering how the hell they’d managed to create these caves at all, given when this complex was supposedly made.

  Wreg dubbed this room the “rabbit warren.”

  Jon agreed it was sort of fitting, at least in terms of the shape.

  Still, the cave had a hard, dense feel to it that didn’t quite match the nickname. It felt more like a military bunker––which he supposed it more or less was.

  Thick, stone pillars broke up th
e cave floor, providing support to the slab ceiling. The contours of those pillars were so rounded and smooth they didn’t look to be carved by human hands at all; they looked more like something that grew out of the rock floor.

  In terms of practical application, they broke up the large space, creating semi-work stations out of what would otherwise be a single, long, cavernous room.

  Dante and her tech people claimed one of those segments.

  Balidor and Wreg each claimed another for their respective teams, and shared this one in the center for coordination between them.

  Even now, Wreg’s military group, led by Loki and Chinja, hunched over a virtual map of the surrounding area, including what they’d mapped so far of the tunnels. On the opposite side, Jon saw Yumi’s tattooed face reflected in a different set of screens as she worked on the construct with Ullysa, Hondo and a handful of others in the infiltration team.

  The honeycomb-like room was located about four levels above the Barrier door––the same Barrier door Allie would be trying to open soon.

  Despite all that intervening rock, Jon could still feel it under them.

  It emanated a strange energy.

  He saw stars sometimes, in moments he didn’t focus his mind on an immediate problem, situation, or person. He had to work to stay grounded or it would pull his mind off center, off into those stars and colored waves of light.

  He knew Wreg was touching him more for that reason. He also knew he wasn’t the only one struggling with the effects. That energy vortex, or whatever it was, made it almost impossible for Jon to forget the Barrier door was there.

  Even with everyone a little light-drunk from the door, they’d gotten a lot done in the days since they’d arrived.

  There was still a lot to do.

  They didn’t even have the underground complex fully mapped yet. Wreg sent out a number of refugee and native humans with trackers, small flyers, and handheld image captures to map every tunnel, room, entrance, exit, water source, food source, and other physical or energetic feature they could find. They’d been weaving a three-dimensional map from their results, but it still wasn’t done, which blew Jon’s mind a little.