Jon gave a last glance around at the burning buildings, jeeps, tanks and planes, the cars whose tires melted and pooled from fire, the sharp crack of glass panes in the fires’ heat, the drifting black and white and gray plumes of smoke. He felt a kind of unreality fall over his mind as he stared at it through the tinted windows of the Humvee, an unreality that made it difficult to comprehend the scene clearly, even though he stared at it with his own eyes.
Jon felt the screams in the wider construct now, too.
The panic he’d kept out of his light as fleeing humans and seers realized who Revik was, what they were fighting, suddenly hit his light in sharp waves. Truthfully, though, Jon couldn’t make that altogether real to himself, either.
The more tactical part of his mind documented the reactions of their enemies as good, as being what they had intended, in terms of sending a message. Jon couldn’t really be happy about their success, any more than he could be upset about what it had cost. The feeling was closer to satisfaction than anything.
Success, which meant they could move on.
Realizing again that he had to be channeling Revik in this, in part at least, Jon found himself recognizing the coping element there, too...and moreover, understanding it.
Truthfully, though Jon felt all of it, he couldn’t really make himself care that much, either. It would have been easy to blame that on his brother-in-law, too, but Jon doubted that distance stemmed wholly from Revik.
Only when he looked back at Allie, who followed behind them, sandwiched tightly between Balidor and Yumi, did he get a vague flash of why this had to happen.
He knew that was partly an excuse, though, too.
MANHATTAN IS A big island, at least when you’re taking it apart, piece by piece, on foot or even by car. Jon knew that, theoretically anyway, but he hadn’t really tested that awareness in a long time... maybe ever.
He’d walked the streets here before, though, with Allie and on his own.
Jon knew Manhattan could be deceptively complex, particularly for such a small area of real estate. It had grown even more complex after the number and height of the skyscrapers exploded in the past ten years. The city constantly evolved, so that was part of it. Manhattan also hid a lot in its cracks and crevices, and even down blind alleys, despite the increasingly commercial and overrun downtown and mid-city areas.
Now that most of the virtual bots had been shut off, as well as the talking billboards and virtual buses and cab walls––the city streets, especially in the heavily commercial areas like Times Square and near the park, had gotten a lot quieter. Those virtual salespeople who used to follow Jon and his friends up and down the Avenue of the Americas no longer ghosted along the sidewalk, looking for barcodes to scan and wallets to empty. When those vanished, the city’s population must have decreased by half, even before the deportations.
The regular clothing shops, grocery stores, electronics, appliance and jewelry stores had been plundered weeks before. All of the fetish stores, art, boutique, antique stores and restaurants had been cleaned out by now, too.
A few of the richer stores owned by larger corporations, as well as a number of the bigger banks and office buildings appeared more or less intact...mostly by being locked up so securely that they looked more like blank steel walls from the street, rather than the glass storefronts or business lobbies those street-views once commanded.
As they passed in the first of four Humvees, Jon saw a small herd of horses grazing freely in a newly-built park paddock and wondered if they’d once pulled tourist carriages, or if they belonged to wealthy locals, too. He also couldn’t help wondering how long before those same horses would be turned into food, regardless of pedigree.
Currently, a number of inconspicuously-dressed men carrying rifles wandered in the vicinity of the stables, likely to prevent that very occurrence, but Jon knew that probably wouldn’t be enough in the long haul. Well, not unless a lot more people died, or food became a lot more readily available over the next few months.
In any case, the New York Jon remembered had simplified in some ways.
One of those ways included the previously diverse and intensely busy shorelines that rimmed the edges of Manhattan itself, both on the Hudson and East Rivers, as well as the Upper Bay where the two rivers met in the south.
That shoreline had simplified a lot in the past year.
Well, really, in the past few years.
Only two functioning docks remained following the city-wide quarantine.
Seer Containment, or ‘SCARB,’ along with FEMA, the NYPD, the Coast Guard and whoever else, had already done over ninety-five percent of Revik’s job for him when they blew up or walled off all but those last two shore access points at the time they instituted the Manhattan quarantine. Really, if you wanted to get technical, most of the coastal access had been obliterated more than a decade earlier, when city planners blocked over half of the original shoreline to build hundred-foot-tall levees around every segment tagged as a potential stress point at risk of damage from rising tides.
Jon remembered the city before that happened, and how shocked he’d been when he’d visited a few years after.
The levees created a strange, fish-bowl effect inside Manhattan itself, one that could almost be claustrophobic at times, even with the virtual panels showing views of the opposite shorelines from the new parks that had been built around the largest of those reinforced walls.
In any case, removing the docks, the ships that floated beside them, as well as the equipment that allowed the OBE field to be opened as a gate or ‘door’ into the quarantine zone at those points, didn’t take anywhere near as long as Jon expected.
When Revik finished with the second and last of these secure ports, destroying the gateway field that allowed the OBE to open to the shoreline, his eyes finally dimmed completely back from that sharp, blinding green to the clear, almost colorless appearance of his normal irises.
He looked at Jon first for some reason, and nearly smiled.
“Do you suppose that got her attention?” he said.
He quirked an eyebrow as he said it, and Jon hadn’t been able to help himself.
He laughed.
Once he had, he glanced back at the Humvee, where a minor commotion had started. In the middle of it, Jon saw Allie, fighting her way free of a protective scrum of infiltrators surrounding her, including Yumi, Balidor, Wreg, Jorag and Neela. Revik motioned them off, a faint frown touching his lips, and Allie walked directly up to him, coiling her body around his in a way that caused Jon to avert his gaze, flushing a little, in spite of himself.
He could feel through the mobile construct, just like most of the seers probably could, that she was reacting to Revik using the telekinesis in a not-entirely asexual way.
For his part, Revik didn’t seem immune to it, either...or to her.
When that got amplified through his own connection to the two of them, Jon backed off, rejoining Balidor and the others next to the Humvee. Even so, he saw when she tugged on his hair, openly asking for a kiss.
Jon looked away even as he saw Revik start to acquiesce.
When he reached the group of other seers, most of them looking discreetly away from Allie and Revik, too, Jon fought to pull his light even further from the two Elaerians but it was difficult, especially since he still had to technically keep hold of the shield over Revik’s light.
Shoving his hands in his pockets, he looked out at the water of the East River instead, fighting to ignore what he felt sparking through both of their lights. He still stood there when a heavy hand fell on his shoulder, causing Jon to jump. He’d expected Wreg again, or maybe Jorag, but found himself looking at the strangely human-like but handsome features of Balidor, instead. Balidor looked more rakish than usual, Jon noticed. He actually had beard scruff, and usually Balidor looked like he’d just shaved and walked out of the shower, minutes earlier.
Some kind of career military thing, Jon always figured.
Today h
e looked more like one of those old magazine ads for cologne, the ones with a handsome, middle-aged guy in a cable knit sweater, looking pensive.
Jon knew he was distracting himself though, even now.
“Go easy on them,” the Adhipan infiltrator advised, his voice lower than a whisper. “...Him, especially,” he added, softer.
Jon shook his head, feeling his jaw tighten. “I wasn’t thinking anything, ‘Dori––”
“Bullshit,” Balidor said pleasantly.
His fingers tightened on Jon’s shoulder, but his voice barely changed tenor. A dry but knowing kind of humor lived in his words when he added,
“We all have been ‘thinking things,’ brother...and wondering, and speculating, and whatever else. Me as well as the rest. But Nenzi is judging himself a lot more harshly than the rest of us, I suspect. The truth is, he’s damned confused...for a lot of reasons.” Balidor turned, looking directly into Jon’s eyes, that same smile ghosting his lips. “As you know probably better than any of us, The Illustrious Sword’s ability to think clearly and logically around his mate has never been one of his strengths. Regardless of her mental state.”
Jon nodded, but felt a faint whisper of sickness in his light anyway.
He knew Revik was confused. More than just confused.
Truthfully, Revik had probably been teetering on that edge again for awhile now, far more than any in the Seven or the Adhipan or the ex-rebels had been willing to talk about or even admit to one another privately.
Revik had focused his crazy better this time than at other times, maybe because he had a child out there for whom he now felt sole responsibility...or maybe because Revik told himself he had to kill Cass before he went off the deep end entirely.
Still, thinking about it now, Jon realized that something had changed.
It had changed even since Revik decided to let Allie accompany them here. It might have changed even before then, when the four of them created that light bond.
The more Jon pushed it around in his mind, the more he felt forced to admit that Allie being conscious had improved Revik’s mental state significantly...if in a somewhat difficult to define sense. Not only because Revik hadn’t showed up dead drunk at Jon’s door since then, but even in terms of his overall ability to think straight, Revik seemed better.
Jon couldn’t put a finger on the difference precisely, not well enough to give it a name, but the more he compared the memories he had of Revik before and after Allie opened her eyes, the more true it felt. Maybe seeing her awake and moving around, even with that empty look on her face, had simply given Revik hope that her condition could change. Or maybe it had more to do with the bond. Maybe her being awake provided a more organic and light-based form of relief, in addition to the rest.
Of course, it also might have something to do with whatever changed after she’d bullied him in that basement in San Francisco. Or after Revik spent an hour or so yelling at her in their upstairs bedroom before everything grew unnervingly quiet.
Jon still didn’t want to think about that aspect of things between them, though. It was a part of their relationship he’d never been wholly comfortable with, no matter what its incarnations.
When Jon glanced back at Revik, he saw that the Elaerian’s arm remained coiled around Allie, holding her flush against him as he looked out over the water. His clear eyes had sparked into life once more, glowing a pale green. Jon realized hers had, too, when he glanced down at Allie’s face. Her fingers gripped Revik’s arm and his back, her arms wrapped with surprising strength around him as they held one another.
When Jon glanced back up at Revik’s face, he caught the seer looking at him.
“Now what?” Jon said through the link.
Revik’s gaze sharpened.
“Now we go back to the hotel,” he said, sliding a hand through Allie’s hair, pulling it carefully away from her face. “We wait.”
“Wait for what?” Jon said, his voice wary.
“For that bitch to give me a call,” Revik said, his voice just as calm and stripped of emotion as before.
Watching Revik lean down to Allie’s ear, speaking to her quietly, Jon realized he was staring again and looked away, swallowing as he turned over Revik’s words.
They actually made a perverse kind of sense.
If Revik really intended to seal off Manhattan, to take out its defensive and offensive capability and prevent anyone from coming or going, then Cass, Feigran and Shadow would be forced to negotiate with him in some fashion.
That, or yeah...try to kill him.
Neither option struck Jon as more improbable than the other. He’d known Cass most of his life, but reports he’d read about her in the past few months, as well as what he’d seen firsthand, made him feel more lost than the others when it came to predicting her next move.
Really, Cass just seemed like a psychopath to him now.
Like Terian had, before he got turned into Feigran.
Watching Revik lead Allie back to the line of Humvees, Jon could only give a low snort, one that held less humor, as he turned over Revik’s flippant response. He watched as Revik made a signal with one hand to Wreg, asking him to raise the bullet-proof glass to shield them from the street, right before he climbed into the long seat after Allie in the second of the three Humvees parked on the curb.
Back in New York last time, Jon still wanted to help Cass. He still wanted to get her away from Shadow, to save her from him.
He didn’t feel like that anymore.
Even in his worst moments as Syrimne d’ Gaos, Revik never turned on the people he loved...not even after Allie betrayed him.
What Cass had done felt intentional.
More than that...it felt like she was enjoying herself.
Jon knew he wasn’t seeing the whole story there, either. He could rationalize about her childhood, about Cass’s own self hate and feelings of powerlessness, about whatever Shadow might have done to her in Argentina and since. Hell, Jon could tell himself all manner of stories to explain all of it.
He just couldn’t make himself feel it. Her constant psychic attacks of Revik in his dreams, her ability to joke about seducing Revik after what happened in the Caucasus Mountains, and after she’d left Allie nearly dead in the same house where Terian murdered their mother. The fact that she could use Jon to get Allie out of that hotel in the first place...all of it just refused to compute in some part of Jon’s mind.
He knew somewhere in that, he probably still felt love for her.
It was hard to attach much meaning to that either, though. Maybe the reality came closer to shock than hate, some kind of disconnect between the way Jon thought the world worked and the way Cass decided it should operate under her own set of rules. More than that, it made him question himself, his ability to judge or understand people in any way.
Following Balidor, Wreg and Yumi back towards the same armored car Revik and Allie just crawled inside, Jon realized things felt a lot simpler to him now. His worry dissolved the longer he turned over the lingering rush of light still emanating off of Revik’s aleimi.
He remembered that feeling of power as Revik patiently worked, eliminating tanks, planes, guns, ammunition and armored vehicles on that packed dirt runway. Jon realized that, in a weird sort of way, he was looking forward to when Revik and Cass faced one another again. Well, not looking forward to it exactly.
Maybe fantasizing about it would be more accurate.
Jon wondered distantly if that made him a psychopath, too.
THE SURGE OF energy from working continued to vibrate Revik’s light.
He felt tired, sure, but most of the worst of that tiredness had been mitigated with the influx of light Balidor provided him from the makeshift feeding pools they’d set up and tapped inside the construct.
That construct had now been tied to the one in the House on the Hill hotel, which gave it a lot more stability. Revik felt the shift as soon as the change took place, somewhere in the middle of their initia
l strike on that airfield.
He knew that feeling of limitless power was illusory, that he couldn’t afford to grow accustomed to it, much less dependent on it, but his skin and aleimic structures vibrated from the excess light anyway. He and Balidor had discussed keeping his aleimi flooded with light as often as possible via the pools, even when he wasn’t working directly with the telekinesis...mainly on the off-chance that their feeding pools got cut off during a frontal attack on the hotel.
Revik knew Shadow’s people would be searching for his light source even now, trying to do that very thing. Revik knew enough about the way Menlim thought...and even Terian and Salinse...that it had to be the very first thing on their list.
Well, assuming they didn’t have that mapped already.
Either way, whether he’d managed to catch them by true surprise or not, Revik knew he had to plan things with the assumption that he would soon have to rely solely on his own team for light, or possibly, that of their seer allies in New York and San Francisco. That assumption diminished their resources significantly, at least in the event of an actual firefight, where he would need seers holding guns almost as much as he would need them in the Barrier. He knew it was the realistic scenario to expect, though, and where he needed to assume they would end up.
Still, things had gone well, all in all.
He didn’t intend to rest on that fact, but he felt satisfied enough to wait for their next countermove while he continued to dismantle whatever resources he could dig up throughout the rest of the city.
He glanced out the window at the thought, glimpsing another brief, tail-end view of humans running down a narrow side street. They’d stopped a few times so Revik could disable working vehicles, and even to crack open a few of the more tightly shielded buildings they passed, those that Revik strongly suspected might belong to one of Shadow’s allies, or, at the very least, one of the humans who bought their way onto Shadow’s list of ‘deserving humans’ who had been relocated behind the quarantine wall to avoid C2-77.
Allie's War Season Four Page 26