He shook his head angrily, fighting past the memory, fighting to see past the blur in his eyes, the light that wanted to blind him whenever he wavered in focus for even a few seconds. He snapped the magazine into the bottom of the gun, chambered a bullet, and clicked the trigger to enact the safety before he shoved it into a second holster under his arm.
Focus. He could do this.
He could fucking do this.
He glanced behind him, hearing a noise.
Wreg stood in the doorway. So did Jorag, Jon, Neela, Balidor.
Revik didn’t look at any one of them for more than a few seconds.
“You got the track?” he said.
His voice came out gruff, almost unrecognizable in his own ears.
“Yes.” Balidor stepped forward, his voice disturbed, low, borderline unstable. Revik blocked those things from his light, too, focusing only on the words. “...They’re in the north part of the city. Eastside. The building they call The Tower, near to––”
“Got it,” Revik said, pulling the image from the other’s mind.
At least they were still in New York.
He shoved a few more magazines into the pockets of his vest. The guns were just back-up, really. He knew if he had to resort to those, he’d really be on his last legs. Even so, habit brought him here first, maybe just to give him something to do while the others worked, getting him the intel he needed.
“You checked for reroutes?” Revik said.
“Yes, of course, Nenz.” Balidor hesitated, then gave an eloquent wave of one hand, even as his back straightened slightly. “...Cass didn’t appear to be hiding. It seems her initial words, about wanting to arrange a meeting of some kind, were more or less accurate.”
Revik nodded, once.
“Who do you want with you, Nenz?”
Wreg that time, speaking as quietly as Balidor had.
“...We thought we should armor up,” Wreg added, his voice holding a strange, faraway quality that Revik almost didn’t recognize. “...Whoever you want. The rest will work from here, on the construct, as well as Barrier defense. They don’t appear to have a lot of numbers, not at the Tower, itself...or much in the way of physical defense. A dozen or so guards below...another handful on the lower floors. One of those upgraded, sentient, AI OBE fields on the roof, another in the basement, cutting off sewer access...one at street level, too...”
Revik glanced over, and Wreg shrugged, one-handed. Next to him, Jon stood silently, his face cold and taut with lack of expression, as if frozen.
“...We think they’re banking on the construct for protection,” Wreg added, his voice still holding that foreign, distant note. “Like in South America. They don’t seem to think they need much else. We’re checking now to see if they have it attuned to you in some way, like before, when the telekinesis tripped it.”
“Where are we on cracking that?” Revik said. “Really cracking it?”
If his telekinesis ended up being useless, this would be a short trip, indeed.
“We can get you in,” Balidor said, speaking before Wreg. He cleared his throat, his voice quieter, but also denser somehow. “We were able to map quite a bit, Nenz, based on what...” He trailed, as if stumbling for words. “...the Esteemed Bridge,” he settled on finally. “What she illuminated for us, when she entered that construct...just now, when she attacked them, I mean. It was the best view we’ve gotten into one of their constructs yet...”
Revik turned at Balidor’s words, feeling his shoulders tense.
Looking over the line of faces, he suddenly saw Maygar there, looking paler than even Jon. Something in his son’s eyes reflected a little too closely the desolation Revik still felt seething in his own light, so he didn’t focus there long, either.
“Jon and Maygar, you’re with me.” Revik felt Wreg stiffen, and nodded in his direction. “Wreg, I’d like you to come, too. I’d prefer it if Yumi, Tenzi and Balidor stayed here to lead the construct team. I’d like Vik on communications here, too. I’d prefer Jorag driving...or Jax. Other than those I’ve named, I’d like to have Neela, Gar, Illeg, Torek, Deklan, Loki and Chinja, if that’s not objectionable to any of them. Other volunteers are welcome, but I’d like to keep it under thirty. Too many and it’ll just slow us down...and I doubt it will help us, anyway. If it comes to that, bring the flyers in from outside and burn the fucking place to the ground. That might still need to happen anyway.”
Revik scanned faces, his jaw hardening in the silence.
He didn’t need to say it. They already understood.
There was a good chance none of them were coming back from this trip.
If he couldn’t take Shadow and Cass out, he’d already given orders to Balidor to use the last contingency to take out their base in the event that he failed. That meant any building where they might be hiding, any ship they might be fleeing in, any submarine or land vehicle.
Anything.
Revik told Balidor to nuke them, if he had to.
For that reason, Revik deliberately phrased his personnel preferences as a request, not as an operational order. For this kind of run, he would take volunteers only, even in terms of Jon and Wreg. Seeing that understanding reflected in the eyes that met his, along with the answer that stood there, consistent across every face, Revik only nodded.
“Fine,” he said. He looked at Balidor directly. “Have transport ready, like we talked about. We might not need it, but it’d be nice to be prepared.”
“Of course, Illustrious Sword,” Balidor said, his voice holding an overt deference. “I will take care of it. As well as transport for your leadership team to the rendezvous.”
Revik grunted, flashing briefly to the two of them circling one another in the tank for some reason, when Balidor had threatened to kick the shit out of him...and Revik had told him he’d kill him the first chance he got. Pushing the thought out of his mind before he could follow the thread, or let himself remember exactly why he’d wanted so badly to hurt the other man, he turned away from the Adhipan leader.
Revik made his mind blank again, or as much as he could.
“Arm yourselves,” he said. Focusing back on the shelves, he made himself look at the guns lying there as he continued to speak in a toneless voice. “Say your goodbyes. Get whatever you need to bring with you. Take care of whatever you need to take care of before we go. I want everyone with me fitted with full combat tech.”
He picked up another Glock, opened and checked the chamber.
“...We leave in twenty,” he said, clicking it shut. “With or without you.”
DESPITE WHAT REVIK said about Jorag driving, Revik changed his mind at the last minute, and had them go by foot. Something about driving there hit his light funny.
Not quite ‘bomb in the chassis’ funny, but something felt off.
He wasn’t in the mood to question that feeling. All he had left, really, was that thread running through his light, pushing him to finish this.
They walked through the park instead.
Revik knew they would still probably end up arriving through the front door of the seventy-five story business complex and apartment building, if only to deal with the less deadly of the five or six OBE fields that protected the walls and windows of the Tower. Even so, Revik didn’t feel like painting a target on himself too readily before that moment.
Driving up to the front door in a caravan of Humvees felt like that target, true or not.
Anyway, he wanted the extra time to think...without standing still.
Regardless of tremors in his light, warnings from beyond the Barrier or whatever else, Revik didn’t really expect much resistance to their entry of the building itself, not given the bullshit games Cass and Shadow seemed to enjoy playing with his head.
They wanted him to come.
That could be the only meaning of the transmission from Cass to their suite in the hotel. They were fucking with him, dangling his kid before him, trying to get him to lose his cool and come after them. I
n other words, he was pretty much doing exactly what they wanted.
He knew that. He didn’t much care.
Revik still had some hope he could get past their machinations anyway. He knew Shadow, and the way Shadow thought. Revik knew he bluffed, although he tended to do so only with an intimate knowledge of his opponents. Revik knew himself better now, too. Thanks to Allie, he knew more about what he’d become, and what had happened to him during those early years. He knew a lot more about his emotional Achilles’ heels, too. From that, he even knew more or less what Shadow would expect him to do.
Revik didn’t know if he could avoid being predictable in all respects. Truthfully, he’d counted on Allie for that, in the past. Allie had a tendency to think about things differently than most seers anyway, probably because she’d been raised human...or maybe because she didn’t have a military background, like most of the seers Revik knew.
Or maybe just because she was the Bridge.
Allie wasn’t here now, though. Revik would have to count on surprising Menlim some other way. He figured the easiest way to do that was to try and stay connected to whatever he could feel of Allie behind the Barrier.
So far, however, that wasn’t much.
He knew that supposedly a ‘blackout’ period went into effect directly after a person died, during which they couldn’t communicate much with the other side.
He knew that, but he still kept his light attuned to hers.
He supposed some part of him still hoped she would come out of that blackout by the time he really needed her. If not, he’d have to rely on Balidor and Tarsi to throw wrenches into the works. Both of them seemed to understand this about him, and why he needed this from them, Tarsi especially...although she’d been unusually reticent, even for her, when she heard about Allie’s death.
She hadn’t even offered condolences.
Then again, he hadn’t been much use to her when Vash died, either. Nor had he been much comfort to Jon or anyone else that night...or this one, for that matter.
Revik didn’t really understand his wife’s relationship with his blood aunt, anyway. Like Allie’s relationship with Vash himself, it always felt like none of Revik’s business. She was the Bridge. She would have relationships with these high-ranked seers, including Vash, including his aunt...relationships that had nothing to do with Revik himself.
Revik could feel these things, these connections, without understanding them.
Luckily, he had a personality that didn’t require him to understand them.
Maybe that was the military background too, bleeding over into the rest of his life, like it tended to do. He cared about his relationship with her. The rest of Allie’s life was hers to lead however she chose.
Vash once called him ‘wise’ for taking that approach, which mostly made Revik laugh.
The old man could be monumentally full of shit, at times.
Still, Revik wished Vash was here now, too.
He supposed he would be seeing him soon enough.
Revik’s eyes scanned the edges of the trees as he thought it, his fingers gripping the holster of the gun that hung off his left hip. So far, they hadn’t run into a single damned thing out here, which struck Revik as odd. Kind of like the silence before a big storm, something about the fact that they hadn’t been interrupted on their walk even once, not even by some cocky hooligans, looking for food, felt ominous to him.
It also gave his mind room to drift.
The idea of being with Vash again, with his mother, with his father, his sister, Elashi, his friend, Kuchta...it did soften things somewhat, when he let himself go there. He couldn’t conceive of what that might be like, seeing those people in that other place. He knew he gave those meetings physical attributes they wouldn’t share with being alive down here, but it was all he had. Unlike Allie seemed to, even from a very young age, Revik couldn’t remember what life had been like in the spaces beyond the Barrier.
He could glimpse those places, the beautiful landscapes, mostly with her, but they were like paintings to him, like smoke, too far away to feel real to him.
But it was too early to let himself think about that, either.
Balidor, Yumi and Tarsi continued to work the construct side of things. Revik still suspected Jon was his best hope for Cass herself, in the event he needed to get past her defenses, in the psychological sense, that is.
Then there was Terian.
Funnily enough, despite all of his fears around Shadow getting Feigran active once more as Terian, Revik had a harder time factoring ‘The Rook’ into the equation in a way that made sense to him. Although he could say he knew Terian far better than either of the other two, personally or otherwise, Revik didn’t know how to catalogue him precisely, in terms of threats.
Truthfully, Revik couldn’t wrap his mind around a Terian who answered to either Cass or Shadow, much less to both of them at once.
Part of his mind also still saw him as Feigran.
Feigran in a Terian mask.
Even under Galaith, Terian had never been very good at following orders. This strangely compliant and back-seat Terian felt like a different breed than the man Revik had known and still remembered from their checkered past together. Revik didn’t know whether to dismiss this version of Terian, to expect him to emerge as extra muscle on the telekinetic front, or to view him as the usual wildcard the old Terian always posed...capable of doing the unexpected thing in the least likely of circumstances.
Tabling that thought, Revik focused on what he did know, instead.
He knew they wanted him to come.
He knew they wanted him there, in person.
Why they wanted that of him, Revik didn’t know precisely. He could guess, but none of those guesses satisfied him, or felt right to him in the segments of his light that still trusted those less logical impulses and instincts. They must know by now they’d killed Allie...and therefore, that they’d killed him, too. A ticking clock hung over Revik’s head, one they must know would make him desperate...or highly motivated, at the very least.
They’d dangled the kid in front of him. They must have known how intensely he’d react to that, especially given how much she looked like his now-late wife.
They’d obviously meant to use the child to bring him there.
But why? That part still fought with reason in the back of his mind.
The logical parts of his mind could come up with reasons, of course. The strongest of those, in terms of detailing motives he knew Shadow himself might harbor, concerned his reproductive ability. Quite possibly, Elaerian or not, Terian was sterile. A hell of a lot of Sark males were born sterile; it was highly probable that a good chunk of First Race males couldn’t reproduce, either.
Perhaps that made Revik even more valuable than his wife, in Shadow’s eyes.
If they still hadn’t figured out a viable means of cloning Elaerian, given their touchier light-to-matter relationship and the inability to pull a soul with the proper attributes from the lands beyond the Barrier, then Revik might seem their best bet in breeding more telekinetics. Maybe they thought they could get enough biological matter off him to create at least one more Elaerian child, this time with Cassandra herself, maybe.
That didn’t feel quite right to Revik either, though.
No, there was something else.
Something they wanted from him. Something less obvious, perhaps. Maybe Menlim had done something to Revik’s light that they hadn’t caught, that eluded Vash and the rest of the Council when they tried to strip the Dreng’s influence from him this last time.
Revik knew that resonance lived there still, in some part of his structure...it might always live there, given how he’d been raised, unable to escape the Dreng’s light for so many of his formative years. He knew Shadow would be doing the same thing to his daughter now, exactly what had been done to Revik himself.
Some part of him choked on that thought, too.
His daughter.
Their daughter
.
The thought of her drowning in the light of the Dreng, being forced to resonate with it, to become one with those hard, silver strands...it made him sick. Beyond sick. The understanding that those images brought felt like a kind of hell all of their own.
He would kill her first. Let her come back here some other way, if she so chose, but not like this. He wouldn’t leave her here, like he’d been left. He wouldn’t force her to suffer a life like the one he’d led. He wouldn’t leave her in a place where all she could do was pay and pay and pay for the debt of having been left...the debt for what she would become under the Dreng’s care.
No, if he couldn’t get her out, he’d kill her.
More to the point, Balidor would kill her for him.
His daughter would leave with him and Allie...with both of them. Let her come back later, maybe when Allie and Revik themselves did...maybe even with them, in some other part of this life-wave. Some quieter, gentler moment in history.
Daughter, sister, friend...
Clenching his jaw to fight back the swell of emotion that rose at the thought, Revik wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He blurted the question to Wreg before he’d let himself think about what he was saying.
“Where did you put her?” he said, without slowing his strides. “Allie?”
Revik felt the other man turn, although he couldn’t see him in the dark of the night sky over that segment of park. He felt Wreg stare at him blankly, also walking across the same patch of lawn, among the trees of Central Park East. The Chinese infiltrator seemed totally confused by the question at first, unsure what Revik had even asked him.
It ended up being Jon who answered, who walked on Wreg’s other side.
Allie's War Season Four Page 34