Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  Meaning, her nephew likely expected to be calling on Adhipan Balidor to blow up the building, once he’d verified the relevant parties were inside.

  Tarsi understood his motivation there.

  She didn’t judge him for it, not even in the abstract.

  Truthfully, Tarsi couldn’t reasonably expect her nephew to care about much of anything at this point, other than to protect what remained of his family. Even so, she knew someone had to. Someone had to care, and the Bridge had given that job to her. Clearly, the others didn’t know how to prioritize the course of the Displacement and the humans they’d been brought here to assist, either, not even her favorite pupil, Adhipan Balidor.

  Maybe it wasn’t even their job to care about such things, not anymore. Perhaps their role was to support her nephew in his, and to play out this little drama of Shadow’s and War’s.

  Maybe it really was her job. Maybe it was the real reason no one had killed her yet.

  After all, Tarsi’s name was on that list, too. First wave. Warrior.

  This had to be the first wave, Tarsi more or less figured...as much as such a thing could be figured by those who didn’t have the gift or curse of true prescience. Tarsi herself had only met two true prescients, in the entire of her existence in this incarnation...and both in the last one hundred years.

  Tarsi herself never had that gift, thank the merciful gods above.

  She was here, though, not dead, not moved on to the places behind the Barrier, so still part of the fight. Moreover, the Bridge had given her a job to do. Maybe from where the Bridge had been for the last few months, she’d seen all of this coming. Maybe that’s why she blew off the two of them, Tarsi and Vash, in hatching this crazy idea of hers.

  Tarsi found herself wishing she knew a prescient now.

  Of course, she did know one...technically.

  But last Tarsi knew, that person was far away, and Tarsi didn’t exactly have a means of reaching her easily...assuming she was even still alive. Her and her mate could have been killed in the craziness following the plague of C2-77. Hell, they could have been killed years ago, for all Tarsi knew, although somehow, Tarsi doubted that, too.

  Still, Tarsi hadn’t heard from that person in years, so anything was possible.

  ‘First wave’ had been written by that person’s name on the Displacement lists, too, but ‘First wave’ had been written by a lot of names who hadn’t lived to see the start of that historical event. Chaos still reigned in the physical realms, for good and for bad. Nothing that could be, ever happened without question or doubt or struggle. Free will created a randomness that defied even the most rigid patterns of even the most entrenched momentums set in motion over the generations. Free will always would trump fate, no matter how certain that fate seemed.

  Tarsi remembered enough to feel reasonably confident in that fact, although it was easy to forget that, when one looked at the intensity of some of those momentums in the Barrier’s waves.

  It had been years since Tarsi had spoken to her, at any rate...years and years.

  Tarsi had been prevented from speaking to her, for the same reasons she’d been prevented from speaking to any who held secrets that couldn’t be allowed to fall into the wrong hands. Tarsi had agreed to those restrictions, of course, but more than anything, Tarsi wished she could ask that prescient’s opinion on unfolding events now.

  If nothing else, she’d love to have a discussion with her sister about just who put that list of Displacement names in that safety deposit box. Whether her suspicions on that score were correct or not, Tarsi knew without a doubt it hadn’t been Menlim.

  Thinking about that now was nothing more than indulgence, too. Whatever role her rather elusive sister might play in the end game, right now, Tarsi needed to be focused on the job she’d been given by the Bridge before she died.

  Tarsi had pressing matters in the present to attend to.

  Standing up on legs that creaked a bit, reminding her and irritating her about the frailties and limitations of physical bodies all in the same set of breaths, Tarsi bent down only long enough to pick up the mahogany cane her attendant in the Himalayas, Hannah, had carved for her and presented to her at their last meeting. Knowing that Tarsi had been about to go on a long trip, first to the Pamir and then to New York, to preside over the Bridge and Sword’s wedding ceremony, Hannah had also woven a thick cape for her, out of sheep’s wool and dyed a midnight blue. The funny girl had been worried Tarsi might be cold in New York, after leaving the Himalayas. Clearly, she’d been watching too many movies on the feed player her husband got for their cabin in the valley.

  Smiling at bit as she remembered Hannah, Tarsi used the cane to navigate her old body to the door of the room. She wondered idly if any of them would notice her leaving, and if so, if they would try to stop her.

  None did. They were too busy.

  Young people, she couldn’t help thinking with a shake of her head.

  Walking down the carpeted corridor to the elevators, Tarsi reached the business foyer by the double row of doors and hit the call button for up. Leaning on her varnished cane, she waited. It seemed to take an interminable time for the ping that came to signal the elevator car’s arrival, then another oddly-lengthy delay before the doors to that car actually opened.

  Once they had, Tarsi walked inside the mirrored box and squinted down at the numbers until she found the one she wanted. Pressing it, she retreated to the back of the car, resting her rear end on the brass railing to take some of the weight off her swollen ankles.

  She should know better than to sit in a chair for so long. She should have been sitting cross-legged, on the floor. That way, her feet didn’t swell up, leaving her half-crippled the next time she needed to walk somewhere. Vash wasn’t around anymore to jab at her about being old, so she had to remember these things on her own.

  Thinking about him brought a smile to her lips, along with that paler regret.

  Not regret for him, of course. Regret that she got stuck here in an old body without anyone to share being old with.

  Somewhere from the space behind the Barrier, she felt him laughing at her.

  That laughter came closer then, so close he might have been in the elevator car next to her.

  Laugh it up, you old fool, she muttered, tapping her cane against the floor of the metal car. When we come down next time, I’ll be younger than you...then I’ll be the one to laugh. I’ll leave you and your old bones, find myself a nice, young stud...

  Vash only laughed harder at that.

  Perhaps we can come while they are still here? Vash sent, his light flickering with amusement. Let them be the old folks for a change? Then I can be the young stud for you...

  Tarsi smiled, shaking her head and rolling her eyes, seer-fashion.

  Always the optimist. That man was so optimistic it almost made him simple-minded.

  Vash laughed again, showering her in a faint, affectionate glow of warm light.

  Let me get through this incarnation first, she grumbled at him. Then we’ll talk about your relative stud value or lack thereof...

  Hurry up, then, he urged her. I’m bored up here.

  Liar, she chided him.

  Even so, he conceded shamelessly, still laughing. It would be more fun with you...

  Tarsi grunted at his words, but another smile touched her lips, in spite of herself.

  The elevator car slid to a stop. The doors pinged, seemingly faster that time than they had when she’d been waiting for them to open from the outside.

  As those doors slowly began to open, they revealed another accent-lit corridor. This one looked decidedly different than the business lobby version she’d left behind on the forty-third floor. Instead of transparent, organic-paned dividers with etched glass on each of the three sides she faced, Tarsi saw plastered and wallpapered walls leading forward in a single, long corridor, with beige carpet and only a few numbered doors.

  Without so much as a hesitation, Tarsi walked out of the
elevator. After walking almost the length of that long hallway, she stopped in front of the second door on her left, which thankfully, the younger Adhipan left unguarded.

  Like most seers of her rank, Tarsi didn’t need a key. Placing her hand on the wall panel next to where a key card would go, she concentrated for only a few seconds before managing to convince the organic machine to open the latch for her.

  A soft click told her when the AI in the machine complied.

  Thanking that fragment of life and presence from behind the Barrier, Tarsi pushed open the real wood door, glancing around at the quiet space. Floor lighting ignited as she walked in, marking a dim trail around the walls and under the large windows and sliding glass doors that led to an outside balcony. The lighting remained quiet, as she didn’t use the voice command for the overhead lights and the fireplace had burned itself all the way down, leaving her with just enough illumination that she could find her way to the single bedroom in the four-room suite.

  She entered that same bedroom without preamble.

  Even so, when she caught sight of the body on the bed, Tarsi frowned.

  Something in the utter stillness of the scene caught somewhere in the back of her heart. Not quite regret, (since she’d stopped fearing death aeons ago), but more a tenser sort of irritation at all of the complexities inherent in the realities of physical incarnation.

  It all seemed like a lot of bother to her.

  Maybe you’re just old, Vash smiled.

  You buzz off, you, she grumped at him. Can’t you see I’m working...?

  I see no such thing, he sent humorously. Thus is my burden in being here, dear one.

  Maybe you’re not looking hard enough, Tarsi sent back, sharper.

  Perhaps, he conceded politely. But kindly permit me to suggest...you might wish to hurry things along a bit, if that is the case? I’m afraid this is not an ideal time for you to be engaging in philosophical rumination of whatever kind...however astute...

  Whatever, she grumped back, using one of the Bridge’s expressions.

  Switching to a more dated, seer gesture, she flicked her fingers at him in annoyance in the dimly lit room.

  She had to concede his point, however.

  Walking over to the bed, she didn’t hesitate that time, but sat down right beside the prone body of the Bridge, dimpling the mattress enough to set that body at a slight angle to the nearest wall, which housed a door to the suite’s one bathroom. Gripping the thick handle of her cane in both hands, Tarsi focused briefly down on that body, letting her eyes fall out of focus as she scanned it with her aleimi, assessing its overall condition, as well as what she’d felt from the Barrier when the Bridge died, a few hours previous.

  Once she had the lay of the land, Tarsi clicked back out, satisfied.

  It was exactly as the Bridge told her it would be.

  Tarsi hadn’t mentioned to the others that she’d been talking to the Bridge ever since Jon pulled her out of that coma...much less that she’d been talking to her frequently, nearly every day. In the same way, Tarsi hadn’t mentioned to Balidor or her nephew or any of the other seers that she’d glimpsed the Bridge on her way out of this plane, either, or that they’d spoken then, too. The Bridge hadn’t asked her outright to keep that information secret, not in so many words.

  But then, she hadn’t needed to say it.

  Tarsi already knew.

  Sighing a bit, Tarsi patted the child’s face. Down here, she was a child still, regardless of how she appeared on the other side.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing, Esteemed One,” she muttered into the silence of the dark bedroom.

  Above her, Vash chuckled, but Tarsi ignored that, too.

  Stilling her light, Tarsi focused her concentration for real.

  She’d spent years honing that concentration, years building the structures she’d need to conduct such work, raising her actual sight rank first and then moving on to raise her potential, as well, through much more difficult and painstaking years of work, most of those spent alone, or with only occasional visits from kind souls like Hannah, and Hannah’s mother before her.

  Before even that time, however, Tarsi could see how she’d prepared for work such as this, especially in her many years of working as an infiltrator––even as the infiltrator of her time, serving in the same capacity as Adhipan Balidor did now, only handing that mantle off to him some two hundred years previous.

  Whatever her role, whatever her title––infiltrator, wife, mother, sister, aunt, recluse or adept––Tarsi had worked most of her life in this task, long before she knew it might be needed.

  As if in consideration of that fact, the Barrier space around her grew utterly still.

  Tarsi worked in the silence of the stars, far away from the construct of the Dreng.

  Far away from her nephew, as well as from any one of the seers she loved and had patiently trained over the years, some of whom resided here in this very hotel, and worked frantically to try and save her nephew’s life from the lower floors.

  Tarsi worked to that end, too, only in a different way.

  The portions of each of the living worlds that saw her engaged in that task, in this dimension and the rest, held their breath in the silence that she inhabited.

  The room fell into silence, too, or as close to silence as could occur in such a complex, physical plane of existence. Only her shallow breathing remained audible over the hum of the floor lights, and the moving components in the walls, and the gentle tick of the conditioned air piped in through vents in the floor.

  Above her, only Vash chuckled, and him, she ignored.

  COME UP HERE, child, the voice said. I need you...

  Dante looked around the room, confused. She stared at her monitor, and for a brief instant, she could have sworn she saw that old woman’s face, the one with the black hair and strange, unlined but somehow ancient-looking face.

  Everyone said the old woman was some kind of relative of the Sword.

  Not his mother, but maybe some kind of great-aunt...or distant cousin, maybe.

  Maybe even his grandmother, given how old she looked. It made sense; they both had those same, eerie, colorless eyes, like panes of glass, only with a crystal-like quality to them. Dante had really looked at the Sword’s eyes once, while he’d been talking to her about something or other on one of their communications from San Francisco. She’d found them both spooky and kind of beautiful. Instead of veins and whatever else in the background of those clear irises, she’d seen only a faint sheen of light.

  Dante glanced around the conference room, looking for the old woman.

  She could have sworn she saw her sitting on a chair in the back, just a little while ago...although maybe that had been longer ago than she realized.

  In any case, the woman wasn’t here now.

  Dante shook her head, giving another quick scan of the conference room with her eyes, feeling her lips pucker in puzzlement.

  She saw a bunch of sweaty-looking seers hovered over machines.

  The main power had gone down again, so they turned off the circulated air so they could use the generators to power the machines they needed to run the op. Dante felt sweaty, too, and kind of gross. Her T-shirt was sticking to her armpits and her back, from all the bodies crammed into a single space. Ironically, another storm brewed outside those walls, and she knew that if they could have opened any of these damned windows, it probably would cool off quick in here, if also get a lot wetter and louder and windier and whatever else.

  Dante looked back at her monitor, which showed a blueprint of Gossett Tower East, the real name of the building where the Sword had gone with Jon and a bunch of the bigger badasses among the seers. She’d seen them on their way out the door; Dante had been part of the group watching as they left out the lobby doors. Deklan yelled at her for that, telling her to get her human butt upstairs, and back on the comps, but she’d wanted to see the others out. She figured this had to be a pretty big deal, the Sword go
ing out like that, primed for some serious fucking-up-of-shit, even compared to earlier that day.

  Him and his icers had been tricked out, too, wearing those swivel harnesses for guns, anti-grav boots, rappelling gear, stunners, armored vests...more than enough ammo and grenades to take down a few floors in one of the glass and steel monstrosities lining the park, even if they didn’t have the Sword’s uber-mind shit for the big guns.

  She’d seen Wreg there, with Jon. He’d looked hotter than hell.

  Both of them had, really, even with how messed up they obviously were from the Bridge dying like that.

  Even as she thought it, that pressure returned to her mind.

  I need you, girl...hurry up.

  That time, Dante found herself rising abruptly to her feet.

  “Hey.” Dante spoke up almost before she knew she meant to. Once she had, she felt her face warm when three or four seers looked over. She looked directly at the gray-eyed seer, the one who’d been in charge since the others got back. She cleared her throat.

  “...Balidor, right?” she said.

  The seer took her face and body in with one flickering glance. The look wasn’t dismissive, like the ones she’d gotten from some of the big shot seers around here...at least the ones who didn’t know her. He looked plenty distracted, though.

  “Did you find the schematics?” he said at once.

  “Yeah,” Dante said, exhaling. “...And no. I mean, I got ‘em. But they’re old. I’m guessing the newer ones got pulled. These are like...” She scanned the dates on the code. “...Fifteen years old. So before the OBEs and organic walls and whatever else.”

  Balidor frowned. Unfolding his arms, he walked over to her, resting his hand on the same chair back where Dante’s rested. He leaned down to gaze down at the same screen she’d been staring at, too. After his eyes scanned the blueprints displayed on her monitor for a few seconds, he muttered what sounded like a curse in some other language. Not the seer one, which Dante recognized now, even if she couldn’t always understand it. Something else.