But even that didn’t matter anymore. Even revenge felt hollow. Pointless.
He lay there, thinking about Allie. Thinking about their daughter, what he’d be leaving her to, if he put the gun to his temple now...if he left her with these people.
Would Allie ever forgive him for that, either?
He lay there, paralyzed with indecision.
He should kill himself. Or maybe, quite probably, that would be playing into their hands, too. He’d always done what they wanted, even when he thought he wasn’t.
“Please don’t die, nephew,” Menlim said, his voice low. “Believe it or not, I will permit it, if you still wish it. But I would implore you to hear me out, first. To make an informed decision, with all of the relevant information at your disposal...”
Revik felt nausea overcome him, pain, feeling a thread of that silver light penetrate his aleimi as his uncle probed him in silence. Fear slammed his light...a kind of despair as he realized the Dreng really believed they weren’t through with him yet, even after all this time.
He stared up at those faces, and yet the only one he could see was that of the child Cass had been holding in her arms in that wall monitor of the suite he’d shared with his wife. He could see her clear eyes, rimmed with green. Allie’s eyes, at least in shape. Allie’s mouth, although she hadn’t grown into it yet. Allie’s face.
It was a cruel image, a betrayal of biology...even of light.
Don’t die, a voice whispered in his head. Don’t die, Revik...please. Please...
Without his willing it, tears came to his eyes.
He lay there, looking up at them, and felt lost, like someone had ripped open his chest. He thought he’d managed to close it down finally, after he found her in that house in San Francisco, only to have her open her eyes and hurt him again, even more. Then he thought it was really gone...really and truly, gone forever...when Allie died in his arms in that hotel suite. He knew, finally and for good, that it was finally over.
He’d come here out of duty, not out of love.
It was too much, what they wanted of him. It had always been too much.
“Gods,” he managed, choking on the word. “Just kill me. It’s over, isn’t it? Just fucking kill me...end it.”
Menlim’s mouth firmed into a small line.
He exchanged looks with Terian, then with Cass.
Terian frowned down at Revik, a strange, unreadable look on his narrow face, turning almost puzzled inside those amber-colored eyes. Cass only smiled, her light brown irises glinting with a kind of triumph, as if she’d expected this, or perhaps only hoped the end would happen this way. Menlim looked away from both of them.
Gazing down at Revik, he made a concessionary gesture with one hand.
“If you wish it,” Menlim purred softly, sadly. “...We will, nephew. I vow it.”
22
SNIPER
BALIDOR COULD FEEL them now.
He climbed the stairs steadily, using the quiet setting on the anti-grav boots, even as he used the sensors on the gun via his headset to look for signs of any movement ahead. So far, he hadn’t picked up anything other than what the breach alarm told him about the roof. The security fields below that level all appeared to be intact...well, intact for those floors as high as Balidor had already climbed, at least.
It didn’t make sense, not if Ditrini’s people had been the ones to take Tarsi and Dante, as well as Allie’s body. From all appearances that Balidor could see, Ditrini’s people hadn’t yet even determined how to reach the lower levels of the hotel from the roof without getting fried in the secondary security measures.
Even so, Balidor’s nerves remained taut. He continued to move cautiously, if quickly, towards the roof. He didn’t have a lot of time.
He could feel that, too.
He knew they were being screwed with...he just couldn’t tell in what way, precisely, not for sure. The Sword and his people had gone completely dark. Tarsi was gone, either off on her own, or, more likely, kidnapped by the very person Balidor was going upstairs to confront––which likely meant that Ditrini and his people had far greater access to the design of the hotel and its security systems than Balidor really wanted to contemplate. Anale could have provided such things, Balidor supposed. Or she simply could have found a way to bypass the upper floor DNA-coded security systems for the elevators, maybe by providing herself with clearance somehow, as well as clearance for Surli, Dante and whoever else.
Allie was dead.
Balidor let that thought die, too.
Not right now. He suspected none of them really could afford to think about the ramifications of losing the Bridge right now. Anyway, all along they’d known it to be a possibility. Even on the list, she and Dehgoies were categorized as ‘first wave’ rather than ‘first and second wave’ the way Jon and a lot of the others had been.
And anyway, they already knew people on the lists, whether human or seer, could be killed before they could do a damned thing in either wave. Shadow had eliminated a good ten or fifteen percent of the humans on the list already, and at least three of the seers they knew of, probably the only three the Dreng hadn’t managed to recruit outright.
Balidor had just passed the landing for the sixtieth floor.
Only three flights from the roof now.
He’d been forced to stop on fifty-nine, to log in with his own security clearance codes to get past the secondary fields, and reprogram the grid to both allow him in and to short out if anyone else tried to cross over into the lower levels of the hotel.
Initially, that field had been designed to keep Allie and Revik’s floor off-limits to anyone without clearance, in addition to the key cards they’d coded to the handful who had full-time access. The latter list had been short. Other than Allie and Revik themselves, and Wreg and Jon, who also shared a suite on the sixtieth floor, the only other names included Balidor himself, Tarsi and Yumi. Anyone else had to obtain temporary codes to get them through the gates––or to ride the elevators above fifty-eight.
But most of the security protocols had been designed primarily with either a sub-level or roof breach in mind. No one really believed that any serious intruders would rely on the elevators, although they should have, Balidor thought, especially after Dorje.
Balidor now had the priority grid rigged in reverse of its original settings, mainly to buy more time for the evacuating seers and humans on the lower floors to get clear.
As far as the sixtieth floor itself, well...there was no longer anything there to protect.
Balidor could feel strange things happening to the roof fields, even from here.
He felt strange things happening in the Barrier, too. He tried to piece them together, and to unravel them from the broader construct over New York City itself, but it wasn’t easy. He felt shimmerings of Tarsi, Vash, Allie, the Sword, Menlim, Terian, Cass. He couldn’t make sense of any of it, although he probably would have said he felt the Four more strongly than any of them, meaning flavors of Allie, Revik, Terian and Cass.
He still couldn’t understand what he had witnessed exactly, in that suite on the sixtieth floor. Allie seemed almost aware in those few seconds, almost like she’d been with them again.
But then, with a bizarre lack of fanfare, she’d just been dead.
Whatever Balidor thought her passing might be like, he hadn’t expected that. Even after that mess with the wires, and everything Dehgoies had gone through with her in the past six or so months, Balidor expected something more...
Well, more worthy of her, he supposed.
He certainly hadn’t expected to see her fried out like an overtaxed computer console that gets plugged into the wrong power source.
Shoving it out of his mind, Balidor returned his focus to the immediate.
His immediate consisted of Ditrini. That psychopath being here explained one thing at least.
Ditrini was the only seer alive Balidor could easily imagine wanting Allie’s corpse.
Which me
ant there was a good chance he’d kidnapped Tarsi, too. And possibly Anale, although Balidor still couldn’t help speculating that Anale might have been recruited by someone working with the Dreng. The Surli aspect could be explained by Ditrini’s presence, since Surli worked for the Lao Hu once upon a time. Surli could have been left behind deliberately prior to the tsunami, to keep him inside the hotel as a plant.
At this point, Anale and Surli could have affiliations with any one of the groups that circled around Shadow, however––Salinse’s rebellion, the Lao Hu, Shadow himself, Cass, the old woman, Xarethe, someone in SCARB or FEMA or Black Arrow. The different groups comprising Shadow’s network had become so multifaceted yet seemingly connected and working more or less in similar directions, Balidor almost couldn’t pull them apart anymore.
He remembered Vash telling him this would happen, too.
Vash told him that in times of relative peace, the different factions allied with the Dreng could seem to be in direct competition with one another, even in direct opposition...up to and including being on opposite sides of the same war. They could conflict openly, even annihilate one another, like, more recently, Shadow using the Lao Hu to wipe out the rebels and enslave their leadership. Or like Terian murdering Galaith, or even the Rooks fighting the Nazis.
At other times, those factions would come together, working as a unified force.
Vash told him that when that happened, war would soon follow.
Real war.
Balidor realized he’d never really seen that kind of war, although he’d approached it during World War I. As much as those lines shifted in the sand over the years, crossing and re-crossing one another as they pushed history in different and seemingly conflicting directions, their overall goals remained compatible, but separate. As a result, all of those different groups under the Dreng utilized different pressure points over the years, resulting in different outcomes and power struggles. Their long game still remained perfectly aligned, but enough movement remained between the cracks for the Adhipan to countermove and hold them back.
Now, all of those distinctions had crumbled.
They had perhaps even crumbled for those peripheral groups, like the Lao Hu, which never fell neatly into one side of the divide or the other. Perhaps now they would have to choose...all of them, choose...which side they would fight for in the end.
That appeared to be part of the intention of the Dreng, too. Vash had stressed that about them more than once, and in particular, about Shadow.
The long game. For the Dreng, it always came back to that.
Of course, Vash, being Vash, joked that the light ultimately played the long game, too.
Their goals remained more or less consistent, too, if simpler overall. The goals of the light also provided significantly more room for variation and deviance, since the only structure they emphasized had to do with free will and truth. Vash said that those different threads would unify on the side of light at the end, too...pulling back all of their children, meaning those who, in their inmost hearts, wanted the light to prevail.
Vash also joked that some of those children might have been dragged through the mud in the intervening years...and that they might return kicking and screaming...but that unless their inmost hearts had changed, they would eventually return to their origins, just like the children of the Dreng would return to their origins, too.
At the time, Balidor assumed he meant Dehgoies...The Sword.
Others probably fit that bill, too, more than Balidor himself could see clearly.
Part of the Displacement had always been this separating out, this pulling apart the gray into sharper shades of black and white.
Anale had been with the Seven for many years.
Then again, Dorje had been with the Seven for many years, as well.
Having Dorje turn out to be a long-term plant of the Dreng, circumventing their numerous aleimic scans and security protocols and whatever else, continued to be a game-changer for Balidor, in terms of his own assumptions. He could no longer consider anyone exempt from corruption or ill intent...no matter how loyal they seemed, or how much Balidor himself might personally like them. Hell, Dorje had been dating Jon for several years.
He’d been part of their inner circle, a trusted insider. None of them suspected a damned thing until he murdered Vash right in front of them.
But it was pointless to worry about Anale now...at least until he knew something concrete. Whether she’d been murdered, kidnapped, recruited or activated as a sleeper agent, Balidor suspected he would know the truth, soon enough.
Even in the chaos of the breach alarms and the evacuations, Balidor thankfully managed to maintain links to Holo, Vikram and the others. Via the sensors, he continued to follow their progress as Deklan, Tenzi and Ullysa worked to empty out the lower levels of the hotel, starting with the humans and seers on the list and establishing contact with the unofficial leaders among the refugees in the hotel’s west wing, so the remainder of the refugees could start making their own arrangements for transport and evac.
Everyone assumed the hotel would be attacked from the street soon, too.
Pushing that out of his mind, Balidor shifted his attention back to the roof.
He’d probably only get a few good shots in, before they retaliated.
He’d have to make them count.
The number of seers the scanners discerned on the roof, while not insignificant, wasn’t large enough to be a threat to the population of the hotel as a whole. Balidor knew Ditrini and whoever else would be warping and obscuring those numbers...but he also knew the likely limits of those effects, given their geographical isolation to the single part of the hotel.
The roof, while large, simply wasn’t big enough to house an army.
Since they hadn’t immediately left following whatever extractions they may have accomplished of Tarsi, Dante and whoever else, Ditrini’s people had to be there for a strike operation of some kind, too. Possibilities included Ditrini using the roof to pick off outliers for a street-level hit on the hotel...or to prevent them from using the roof as an escape route, in the event of a full-scale attack from the ground floor or below.
It almost didn’t matter which of these were true for Balidor’s purposes. He just hoped Tarsi and Dante were still alive.
He knew how Ditrini’s people had reached the roof by now, too.
They hadn’t taken planes, helicopters, or even parachutes.
Instead, they had rather ingeniously climbed up from one of the lower floors that didn’t have the protection of the OBE, using zip lines and hook-launchers from the adjacent Four Seasons hotel. Then, reaching a balcony on the sixty-first floor, instead of going down, which might have made more sense, given their targets––and which would have fried them on the spot, incidentally, given the added security Balidor had built into Revik and Allie’s floor alone, on the outside of the building as well as inside––they elected to go up, using grappling and anti-grav hooks and nets to climb up to the roof, where they’d blown out the OBE transformers at the source. The fact that they managed most of that without tripping the breach alarms told Balidor they’d found a way to hack the construct, as well.
Truthfully, they might not have discovered Ditrini’s people even now, if Hondo hadn’t been up there, looking for evidence as to where and when Tarsi and the others disappeared. No one could find evidence that Tarsi, Anale or Surli left through the lobby or one of the lower floors. Since the lower levels had better surveillance and more people who might have witnessed an exit, Balidor ordered Hondo upstairs to check the roof.
Even so, to call Ditrini’s approach ‘risky’ would be to understate it a lot.
It also showed a certain kind of intelligence, if nothing else by not underestimating the Adhipan security measures on the upper floors.
The weather couldn’t have made the climb fun, though. The wind outside the hotel had picked up in the last thirty or so minutes...but even before then, when Ditrini and his peopl
e must have engaged in the riskiest part of their climb and dismantling of the OBE, they would have been blasted by unpredictable and strong, high gusts, as well as being blinded by precipitation and smoke and whatever else was coming from this Greenland-based storm by now, as well as the fires in the park and other parts of the city.
Balidor tried to keep a screen open via the headset to keep tabs on the weather, too...as well as the river and ocean tides, given their probable options for escape in the event of a street-level attack. He kept a screen open for any news from Dehgoies and the others, too...although he tried not to think about how long it had been since he’d last heard news of their whereabouts in the Tower.
Too much time had passed.
Some of that was his own fault, as he tried to find ways to stall invasion of the hotel from the upper levels while the others escaped. Balidor had been setting his own, less obvious traps for the past forty minutes, hoping to at least slow their progress to the lower floors, in the event he couldn’t stop them outright.
He reached the final landing below the door to the roof even as he thought this last.
After pausing and listening for a moment, he climbed the rest of the way up. He hesitated only a heartbeat before laying his ear against the metal. He kept his aleimi close to his body, behind a shield.
Nothing. He couldn’t hear anything.
Glancing to his left, he saw the panel into the ventilation system, just like he’d remembered. Keeping his light behind the shield, Balidor carefully touched his headset.
“Deklan.” Balidor used subvocals, keeping totally silent inside his Barrier shield. “I’m here. Anything more for me on the roof, before I start?”
There was a silence.
Then he heard the click-over of the other seer.
Immediately, Balidor flinched, hearing a chaos of sounds on the other end, what sounded like screaming, fabric shifting as bodies thudded into and rubbed past one another in a space too small for all of them to pass. Balidor heard voices talking.
Allie's War Season Four Page 48