The son of a bastard would lay hands on Allie’s daughter over Balidor’s dead body.
Just then, Ute moved out from under the older seer’s hand.
The moment stretched, a strange sort of silence taking over Balidor’s mind as the female stepped fluidly to one side. Only the sound of the wind over the roof broke the physical silence, but even that felt far away, strangely distant and unreal.
Balidor had time to see the disgusted look on Ute’s face, the faint curl of her lip, right before she gave him the opening he’d been looking for, waiting for, maybe for months now, ever since that first interview with Ditrini in the basement of the hotel.
Focusing his eye down the sight, Balidor adjusted his aim a hair’s breadth, centering it on the elongated face of the seer with the silver eyes and the long, braided, iron-gray hair.
Then, squeezing the stock of the gun more tightly against his shoulder...
Balidor fired.
23
WHITE RABBIT
“WHAT IS WRONG with her?” the male seer muttered. “The Bridge?”
He kept glancing backwards, Chandre noticed, his bare forearms and neck tense as he hunched over the open organic circuits. Chandre could see the hair standing almost erect on the back of the seer’s neck. She couldn’t tell if anxiety or cold caused the physical reaction, though, and she really hated the way he kept looking at the Bridge.
It was too familiar. Too familiar by half.
Frowning, Chandre glanced back at the vehicle where the old woman sat, holding the Bridge’s head in her lap.
“She’s dead,” Chan said, blunt.
“What?” Surli’s eyes jerked up, his dark pupils narrowing to pinpricks, making the calico hazel of his irises grow wider and larger-seeming. “What the di’lantente a’guete is that supposed to mean? Dead? How can she be dead? The Bridge?”
Fear had risen in the male’s eyes, a kind of low-level panic.
“She can’t be dead,” Surli said more firmly, as if daring her to argue. “It must be a trick...by that fucker Shadow. Why else would the old woman have her body?”
Chandre clicked softly, gripping the gun in her hand tighter.
She glanced at Anale, the female seer who came from the hotel with the old woman and the human girl, and then at Damon, a seer from her own team. Anale’s light gold eyes looked harder in the darkness of the street. Chandre watched them flicker up and down the unlit row between buildings, searching for threats, seemingly oblivious to the three of them by the Tower’s back doors. Even so, Chandre could tell that Surli’s words had affected Anale, too, even if they hadn’t lessened the alertness of her light as she stood guard.
Whatever Surli’s issues with the Bridge, he wouldn’t be the only one to react this way to the news of her death, Chandre knew. If it got out the Bridge had been killed, they’d have a full-scale panic on their hands among the survivors. Not only would seers feel grief at the loss of the intermediary, many would assume the war to be over, too...they would assume that the Dreng had won. Chandre wondered how many even in their own camp would jump sides to find protection with Shadow, in that event. She wondered how many of them would rationalize such a thing by claiming to follow Shadow’s new pet, the Formidable War.
Thinking about Cass brought a pain to her heart, though, sharp enough to clench her jaw. Looking away from Surli, Chandre paused long enough to shake it off.
“Get back to work, brother,” she muttered then, flicking her fingers at Surli. “Your cousin is making more progress than you are...”
“Because she’s some kind of mutant,” Surli muttered.
“I had heard that you were good at this, brother...at the machines,” Chandre mocked. “Even the Bridge seemed to think so. She said you foiled comp-attacks in China, did you not? Single-handedly? Or was that simply boasting...an attempt to impress her?”
“The machines are different here...” Surli muttered. Giving her a dark look, he added coldly, “So the Bridge told you about that, did she? Did she tell you that’s how we met? That the Chinese government gave me a night with her as a reward for that op?”
Staring at him, Chandre felt her shoulders tense. After a bare pause, she raised the gun she held, pointing it right at his face.
“I wouldn’t be so flippant about that if I were you, brother,” she said through gritted teeth. “It might just get you shot around here...and not only by me. Not all of us are so forgiving of our intermediary having been used as a slave by those dogs that you worked for. The only reason I haven’t shot you already is that the old lady seems to think you might be of use...”
Surli rolled his eyes, clicking at her. “You say that like it’s the worst thing that could happen to me out here,” he muttered darkly.
Even so, Chandre’s words––or maybe her gun––seemed to do the trick.
Surli’s light and eyes focused back on the open panel in front of him.
He returned to separating out the jelly-like tendrils hanging out of the broken casing a few seconds later, his lips moving silently as he counted them. The tendrils themselves shone faintly in the deeper shadow under the building’s alcove, shimmering with their own internal light, like deep sea fish. Chandre could feel the male seer’s light entwined with the presences there once more, as Surli attempted to speak to them, to get past the security barriers encoded into their light to reach the mechanism of the door.
They were lucky really, that their numbers were few.
The military in front of the building wasn’t looking for threats from a handful of seers and one teenaged human.
Dante, the sixteen-year-old hacker kid that Chandre taunted Surli about, looked up from the open security console on the other side of the double doors. Meeting Chandre’s gaze, Dante flashed her a grin, her teeth shockingly white in the dark. Chandre returned the smile with a faint clicking and shake of her head, before motioning the human back to work.
She knew Dante’s end constituted mainly dead circuits, but that those circuits connected to the organics Surli still struggled to penetrate with his aleimi. Whichever one of them managed to break through the security encryption first would likely be able to do the work of the other.
Like most computer types, they were competitive. Whatever Surli’s gibes about Allie, he seemed particularly determined not to be bested by a ‘worm,’ no matter how genius she happened to be with the machines.
Chandre couldn’t help finding that mildly funny.
On the other hand, she didn’t feel particularly inclined to discourage that competition, either, given that they needed the doors open as quickly as possible.
The three of them stood at the base of the tall office and apartment complex known as the Gossett Tower East. Chandre knew it had been...or perhaps still was...owned by some rich human investor, one of the tycoon types who made headlines in the news feeds a few decades earlier. Chandre couldn’t remember the name of the particular one who’d owned this set of buildings, but she supposed that didn’t matter, either, especially now.
She felt her worry leak out to the ends of her limbs, into the nerves living under her skin, all the way to the tips of her fingers and toes. She was tired, strung out, jumping at shadows and had no idea what they were doing here, or what awaited them inside the seventy-five-story building. She knew only that they had to get inside, and fast.
Tarsi hadn’t exactly been specific when she’d pulled them for this thing.
Balidor can handle Ditrini... Tarsi had sent to Chandre, breaking through their silent construct with that aggravatingly calm voice she had. Her patois leaked through her words, even in Chandre’s mind. I need you more here. Bridge need you, too...
The Bridge? Chandre had asked, fighting to recover from her shock at hearing from the old woman in the first place, especially in the middle of an ongoing infiltration op where no one was supposed to know they’d even reached the city.
Where is Allie now? Chandre asked. Isn’t she with the Sword?
She’s wit
h me, Tarsi said, as if that much was obvious. Consider it an order from her, if that’s easier for you, sister. The Bridge needs you...it’s a matter of utmost urgency, and not only to her. Pausing for the barest breath, Tarsi’s thoughts had shifted into an open impatience. Not a lot of time, sister. Are you coming? Or just standing there?
I’ll be there. Just give me––
The old lady cut her off before Chandre could finish.
To add insult to injury, she also booted Chandre unceremoniously out of her light, even though she’d accessed that light by Chandre’s own construct. Chandre had blinked up at the night sky outside of the Barrier in bewilderment, only to found herself standing in the middle of a still-smoking airfield, surrounded by Varlan, Stanley, Damon, Rig and Yarli.
The rest of them had agreed to join her, which surprised Chandre, too.
Her team had only just arrived at the island, on the tail of Ditrini, who’d managed to elude them for the past day and a half. When Tarsi showed up in Chandre’s mind, she and Varlan had been trying to determine how best to contact their allies at the hotel without tipping off Ditrini that they were there, too. They were already reasonably sure (or, to be more accurate, Varlan was reasonably sure) that they’d been made by Ditrini’s people a few weeks earlier.
Since then, they’d gone out of their way not to connect to the Lao Hu seer, or with Ute, the female rebel who appeared to be working with Ditrini directly now.
They’d been hoping they could fool Ditrini into believing that he still had the element of surprise, and get him alive before he breached the hotel.
Unfortunately, they’d fallen behind, and in the process, Chandre strongly suspected that she and Varlan had actually given Ditrini that element of surprise, by not contacting Balidor to warn him that the Lao Hu seer was coming.
From what Tarsi told her, that mistake had been corrected in the time since. The breach alarms had been engaged in the hotel. That didn’t make Chandre feel any better about dumping that particular present on brother Balidor’s lap, and not only because of Balidor’s personal feelings about Ditrini himself.
Shivering a bit, even under the armored vest, Chandre glanced up at the sky as another gust of icy wind barreled through the spaces between buildings.
She glanced at Varlan, who stood in a kind of sentinel position, halfway between the armored car and the door to the back of the building. Chandre’s eyes scanned down the next block, feeling more than seeing glimpses of Rig, Damon, Yarli and Stanley where they maintained a Barrier illusion to keep the SCARB force that patrolled the front of the building from stumbling upon them in the side alley.
Despite that, and Varlan’s steady watch over Tarsi herself, Chandre felt her nerves worsening.
“Hurry up, brother,” she urged Surli.
“Patience sister,” he grumbled, still separating out filament-like strands with gloved fingers. “Just give us a few more minutes, and––”
“Got it!” Dante called out triumphantly from a few feet away.
Surli’s head and eyes jerked sideways, even as the kid straightened.
Stepping back from the heavy, organic-metal door, Dante keyed a final sequence into her hand-held, which she’d reconfigured as a combination flat screen and console that she held around chest-level between both hands. Chandre stepped back with her, still watching Dante’s face as she frowned up at the door.
“Do you have it or not, cousin?” Chandre pressed.
“I’ve got it,” Dante said, with the full confidence of youth.
Luckily, that confidence turned out to be warranted.
Chandre heard the locks disengage, even as Surli gaped up at the door, releasing the strands he’d been in the process of separating.
“Endruk et dugra,” he muttered. “How the fuck did she do that?”
Chandre clicked at him, even as she felt her shoulders relax.
“She’s actually competent,” Chandre said dryly.
“Competent?” Dante said from the other side. She raised an eyebrow at both of them, looking up from the screen for the first time. “I was going for miracle worker. Or hey, let’s give that girl a car!”
Chandre clicked at her, shaking her head.
Surli burst out in an involuntary laugh.
Just then, Anale looked over at the three of them.
“We’ve got company,” she said, her voice low through the link.
Chandre looked over at her sharply, rearranging her grip on the handle of her gun. She glanced at Varlan then, and saw that he had already moved his rifle more tightly into his body. That rifle, a rare and heavily modified XM29, appeared to be aimed at a different segment of street than where Chandre saw him focused before.
Clearly, Anale’s words had come as less of a surprise to him.
Even as Chandre thought it, Varlan’s voice rose in her headset, as well.
“I think he is friend,” the older seer said. “He has the mark of Adhipan.”
“Don’t assume anything,” Chandre said at once.
She felt a glimmer of Varlan’s dry humor.
“I never assume, sister,” he said only.
Chandre felt her jaw clench slightly as she remembered who she was talking to. Varlan didn’t seem to much care, though. She watched him as he continued to aim the gun down the street, staring into the near-perfect darkness. Chandre glanced at Dante and Surli, and noticed both stood in perfect stillness, and that even the human’s light appeared to be unmoving behind the Barrier. Someone must have trained her in that, too.
Even so, Dante looked paler than she had a few seconds earlier. She didn’t look panicked, though, Chandre noted, or about to do anything overly stupid.
Chandre wondered again about this girl, and who had been training her. Regardless, she found herself grateful for her operations savvy...or at least for her self-control, which would have been highly unusual in any seer of her age, much less a human.
Chandre motioned for Anale to get to the other side of the armored vehicle, to provide cover to the old woman and the Bridge’s body. She watched the female move silently through the dark, Damon joining her, both of their lights as still as death. Chandre was about to pull in Stanley and Rig, too, when a familiar voice rose in her headset, utilizing a different channel.
“Sister Chandre?” it said. “Is that you?”
Confusion rippled her light, but only briefly.
Chandre quickly switched channels in her headset, but opened the line to the others, allowing her team to listen in and pinging Varlan to run his own scan. She threw another light line to Stanley and Yarli, letting them know to help Varlan take the newcomer down in the physical, if that ended up being necessary.
She felt both of them affirm without words.
Barely two seconds had passed since the other seer hailed her on the secure channel.
“Vikram?” Chandre said then, using the same channel he had. She cleared her throat. “What are you doing here, brother? Why aren’t you at the hotel?”
“Dante is with you? The human girl?”
The emotion behind the question startled her a little.
Chandre glanced at the girl in question, frowning. “Yes. What of it?”
A flood of overwhelming relief reached her from the light of the male seer. “Gods,” he said, and that relief reflected in his words. “Thank the Ancestors! We thought Ditrini had her, and I didn’t think he’d do anything but kill her. And Tarsi? Is she with you, too?”
“Her, too,” Chandre said, her voice still wary.
That time, she glanced at Tarsi, but the old woman only shrugged.
Chandre turned her gaze to Varlan next. The older seer motioned with a hand behind his back, on the side opposite from where Vikram walked. He hadn’t picked up on anything.
If he didn’t find anything, Chandre rationalized, no one probably would.
Even so, she found herself hesitating. She trusted Varlan a lot more than she had when this whole thing started, but Chandre still tended to hesit
ate a little when she had only the ex-Rook’s word to go on...which happened a lot more often than she would have liked, given his obscenely high sight-ranking in actual.
Then again, they had someone with an even higher sight-rank with them now.
At the thought, Chandre turned back to the old woman.
Tarsi met her gaze directly that time.
He’s clean, she sent.
Chandre nodded, feeling her shoulders relax. She couldn’t see Varlan’s expression, but saw that he hadn’t lowered his weapon from where he aimed it up one of the side streets leading to East 79th, either, regardless of his words. She found herself glad for his caution, although she found herself wondering if there might be more to that, too. Sometimes Chandre hated that she couldn’t read Varlan’s light with any accuracy. She knew she likely wouldn’t have been able to read Varlan’s face in direct sunlight, either, given his training. In general, trying to read Varlan came close to trying to read a wall of solid granite.
“He is clean,” Varlan said, mirroring Tarsi’s words.
“I carry only a sidearm, sister,” Vikram added, as if he’d heard both of them.
Chandre could see Vikram’s outline now, as he came close to where Stanley stood, in the darkness of another recessed doorway built into the base of the Tower.
Vikram was holding up his hands. The slightly-built, East Indian seer’s form had an impact on their newest recruit however.
“Vik-man!” Dante said. She said it quietly, but Chandre shot her a warning look anyway. Dante switched to her headset. “What are you doing here, you crazy icer?”
Chandre felt Surli flinch next to her, reacting to the racial slur.
Dante didn’t seem to notice. She started to walk towards Vikram, but Chandre held up an arm, speaking aloud that time.
“Stay where you are,” she commanded. Switching to her headset, she pinged Stanley. “Frisk him, okay? And Varlan...make sure you’re right about his light.” Switching channels again, Chandre directed her words at Vikram himself. “...No offense, brother. We’re not inclined to be trusting right now.”
Allie's War Season Four Page 50