“You sure about that?” she said.
Up, Tarsi repeated with gestures, no doubt in her expression. I am sure, little sister.
Chandre couldn’t help snorting at that.
“All right,” she said through the link. Chandre realized with a vague kind of defeat that she’d already decided to follow the old woman, whatever fool place it led them. She motioned at Anale, then at Varlan. “Stairs. That one.” She motioned for the second staircase she’d found, the one with the body propped in the opening. “The other one’s blocked. Some kind of fire happened down there.” Seeing the blank look on Anale’s face, she frowned. “Now. We don’t have much time. Same order as before, sister, if you please.”
Anale’s expression cleared. She nodded from where she stood by the edge of that shattered entryway. She touched her ear then, igniting the headset, even as she switched to subvocals.
“We’ve got maybe a minute before they next group gets here,” she told Chandre.
“Same affiliation as before?” Chandre asked.
“No.” Anale shook her head. “Looks like that bunch went to the hotel, just like we thought. This is more SCARB...less FEMA and federal military. This lot might be going to the hotel too...or trying to cut off retreat and evac.”
Chandre saw the female’s gold eyes glance around the silent foyer.
“...This place looks dead to me,” she said. “Like the fight’s over.”
“Or moved elsewhere, perhaps?” Varlan suggested, also on the link.
Chandre didn’t answer, but felt her jaw harden. “My order stands. The elevators are out of the question, the main staircase is blocked, and we can’t stay here. They’ll scan the lobby as they pass. They’d be stupid not to, if they have people inside.”
Anale nodded. That time, she picked her way rapidly across the room, reaching the door to that secondary stairwell, even as Stanley and Damon finished lifting the body silently out of the opening where it had been stuck while Vikram held the door. Chandre watched them carry it to the wall on the side of the security desk, laying it just as soundlessly next to a body short enough to be human, although it wore one of the uniforms Chandre ID’d as seer.
Then again, maybe the uniform meant something else.
And maybe it didn’t really matter at this point, anyway.
Sending up a brief prayer for the souls around her, Chandre motioned towards Anale a second time, using hand signals to indicate she should light the way.
“After you,” Chandre said through the link.
Giving her a curt nod, Anale did as Chandre asked, still holding her gun out in front of her. She paused long enough to touch her headset. Once she was out of the view of the street outside, and therefore the uniformed soldiers, she activated a second switch, bringing up the sharp, blue-tinted light embedded in the right shoulder of her armored vest. The light illuminated the staircase and another body that lay there, which Anale stepped over after barely a glance. Chandre watched as the female seer began to creep quietly up towards the first landing.
She waited for gunfire, for any sound that indicated they might have company, but heard nothing. Well, nothing but the occasional chirp of a radio on one of the soldiers out front, and what sounded like a tank approaching on the streets outside.
Glancing around at the walls, Chandre noted that the Sword had already destroyed the main surveillance system. She couldn’t feel any others, nor could she pick them up on her portable frequency scanner.
“All right,” she said, exhaling a little into the link. “Everyone else.” She gave Dante a pointed look. “Keep the light from that monitor out of sight of the street, girl. In fact, turn it off until we’ve got the doors closed behind us.”
That time, Dante didn’t argue. She dimmed her hand-held at once.
Glancing at Rig next, Chandre told him, “Let us know when you need one of us to take the Bridge, brother. Don’t let yourself get overtired...we will all take a turn, if necessary.”
Rig nodded, but his expression looked faintly impatient.
Truthfully, the Bridge didn’t look particularly heavy in his arms. Chandre knew that might change, however, depending on how high the old woman intended to take them.
Hell, one of them might end up carrying Tarsi.
Tarsi chuckled softly at her thought, even as the old woman started to follow Rig through the door.
Watching the others start to disappear after her, Chandre remained where she was, holding a gun on the lobby as, one by one, they followed Anale and then Rig and Tarsi through that same door. While she waited, Chandre found herself staring again at the jacked open elevator doors, frowning. Anale was right. It was too damned quiet. No matter if the fight had moved elsewhere or not, it didn’t feel right here. It felt like something wrong was happening, and that it was happening below ground, not upstairs.
Chandre didn’t voice the thought aloud, though, not even to Stanley.
When she was the last one outside the stairwell, Chandre backed towards the door as well, her gun still aimed into the dimmer light by the entrance of the Tower.
No one came through.
Not a sound stirred the bodies or burned holes or broken organic glass scattered around the tile-covered room.
A FEW DOZEN flights later, Tarsi still hadn’t told them anything.
She wouldn’t even tell Chandre how high she wanted them to climb inside the Tower.
She certainly hadn’t told any of them what she expected to find.
She didn’t respond when Chandre pointed out that all of their scans, even those conducted by Varlan, told them that far fewer people could be felt on the upper floors than on any of the lower ones...and that few occupied those lower floors to begin with. Tarsi wouldn’t tell them why the Bridge’s body needed to be carted along with them, or why that body needed to be ‘closer’ before they made their next move...much less what that move would be.
Chandre couldn’t help wondering if the old woman had developed some kind of human-like senility. She verged on making a crack at Tarsi on that very subject, when, at the lower landing below the forty-second floor, Tarsi suddenly instructed them to stop.
Standing outside the metal door that led onto the floor, and what was presumably a row of office suites, Tarsi cocked her head, as if listening.
After what felt like an interminable pause, she looked directly at Chandre.
“Four of them. Only four. Can you feel them?”
Puzzled, Chandre glanced at Stanley, then at Varlan. Seeing Anale’s eyes on the old woman, too, her sculpted mouth pursed, Chandre shrugged.
Looking around at the rest of them, Tarsi suddenly changed demeanor entirely. A military-like glint sharpened in her eyes and light. Her voice grew openly impatient, carrying a stronger accent in her English-Prexci patois.
“You want my nephew to die?” she said, her voice cold.
“No, sir,” Varlan said at once.
Chandre only stared at her, taken aback. Tarsi clicked at her more sharply, but some of the anger in her eyes faded when she motioned towards the door.
“Blind as bats,” she muttered. “You do not need break shield,” she added, her voice carrying that harder edge. “Just feel them. Feel them from here. They human...blind like you.”
“Human?” Chandre stared at her, confused. “You brought us up here for four humans?”
“Not only them, no,” Tarsi said, clicking.
Her voice sounded more amused that time, though.
Before Chandre could think of a suitable retort, Tarsi motioned for Rig to put the Bridge’s body down on the landing.
“Okay,” Tarsi said. She sounded matter-of-fact that time, as if contemplating what to have for breakfast, or maybe which feed broadcast to watch before her nap. “I think now is good. We can’at wait longer. Must be now, anyway.”
“Now is good for what?” Chandre said. She still held her gun in her hand, although she had it pointed to the floor. Or, more specifically, straight down at the metal,
corrugated stair on which she stood. “Old woman?” she prompted, when Tarsi didn’t answer.
“Shhh,” Tarsi chided. “I need to concentrate for this...”
“For what?” Chandre persisted.
Tarsi gave her a hard look with those colorless eyes. “Control yourself, sister,” she said. “You’ll have answers, soon enough. I can’t risk there being leaks before then.”
“Leaks?” Chandre muttered. Still, she fell silent when Tarsi gave her another glare.
Fighting a swell of irritation mixed with genuine bewilderment, Chandre holstered her gun more forcefully than necessary, crossing her arms as she stared down at the old woman, who now bent over the body of the Bridge. Rig had lain the Bridge carefully, almost reverently, on the textured metal of the staircase landing. Before he straightened, he pulled Allie’s hands and arms over so they would cross her chest, leaving room for Tarsi to kneel beside her...which Tarsi did, her joints creaking audibly.
Chandre bit her lip, but forced herself to stay silent that time.
Her mind couldn’t help grinding over the other thing Tarsi said, about the Sword. Were they really wasting time up here, if his life was in danger? What could be so important, that they wouldn’t go to help him first?
Even so, she found herself watching the old woman along with the rest of them. When nothing happened for what felt like a long set of seconds, she glanced at Stanley again, her chest tight with held breath as she tried to decide what to do. Had Tarsi really lost her mind? Or was she to trust the old woman, simply because she was an elder, and had spent so many years communing with the ancestors in those caves?
Chandre knew which thing tradition told her to do, but then again, tradition gotten them into a lot of this mess in the first place.
Below her, Tarsi chuckled faintly, but her eyes never left the Bridge’s face.
“I know you worried about him,” Tarsi said, softer. “She is, too.”
Chandre didn’t know what to say that, either. She didn’t even know for certain to which of them Tarsi was speaking...or referring to. Biting her lip, she shifted her weight as she stared down at the old woman.
Stanley didn’t share Chandre’s glance the second time she looked at him, either...or the third time...or the fourth. Instead, the dark-skinned seer watched Tarsi alone, his expression holding an open interest, along with a dense form of concentration Chandre hadn’t seen on him before, either. She found herself remembering that the African-born seer had also spent many years in caves, meditating, just like Tarsi had. Maybe he understood this better than the rest of them, for that reason alone. In any case, his dark, full mouth pursed in a slight frown as he watched the ancient seer grip the shoulders of the inert body of the dead Bridge.
Tarsi leaned closer to the Bridge’s pale ear as she began to murmur in old and soft words, words Chandre could feel but not understand.
Even Dante shut off her hand-held long enough to stare and listen to the old woman, her dark eyes holding as much puzzlement at Rig and Chinja’s. She didn’t look away, though, but fell silent with the rest of them, peering down through the curtain of her blunt-cut, dark hair.
The silence stretched.
It must have gotten a lot more still on that landing than Chandre realized.
When a sharp, shocked-sounding gasp broke the silence, she must have jumped a foot in the air. The shock of that sound paled in comparison, however, to when she looked down, and saw the faintly glowing green eyes of the Bridge.
Chandre felt her jaw go slack. Every muscle in her body went limp.
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t formulate words...or move.
She still struggled to wrap her mind around what she was seeing, when Vikram shouted from next to her, nearly making Chandre jump out of her skin.
“Holy fucking gods in the heavens!” he said. “What in the di’lanlente a guete is that?”
For some reason, Varlan burst out in a laugh.
Chandre couldn’t laugh, though. She still couldn’t even make her jaw move to form words, to even ask the question. Swallowing thickly, she stared down at the Bridge’s face, watching her look up, not at Tarsi, but at Stanley.
Even so, it crossed the infiltrator portion of Chandre’s mind that someone might have heard Vikram in the hallway outside that metal door.
If so, that possibility no longer seemed to alarm Tarsi.
Maybe it was too late for that to matter.
Chandre was still staring down, fighting to move her thoughts in anything close to resembling straight lines...when the Bridge spoke.
“Hey,” she said, blinking those glowing eyes up at Stanley. She squinted, as if trying to see past that light. “...Is that rabbit?” she said.
Staring down at her, Chandre realized she saw nothing of the blank-eyed stare she remembered of the Bridge the last time Chandre had seen her awake. That had been through the virtual connect with Dehgoies, when she’d seen the Bridge curled up in the lap of her husband in that Victorian house in San Francisco.
That had been unnerving too, yes...but somehow, this was worse.
Staring at Allie’s face, seeing her in that expression, brought tears to Chandre’s eyes so suddenly that they blinded her. She blinked to clear them, but didn’t bother to wipe them off her cheeks. She still couldn’t make herself tear her eyes off the Bridge’s glowing irises.
Allie seemed to be struggling to work her jaw. She still stared up at Stanley, though, as if his face grounded her, or held some kind of deep significance.
“Is anyone going to answer me?” she said. “I mean...that’s him, right? That’s the rabbit. Stanley...am I right?”
At that, for some inexplicable reason, Stanley burst out in a laugh, too.
24
HEAVEN’S DOOR
REVIK STOOD IN a fighting stance.
They’d backed him up against the wall.
Well, as far as he could tell, anyway, given how the room looked to his physical eyes. He couldn’t use his sight. There might be another trap door behind him...or an electrical field, for all he knew, or drug darts, or any number of other means of getting him down. If so, they hadn’t used any of it so far. His eyes told him he stood in the corner of a low-ceilinged, cement-walled room. He’d spent the last twenty minutes, his internal clock calculated, in the same low-ceilinged room where he’d landed on the floor, the wind knocked out of him and his ankle and one of his knees hurting from the fall.
He’d also spent that time fighting them off, or at least avoiding being cornered.
He knew his time was winding down, though.
He’d been in enough fights to know he wouldn’t be on his feet much longer.
What he didn’t understand was why he was on his feet still.
He didn’t understand why they hadn’t just knocked him out.
His mouth tasted of copper. So yeah, he was bleeding. A few of Menlim’s guards were decent fighters, which didn’t surprise him, given where he’d learned it as a kid. Three or four of them had gotten in some good hits. He grimaced as he wiped his mouth in the pause, giving a bare glance to the blood that landed on the light blue carpet.
The row of faces still watching from the semi-circle on the other side of the room didn’t flinch, nor would he have expected them to. He’d kept their soldiers away from him up until now mainly with his fists and feet. He’d managed to stay out of the Barrier since he’d emptied around eight magazines on the men trying to corner him, men Revik suspected were real, although he felt less sure about the apparitions of Menlim and the other seers standing nearby, even now.
When he’d tried to shoot those people down here, the bullets ricocheted off them, implying some kind of shield in the physical. So yeah, different from upstairs.
Even that didn’t convince him they were real, though.
Real or not, he could feel them working on the edges of his light, trying to get in. He had no shield. He had nothing down here. He could feel them trying to resonate with him, trying to adjust the freq
uency of Revik’s own aleimi to where he would have to fight harder to feel and see the problems in their light, and the lack of connection in his.
Vash was gone.
He couldn’t feel Jon. He couldn’t feel Wreg...or Maygar, his son. He couldn’t feel any of them. He could only hope they were still alive, somewhere.
He could only hope he might be buying them time, even now. Time for them to get back upstairs. Time to give the order to Balidor to bomb the building, which he’d authorized Wreg to do, in the event he got killed or incapacitated.
Revik wondered if that would do any good at this point, either.
Why hadn’t they knocked him out?
The guards felt more or less real. Even hitting them felt different than hitting that illusion of Allie upstairs. He felt bones under his hands and feet and elbows and arms. He felt flesh and skin and the contours felt about right to a real human or seer face.
The remaining five guards out of the several dozen Menlim initially instructed to collect him had backed off for now. The closest of these stood a few yards away, watching Revik warily, his cheek swelling from a cross Revik got to his face. All five of them were out of breath. One of them scowled at Revik when he glanced at their leader. Red-faced and breathing, he looked to Revik like he might go into cardiac arrest any moment.
Thank the gods he’d spent the last few months in the ring.
Even as he thought it, Menlim let out a purring sigh, clicking at him softly.
“Nephew,” he said. “This is pointless. You will come with us. Whether you want to do so or not is beside the point now.”
Revik let out a low laugh, wiping his jaw again with the back of his hand.
Even so, he couldn’t argue with his uncle’s basic logic.
Why hadn’t they just drugged him?
When one of the soldiers moved closer again, Revik repositioned his body, his peripheral vision focused on the other men who hung back. He wondered if they’d called for reinforcements yet. He wondered if he was buying them time, too, even now, while the rest of Shadow’s people evacuated through the lower floors.
Allie's War Season Four Page 52