Balidor ground his teeth, but forced himself to shrug.
“I think he’ll want to get rid of Menlim, anyway,” Balidor said, making a defeated gesture with one hand. “I don’t see how that’ll change. He’ll be afraid for his family, if nothing else.” Giving Tarsi a harder look, he reminded her, “He still fears him, you know...Menlim. He fears the power he had over him, what he did to his mind. More than that, he fears what Menlim made him do. Especially to women. He asked me to kill him once, remember? He asked me to kill him, because he feared what Menlim might make him do to his wife. Now he’s got a child to worry about...a daughter, no less. I don’t think he’ll be able to stand leaving him alive...not now that he knows he’s out there.”
“Even if it kills him?” Tarsi said, still looking at him narrowly.
Balidor sighed. Rising to his feet, he walked to her in two strides, getting his own mug out of the overhead cupboard and holding it under the hot water spigot while he pressed the button. When he finished, he dunked his own tea bag, leaning against the counter next to her and biting his tongue as he thought over the woman’s question.
He found himself thinking about Revik, about the man he knew and didn’t know. First as Syrimne d’ Gaos during World War I. Then as Vash’s pupil, as their recruit for the assignment in Germany and with Galaith. Then again as the Rook, then the ex-Rook...and Allie’s husband. Finally as Syrimne reborn, as Allie’s husband again, but as this new, different kind of Sword, born from the ashes of the Dreng.
Balidor thought about all of these men, and what mattered to all of them, where the threads crossed, and where they broke.
He thought about what they’d found in Sikkim, that boy in the tower under the snow.
He thought about those sessions in the tank.
Once more, he spoke from the heart.
“Even if it kills him,” Balidor said, knowing it was true. “He won’t be able to leave it alone, sister. It’s simply not in his nature.”
Tarsi only looked at him for a moment, her clear eyes––eyes so very much like those of her blood nephew, Dehgoies Revik––thoughtful, as she took a sip of her tea.
Then she nodded, rearranging her butt against the low counter.
Balidor leaned on a section of counter next to hers, blowing on the steam of his own mug.
For a long moment, the two of them just stood there.
For an even longer stretch of time, they didn’t talk.
Really, there wasn’t anything more to be said.
PROPHET
Allie’s War Book Eight
Dedicated to J.L. and the smattering of
other prophets I’ve known in my life...
1
MACAU
OVERWHELMED.
That might have been a word I’d use to describe myself about then.
Even as the word passed through the background of my mind, I was still in motion, stepping up off of the edge of the small ferry boat only to have my hand grasped, my body steadied. They caught me in mid-motion, even as I placed my high-heel clad foot onto the private dock covered in white, fairy-like lights.
I looked up once I was there, staring at the sharper colors of the city skyline shining out of the dark. It looked both futuristic and weirdly like an anachronism, like something from a recent past that suddenly felt a lot less distant.
I must have hesitated too long.
Before I could get my other foot up and over the railing and onto the wooden pier, I found myself caught by my other hand by a white-gloved attendant...only to have the first hand, a warmer and much more familiar hand, bring me the rest of the way over the rail and pull me closer to where he stood.
Before I could catch my breath, both of his hands had replaced the one with the glove entirely, and now he stood between me and the other seer, seemingly seconds after both of them stepped forward to catch me. I felt the protectiveness of that stance––and truthfully, a good chunk of the possessiveness there, too––but that didn’t bother me, either.
Overwhelmed...definitely.
Or maybe stimulus-overloaded would be more accurate.
I let my eyes drift higher, taking in the white, city-like complex that started on the other side of the pier, as well as its twin, fifty-story towers on either end of that sprawling expanse. I knew from the holographic blueprints that those towers were separated by multiple pools, a shopping mall and a five-story casino, as well as a lot of palm trees, deck chairs, walking paths and bars.
Even so, to see it in real life was...different.
Especially with it all lit up, where the cascade of lights created a strange, almost underwater appearance to the towers and the forest of palm trees that lived between them.
My eyes scaled the nearest of the two towers, stopping on the higher floors.
I could see palm trees up there, too, along with tall ficus on open-air terraces starting somewhere above the twentieth story, like sprawling oases between layers of glass and steel. At the very top, a giant terrace spread over half of the roof. I saw more lights up there, too, and what looked like a full-fledged palm forest, lit up with colored gels and spray from fountains. Fire blazed from either end of that same forest, either from massive bowl torches or some kind of elevated fire pits.
When Revik squeezed my hand, I glanced down, flushing a bit.
My eyes took in the length of his body in the same pause, and I found my skin warming more, and that time, not in embarrassment.
“Damn, you look good in a suit, husband,” I murmured. Clicking at him softly, I gave him a small smile, shaking my head. “It’s not fair. It really isn’t.”
He turned slightly from where he’d been looking over the same view as me. He’d been checking out the environment somewhat more surreptitiously, though. Meaning, with a studied casualness versus my open stare.
I felt a whisper of that military sharpness to his light, which didn’t help my reaction to him, unfortunately. Of course, I hadn’t forgotten why we were there, either, but I admit, a part of me was enjoying the shore leave aspect of the whole thing, too.
When he shifted his weight on his feet in the leather dress shoes, I glimpsed even more of his chest and torso in the dark gray lines of the suit. The jacket lay open in front, contrasting an open-collared white shirt. He was tan from time spent on the boat deck, and muscular from working out and mulei. The jacket and pants fit perfectly and accentuated his long form, emphasizing that he’d been running again, too, and fighting enough to be in his lean and mean body type.
He quirked an eyebrow at me, pretending to adjust a nonexistent tie.
Then his eyes drifted down to my own clothes, even as he tugged me closer with an insistent pull of his hand.
I watched as his gaze lingered on the short hem of my dress, then the thigh-high boots I wore with heels a good two inches steeper than I’d worn even in my clubbiest and most fashion-victim-y phases back when I lived in San Francisco. His eyes continued to travel up, pausing on where I wore my long hair down in ringlets that cascaded down my open back. He paused again on the low neckline of the same short, black dress.
Reaching up with one hand, he finger-adjusted the emerald-colored necklace that decorated my neck and shoulders.
“Trust me,” he said, leaning down to kiss my cheek. “They’re not even going to notice me with you in that outfit, wife,” he murmured.
Pain bled off his skin in the kiss, even as I saw him close his eyes.
Blushing a little, I rolled my eyes at him when he raised his head.
I was about to say more, when I felt a faint ping from the construct Barrier space, by someone who likely didn’t much care how either of us looked in our shiny new clothes.
Get going, Tarsi whispered in my head. Clock is running, Bridge.
Glancing up at Revik, I saw him frown.
I could feel from his light that he’d heard her as well. Instead of reassuring him that our back-up team was still with us––despite the high-grade security construct strangl
ing this island paradise––a faint tension slid through Revik’s light. It was there and gone, but close enough to the surface that I couldn’t help but see it.
He glanced around us again, even as I thought it.
I could almost feel him looking for snipers that time.
I knew he wasn’t worried about them shooting at him, either.
Shrugging a bit, I indicated forward down the wooden pier with one hand, gesturing politely for Revik to lead the way.
He obligingly started to walk, still holding my hand.
He kept me close to him, away from the buildings, I noticed. He also walked so that I was slightly behind him.
By then, something about Tarsi’s ping had taken some of the holiday vibe out of my mood, too, though.
I found myself clicked back into a different state of awareness, my light darting around our surroundings even as I tried to keep my facial expression casual. Within seconds, I felt the edges of the next layer of the construct as we approached the other end of the dock. I knew from the Barrier scans our scouting team had conducted that we were still only on the fringes of the real protection grid being maintained on the island as a whole.
It felt strange to be in such a complex, and, well...established construct, given where we’d been for the last few months. Most of our shore excursions of late had involved burnt-out husks of previously-thriving cities, filled with roving bands of feral humanity. Often, that same humanity had to be shot at, just to keep them from attacking us for no reason.
Most of those excursions had been coming up empty, of late, too.
It took us months to determine why.
Then, four weeks ago, we got intelligence that someone was buying up List seers, and possibly even some List humans. By List seers, of course, I mean those whose names had shown up on the Displacement Lists, marking them as somehow important for the fight against Shadow and his Dreng army. Finding seers and humans from those Lists, or “Listers” as we’d begun to call them, had more or less become our full-time job of late.
Shadow just killed the Listers when he found them.
Or when we found them, really, since he didn’t have a copy of the Lists himself.
This other guy, our mysterious buyer, didn’t seem to be doing that, though. Whoever he or she was, they appeared to be ordering seers alive, mainly from smugglers working out of various ports in Asia. Of course, we still had no idea if they were targeting List seers, in particular...or if they were simply buying up large quantities of seers in general, perhaps going after those with high sight ranks, which most of the List seers seemed to have.
If they were targeting List seers specifically, that meant someone besides us had a copy of the Displacement Lists...a possibility I didn’t even want to contemplate, frankly.
If that was the case, we might be truly fucked.
On the plus side, we’d been told by the infiltration team that, whoever this buyer was, he didn’t seem to be killing his acquisitions, unlike what Shadow had been doing with the Listers. Balidor said his team could still ID their aleimi down here, so they had to be alive...somewhere. Tarsi and the rest of the Council agreed with him.
We traced the last big shipment from Taiwan to here, meaning Macau.
A few days later, Revik wrangled an invite, on the pretext of being a buyer, too.
Which hadn’t been easy.
It also required Revik to promise these jerkoffs a number of things he was still, interestingly, pissed off at me about. As if I was the one making outrageous demands.
The pirates of Macau may not be Shadow’s people (not directly, anyway), but our hosts weren’t exactly “friends” in the strictest sense, either, so coming here, regardless of pretext, might still be deeply stupid.
We couldn’t afford to lose any more of the seers or humans named on the Displacement Lists, though. We’d lost far too many to Shadow and his death-squads already.
The numbers related to this new player were frankly too big to ignore.
Looking up at the high, L-shaped towers of the lit building in front of us, I frowned at the sheer opulence of the buildings themselves, and the colored lights being shown onto each tower from the lawns dotted with palm trees and swimming pools below. The height of both main wings of the hotel and casino pulled at my eyes, if only due to the contrast of the endless stretches of ocean it felt like I’d been staring at for weeks and weeks on end.
My eyes drifted back to the skyline of the city itself even as I thought it, before locking dead-center on the walkway in front of us.
By then, I could feel us being checked out by the seers working this end of the construct, too. They’d already done a positive ID, looking at the different markers that lived in our aleimi, or living light, but I could feel them trying for more of that.
Maybe it was a bit of a prestige thing, too, I guessed.
After all, for the first time in a very long time, we were here as ourselves.
As a result, I could feel the interest there, the curiosity, but also the arrogance. They were used to being the smartest guys in the room, for sure. Out here, I had my doubts they were often challenged, even by the Lao Hu.
And, well, we were celebrities, I guess...in the seer world, at least. I could only imagine that cracking our construct would win them macho points with their infiltrator pals. Bragging rights for having hacked the Bridge and Sword.
Grunting a little, Revik glanced at me, a thin smile on his lips.
“You aren’t wrong,” he murmured.
His fingers tightened on mine again. I heard the warning behind his humor, but only smiled, squeezing his hand in return before I sent him a pulse of light. Anyway, there wasn’t much I could say. We knew we were being recorded.
Definitely visually, but probably our audio by now, as well.
On either side of the pier ahead, I could see shadowy figures carrying automatic rifles. Six humans, four seers, from my light’s darting probe.
They all dressed in identical black uniforms.
As we walked closer, a walk that began to feel strangely lost in time, I found myself staring at the red and yellow cloth bands each of the black-clad soldiers wore around their upper arms. The symbol looked like a flaming sun inside a lion’s mouth, almost a perversion of the sword and sun symbol, only their sun was the color of blood. The flames didn’t glow so much as consume the sun’s center, and overall, it had a threatening kind of vibe, which made sense, I guess, given what it was meant to represent.
The bands sat in roughly the same place around the sleeves of their uniformed shirts that the sword and sun tattoos of the rebel seers were generally situated, too.
Basically, the placement of your run-of-the-mill Nazi swastika armband.
“Be nice, wife,” Revik murmured to me.
“I’m always nice,” I muttered back.
He snorted a soft laugh.
I glanced up, watching as he smoothed down the front of his white shirt and the dark gray suit jacket with one hand. He straightened the edge of his collar out from under the jacket as he walked, without letting go of my fingers with his other hand, or taking his eyes off the security guards watching us approach.
I saw his clear eyes dart to metal poles on either side of the pier as well, marking the placement of image collection and probably gait and facial-rec as well. He did it casually, but I felt the heat in his light, the barely suppressed tension that flickered around his aleimi as he collected data, and not only with his eyes.
I saw him look at the flickering neon skyline of the city of Macau itself, right before his gaze returned to the pier and the complex beyond it. The first and largest of those wings faced us directly now, leading into the back end of that massive, upscale hotel and resort.
We had nearly reached the tiki torches on either side of the stone path that started where the pier ended. I saw the virtual landscape shift as we got close enough to see the edges of it, and realized that some kind of semi-electronic shield lived here, too, either an OBE o
r something similar. Whatever it was, it had been programmed to blend seamlessly into the background, likely using virtual reality and some other pyrotechnics to confuse our perspective on where we stood in relation to the hotel and grounds themselves.
I was still staring up at that shimmering mirage when a guard stepped deliberately into our path, holding up a hand with a flat-eyed smile to indicate for us to halt.
“We’re guests here, remember,” Revik added under his breath to me, his words a bare exhale. “Act like it.”
“Okay, boss,” I murmured just as softly.
“Right. Then stop looking like you’re scouting for a military patrol,” he muttered.
“I will if you will,” I said, even quieter.
He nudged me with his shoulder, smiling again.
Even so, his aleimi didn’t relax at all.
By then, we were too close to the black-uniformed guards to talk anymore, not even under our breaths. Definitely not from our aleimi.
Even though we only stood there quietly, the Chinese-featured human in the black uniform frowned a little, looking from one of our faces to the other. I found myself focusing once more on the red and yellow armband he wore as he gradually lowered that same arm and hand back to his side, as if finally making up his mind that we weren’t going to attack him.
His expression appeared totally empty. He gestured for us to hand over our invitation cards, which Revik did, pulling them out of an inside pocket of his suit jacket.
We’d received them on the ferry boat, after they conducted the first direct verification of our light, and ID’d us, probably using something they had on file from SCARB or one of the other previous law enforcement agencies.
From what Revik told me, places like this thrived on bribes and shared intel with corrupt law enforcement, long before C2-77 hit anywhere near this part of the world.
I knew that these “cards”––or chips, really, since they were more like GPS trackers inside small, semi-organic cases––were now the only way inside this private enclave.
This place might look like it did before the human-killing disease, C2-77, came and wiped out a good chunk of the planet’s human beings, but I’d been told it wasn’t much at all like it had been, back when this used to be nothing more than a tiny, semi-autonomous corner of the country called the People’s Republic of China.
Allie's War Season Four Page 62