The Sword’s default position tended to live in the restriction of information, so really, the request hardly constituted a deviation from the norm.
Regaining his feet as he continued to run over details of the plan in the back of his mind, Loki hunched his way out of the seat, and then straightened in the main aisle of the plane before reaching up to the luggage rack, where he’d hung his weapon on one set of hooks that had been fitted to the luggage racks for that purpose. Since the Chinook had been converted to civilian use at one point, and they primarily had been using it to move personnel, not supplies or bombs or even weaponry per se, they had kept the modifications to a minimum, at least until they needed to change the design more drastically.
The other seers continued to peer out the windows, most of them also standing in the single aisle with rifles slung around their backs, leaning down on the seat backs to stare through the oval portals.
“We going in there, boss?” Jax asked him.
Hesitating only a bare instant, Loki looked at him, and nodded. He found his eyes shifting to the woman in the fourth row of seats behind the cockpit.
“Is she coming with?” Illeg said. “Or staying here?”
Loki thought about that, too.
He really did not want to leave her with Rex, not even with Preela here to watch over the two of them. He could leave Illeg behind...or Anale...but both of them were seasoned in the field, and he might need them if things got difficult inside.
He made the decision even as he glanced back at Rex.
“Yes,” he said. “She stays. So does Preela. I want Rex with us.”
The large-boned seer with the heavy shoulders grinned. “Don’t trust me with your best girl, eh, Capitan?”
Loki didn’t answer aloud, but found himself thinking, No. No, I do not.
He must have thought it louder than he intended, because Anale laughed.
“I can stay behind, boss,” she told him.
Loki shook his head again, slower that time.
“No,” he said. “I might need you, sister. Preela can handle it. She can lift off if she encounters any trouble...and unlike last time, we shouldn’t be long.”
Hesitating, he glanced to his right, avoiding looking at the woman, Gina, as he met Preela’s light hazel eyes from where she stood silhouetted in the cockpit’s door.
“Land on the roof,” he said, motioning towards the White House’s south side. “If you can. Meaning, if you encounter trouble, sister...but have a care. There could be structural damage.”
Preela nodded, winking at him.
She glanced at the woman in the fourth row, too, smiling at her in a friendly way. When Holo stood up, however, the woman, Gina, stood up with him to follow.
“No,” Holo said in heavily-accented English. He motioned to her, too, using seer sign language, which Loki knew would be meaningless to her. His English was pretty much nonexistent, though, so he smiled at her, motioning again with his hands, smiling as he indicated her seat. “No...stay. Please. Thank you...”
Anale snorted, rolling her eyes. In Prexci, she faced the rest of them. “Are all of you that bad at English?”
“I speak it,” Loki said, his voice clear, holding a trace of British accent, or so he’d been told. He’d been classically trained in English, though. He did know the language well.
His answer only made the others bust up laughing again, however.
Rex clapped him on the back, switching to Prexci. “You can practice it later, brother,” Rex said, grinning. “You know, when you start asking her, ‘does this feel good?’ ‘how about this?’ And ‘what about when I do this with my––’”
Before he warm up in his exposition, Anale cut him off, once more looking at the human, holding up both of her hands in reassurance.
“––It is okay, cousin,” she said, switching to the human language.
Turning with her gun, she faced the woman, Gina, directly, speaking with only a slight Asian accent of her own.
“It is okay, beautiful cousin,” Anale said. “You should stay here. We want you to stay here...where it is safe. We will not be gone long. We have only a short thing to do here.”
Still on her feet, the woman, Gina, looked directly at Loki.
Even without turning, he felt her stare.
Again, pain tried to take over his light.
Anale must have felt that, too, from standing so close to the human. Whatever her reasons, she stood more squarely in front of him, blocking the woman’s view of him...or maybe trying to get in between their respective lights.
The next time Anale spoke, she seemed to be trying to get the human’s stare to shift to her, to get her to stop focusing on the Middle Eastern seer. Loki could feel his own light wrapping into the woman’s once more, however, and almost told Anale it would do no good.
“It is okay,” Anale repeated. “We will not be gone very long, cousin. We will all come back, and then we will leave here. We will take you to your daughter.”
“Dani?” the woman said. For the first time, her eyes shifted away from Loki. She looked at Anale, focusing on her alone, her mouth in a slight frown. “You’re going to take me to Dani after this? When? Where is she?”
“Soon, cousin,” Anale soothed, nodding. “Yes, cousin. We will. We are only stopping here for a very short time. She is on a ship, and we will go there next...”
Seeing the woman’s stare shift back towards the Middle Eastern seer, Anale snorted, as if unable to help herself.
You are truly fucked, my brother, she sent to Loki. She has it as bad as you do...what did you do to her down there? She seems to think you saved her personally, brother...that you went in there looking just for her...
Loki didn’t answer, but he couldn’t tear his eyes off the human, either.
Mika clapped Loki on the shoulder with a grin, maybe to distract him, to give his light something else to feel. She aimed her words at the human woman, though, and spoke in English, so she’d be understood by her, too.
“Hey,” she called to Gina. “We won’t let him get hurt. Don’t worry, cousin.”
The woman, Gina, looked doubtful at Mika’s words.
“We’ll keep him safe,” Rex seconded, also gripping Loki’s shoulder briefly. “Promise.”
Loki felt Gina’s light pulling on his, willing him to turn, to look at her, maybe to reassure her himself. He told himself he wouldn’t turn, that he wouldn’t look at her again...but after a few more seconds, he did, unable to deny her light what it wanted of him.
When he met her gaze, he found himself staring at her again, lost in those dark eyes which still seemed to be looking for him behind his silence. He didn’t see fear for herself in that look. Or maybe, that’s simply not all he saw. Returning that worried look in her eyes, noting the firmness of her mouth, he lost control of his light again briefly, even as he gripped the seat in front of him. He muttered words in Arabic, in spite of himself.
“Steady there, brother,” Mika said from his other side, also touching him along with Rex, rubbing his arm. “Hey. Control. You’re control guy, aren’t you? Chill.”
Loki felt another darting pang of jealousy off the human woman from Mika’s touch, and his pain worsened. He bit his tongue, trying to pull back his light, but Rex laughed behind him.
“It’s always the tightly-wound ones you have to keep an eye on,” the larger seer joked. “I think maybe he’s the one we can’t trust to be alone with her. One of us should check her light. Read her to know if he’s manipulating her to act like a dog in heat with him, just as he is with her. Dante will never forgive us if he is bending the light of her mother...”
For a long-feeling count of seconds, Loki wondered about Rex’s words.
Then he wondered if perhaps he should not go on this mission.
Perhaps he should stay here, on the Chinook.
Perhaps he was a liability at this point.
That thought brought another swell of pain, one he found himself fighting more
deliberately, maybe in horror of how visible he was at the moment, or how much he could feel himself genuinely alarming the other seers with his erratic behavior, despite their back and forth jokes. He felt Illeg watching him the most closely of all, followed perhaps by Anale and Ontari. Despite his words just then, only Rex seemed to find the whole thing genuinely amusing.
Eventually, Loki pushed that out of his mind, too.
The Sword had given him a job.
He would do that job, just as he told the Sword he would.
When he glanced at the human again, she was lowering her weight reluctantly back to her seat. Loki felt her pulling once more on his light, but less insistently now, more in a kind of reflex from the background currents weaving through both of their aleimi, separately and where they already wound together. At least some of what he had been thinking must have passed to her in that pause. The human’s expression had shifted, holding a stonier, but more accepting kind of worry. Like she got, somehow, that Loki had to do this, but she still did not like it.
She did not like it one bit.
The fact that she did not want him to go only made the pain in Loki’s light worse.
“We’d better get him out of here,” Illeg muttered.
Laughing, Jax seemed to agree.
Grabbing hold of Loki’s armored vest, he began dragging him down the aisle to the forward hatch. Holo reached it just in front of them, and Loki watched as he yanked down on the locking bar to swivel the hatch open on its greased metal hinge. Holo swung it all the way open, until it caught and locked. Then, looking down, he used his foot to engage the lowering of the metal stairs.
Loki did not let himself look at Gina again.
Even so, he found himself aware of her, aware in every part of his body and light, during those few minutes it took to get himself off the Chinook.
9
WHITE HOUSE
LOKI’S BOOTS HIT the grass. His aleimi continued to pull on the woman’s in the background, but once he’d landed on the muddy, water-soaked ground, his head felt marginally clearer again, perhaps just from being outside the aircraft.
He could breathe freely again.
He glanced back at the Chinook a last time before Jax gripped his vest, dragging him deeper into the area of the old lawn and away from what his light still wanted.
“I am sorry, brother,” Loki murmured, glancing at the shorter, East Indian-looking seer. “Truly.”
Jax only smiled at him, clapping him on the back. His eyes remained serious, though. “No apologies. You might need a chaperone until we get you two lovebirds back to the carrier...but no apologies required, brother Loki. I guess it was just your day.”
Loki nodded at the seer expression, not answering.
He still found himself fighting his own light.
Slowly pulling his equilibrium back to center, he shifted his eyes around where they stood, focusing on the grounds themselves, on the physical details of their location about twenty meters from the door to the reception hall below the South Portico.
The transformation of the building struck him more directly that time, now that he could see it all without the intervening organic-glass window.
It differed markedly from the out-of-date virtual schematic the Sword provided.
Dirt and scorch marks rode in twisting patterns up several of the white columns, he could see now. The dirt looked mostly to be weathering from storms. The scorch marks still looked more like localized fires than bombs or missiles.
Loki saw broken furniture, cloth and other refuse covering much of the lawn directly below the portico itself, as if most of the items there had originally been thrown to the lawn from the upstairs floors of the White House itself. The grass itself was mostly gone. That, or else it had grown wild, depending on which segment of ground Loki studied with his eyes. He saw an equal number of bald, muddy patches filled with tire ruts and garbage, sometimes directly adjacent to denser patches of taller, field-looking grasses mixed with dandelions, thistles and wildflowers. He saw broader-leafed plants, too, which must have seeded from other areas.
He measured with his eyes that most of these, dead and alive, had entertained at least a few months’ worth of growth. The monsoon-like rains must be keeping the area greener than usual, even without the fountains and sprinkler systems of the past, but clearly, no one had mowed any of these patches of wild growth for six months or more. If not longer.
Loki tried to remember again, when all of this started.
Had it been a year already? It had been more than that, he realized. The disease had come to San Francisco in October of the previous year, so they were already a month past the time of the initial infection.
As Loki puzzled over this fact in his mind, and how different this area had been just those thirteen months previous––when the Sword and Bridge and the rest of them still lived inside a fully-functioning hotel in New York City––he realized, once again, that until he had a concrete reminder such as this, of the actual, physical changes that had taken place, in areas he knew before the disaster struck, it sometimes felt like things had always been this way.
Well...except when they weren’t.
Memory interceded, reminding him, but it all felt strangely distant, even now.
The stone fountain had a few inches of yellowish-brown, brackish water stagnating in its basin, choked with mosquito larvae and trash broken by circles of mossy foam on either side of the previously white walls. The place stank of rotten vegetation and urine, and Loki felt his mouth curl involuntarily until he looked away, back towards the scorched walls of the White House’s main building itself.
He motioned with one hand to Illeg, then to Jax, pointing towards the lower entrance to the diplomatic reception room. The Sword had given him blueprints along with operational parameters, but there was no way to know which entrances would still be open and which blocked. Balidor had also provided the most recent aleimic scans they had of the building and surrounding city, but those were at least two months out of date, as well.
Even as he thought it, Illeg motioned towards him, asking a pointed question with her hands.
My discretion, he answered, gesturing back the answer, also using seer sign language. For now, no Barrier, he added. Once we’re inside, if there’s still no construct present, we might use it in targeted bursts...but only at my signal. The construct is abandoned, according to the Adhipan, but the boss thinks they might still be watching this and other hot spots, so we’ll only dip in and out as needed. Understood?
Illeg nodded, her eyes holding a faint relief.
Loki did not add that Shadow and his people might be watching them, too, meaning the individual team members, especially given who they were. Particularly, he might be tracking those who had accompanied the Sword into Gossett Tower that night, and who had aided him in stealing back the Bridge and Sword’s daughter, as well as the being, War.
He didn’t voice any of that, though.
Instead he looked around at the rest of the team, ensuring they also understood.
Mika nodded, confirming her understanding with another set of hand signals. Jax, who had been watching them converse back and forth, nodded, as well. Loki caught Ontari’s eye when he glanced that way, and waited for his nod. Once he had it, he checked with Anale, Holo, Kalgi and Rex, as well. Loki noticed only then that all of the seers seemed to have relaxed, in both their facial expressions and their light, since they had gotten Loki off the aircraft.
Pushing his mind off the reasons for that, as well as the woman he was leaving behind, Loki nodded again, to himself that time. Glancing around once more at rest of them, including Rex, he motioned to Illeg again, waiting for her and Jax to walk out ahead before he signaled for Holo and Rex to follow. He pinged Ontari and Mika after they fanned out behind their leads, then motioned Kalgi closer, speaking to her in a low voice.
“Stay behind us a little,” he said. “This should be a simple extraction, but it feels very quiet here to me.”
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“Awfully fucking quiet, sir,” Kalgi confirmed, her eyes and voice agreeing with his implied meaning. “I’ll see if I can get Adhipan backup in terms of our own lights, sir.”
Loki nodded, sending a pulse of approval. “Good. Very good,” he said.
“I should have mentioned it earlier, sir,” she said almost apologetically. “I only thought of it now, to be truthful.”
He clicked at her mildly, but only smiled.
“I will mention it to the Sword,” he offered.
“Like hell, you will,” she retorted.
Smiling faintly at what he heard in her voice, he touched his headset again, switching it on and sending a subvocal check around to the rest of them, even as the props of the Chinook behind them continued to grind to a half power-down, moving slower and slower over the grass as the whine of the rotors lowered in volume and tone.
Realizing it would take some minutes to power the helicopter back up again, even from its current waiting stance, Loki hesitated, tempted to tell Preela to move the bird now, as a precaution. Even so, he appreciated Kalgi’s words...and understood their meaning.
He could feel they were all essentially pulling for him, too, since Loki himself had only recently been assigned to lead teams on the ground. The thought touched his mind briefly, how strange this might have been to all of them, even a few years earlier, with Kalgi, an ex-Adhipan lifer, taking orders from him, Loki, who fought as a rebel in two wars.
Loki found the symmetry there pleasing, however.
Something in it felt more like a circle than otherwise.
Giving Kalgi and then Anale a last glance and a smile, Loki raised his rifle, following the others towards the ground entrance into the oval hallway.
THE SWORD ONLY gave Loki the bare bones of where to look.
Truthfully, from the encrypted recording Oli sent, Loki could not be sure that the Sword knew for certain if there was anything to find, much less where it might be. Still, he understood the logic of looking, since they were all unlikely to be in this part of the world again, at least any time soon. They had found as many from the Lists as could be found here.
Allie's War Season Four Page 77