Allie's War Season Four

by JC Andrijeski

  Despite the redesign, most seers still called it the bullpen.

  We now had most of our major strategy meetings in there.

  I’d been told my parents would be staying with us, too, at least until they left with the majority of the civilians on the List. Balidor marked off a whole segment of bunks near the stern for Kali and her leadership team, including Dalejem. Some of Kali’s team already slept with the regular seer crew, however––meaning those vetted by Wreg who had been integrated into our infiltration and military teams by mutual agreement.

  I hadn’t really gotten involved in any of that though.

  I also hadn’t visited that part of the ship.

  The bullpen itself sat on the deck directly under the hard deck, along with the captain’s cabin, (which currently housed Balidor and Yarli), and a larger, second, command-center type room that handled air traffic control and routed radar information from the tower.

  The comp nerds, led by Vikram and Dante, sat on our other side, towards the bow. They pretty much owned the entire tech enclave that took up a good chunk of that half of our level. From what Balidor told me, that segment was growing.

  It had grown more since Loki and the others brought back all of that crap from D.C.

  Sighing up at the ceiling, I tried to push all of the other voices out of my light.

  I still struggled with the whole thing. With Revik knowing about my parents, with Dalejem leaving Revik to work for my mother, with whatever the hell had happened between my mother and Revik that still had my father watching Revik like a hawk.

  I’d asked him about that, too, but for once, he hadn’t said much. He admitted he’d had a crush on her when he first met her in Saigon, but it felt like there was more to the story than what he told me.

  He was vehement that they had never been physical, which was a relief, at least.

  Anyway, I couldn’t tell which part of it bothered me more. All of the stuff with Revik, the bullshit secrets for all of these years with Balidor and whoever else...or my mother apparently instructing Dalejem to leave me under a fucking overpass in the middle of a human city, when I was too young to even crawl.

  Revik claimed he knew nothing about that, either, and I believed him.

  It didn’t really answer any of my questions, though. It also didn’t make me want to talk to either of my parents, really, much less Dalejem himself.

  I knew Revik felt he couldn’t tell me any of that stuff before.

  I knew he’d made a vow, and that not breaking vows was a big deal to him. I also knew he’d obeyed Kali in part because of her intermediary status... and, indirectly, because of mine. I knew that got into his religious beliefs, which was a whole other part of his psyche I only partly understood but also knew mattered to him a lot.

  But yeah, it bugged me.

  Plus, there was that whole other question that nagged at me.

  “How many men have you dated?” I asked him finally. “And why didn’t you ever tell me about any of them?”

  That made him roll his eyes, too, and probably deservedly.

  He told me, though. A funny thing about him ever since that blow up with me walking out: as annoyed as he might get with me for worrying about that stuff, he never refused to answer any of my questions. The answer to that one was pretty brief, though.

  “None other than Dalejem,” he said, shrugging with a hand. “Other than Terry...and you already knew about that.”

  A flicker of shock slid through my light. “I did?”

  Revik turned his head, staring at me. His German accent grew more pronounced. “Allie! How did you not know about that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, clicking in annoyance. “Maybe because you never told me?”

  But Revik seemed to think that the fact that he and Terian had once dated should have been completely obvious to me, even though he claimed that had only been sex, too. He claimed all of his relationships with men had been sex, that there hadn’t been any real “dating” going on with any of them, apart from Dalejem himself.

  Revik further said he only called it a relationship with Terian because they’d been exclusive for awhile. He then pointed out that he’d been a Rook at the time, too, so hadn’t even been the same person he’d been with Dalejem, much less with me.

  When I asked him if he’d slept with any of the male seers I knew on the ship, he’d gotten even more frustrated, but he’d told me the truth there, too.

  “Yes,” he said, blunt. “Why? Do you want a list of names?”

  I did, actually, but I hadn’t exactly wanted to tell him that.

  Anyway, as much as I did want to know, I didn’t want to know, too. I was pretty tired of the Alice in Wonderland rabbit hole that was Revik’s sexual past. As soon as I thought I was more or less cool with all of it, something else appeared to smack me across the head and unbalance me all over again.

  So instead I’d countered, “If we were in Beijing, would you want to know?”

  But that made him angry for real.

  Angry enough that we pretty much dropped the discussion after that.

  I fought to think past everything we’d said though, even now, through the heartbeat of the ship, as I lay curled up against Revik’s side, my head cushioned on his bare shoulder. We hadn’t stayed angry at each other... we never did these days, not after we’d both apologized... but I felt that my comment about Beijing had hurt him. I could also tell he was still pissy about the whole thing with me staying with Jaden, even though he pretended to blow it off.

  I’m pretty sure he knew I went there to see Angie, not Jaden himself, but yeah, it still bugged him. And yeah, I couldn’t exactly blame him for that, given my own lingering issues around Dalejem and Ullysa and whoever else.

  Besides, Revik was probably right. I probably still loved Jaden in a way, too.

  But I also saw him clearly now.

  Clearly enough that I knew us even being friends was still a good ways off, and may never happen. Most of that wasn’t bitterness, at least not on my part. We just saw the world too differently now––I’d changed too much since those years. I could barely remember what I’d been like back then, meaning the version of me that first fell in love with Jaden.

  Regardless, I couldn’t sleep.

  The tension in my light didn’t feel like it was about Revik, though, not really. Not the bulk of it. Truthfully, I was feeling kind of down.

  The world felt darker to me again.

  I hated how little we really knew.

  I hated how much everything we did these days seemed to rely on some form of bullshit or another, too––”prophet’s fumes,” as Revik called them, but essentially bullshit.

  My bullshit. Kali’s bullshit. Tarsi and Balidor’s bullshit.

  The so-called insights of the Council. Dreams. Time Jumps. Weird flickers of the future and deconstructions of the past.

  It was all so damned nebulous. I was beginning to think I wasn’t much different from one of those ancient human kings who cut open chickens and had some weirdo pull apart their guts to make decisions.

  I hated how little we actually knew, and how completely unreliable most of our sources were. I hated the fact that we all knew we probably had more Shadow plants on the ship. I hated that some of the things I dreamed might come true.

  I hated that Terian was beginning to feel like one of my more reliable sources of intel.

  We had planning sessions just about every day. Long ones, especially since Revik and Lily had come out of the tank. Those sessions could stretch for friggin’ hours and drive me crazy with the vagueness and b.s. that was all we had to work with.

  Loki’s team had successfully pulled everything they could from that wall safe in the bunker under the White House in D.C. I’d probably been more skeptical than any of them about finding anything there... at least until Loki, Rex and Mika dumped out a bunch of data drives on the tech lab storage tables, along with organic machines I’d never seen before and reams of what looked like actu
al, dead-tree paper.

  The techs were still going over all of that stuff, but we’d gotten some preliminary intel from the cache. Most of it––apart from some stuff on emergency weather planning, OBE fields and underground crop development––pertained to genetic experimentation. A lot of that focused on fusing machinery into humans made of seer parts.

  Yeah. That.

  From what Revik told me, that kind of thing had been going on for years, even though it was deeply illegal under the now-defunct World Court. Galaith had labs all over Asia working on similar problems, including the one where we’d found the original Barrier-enclosure, or “Tank,” in Southwestern China.

  Vik now thought whoever was running this current crop of experiments might have had some success, though. Unsurprisingly, initial funding started under President Wellington.

  A.k.a., Terian.

  From what Revik told me, Terian had an obsession with genetics that dated back to the 1920s, before Revik even met him. At the end of World War II, Terian even roped Revik into coming with him to pillage Nazi concentration camps and hospitals before the Russians or Americans could get there. He’d stolen data, tissue samples, even live specimens pertaining to some of the fucked up experiments the Germans did, again mostly on seers. Galaith went on to fund Terian’s obsession for decades after that under the Rooks.

  Revik explained he’d been tasked with keeping an eye on these projects as Terian’s superior. He’d even been brought in once to shut a facility down, when Terian played a little too fast and loose with his charter.

  I didn’t ask for details.

  Honestly, I didn’t really want to know what levels of grossness that must have entailed. For Terian to have slid past acceptable levels of sheer ick even for the Rooks, I knew it had to have been pretty godawfully bad.

  Anyway, someone buried Wellington’s pet project when the new president, President Brooks, took over following his death. Or maybe they’d simply never told her about it.

  Either way, we all had a pretty good idea who funded Terian’s hobbies now.

  Why any of that had been left behind in the evacuations was anyone’s guess. Then again, a lot of things probably got lost with the panic around C2-77, and even earlier, when Wellington showed up dead. Revik told me Terian always did things off the books, no matter who he worked for. He’d hidden things from Galaith the whole time he was in the Rooks, or tried, anyway. Which told us something else.

  Either Terian forgot he’d left that stuff there––presumably in his transition into Feigran and then back into Terian––or he’d deliberately kept that information from Shadow.

  Revik seemed to think Shadow wouldn’t have left it there, if he’d known.

  While I suspected he was right, I wanted to ask Feigran those questions himself.

  Although, yeah... I knew how useful that might end up being.

  Apart from intelligence and military strategy sessions and planning for the landing in Dubai, personal drama, of course, also unfolded... and not all of it around me and Revik. The drama quotient seemed worse lately in general.

  Maybe because, yeah––giant boatload of seers.

  I’d already heard about the whole shit-storm that broke out when Dante’s mom came back from the United States. Apparently Dante caught her mom in the middle of some weird light-bonding thing going on between her and Loki, of all people.

  Yeah, Loki. The one guy in the senior team who talked even less than Revik.

  From what I’d been told, it started pretty much the instant the two of them laid eyes on each other.

  The other seers in the team, especially Mika and Rex, seemed to find the whole thing extremely funny. Dante threw a fit, however, which I guess was understandable. She accused Loki of mind-fucking her poor mother to get into her pants and a bunch of even less-complimentary things involving gang rape and racism against humans. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Loki felt the need to inform Dante that he hadn’t had sex with her mother yet, but that only blew Dante up more.

  Maybe it was the “yet” part of that sentence?

  Anyway, I barely got the story for all of the giggles from the seers who told me about it, and okay, from a distance, yeah, it was pretty funny. Since I’d been raised human, I maybe had a little more sympathy for Dante than a lot of them. I remembered all the crazy shit I used to believe about seers and tried to imagine walking in on my own mother (meaning Mia Taylor) with Balidor or one of the other infiltrators and the whole thing was just too disturbing to contemplate.

  Of course, it was also only funny to us because we knew it wasn’t true.

  Meaning, we knew Loki wasn’t raping her.

  We could see it, even if we had no reason to believe his words. The first time I saw Loki and Gina together, I could see that she was into him. Heck, she could barely keep her hands off him, even sitting in a plastic booth in the mess hall.

  I looked at Loki’s light pretty damned closely, too, and I couldn’t see him manipulating her at all. In fact, I could feel a lot of paranoia on him around that very thing, resulting in more of a hands-off approach to her light than might have been the case between two seers in the middle of a similar crush-type thing.

  But yeah, I’m sure to Dante it was a lot less funny.

  It would likely remain unfunny to her until we managed to convince her that no one had actually done anything crappy to her mom.

  I already really liked Gina, Dante’s mom, from the small amount I’d talked to her. It was kind of weird to realize we weren’t that far apart in age. In fact, we basically were the same age, give or take a few years, and from a human perspective, that put us solidly as peers.

  The reality of that age similarity made me look at Dante a little differently, too. Not quite in a “motherly” way, but yeah, maybe a bit more how the seers saw her, and a lot younger than I’d been seeing her back in New York.

  Of course, having my own daughter might have influenced that.

  The thing with Gina was funny, though––meaning the age thing––if only because it made me realize how much I’d changed, in terms of my own perceptions. Something about living among seers and constantly being told how young I was must have skewed my previous ideas of what certain ages meant, from the human point of view...where, yeah, I would have been old enough to have a teenage daughter, if I’d still been living a normal human life.

  I still think Gina had Dante pretty young, because she couldn’t have been over thirty-five or thirty-six, which put her in late teens or early twenties when she gave birth. That was even assuming she looked a few years young for her age.

  Still, it was nice to have another woman on board that I could more or less relate to.

  I mean, sure, I could relate to the other female seers a lot better now, but there was something different about being with a human who had been raised human versus a seer who had been raised seer. In some ways, I could still relate a lot more to the human experiences and perceptions, since they’d still shaped the majority of my own life.

  Moreover, yeah, Gina was cool.

  I’d remembered Dante telling me she had a “cool” mom, and I guess I’d pictured cool moms like when I was a teenager...not someone more or less my age, who was maybe was a senior while I was a sophomore in high school. The biggest differences between us, in fact, came more out of the New York versus San Francisco thing, not the human to seer thing.

  I could tell Revik found it funny, too.

  He told me he found it interesting hearing me and Gina talk. It reminded him of watching me with my human friends back when he’d been my bodyguard. He told me I hadn’t talked to Jon like that much for years now, that I tended to treat Jon more like I would another seer, with only occasional forays into private jokes and San Francisco-specific things.

  Also, Revik knew Jon, and so did I; people act different with someone they know.

  Some of the drama had been around me and Revik, too, of course.

  There was what I’d done to his and Lily’
s light, which caused a stink with some of the senior infiltrators and the Council. There was the whole thing with my biological parents being on board. And yeah, probably most of all, there was the blowout with me and Revik, and the thing in my light that changed afterwards, which apparently was pretty obvious to just about every seer who looked at me now. There was also some lingering gossip about the blowout itself.

  I apologized to Jon. And to Wreg.

  Both of them basically told me to forget it.

  I tried apologizing to Ullysa, but she wouldn’t really let me. Instead she fell over herself to apologize to me, which, yeah, was awkward.

  She was less understanding with Revik’s side of things.

  Revik finally admitted to me, after I bugged him about it, noticing how cold she’d been to him, that Ullysa wouldn’t speak to him at all anymore. She’d essentially severed their friendship following what I’d done in the mess hall, and told him so.

  When I asked him why, Revik rolled his eyes, clicking at me.

  “Because she thinks I misled her,” he said, his voice impatient. “And she’s probably right. I did tell her that I’d talked to you about it.”

  I stared at him, surprised. “You actually lied to her?”

  He clicked at me louder, leaning against the wall behind the bed.

  “I meant about needing that...and about telling you I wanted it. But yeah, she obviously thought I meant I’d talked to you specifically about why I was there. I didn’t dissuade her.” Seeing the incredulous look on my face, he rolled his eyes again, but colored that time, exuding embarrassment. “All right. I misled her.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Ullysa is religious,” he said, giving me an angrier look. “And a fuck of a lot more devoted to you than you seem to realize. I knew she wouldn’t do it if I didn’t tell her I had permission...so I let her think I did.”

  I’d continued to stare at him, still blown away that he’d lied.

  “And you thought that wouldn’t get back to her?” I said finally. “Or was it me you were hoping wouldn’t find out?”