He’d combed his fingers through his hair, exhaling again.
I felt the grief in his light that time, though, even before I heard it in his voice.
“I lied to myself about that, too.” Glancing at me, he let some of the defensiveness in his voice drop. “Allie, I really thought of it more like going to Yumi. I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I never intended to lie to you about it. I lost a friend over it...and I deserve that...but I don’t want you to think that I deliberately went in there, knowing it would hurt you. I convinced myself it wasn’t a big deal.”
I hadn’t said anything after that, mostly because I didn’t have to.
He was right. He’d already lost a friend over it.
“...And nearly a wife,” he muttered, his voice holding that grief again. “Believe me, Allie, there is no confusion in me on that point. There won’t be. Ever again.”
I’d frowned at that, too, but wasn’t sure what to say.
I could see how he’d rationalized it to himself. I could also see how Ullysa had seen it, and I couldn’t help but be more sympathetic to her viewpoint than his.
I suspected he even felt the same. Somewhere in that, I’d asked him how he would have felt if I’d gone to Jaden for something that personal, and I could tell that stung him, too.
I could also tell the comment hadn’t quite left his mind yet.
Anyway, he’d hardly fought me on any of it. Rather, he’d basically promised me he wouldn’t so much as take his shoes off in front of someone else without my permission, ever again...or at least not any time in the foreseeable future.
I hadn’t asked that of him, either. Nor did I really want it, truthfully, but he didn’t seem to want to even discuss it with me. In any case, I could tell he meant it.
Still, things continued to be strange with us.
Maybe because my light had changed again after that whole blowout, or maybe because of what I’d done to his and Lily’s light in the tank the next day, but Revik and I were going through one of our “things” again...a lot more intensely than when we’d first been reunited after we left New York. Revik had given me a bunch of reasons around why he thought that was, and while they all made sense intellectually, the way I experienced it was a lot more straightforward.
Meaning, yeah, I wanted to touch him pretty much constantly.
I wanted to be in his light constantly, too, and when we weren’t with Lily, I pretty much wanted us to be naked constantly...to the extent that I was having trouble keeping my hands off him in front of other people, which hadn’t been much of an issue before.
As a result, we weren’t getting a lot of sleep.
As we parked in the staging area on the North Indian Coast and plans started firming around Dubai, I knew I needed to do a few things before we went live.
Things other than the endless planning sessions, that is, and the arguments about who would go ashore and which of us would lead what extraction teams for what parts of the city and what might happen to me and Revik inside that construct, especially if Shadow managed to cut us off from one another...and a million other things.
At the top of that list, I had to bite the bullet and talk to Cass.
I FOUND MYSELF inside a virtual depiction of the inside of the tank quadrant all at once, and without preamble. I didn’t know for sure how it looked from her end––I assumed it included the door being opened from the outside, complete with sound effects and whatever else––but from my perspective, I just appeared there.
Ignoring her at first, I walked directly to what for me was a virtual chair, and sat in it.
We weren’t playing this little game in virtual just to be jerks.
I couldn’t be cut off from Revik and Lily, not even for a short interview, so I was in a specially-designed virtual jump room, lying in a vat of pink jelly stuff that reminded me of the green slime we used to buy at the joke shop as kids. It looked pretty gross and felt wet even though it wasn’t––but now that I lay in a bathtub of the stuff, it allowed me total freedom of movement. Balidor likened it to floating in salt water, which made sense.
In any case, Cass shouldn’t know I wasn’t really there.
Over the past few weeks, they’d equipped her quadrant of the tank with a pretty fancy virtual reality interface. Dante had taken it as a personal affront that Terian’s VR transmission inside the tank was more sophisticated than anything she’d worked out on her own. As a result, she made it her personal mission to figure out how he’d done it.
She and Jaden had been working on widening the bandwidth that could operate inside the tanks for awhile. Dante redoubled her efforts on that, too, once she realized she’d need it to pull off Terian’s trick.
I was the test run. If we’d done everything right, Cass shouldn’t even know I wasn’t really there, not wearing a collar.
She hadn’t spoken to me yet, or even acknowledged me apart from a faintly-amused grunt as I first lowered myself into the chair. She didn’t look up as I continued to sit there, but only shook her head, exuding anger. I couldn’t feel that anger, of course.
Well, not really.
I could see it on the Barrier readouts being recorded via cameras inside the room, and Dante’s new, enhanced VR program now translated those imprints into actual emotional feelings that hit my light. So yeah, with the virtual program translating those imprints into actual sensations, it felt like I could feel it...if that even remotely makes sense.
The truth was, I didn’t want to be here at all, not even like this.
I knew I had to talk to her though. Even if I didn’t know exactly why.
Anyway, anger wasn’t the predominant emotion I felt on Cass. Not real anger.
Most of what I felt via that Barrier-virtual-recording interface was excitement.
I’d halfway expected that, too, from our last little interaction. It reminded me of Ditrini, that wanting of engagement. Maybe they both looked for any opportunity to feel important. That, or they needed the distraction from the silence when they were left alone. I’d known for awhile now that this new version of Cass got off on any excuse to fuck with people––with me, Jon and Revik especially––but the reality of that excitement still made me grimace.
Since that whole blowout with Revik, so many things were just clearer now, including around Cass, both the old and new models. Some part of me had known from the beginning that this personality transplant wasn’t wholly new to Cass...not entirely anyway. She’d always liked fucking with other people a little too much. She’d always liked power games and gossip and revenge a little too much. She’d always gotten off on “winning” a little too much, or at least the illusion of it. I knew she could be incredibly passive aggressive to those ends, in addition to aggressive-aggressive, especially when the theatrics suited her.
I also knew she invented a lot of these dramas in part to fight depression.
But all that had been softened by other things, back when we were friends.
Now, it was like the person I knew was still there, but warped and distilled through a pane of glass that only let through the ugly bits. None of it was unfamiliar exactly, but it definitely had a harder, meaner flavor. There were also a lot fewer glimpses of the vulnerability of the person behind the veneer, the one I actually gave a shit about.
What had been occasionally irritating but overall kind of sympathetic and human before, now just felt petty and dark.
That core of vulnerability and heart that had once softened and wrapped itself around those other parts of her was gone...or hidden, at least.
I’d seen her play victim in here, sure, but that just felt like more bullshit, one other tactic in an arsenal meant to control, not to connect.
Now, with so much of her light structured by the Dreng, Cass seemed to have given herself permission to live in that shallow, power-obsessed place pretty much full-time.
Because of that, I could only see the parts of her I’d chosen to overlook in the past––the parts of her that liked to chi
p away at people, to undermine, to run little agendas and games. To lie. To steal boyfriends from the girls she was jealous of. To turn perceived slights into full-fledged wars. To manipulate people. To drive wedges between them. To sabotage other people’s good fortune or find some way to make their victories about her.
Basically all the parts of her I used to pretend she’d grow out of.
It was looking less and less likely she would grow out of it anytime soon.
Considering where her mind and light lived these days, it was pretty much a given that Cass looked forward to seeing me. One thing I’d learned over the past few years, especially in Beijing: people who lived to exert power always looked for an excuse for engagement. Any excuse at all. Being ignored was like a death sentence for them. It was also pretty much a given that the mere fact so much of their energy was focused on fucking with other people’s heads, inevitably they’d be good at it.
So when I sat there, looking at her, I saw Cass ignoring me.
More than that however, I saw the button she was aiming at, trying to get a reaction, by the precise way she ignored me.
Sighing, I looked around the small space. I made an instant decision. It might tip her off that I wasn’t really there, but I didn’t care all that much.
As I thought it, it happened. The virtual space reconfigured around us both.
I found myself sitting on a stretch of sandy beach that I knew so well it caught my breath, even though I’d been the one to summon it.
The beach no longer existed in reality, so maybe that was part of it.
Back when we were kids, Cass and I visited the real place a lot... to chase birds, to make sand castles and collect shells... and, more than anything, to use our bikes to get as far away from the adults as we could. Later, when we were in high school, Jon would come with us, and sometimes others in the old crew. We’d sit on the dunes and talk shit and smoke and drink from the flask Cass always managed to fill up from her dad’s liquor cabinet.
Eventually, Jaden and I would come out here too.
Thinking about those days, I looked at the red-painted Golden Gate Bridge on my right in the distance, and felt a pain in my chest.
Most of those people were dead now.
Something about that realization, along with the memories themselves, combined with my recent few days of watching Sasquatch and Jaden get stoned and play video games, made those days seem strangely closer and yet further away than they ever had.
That version of me just felt... gone.
Maybe even more gone than the version of Cass I remembered.
I sighed as the hard metal of the virtual chair from Cass’s cell vanished.
Now I rested on a grassy dune of virtual sand, just southwest of a cliff that sat far out in the water, cutting off the north end of the beach to my right. Drawing my knees in to my chest, I circled my shins with my arms, hugging my legs tight to my body. I looked out over the dark blue water and the lightly crashing waves.
Cass stared out over the same view.
I could even feel the coast inside the VR, so there must be some lingering Barrier imprint catalogued in the program...that, or my mind and light manufactured that feeling from resonance and memory alone. Whatever the source, for the first time, I let myself go there. I let myself feel that this was Cass, my best friend for as long as I could remember.
I knew the dangers of doing it, even as I let it happen.
I didn’t need any reminders of how dangerous she was now...even locked up in here. Balidor lectured me on that point again and again in the lead up to this little interview. Those warnings felt beside the point, truthfully. Looking out over the sunset-kissed image of the Golden Gate Bridge hanging over the water, smelling rotting fish and salt as I listened to the cry of gulls, I found myself seeing Cass as a person again, beyond the twisted thing that she’d let herself become under the Dreng.
I also saw how I hadn’t been doing that before.
Really, since we’d found her down in Argentina, I’d let myself forget about Cass as a person... as opposed to an operational priority of one kind or another. That might have made me feel guilty at one point. Now, I didn’t feel anything.
Maybe because, for the first time, I didn’t kid myself that the person sitting in front of me was my best friend, Cass. I didn’t know what she was anymore, or where Cass had gone, or even if Cass still existed the way I remembered her, but pretending this was my best friend, no matter what this thing looked like, wasn’t going to do me any favors.
Nor did it feel particularly accurate.
This wasn’t even like Revik, where I could still glimpse him inside the mess he’d become while trapped inside the Dreng. All I saw when I looked at Cass was a blank wall. So yeah, for now, at least, I assumed I was dealing with the Dreng directly when I spoke to her.
“Hey...are you okay?”
Revik, via the link in my ear.
I nodded, barely perceptible. I knew he would see it.
They’d decided to leave me alone inside the interrogation room so that I would have less Barrier interference. They hadn’t left me alone entirely, of course.
I felt a flush of worry on Revik’s light. I knew he didn’t want me talking to Cass in the first place. I knew why, too.
I knew Balidor agreed with him, if for different reasons.
The truth is, Kali was the only other person who thought I should come in here. As much as I hated to admit it, I appreciated her for that. I knew they would’ve fought me if I’d been forced to make the argument alone, but they seemed to listen to her, as the resident prescient. The bottom line was, I needed to talk to Cass before we hit Dubai. I didn’t know why––which irritated me, yeah––but the feeling held, so I was doing it.
Even Revik didn’t argue once Kali backed me up.
Anyway, it seemed to have become the Allie and Kali magical bullshit hour lately, so no one questioned my nebulous impulses anyway, maybe partly from having her around. I still didn’t like that fact––not at all, really––but it was what it was.
Now that I was here, I decided to let Cass open things up.
I didn’t have to wait long.
Turns out, the new and not-so-improved Cass didn’t like silence anymore than Ditrini did. Eventually she seemed to realize I wasn’t going to push her to talk. She let out another of those laughs that contained not a single shred of real humor.
Leaning back, she plopped her palms in the soft sand, shaking out her long, red-tipped black hair under the last light of the sun. Lifting her hand a moment later, she shielded her eyes from that same virtual sun as she aimed her gaze further west. Again, fitting in a way. We’d watched more sunsets on the real Baker Beach than I could count. We generally ended up here after school and homework, and went home not long after dark.
I watched Cass’s eyes follow a pelican skimming over the tips of white-crested waves as they curled gently into foam.
Lowering her hand, she let out a louder snort.
“Baker Beach,” she said. “Wow. How corny could you get?”
She looked at me in annoyance, her brown eyes unknown to me, so distant I didn’t even bother to look for her in them. I looked at the electronic conversions of her aleimic signature instead, using invisible-to-her VR screens I pulled up behind her, so that they floated over the reddening mouth of the bay.
I wondered again if I might be able to pull the same structures off her that I’d pulled off Revik and Lily. I’d already been warned it was less likely in Cass’s case, and not only because Revik and Lily wanted theirs gone.
Still, I didn’t really get why until I saw the structures themselves. Now that I could see her through the changes in my own sight, I noticed a lot of rebuilding by the Dreng. Not really more than what I’d seen on Lily or Revik, but different. It was like they’d created whole sections of her structure from scratch, maybe to jumpstart the telekinesis.
“It’s not only that,” Revik told me softly in my ear. “They took a lot out,
Allie. Mostly stuff from her childhood.”
I frowned, but gave another bare nod to show that I’d heard.
I wondered what might happen to Cass if we pulled Terian into the mix.
Even as I thought it, I found myself speaking aloud.
“Terian contacted me,” I told her. “As in me, personally. Not Revik. In fact, he told me he’d waited for Revik to be gone. Why would he do that, Cassandra?”
Cass turned, staring at me, her dark eyes briefly widening.
It was a micro-expression, barely there before it was gone, but I saw the ripple in her light signature. My words definitely surprised her.
She turned that surprise into a mocking smile within a heartbeat.
“Looking for dating advice, Al?” She made her voice falsetto, reminiscent of 1950s-style advertising. “Oh, my! What’s a modern girl to do? So many eligible men, and so little means to choose between them!” She gave me another smirk. “Perhaps you should come up with some sort of criteria, Al? Or a system of incentive between them. Have them fight to the death. Or see which one of them gives better head.”
I frowned a little, but didn’t stop on it for long.
“What’s in Dubai, Cass?” I said.
“Sand,” she said, smiling at me again. “A fuck-ton of sand, Al... even more than you’ve got in your virtual memory walk here. And I happen to know from personal experience that you can buy shoes made of solid gold, if that’s your thing. Nowadays, you can probably buy a few cute Middle Eastern human males, too... put collars around their necks and take them for walks around the air conditioned malls... order them to suck off the cocks of passersby, if the mood strikes you.” She gave me a harder stare. “I hear you did that, Al. In Beijing. Is that true?”
I felt Revik flinch, somewhere in the other room.
I kept my expression smooth.
“Does Shadow want me to go to Dubai, Cass?”
She threw up her hands, smiling. “How would I know that, Al? I’m in here... remember? A bit out of the loop, these days, with the big boss.”
Allie's War Season Four Page 111