I also saw Varlan and Balidor both look at Tarsi, nearly at the same time.
She didn’t return their stares.
Instead, her clear eyes swiveled between mine and Revik’s. She made a vague, somehow dated gesture with one pale hand. That same hand––as well as the one resting on the table next to it, poking out of the loose sleeves of an embroidered blue and gold robe––looked strangely small to me all of a sudden. It also looked frail. And old.
It hit me in the same set of seconds that Tarsi was old.
It made her seem incredibly vulnerable to me suddenly, in a way I’d never let myself contemplate while Vash was still alive.
“Bite me, Esteemed Sister,” she said conversationally.
Forcing another smile, I rolled my eyes at her, clicking.
She wasn’t finished.
“Yes,” she said in her accented voice, quirking an eyebrow at me before she gave Balidor a look. “We saw a few things, while you and your husband act like great big adolescents who didn’t just have loud, uncivilized sex an hour ago, where some of us can hear it.”
Despite the faint humor in her tone, her eyes grew more serious.
“You sure you want to hear this, Bridge? Right now? Here?”
My jaw hardened. I didn’t glance back at Revik, but I felt his fingers tighten on my shoulder. When I didn’t speak, Tarsi let out a purring kind of sigh.
“I suppose you’re right,” she said. “No point in hiding any of this, now.”
She glanced at Balidor. While I read nothing in his face, I felt him agree with whatever Tarsi said to him, right before she turned back to us.
“You are fighting him,” Tarsi said. She drummed her fingers on the table, which somehow felt more comforting than impatient. “He is trying to pull you apart. Both of you are fighting him. You are fighting him very hard.”
I stared at her, feeling my light react. It snaked around me in sharper currents and waves, enough that I knew some part of me already understood her words, even if the full story hadn’t made it to my mind yet.
I glanced over my shoulder at Revik when his fingers tightened painfully. His face remained unreadable. I felt reactions in his light that told me otherwise, but I didn’t try to read those either, or any of his actual thoughts.
“Pull us apart?” I said, looking back at Tarsi.
By then, I understood. The important parts anyway.
I strongly suspected Revik did, too, but I needed to hear it.
“Aye,” Tarsi said, giving us a seer’s nod. “He wants to pull you apart. He’s trying to unravel your bond. To interrupt it, at least. He is testing the interdependence there. The thing that keeps the two of your life streams entangled.”
Behind me, Revik’s muscles hardened to rock.
I felt him react and wondered, almost at a distance, if he’d been doing the same thing I had done, pretending he hadn’t understood when he did. Or maybe he really hadn’t known.
Maybe he wasn’t as good at denial as I was.
As if she’d picked up on my thoughts, Tarsi narrowed her gaze at me.
“You hear me now, Bridge?” Tarsi said.
When I didn’t answer, she knocked her fist on top of the table with sharp, rhythmic raps. Her colorless eyes reflected light from the walls.
“He’s trying to unlock the bond,” Tarsi repeated. “Maybe not all the way. Maybe not entirely. But enough. Enough to kill you, maybe. Enough to kill all three of you.” She gestured at me with a gnarled finger, then slid that same finger towards Revik, a near accusation. “Maybe Shadow’s promised to re-bond him to War. Or to the Broken One. They might not want you dead, nephew. They still want the girl, too, I suspect.”
Pausing a beat, she looked directly at me.
“Shadow wants you dead, Bridge. Make no mistake. Shadow wants you dead so badly he can taste it. Your husband’s right to be worried. Maybe he’s right about a lot of things you don’t really want to think about right now, Bridge.”
Swallowing, I didn’t answer.
My mind turned over Tarsi’s words, the layers behind what she was trying to tell me. I could feel the rebuke, of course. I read something else, there, too, something about Kali and Uye that hit me pretty damned hard in the chest, although most of me still didn’t want to go there, either. As the understanding filtered over my light, that anger worsened.
Fury, really.
Not just about Menlim.
Although Menlim was a huge part of it, yeah. Whatever else happened in this post-apocalyptic nightmare, no matter how many humans and seers continued to annihilate one another for centuries afterwards, Menlim and his fucking Dreng posse had to go.
Maybe that was part of Tarsi’s message to me––to be willing to cross lines I hadn’t wanted to cross, to take risks I’d been unwilling to take, to make that happen. Maybe it wouldn’t be enough to take the safe road, even if it meant sacrificing myself. Even if it meant sacrificing people I loved. That idea terrified me, though––especially when I thought about the people sitting around this table, much less Lily and Revik.
I also wondered if Tarsi thought I should be giving Revik his head more, especially in those areas where he did best. Maybe I was holding him back. At the very least, maybe I was refusing to take advantage of what and who he was.
Behind me, I felt Revik agree.
Exhaling, I leaned deeper into his chest.
But if Revik wanted a free head with this, he had to give me one, too.
I cleared my throat. “Menlim is doing this? Menlim is trying to unlock the bond? Him, specifically?”
Balidor and Tarsi exchanged another look. Then, for some reason, Balidor looked directly at Jon, who grimaced.
“Not Menlim, no,” Balidor said.
“Terian,” Jon said, exhaling in a near-growl. He looked at Wreg, then leaned back in his chair, folding his arms. “I felt Terian there, Al. So did the rest of us who know his light. But I suspect you already knew that, given how you asked the question.”
I only nodded. “How is he getting through? Does anyone know?”
I looked at Jon, but he only shrugged with one hand, clicking softly. I couldn’t help noticing how seer-like he looked and sounded, even apart from the leather jacket and dark red shirt, that somehow made him appear more Wreg-like than usual.
“Presumably through Revik,” he said, shrugging the human way as his eyes rose. “Maybe Menlim’s helping him. Or maybe Menlim’s using Terian. I don’t know.” He waved a hand in another seer’s shrug. “But it definitely felt like him. And it definitely felt like it’s coming from Dubai. So whatever other bullshit he fed you in that visit of his, he probably told you the truth about where he was. That, or this is another ploy to get you there.”
I stared at Jon. As I did, the missing piece fell into place.
Remembering that virtual image of Terian in the tank, pleading with me to come for him, to pull him out of Dubai, I looked over my shoulder at Revik.
Revik’s eyes had turned murderous in that pause.
Even so, I already felt the decision there.
Terian had just become an objective in our trip to Dubai, after all. In fact, Terian had just become operational priority number one.
I strongly suspected he might not like it very much when we found him, though.
25
SLAVE SHIP
SAYING GOODBYE TO Lily was hard.
Excruciating, really.
Revik held me the whole time, even as I fought to keep my mouth shut around Kali and Uye, if only to prevent myself from saying something I would regret.
I knew my biological parents and their Children of the Bridge were the logical people to take her. I knew that, and I told Lily the same, but I couldn’t stop myself from crying as I said it. Once Lily saw me crying she started crying too, which only made it worse.
Watching her cling to Revik’s leg didn’t help. Nor did it help when she started trying to bargain with us, promising she’d be good if we’d just take her with u
s.
Yeah, it really sucked.
My fears around my parents taking Lily didn’t stem from trust issues so much––at least not in the usual way trust issues presented for me these days. However I might feel about my newly-found “parents,” I didn’t believe they were agents of Shadow, especially with Tarsi and Balidor vouching for them and telling me how unlikely that was. I argued with Revik about it at first, but he pointed out that my negative emotions and distrust were more personal than not, and that I’d agreed with Kali that Lily was no longer safe on the ship.
I finally caved after Revik pulled Balidor and Tarsi into the discussion yet again, but I still had to fight to get enough distance to look at my reactions objectively. Once I did, I had to admit Revik was right.
I still hated it.
On the plus side, Lily had been a lot happier since we got her out of the tank.
She liked having her own room next to ours. She especially liked the adjoining door, which she would knock on incessantly if we hadn’t gotten around to unlocking it yet by the time she woke up. She also knocked on it in the middle of the night a few times, asking to sleep in our bed with us. Even with all of me and Revik’s distractions with our own light, Lily still managed to be in our room as much––if not more––than her own.
She also came with us to eat in the mess hall for all of her meals now, and to get cooed over by all of the adult seers who finally got to spend more time with her, including her “Uncle Wreg” who was the worst of the lot in spoiling her rotten and letting her have her way.
Not like the rest of them were much better. Even Balidor seemed physically incapable of saying no to her.
Jon was a little better about setting boundaries. So was Chandre, although I’d seen her sneaking Lily ice cream at least once, too. I had zero qualms about chewing her out right in front of my daughter, who I couldn’t help noticing looked entirely lacking in remorse.
Lily also came with me whenever I walked on the deck.
Revik took her flying one day, too, taking her up in one of the prop planes. I’d been stuck in a meeting and couldn’t go with them, but I got to hear all about it that night, and about how the flight crew gave her tours of the jets and helicopters lashed to the deck, and let her wear the giant sound mufflers used by the deck hands.
So yeah, Revik wasn’t much better than the rest of them, really.
Neither was I, when it came down to it.
Jon and Wreg came with us to introduce Lily at the human school the day after she got out of the tank. Since then, she’d been jabbering nonstop to me and Revik about her new friends. More than any of them, she talked about the one other seer child who attended classes with her, a male Asian seer named Buuri who Lily claimed had eyes “just like Uncle Wreg’s,” which I took to mean they must be close to that black, obsidian color of my brother’s husband.
She also claimed Buuri knew more languages than she did, an announcement that sounded more like an accusation than not. It soon came out that Lily had somehow decided that her lesser knowledge of languages was entirely Revik’s fault.
I supposed that made sense in Lily’s world, since Revik tended to switch up languages a lot more than I did, often without noticing he did it.
Even so, I had to laugh a little.
Regardless of the relative merits of Lily’s blaming Revik for her perceived skill gaps, she’d demanded that he teach her Mandarin, Russian and Spanish at once. I’m not entirely sure why she picked those three languages, but they were pretty solid choices and Revik was fluent in all three, so we didn’t argue. In the short term, Revik got her tutors instead of doing it himself, however, since we were often in planning sessions now even when she wasn’t in school.
Lily went along with that, if somewhat grudgingly.
Lily also wanted to learn Vietnamese, she announced a few days later.
I was less clear on her motives for that one, but Kali offered to teach her after we left for Dubai. I thanked her for that, but not very nicely, I’m afraid.
Either way, and even apart from Lily, the aircraft carrier appeared to be slowly disbanding.
We’d already decided we would continue to use it operationally for Dubai, but we would limit the crew to military. Even then, I’d ordered them to keep it at a skeleton crew once they got the tanks and other large items moved. They’d already started the transport of nonessentials a few days before we got to the staging area.
Now that we were ready to go live, that clock started to count down for real.
I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that.
Meaning the fact that we would soon be land-bound again.
But, like giving Lily to her grandparents, I didn’t have much choice.
AS I BOBBED in the water, gripping the side of the inflatable boat that still held Wreg, Jon, Chandre and Neela, I couldn’t help thinking, it’s a good thing I’m a decent swimmer.
We’d gone over about a million different ways to enter Dubai.
As with most of our operations lately, the tricky part would be me and Revik.
We’d been practicing different types of Barrier cloaks and shields for weeks. We also worked to get better at hiding specific trauma markers, as well as other imprints and structures particular to ourselves and our aleimi––especially Revik, whose light had been mapped more extensively by Shadow and his minions than anyone else on our team.
That didn’t even get into things like changing the way we walked, talked, sat and otherwise moved our bodies to keep from being picked up by electronic surveillance. We knew Shadow could very easily be focusing defensive scans on other seers in our team by now, too.
We knew they might be expecting us.
Not because of Macau, necessarily, but definitely because of Terian.
Clearly, someone wanted us paying attention to Terry, and to Dubai more generally. As Revik pointed out, however, the smoke signals from Terry could be meant to draw us to Dubai, or they might just as easily be meant to warn us away. Terian asking us to come was so heavy-handed that it might have been intended to have precisely the opposite effect.
On the other hand, unraveling our marital bond seemed like a pretty big flag to wave in front of our faces, especially under the circumstances.
Whatever the meaning of Terry’s erratic smoke signals, and even though the infiltration team managed to pinpoint Dubai as the source with a fair degree of certainty, the idea of Terian being stationed there...or anywhere, really...was also a fallacy on multiple levels.
We had absolutely no idea how many bodies Terian might be operating these days, or how they might be connected. Even if we found one of those bodies in Dubai, getting ahold of it might be mostly worthless. We had no way to “hide” him in any conventional sense, given what he was. Putting a secondary body in the tank and cutting it off from his primary body––meaning Feigran––would likely only kill it. There was zero guarantee it would provide us any useful information before that happened.
Conversely, given how Terian’s bodies worked together in the past, Revik warned that no amount of shielding would cut Terian off from the rest of the his bodies if we left him in some kind of military construct outside of the tank. That meant he’d be a walking GPS signal for Shadow unless we locked him up... which again, would probably just kill him.
That didn’t leave us a lot of options, really.
Well, unless we happened to get ahold of the primary body, meaning Feigran himself.
In the past, the Dreng and Terian himself had gone to pretty drastic lengths to make his original body inaccessible, though.
Under the Rooks, he stored his original body up in space.
The whole topic of Terian and Feigran spawned an interminable number of endless discussions and arguments, including how long we could afford to stay there, inside a Shadow city, to look for someone who would probably be under armed guard and in close proximity to Shadow himself. Many of the infiltrators questioned whether we should even be trying to bring in Feigr
an, given the risks and uncertain benefits.
More than one person thought we should find him primarily to kill him.
Another group thought we should grab the List seers and get the hell out of there.
A smaller set of us, including me and eventually Revik, thought we should at least try to bring Feigran in alive, mostly in the hopes he might be able to help Lily.
Of course, those discussions also brought on a set of extrapolations around what might happen if we managed to get ahold of the original Feigran body, and, more to the point...if we could find some way to throw a kill-switch on the rest, in effect, killing “Terian” once more, and integrating all of his requisite pieces back into a unified Feigran.
Again, most of those theories involved utilizing the tank to cut Feigran off from his satellite versions, which in theory couldn’t survive without the original body. We had no idea what that might do to the “fragments” of Terian left floating out there, though, if they would be reunited with the Feigran body when he emerged from the tank, or...
Well, or not.
Revik thought if the gap wasn’t too long, they might reunite.
It was all just one giant jumble of maybes and what ifs though, and we all knew it. No one knew for certain whether Feigran would even survive the process, if he lost whole pieces of himself to the ether while locked up inside the tank. Revik also reminded me repeatedly that capturing Feigran couldn’t be a full-fledged mission priority until we’d breached the city walls and could do a realistic assessment of the likelihood of that mission’s success.
We did have a few people on the inside by then, of course.
Communication had been spotty, but we knew they’d made it inside.
They were able to tell us a few approaches not to try, at least, as well as a bit more about security measures to expect once we breached the city’s construct. Since our inside contact was Surli, meaning my sort-of ex-boyfriend from China, I knew Revik felt even less confident about using that intel than I did. He’d made absolutely no bones about not trusting Surli, but Tarsi recommended him, and in the end, it had been me who had to make the call.
Allie's War Season Four Page 117