Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  Loki watched as she approached Anale. He was just looking away when Mika sent him a flicker of pain, one he felt all the way to his groin.

  Let me know if you change your mind, brother, she sent. The offer didn’t contain as much charity as you seem to think.

  Loki did not answer that, either.

  Instead, inexplicably, he found himself looking at the human woman, only to find her staring at him, a deeper frown turning down the edges of her full mouth.

  A girlfriend? Or just someone he’s sleeping with? the woman mused.

  His cock hardened painfully, catching him off-guard. The thought of him sleeping with Mika bothered the human. He couldn’t be sure if he’d felt jealousy, exactly––if he had, she did not seem to have admitted the emotion to herself.

  He fought to pull his mind off her, off the woman’s full mouth and Mika’s offer of oral sex. Forcing his eyes off the human, he did his best to make his face infiltrator blank, an expression he wore more often than not.

  As he did, he heard Mika’s laugh echo softly inside his head.

  15

  DID I MISS SOMETHING?

  THEY MADE IT to the Chinook in just under two hours.

  They stood outside to regroup before take-off, gazing around the empty, cracked asphalt of what had been a school playground, according to the woman with them.

  She even seemed to recognize it, Loki thought, watching her look around, a faint sadness in her dark eyes. He wondered if she’d gone to school here, if she had memories specific to this place, ones that were personal, and had to fight to keep his light off hers to find out.

  He wanted to comfort her, in any case. He could see the shock wearing off her slowly, not just of her rescue, but maybe of the shift in her reality, from slavery and certain death to something a lot less certain and still only barely tinged with hope.

  To Loki himself, the place looked desolate. It reminded him of war-torn areas of his youth, places razed by human bombs, broken and devoid of life, littered with dead bodies.

  It also looked abandoned.

  The field’s grasses had turned to a near-swamp in the months after the containment fields failed, high and green in places, brown and smelling of mulch and mold in others, especially near the chained link fence that separated the field from the road. To his left, in the distance, he saw a brown brick building, windowless, that stretched the length of yet another street.

  From the woman’s fleeting memories, he guessed the brownstone building had been the school, and the large cement building next to it, the gymnasium.

  Directly in front of him, a sad-looking remnant of school pride stood in the form of rusted metal bleachers. Empty now, the bleachers overlooked the waving grasses of the field, limp in the slanting, sideways rain of yet another tropical storm.

  At least one dead body lived under those bleachers.

  Loki could smell it, even from where they stood.

  He glanced at the woman, and saw her shove small, white-looking hands in the front pockets of her black jeans. She wore four rings, he noted––silver, chunky things that felt less like they had emotional meaning than that she liked to wear them for other reasons. He wondered if they served as weapons, especially in that horrible place where they’d found her.

  She caught him staring, and he averted his gaze, fighting not to react to the way her light clung to his, seemingly looking for reassurance.

  More images flickered through her mind, memories of this place.

  Loki felt her grief. He noted her shock worsening, this time from being underground for so long. Shock of memory, of the realization her world had crumbled even further while she’d been locked away in that apartment building.

  Fear of the unknown. Worry for her daughter.

  Grief for lost friends.

  Grief for a whole way of life, gone forever.

  Tearing his light from hers, from her memories, he fought to refocus on his task.

  Blinking into the rain, he faced his small team, and the Chinook parked just behind them.

  According to their pilot, Preela, and Rex, the muscular seer Loki left with Preela to help her guard the Chinook, the two of them spent most of the last seven hours on the roofs of nearby buildings, dodging militia groups and armed human gangs. They spent a lot of that time on the same brick school building that stood behind them, although apparently at least one human gang lived inside those windowless walls, too.

  Rex spent most of his time in the Barrier, looking for possible threats while Preela piloted; Rex was also tasked with persuading better-armed humans not to aim missile launchers and other larger weapons at them while they were in the air.

  They even managed to get the Chinook refueled at the half-submerged JFK airport.

  That feat alone impressed Loki, as well as others on the team. Given the value of the fuel tanks there, and the dangers from rising waters, they must have been resourceful, indeed.

  Preela reported, and the far-less-talkative Rex confirmed, they’d had to fight their way through one of the local militias to gain access to the tanks. That same human militia determined some means of diluting the higher-octane plane fuel to a version they could stretch out for use in ground vehicles––which meant they had at least one person in their group of decent intelligence, despite how animalistic Loki observed most of the humans behaving here.

  He found himself thankful, again, they would be leaving soon.

  It didn’t help that he could feel the woman wanting to leave now, too.

  His living light had grown more tied to hers over the past hour, not less. His light sank deeper into hers, even now––more and more with each passing minute it seemed, until that fact grew openly uncomfortable––but he didn’t seem to be able to do much about that, either.

  The other seers had definitely noticed.

  A few gave him glances Loki knew he was not meant to intercept. He saw them look between his light and that of the human; he felt side conversations he was not supposed to overhear.

  He tried to pretend he didn’t see those looks or hear those murmurs, but again, it mattered little. He could not hide what his light was doing, not in this small of a construct.

  Luckily, most of them seemed to find it amusing more than alarming.

  Only Illeg and Jax seemed less amused––and Anale, to a milder degree.

  Loki knew all three were close to Dante; their warier reactions stemmed primarily from a desire to protect their young cousin. They would do their best to protect the woman who gave birth to Dante, as well––even if that woman was a full adult in human years, being in her early- to mid-thirties, at minimum.

  Loki grew uncomfortably aware of the female human’s eyes more and more on him, too.

  He knew that might be his fault.

  She could not help but react to his light’s interest in hers.

  Of course, if she had felt differently about him, or his reactions to her, it would have caused a different reaction in both of them, but as it was, he found himself looking at her too often, and more often than not, he found her returning those looks.

  Truthfully, a part of his mind was already contemplating how he might find some way to talk to her alone. Not only without the others around––out of earshot of the entire construct.

  He remembered what Tarsi’s cake had told him, all those months ago.

  It prophesied a love interest for him, during these dark days.

  He had not been gifted a glimpse of her, this love of his, but he’d distinctly felt her to be human. He’d been turned on by the vision––he had, in fact, spent most of the night kissing the Bridge’s human aunt, he’d been so turned on by it––but he hadn’t felt with any confidence that he’d yet met the woman whose light he tasted in that vision.

  Now, his hunger wanted to confuse him on that point, too.

  He fought to focus on the mission to D.C., on how best to approach from the air, how close they should get––but his eyes found an excuse to look in her direction,
again and again. Under the pretext of looking at Holo, the buildings behind where she stood, even at the sky, his eyes lingered on her long, jagged-cut dark hair and noted her body as slim-hipped and muscular, but wiry. She had medium-length legs, and they looked strong and toned under the black jeans she wore.

  Even apart from those strange, silver rings, her clothes interested him––somewhat dated, dark-colored human-styled clothes with which he was only passingly familiar, including those dark stretch jeans and a black and white band T-shirt from a New York rock band.

  She dressed herself in front of him in that back room of the residential apartments where they found her. Loki looked away, of course, along with the rest of the seers, but he’d been aware of her, the whole time she covered herself, even as he pretended he wasn’t.

  He felt her aware of him too, even then.

  She’d been deeply embarrassed to be found that way. Embarrassed and sad and fearful that they would tell her daughter.

  Even then, in those first few moments of contact, while listening to Anale explain to her in English who they were, why they were here, Loki himself only wanted to comfort her in some way. He wanted to reassure her that none of them judged her, that they would not betray anything to her daughter she did not want known.

  Loki found himself remembering Vikram describe her over the comm, right before they went into that warlord’s den near Prospect Park. Vikram sent real-time images, in addition to the verbal description, although he’d confessed he was forced to steal the former off Dante’s network queue. For the same reason, none of those images were clear or recent, since Dante pilfered what she could off hacks of government security files.

  According to Vikram, Dante herself described her mother as “kind of a middle-aged rocker type chick, like old lady cool,” which both Holo and Jax found extremely funny.

  The woman Loki looked at now didn’t strike him as old in any way, or as particularly humorous in her light or her physicality. Even for a human, she was quite young––which was neither here nor there to Loki, but he found it interesting, in terms of how her daughter seemed to view her. He wondered if it had something to do with her having given birth.

  She still wore the remnants of the dark eye make up she had on when they found her.

  Noticing that got him remembering what else she’d been wearing––and not wearing––when they broke into that room. A mere flicker of the memory brought a denser pulse of guilt, and a hotter wave of pain that wanted to take over his light.

  The latter caused his tongue to thicken before he glanced at her again.

  Gods. She probably wouldn’t thank him for his being turned on by her enslavement, whether she negotiated the terms of that enslavement or not.

  Avoiding her wide, dark eyes, whose stare didn’t exactly help his concentration, Loki looked back towards the Chinook and to Preela.

  “Approach?” he said, adjusting the rifle strap on his shoulder. He cleared his throat, his voice toneless. “What do you recommend?”

  He’d already told Preela and Rex where they were going.

  He felt the female human’s light, curious in his, and his pain worsened––enough that he saw Preela flinch, right before she glanced at Rex, then at Jax, who stood on Loki’s other side.

  Jax shrugged, a faint smile touching his lips, but he gave Loki a wary look.

  Rex grinned openly, leering in interest at the small, dark-haired, muscular woman standing between Holo and Illeg just outside their tighter circle.

  “Got a hard-on for our cargo, eh, Captain?” Rex grinned, using Prexci, the seer tongue, presumably so the human wouldn’t understand. “You can sit in the back. None of us will bother you if you want to fuck her brains out all the way to the next drop.”

  Loki ignored him, looking at Preela.

  “What do you think?” he repeated politely. “In terms of approach?”

  He felt the human woman behind him tense, and blew a warm pulse of light at her in reassurance. He did it without thought, without questioning whether it was appropriate that the others see it, but once he had, he felt the woman’s light wrap even more deeply into his.

  He felt flickers of that uncertainty in her again––fear of the unknown, fear of not knowing them, of not knowing if she could trust them. He felt her remind herself they had treated her gently so far, that no one had hurt her––so far––as she tried to reassure herself she wasn’t crazy to risk going with them, if it might bring her to her daughter.

  She couldn’t have understood Rex, but Loki had to restrain himself from stepping between the two of them, and using his light to reassure her that no harm would come to her.

  He decided he wouldn’t leave Rex alone with her, either.

  He avoided saying her name still, or even thinking it.

  He knew her name. It was Gina.

  Gina Vasquez.

  His pain worsened. He forced his mind off the woman he could now feel tangibly where she stood behind him. She wanted to touch him; he could feel that, too. He wanted Holo away from her, almost as much as Rex, and briefly, he had to fight his own light until he controlled it.

  The others were all looking at him now.

  A few wore wary expressions, even woven into their amusement.

  Illeg muttered something to Holo, but Loki only caught a few words.

  “…the fuck happened?” Holo muttered back. “Did I miss something?”

  “…Fixated… need to watch him with her…”

  “Gods,” Ontari muttered. “When? When we found her?”

  “No one knows––” Jax said, even as Illeg talked over him.

  “––I don’t know. Does it matter?” she muttered.

  “Happened fast, though,” Jax muttered, maybe not to be outdone.

  Loki did not look directly at any of them. He just stood there, letting them feel over his light. He understood their concern. He accepted it, along with their scrutiny. He likely would have a similar reaction, if the situation occurred with one of them in relation to a civilian passenger they had the collective responsibility to protect.

  They had to know they could trust him with her. They had to know he wasn’t going to do something crazy, something that might jeopardize the mission.

  A few seconds after they finished scanning his light, Anale tried to break the tension, but Loki heard a thread of nerves in her voice.

  “Cap’n’s gone off the deep end.” She gave Loki a good-natured punch in the arm. “Pull it together, brother. Or hell, ask her for it. Do we need to get you drunk?”

  “Don’t tell him to ask her!” Illeg frowned. “Gods, Ana. We’re in the middle of an op!”

  “Not to mention the Bridge would kill us. Assuming Dante didn’t do it,” Jax muttered.

  “He might need to ask her,” Ontari muttered. “Dugra a’ kitre––look at him.”

  “We can’t talk about this here,” Mika said. “Shut up, all of you. You’re all just making him worse, talking about him fucking her. Can’t you see that?”

  Jax broke into a nervous laugh. Anale only shrugged towards Mika, unapologetic. Her eyes remained fixed on Loki’s face.

  “You all right, brother?” she asked again.

  Loki shook his head, feeling his face get warmer.

  He knew most of that was not from embarrassment.

  “I’m fine,” he said tonelessly.

  When the silence deepened, he took a step towards the Chinook, not looking at any of them.

  “We should leave now,” he said simply.

  Without waiting for their answer, he grabbed the guardrail outside the Chinook’s open forward hatch. Placing a foot on the second step of the descended staircase, he yanked himself up, without looking back to see if any followed him. Even so, he felt the exchanged looks between the seers he left outside as he made his way deeper into the row of seats behind the cockpit.

  He kept his mind blank to all of it, as much as he could.

  He mostly succeeded by the time the rest of the
m began to file up the same staircase. He deposited his weight in a window seat on the starboard side, about ten rows deep into the thirty or so in the main hold. He watched in his peripheral vision as the other seers made their way through that same aisle, choosing seats throughout the body of the Chinook and talking to one another in low voices.

  Loki only intervened once, clicking his fingers and waving a hand sharply towards the front of the plane. Rex had filed in after Holo and their human cargo, and seemed intent on sitting beside her for the duration of the flight.

  “No,” was all Loki said.

  He said it loudly, however.

  After he spoke, Jax and Rex exchanged looks with Anale before all three of them burst into mutual laughter. Looking between them, Loki realized, clearly, the attempt was staged for his benefit. Even after he determined that fact, he still watched to make sure Rex relinquished his seat. He continued to watch as the large-boned seer walked towards the back of the Chinook, moving his bulk awkwardly through the row of navy-blue, cloth-covered seats with their individual headsets and plastic armrests.

  The large seer winked at Loki as he passed, patting him on the arm, but Loki didn’t smile back.

  Instead he fought another wave of pain, watching Holo seat himself next to the woman.

  Loki did want to sit with her. He knew it wasn’t a good idea, and not only because every seer on the aircraft now watched his eyes and light with amusement.

  He wanted it, regardless.

  Pushing the thought from his mind, he aimed his eyes out the oval window to his left, fitting his headset over one ear as he replayed the message he’d received from the Sword via Oli.

  He would figure out what to do about the woman later.

  For now, the Sword had given him a job.

  The thought sustained him through most of the next ninety minutes of flight.