16
DON’T WORRY, COUSIN
THEY DROPPED DOWN in the middle of the city, on the largest of several lawns belonging to what used to be one of the most heavily-guarded buildings in the world.
Loki contacted the carrier en route, telling them of his intentions once he got a good look at the satellite feeds out of D.C. Once he realized the place was almost totally deserted, at least in terms of a real military presence by the humans, he requested permission for a direct assault, utilizing speed rather than stealth to minimize risk.
He knew from feeds, of course, that the United States government continued to function. Their command center was now located underground, in a military bunker in another area of the country. He had heard several rumors as to that location, and none were coastal.
The list of potential locations had grown somewhat in recent months, since the remaining human elite seemed to be employing a lot of seers at this time. They also seemed to be periodically changing locations to evade––
Well, whatever it was they felt they needed to evade.
Truthfully, Loki could no longer be certain what that was.
Like Balidor and Varlan, with whom he had spoken about these matters, Loki believed the human leaders were being manipulated into a state of near-constant fear and paranoia by Shadow and his seers.
He frowned out the window as the Chinook’s blades powered down, staring up the walls of the famous building’s South Portico and its high, white, ionic columns. He squinted past the anti-glare glass to the rooftop balconies, where secret service used to patrol above the two massive balconies below those upper floors.
He saw no one up there now.
To Loki’s light, the place felt abandoned.
The previously elaborate military-grade Barrier constructs had already mostly dissipated from lack of maintenance by construct seers. He could feel few people inside the building itself, and those he did feel had a haphazard energy to them, totally unlike previous imprints Loki got of this place, when it housed a working government, and, even more importantly in many respects, that government’s leader.
Organic-reinforced windows appeared to be missing from the upper and lower floors, with none remaining in any part of what he could see of the East and West Wings.
As none of those windows had been glass, that fact was telling.
They must have been broken out manually, using some considerable amount of force. It could possibly have occurred through the use of missiles, or some other military-grade ordnance, but he doubted it, given the size and shape of the scorch marks on the outside of the building. Those he saw looked more to be from fires than from explosions.
The quiet bothered him.
Then again, he did not intend for them to be here long.
In the encrypted recordings, the boss gave very specific instructions. He also asked Loki to keep the particulars of any intel they found to himself, until he or the Bridge specified otherwise.
Loki found the Sword’s request for secrecy interesting, but not particularly surprising. The Sword’s default position tended to live in the restriction of information.
Regaining his feet as he continued to run over details of the plan, Loki hunched his way out of his seat and straightened in the main aisle before reaching up to the luggage rack, where he’d hung his weapon on a set of hooks fitted 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’d so far kept modifications to a minimum.
The other seers continued to peer out windows, most standing in the aisle with rifles slung around their backs, leaning down on 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 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, 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 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, smiling at her in a friendly way. When Holo stood up, however, the woman, Gina, stood up to follow.
“No,” Holo said in heavily-accented English.
He motioned to her, using seer sign language, which Loki knew would be meaningless to her. His English was mostly 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, however.
Rex clapped him on the back, answering in Prexci.
“You can practice it later, brother,” the big seer said, grinning. “You know, when you ask her, ‘does this feel good?’ ‘how about this?’ And ‘what about when I do this with my––’”
Before he could warm up in his exposition, Anale cut him off.
“––It is okay, cousin,” she said, switching to the human language.
She faced the woman, Gina, speaking with only a slight Asian accent and holding up both hands in reassurance.
“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 it, 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 him. Loki could feel his light only wrapping deeper into the woman’s, however; he almost told Anale it would do no good.
“It is okay,” Anale repeated. “We will not be gone 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, no
dding. “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, speaking English.
“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. “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, 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, noting the firmness of her mouth, he lost control of his light 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, 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 woman from Mika’s touch, and his pain worsened. He bit his tongue, trying to pull back his light.
Rex laughed behind him.
“It’s the tightly-wound ones you have to keep an eye on,” the large 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. Make sure he’s not 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.
The thought brought another swell of pain, one he found himself fighting more deliberately, maybe in horror of how visible he was, 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 still felt her pulling 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 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 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.
17
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, 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 seer. “Truly.”
Jax smiled, clapping him on the back. His eyes and words were serious. “No apologies, brother Loki. You might need a chaperone until we get you two lovebirds back to the carrier, but no apologies required. 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 White House grounds, 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, 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. The dirt looked mostly to be weathering from storms. Loki saw broken furniture, cloth and other refuse covering much of the lawn directly below the portico, as if thrown to the lawn from the upstairs floors.
The grass had grown wild, depending on where it was in relation to the swampy areas filled with water. He saw an equal number of bald, muddy patches filled with tire ruts and garbage as he did denser patches of field-height grasses mixed with dandelions, thistles, wildflowers, reeds and swamp grasses. Broader-leafed plants grew in bushes next to young trees, breaking up the prior expanse of lawn.
The height and density of the vegetation gave him some idea of when the building must have been vacated. No one had mowed, trimmed, watered or cultivated any of these patches of wild growth for at least six months.
Loki tried to remember when all of this started.
Had it been a year already?
It had been more than that. The disease came 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 lived inside a fully-functioning hotel in midtown 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, it sometimes felt like things had always been this way.
Even his memories felt strangely distant 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.
He motioned with one hand to Illeg, then to Jax, pointing towards the lower entrance to the diplomatic reception room.
The Sword gave him blueprints
along with operational parameters, but there was no way to know which entrances would still be open and which blocked. Balidor provided the most recent aleimic scans of both the building and city areas closest, but those were at least two months out of date––one of the downsides of a last-minute excursion like this.
He knew Yumi and the others would be scanning the building and grounds now, of course, but they were bound to miss things, with so little prep-time.
Illeg motioned towards him, asking a pointed question with her hands.
My discretion, he answered, also using seer sign language. For now, no Barrier. Once we’re inside, if there’s still no active construct, we might use it in targeted bursts––but only at my signal. According to the Adhipan, the construct is abandoned, but the boss thinks they might still be watching this and other hot spots, so we’ll only dip in and out as needed.
Illeg nodded, her eyes holding a faint relief.
Loki did not add that Shadow and his people might be watching them, even now. Nor did he add that Shadow might have been watching them long before this op, meaning their individual team members, if he’d assigned infiltration units to keep an eye on the Sword’s people.
Instead, Loki looked around at his team, making sure they all got the message.
Mika nodded, confirming her understanding with a set of hand signals. Jax, who’d watched them converse back and forth, nodded, as well. Loki caught Ontari’s eye, and waited for his nod. Once he had it, he checked with Anale, Holo, Kalgi and Rex.
Loki noted all of them seemed to have relaxed, in both their facial expressions and their light, since they’d gotten Loki off the aircraft.
Pushing his mind off the reasons for that, as well as the woman he was leaving behind, he motioned to Illeg, 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. This should be a simple hunt and extract, but it feels very quiet here to me.”
“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.”
Prophet: Bridge & Sword Page 15