Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  I didn’t really listen to their words, but I felt their light interact, and I watched Revik’s eyes as he argued back with her, his clear irises serious as he looked up at her face, his expression infiltrator-still as he listened to her.

  Even now, when she tried to push him around, all I saw in his face as he looked at her was love. Really, given everything I could feel on his light right then, I wondered how she could fight with him at all.

  Watching the two of them, I laughed aloud a second time, wiping my eyes in some embarrassment when they both stopped their back and forth long enough to give me puzzled looks. Even then, I didn’t really stop smiling.

  In here, everything else had a tendency to just go away.

  In here, the rest of it just didn’t matter.

  I knew that wouldn’t last––that it couldn’t last––but for now, it was enough.

  For now, it was everything.

  31

  SRI LANKA

  I HAD PRETTY mixed feelings about hitting Dubai, despite how adamant I’d been about it. We hadn’t hit a Shadow city until now, with good reason.

  I couldn’t tell what Revik thought, not now that we were into the planning stage.

  He’d been surprisingly quiet about the whole thing since we solidified our compromise, maybe because he’d already gotten the bigger things he wanted. Meaning, I gave him sole discretion when it came to determining safety precautions for me and Lily––both on the ship and for the op itself.

  Revik didn’t get everything he wanted, though.

  The Council ruled against him, regarding his request to execute Cass.

  I admit, their decision surprised me––especially after the case Revik laid out before the Council, two days after our big blowout. Listening to him make his case, I’d been simultaneously impressed and resigned when I realized I didn’t have anywhere near as good of an argument to keep Cass alive. Really all I had was a gut feeling that we shouldn’t kill her.

  Revik argued like a lawyer.

  He also shared a lot of sight imprints and memories of Menlim’s specific threats against me and Lily to back himself up. He made a pretty convincing case, even to me, that letting Cass live posed a direct threat to me, and indirectly, to Lily.

  Moreover, Declan, Raddi and Jorag, all ex-Rebels, backed him up, as did Wreg.

  Jon remained uncharacteristically quiet.

  So did Balidor.

  Chandre gave a brief statement supporting my stance, although her points appealed more to Cass’s religious significance, so I’m not sure it helped.

  My arguments were definitely the most nebulous, even to my own ears.

  After the verdict came back to keep Cass alive, I thought at first that Chandre had been the one on the money, that the Council’s decision was some religious thing, either because of who I was, or their unwillingness to kill Cass as a member of the Four.

  According to Balidor, though, that wasn’t true.

  He said they used their collective sight to look for what they perceived as the more beneficial outcome from the perspective of the Ancestors and the Light. Whatever they’d actually seen, they didn’t share––but when they came out, they said no to Revik.

  I couldn’t help but be relieved.

  Oh, and as part of that whole thing, I found out Balidor had been named as the newest member of the Council of Seven.

  I hadn’t been thrilled by the news, honestly.

  “No,” I said, when he first told me. “I appreciate that they’ve offered it. Obviously you deserve it. But no. You’re the head of the Adhipan, ‘Dori. I absolutely cannot spare you. They’ll have to pull someone out of meditation or something, if they’re short a body.”

  Balidor gave me one of those smiles of his, clicking at me softly. “It is a very great honor you would deprive me of, Esteemed Bridge. You know that, yes?”

  His words flustered me, making me ashamed and angry at the same time. I didn’t catch that he was teasing me until a few seconds later.

  “Damn you,” I said.

  “We worked out a compromise––” he began, smiling wider.

  “You knew I’d freak out,” I said, clicking. “You knew, and you let me do it anyway. Jerk.”

  “I can do both, Esteemed Bridge,” he assured me, leaning on the edge of his metal desk. “I just wanted to see your reaction, I confess.” When I smacked his arm, he added, “They promised to only pull me into sessions where my Adhipan duties will not conflict.” Still smiling faintly, he let his gray eyes turn more serious before he added, “It is a great honor, though. I am a bit insulted you do not think so.”

  Giving an involuntary laugh, I threw my arms around him, giving him a hug. My voice came out half in laughter and half in lingering annoyance.

  “You really are a jerk,” I told him.

  “It’s been mentioned, Esteemed Bridge,” he said, smiling back. “Mainly by your husband, incidentally.”

  Despite his newfound status, Balidor recused himself from the decision about Cass, without giving a specific reason as to why. He still sat in on the deliberations. He told me they’d looked at various permutations of possible timelines, then discussed what they saw. Apparently, the timelines that turned out the most promising all had Cass playing some kind of role.

  Of course, Balidor added, making one of those cryptic expressions of his, some of the very worst scenarios featured Cass, as well.

  Around that same time, Balidor also informed me he’d heard back from his mysterious leader of the Children of the Bridge.

  He didn’t tell me much, only that she preferred to introduce herself to me in person. She also wanted to explain to me who she was in person, and why she hadn’t revealed herself before now.

  I found it kind of irritating and pretentious, honestly.

  Since she’d also offered to lend us infiltrators, however, and help us find more humans and seers on the Lists, I agreed to her terms.

  Finding a meeting spot was harder.

  We had to go around Singapore, since Singapore was a Shadow city, although one of the smaller ones––and of course we didn’t want to get too close to Dubai. We were warned off Jakarta and really anywhere in Indonesia due to extreme violence reported on Drahk, and Timor and Thailand weren’t much better, apparently.

  Extreme flooding still plagued the Philippines and New Guinea. The Maldives were entirely underwater after their fields crashed, which I admit, disappointed me, since I’d really wanted to see them. We considered Australia, but the Children of the Bridge said it would be too difficult for them. We did know Australia banned seers a few months earlier, so it was probably better if we steered clear, anyway.

  Balidor had been the one to suggest Sri Lanka.

  While hit pretty hard by storms, Sri Lanka reportedly handled the virus reasonably well. They’d been flooded with refugees from southern India, but none of the Sri Lankan cities had been specifically targeted via their water supplies, so they’d managed to maintain somewhat of a protected zone.

  Anyway, we wouldn’t be there for long.

  Because we needed to minimize stops, we’d be picking Loki and his team up at Sri Lanka, too. They’d already worked out a route that would allow them to hop and refuel the Chinook, stopping in Pakistan last before traveling to a small airstrip just north of Yala National Park, which was partly flooded but still had a few open beach areas.

  Once the carrier got within range, they’d land the Chinook on the deck, but at least we’d know where to look for them if anything went wrong.

  We didn’t intend to stay long, like I said.

  Now that Balidor was more or less cooperating with my demand that we minimize secrets within the core group of the leadership team, I didn’t much care about the Children of the Bridge. I figured they were a bunch of religious fanatics, which didn’t interest me.

  I assumed I’d meet this person, she’d tell me her little story, we’d agree to some kind of loose alliance, I’d borrow some of her infiltrators, since Balidor cl
aimed a few had recent knowledge of Dubai and its security protocols––and that would be that.

  I should have known it wouldn’t be that easy.

  WE LANDED SOMEWHERE south of what had been Arugum Bay, which Jon informed me used to be a fairly big surfing spot back in the day.

  Now, it looked pretty deserted.

  Most of the coast looked like it had been devastated by tsunamis, or maybe just weird weather combined with rising sea levels. Balidor told me they’d suffered a fair bit of “beach creep” over most of Sri Lanka anyway, as was true of just about every island and coastal area inhabited by humans that didn’t have a containment field in place.

  The remnants of a resort hotel sat on a slight rise above the beach, not far from where we landed.

  Balidor told me he’d picked this area in part because the southeastern edge of Sri Lanka had mostly been evacuated. He claimed that was less due to the virus, and more due to erratic weather and human pirates stealing women, children, food and fuel from the shores.

  Either way, it was pretty eerie standing there, on a worn-down concrete slab dotted with fallen trees. Clothes, blankets and thick pieces of plastic wrapped into branches and tree trunks. An old advertisement sign stuck out of the sand, worn down to a muted gray color, with only the faint outline of a woman drinking some kind of soft drink showing on the metal.

  While we waited, the only sounds I heard came from seabirds and crashing surf.

  I still hadn’t adjusted to how quiet the world was these days. With so many of the human-generated sounds gone, the Earth’s stillness seeped over everything, disorienting me, even beyond the ambient noises of animals and birds, running water and wind.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane in the sky, at least that wasn’t one of ours. We almost never ran into other ships, apart from when we got too close to one of the Shadow cities. The only time I ever saw strangers anymore was during field ops.

  It felt eerie to be on land in a non-military capacity, watching our motorboat bob in the waves with only Jorag in it, managing it against the currents to keep it ready in case we needed to leave in a hurry. I watched dark clouds cluster over the ocean’s horizon and hoped like hell an earthquake didn’t hit while we were out here.

  Revik grunted a little, from next to me.

  I glanced at him, smiling.

  Once I had, I found myself doing a double-take––staring at his face more closely than usual.

  He was nervous.

  I could feel his nerves. He’d been acting strange since we set up this meeting, and while I was trying really hard not to connect it to the whole Dalejem thing, it wasn’t easy. For one thing, Revik was trying a little too hard to pretend everything was fine. I caught myself shielding from him more than usual because of it, which didn’t exactly help.

  I fought to focus on why we were here––and how I could keep this short.

  Jon, Wreg and a few others were already in a second boat, heading further north to find Loki and his team and signal them when it was safe to fly the Chinook in to the carrier.

  They weren’t bringing Dante, Jon told me, right before they left.

  Apparently some of the tech geeks, and even Wreg and Jon, wanted to surprise her, by bringing her mom to her.

  I knew that wasn’t all of it, though.

  They also didn’t want to risk bringing Dante to a potentially unfriendly shore.

  Sixteen or not, she was increasingly becoming the real tech chief, even if Vikram still held that role in name, mostly due to his age and his long tenure with the Adhipan. After losing Garensche, they were all feeling especially protective of their teenaged whiz kid.

  Some of that was personal, of course.

  Hell, most of it was probably personal. Even so, they increasingly had valid grounds to justify their protectiveness with military reasoning, as well.

  On the down side, I’d miss the reunion, which was kind of a bummer, since Loki’s team should be back on the carrier before we returned. We’d decided to do both things at the same time, instead of sequentially, to minimize our time and exposure out here, and also to provide each group a form of potential help, in the event one of us needed backup.

  For the same reason, Wreg and Jon planned to patrol the waters offshore in the boat after they saw Loki and the others off, just in case anything went wrong.

  Not that we expected anything to go wrong.

  I fought to keep my light and focus off Revik, but it was hard when I felt his nerves worsening, hitting my light with enough charge that I looked up at him again. He didn’t return my gaze exactly, but I felt him react to my stare, and eventually I looked away.

  When I felt the group of aleimic lights approaching, my own nerves worsened.

  Throwing up a harder, more leadership-type cloak, along with a somewhat less friendly expression on my face, I folded my arms, waiting.

  I didn’t know what to expect when the Children of the Bridge finally emerged from the trees, but the sheer number of them took me aback.

  I counted at least forty seers with my eyes, most of them well-shielded.

  Infiltrators.

  Well, not all of them. But most definitely had that stamp.

  I picked Dalejem out of the line, and frowned, in spite of myself. That frown deepened when I saw him looking at Revik, his green and violet eyes reflecting sunlight.

  Jerking my eyes off his dark hair and high-cheekboned face, I forced my gaze over the rest of the group, noting they covered a pretty broad age-range, but the majority were probably somewhere in the two-hundred to three-hundred year range.

  In the middle I saw a woman, who might have been older.

  She didn’t feel like an infiltrator.

  I didn’t really have a basis for knowing either of those things, but both felt true.

  She looked young, like most seers tended to look young. I would have pegged her at early forties if she’d been human, maybe even younger. She had an Asian cast to her features, like a lot of seers, and bright green eyes a few shades darker than mine. Close to Dalejem’s in color, they lacked the violet ring that made his stand out so intensely.

  As for the not being an infiltrator thing, I was more certain about that, but it was harder to put into words.

  She just didn’t feel like an infiltrator.

  Her light had a different quality. It wasn’t soft exactly, but it didn’t have that charged up, laser-sharp aggression I associated with infiltrators, either. It also felt more open, maybe more transparent, than the light of most infiltrators.

  She looked familiar to me somehow.

  I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, what it was or who it was she reminded me of. I knew I’d never met her before, at least not since I’d known myself as a seer and learned how to access a seer’s photographic memory.

  A man stood next to her.

  After a few seconds, I found myself staring at him, as well.

  He had blue eyes, like a really, really light, turquoise blue, that seemed to shine with their own inner glow. He was handsome, and his light brown hair was bleached blond from the sun. The blond color alone was unusual enough on a seer that I couldn’t help but stare at him, and at his tanned features, that almost reminded me of Balidor’s, they were so human-like.

  His eyes betrayed him as seer, though, even more than his height. That, and the way he moved, even apart from the breathtaking stillness I felt from his light.

  He didn’t feel very young, either.

  He might have been older than the woman or younger; I still didn’t understand seer aging well enough to be able to guess either of theirs with any certainty.

  Next to me, I felt another spark of reaction off of Revik’s light, a denser, more complicated one. I fought not to look at him, but felt an apology in that somewhere, what might have been guilt, strong enough that it felt tinged with fear––maybe even panic.

  He reached for my hand then and I finally looked at him, half-expecting to find him staring at
Dalejem. But he wasn’t.

  Instead, he stared at the woman in the middle of the group, the same one I’d been looking at, with the forest-green eyes and the long, straight, black hair.

  Revik gripped my hand tightly in his, and his mind opened suddenly, blurting words, a string that came out so fast it was almost unintelligible.

  Gods, Allie, he sent, that panic rising in his light. Allie, honey. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t. I couldn’t tell you. She made me vow it. When you were fucking born they made me vow it. Before I knew you at all. I’m so sorry, Allie. Please forgive me…

  I stared at him, my mouth curling in a frown.

  Sorry? What the hell was he sorry about? Tell me what?

  My confusion only deepened as I sorted through his words, then followed his eyes back to where he stared at the green-eyed woman.

  That time, I paused on her face.

  When I did, something clicked.

  Once it had, I couldn’t unsee it, even as I found myself understanding suddenly why her narrow face looked so familiar.

  She looked like me.

  Replaying Revik’s words, I stared at her, then at the taller, blond-haired and blue-eyed seer who stood next to her, smiling at me. Both of them looked like me, albeit in different ways. I saw myself in those faces, and even in their bodies, especially hers.

  It hit me then, that both of them were looking at me, too.

  As in, they were looking only at me, ignoring everyone else in our party, including Revik.

  I also realized both of them had tears in their eyes.

  Pain ripped through my light in that bare whisper of time and understanding. Some part of me reacted before my brain had time to catch up, igniting a fire in some fucked-up, broken-down, shadowed, hidden crack in my heart I hadn’t even known existed.

  Then I did exactly what Lily had done, when she first recognized me.

  I burst into tears.