Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  The flight itself would take a minimum of twenty hours. He’d been on the wrong side of the world, of course, when they found her...he’d been so sure she’d return to the States, where she’d been born. Or at least where she’d spent her childhood.

  Again, he’d misread her. It was starting to piss him off, just how badly he’d fared at trying to predict her movements.

  She was his mate. He should know her better than this.

  A fear settled into the pit of his stomach as he remembered her words to him when he’d last seen her. She’d looked hot as hell, even then...her hair cascading down her back in thick ringlets, makeup darkening her eyes from their fucking earlier, the dress covered by a tuxedo jacket but still showing enough skin that he’d found it distracting even listening to her at first, as she yelled at him...

  But the look in her eyes. Gods. She’d looked at him like she hated him...like he was the vilest piece of excrement she’d ever laid eyes on.

  He shoved it from his mind, angrily.

  He should have listened to Wreg.

  He’d bring her in now, the hell with it. He couldn’t risk those Seven bastards indoctrinating her any further...poisoning her mind against him before he’d had a chance to explain things to her. He needed to show her what he was trying to do, try to make her understand. If it was really the killing that bothered her, he’d find a way to compromise on that too...conduct more ops where they captured instead of killed, find some other way of neutralizing those he needed out of the way.

  It infuriated him, to think of how much he’d contributed to her warped views himself. He’d been such a puppet of the Seven those years...and he’d tried to shield her too, he supposed, protect her from the worst aspects of the world she’d been forced into without warning or preparation, and at such a late age.

  He’d planned to tell her, of course. He’d thought he would ease her into the truth, let her see things in stages, as she grew used to living as a seer.

  Maybe that had been a mistake, too.

  He should have taken her to one of the present-day work camps run by SCARB, let her watch a few weeks’ worth of systematic rape, torture, families being torn apart, mates being sold out from under one another, unused “inventory” being farmed out for slave labor or cut up for spare organs and bio-matter to build machines.

  She’d been upset that he’d worked for the Germans in World War II...even though he’d left before the Final Solution had even been dreamed of. Even though he’d done it as an infiltrator, working undercover for the Seven.

  Let her see how SCARB and their minions impregnated seer females, cutting babies out of them to raise them before they could energetically bond with their parents. Let her see the mass graves...and the “schools” where they hooked seers up to inducement machines, getting them addicted so that they depended on SCARB to provide their next fix.

  See how much she minded watching him kill those bastards then.

  She’d never really seen the dark side of the peaceful religious philosophy of the Seven...how SCARB continued to use it against them again and again. Even now, when seers should have learned better.

  A few tours of the reality of most seers’ lives might have changed things between them that day in Delhi. Hell, she’d be giving speeches for their side, channeling all of that righteous anger where it belonged.

  He knew he was acting desperate, in a way...but maybe he deserved that, too.

  Maybe she’d been right before. She’d told him once, during their consummation time in the mountains, that she’d always felt like it was her pushing him to be with her. She’d felt like she was always waiting for him, putting up with his indecision about them, his standoffishness, his fear of being married again...his infidelity.

  She’d felt like it was her who’d kept their marriage intact. She’d even worried she loved him more than he did her.

  Maybe it was time to show her otherwise.

  Revik clicked over to the recording function, adjusting the headset around his ears and the back of his neck.

  He let his eyes phase out as he fell into the Barrier proper.

  DARK CLOUDS BILLOW out around him...

  It happens fast. He falls hard and deep; the world rises abruptly into view.

  Earth rotates below, snagged and snarled in billions of crossing lights...

  Seconds later, the jagged horizon of the Himalayas slides majestically into view, their outlines harsh against a deep blue sky ribboned with aleimic light. They grow larger, swimming into crystal clarity below where he watches. He clicks backwards further, resonating with the particular frequency of Seertown and its surrounding hill country. He has the imprints supplied by Wreg to make this even more precise, but can’t help threading in a whisper of Alyson’s presence as well.

  It hurts again, once he does, but he holds on to her...taking his time as he approaches.

  The landscape blurs, shifting faster than he can track.

  When it reconfigures, he finds himself in a place he recognizes.

  He is walking down the main market street of Seertown.

  He stares around where his light feet carry him, taking in the bombed out buildings and their blackened walls from fire. His aleimic body shifts, growing brighter, more distinct against the gray and black landscape, dotted here and there with green as weeds and grasses begin to grow up through the cracked walls. Trees still stand in places between the various structures, but mostly he sees broken glass, blackened pieces of wood, broken figurines and piles of garbage left over from looting.

  Frowning, he walks up the hill, and doesn’t see a single other soul. Reaching the end of the street, he decides to get closer to where the construct lives. He focuses on the Mansion itself, and the scenery blurs again...

  He stands on a green stretch of lawn, dotted with white-skinned trees. Statues and benches made of carved white stone litter the paving stone path winding around the base of the hill. Some of the trees are blackened, their limbs wasted and pointed upwards.

  He walks closer to the castle-like mansion, tightening shields around his light.

  He doesn’t see anyone from his team. He’s asked them to stay away though, at least until he can do a first pass.

  Hesitating only another breath, he begins to walk around more slowly, his light extended within the shield, looking for any trace of familiarity in the surrounding landscape. He focuses most of his attention on the light-infused Barrier ground, knowing it is the most likely to have retained fingerprints of any passersby.

  It looks like the physical place would have to his eyes, of course...with exceptions.

  Detail stands out in the tiny blades of light-infused grass.

  Flavors criss-cross through plant life and earth. Worms and flies have passed here, squirrels and birds, beetles and snakes, the occasional fox and dog.

  People too...most of them so long ago he passes over their trace scents without examining them closely.

  He feels birds here, too. Mostly...crows.

  He walks in slow circles, letting his light pull him.

  Then, at the edges of the garden, he stops.

  He stares at the ground, doubting his eyes at first.

  He looks around, as if hoping for another clue...some verification that what he is seeing is real, beyond the footprints he finds carved in mud leading to the base of the building. He glances up ahead, towards the giant stone staircase. The footprints likely lead there.

  He follows them, biting back his excitement as he becomes more and more sure. At first it seems like he’d been right, that the tracks will lead him right to those stone steps, right up into the main floor of the ancient building. But he pauses when the footsteps take a sudden turn to his right, to a garden trail between the trees.

  He stares at the tracks, then at the stairs.

  Hesitating only another heartbeat, he follows the tracks, unable to pull his light away from them now.

  He is able to make out five separate sets of prints. Their aleimic vibr
ation has dissipated in the time since they were made, but at least one set has his attention fully riveted.

  He feels his light reacting in sparks at her particular scent...faint but unmistakeable, only days old. Weeks at most.

  He will look for the vehicle later.

  Walking, head down, he nearly runs into the door at the end of the low retaining wall. Pausing only long enough to take a snapshot with the part of his light that stores memory, he passes through the water-logged wood that hangs on rusted iron hinges.

  He finds himself on a staircase, one that leads down to the Mansion’s basement archives.

  He’s never been inside these before, not in the physical.

  The footprints are gone, of course, once he passes inside, but he still feels her faintly on the wooden stairs. Fighting back another reaction in his light, he descends them rapidly, taking more snapshots, mapping out the layout of the basement rooms.

  He must be inside their construct now.

  Constructs didn’t keep seers out, of course...not entirely...but they altered the Barrier space, disguising the landscape. They obscured what was there...and they could be damned tricky to navigate, especially if one didn’t know whether they were in one or not.

  Even when you knew, it was easy to get lost...to lose track of the boundary between the illusion the construct projected and the real Barrier imprint behind that illusion. One had to look precisely in the right spot to even detect if a construct existed.

  Then, if they wanted to see past it, they had to find some way in.

  They’d lucked out, finding the construct at all. It hadn’t even been sloppiness on the part of the Adhipan...but an honest to gods lucky break.

  Revik can make a few educated guesses on what kind of construct it might be.

  They would want it to be relatively open, to keep Allie safe and facilitate easy and fast communication. Access might be broken out at more than one level, but the priority would be to secure it from outside encroachment. They would have built layers into that, imprints behind imprints. It would be easy to stumble into a trap too, tip them off to his presence.

  He could be standing among them, right at that moment, and because he is locked out of the construct, he wouldn’t be able to see them.

  Luckily, as long as he doesn’t do anything stupid, that also means they shouldn’t be able to see him.

  Looking around, he tries to think.

  Really, he has only one way in.

  He might be able to find her...if he at least finds the right room, he might be able to feel her, somewhere around where he stands.

  Wandering through the corridors, he tries to imagine the uses for each of the rooms...meaning what he would do with them, if he were staying here. Not knowing Balidor well enough to speculate where he might deviate, he is forced to look around, use his own impressions of the security of the space.

  They would have projected a facsimile of the layout...meaning before they altered any of it, or added equipment. What he is looking at was probably the archives in their original form, meaning how they’d found them when they arrived.

  He enters a corridor, where a number of smaller storage rooms live. Unless they are planning to camp out here awhile, they likely wouldn’t bother with emptying all of these. But this one, he thinks, looking in on one, then another, only filled halfway with stored books and documents...they might empty these out, if they wanted bedrooms for a few of them.

  He walks deeper into the catacombs.

  Main staging area, he thinks, looking at one of the larger rooms.

  Could work this out as a kind of gym...or map room. Could even store equipment in here if they wanted.

  He finds a room off on its own then, with a pony wall to another segment.

  Looking between the two areas, it strikes him that it would make an ideal interrogation area. Organic panel there, he thinks, touching the pony wall. Seats and organics in the smaller of the two rooms. The other could dual as a cell and an interrogation space.

  He lays his aleimic hands on the metal table in the middle of the room, the two wooden chairs on either side, sinking deeper into the vibration.

  Concentrating on his image of the room, he looks for Allie.

  For a long moment, he sees nothing.

  The room stays as he found it, static. He sees the gray walls, glowing faintly in the Barrier’s after-image. He sees the table, empty...

  But not empty.

  A man sits there, on one side. Handcuffed. His outline in the Barrier space shows him to be a seer. Collared.

  Revik stares at him, making out a semblance of his form in the dim aleimic glow, obscured by the collar’s stranglehold on his light.

  He can’t be sure...

  But another form sits across from him, at the same table.

  Also collared, but the light of this one is brighter...a sharp white in the dim rosy glow of the Barrier space. Her aleimic body is so close to his that it pulls at him in the dim space, winding into structures around his arms and hands.

  Revik feels his light spark out.

  He feels himself reacting, unable to stop the ripples running through his light as he recognizes the distinct flavor of hers.

  They’d collared her. They’d fucking collared her...

  His connection to the room breaks.

  Her light dissipates like smoke, along with the man with whom she shares the table.

  For a long moment, he doesn’t do anything.

  Then he takes his light hands off the Barrier signature of the metal. He finds himself staring around the dim space, the empty-seeming room. Pain runs through liquid veins of his light, and for a moment his mind feels entirely blank.

  Grief hits him then, mixed with a fear that makes it hard to see clearly.

  She is here.

  And someone put a collar on her so he couldn’t find her.

  He fights with what to do. He’d be pressing his luck, trying to reach her again. His own light pulls at him though, asking him to do just that. His mind interferes, reminding him that Balidor likely sits less than fifty feet away, and that he would be monitoring the space minutely for any trace of him.

  He steps back from the table, walking with his light feet back to the door of the room. Looking inside, then down either hall, it occurs to him that he hasn’t seen the other side of the larger space. Dotted with aisles of shelves filled with artifacts and scrolls, like an ancient library, the space stretches the length of a city block, stone pillars holding up the walls on either side of the main archive. On a different day, Revik would give a fair bit to be able to explore the actual, physical shelves in this space, but right then, his mind remains strategic.

  He wanders down the main corridor, cataloguing the few rooms he sees jutting off on either side. Kitchen. What might be another bedroom. Could be fixed up as a cell...if the interrogation room isn’t doing double duty.

  Stopping briefly at the last of these, he concentrates again.

  Using a faint taste of Allie’s light to get back inside the construct, he stills his own, willing the view behind the illusion to reveal itself.

  After the faintest pause, he finds himself seeing the outline of yet another being he knows.

  Complicated structures spiral off the old man’s light, even in sleep. Colors reside in his form that Revik has seen in no other, in all the years he’s spent looking at other beings from behind the Barrier’s walls.

  This seer, unlike the other two, wears no collar.

  Revik gazes down at him, his mind nearly blank once more.

  He could kill him. He could kill the old man so easily...the ancient seer likely wouldn’t even wake up. It would be a quiet death, a painless one.

  They might not even trace it back to him...not for certain anyway.

  For a long moment, Revik stares at the sleeping body of Vash, trying to decide what to do.

  WREG SLUMPED INTO the seat next to him.

  They’d been en route for over six hours, but so far, Revik
hadn’t interacted with any of the other infiltrators. Looking up now, he saw several others he recognized, but he only tracked a few faces before he went back to programming the virtual for a second jump.

  Glancing up at Wreg, he found the older seer watching him warily.

  “You don’t look so good, brother,” Wreg observed.

  “I’m fine,” he said, dismissive.

  “Maybe you should take your mate up on her offer,” Wreg said. “Teach her a lesson.” He nodded towards a female seer leaning over to speak to one of her friends from the aisle. She laughed at something the other seer said as he watched, her hand on the back of the airplane seat.

  “Any of them would have you, brother,” Wreg said, his voice low. “Hell...you’re the fucking Sword. They would jump at the chance. At least get one of them to put their mouth on you. We’d give you privacy...”

  Revik gave him a cold look. “No, thanks, brother Wreg.”

  Wreg held up his hands. “No offense meant. I just thought maybe you needed to get your mind off things...”

  Revik felt his jaw harden.

  Two years ago, he could rarely get sex with another seer that he didn’t pay for. He’d maintained a few friends he could occasionally trade with, like Kat and Ullysa, but most of the females in the Seven steered clear of him as a byproduct of his time in the Rooks.

  He understood why. The interrogations when he’d been brought back to the Seven had been fairly public. Even before he remembered much, he picked up enough off others to know it had been bad...and that in some cases it had been graphically bad.

  It had been a point of embarrassment to him, that he had so few willing sex partners among his own people, but he worked with it. Occasionally, he ran into a seer in the States who hadn’t heard of him...but since the vast majority of the unowned seers in the West were infiltrators, that had been exceedingly rare. And, of course, not all of those strangers were eager to jump into his bed, either...or he theirs, for that matter. He’d been all right with that, though, he thought.

  Now all of a sudden, if he could believe Wreg, he could have any female he wanted.

  Instead of finding the idea attractive, as he might have done a few years ago...he found it sickened him a little. Maybe more than a little.