Flashing those guards a second Barrier signal as he passed, he ignored a few curt nods of greeting. Instead he sent a packed missive to their leader that Allie and her protection unit would be leaving within the hour.
Seeing the man acknowledge this with a seer’s gesture of ‘yes,’ Balidor didn’t wait, but pulled Cass in after him once the first set of elevator doors opened.
He prayed no one had deviated from protocol as he hit the button for the upper floors, motioning Baguen to hurry up as he shuffled his considerable weight in after them. Allie could be damned persuasive when she wanted...and stubborn. If she’d decided to leave the protected space of the secure construct, they’d all be at risk. Hell, there were seers who wouldn’t hesitate to blow up the whole building to get at her.
Leaning against the brass rail inside the elevator, he released Cass only after it began gliding up floors on smooth rails.
Cass looked dazed, her brown eyes partially out of focus as she glanced at the mirror opposite the elevator doors. Baguen loomed over her within seconds, using a cloth from his pocket to wipe at the blood on her forehead, dabbing where it had started to roll down into her eyes. Balidor watched them without speaking, wiping sweat from his own forehead with his sleeve, only to find that at least some of that was blood, as well.
Touching his face more tentatively, he glanced back at the mirror, too. His fingers and eyes marked the length of the long graze by one ear and over one cheek. He couldn’t help marveling that he hadn’t felt it...or how close he’d come to seeing his own end out there. Likely the closest he’d been since the last world war. No one had taken a shot at his head since then, anyway, at least not gunning for him specifically...not that he could remember.
He used those same fingers to comb the sweat-stuck hair from his forehead.
Glancing at the other two, he was rewarded with a scowl from Baguen, who clearly blamed him for the state of his girlfriend’s head. Clicking at the Wvercian mildly, Balidor chose not to remind the giant seer that he might have saved her from being killed, as well.
He supposed he might not have appreciated it much either, if their positions were reversed.
“Are you all right?” he asked Cass instead.
Still dazed, she nodded, looking at the cut on his own face. When Balidor reached for her, Baguen hit away his hand, grunting in irritation.
“Don’t touch,” he said in accented Prexci.
Glancing at Cass, Balidor raised an eyebrow, and she laughed. Reassured, he leaned back against the brass rail, closing his eyes.
They reached the correct floor a few seconds later.
Balidor’s eyes opened with the doors. He felt something in his chest relax when his gaze immediately found the second security detail out in front of the correct room. Nothing amiss so far. He noted their raised weapons with approval even as he flashed the third Barrier countersign, walking out in front of Baguen and Cass.
It was protocol of course; the two seers at the door knew him.
He bowed only enough to acknowledge theirs, then pushed against the heavy, dark wood of the conference room doors.
He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her, half in relief and half in frustration.
She still had that effect on him, even now.
ALLIE AND JON looked up from where they huddled together on the further end of the long, polished oak conference table. The table itself took up most of the center of the wide room, surrounded by high-backed, rocking swivel chairs.
Allie appeared dwarfed inside the dark brown leather, and out of place in her jeans, clinging T-shirt and laced combat boots.
Her face held an almost unnerving focus though.
She looked away from Balidor's face after barely looking at him at all.
He followed her gaze to a large monitor on the far wall, depicting the mob scene outside. Shots were still going off. He flinched when he saw a body fall as the crowded rippled backwards. The mix of seers and humans ducked and dove behind cover, but the majority scattered and shoved backwards in a panic.
The image capturing devices swiveled, zooming in on the faces of several humans and a few seers. One collapsed right there in the street, the gunshot to the head caught on screen as it happened. The avatar of the seer wavered, then showed his true face, once it was clear he was dead. His eyes stared upwards, half of his temple exploded into bone shards.
For a moment Balidor could only watch with Allie and Jon, equally silent.
The crowd surged again, tramping over those wounded even as screams filled the room from the conference room's built-in speakers. More shots went off. The chants grew louder in the pause, and Balidor realized that they’d never really stopped.
Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge!
Vengeance for the Sword! Death to the race traitor!
Give us the Sword! Give us Syrimne d’Gaos!
Some sang an old seer song in a separate group by one building, led by a woman carrying a megaphone. Balidor didn’t bother to try and make out the words. He knew the tune from the original protests, back in the 1920s, when the first set of racial purges took place.
The Evolutionist Movement.
Gods, Balidor thought. That was one movement they didn’t need rising up again. They’d almost been worse than the overt racists, with their deification of seers, and those voodoo-like blood rituals they enacted. They seemed to believe the seers could save them somehow, rub their mojo off on them like a virus and save humanity the trouble of having to advance themselves, mentally or spiritually. They never understood why most seers didn’t feel all that ‘honored’ by their attentions. They were such fans of seers, after all.
Thinking about this, and what it had led to the last time, in terms of both World Wars and the racial purges of the fifties, Balidor felt his anger worsen.
“Are you satisfied, Bridge Alyson?” he found himself saying. “Are you ready to abandon this fool’s errand at last? Or would you prefer to be dead, as well as despised?”
It came out harsher than he intended.
She only stared at him though, her pale green eyes flat.
Looking at her face, he found his anger draining away, replaced by something closer to frustration, maybe even grief. At times, she looked more like her husband than he felt comfortable acknowledging, even to himself...even when alone.
Lately, that tendency had been worse.
Whatever she’d done at the end, to get him out, she’d spent months with him there. She’d spent months entwined with his energy, with the light and energy of his people. She'd spent months as one of the pawns of the Dreng. Dehgoies had gone out of his way to strengthen that connection...to grow it, in fact.
Since she’d come back, she’d been different. Colder somehow.
Even what she’d done to Dehgoies himself had a flavor of that cold. It wasn’t that she’d gotten him out, or even that she’d kidnapped him. There was something else in what she’d done, something that didn’t entirely sit well with any of them.
She’d lied to him, yes. But it was more than that...she’d managed to deceive him at a far greater level. She’d done it with a ruthlessness that Balidor wouldn’t have thought her capable of before all of this. The very fact that she had been capable of it made him uneasy, to say the least. She'd used Dehgoies' own devotion to her against him, and his trust of her, as his mate.
She’d used sex against him, too, in a way that most seers didn’t do to one another...mainly due to the vulnerability of all seers in that area. That vulnerability was multiplied exponentially in bonded mates.
It was like kicking someone in their achilles’ heel.
When Balidor really thought about it from that perspective, the whole op made him uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than he could fully admit to her, or to any of the others...even though he’d been the one to train her for it. In a way, he almost understood the outrage in the seers protesting below.
She’d gone after her own mate.
Balidor
himself was a seer. He fully understood how the seers protesting outside would view that as evil...or at the very least, heartless in the extreme. The fact that he hated her husband didn't change that really. It only made him wonder about her, as well.
He knew he wasn't alone in feeling the Dreng seethe through the edges of her aleimi, or living light. Truthfully, he’d felt the change long before she’d left with him for that Rebel stronghold in the mountains. He’d felt it since her husband had turned back into Syrimne.
But it was worse now. A lot worse.
When she answered him, he even imagined he heard the Dreng in her voice.
“Yeah,” she said, still holding his eyes with that empty gaze. “I’m ready, ‘Dori.”
Feeling his anger deflate still more, Balidor just looked at her, at a loss.
He glanced at Jon. After the barest pause, he realized the human felt it, too.
Even though he was human, Jon picked up on a lot. He knew something was wrong with her. Balidor felt it in Jon’s light; he could see the understanding in the other man’s gaze. He also saw it in the tautness around his mouth, even before Jon reached out, squeezing his adoptive sister’s arm with his fingers. Balidor stared briefly at the human’s mutilated hand, the place where two of his fingers had been severed by Terian with a jagged knife.
“What about you, ‘Dor,” Jon said, glancing up. “Are you ready?”
Balidor met his gaze. Seeing the creases in the human’s forehead, he saw that Jon had been noticing the expression in his face, too.
Nodding a little to the human, Balidor forced a sigh, clicking.
He would have to talk to Jon...and to Vash. Maybe one of them could get her to see reason. Balidor himself certainly couldn’t. Maybe it was his own fault; he couldn’t exactly separate out his own feelings in a way that made sense these days.
Maybe Jon really could reach her.
If any of them could, it would likely be him.
For a long moment, Balidor only looked between them, watching the human look at Allie with that understanding in his eyes. Somewhere in that pause, her eyes returned to the wall screen; but Balidor discerned nothing in that empty stare as it followed the jerking and flickering images on its surface. As the seer watched, Jon took her hand. He gripped her fingers tightly, as if trying to reach her behind that flat gaze, but Allie didn't seem to notice.
Just when Balidor was about to give up, to usher both of them out of the room and to the waiting helicopter, he saw Allie stiffen, her eyes riveted to the wall-length monitor.
Jon seemed to be staring at the same image, equally mesmerized.
"What the hell?" the human muttered.
Balidor followed his gaze. It occurred to him only then, that the crowd had gone silent. It was as if the monitor had been muted, but no one had touched the controls. The chanting stopped. So did the gunshots, and the screams.
A group of men wearing all black had formed a line in the middle of the main street in front of the office building. They stood perfectly still, directly between the barricades protecting the police and the Lao Hu on one side and the demonstrating crowd on the other.
Balidor frowned, stepping deeper into the room.
Something was definitely wrong here.
He glanced at Allie, but she was frowning too. He saw no emotion there, but the same puzzlement stood in her eyes as she watched the row of men on the screen.
Realizing she was trying to see them with her light, Balidor did the same, dipping into the Barrier to try and get a better look at the row of people in black kevlar. When he focused his aleimi on them, however, he hit a solid wall. He couldn't see past it, even after repeated tries, using a number of different sight tricks to get around any Barrier shields. All he could say for certain was that the shield was being reinforced from somewhere else.
Somewhere not in Hong Kong...or even Asia.
Which meant that the black-clad soldiers were likely seers themselves; humans couldn't be guarded effectively from such a distance. Their lights were too difficult to pick out of a crowd, and their aleimi lacked sufficient structure to support a full shield without physical proximity.
If the soldiers were humans, then they had guards on the ground as well, facilitating the shield connection...but Balidor doubted it.
In any case, the shields he could see surrounding them in the Barrier space were impressive. He could get past most of the low-grade stuff. Even some of the professional shields often had chinks of one kind or another that allowed Balidor some glimpse inside.
These completely blinded him.
"Sweeps?" Allie asked him.
Balidor split his aleimi so he was still halfway in the Barrier, glancing at her.
"No," he said. He knew that signature well enough. "It's not World Court at all."
"Could they be rebels?" Jon said.
That time, it was Allie who shook her head. "No. I don't think so."
"Can you get through?" Balidor asked her.
After a pause, she shook her head again.
"No," was all she said.
The men in black kevlar raised heavy weapons, aiming them at the crowd. They didn't carry regular rifles, Balidor noticed, but dark green, semi-organics with stubby, thick barrels, too wide for normal bullets. Before he could say anything, Balidor heard the lower-pitched thup sound of the guns going off, a heavier and somehow slower sound than that of regular gunfire.
Once again, Balidor saw gas canisters bouncing on the pavement.
They exploded into clouds at once, obscuring faces of avatars, as well as the buildings and street kiosks closest to the largest crush of people. But the clouds didn't remain. Nor did Balidor hear the screams he would have expected with most nerve agents used on crowds, or see anyone in the range of the gas coughing, or rubbing watering eyes. The gas dissipated quickly into the air, so it hadn't been designed to create a diversion, either.
"What is it, then?" Allie said.
Apparently, Balidor's thoughts had been louder than he realized.
"I don't know," was all he said.
Just then, the first person collapsed onto the pavement.
Balidor watched in a kind of numb disbelief as the camera panned sickeningly, following the body to the ground. The woman's avatar faded, revealing the face of a twenty-something girl with black hair and a heavily made-up face. Trails of blood streamed from her eyes and ears and nose, obscuring her features, making trails through her foundation and lipstick.
The camera left her face in time to show the next body fall.
Within seconds, however, there were too many for the camera to capture.
Balidor watched it happen, unable to tear his eyes away, but a part of him still couldn't believe it. He was aware of the feed reporter's voice in the background, rising to a near hysterical pitch as more bodies fell. He heard more reporters reacting as the bodies seemed to domino down faster...but even with that, the silence remained in the background, making it impossible to understand the reporters' words.
It all happened too fast for Balidor's mind to catch up...yet so slowly that it seemed like an eternity before it was over. Half the crowd seemed to have collapsed on the pavement before Balidor became aware of another sound, something that also seemed to creep only slowly into his awareness.
It was screaming.
That time, the screaming had a different sound to it, though. It wasn't the sound of an angry mob, high on adrenaline. Or even the sound of people afraid of being shot.
Instead, it was a high-pitched, irrational sound, like a rabbit caught in a snare.
It was a sound Balidor associated with what they used to call 'battle fatigue,' or 'shell shock'...the sound of pure, unbridled terror, terror that ripped a person out of their moorings, sending them spinning totally out of control.
It was while the sound penetrated his awareness that Balidor noticed something else. Only one group of people in the crowd were screaming.
It was the seers.
Seers bac
ked away from fallen, falling and swaying bodies, screaming in disbelieving horror as more and more people slammed unceremoniously into the pavement. Most of those falling were already unconscious or dead by the time their limbs gave out. They landed flat on their backs or directly on their faces. Few even had time to throw up their arms or fall to their sides. Some fell to their knees first, and a few were knocked into odd positions by the surging and fleeing crowd, but most fell like a tree falls...straight down, no resistance at all.
The seers watched it happen. They tried to move out of the way only to trip over and run into more bodies, more bleeding faces, more death. So they screamed, caught within a maze of corpses. Once they started, they didn't seem to be able to stop.
It took Balidor a few seconds more to understand why only the seers were screaming.
Then he realized the awful truth. The seers were the only ones left.
The humans were all dying, too fast for any of them to utter a sound.
2
CAGED
REVIK. DEHGOIES. NENZI. Simon. Rolf. Ewald. Sword. Syrimne.
There had been others...other names, other people.
The names blended now, grew meaningless.
He knew himself now as she knew him. He knew himself in her eyes, even when she’d tried to gouge his out...to kill everything he was, everything he had been.
He sat chained to the floor and wall of a green organic-metal room.
Revik stared up the high walls, feeling his chest start to hurt again. His head and body throbbed, pulsing a slow, nausea-laden heat as he took in the dimensions of the space.
Something felt off in the room, above and beyond the heavy collar he wore on his neck. Thick binders imprisoned his wrists and upper arms. But it wasn’t just his physical restraints.
He felt cut off, alone.
Not just alone.
Allie's War Season Two Page 55