Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  They’d broken him. He didn’t know how she’d done it, but he knew it was her. She was the only one he’d let close enough. She was the only one who could do this to him, who would know how to hurt him so badly.

  He’d always known that, but he’d thought...

  He’d thought she wouldn’t.

  He’d thought she wouldn’t hurt him.

  His head throbbed, forcing his eyes closed against the overhead lights. They weren’t bright, but everything hurt. Everything hurt so he did whatever he could to shut it out.

  He had to remember.

  He couldn’t cower in here forever. He had to get out.

  He had to find a way out, somehow.

  But she’d crippled him. She’d smashed something that held together the pieces of him, that gave him internal order...coherence. Separation sickness didn’t explain it. Separation sickness didn’t break his mind until he got lost in the fragments, half dead in the spaces between thoughts, terrified of falling into a black pit that held nothing but pain and dread and a smothering feeling that wouldn’t let him go.

  Whatever it was, it wouldn’t let him go. It strangled his light, even beyond the collar. It choked his mind, submerged him in dark coils.

  He hated her. He hated her for making him feel like this.

  He hated them all.

  They’d chained his ankles as well. Protocol, perhaps. Perhaps she told them to, out of fear...or because her boyfriend, the Adhipan leader, advised her to do it.

  He wondered, almost at a distance as he fought back the rage wanting to linger, to spiral higher and hotter in the forefront of his mind, whether it was the same room they’d used to simulate his wife’s death less than a year previous.

  He couldn’t hold onto that thought, either.

  Nothing remained. Nothing.

  He fought it, even as he stared down through it...inside it. A seething pit below, a darkness glimpsed only with his light, knowing it without being able to touch it, without being able to feel any of it. It terrified him. He teetered on the edge, watching it, fighting not to fall deeper within. He knew what lived there. He couldn’t articulate it to himself, but the feeling that lived in those spaces between spaces felt older than he...older than the stories he used to explain to himself who he was. The feeling was beyond familiar...

  It felt like the truth.

  The truth guarded, watched over. Lured.

  Something else lived there.

  He knew that thing as well, but it terrified him, even more than the dark.

  Whatever it was, it lived. It had a consciousness all of its own.

  It had hungers.

  A demon, perhaps. A demon crouched behind all the shifting masks.

  He could see it now. Recognize it as his. It wanted him. He wanted to eat the flesh off his bones, to crunch his bones in its sharp teeth, to knead his skin under its razor-like claws. Stripped of life support, the easy civilization he wore like a second skin, there was...nothing.

  It wanted that, too. It would eat all of him.

  He felt it waiting. It was patient, too...especially now, with him broken like this.

  His arms ached from where they’d been wrenched into odd angles behind his back. The two sets of dead-metal organics – one at his wrists and the other at his upper arms – had been braced with a bar behind his back. They couldn’t give him organics, of course. If he broke the collar, it wouldn’t make much difference, but he understood the logic.

  Safety net after precaution, redundancy with initial...backup and primary.

  He’d been unconscious when they attached those, of course.

  He’d become an animal to her. An animal that had to be put down, locked away in a pit.

  But he always got free. Sooner or later...he always did. Even when he didn’t want to be freed, he was, by someone or something. This wouldn’t be any different.

  He’d never escape. Never.

  Arendelan ti’ a rigalem...destiny is harder.

  His uncle told him that; his uncle taught him the meaning behind what he’d become, what he’d been called to do.

  The hard path. He’d heard it even from his mother, even before...

  But his mind couldn’t stay there, either.

  Isthre ag tem degri...to lead is sacrifice.

  He opened his eyes. The lights flickered back to life, sensing his returning consciousness, and he blinked...unsure if he’d slept, or if he’d simply lost more time.

  He didn’t move as he looked around.

  He felt it then, the drug. He could feel the sedative wearing off.

  He was already being hunted.

  He tensed, but a part of him was relieved, too. He could fight what he could see. What he could smell, even taste. It wasn’t his mind...it wasn’t the demon lurking in the dark. His senses wove around him keenly, telling him all he needed to know, even with the collar.

  He’d been trained for this. He’d been trained...

  They would be watching him. She likely stood on the other side of that glass, watching him with her jade-green eyes. Studying him. Maybe reading him, since the collar made sure she could do so with impunity...without him knowing her in his mind, or feeling her.

  Even now, after everything, the realization hurt. Wanting lived there...a wanting to touch her light, to weave back into hers.

  Anger tried to assert itself, to live in the spaces between breaths.

  He let it. He welcomed it...needed it.

  As the realization sank in, the anger turned colder.

  It held the demon in check, made it easier to breathe.

  He bit his tongue until he tasted blood, and control lived there, too. He could hurt himself. He could hurt them, sooner or later. He wanted to feel something...even pain. Even from her. He knew how to lessen the call of that black pit. Anyway, he always operated better with concrete goals, with a puzzle to concern the parts of him that continued to fight that darkness.

  He sidestepped the fear and the confusion from the broken fragments, and wondered again how she had done it to him, how she had destroyed his mind.

  She was the Bridge. Perhaps that was all he needed to understand.

  She lived to destroy...to break things.

  Even so, he hadn’t thought it could happen again. He’d fixed himself. He’d been whole once more. She even helped him in that.

  Unless it was another lie, another key to get at that darker place...that place where eventually, everyone wanted to go. It drew them like a drug. It called to them, made them want to experiment on him, to feel it through him.

  They all wanted what lay buried beneath his feet.

  Perhaps that was the demon’s song, too.

  He fought to control the emotions slamming through his light, sparking currents in the sight-restraint collar around his neck.

  He still fought them...

  ...when the door to his cell abruptly opened.

  He looked over. He turned before he could stop the reflex and found himself staring at the seer standing there, unable to look away.

  His eyes locked there, frozen.

  The other male gauged his expression. His own gaze remained clinical...wary.

  His clothes were neat, Revik noted. Pressed. His chestnut brown hair had been artfully combed. His black boots looked polished, straight out of the box. His gray eyes held the gravity of a man sure of his own righteousness, a man prepared to be generous to his inferiors. He looked like...what did Allie call him?

  An aging movie star.

  A timeless handsome, his friend, Kuchta, would have said.

  The thought spun him helpless briefly, sliding him closer to that night-blackened pit.

  Kuchta.

  A name he’d forgotten.

  Lives lost...laughter in the sun, a field overlooking a valley rimmed by diamond waves...

  He’d seen her dead, too.

  The gray-eyed man continued to study him, eyes wary. After what may have been a calculated pause, he walked closer with deliberate s
trides.

  Revik felt his whole body stiffen, even as something in him grew entirely still.

  Gods. It was something simple at last. Something pure.

  They could torture him. They could do whatever they wanted. It wouldn’t matter.

  He would kill this motherfucker if it was the last thing he ever did. It was a goal worthy of the sacrifices that would come before. Of the training.

  ...Training.

  “Hello, Dehgoies.”

  The older seer stood over him, but Revik hadn’t shifted his gaze upwards. He found himself eye-level with dark-armored pants and the heavy, semi-organic boots the other man wore, that looked so polished he might see his own face in them, at the right angle. He felt his jaw harden as the brief flash of clarity slid away, leaving him in the flickering lights.

  He could feel the dark again, that wavering space below.

  The knees in front of him bent smoothly, bringing the gray eyes level with his.

  Revik stared into the face of Balidor, the leader of the Adhipan.

  He studied him, thinking about where he might start. Perhaps he would start with the face. The face seemed appropriate, given Kuchta’s thoughts on the matter. She could help him...tell him what made that face so special, so much better than his own. She could give him insight into the female mind, human and seer.

  She could tell him how to take those things away, one by one.

  “Are you going to talk to me, Dehgoies?”

  Emotion slid forward. He stared at his own feet, feeling the darkness creep forward, entangling him.

  Kuchta. What had he been thinking just now? She couldn’t help him.

  She was dead.

  He frowned, trying to pull back the threads of his mind. His uncle would have beaten him bloody by now, for being such a sniveling child. He would have had his jaw broken, if he’d been in training...maybe one of his hands. His uncle never would have tolerated this. Never.

  He would have put him back in the hole.

  Tied his hands to his feet. Starved him. Given him to Merenje to play with.

  He’d survived that. He could survive this.

  His uncle prepared him well. He’d been weak, but his uncle helped him with that, too. He taught him to be strong...forced him to be strong. That strength had saved his life, more than once. It would save him now.

  Revik met the other male’s gaze. The heat in his chest grew difficult to breathe through once he had. He stared at the other seer, taking in the lines of his chiseled, almost-human features.

  His wife had thought this man handsome. He had felt that on her, too.

  “Ah, yes.” Balidor smiled, his eyes still level on Revik’s. “...She told me that.”

  The other man paused, still studying his eyes.

  “Does it bother you, Dehgoies, such a trivial thing?”

  Revik didn’t lower his gaze.

  When he didn’t speak, the older man rested his arms on his thighs. After another pause, he cleared his throat, gesturing lightly with one hand, his voice casual. He spoke Prexci, the seer tongue, framing his words in a precise, almost scholarly accent.

  “This is childish, you know...this blaming of me for your domestic concerns.”

  Revik felt his breath fight its way through his chest.

  “Frankly,” Balidor added. “...I don’t see how this is what concerns you, given the predicament you are now in. Or how the blame for these circumstances falls on me.”

  When Revik still didn’t speak, the older seer clicked a little to himself.

  Revik followed the motion of his jaw with his eyes.

  Balidor sighed.

  “...She wasn’t terribly difficult to seduce, Dehgoies,” he said. “Nothing like what I would have imagined, going in. So things at home couldn’t have been all that stellar, yes?”

  The light gray eyes studied Revik’s, flicking briefly from one to the other.

  “...I let her think it was her idea, of course,” he added. “...That wasn’t particularly difficult, either. Your wife is a bit naïve, you know.”

  Revik could not take his eyes off his. He kept his expression still; even his gaze didn’t move from those mild-appearing gray eyes.

  The other man continued to appraise him, hands loose where they hung from propped arms on his thighs.

  “...I don’t suppose she told you why she agreed to fuck me, did she, Rook?” he said then.

  Revik flinched.

  He couldn’t help it.

  Pain whispered around his light, throwing it off its neat rails. Darkness tried to cover it, but the pain lived there too, so much older than...

  “Ah, yes.” Balidor’s eyes remained grave. “You do not like the blunt accuracy of my words. But I do not cater to your sensitivities, Dehgoies. For we must all be men some day, yes? And you are getting older now. You cannot continue in this way...even for a Rook, it is undignified, to be such a child. Do you not think?”

  He paused for another lingering set of seconds.

  “...But you did not answer my question. Did she tell you why? Why she did it?”

  When Revik didn’t speak, the other man’s smile widened a bit more.

  “No, she wouldn’t have. It was part of the infiltration, you see. Part of her deception of you. Given that, you can hardly be angry at her for not explaining her reasoning...”

  Revik bit his tongue. It hurt, but not as much as he needed it to.

  The collar prevented him from holding back the anger that rippled his light, doubtless sparking where Balidor could see it.

  He would lose. He would lose everything, if he didn’t...

  Gods. His uncle would kill him.

  Or worse. He wouldn’t kill him.

  He would kill someone else.

  “...I trained her for months for that op,” Balidor added. “I pretended to fight her on it, of course, to disapprove. I argued over every detail of her proposal, but still I trained her...I fed her everything she needed to know in order to deceive you, Dehgoies.” Pausing, he gestured fluidly with one hand. “Then,” he said, sighing a little. “When she was well and truly invested...I helped her to realize that it was the only way to be sure.”

  Balidor smiled, his eyes carrying a faint steel.

  “...I told her it was the only way to know for certain if she could shield from you well enough to infiltrate you. We had to be intimate. If she could keep that from you, then she would be ready.” He spread his hands. “Given that, she really had no choice...”

  Revik felt his heart stop in his chest.

  He stared at the other man, unable to hide his reaction entirely.

  At the same time, he remembered. He’d been obsessed with why he hadn’t felt it...why he hadn’t known the instant his wife let another man touch her...

  He still didn’t understand.

  How had Allie done that to him? Why?

  What had happened to her? What had this man done to his wife?

  Pain flickered off him once more, a grief so unbearable that he really thought it might kill him. He wanted it to kill him.

  The Adhipan leader gestured towards him, an affirmative in seer.

  Revik followed the motion, uncomprehending.

  “Simple,” Balidor said thoughtfully, studying Revik’s face. “Deceptively simple. She really was an easy mark. So desperate for any means to get close to you...”

  The dagger slid into his chest, hitting its mark.

  He fought to keep the pain of it from his light as well, but he couldn’t. He knew the Adhipan leader felt it hurt him...it hurt him so badly...

  He would lose. He was going to die here. He would finally die.

  The thought brought a near-relief.

  “Then it was just a matter of using my light...” Balidor paused, smiling faintly into Revik’s eyes. “I admit, I was unprepared for how much it would affect me. She whimpered at the end. Actually whimpered...like a child. Does she do that for you?”

  Revik lunged against the chains.

&nb
sp; They caught before he made it more than a few feet. His whole body strained forward, as if trying to rip off his own limbs. The posture hurt like hell within seconds, and the collar kicked in as his light fought to reach the older seer, too...but he didn’t back off.

  His mind didn’t work. He couldn’t think a single coherent thought. The chain caught when he was less than a foot from the other man’s face, but he couldn’t close the gap. A string of words came out of his lips that he barely heard, that didn’t penetrate his mind until later, and even then didn’t come close to expressing what he’d felt in that moment.

  “...rip your goddamned heart out of your chest...feed it to you...” he finished, fighting to breathe. “...give me time...give me time, you fucker...”

  The collar let off a higher pulse, nearly blinding him with pain.

  In some backwards part of his mind, he realized it was cycling upwards as he tried to reach the other man with his light.

  He gasped when the pain worsened, turning to fire under his skin.

  He barely felt the metal cutting into his arms, into his wrists, closing off his chest. He stared into that face his wife had wanted hanging over her, and his mind fell into such a blackening rage it passed through him briefly that he might never get it back.

  For a long moment, he and Balidor only stared at each other in that space.

  He hung there, sweating with pain, staring into those gray eyes.

  Eventually, the collar did its work.

  Revik slumped back against the wall. He landed there in a heap, muscles twitching. He stared at the other seer still, fighting to stay conscious, his mind shifting into a blank, lightless space. The fragments churned, leaving him desolate, lost in that dark, watching it wait for him. Adrenaline hurt deep in the abdomen, shaking arms and hands, even his fingers. Vulnerability washed over him, fear...of being lost, of insanity perhaps...but it felt deeper than mere madness. The physical pain didn’t come close to touching it.

  But the training remained there, too.

  Parts of him assessed, calculated, catalogued...even now.

  Even now, when he wanted to be dead, his uncle’s training kept him alive.

  For example, he knew something about the collar now.

  Even in those moments of blank near-death, he noticed that the pain wasn’t as bad as it could be, with collars of this kind. The light muzzle they had on him was thick, but it concentrated mainly on the structures used to perform telekinesis.