I had deliberately stayed away from the security station, where I could have seen, and even heard their interaction.
Now, looking at Balidor's face, I wished I hadn’t.
I watched the Adhipan leader approach where I stood, feeling my whole body grow colder when I saw the anger underlying the grim look on his face.
I knew he hated Revik. I knew he might not even care all that much, whether Revik survived this whole thing, even if it meant my death, too. For a number of reasons, I’d assigned him parts of our task anyway.
I’d already been told by a number of the older seers that I’d made the right choice. Balidor was an expert when it came to deprogramming Rooks. He’d been doing it since the Rooks first appeared, in the period before World War II. He’d been fighting the Dreng even longer than that. He understood the difficulties we were facing. When it came to various corruptions, symbioses and dependencies that could damage a seer’s light, he knew what he was doing.
But I hoped like hell he understood his role.
I still worried he was running his own game alongside mine. I already knew he was capable of it. If he thought my judgment was compromised, for example, he wouldn’t hesitate...and he could easily argue it was, considering who Revik was to me.
Really, what was an infiltrator, if not a professional liar?
He reached a space within a few feet of me, still not quite meeting my gaze.
I swallowed, touching his light cautiously with my own.
“Well?” I said.
“He cannot get free,” Balidor said. “The collar will hold.”
I felt my hands curl into fists at my sides, but my whole body hurt. I had to get used to that pain. Chances were, I might have to get used to it for the rest of my life. I stared at the pressurized door, avoiding the thick, organic window with my eyes.
I hadn’t caged him, I told myself. I hadn’t done this.
But I had. I had done it...and a lot worse.
“I knew that already,” I said brusquely. “Unless you were lying to me earlier?”
“We are still conducting tests, Esteemed Bridge,” he said politely, but by the formality of his tone, I knew my remark cut at him, too.
I’d learned a lot, in the weeks I’d been back from my months on assignment. Meaning my months at that rebel hideout in the mountains.
Most of what I’d learned hadn’t been pleasant.
Most of it, in fact, still made me physically sick to think about. Before I’d even gotten all the way here, I’d already heard and seen details of the raid by Voi Pai and her “Tiger People,” the Lao Hu. I saw it from the Barrier, and on the few recordings they provided us in the aftermath, likely to rattle me, if I judged Voi Pai correctly. I knew how many she’d killed. I knew how many had died in the gunfight, or trying to escape.
I knew how many of the rebels had committed suicide, thinking I’d sold them as slaves to the Chinese humans. One of them had been a friend of mine. Someone I’d risked my life for, and who’d done the same for me.
I also knew how many had fought to the death for Revik...and even for me.
I knew they knew the truth by now. Those who survived to hear my role in the attack hated me worse than they hated the Lao Hu. I was the worst kind of race traitor...and a traitor to my supposed role in history and my reincarnation status, which never used to mean much to me, honestly. It did now, if only because I knew it made all of this a more bitter pill to swallow by so many. Whatever I believed, they believed it...and to them, it was as if the gods themselves had turned against them, sending someone like me as their protector.
From Balidor, I knew that new bounties appeared on the black market feeds all the time.
The Bridge’s days of being a symbol for peace and freedom from human slavery for the seer race were over.
But I wasn’t sure if I could think about all that yet. Mostly because I wasn’t sure what I could do about it. I kept ops going in the background, sending out most of the Adhipan and the Seven to continue looking for seer refugees and bringing them back to the ancient seer strongholds in the Pamir. At first, I tried making public appearances to mollify both the humans and the seers, but from the way my comments were cut and pasted together in the feeds after each of my appearances, it seemed I was doing more harm than good.
Whatever I symbolized now, it seemed only to incite riots in my wake, so I decided to stop waving the red flag in front of the armed bulls.
Anyway, I needed Revik. I needed him whole again.
Whether he hated me or not.
After spending the last four weeks in training with Vash on how seers handle this kind of thing, I knew now, what it would take...what I would have to put Revik through to bring him back. To free him from the Dreng.
The truth was, he wouldn’t ever really be “back” for me at all.
The Revik I’d married was gone. Really gone.
What would come out the other side would be a Revik I’d never met. Assuming he came out the other side at all, and the process didn’t kill him.
But I had to try. If nothing else, because it still felt like the right thing to do.
Whatever else I was sure of, Revik didn’t deserve what had been done to him. Whatever he’d done as a result, sure, yeah, maybe he was responsible for that. But he’d been taken by those people as a child, and he hadn’t deserved what they’d done to him.
I studied Balidor’s face, wary at the infiltrator’s mask I saw there.
“What else do you have to tell me?” I said. "...About Revik, I mean."
“That is all for now. His restraints seem to be holding.” He paused, giving me a level look with his clear, gray eyes. “It is no small thing, Esteemed Bridge...we have never attempted to cage a telekinetic seer before. Not without heavy sedation...”
“Are you absolutely sure, ‘Dori?” I said. “He wasn’t faking?” I felt my throat close, even as my fingers gripped the edges of the long kurta-style shirt I wore. “Vash said the room alone might not be enough...to keep the Dreng out, I mean. The collar has to work. It has to...”
Balidor’s eyes slid back up to mine.
He looked tired, I noticed that time. Exhausted really, as if he carried a weight somewhere just out of view. As I looked at him, a thin smile formed on his lips.
“He wasn’t faking,” he said.
I felt my skepticism worsen at the flat certainty in his voice.
“How do you know?” I said.
Balidor shook his head, clicking at me, seer fashion.
“I have done this before, Alyson,” he reminded me. “...I have, in fact, done it to this being before. I know him a little, you see...”
My jaw hardened. I tried to ignore the reminder that a small circle of my supposed trusted friends had known exactly who Revik was...and well before we were married. Balidor was one of them. So was Vash...and Tarsi. All three of them knew Revik and Syrimne were the same person, but had collectively decided not to tell me.
Hell, even Galaith knew.
He hadn’t told me either...not even to taunt me with the information. Some secrets were more important than grudges between mortal enemies, I supposed.
In a certain way, I even understood their need for secrecy.
For one thing, I would have overreacted, no question about that. And given that Revik didn’t himself know the truth about his past, I probably would have let the secret slip, given that we were married, intentionally or not. Terian already knew about the boy, so it probably wouldn’t even have made any difference.
It still bugged me.
Even now, it bugged me...when it was sort of a moot point.
When I refocused on Balidor’s face, I saw a vague sadness in his expression, gone before he startled me again, reaching up to caress the hair off my cheek and neck with one hand. I stiffened a little, but he removed his hand just as simply. The gesture startled me more in the tenderness I felt behind it than the fact that he’d done it.
His voice softened.
&
nbsp; “Trust me on this, Esteemed Bridge. If he could get free, we would not be having this conversation right now.”
I met his gaze. That time, I saw something more in his eyes. More than anger, I mean.
It might even have been regret.
“What do you say to him, ‘Dori?” I said, my voice thick. “When you go in there? What do you talk to him about?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes...it does. To me it does.”
Balidor’s expression grew blank once again, indecipherable.
“Then you’ll have to ask him yourself, Esteemed Bridge,” he said.
I saw that more complex emotion there again, briefly, but he had already turned away.
“...But not now,” he added. His voice grew businesslike. “...You are not to go in there alone, Allie. Not for any reason. I would prefer if you did not go in at all, truthfully, so please do not try to coerce someone into accompanying you until we have completed all of our tests.” I saw his expression harden as he stared at the far wall. Still looking at nothing, he folded his hands, seer-fashion, at the base of his back. “...Despite what I’ve said, I don’t want you taking any chances. We’ll give it a few more days with this collar configuration. Test it a few more times to be sure I’m right, along with the construct boundaries of the tank itself. We will ensure it meets Vash’s specifications before we do anything more, yes?”
He looked at me again.
Despite the politeness of his tone, I saw a threat in his eyes.
“...Until then, stay away from him, Bridge Alyson. Even with gas as back up, we’d be foolish to risk putting you in there with him. We have absolutely no idea how he’ll react...”
I thought about arguing.
Seeing the expression harden into anger on his face, I didn’t.
There would have been no point.
I simply nodded to his words instead, my arms curled tight around my upper body.
When he saw I wasn’t going to fight him on it, the tiredness began to leak back out over the rest of his posture. Still silent, I folded my arms, keeping my expression blank as I studied his.
But he didn’t remain long enough for me to draw any real conclusions.
Turning away from my gaze, he made his way stiffly down the corridor. I watched him make a right at the fork, following the larger of the two passageways leading to the next set of underground tunnels and the kitchen and common areas.
I wondered when he’d last slept, then pushed that from my mind, too.
Only when he was well and truly gone did my eyes return to the heavy green door.
JON FOUND HIMSELF in the segment of tunnel leading directly to the giant, organic, fishbowl of a cage where they were keeping Revik. Even with its touches of the past, like that Old West bank vault type door, the tank still managed to look retro-futuristic, like something from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, or maybe an early movie about space travel.
Like the seers, he’d begun to think of the enclosure as “The Tank.”
Jon had aimed his feet in that direction almost unconsciously.
Meaning, he’d been thinking about going there for days, but hadn’t quite mustered up the courage to make it into an actual decision. He’d tried to justify both his wanting to go and his reluctance to actually see Revik in that place. He knew Allie felt responsible, but the truth was, they’d all done it, more or less. Jon hadn’t exactly given Revik a call to give him a head’s up on what she’d been planning...and while he hadn’t known she intended to kidnap him, exactly, they’d all been more or less on board when she explained her reasons.
Well, all of them except Balidor maybe.
Jon had nearly reached the first security checkpoint before he’d fully admitted to himself where he intended upon going.
Even after he had, he still told himself that he’d only gone to visit the seer assigned to watch over the surveillance feeds for the room. Because the seer on the console that night, monitoring the tank’s feeds, happened to be Dorje, the lie was almost a convincing one.
But he knew the real reason he was going.
He also couldn’t help thinking the visit overdue, given who Revik was to him, and the fact that he’d been there for Jon in the worst period of Jon’s life. In that bunker under the Caucasus Mountains where Terian held them captive and tortured them, Revik had been a lifeline for him and Cass. He was the only reason either of them made it out remotely sane...much less alive.
So Jon had his own reasons for wanting to talk to Syrimne, the scourge of humanity. Truthfully, his reasons didn’t have a whole lot to do with all the back and forth with him and Allie, although he wondered if either of them would see it that way.
That being said, he supported Allie, in terms of what she was trying to do.
He couldn’t say he fully understood all of what she’d been trying to do, especially in terms of the op to pull Revik out...but he definitely supported the concept behind it. He’d met his brother-in-law in the flesh one too many times as Syrimne d’Gaos. He knew Revik had lost his soul somewhere in the change back to that older, more mythic identity. Still, the whole thing had been such a crazy nightmare from the beginning, with Revik being one person who had been split into two, returned to one again so abruptly and brutally.
It barely seemed possible that so much could have happened to one person in a single life. But then Revik was a seer, like Balidor...and Vash. They lived a long time.
In fact, their lifespans often stretched to ten times the length of a human’s.
It was weird to think Allie might live that long herself.
But then, at the rate she was going, the chances of that were pretty slim.
From what Jon had been able to piece together, Vash and the other Council elders tried to save Revik from the Syrimne thing once before. They tried cutting out the parts of him that had been brainwashed and beaten and twisted into a weapon by seers with some crazy, anti-human political agenda. Vash and a couple of other seers had taken those removed parts...including the parts of Revik’s seer light body that allowed him to kill people with his mind...and hid them in the body of a dead seer boy.
A dead seer boy who just happened to be the real Dehgoies Revik...meaning the child seer whose identity they stole to create the new Dehgoies Revik.
Pretty twisted, in a way.
Allie seemed to agree with him.
Jon caught her wincing a few times, when the other seers talked about the logistical problems of trying to split him again. They all seemed to agree it probably wouldn’t work, and it might even kill him. They also talked about how it might have made his condition worse in the long run, particularly given how the boy had been treated for those 80-odd years, locked in a dungeon Allie said should have killed him.
Then again, maybe she just felt guilty...for the part of her that must have at least been tempted to make him back the way he was before, even if it meant being married to only half of the man. Or maybe knowing him as Syrimne, when she lived with him and the rebels, changed her mind about a lot of things.
Jon had that same twinge himself, once or twice. He hated the part of him willing to do that to another person, and for purely selfish reasons.
Not that he wouldn’t prefer his friend, Revik, back...the seer he’d originally known in that body. Hell, Revik had been one of his best friends before Syrimne took his place.
More than that, he’d been family...above and beyond his marriage to Allie.
Jon missed him.
He missed the reticent seer with the dry sense of humor who’d managed to make him laugh even when they were being tortured by Terian. The person who taught him the seer language, Prexci, who kept him and Allie’s best friend, Cass, from despair and madness in that same prison. The man who later taught him how to clean and load and shoot a gun, how to make seer ingrat, a kind of muddy-tasting spiced dish, and who patiently taught him about the Barrier and the myths, mulei and sign language...who saved his life.
That seer, despi
te his eccentricities, insecurities and prejudices, had been a good guy, with a good heart...and without a good percentage of the completely terrifying parts that had made him Syrimne.
Syrimne, on the other hand, contained all of them.
But Jon agreed with Allie’s assertion that there was something off about the whole idea of trying to split him again.
Cutting a person up to get at the “good bits” just wasn’t right.
Further, she loved the dangerous psychopath. Jon suspected she loved him as Syrimne, too. Jon also suspected she felt responsible in some way, for what had happened to him. More than that, she wanted to help all of him...not leave parts of him behind to rot.
Vash agreed with her.
So did Dorje and a fair number of the others.
Balidor even seemed to agree...although Jon suspected it was for different reasons.
Balidor wanted Revik dead, or at the very least, completely neutralized. He thought cutting him up into multiple-personality Revik was a potential security risk...and one that would fail a second time, given enough years, even if Balidor himself didn’t live to see it. He’d confided to Jon that he had no intention of leaving that burden on future generations of his people, or on future generations of humans, for that matter.
From Balidor’s perspective, Revik was still relatively young.
But then, Balidor couldn’t exactly maintain objectivity when it came to Revik. He’d fought Syrimne twice now, and nearly died both times. He’d seen him kill indiscriminately, turn seer against seer, human against human. He’d seen him cause death and mayhem wherever he went. He wouldn’t let it happen again, he told Jon.
As a result, he agreed with Allie’s proposal to eradicate the problem at its root.
But more than anything, Jon suspected, Balidor hoped the process would kill Revik. Or at the very least, that it would kill Syrimne...the being that Revik more or less truly was.
As far as objectivity and Revik went, Balidor had another problem. Jon strongly suspected that Balidor was more than a little in love with his sister.
Really, though, most of the fears around Syrimne and what he might do hearkened back to World War I. The more recent incarnation of Syrimne hadn’t really had the time to do much damage. Anyway, he’d been a little too busy courting his wife to go full-fledged serial killer on the human race. Jon would even argue...hell, Balidor himself might even concede to this...Revik had done a fair bit of good as Syrimne this time around, despite the mayhem and the bombings.
Allie's War Season Two Page 59