Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  “Yeah,” I said. “I get it.”

  I didn’t really want to know how he would have finished that sentence.

  “So maybe tone it down a little,” Jon said. “At least around Balidor. The guy’s paranoid enough...especially about you and Revik.” His voice turned joking, but there wasn’t much real humor in it. “You don’t want him shooting you again, Allie. Not for real.”

  Giving a half-smile, I nodded, still staring at the floor. After another pause that was longer than it should have been, I met his gaze.

  “I’ll be more careful,” I said. “I promise I will, Jon...but I really need to be alone right now. I need to, you know...regroup. Take a shower.”

  He flushed a little. His eyes flickered down my body seemingly against his will.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Okay. Sure.” He stepped through the door, and started to close it behind him, when he hesitated again, his voice low.

  “Are you sure you’re okay, Al?” he said.

  I nodded, forcing myself to smile. “I’ll be all right, Jon. When all this is done, everything will be fine. No more scary Dreng sister...promise.”

  He nodded, smiling back wanly, but his eyes remained unconvinced.

  Still, he shut the door, which at that point was all I really wanted.

  Once he had, every muscle in my body abruptly unclenched.

  I rested my forehead in my hands, letting myself just breathe for a moment, to try and think past everything Balidor had said, and Jon...and everything that had happened in the tank less than an hour earlier. Once I’d pushed past the details of all of those things, I found that one thought kept wanting to repeat in my head, like some kind of mantra.

  I didn’t have much time.

  I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. I couldn’t afford to wait a single day.

  I’d just have to get better at holding it together around the rest of them. That included Revik and Jon and Balidor and whoever else might be watching. I had to get through this, or neither one of us would survive it. I’d kill us both if I had to, to keep us from the Dreng, but it wasn’t a thought that exactly filled me with joy.

  So I only nodded to myself, wiping my cheek absently with one hand.

  “Never fire and back to earth...” I muttered, glancing up at the curved stone walls. “...Some days I submit, some I won’t...”

  For a long moment, I only sat there, staring at the bathroom door.

  JUST LIKE THE first time, I didn’t look at him as I walked in.

  Just like the first time, I felt him watching me, his eyes following my movements minutely as I crossed the floor of the green-walled tank.

  He didn’t talk.

  I wasn’t sure if his silence was because he’d decided to try something different with me...or if he was surprised I’d come back at all so soon. In any case, the quiet only lasted until I’d arranged myself once more on the blanket and prayer mat pallet.

  “Hungry again then, pet?” he said.

  Not looking up, I flattened the blanket around my feet.

  “You’re walking a little stiffly there, love,” he said. “I didn’t break anything, did I?”

  Moving the longer cushion closer behind me, I sat on it, folding my legs. Reaching into the bag next to me, I pulled out the water bottle and took a long drink.

  I heard his smile, the harder note woven underneath.

  “You’re not mad at me, are you, wife? You used to like it rough...”

  He waited. I felt his eyes on my face, watching me.

  “...Maybe next time I’ll make you talk to me,” he said, his voice growing softer, more cajoling again. “...Make sure I’m getting it right. I have to admit, it drives me crazy when you do that...I’m getting a little turned on just thinking about it...”

  My mind pretty much just blocked his words out as I tried to focus on how to even start this next part. It occurred to me, as I did, that I hadn’t done anything remotely like this in months, even years...not since I’d been on the ship with Revik, hunting for the man I’d thought was responsible for killing my mother. Later, I’d worked with Maygar and Vash to find Galaith, but that had been more of a coordinated, team effort.

  I hadn’t done it alone in a very long time.

  Vash and I had talked about a strategy, of course.

  He’d told me a lot, actually, answering just about any question I had, at least those he could. He told me what he knew about Revik’s past and even gave me a fair bit of detail about the first and second splits they’d made in his light. He hadn’t known as much about the specifics of his time with Menlim, not other than the bits and pieces they’d pulled out of the scans they’d done of his light following his capture. Despite how detailed those scans were, they didn’t pick up much on his earliest years.

  Vash assumed those memories were buried deeper...and possibly protected through a number of mechanisms in Revik’s own mind.

  We talked most about the splitting process itself.

  I found myself replaying parts of that conversation in my head.

  “...It was very crude, that first split we did of your mate, Alyson,” Vash had said, looking at me from where he leaned against a virtual tree in the Barrier space he’d created for us.

  His voice had been somber, almost sad.

  For most of those talks, we sat in a Barrier field that seemed to replicate some locale in the high plains of Asia. Wherever it was, a real place of some kind, or a composite of several places, it felt almost familiar. Tall grasses waved across a bowl-like valley, dotted with trees and resting below a pale sun in a high, deep dome of sky. Drawing in the air with his fingers, Vash showed me a faint outline of an aleimic body that I recognized as Revik’s.

  Swallowing a little, I looked at the structures over his head.

  “He’s really got all of those again?” I said.

  “Yes,” Vash said. “You saw him use them, at least some of them, in Brazil.”

  “Yeah.” I waved off my own comment. “I know. I just...you know. It’s kind of unbelievable. I remember seeing them on the boy. They seemed almost unreal...”

  “Your light could look the same one day, Alyson,” Vash said, smiling at me. “Your mate has already structured it quite a lot...perhaps more than you realize.”

  I made a dismissive gesture to that, too.

  “So you were saying,” I prompted. “About the split...what you did to him the first time?”

  “Yes.” The old seer’s smile faded. “It was quite crude, as I mentioned. Most of this was lack of knowledge on our parts...and perhaps too much haste, in that we were concerned with how long we would be able to successfully hold him captive. This was before collars were anywhere near as prevalent or effective as they are now, Alyson...” he added.

  “So?” I said, staring at the model of Revik’s aleimic body. “How did you do it?”

  Vash clicked a little to himself.

  “I am somewhat embarrassed to admit that we did the Barrier equivalent of taking a hack saw to him, Alyson. We essentially cut out every structure we could find that he used for performing the telekinesis. In effect, that also removed any memories associated with those same structures. But a wide gap remained, in terms of his memory and his actual abilities...”

  Sighing a little with another set of low clicks, he explained apologetically, “It was the first time I had ever been involved in an operation of that kind, and there were concerns that it would kill him. We tried to be...restrained. And yet, we likely took far too much of him and far too little, if you get my meaning...”

  I watched him replicate the process on the model that hung in the air between us under the shade of the Barrier tree. A thin line of bright gold light formed an incision towards the lower part of his aleimic structures.

  I watched as that incision widened, systematically selecting and removing pieces of a number of the rotating geometries that spiraled above his head.

  “...The second time, we tried to be more precise,” he added, showing m
e the areas of his light that were honed under his time with Galaith and the Pyramid, working for the Rooks. Vash pointed at some of the darker structures.

  “You see, here?” he said gently. “These broken parts of his light...the missing parts...most of these were put there by Menlim, too...”

  I found myself following his train of thought.

  “...So he was vulnerable to them,” I said. “Before he got to Germany, and worked for Galaith...he already had the resonance in his light.”

  “Quite a bit of it, yes,” Vash said. “More than we should have left there. If we’d known more about what we were doing, we may not have made that mistake.”

  “Is that why he had to go to those caves following the second split?” I said. “He told me he had years of light restructuring...that even after he was separated out from the Dreng, and his memories changed, he spent a long time working on his light.”

  “Indeed. That is exactly why. We did not wish to leave the same open door available to the Dreng. It was an attempt to rectify that original mistake, as it was clear they would try and bring him over to their side again...”

  Vash conjured a new image, this time of an underground series of caves. I saw Revik sitting cross-legged on a mat, his hands on his thighs as he listened to someone...or something. He looked tired, thin, worn out. But the expression on his face had a kind of peace to it.

  “...We were very afraid of killing him at that point, Allie,” Vash added. “Or of taking so much of him that too little of the man remained. His time with Galaith spanned almost as many years as his time with Menlim. Together, his periods with the Dreng have taken up more than half of his life.” Vash clicked softly, a lulling sound when it came from his lips.

  “...He is strong, Allie. Most seers would have died with what he’s been through, in either one of those lives. It is what gives me hope that this plan of yours might work.”

  “Why him?” I said, before I’d thought about it. “Why did you send him on that mission with Galaith...why did you have him become a friggin’ Nazi? Couldn’t you have assigned someone else to infiltrate the Rooks, given his past?”

  I fought to keep the anger and accusation out of my words, but didn’t succeed.

  “...Putting Syrimne into that kind of danger again, when you knew who he was...what he’d been through. You had to have known it was a risk, even without knowing you’d left the door wide open to them. Hell, even just throwing him in with the Nazis would have screwed with his head, given that Menlim raised him in Germany...”

  Vash’s smile grew heartbreaking.

  “He volunteered, Alyson.” His voice was almost soft. “I could not refuse him. It is a mistake I will never stop regretting...never.”

  Closing my eyes, I shook my head, taking a deep breath.

  Focusing back on the room where I sat now, I tried not to think about what had already been done to the mind of the man in front of me. Neither Vash nor Tarsi vocalized it outright, but I knew that was the biggest risk. Revik simply might not be able to handle having any more surgeries done to his light...even the relatively non-invasive kind.

  When I closed my eyes the second time, I half-expected him to say something else, to try to break my concentration.

  But he didn’t.

  My last glimpse of him was a wary stare from the far wall, his arms crossed and resting on his propped up knees in front of his chest. But the image didn’t stay with me for long.

  Instead, I found myself immersed almost immediately in black clouds.

  But that didn’t last long, either. After all, this time, I knew who I was hunting.

  And I knew exactly where he was.

  ...LIGHT EXPLODES INTO flickering shadows and bursts of brilliance as I find myself thrown into a movement of arms and legs and hands...

  Beginnings live here, and the beginning is light.

  So very, very light...

  The lightness brings relief, an inhaled breath that nearly catches in my unseen throat...too light for me to take in. It has been so long since I felt so light myself. I find myself thinking of people, places, memories...things I haven’t thought of in so long...

  Revik laughing up at me from a blanket spread beside a river, horses tearing at grass from where they’re tethered nearby...laughing harder as I show him the ridiculous jazz routine I did for one of my dance classes in college, until he is nearly crying, begging me to show him another...

  My father grinning before the room-sized model of the planets and the stars...spinning them around on their brass rails, so that they sing to us...

  My mother and Cass and me at the beach, wearing our bathing suits and sunglasses with the big rubber noses...giggling uncontrollably when someone asks us for the time...

  Jon and I climbing rocks at Big Sur, singing at the top of our lungs...

  This feels like all those memories, but it is lighter still.

  So light I can barely stand how good it feels. I want to run and jump and climb and laugh...I want to be with him here, but I don’t know how to be in such a breathless place...

  He is happy here...so happy...

  The thoughts cascade to me, a child’s thoughts, settling like a butterfly’s feet only to whisk away at the first whisper of wind, the first new smell, the first high-cheekboned face.

  A woman with black hair and clear eyes. She smiles at him, and the love in her eyes makes it hard to breathe...fights to break my heart. I hurt for him, but he takes it in, and it washes over his small form, leaving him lighter than before. Even when she scolds him, I see that love there, shining at him, her light encasing his in warm, gentle tendrils that reach through every structure around his body. He rests there, without needing it explained, without questioning it or distrusting it or worrying about its permanence or when it might go away...

  Another form stands in the doorway.

  A simple thought enters his mind, and then his hands are outstretched, grasping at air.

  “Up!” he exclaims. “Please up!”

  I feel a dizzying thrill as larger, male hands grasp his middle, throwing him up in the air, making him gasp and choke with laughter.

  “Again!” he shrieks, and I find myself watching him half-incredulously with the man, pulling my light apart from his to look around their three-roomed, tile-roofed home with the long, horizontal windows. The floors are wooden and clean. Thick rugs cover the polished planks, along with hand-painted, wooden furniture and the threshold of a stone fireplace, wide and smoke-blackened, so used for cooking and not simply warmth.

  It reminds me of that other place, too, where we were married, and I wonder if that was deliberate...or simply the fragments of some repressed memory that fought its way to the surface, trying to be shared.

  The woman smiles from that smoke-blackened hearth, watching as the man tosses the boy again, and her eyes are clear, slanted at the edges, almost entirely colorless. I stare at those eyes, still trying to get my footing in this new place, when the boy’s feet return to the floor, and he runs from the room at top speed, darting through the open door and towards a sound it takes me a moment to identify.

  Hoof beats. Horses, and they are coming closer, moving at a steady walk.

  I am outside with him then, and a larger girl holds him back, grasping his shoulder in insistent fingers. She smacks his head a little when he squirms, whispering in his ear, and he laughs, butting into her with his back and head and feet.

  She stands two heads taller than him, and she has the same colorless eyes, but her face is rounder, more like her mother’s. It is a strong face, almost Asian, but with that same odd mixture that always made it so difficult to pinpoint her brother’s exact ethnicity.

  They watch the riders approach together.

  His eyes are excited, and focus only on the horses.

  Hers are worried, I notice, almost somber as she stares at the riders.

  Older seers sit on the backs of tough-looking beasts who blow through their noses from the long, steep climb to
the little wooden house. Four of those scruffy horses stand there, with four riders. The newcomers wear monk’s robes, a pale amber color, and one the color of sand, and they are looking at the boy with great interest, smiling at him, speaking to him in a tongue that is like his, but so different he can barely make out their words.

  They speak to him in his mind also, and there he understands them.

  Syrimne d’Gaos...we honor you...most Illustrious Sword...we bring you blessings from the lower heights, most beloved intermediary...

  Their words make him laugh.

  They also make him hide behind the skirt of his sister, whose sun-browned face wrinkles in a frown. She grips his tanned arm in strong fingers, pushing him further behind her, away from the curious eyes of the monks.

  “Go away from here!” she yells, motioning with her other arm in seer sign language. “He is not your holy man! He is a boy who still eats grass and snails!”

  The boy laughs hysterically at this, still holding her shirt.

  Grass and snails!

  Elashi, his sister, is always funny.

  His parents, who come to the door, are somber, though, and do not laugh at her words. They bow to the monks as the latter dismount from their horses and they shush Elashi, who is still complaining that they are messing up the stone footpath she mended only the day before.

  Elashi is upset. The boy feels in her light that it isn’t all about the stones. She wants to take him from there, away from the monks. She doesn’t like them.

  He grips her clothes tighter, trying to warm her with his own light, to reassure her.

  He can barely tear his eyes off their horses, though. The black one blows out air from its nostrils, staring back at him with one large, liquid brown eye.

  He looks up at his mother, then his father. He tries to understand the fear he sees in his father’s face, the somber look as he listens to the monks speak in their odd tongues. His father’s face is long and straight, with the angularity I know from his son’s adult face, the same narrow mouth, and the broad-shouldered height and athletic frame. There is an easiness in those angles of his face, however, wind-worn and set differently with dark blue eyes that seem to be forever scanning the horizon. I see his arms and realize they are Revik’s arms, just as the woman’s eyes and smile and thick black hair are Revik’s, too.