Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  Something in the simplicity of their biological sameness clutches at my heart.

  They leave gifts, these newcomers. Scrolls and fine fabrics, loops and coils of what look like organic chains, an urele, a tool I’d only seen once before, which Terian claimed had once belonged to Revik...and could even be this exact urele, from so many years before. Long, crystal wands cut in elaborate patterns, urele had been used for training young seers.

  The monks give his father a rich-looking tapestry, bearing the symbol of the sword and sun. They give his mother and sister delicacies to eat and money from the people in the land from which they have come.

  They praise him, again and again, and tell him they had seen him come, from very far away. They say they will be back soon, with even more riches.

  After a time, the monks ride off.

  The boy watches the black horse walk back down the slope, and wishes it was his.

  Since the strange men seem to like him so much, he wonders if they will bring him a horse next time, if he asks. He wishes he thought to ask before they left.

  When he asks his father though, his father doesn’t answer.

  No one speaks of the mysterious horsemen again, not at dinner, nor at breakfast the next morning...but the boy hears the adults talking, using the hand language and the longer words, that other dialect they think he does not know.

  More will come, he hears his father say to his mother. More now, that they know of him.

  She shrugs with one hand.

  She hides it better, but her eyes reflect the same fear.

  “It is too late, husband,” she says, in that other tongue. She stares ruefully at the collection of gifts. Her pale eyes hold no attachment to anything in that pile of rich items sitting on the floor by their kitchen table. She looks at it almost like it crawled into their home and died there, and now she is stuck dealing with the corpse.

  The boy watches her, puzzled. But he does not want them to notice him, so he doesn’t ask.

  “We could move,” his father answers her, in the same tongue.

  She shakes her head, her eyes holding a whisper of sadness.

  They would only come again, she says.

  His father sees him then, and pings her light. The two of them turn, and the boy watches them stare at him, thoughtful looks on their unusually serious faces. The boy is not made nervous by this...there is no fear. But something in those looks brings him into his mother’s lap for a hug, right before he lets his weight fall into the cradle of her arms. Touching her hand, he plays absently with a silver ring she wears around her thumb.

  “Go outside now,” she says gently. “Go on, Nenzi...find your sister...”

  Sliding off her legs, he pauses only to kiss her cheek and press his against it. Then he scrambles for the door outside.

  As he hits the sunlight, something jerks me, and I fall...

  Until I am lying on a thin pallet on an organic floor, fighting to breathe.

  Tears run down my cheeks. I am choking, gasping for air, but I am still in the Barrier, still surrounded by sounds and that bright, blinding light, and I hear Vash’s gentle voice, talking to me somewhere behind the shadows...

  Go back, Allie, he urged. Go back now...see it all, while you can...

  Before I make up my mind to obey his soft words...

  I am already there.

  Light erupts behind my eyes.

  Blue sky. Tearing into the space above me.

  It shifts, tilts...

  The shadow morphs in wind over a broken world, tearing holes in the light, drifting deeper into the sun. Everything is jerking, moving wrongly...

  The world spins too fast.

  I am sick from it. I can’t breathe. It is like a weight sits on my ribs, crushing me slowly.

  I see trees around me. Grass on the ground, along with moss and ferns. It is green, so green everything washes into breathing soil and plants, water in quivering beads dotting every frond. Towering white clouds fill a distant horizon, visible through the tree-line to the valley below. The earth smells rich and mulchy, drenched in mold and mushrooms, dotted with moss-covered rocks and the water-soaked trunks of trees sprouting ferns like sharp green beards.

  There is screaming.

  Screaming fills the clearing, but not loud enough to cover a woman’s agonized grunts, as if something is being torn from her, ripped from her insides.

  It goes on and on. There is no end to it. He is lost there, in that moment that will not end, but they hold him off. He screams and screams, fighting to be free while the animals laugh...

  And then, when there is no breath left, no time, no wind, no blue sky or winging birds...

  It is silent.

  Not a sound touches me, nothing but breath reaches me from the being sitting on the ground. He breathes hard, concentrating on each in and out breath. There are no words, no thoughts, no feelings. A blank slate rests there, holding his hands to her chest.

  But the blood is cool now.

  It is cool.

  The world tilts faster still, bringing a gradual darkening, and alien sounds from the trees. The rain starts, but the boy doesn’t notice. The monsoon season is only a few weeks away...but for now, it brings only spurts of thunder and rain, the threat of more to come. The rain drenches his hair, his clothes...and the woman...forcing him to blink and cough as he holds on.

  He is alone.

  He watches the water as it pools in the hollow at the base of her neck, pools at the corners of her eyes, in the dimples by her mouth and in her clothing. The rain washes her skin, washes her dress and hair and lips, but his hands remain on the front of her embroidered apron, feeling for a heartbeat in stiffening, hardening flesh.

  The clearing lay in darkness but for a few lights swinging in a half-ring, obscuring shadowy forms. The sun has already disappeared. I don’t remember it leaving and the rain hasn’t stopped, but it has grown colder. I try to move...

  And a shout rings out.

  He is found. Someone sees him there, with the woman. They call to other someones, holding a lantern higher to illuminate a bearded face. Other bodies lay on the ground beside the boy, but it is to the woman that he clings. She is the one whose clothes he put back on, who he washed.

  The others...

  He looks at his sister’s wide face, the boots of his father.

  But they aren’t real either, broken dolls.

  He can pretend. He can look at them, not see them.

  With the woman it is different...

  Look away, Nenzi-la, she whispers. Don’t watch. Don’t watch, my love...

  They hurt her. He doesn’t understand what they are doing, but they hurt her, like animals. They rip at her, tear at her clothes, laughing. He sees her eyes understand, knows she is reading them, but they don’t seem to read her, or understand the anguish in her high-cheekboned face.

  He is screaming. He doesn’t know this then.

  He is screaming, and his father’s boots already lay inert on the soil, and the animals, the beings with dense, cloudy light, with nothing but blank eyes and hungry mouths, they look at him, and they laugh again.

  In the silence, he can pretend.

  He can wait for them to return.

  But now...the silence is invaded.

  It’s dark now and he’s alone, lights swinging in the wind through the tunneling tress...and there’s only one being left to rip and tear and laugh at. He doesn’t run though, or let go of the woman lying in the rain-soaked ground still covered in boot-prints from the last set of trampling feet. He doesn’t move, still kneeling at her side as the new danger comes to him in his clearing...for it is his clearing, now.

  He watches them, trembling, knowing only that he won’t run away. He won’t...

  He is sure it will be more of the animals, more creatures come to pick the bones dry. He is deathly sure it will be them...so when the tall, gaunt seer with the skull-like face appears out of the dark, a feeling that is almost joy floods his heart.

 
; He begins to cry.

  One of his people has found him. They will help him. They will bring her back.

  They will find his father...

  But the thought dies there, with nowhere to go.

  He doesn’t look at the boots that face him from the ground nearby, the man’s crumpled body in the mud. He doesn’t look at the girl lying beside him.

  The aged seer walks over to him, his long face grave. It is not an angular face, like his father’s, but one almost devoid of flesh entirely, with a small, strangely thin nose.

  The boy sees the animals who are with him, but the seer is their master and he is the one who has come for the boy.

  The seer whispers in his mind, a careful caress.

  I am so sorry, nephew.

  And now he knows that the old seer can’t bring her back. He can’t find his father. He can’t reverse anything that happened all those hours below.

  Elashi.

  The name burns in his throat.

  The boy can’t answer the old seer. He tries. He fights to remember his voice, to pretend that none of this is real. His words come out in choked attempts at air.

  The old seer speaks to him again, before he can make his voice work.

  Where is your other family, my son? Are they near?

  The boy is confused. He gestures a thank you to the seer, but it is not for his words.

  He has no place to go. There is no one.

  The thought is debilitating. Too foreign to be real.

  I am so sorry for this terrible thing that you have suffered...so sorry, my son...

  The boy tries again to speak to the tall seer with the skull-like face, fighting for words, even in his mind, using hand-language when he can’t speak past the clouds in his mouth.

  The seer seems to understand. His long fingers stroke the small, black head, tightening briefly on his narrow shoulders.

  We will bury them, he whispers softly. We will bury them together...

  The boy can’t breathe.

  He can’t breathe.

  But he can gesture yes.

  At the tall seer’s prompting, he reluctantly releases the woman’s dress, clutching her silver ring in one hand as he moves his feet to follow...

  I broke out, sweating.

  The room felt deathly silent.

  The floor under the pallet hurt my back; my muscles felt cramped into knots. There was no gentle transition, no period where I was half in and half out, floating in the ocean of light with Vash and Tarsi...or even with him.

  The tank felt dead inside. Cold.

  I still saw Menlim’s skull-like face behind my eyes, those cold, urine-colored eyes. I knew now, that he didn’t look as much like Salinse as Revik had told me.

  I heard my own breaths, but they didn’t penetrate that silence. It only deepened around me as I stared up in the dark. Aloneness trembled my light, a feeling of being lost...so profound I couldn’t see past it. I wanted to cry. But whatever I felt couldn’t come out through tears, or even through screaming. I felt sick enough that I broke out into a sweat and fought to breathe for a full minute, sure I would throw up if I tried to move.

  My hand clenched the front of the cotton shirt I wore, sweated into a fist, nearly white-knuckled. I lay there, staring at the ceiling, feeling the nausea coil through my body, tightening my lungs, making my bowels loose.

  That some of this was cold, naked fear only reached me afterwards.

  It was more fear than I’d ever felt in my life, even when I’d been captured by Terian. Even when I thought he’d killed me. It was more fear than my body could handle.

  Immobilized, I tried to move through it some way, to let it pass, even as it seemed to be crushing my chest.

  I remembered this...tastes of it anyway.

  I remembered the intensity of feeling from when I’d been in the cave with Tarsi. The same influx of emotion met me nearly every time we followed the boy’s footsteps through that broken trail of memory. Tarsi had me study Syrimne, before I knew who Revik really was. I remembered the familiarity there, the lost feeling. I remembered wondering how any one person could feel so much, without going insane.

  I knew now, how that was possible. The very thing that made him so happy as a kid had been the thing to destroy him afterwards. I’d loved my human parents...a lot. I know they loved me, and that Jon loved me...and Cass. But they’d never been capable of being as open and loving to me as Revik’s family had been for him.

  He’d been open in a way no human being could even comprehend.

  Of course, I realized now that Tarsi had shielded me from that, too.

  She’d protected me from the worst of it, probably to keep me going as we studied his past. It wasn’t until after everything happened in D.C. that I realized the true purpose of her little exercise. She’d been introducing me to my mate.

  After another long collection of minutes, I realized I felt him, too.

  I heard him breathing.

  I thought I imagined it at first, that it was some echo in my mind, some remnant from the place I’d just left, or even my own body’s labored attempts to regain equilibrium.

  Then I heard him in it. I heard his voice. He spoke through his attempts to breathe, as if reciting prayers, or repeating the same snatch of song lyric over and over...like I’d heard him do earlier that day.

  This was different. Rather than some exercise in whistling in the dark, he was choking for air, as if fighting each breath past a thick weight sitting on his chest.

  Realizing it wasn’t coming from the Barrier, I turned my head.

  He lay half on his side, his legs coiled in a strange crescent shape, close by his body, his arm over his abdomen. Still choking and breathing, he whispered more words while I watched, as if unable to keep them from spilling through his lips. He didn’t look at me for a long time. He lay there, sweating, his eyes staring blankly ahead when they weren’t closed.

  He muttered quietly, reassuringly, as if talking to himself.

  Then, all at once, he felt my stare.

  His eyes shifted, meeting mine from the other side of the room.

  The look on his face shocked me, bringing my heart to my throat.

  “Revik.” I couldn’t find words to follow. An image of the boy slid forward into my mind and I had to fight not to burst into tears. “Revik...are you all right?”

  “Stop...” he said. “Allie...please stop.”

  I continued to stare at him, fighting what I saw, what I heard in his voice. It crossed my mind that it was a trick, that he was imitating me where I lay on the blanket, but his voice was barely a murmur.

  “Please,” he repeated. “Stop this, Allie...please...”

  “I can’t,” I said, almost helplessly, still lost in his clear eyes. I’d never seen so much emotion in his eyes. Never, not since I’d known him.

  “Yes, you can...please...please, Allie...I’ll do anything...”

  His voice pleaded with me, pulling at me through the bond.

  Tears came to my eyes, feeling him there, too, in my light. I couldn’t stop them before they nearly blinded me.

  “I can’t. I’m sorry, Revik...”

  “Allie...I’m sorry...I’m sorry for what I did to you...”

  “That’s not why. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

  “Please...gods, please...don’t do this to me...” His voice broke. “What did I do to make you hate me so much? What was it, Allie?”

  I found myself unable to look away from his pale face, at the look of anguish there, but more than that, fear...more fear than I’d ever seen in anyone’s face, much less his. He looked lost in it, his eyes nearly wide in his narrow face, his chest still laboring for breaths. His hair looked sweated to his head; his fingers clutched his shirt in the same place I’d clutched mine, as if trying to crush his own heart, to keep it inside his chest.

  “Was it D.C.?” he said. “Have you hated me since then?”

  “I don’t hate you, baby...I don’t...I swear I don’t...
I’m trying to help you...”

  He closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to push my words away from him.

  Then I felt the other thing.

  His grief expanded over me, bringing a low cry from his throat.

  “Allie...”

  A sob broke out of him, so young-sounding I flinched.

  I continued to watch him, helpless, as he choked on another cry. He was talking again, murmuring words in a litany I’d never heard, that sounded foreign to my ears, even more than his singing had earlier. It struck me suddenly that they were prayers.

  I’d never seen him pray before, although he’d hinted around to being religious, and I knew from Balidor that Syrimne left coded messages and spoke in scripture during the war. I watched as his whole body wracked in another heavy sob. He looked like someone had just gauged his heart out of his chest and stabbed it over and over again.

  I didn’t want to look at him anymore. I didn’t, but I couldn’t look away.

  And somewhere in all that, I understood. Really understood. Vash and Tarsi weren’t going to ‘fix’ him...not in any of the ways I’d told myself that they would, when they told me of their role. They weren’t going to pour some magic Barrier juice on his head, and flush out everything horrible that had ever happened to him.

  They were simply going to make him feel it.

  There were going to make him face every excruciating frame. They were going to ensure that the line stayed open both ways, despite the collar. They would keep it open, emotions and all, as I looked for the source of the initial breaks in his light.

  Swallowing at the look on his face, and a rising swell of guilt I couldn’t think past yet, I finally tore my eyes off his. I didn’t know if he understood yet or not, but I knew that if he didn’t, he would soon.

  In any case, I had been wrong. More wrong than I’d been about anything I’d tried to do with him, through all the mess of the past year.