I would be torturing him. Worse than anything Terian could have devised.
I was going to make him relive his own life.
8
NEW YORK
“WHO IS THIS?” the voice repeated, still carrying a thread of disbelief. “I don’t think I heard that right the first time...”
“It is Chandre, cousin Jon,” the seer clicked impatiently. “...And please stop pretending that you have some form of worm-amnesia and do not remember who this is...”
“Oh, I remember my cousin Chandre, all right,” Jon said, incredulity still in his voice. “I just can’t believe you’re calling me. Aren’t you, like, one of terrorists now?”
Pushing out her lip in frustration, she clicked at him loudly through the line.
“Is Balidor there? Or not?”
“I told you, he can’t come right now...he’s busy.”
“Fine. Then just give them the message. Tell Balidor, or someone else in the Adhipan...” She paused, barely a beat. “...Or Allie. Tell them I have a lead on the occurrence in Hong Kong. I will do what I can to send updates, but for now I know very little. I will attempt to make contact with a new source in two days...after that, hopefully I will know more."
"Is that it?" Jon said, skeptical. "That's not much. In fact it's nothing, Chan..."
Chandre hesitated. Then she shrugged, seer fashion. If they were tapping this line, whatever she said wouldn't matter now.
"All I can tell you is that it could be a disease," she said, blunt. "Not a gas."
"A disease? What does that mean?"
Chandre ignored his question. "...Be clear with Balidor, also, that there is no doubt that they are looking for you...that at least one group is expending considerable resources...”
After a pause, Jon seemed to let it go.
“Yeah," he said, sighing. "So what else is new?”
“Well, if that is the case, I would think you would be glad I am keeping an eye on them for you,” she said shortly. “...And glad as well of the information I am indirectly sharing with you, as to the inadequacy of your current security protocols...”
“What?”
Chandre sighed, clicking a little in impatience.
Then she indicated to her own person, holding out her hands, knowing her avatar would copy her visual cues if he had his VR option switched on.
“If I can find you, cousin...”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jon said, seeming to have caught up. “Okay. I get it.”
“Exactly where are you, cousin Jon?” she said. “...If you don’t mind my asking?”
“Where?” He laughed. “You called me, remember? And yeah, I do mind you asking. Terrorist, remember? As in, last we knew, you worked for him...” He paused. “And just how did you know how to find us?”
“I found you, Jon...not ‘us.’” She hesitated, but barely a beat. “...And I called the old secure line. The one from the Adhipan...the same one they used in Delhi,” she lied. “They patched me to you. GPS is obscured to all but the rough area of continent, so you can tell Balidor that much is secure...but it is not a geography with which I am familiar...”
“Oh.” Jon paused on this. A second later, his voice grew openly skeptical again. “You’re telling me that Balidor, the most paranoid man in existence, didn’t change that number, after you and Garensche and whoever else defected to Revik’s camp?”
She bit her lip.
For humans, neither Jon nor Cass struck her as being quite as stupid as they perhaps should have been. Clicking again, more sharply that time, she told him the truth.
“It is satellite, Jon. I tracked you through your implant.”
“My what?” he said.
“Your government chip. The one under your tattoo. I can get a basic location from that. Then I just scanned open lines in the vicinity until I found yours...”
“I don’t have a chip, Chandre. I opted out of getting that when I was eighteen!”
She smiled. “Really? Then you tell me. What am I looking at on my screen right now?”
“How?” he demanded. “And since when?”
“Since always, little brother,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You humans are so trusting. Believing everything your human government tells you, yes? Like when it says it removes an implant from your skin and replaces it with an ident tattoo, even though that implant provided them exponentially more valuable intel for their own internal security...”
She paused at the silence this produced, shrugging with one hand as she tossed the braids out of her face.
“...Most of the seers have theirs altered already, cousin. It might not have occurred to Balidor to do this for you, as well. I would look to that, if I were you...in case it occurs to one of the Sword’s people.” She paused again, feeling her jaw harden.
“...I would have Cass do the same,” she added tersely.
“Cass isn’t here,” Jon said.
“Where is she?”
She felt the human’s mind through the line, his reaction to the pointedness of the question.
“Forget it,” she said in a clipped voice. “It does not matter...as long as she is somewhere other than where the Bridge is.” After another bare pause, she added, “I would move whatever you are doing, though, cousin. In case they have already determined to track you through your implant. In any case, given the danger, it would not be wise to stay too long in one place...”
“Yeah, okay, Chan.” He hesitated. “Look, about Cass...”
“I told you, it is not my concern,” she said.
Before he could take another breath to respond, she added crisply,
“...Peace to you, cousin Jon. And honor to the Esteemed Bridge...as well as her mate, the Illustrious Sword.”
Without waiting, she disengaged the signal.
Pulling the headset off her ear, she found she was still angry, however.
With a few key touches and a DNA scan, she erased the record of the call, replacing the log entry with a dummy call to a fellow seer in New Orleans that she had running simultaneously in the background. She matched the time signatures up exactly, using every trick she knew to make the trace signatures disappear, but still, risk remained, particularly if anyone were monitoring her communications already.
She hoped Jon spoke to Balidor as soon as the call ended.
Gazing out the window of her Maryland apartment, she stretched her arms, tilting her body sideways to get a kink out of her back.
So far, she had met with nothing but dead ends since arriving here. Of her three assignments, she had made concrete progress with only one, and that progress had not been as significant as she would have liked, given the amount of time she’d been in the United States.
One of those outstanding tasks, in particular, nagged at her.
Unfortunately, that was also the one with which she had made absolutely no headway at all.
She’d come to the United States with two initial charges.
Dehgoies wanted someone who could infiltrate the SCARB branch in D.C. for intelligence purposes, working their way as closely to direct White House access as possible.
Her second task of course came from Balidor, and was pretty straightforward. Watch the Rebels and SCARB. Report back on the doings of both.
Once she’d established a stable identity with the Rebels and with SCARB, Balidor assigned her a third task. He wanted her to track down the whereabouts of an old female seer, a scientist who used to work for Galaith. All he’d had to go on were a few aliases, the seer’s age, and the fact that she had strong backgrounds in both law and genetics.
What he hadn’t come out and said, but what Chandre discerned from the intel he’d provided, was that somewhere, this old seer had connections to other, very powerful seers. Seers he wanted to know more about. In particular, he seemed very interested to know if she had connections to any seer colonies based out of South America.
The old seer’s name was Xarethe.
Weeks after Dehgoies got custody of
Feigran and Allie from the Lao Hu in China, the Sword contacted Chandre with a fourth task.
He wanted her to find evidence of a biological weapon that the Americans had developed. He had read intelligence off the schizophrenic seer, Feigran, from when he was president of the United States. During that time, he had apparently commissioned the design of a virus that killed humans while leaving exposed seers alive. The purported goal within the human defense community had been to potentially deploy this weapon against China in Wellington’s unfolding war with the East. They wanted to retain as many seer assets as they could, while taking out a significant portion of the urban population of Beijing.
Naturally, the Sword wanted her to find out where they were with the project.
Officially, he suspected it had been taken off the books...either by the CIA or its research arm when the president was assassinated. But Revik knew how such lists tended to operate. He suspected the project had merely been shifted into a different budget category, its funding buried under a paper trail of several other projects of its kind.
He also suspected the new president might not know anything about it.
“Perhaps,” he’d joked with her over the VR link, “It is now labeled 'Experiment for the balancing of non-European populations to meet international livestock projections'...”
The Sword, like the Bridge, had a bit of a dark sense of humor at times.
She’d asked him if the opposite kind of virus might also be in development. Meaning one that would kill seers, leaving humans untouched.
He told her to let him know.
She had found nothing on the books, official or unofficial, regarding either type of disease. She’d pored through funding lists for the research tanks supplied with military contracts, looking for any individual or cluster of projects that might meet some portion of the description she’d been given. She used everything from keyword searches in databases with several hundred thousand projects that might be related, to actually visiting several of the labs in person and speaking with their administrators under the guise of being a SCARB investigator.
Even reading the humans, and pushing them with her light, she’d found nothing.
The closest she’d come had been in Los Alamos, New Mexico, where they showed her a family of tests they had been running to combat such a virus, were it ever to be developed elsewhere in the world. The paper trails and funding around those tests had been obscured under a number of different guises, mainly connecting them to vaccine projects to combat ebola and other dangerous diseases to which humans fell victim in the developing world.
Still, Chandre knew that not finding it did not mean it did not exist.
Then the Sword had been kidnapped, and not long after, the incident in Hong Kong occurred. The news feeds screamed about terrorism for a few weeks and there were memorials and paranoid rants on talk shows...but no real evidence surfaced, officially or unofficially, about whatever it was that had actually killed the humans. All of the connecting points in the different stories and fragments of stories kept trying to form a picture in Chandre's head, but whatever that picture was, it never came into focus.
She knew ways existed to bury such a thing, by splitting it up into enough components and giving each component a long, boring-sounding and obscure name that no one would tie to the actual intent. Still, at least one person would have to be on point for assembling those components, and ensuring that they, together, produced the desired results.
If such a thing did exist, Chandre would have to find that person.
Clicking softly to herself, she shouldered a leather coat over a white blouse and dark jeans, and pulled on her boots, stomping each heel individually to settle it. Grabbing a piece of toast off a plate on the kitchen counter of her two-bedroom flat, she holstered her sidearm in her shoulder harness and grabbed her keys from the hook by the door.
She opened the door, and instantly froze.
A seer stood there, holding a gun to her face.
She stared at him, unable to hide her disbelief.
Her eyes flickered to the gun only long enough to see that the safety was off, then she was looking at the seer’s face again, studying his dark brown eyes.
“Hello, sister Chandre,” he said. “I don’t suppose you mind if I cut into your morning routine a bit?”
Chandre pursed her lips, looking him up and down, from the dark leather motorcycle jacket to the heavy boots on his feet. Then she gestured towards him hospitably.
“Brother Maygar,” she said, tilting her head back towards the inside of her apartment. “If you wanted breakfast, you had only to ask...”
“Not here,” he said, shaking his head. “I want you to come with me, Chan.”
“Maygar,” she said, impatient. “What is this about?”
“I can’t tell you here. But I’m not here to harm you...I vow it, sister.”
She quirked an eyebrow at the gun. “What’s that all about, then?”
“Just a little insurance,” he said. “Nothing personal, sister.”
She gave him an impatient look. “Insurance? If I wanted you dead, I could have gone after you months ago. Sources tipped me off as to your whereabouts in New York before I even landed on U.S. soil...” Clicking at him in irritation, she added, “I am probably the only seer working for the Sword who would not inform him that I had received news of you. You should be grateful for that, at least...”
“I am not here to kill you, Chandre.”
She folded her arms. “What a relief.”
“Damn it,” he snapped. “Will you just get in the car? I want to talk to you!”
“Why can we not talk here?” she said, gesturing fluidly with one hand, her eyes darting around the green lawns and white painted trim of the houses on her Maryland street. “I have food inside, if you really are hungry – ”
“I’m not hungry, Chan,” he said. Still, he seemed to sigh a bit in frustration, right before he holstered the gun back in his own shoulder harness.
“Look. I have something I want to show you. It won’t take long,” he said, looking back towards the car, motioning with one hand.
In that instant, she punched him hard, in the throat, with her fingers. When he choked, raising his hand to where she’d hit him, Chandre yanked her own gun out of its holster, flipped it in her hand, and slammed the butt into the side of his head.
Maygar crumpled on the steps of her apartment complex, dazed.
Reaching into his coat, she swiftly disarmed him, then pulled a small, metal cylinder out of her own pocket and pressed the flat end against his neck. Pushing a button on the organic syringe with her thumb, she released the entire contents into his blood.
Without waiting for the drug to take effect, she grabbed him under his thick arms. Using her hip to push the door open behind her, she dragged him back inside the red-painted door, dropping him unceremoniously once she’d cleared the arc of the door.
Walking around his body, she kicked her front door shut, locking the deadbolt after she’d done a quick scan of the windows and cars outside.
MAYGAR’S EYELIDS FLUTTERED for a few seconds before he opened them. His head lolled on his thick neck before he managed to raise it to more or less vertical.
Chandre sat across from him, perched backwards on one of her kitchen chairs as she sipped a mug of fresh coffee. After a second or two more where he seemed to be fighting to focus his eyes, he blinked at her.
She smiled at him.
Frowning, he tried to sit forward in the chair.
The bindings on his ankles and wrists stopped him. So did the organic wire she had coiled around his chest and waist.
“Would you like some coffee, brother?” she said, raising her cup.
Maygar frowned up at her again, his eyes still half-focused. He returned them to where he’d been examining his predicament with the chair.
“What the...” He squinted at her, blinking to clear his vision, his mouth still a puzzled frown. “Chan? What are you
doing?”
“What am I doing?” She clicked at him softly, her expression hard. “You showed up on my doorstep, brother...holding a gun. You tried to abduct me. That’s not very brotherly now, is it?”
“Abduct you?” The male seer’s Prexci still came out somewhat slurred, but his disbelief sounded genuine. “Chan, d’gaos ‘le yilathre...I’m trying to help you! Now untie me, goddamn it...my arm’s starting to fall asleep...”
“Help me? By pointing a gun at my face?”
Clicking in irritation, Maygar averted his gaze, wincing a little as the hangover from the drug must have slid more to the forefront of his awareness.
Shaking his head, he said, “I didn’t know how you’d react to seeing me. Last I knew, you were working for him...”
Chandre snorted into her mug. She shook her long braids then, clicking a little at his pained expression as she took another sip of the coffee.
“Well?” she said. “We have a predicament, then, yes? Because I do not like it when little baby Rooks show up at my door, brandishing pistols...”
“Rook? Me?”
He made a disbelieving noise, staring her straight in the face. She noticed his lip held more of that curling sneer of a frown she recognized. His expression reflected the belief that her remark had openly insulted him.
“This from you...a sister working for the head Rook himself?”
She shook her head with a laugh, taking another drink of coffee.
“Chan,” he said angrily. “Just what do you think Dehgoies is these days? An emissary of the beings from beyond the Barrier? Some kind of good fairy, here to dispense justice and hope for all of his people? You can’t possibly be that dumb...” He bit his lip then, his eyes showing a more complex flair of emotion, almost an accusation.
“...How could you leave Allie?”
Chandre stared at him, her dark red eyes clouding.
For an instant, the question angered her. She might have reminded him that he hardly treated the Bridge all that well in their last direct encounter...that he had, in essence, tried to rape her in an attempt to break up her marriage to the Sword. That he’d been involved somehow in her imprisonment under the White House, working with Terian. That he’d stood by and let Terian beat her and abuse her when she wouldn’t submit to the Rook’s wishes while he had her locked in that underground cage.
Allie's War Season Two Page 71