Allie's War Season Two

by JC Andrijeski

  "You know a lot, worm," Varlan observed quietly.

  If he heard the threat behind those words, Eddard's expression didn't show it.

  "Not really," he said seriously, in his clipped, British accent. "I know only that you were hired...not by whom. Nor do I know the precise layout of the lab you intend to break into, although I do know of its existence and location. I also happen to know the name of the scientist who is running the project, although I do not know where he is currently, either..."

  Varlan looked up at him, his eyes faintly amused. "Anything else?"

  "I need to speak with you," Eddard told him, as serious as before. He glanced around at Chandre and Maygar, adding, "...To all of you, really. It's damned lucky I found you before you'd executed the contract. I'm here about the disease you plan to destroy..."

  In the silence that followed, Chandre turned, staring openly at Varlan.

  "Destroy?" she said in surprise. "That's what you've been hired to do? To find the lab and destroy the biological agent? Really?"

  Varlan sighed again. Exhaling a cloud of hiri, he shrugged, seer-fashion, and said, “Does this bother you, sister?”

  Chandre felt her jaw harden again. “It does not bother me."

  "You would rather if I deployed the disease?" he said, still sounding tired. "...Caused a worldwide epidemic and pandemonium as the human race is rapidly exterminated?"

  "No," Chandre said. "I do not wish that."

  "Well, then...our interests seem to align," he said, shrugging. "As do those of my client...who thankfully is better informed than all of us, it seems, as well as being significantly better funded." He smiled at Eddard, his eyes openly amused. "Unless, of course, the human objects to our eliminating a human-killing virus...?"

  "I do not," Eddard said. Hesitating, he glanced around at all of them, once more pushing the glasses up the bridge of his nose. "...In fact," he added. "I want to help you."

  9

  TORTURER

  HE DIDN’T BEG me the next time I went in.

  He didn’t curse me, either...or try to bargain.

  He watched me from the wall instead, his face and eyes expressionless. Looking at him, I couldn’t help but be reminded of cornered animals I’d seen, those who had been hit one too many times with something hard and sharp. He looked thinner too, as if he’d lost weight even in those twelve or so hours since I'd last seen him. His expression still showed the remnants of his introductory tour down memory lane...meaning a lingering grief and tiredness that went beyond captivity and lack of sleep. But mostly what I saw behind his stare was anger. The war with me had begun, I suppose.

  That had been over a week ago.

  According to Jon, he hadn’t eaten at all in the past two days. He drank water from the spigot on the wall, even stuck his head under the same faucet and splashed cold water on his face...but he pushed away the food they brought him without even looking at it. The sandwich from that morning’s meal still sat on the floor in a metal plate, a few feet away from the stub of the last hiri he’d smoked, which Jon gave him when he delivered the food.

  He leaned his back flat against the organic surface, his long legs drawn up in angles so that his forearms rested on his knees, hanging his hands over the floor.

  From there, he stared at me, as if I were another animal.

  Each day I entered, I braced myself for another back and forth with him, another series of taunts and attempts to provoke me or knock me off balance. But it never came. I didn't know if he was studying me, trying to decide on a new approach or simply taking a new approach by being silent...or if he’d given up trying to reach me at all.

  I tried not to contemplate any of the things he might be thinking as I walked in and set my bottle of water on the floor. I told myself it was irrelevant, but I knew that wasn’t entirely true, either. The truth was, I couldn’t tell if what we were doing was even making a dent. I didn’t know if him seeing these things, re-experiencing his past, was accomplishing anything at all, other than making both of us miserable.

  I’d done what I could to strengthen the connection between us.

  Even as early as that second day, I’d spent the night in the tank with him, leaving only for a few hours the next morning to shower and change my clothes and debrief with the others.

  The decision to sleep in there with him had been pretty straightforward. I’d felt the connection between us strengthen significantly after those initial two sessions on that first day; but after a night spent apart, with him in the tank and me out in the barracks, that connection felt only about half as strong as it had by the next morning.

  The Barrier shield in the tank was just too strong for me to be away from him for long.

  Vash had already warned me that I would need to develop a stronger connection to him, if I wanted to get at the memories he most didn’t want me to see. So I’d resigned myself to the fact that I would essentially be living in the tank with him until that happened.

  Balidor hated the idea, of course.

  They’d gassed Revik not long after the first session ended. Partly to give him a shower and a change of clothes, and partly because I think Balidor wanted to silence his cries, which went on for several hours even after I’d left.

  Everyone who’d been watching at the security station had been spooked.

  No one said anything to me directly, but no one quite looked me in the eye when I came out, either. I read whispers off a few of them who thought I’d done something to really hurt him in the Barrier...some kind of revenge against what he’d done to me earlier that day, I guess. More than one seemed to think he deserved it, but they still gave me plenty of space when I came out, and looked at me as if appraising me with new eyes.

  I had become his torturer.

  The seers seemed to respect that fact as much as they feared it.

  Only Jon followed me back to my room that first night, and he didn’t come out and ask me anything. Instead he just hung around while I ate, making jokes every now and then when the silence got too thick...offering to spend the night if I didn’t want to be alone.

  Finally, when he couldn’t coax me into going to the other room to watch an old movie with him and Dorje on the feeds, or play chess, or the seer card game rik-jum, or even just go to sleep with him there, he gave in to the fact that I wanted to be alone and left.

  The days started to bleed together after that first one, just like they had in Tarsi’s cave.

  I knew Revik and I were both likely overdue for another break and a serious hosing off, but I didn’t want to do anything that might slow things down just yet. I also wasn’t sure if I could make myself come back in as easily or as quickly if I stopped for too long without having made any noticeable progress whatsoever.

  In that sense, it really was like Tarsi’s cave all over again, only worse...a kind of sick voyeurism that both repulsed me when I let myself wonder about my own pulls and motives, and at times drew me like a drug, even made it hard to end sessions.

  But I couldn’t afford to think too much about that, either, or what this might be doing to me as well as him. If I was going to finish this thing, I was pretty sure it had to happen in one shot. Until that hard push was done, and I had some idea if any of it might work, I didn’t have the luxury to factor myself into the equation much at all, really.

  He’d begged me one other time, since that first session.

  Lifetimes seemed to pass between the first time he asked me to stop and the second. In reality, only about six days had gone by...seven at most. Over the course of those days, we spent as much as seventeen hours in the Barrier in any one twenty-four hour period.

  The gap between the two didn’t make it any less horrible to listen to, or make me feel any better when he started screaming obscenities at me after I tried to talk him down.

  I’d made myself sleep in there that night, too.

  I laid there through most of it, not sleeping, but I didn’t let myself leave. About three days in, I’d had th
e Adhipan set up a protected space so I could go to the bathroom in there, on the opposite end from where he’d been chained, so they wouldn’t have to put me through security protocols every time I needed a toilet or to wash my face. Using the organic functionality, I could even take a shower if I wanted, have the wall barf out shampoo and soap...even a clean towel and clean clothes, if I wanted.

  When I stopped answering his attempts to provoke me that second time, he just lay there, crying...which was worse.

  I think what we were doing affected his dreams, too.

  I know it did mine. I woke up unsure if my mind still lived solely inside the Barrier, feeling his light weaving through mine in erratic pulses as it looked for an escape, for any way out. I dreamt about caves and shackles that tied my wrists to my ankles. I dreamt of the smell of urine and blood, the sound of rats, the feel of insect legs and pinchers piercing my skin under my clothes...I woke up with weights crushing my chest, in pain like I was dying.

  I woke up screaming once.

  I don’t know if I scared Revik, but Jon told me that Yumi, who had been monitoring the security console, nearly jumped out of her skin.

  The gaps between jumps got shorter, as sleep became more and more pointless for both of us. Some part of me was even trying to wear him down, I think, to make him so tired it was harder for him to fight me. I slept whenever I could, even when he lay there gasping...trying to save my own energy, hoping he would stay awake, hoping the pressure would force him to submit. Hoping he would do it before his mind broke totally.

  A few times, I wondered if I might have a torturer living in me after all.

  It was a terrifying realization, but one I didn’t let myself get too close to, as I began to view him as a puzzle that needed cracking, a thing I had to open up from the inside out, and hopefully without breaking the overall design. I saw myself dancing on that line at times, even pushing on it, to see if it might bend, drawing back when the strain seemed to be moving him into a space I couldn’t control.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if I drew on his experience in that, too...one of the many shared skill sets inherited as a part of the bond.

  I didn’t really want to think about whether that made it better or worse.

  ...HE SCREAMS, LYING face-down on a heavy wooden table.

  He is hoarse from screaming, deaf from it. He can’t make himself stop.

  Panic smashes into his light; he fights to get free, his left wrist shackled to the wood. The human works over him with slitted eyes, his mouth twisted in a half-smile as he raises the brand from his skin, looking at the end that still sizzles with fat and blood.

  In here, I can’t not be here...I can’t not be him...

  But I can look away.

  I can’t stop myself looking away, willing myself into some other part of the room, some other place where I can hear it and smell it, but at least fewer of the images are burned into my brain, making me feel like it’s me that’s doing this to him...

  I see the old man watching passively, his long hands folded at the base of his spine, his skull-like face unmoving over the dark motionlessness of a gray cloak and hair a darker shade of iron. He wears human clothes. Riding breeches and a coarse cotton shirt. His hair is combed and the beard is trimmed down to a goatee, which only makes the skull-like shape of his head more prominent. His features blend strangely beyond their bone-like similarity; little stays with me but skin stretched tightly over that death-like skull and skeleton, leaving no other impressions than his deep-socketed, staring eyes...yellow eyes, the color of sickly urine.

  He waits until the boy has literally run out of air.

  “Nenzi,” he says then.

  His voice is cold, a command.

  “Nenzi...you must be silent.”

  The boy gasps, choking on a breath that wants to become more than that.

  It is the only command his body can obey. He knows what will happen if he does not...and already, I realize, already Menlim’s voice holds more sway than his own, even in this simple thing. Even so, he is choking, fighting for air, his thin arms and legs tensed to their limit where they’ve got him splayed over the table. He is brown from the sun, barefoot, and to my eyes, which still see age through the lens of a human, he looks about seven years old.

  I can’t stand it. I really can’t stand it.

  But I have to.

  When the boy regains control over the sounds he is making, closing his eyes, his breath still a lunging fist in his chest, the old seer clicks at him in a rolling purr, gesturing with one hand.

  “You can save yourself, Nenzi,” he says softly.

  “No.” Tears fill the light eyes. “I can’t...”

  “You can kill this human. You can kill him as easily as swatting a fly.”

  “I can’t...uncle, please...”

  The old seer’s eyes harden to slate. A frown touches the sculpted lips.

  “Do not beg me, nephew. Do not grovel before me like some kind of craven worm. You are an intermediary being...one of the chosen...”

  “No...” the boy gasps. He gestures 'no' with a shackled hand, tears in his eyes. “Mistake. It’s a mistake. It can’t be. I’m not him...I’m not Syrimne...”

  The old seer’s eyes don’t move at first.

  Then they shift from the boy’s face, returning to the human.

  “Again, Merenje,” he says, emotionless. “We will do it again...and again...until my nephew realizes what a sacrilege he has performed with his own mouth...to refuse the honored position to which he was born...to scorn his parents, and his parents’ lives, which they sacrificed for him...”

  “No!” He screams, twisting his head around to try and watch the human. “No! Please! I’m not...I’m not refusing...I’m ready! I’m ready to be him!”

  “When you are done,” the old seer says. “Put him back, Merenje...”

  “No!” the boy screams. “No! Please! Please don’t!”

  I stand somewhere in the shadows, flinching at every scream.

  Even so, I know I only catch the barest taste, feeling it with him but not, watching the old seer as he turns to leave the underground room. I know already that there is a room below that, that a trapdoor lives in the stone below the table where the boy is chained. I know that down there is where the rats and other crawling things live, where he digs in the dark, fighting to breathe, suffocating in the dank air. I know the boy will be there again, his hands tied to his feet, and that they’ll leave him there, possibly for days...possibly for longer.

  And I look up as the Sark turns at the top of the stairs, the protruding bones of his face catching the light as he watches the boy again with hard, almost reptilian eyes.

  I want to kill him. I’ve never wanted anything so much.

  But I am not really here.

  Menlim waits until the human pauses once more, until the screaming devolves back into broken gasps and softer cries.

  “I’m doing this for you, Nenzi,” he tells him, his voice almost quiet. “What I teach you can save you, my son...”

  “Please!” the boy chokes. “Please, uncle. Please. I’m sorry...”

  “Nenzi,” he says, clicking quietly. “Nenzi, stop.”

  “Uncle, I...”

  “Just stop, Nenzi. Stop. I want you to pray with me...”

  For a moment it grows deathly silent.

  All I hear is breathing in the dim room, a room smelling of blood and charred flesh.

  It is mainly the boy who fights to breathe, his head pressed against the wood, his hands clenched in fists on either side of his face. His body is still contorted in pain, his back bent where he’s half arched off the wood, but I can tell from his face that he’s heard the old seer, that he knows he must obey him in this, too. Even the human pauses in his work, looking up at Menlim with a subdued look on his face, almost a reverent look.

  “Nenzi?” the old man says. “Are you speaking with your Ancestors?”

  I look at the boy, and I see his eyes s
hut tight.

  His face is still pressed into the wood, but now his lips are moving, muttering words. I watch him, feeling a kind of despair creep over my light, a deeper nausea.

  “Remember this moment, my son,” the old Sark breathed, his voice a near caress. “Always remember who you are...how much you have given to the cause. You will look back on this, and know you can withstand anything. You will know you have given everything to save your people, Nenzi...that you are more than a man, you are an emissary of Light...”

  It breaks off, like it does.

  I am left sick, alone in a different place, no time to adjust, no place to go in my mind to rest, to even absorb where I’ve just left. There is pain here, everywhere, and my mind is too lost to see a cause. I am the boy once more, lost inside his physical vessel, and a voice is calling to him sharply, calling his name from another part of the room.

  He jerks up his head, moving like an animal, expecting shackles to stop his movements.

  When they don’t, he moves too far, nearly falling out of his seat.

  ...and laughter erupts around him. Children’s laughter.

  But the other voice silences theirs, too.

  “Ewald!” The woman says, her voice sharp.

  With him, I try to focus on the face that called to him first.

  “Ewald! Are you listening to me?”

  He starts to use his hand to gesture, then remembers, stopping in mid-motion even as his eyes dart furtively to the giant boy crammed into a similar-sized seat two rows back. The boy with the shocking white hair and the deep-set black eyes smiles at him, the skin around his eyes crinkling faintly as he makes a kissing gesture towards the boy, tapping his temple.

  Too late, he thinks, knowing the boy will hear it. Too late, runt...

  “Ewald,” the woman says. “I asked you a question.”

  “Yes, Frau Schlossing,” he says, jerking his eyes back to the front. “I am listening.”