He trailed, maybe seeing something in Revik’s eyes once more.
His own darkened, right before he looked back at the monitor.
“...But if she’s on the Rynak,” he said.
Not finishing the thought, he shrugged, his eyes cold as he stared at the feed.
Revik’s jaw hardened. He looked at Balidor, but the Adhipan leader didn’t return his gaze. His eyes were more difficult to read than Wreg’s, staring at the same lines of text projected over the console. His anger looked colder than the rebel’s, too.
Wreg glanced at all of them again, but seemed to be speaking to no one in particular.
“...We hoped that human of hers might lead us back here,” he added. He focused on Jon, exhaling in a rolling set of clicks. “...But she didn’t. She and that Wvercian went back to the Americas somewhere. Really, we only found this place through sheer luck...a fluke. One of the seers we’ve been working with in SCARB must have run a trace on you...”
“Who?” Balidor said, staring at Wreg again.
Wreg shrugged. “No one I know. We only found it because she didn’t call it in. She’d tried to bury the signal in her records. We have a program for any tampering. So we got a flag that showed she talked to someone here...”
“Chan,” Jon said, speaking up from by the door. He looked at Balidor, then at Revik. “He means Chandre. She warned me we’d better move...that we were at risk. She found me through my implant. Some SCARB bullshit, where she had my illegal ident on file...”
Wreg shrugged with one hand, neither agreeing nor arguing.
“Well, we assumed she was a traitor,” he said only. “We sent someone after her, too. They should be halfway to D.C. by now.”
“Call them back,” Revik said. “Now, Wreg.”
He didn’t look up from the console, but his words silenced the room.
When the other didn’t move right away, Revik lifted his gaze.
For a moment, Wreg continued to stare at him, a wary measurement in his dark eyes. Then, seeming to understand his words belatedly, he nodded, gesturing an additional affirmative in seer before he turned to look at Jax, clicking his fingers to get his attention before signing a command. The younger seer made an affirmative gesture in return, bowing before he removed himself swiftly from the room, half-jogging down the long, green corridor.
Revik barely followed any of it.
He continued to stare at the console, but he could feel all of them now, even when he tried to shut them out. He fought to think, to move his mind past this...past the images that wanted to rise, that wanted to connect to what he’d been feeling off her off and on for the past weeks...
“Revik?”
He turned before he could stop himself.
Jon stood there. The human paled a little, seeing the look on his face, but his eyes remained on his.
“Revik, man,” he said shakily. “...it’s all right. We can get her out. We know where she is now, so we can get her out. Right?”
Revik didn’t answer.
When the silence stretched, Balidor spoke into it.
“Not without starting a war with the Lao Hu,” he said.
“But they have the Bridge,” Jon said. He glanced at Revik. “...Allie. Are you going to tell me the rest of the seers are going to stand by and let her be a...” Hesitating, he reddened, waving a hand vaguely. “...You know. To do that?”
Balidor gave him a grim look. The smile at his lips didn’t touch his eyes.
“Does she seem particularly popular to you in the seer world these days, cousin?” he said. “I think right now, it would not help us to look for support from within the seer community...”
Revik turned, and saw the Adhipan leader’s eyes on his, too.
Balidor’s gaze was warier though, than Jon’s had been...as if measuring Revik’s face, the vibrations in his light. He looked at him as one might look at a wild animal, trying to determine what it might do.
“So,” Jon said. “Then we risk war.”
Still looking at Revik, Balidor sighed.
“It may not be that simple, cousin...” he said.
“What choice do we have? We can’t leave her there!”
“The human is right,” Wreg said. “We cannot leave her, Nenz. It says they’ve sold her. That means they’ve broken the original deal with her...” He looked at Balidor, as if finding his gaze easier to hold than Revik’s. “...She was under contract before. There was a specific sum involved, and then she was to be set free. If they’ve sold her, something’s changed.”
“What was the sum?” Jon said.
“Does it matter?” Balidor asked dryly.
“It does if we have to pay it,” Jon shot back.
“Twenty-two million. American.” Wreg looked at Jon as he said it, then, as if feeling something off Revik, he glanced at him as well. “It was a steep price...an unfair price. But that Voi Pai cunt would not negotiate the amount. She wanted a quarter to a half mil for each of the infiltrators, even those with very little formal training. She charged more for me and some of the others...and the work camp was a set price.”
Revik barely heard this, either.
He stared at his own hands, fighting the rest of it out of his head. What he’d felt off her, for weeks now...long before he voiced it aloud to Balidor.
He should have known what it meant. He should have figured it out.
Balidor must have noticed something. He must have picked up on something in Wreg...maybe one of the others. Balidor had known something was off in their story, and he’d made the connection to Allie, long before it even occurred to Revik to go that direction in his own mind. He’d been so sure she’d taken up with someone else. He’d assumed that she’d simply found another lover more quickly than he would have expected...maybe even to forget about him. Or to get back at him, maybe.
He should have considered it might be something else. She’d never done anything like that before. Not even when he’d given her cause...she still hadn’t. Even the thing with Balidor hadn’t been what he’d thought. They might have been friends. She might have loved him even, in her own way. But according to Balidor, she hadn’t let herself love him romantically. She hadn’t been looking to replace him, or even to hurt him.
Hell, she’d never even threatened to sleep with someone else. Even that time in Delhi, when she’d been so angry at him she’d looked at him like she hated him, she’d thrown his past indiscretions in his face, but hadn’t threatened him with the same.
This time had felt different, though. Even Jon convinced him it had been different, that he’d have to work just to get her to talk to him. Jon told him she probably wouldn’t talk to him, at least not anytime soon. It hadn’t occurred to him she might have been in danger, that something might have happened to her.
It should have occurred to him.
Hell, half the free seers in the Western hemisphere wanted her dead. According to Balidor, there’d been a price on her head...and not only from Wreg’s people.
He’d been too worried about what he would have to do to get her to come back.
But he knew he was distracting himself, still. He couldn’t think past that distraction, or what wanted to cycle back to the forefront of his mind.
Anger rose in his light. It was at himself, he could feel that much...but he couldn’t contain it, and it wasn’t enough to aim it inward. So he lifted his eyes, staring at Balidor.
“How could you be so stupid?” he said. “You let her walk right into it...” Fighting his voice, he gripped the console harder in his hands. “Goddamn it! What was she doing there? She’s the Bridge, damn it! Are you all fucking stupid, to have forgotten what that means?”
Everyone stared at him again.
Revik saw the fear in their eyes. He knew from his blurred, ghosted vision that his own were probably glowing again. He tried to bite back his anger, to control himself, but he couldn’t seem to stop the words from exploding out of him.
“Voi Pai asked her to com
e!” he said. “She wouldn’t negotiate with anyone else...she took one of Allie’s oldest friends! What did you think she wanted? Did you really think she’d let her just walk out of there?” He glared at Wreg. “That she’d ever let her out? That she’d honor a contract...even one for twenty-two mil?”
None of the seers moved.
Jon glanced between Wreg and Balidor, then swallowed, gesturing in affirmative.
“Yeah, about Cass,” he said. “Why didn’t Cass get word to us? Not inside. I mean when she got out. Why didn’t she tell us Allie was there?”
There was another silence.
Wreg clicked softly, still looking at Revik, although his words aimed at Jon.
“That was part of it,” Wreg said. “My vow to the Bridge.”
“What was part of it?” Jon said.
Wreg shrugged, one handed. “I erased the human. Her Wvercian said he’d take care of it from there...keep an eye on her. Make sure none of it came back.”
Jon stared at him, his eyes showing incredulity.
“Jesus,” he said. “Her own boyfriend?”
Wreg gave him a hard look. “He’s loyal to the Bridge. He knew how to follow orders. Believe me, I was grateful of that...I would have had to kill a lot of Wvercians in that situation. Most of them have no loyalty. Except to money, or their dicks...”
Revik shook his head, still staring down at the console. He didn’t speak though, and didn’t look up when he felt the others watching him once more.
“We can’t leave her there,” Jon said again, looking at Revik. “We can’t, man.”
“We’re not leaving her there, Jon,” Balidor said.
Revik felt something in his chest start to tighten again, even as the others’ words sank in. Raising his head, he straightened abruptly, taking his hands off the organic metal.
“No,” he said, his voice cold. “No. We’re not leaving her.”
“So we’re going, then?” Jon said, relief in his voice. “When, Revik?”
The Elaerian glanced at Wreg, then at Balidor, whose eyes looked wary once more.
“We’re going now, Jon,” Revik said flatly. “Right now.”
24
COMPENSATION
I SAW MORE clients now.
The type and variety of clients changed, too. The variety, in particular, made me wonder, but I figured that was Voi Pai’s attempt to shame me, since the whole status thing and saving face was big for her. I’m fairly sure she threw a few slave traders into the mix...and others she likely invited to demean me in whatever way.
The security protocols didn’t seem to have grown any more lax; in fact, on my end, they tightened considerably.
Voi Pai claimed I’d cost her around forty million US dollars, for what I’d done, killing Gerwix. She said I owed her for that. She also said she didn’t intend to wait another decade or so before she could collect the full amount.
I didn’t argue with her...mostly because she didn’t give me the opportunity.
But the thought of working off sixty million kept me up at night. I had no idea how much she charged for each of those sessions, but it couldn’t be the same ten or twenty thousand she charged that original set of heavy hitters and government bigwigs. Even among that high-end group, the price varied significantly between ‘friends of the Republic’ and their more flush business partners from the West.
Even if I commanded the same high price for every single one of them, I’d done the math. Sixty million, even at forty thousand a pop, was still around 4 a day for over a year. And there was no way I was making forty thousand a pop...not even for half of these. Nor was I seeing four clients a day. The reality was closer to two...three, tops.
At ten thousand a client, that was four years of four clients a day. Or eight years of two clients a day. And that was at ten thousand a client. I doubted I was making that with any but the high end guys, and they usually booked me for an eight hour bloc. So that meant one of those guys a day, given the security constraints.
Broken out hourly and daily like that, it meant doing this gig for longer than I could bear to think about. My mind couldn’t really go there, in terms of what that would look like for me...but I figured I was looking at three or four years, minimum.
Realistically, more like six to eight.
None of this had been negotiated with me directly, though...and I wasn’t really sure what that meant, either. It could mean that killing Gerwix put me more in the status of prisoner than “contract employee,” so Voi Pai no longer felt the need to negotiate terms with me directly. It could also mean that she was still negotiating with whoever had been at the other end of Gerwix’s leash. In any case, the silence made me nervous, too.
I was beginning to hate the work. I still tried to stay numb, but either it wasn't working as well, or something else was forcing me to face things more directly. I probably would have drank myself stupid, in another environment, but Voi Pai forbade that, too. The one time she found me drunk had been enough...after that, I wasn't allowed anything alcoholic at all, even when I was off-duty.
Other things changed. I was bumped up in infiltration classes, and those got more intense, too. I now spent five or six non-working hours a day with an older set of seers, working hard with my aleimi, mostly at tracking and sparring. Only one of my former classmates joined me in that new group, a youngster with the highest potential rank in the bunch, something like a ten or eleven. Since the classes were daily, that cut into the number of clients I could see in any given week, too, even though they shifted the times of class to suit my schedule. In any case, they were now training me at some considerable expense to themselves.
Which, of course, made me wonder why.
Ulai wouldn’t tell me.
For some reason, his silence and the infiltration lessons made me nervous, too, even if I was glad for the lessons themselves. I even tried to bring it up with Voi Pai, but she only dismissed my questions with a wave of her manicured hand. It was essentially the same answer I got when I asked her if she really expected me to work off forty million dollars for a piece of excrement like Gerwix. I imagined the fact that there was no way she’d willingly get me to agree that Gerwix’s life was worth that much contributed to her unwillingness to make formal terms with me. She refused to discuss anything regarding my situation, in fact. When I insisted, she claimed I could not negotiate the value of something of which I knew nothing.
She did tell me once, in her first bout of anger about what I’d done, that mostly she would be forced to pay ‘respect’ money...as well as additional compensation for the sentimental value Gerwix commanded for his many years of loyal service.
The latter might have made me laugh under different circumstances.
They still had to take the collar off me for me to work...and for the infiltration classes, of course. I honestly didn’t know whether my having murdered one of my clients was common knowledge in the City, but I assumed it had to be. I didn’t know if it was communicated to my clients, either, whether for insurance/liability reasons or as a matter of courtesy. I also didn’t know if that information would make me worth more or less.
But I did know that more of them appeared to be afraid of me.
It probably didn’t help that I now had a cadre of Lao Hu guards surrounding my apartments during the length of every consort appointment...or that at least a half-dozen of them held high-powered trank guns that looked more like assault rifles.
Following the incident with Gerwix, my client compartment was also fitted with gas.
A part of me couldn’t help but find that sort of karmically fitting.
A sense of foreboding remained with me, regardless. I couldn’t get a read on what it meant, or why it clung to my light with such tenacity. I woke up feeling worried...beyond the sickness at the job, or the increasing anger at feeling trapped. I stayed up too late at night, too, staring at my ceiling, either alone or with Ulai lying next to me.
More of those nights, lately, he wanted to s
leep beside me. I let him, and even had sex with him some of those nights...but I couldn’t say his presence provided any true comfort. I distracted myself, wondering about him, and about Voi Pai, but the truth was, neither of them really factored into my mind’s true preoccupation. I spent more time practicing for infiltration classes than I did thinking about anything else in my increasingly small world.
I was waiting for something.
I didn’t know what it was, exactly, but it made Ulai more clingy with me, and caused Voi Pai to avoid my eyes whenever I looked at her directly. It might have been my imagination, but it felt like my friends among the consorts were distancing their light from mine, too.
The only people who seemed oblivious were the other seers in my infiltration group, most being too young to be in the know on much of anything going on at the higher levels of the Lao Hu. So I probably talked more to them, despite Ulai’s efforts to get closer to me.
I didn’t find out until later that I’d already been sold.
It was a lot longer after that before I knew who I’d been sold to.
JON SHOVED HIS hands in his pockets, looking nervously around at the line of infiltrators that ringed the walls of the high-ceilinged room. Most of them held assault rifles of one kind of another, and didn’t seem shy about aiming them at the seers in their party.
He noticed the majority pointed at Revik, however.
It was pretty different from the last time they'd all been under this roof.
Revik had done surprisingly well, keeping his cool. That was in spite of the three days’ wait they’d had, at the gates of the Forbidden City, and the following ten hours in a holding area outside the first, and largest, of the inner walls...the one able to be breached only through the Meridian Gate. Then there had been another day of security checks of various kinds, cups of tea, ceremonial greetings of one kind or another, tours of the gardens, puppet shows.
Allie's War Season Two Page 114