Rook (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #1): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  Table of Contents

  SYNOPSIS

  ONE: Allie

  TWO: Mr. Monochrome

  THREE: Glow-Eye

  FOUR: Running

  FIVE: Drive

  SIX: Terian

  SEVEN: Apocalypse

  EIGHT: Barrier

  NINE: Rook

  TEN: Mortal Peril

  ELEVEN: Surfacing

  TWELVE: Seattle

  THIRTEEN: Germany, 1941

  FOURTEEN: Vow

  FIFTEEN: Change

  SIXTEEN: Rejection

  SEVENTEEN: Horsemen

  EIGHTEEN: Leaving

  NINETEEN: Vancouver

  TWENTY: Murder

  TWENTY-ONE: Revik

  TWENTY-TWO: Grief

  TWENTY-THREE: School

  TWENTY-FOUR: History

  TWENTY-FIVE: Construct

  TWENTY-SIX: Betrayal

  TWENTY-SEVEN: Revelations

  TWENTY-EIGHT: Break Down

  TWENTY-NINE: Exit

  THIRTY: Freed

  THIRTY-ONE: Compromised

  THIRTY-TWO: Surprise

  THIRTY-THREE: Wolf

  THIRTY-FOUR: Fire

  THIRTY-FIVE: India

  THIRTY-SIX: Challenge

  THIRTY-SEVEN: Brother

  THIRTY-EIGHT: Hunt

  THIRTY-NINE: Sacrifice

  FORTY: Wire

  FORTY-ONE: Respite

  FORTY-TWO: Candor

  FORTY-THREE: London

  FORTY-FOUR: Lunch

  FORTY-FIVE: Descent

  FORTY-SIX: Contact

  FORTY-SEVEN: Taken

  FORTY-EIGHT: Galaith

  FORTY-NINE: Realization

  ROOK

  Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #1

  by

  JC Andrijeski

  Copyright © 2017 by JC Andrijeski

  Published by White Sun Press

  Cover Art & Design by Damonza.com

  2017

  Ebook Edition, License Notes

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please visit an official vendor for the work and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

  Synopsis for Rook

  “You are the Bridge…”

  Allie Taylor lives in a world populated by seers, a second race discovered on Earth at the beginning of the 20th Century. Psychic, hyper-sexual and enslaved by governments, corporations and wealthy humans, seers are an exotic fascination to Allie, but one she knows she’ll likely never encounter, given how rich you have to be to get near one.

  Then a strange man shows up at her work –– then another –– and pretty soon Allie finds herself on the run from the law, labeled a terrorist and in the middle of a race war she didn’t even know existed. Yanked out of her life by the mysterious and uncommunicative Revik, Allie discovers her blood may not be as “human” as she always thought, and the world of seers might not be quite as distant as she always imagined.

  When Revik tells her she’s the Bridge, a mystical being meant to usher in the evolution of humanity––or possibly its extinction––Allie must choose between the race that raised her and the one where she might truly belong.

  A psychic end of the world story with romance, a cyberpunk flair and apocalyptic, metaphysical leanings akin to the Matrix.

  Dedicated to Maya, Samantha, Naomi, Keeley and Allie and all of the other lights that came to build us a better world.

  “The meaning of events is the supreme meaning, that is not in events, and not in the soul, but is the God standing between events and the soul, the mediator of life, the way, the bridge and the going across.”

  ~ Carl Jung, The Red Book, Liber Novus

  1

  ALLIE

  I KNOW WHO I am.

  Somehow, deep down inside, I’ve always known.

  I don’t know how to explain that statement precisely. It’s not in the “I am Alyson May Taylor” sense of knowing myself. It’s more like this presence I carry within me, this solid sense of “me-ness” that feels untouchable in some way. It shocked me as a kid, when I realized a lot of people didn’t have that.

  For a lot of people, that rock-solid, “here I am” thing was more elusive. A lot of them spent their whole lives searching for it.

  Funnily enough, with me, it turned out who I was didn’t end up being all that important.

  What I was mattered a whole lot more.

  On that front, I knew a lot less than I thought I did. I might have had that essence thing down, but I was missing a hell of a lot of pretty significant details.

  “HE’S BAAAACK.” MY best friend, Cass, grinned at me from where she leaned over the fifties-style lunch counter, her butt aimed at the dining area of the diner where we both worked. Given that our uniforms consisted of short black skirts and form-fitting, low-cut white blouses, she was giving at least a few of our customers an eye-full.

  Seemingly oblivious to that fact, and to the men sitting at the counter to her left and my right, pretending not to stare at her ass as she stuck it in the air, she grinned at me, her full lips looking even more dramatic than usual with their blood-red lipstick.

  “Did you see, Allie?”

  I pursed my lips, rolling my eyes.

  “What’s the pool up to now?” she said. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”

  “Eighty-five.” I used the metal stopper to compress finely-ground espresso beans into the metal filter I held in my other hand, managing to spill a small pile of grounds on the linoleum counter in the process. “Sasquatch threw in twenty yesterday.” Remembering, I let out a snort-laugh. “He walked right up to the guy’s table. Asked him his name, point-blank.”

  Cass’s black-eyeliner decorated eyes widened. “What happened?”

  I smiled, shaking my head without looking up. “Same thing that always happens.”

  Cass laughed, kicking up her high heels, which were red-vinyl platforms, more seventies than fifties, not like it mattered. Again, I saw the men nearby sipping their coffees while they surreptitiously stared at her legs.

  Cass had been on a red kick lately. Her long, straight, raven-black, Asian hair had dark red flames coming up from the tips, the color matching her lipstick, eyeshadow, fingernail polish, and the five inch heels.

  Two months ago, everything had been teal.

  She could get away with just about any style she wanted, though. Her ethnicity, an odd mish-mash of Thai sprinkled with European and Ethiopian, somehow mixed inside her to make her one of the most physically beautiful women I’d ever seen.

  I hated her a little for it, sometimes.

  Other times, I pitied her for it. Truthfully, I hadn’t seen that it had done her a lot of favors over her life, and Cass and I had known each other since we were kids.

  Looking up from where I was doing battle with the diner’s antiquated espresso maker, a machine I was convinced had it in for me, personally, I blew my much less dramatic dark brown bangs out of my face, glancing at the man in the corner booth in spite of myself.

  I’d seen him walk in.

  Truthfully, I’d felt him walk in.

  It was unnerving as hell, the effect he had on me, simply from entering a building I happened to occupy.

  This was in spite of him never saying a damned thing to me, apart from whatever single-item purchase he made off the d
iner’s crappy menu. He paid in cash. He never came in with anyone else. He flat-out ignored any attempts at small talk, even polite questions. He rarely made eye-contact, although I always felt his eyes on me. When I looked over, however, he was usually staring out the window, or down at his own hands on the table.

  Mr. Monochrome wasn’t a talker.

  He wasn’t a people person in any sense of the word. He took ignoring other sentient beings to the level of an art form. The extremes he went to in avoiding conversation didn’t just verge on rude; they were rude. Mr. Monochrome didn’t care.

  Mr. Monochrome wasn’t interested in our opinions of him.

  Mr. Monochrome wouldn’t even tell us his name.

  That last part was the pool Cass referred to.

  Given that most people paid bills with their headsets these days, the fact that he paid in cash made him frustratingly impervious to our curiosity about him. He was a blank canvas. My mind superimposed that canvas with various stories, of course, as did my co-workers––undercover cop, international fugitive from justice, spy, private detective, writer doing research, terrorist for the seer underground. Serial killer.

  I knew the reality was likely a lot less interesting.

  Jon, my brother, referred to him as my “current stalker,” but Jon was paranoid about that kind of thing, given the number of problems I’d had in that area back when I was a kid. Apart from the fact that Mr. Monochrome insisted on sitting in my section every day––even when we moved around which tables were mine––he didn’t seem all that interested in me, either.

  He certainly hadn’t made any overtures in my direction, not even oblique ones.

  He was probably just a guy who lived somewhere on the autism spectrum, and I’d fallen into his daily routine.

  At most, he might be cultivating a deep-seated paranoia around being tracked by the government, one that made him reluctant to use his headset. If he did have some kind of socially-dysfunctional crush on me, he didn’t seem the type to do much about it. He likely worked at one of the tech companies nearby and came to the Lucky Cat because we still accepted cash; more and more places in San Francisco didn’t.

  So yeah, a tinfoil hat weirdo, maybe… but a harmless one.

  At the thought, I glanced up at the monitor on the wall.

  Cass or one of the other waitstaff had turned the volume down, but the news feeds were still playing up there, showing the reaction to the latest terrorist attack in Europe. I watched the President of the United States as he gave a speech from behind a podium, his mouth moving silently. Blooming trees waved gently in a breeze behind him, framing the view of a sprawling lawn and flower gardens. His blond wife stood beside him, hands clasped, a small smile etched on her face, her expression rapt, if bland.

  I knew she didn’t really look like that, of course.

  Neither did he.

  According to Human Protection Act rules, both were required to wear avatars to avoid being targeted by seers owned by enemy governments. Even the landscape around them was digitally altered, to prevent seers from tracking them or reading their minds.

  Still, his avatar suited the speeches he gave.

  Hers suited him, somehow, as well––meaning, she looked like the kind of person that the man giving those speeches would marry.

  Of course, his actual voice was altered digitally, too.

  I’d listened to dozens of his speeches over the past however-many years, like everyone else. Daniel Caine was the most popular president we’d ever had, at least as long as I’d been alive. There was already talk of adjusting the presidential term limits again, so he might be allowed to run for a fourth term.

  Opposite Caine’s wife stood his Vice President, Ethan Wellington. His avatar showed him to be a handsome black man in his late forties, roughly the same age as Caine. I remembered reading somewhere that they’d even gone to school together.

  Both were young, energetic, articulate.

  Both of them bothered me.

  I honestly couldn’t explain to myself why.

  I certainly didn’t try to explain it to anyone else.

  To be clear, I didn’t think they were evil or anything, or even that they were hiding some sinister secret; I just didn’t fall all over myself with love for them, the way most people did. Maybe it was just a random distrust of any image that had so few apparent cracks. I knew most people would think I was crazy for thinking that, even Cass. Hell, even Jon liked President Caine, and he hated most politicians, no matter what side of the spectrum they fell on.

  Objectively, I got it.

  Caine ended years of stalemates and infighting in congress. He’d been the one to move the country as a whole back to a more moderate middle, socially and politically. He’d brought stability, boosted the economy, created jobs, improved our image overseas. He’d even fixed healthcare, and all without raising taxes too much.

  If there were conspiracy theories about Caine, they usually involved him being too perfect. Like somehow that must be a trap, which I guess is how my mind worked, too.

  Still, in almost ten years of running the country, he’d managed to avoid pissing off any of the major political factions, including the military and the corporate elite.

  He was pretty universally liked.

  Frowning slightly, I glanced at Mr. Monochrome again, wiping the counter off with a wet rag where I’d spilled the espresso bean grounds.

  If I was right in my tinfoil hat theory, Mr. Monochrome likely believed a lot of the same conspiracy theories my brother, Jon, did. Jon had a whole paranoia thing about seers, in particular, and how our own government was likely using them against us, via our headsets and whatever else. To be fair to my brother––and possibly Mr. Monochrome––I had noticed a lot more seers in San Francisco lately.

  Most didn’t seem all that involved in government espionage rackets though. From what I could tell, most worked in sex fetish clubs, or for corporations downtown.

  Of course, rich people had been importing and maintaining privately-owned seers in San Francisco for years. They’d kept their “purchases” behind closed doors for the most part until about the 1990s, however, in part because of the strict Seer Containment Codes in California, and partly because they likely didn’t want people to know they had a psychic living in their house. After two world wars prominently featuring seers––primarily as villains, or the tools of villains––most people were pretty paranoid about them still.

  I knew from listening to anti-seer talk feeds that a lot of people wanted them all deported from the United States entirely. Some people wanted them exterminated––as a species, I mean. The real nutjobs even wanted to kill the more docile variety of seers living in the monkish enclave of Seertown, a quasi-mythical town somewhere in Asia, supposedly filled with chanting robed seers and their human followers.

  Since the feeds weren’t allowed to go there, I had no idea what Seertown looked like, but like many people, I was curious.

  According to the political feeds, and what I’d learned in history classes back in high school and college, the World Court had an agreement with the seer government that seers who lived there couldn’t be owned, just so long as they never left.

  Plenty of religious types still believed seers to be children of the Nephilim, though––if not outright spawns of the Great Horned One, Satan himself. Even moderates viewed seers’ increasing integration into human society as dangerous.

  On a more practical level, most people simply didn’t want someone’s pet seer reading their minds and sharing their most private secrets with their human owners.

  Apparently, a lot of rich people weren’t all that cool to their friends.

  Despite all this, seer numbers in San Francisco were definitely increasing.

  More and more, I saw seers out on the street, especially in the business district. From stories I’d watched on the feeds, most of the new arrivals were owned by corporations, not individuals, but I knew that didn’t reassure people all that much. It
didn’t help that seers weren’t always easy to spot; they blended in more or less seamlessly with the humans they accompanied, wearing business suits and sporting expensive haircuts and shoes. A lot of times, given how valuable they were, and the investment they represented to their owners, they had their own bodyguards.

  I’d read in the feeds somewhere that a highly-trained seer could go for more than the cost of an entire apartment building in San Francisco.

  So yeah, being a peon myself, usually I couldn’t get very close.

  A few times, I got within a dozen yards or so, though.

  Only once did a seer seem to notice me. A female I’d seen out in front of a sex club caught me looking at her, and stared back.

  It was difficult to pin down exactly, what was so different about her, as compared to a regular person, but some of it had to do with the way she moved. The differences there evoked an animal in my mind, even though she looked more or less like a human being. Wearing nothing but a white mesh bodysuit, she stalked around the buffed, black bouncer who stood beside her, her long, dark hair hanging down her back in thick braids. The bouncer held her leash––literally, in her case––but she didn’t appear to be trying to get away. Her careful steps, graceful and precise, reminded me of a cat’s, or maybe an insect’s.

  She was beautiful and wild, and yes, a bit terrifying.

  From what I’d seen on the feeds, most seers tended to have beautiful features, though. A few of the corporate-owned seer pop bands had cult-like followings in part because the male and female leads were so stunningly beautiful.

  If I were being honest though, I mainly spotted seers by their collars.

  By law, all seers wore them.

  Most of those collars were silver with a greenish tint, a kind of brushed metal that glowed faintly, even in direct sunlight. I’d seen a few seer collars decorated more like jewelry or S&M bondage wear, but it was difficult to disguise them entirely. They all sat in identical places at the base of a seer’s neck, likely because of how they attached to the spine.