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

by JC Andrijeski

  …and caught his wrist.

  He whipped his legs around, smashing them into the back of Terian’s calves. Throwing his torso backwards as far as the chain allowed, he yanked him forcibly to the floor.

  His other hand shattered the glass.

  The seer fell on him. Revik rolled, half-pinning the Indian seer under his chest. Working his fingers quickly into strands of his hair, he jerked the head back. The Sark’s eyes showed white.

  “Rolf, no! This won’t help you…!”

  Revik ground the shard of glass into the seer’s throat.

  A thin spray of blood hit him in the face. Sliding the glass in as far as he could, he gasped, crying out, seeing himself covered in blood and fresh wounds and scars, naked, bearded, in a hundred mirrors. He tore through muscle, veins and skin, then ripped the shard out. Blood sprayed upwards in a hot arc. The white throat pulsed, pouring thick fluid.

  Revik stared down, watching, feeling his mind clear as…

  The seer’s eyes gradually lost light.

  The blood slowed, pumping erratically from the jagged hole in his throat. Revik continued to stare down, but the seer felt dead. He smelled dead.

  Realizing he wore more than a collar, that it wasn’t only drugs affecting his mind, he ripped the inducement wire from around his own throat. He stared down at the twisting, organic coil once he had, then flung it to the ground, looking in the room’s corners.

  Gasping, he fought to clear his head, to think.

  Jon wasn’t there. Neither was Cass. All he saw was his own reflection, replicated over and over. This might be more inducement dream, too.

  If not, he had minutes, maybe seconds.

  Flipping to his side, he brought the back of his neck down to his hands, fumbled his fingers over the length of the organic-metal collar he still wore. It took him a few tries to activate the thumbnail switch. By the time he got it open he felt light-headed.

  He thought he heard a noise in the outside corridor and grabbed the dead seer’s hair. He flipped back to his side, turning on the slick tile, angling the body’s face towards the back of his neck, trying to align it with the retinal scanner.

  Nothing happened.

  Revik craned over his shoulder, saw the corpse’s eyelids half-open, smeared with blood. He picked up a smaller shard of glass, slicing his fingers as he fumbled with it. He used the edge to shave off the body’s eyelids, careful to not puncture the eye, wiping blood off each iris. The lids kept slipping from his fingers but he got most of it, prayed it was enough.

  Shifting to his side again, he struggled to grip the blood-soaked hair, to hold the eyes in position. Dread, adrenaline and fear nearly made him black out.

  He wrenched the head back, then fought to concentrate, crying out when it tripped the collar’s anti-sight mechanism enough to cause a jolt of pain. He nearly let the body drop.

  He didn’t, though. He positioned his neck over those staring eyes…

  He felt the click as much as heard it.

  The prongs retracted, receding from his neck in one smooth pull. Gasping, he raised his head. The old reflex kicked in and that time it felt so good he groaned aloud.

  Without waiting, he focused on the chains. He already knew they were tied into the organics of the room. He looked for the right organic being… he remembered doing this before, as well, although he hadn’t done it in years. Within a few seconds, the being had stopped listening to the artificial intelligence that normally directed it, and was listening to Revik instead.

  He heard footsteps. They sounded real this time.

  Regaining his thread with the organics, Revik tried to talk to the damned thing, to coax the living metal to open. He was breathing in so much oxygen he nearly passed out.

  His vision cleared as an opening morphed in the wall, revealing a man with long, auburn hair. Terian-6 paused, seemed to take in the entirety of the scene: Revik contorted and cuffed to the floor, the dead body lying in a pool of blood behind him.

  “Oh, Revi’…”

  Terian-6 held the edges of the opening, his liquid eyes shining. “You have no idea how much fun I’m going to have with you.” He finished entering the room and Revik jerked back, startled when his arms moved with the rest of him.

  He looked down. The chains lay open on the floor.

  Terian-6 halted. He stared at Revik’s hands, his muscular body suddenly tense.

  “Revi’…” he said warningly.

  Revik threw himself at the seer, using the water on the tile floor to slide across the meters between them. He saw Terian fumble for a pocket, moving frantically so that he jerked his elbow into the wall. Their bodies collided just before they slammed into the green organic surface together.

  There was a loud crack as they hit, but Revik didn’t stop grappling for the seer’s neck. Grasping hold of his throat, he slammed Terian-6’s head against the glass, then again.

  He did it again… and again… until the light eyes glazed.

  He didn’t realize the glass shard remained clutched in his hand until blood seeped through his fingers from the seer’s throat.

  Revik reached for the pocket the seer had been groping for, ripped a serrated knife from the cloth jacket. Without a pause, he flipped it open, plunged it into the seer’s chest to the hilt and cut downwards, sawing like he was dressing meat. Hitting bone, he pulled it out and stabbed him again, going deeper into the chest cavity. He did it again.

  And again… until he felt the shift in the other seer’s light.

  Revik held the dead weight against the glass wall, staring at its face.

  Hesitating, staring between the Sark’s eyes, he flipped the knife in his hand, letting the body slide down the wall to the floor. He knelt over it again, taking steps to ensure it wouldn’t come back.

  It wasn’t until he’d severed the head from the neck that he felt the urgency and adrenaline in his limbs begin to abate.

  He looked at the mutilated body, feeling light-headed. Ripping the deactivated collar from his neck, he leaned on the glass wall.

  He couldn’t pass out… couldn’t.

  He felt light again, his and others––a flood of presence so near and warm it shocked him, brought tears to his eyes. For a long moment, he let it hold him, trying to pull himself out of the dark, to feel something different.

  Slowly, he felt himself grow almost calm.

  There would be more bodies. Terian built redundancy after redundancy into every system he created. There would be more. Maybe a lot more.

  He remembered Jon and Cass then, and dragged himself up the wall to his feet.

  41

  RESPITE

  REVIK LIMPED DOWN a narrow, military-green corridor.

  He felt a larger room at its end.

  Naked, he still had only the knife he’d gotten off Terian-6 and the body’s belt wrapped around his knuckles. Hitting the panel to open the second set of doors, he slid behind the wall before peering out, using his sight to glance lightly over the room’s landscape.

  His head felt clearer with the wire gone.

  He was pretty sure he wasn’t all right, though. He could still feel something else, drugs probably, clouding his mind. Now, with the sight-restraint collar off his neck, and having left the green tile room that shielded his light, the drugs fought to take him out of his body, to make him too visible in the Barrier. He fought it, fought his mind back into reasonably straight lines.

  Taking a breath, he centered himself.

  Stretching out his light, he located a weapons locker.

  His periphery remained on high alert, looking obsessively in the background for other seers, for any ripple or touch from the Barrier. His light detected a few more bodies behind glass or maybe embedded in the organic wall.

  Once fully in the Barrier, he can tell his sight is still blurred from the drug.

  He feels strangely alone.

  Even so, he knows his scan is only long subjectively.

  He clicked out as the door to the nex
t room finished opening, and found himself staring at what looked like an enormous fish tank hanging from steel and organic cables in the ceiling. Hookups for at least three living beings floated in the jelly-like liquid, but only one had an actual body attached to it. Revik focused on the man floating inside.

  He felt his heart stop as it occurred to him it might be Jon.

  But it wasn’t Jon.

  He studied the man’s features. He didn’t recognize him, but he was young, in good shape, handsome. It must be another Terian. He looked at the other three hookups. One seemed to be rigged for a body the size of a dwarf.

  Or a child, perhaps.

  The thought sickened him. It also felt right.

  He didn’t flinch until the remaining body moved in the tank, opening its eyes to stare at him. Gritting his teeth, Revik walked around the transparent window until he found the control panel. Using his sight to discern keystrokes, then to speak to the organics, he gained access to the main computer. He turned off all of the functions supporting life support he could find.

  When he looked back at the tank, the tubes leading into the suspended body were no longer pumping liquid.

  It took a few seconds for the man in the tank to comprehend the change.

  Then Revik watched him start to suffocate.

  He banged on the plexiglas. His fists were sharp at first, a demand. Then he thrashed in panic, screamed, beating against the transparent wall. Revik felt sick, wondered if he should try to break it, to snap the creature’s neck.

  He could feel more living beings here, somewhere. But no other seers.

  Before he could confirm what he felt by looking physically, a voice nearly made him jump out of his skin. He slammed his back into the plexiglas tank, hard enough to hurt himself in his effort to get away.

  “Jon! Look! Look!”

  Revik fell into a half-crouch, wishing he’d started with weapons.

  Unable to comprehend at first what he was seeing, unable to get over the fact that they could have shot him in the back if they’d been armed, he didn’t move at first, fighting to get his equilibrium back.

  He found them then, with his sight.

  Still, he couldn’t make himself relax.

  He crossed the room, knelt down in front of the low cages he hadn’t seen buried in a military-gray wall. He peered inside, confirming with his eyes what he’d already felt with his sight.

  “Revik! Holy shit!” Jon banged on the hard plastic of the kennel. “You got out! How’d you get out, man?”

  Revik barely heard.

  He jumped into the Barrier the second he verified their appearance.

  …and now he is lost there, scanning their light. It is something he hasn’t been able to do since he got here. He studies every structure in their aleimi, segment by segment. He risks going deep, needing to be sure. He checks it twice, then rechecks it.

  After a few moments, he feels his shoulders begin to unclench for real.

  He checks each of them again, just to be thorough. No threads are leaving them into the Barrier, no sign or flavor of the Pyramid, the Dreng, or Terian lives in their light. Nothing lives in their light but themselves, their ties to him and each other, their ties to Allie and other friends and family. Everything is dampened by the overall fog of this place, but they are real.

  He checks them again, going over every inch of their aleimi a last time.

  Then, he lets himself smile.

  Clicking out, he met Jon’s hazel eyes.

  “It is you,” he said.

  “Well, yeah. Who did you think it was?” Jon grinned at him, though, banging on the glass. “Come on, man! Get us out!”

  Revik glanced at Cass. She clutched the transparent wall of her four-by-six box, staring up at him. Her splayed fingers reminded him of a tree frog in a glass aquarium, especially with her wide eyes in a too-thin face. A mixture of fear, hope and another emotion he couldn’t identify shone from her eyes.

  Revik barely hesitated, then rose to his feet.

  Crossing the room, he opened the weapons’ locker, where he found four custom Berettas M9s with organics, a Steyr TMP, and six SCAR-H fully automatic rifles. Stacks of magazines for all of the weapons filled metal shelves above and below the main locker, which had hooks on the back wall for the handguns and slots for the rifles.

  Grabbing one of the heavier rifles off the wall, Revik looked for a box of shells, and loaded it. Once he’d filled the reservoir, he chambered a bullet, and walked back to the cages. He motioned Cass back first.

  “More,” he said, until her back was pressed to the wall. “Cover your face.”

  The mixture of relief and fear and… gratitude, he realized… returned to her gaunt face.

  “Did you kill him?” Her voice was muffled, but raw.

  He nodded, barely meeting her gaze.

  Raising his arms, he aimed the gun at the lock, and fired.

  LESS THAN AN hour later, Revik sat at a desk chair over a flat computer console, chewing on a piece of canned meat with his back molars and thinking he’d never tasted anything so sharp, salty, tangy… and just so damned good in his entire life.

  He exchanged grins with the two people sitting across from him, who were chewing with equal enthusiasm from separate containers.

  While Jon and Revik checked the structure for more bodies and weapons, Cass had found them food––and clothing. Luckily, there’d been enough of both in the bunker’s storage lockers for all three of them.

  Extending a filthy arm in a designer wool shirt, Revik pointed at a juice carton sitting on the table next to Jon, making an unintelligible noise. Jon threw him the carton, laughing when Revik missed and it went spinning to the floor. Scooping it up, he ripped the paper open with his teeth and drank deeply, washing down the meat and belching.

  “What is it you said?” he gasped. “Holy fucking God… that’s good.”

  Cass laughed, shaking her long, black hair with the dyed, bright red ends. It was still thick with sweat, blood, water––gods knew what else. Both Jon and Revik had beards. Jon’s red-blond hair fell past his shoulders, still streaked with black and white-blond at the ends.

  “So why are we still here, man?” Jon propped up his bare feet, wearing pants from one of the Terian bodies. He was so thin they bunched up baggily around his waist, held there by an expensive-looking leather belt.

  Revik took another long pull of the juice. He motioned at the console.

  “We need to figure out where we are.” He belched again. “…Find a shower, maybe. But not here.”

  Jon laughed, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with my plan?”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Getting the hell out of here… now. Walking out. Now.”

  Revik motioned towards the metal ladder built into one wall, and the round, submarine-looking hatch that stood at its top.

  “Be my guest,” he said. “You might want a jacket, though.”

  Hearing this last, Cass frowned.

  Before Jon could move, she dragged herself to her feet, and crossed the room to the green metal ladder and its circular cage. She climbed up it with her bare feet, dwarfed in a dark sweatshirt and a pair of sweat pants that were almost comically large on her.

  Revik watched her carefully. She’d barely spoken since he’d gotten her out of that cage, but she felt open to him still, strangely clear in her mind.

  Clicking out, he was still watching when she reached the top of the ladder and twisted the locking mechanism counter-clockwise to open it.

  “Careful,” Revik warned. “Hold on to the rungs.”

  She opened the door. Immediately, sound filled the metal chamber. Bits of white were blown in through the open portal. Wind echoed down, filling the small space, beating against the walls, penetrating Revik’s clothes.

  “Jesus.” Jon stared up as Cass yanked the metal door shut, spinning the wheel to close it. “Where are we? The North Pole?”

  “The North Pole is water, Jon,” Revik remi
nded him.

  “That’s not what I—”

  “My guess would be Russia,” Revik added, stretching his arms. “Maybe the mountains in Norway… or Asia. Could even be Greenland, but that’s a bit much, even for Terry.” He grunted. “I don’t think he’d risk the Himalayas, even in winter. But there are many places to hide on the southern border of China.”

  Jon looked at him. “You could feel that out there? The snow, I mean? You knew what it was like?”

  Revik shrugged. He stuffed another piece of meat into his mouth, chewing. Both humans were staring at him now.

  “So what do we do?” Jon said.

  Revik hesitated. He’d thought about that, too, but he doubted the humans were going to like what he’d come up with. “We have to walk, Jon. But we’ll need to gear up. And we might have to go the long way, in case Terry’s sent for reinforcements already. Cass found us heavy jackets. And boots. You’ll both need guns. At least two… and a rifle, if you can carry all that. We need to leave within the hour. Less, if you think the two of you can be ready.”

  Cass nodded in agreement, returning from where she’d finished descending the ladder. She sat cross-legged on the floor and began to eat again, silent.

  Revik checked her mind. He clicked out seconds later, exhaled.

  “We’ll need water,” he added, turning to Jon. “As much as we can carry. And food, of course.”

  Cass looked up at them suddenly.

  Her eyes widened, grew bright––as if a light had just gone off somewhere in her head. Revik didn’t read her, but both men watched as she got to her feet and crossed the small space. She opened one of the lockers she’d explored earlier, began rifling through the back of it. Revik took another drink of juice, still watching her warily.

  She turned then, jingling something in her hand.

  When they only stared, she jangled the metal harder. Revik’s eyes snapped into focus. In her hand dangled a set of keys, clearly fitted for some kind of vehicle.

  “Shotgun,” Cass said, grinning.

  It was the first time Revik had seen her smile since watching her and Allie together in that diner in San Francisco.

  Meeting her gaze, Revik grinned back.