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

by JC Andrijeski

  42

  CANDOR

  CANDOR WAS A poor city, even smaller than its sister city of Mestia in Upper Svanetia, the higher half of the Svaneti region in the country of Stalin’s birth.

  Georgia is smaller than most people imagine, at the southernmost tip of what had been, once upon a time, the Soviet Union, and closer to Tehran than Moscow. In the winter, like now, the Caucasus Mountains were buried in snow and ice, more so since the climate started changing and increased the average snowfall across most of Asia, especially in the last decade.

  Historically speaking, the town of Candor was also new, grown up from the slave trade between Asia and Europe that erupted after the second world war.

  Trade in young seers remained the town’s only real industry.

  Sight slavery was, of course, legal in Georgia.

  Ironically, the dearth of visiting free seers made it easy to slip past racial checkpoints unnoticed, even in the heightened paranoia caused by rumors of a telekinetic seer terrorist.

  No one expected a free seer to walk into Candor willingly.

  At present, according to the few feeds they could access via the snowcat’s comm, Allie was said to be training seers in India, readying her nascent army to wage war on the United States and China. While no one in Candor was overly fond of the governments of either place, purges had occurred there as elsewhere, in reaction to the news of a telekinetic seer in their midst. Bids on her blood and any genetic “samples” were whispered on the sidelines, too, of course, but Sark settlements in places like this were work camps, or else holding pens.

  They were also recruiting grounds for the Rooks.

  Revik was able to think through this much just from his own knowledge of the area combined with what they’d heard on the English news feeds. The snowcat was fitted with organics like their prison had been, in this case to give it satellite capability. Even so, the weather and the mountains interfered off and on as they wound their way into the valley, and he avoided any feeds with two-way capability, which meant most of the majors as they tended to cull demographics for ads.

  Jon and Cass didn’t look like seers, so that helped. Revik’s blood type would help them fly under the radar, as well.

  No one stopped the snowcat at all as they approached the town.

  At the registration checkpoint, the guards seemed bored. Dirty, horny and bored. They only noticed Cass with any real interest.

  They wanted to know race-cat, local contact, settlement preference––the usual for clan-based systems. Revik knew they’d bother him less if he was specific, so after giving them all the ID info they asked for, he told them he wanted the 4th, nearest Multe markets, hoping they hadn’t burned down in any recent riots.

  They hadn’t. The human took their blood on the spot, and Revik waited, the snowcat’s engine still on, while they ran it.

  In the pause, he assessed his two charges.

  They both still looked dazed and dirty, which luckily wasn’t unusual up here. Their condition couldn’t have been helped by staring at nothing but snow for two days straight. It occurred to him how thin all three of them really were. The same thing seemed to have occurred to Cass, who had wrapped her face and neck in a thick scarf just before Revik rolled down the window to speak to the guard.

  Thinking about this, he smiled at her again. For a human, she wasn’t stupid. Neither was Jon, for that matter, who kept his hand by his gun the whole time the guards were gone, his hazel eyes alert even through their fatigue.

  The guard returned. He motioned towards Revik’s arm.

  When Revik held it out, the man clamped a white wristband around his bony wrist. The guards continued to look bored, and now slightly drunk. Cass and Jon followed Revik’s lead, sticking out their arms. Revik watched them look at the wristbands, dazed, and realized again it was probably the first time they’d ever seen anything like them before.

  The guard motioned to Revik again, speaking in heavily accented Russian.

  “…You know where to go?” He glanced at Cass.

  Revik nodded, giving him a quick three-finger salute in thanks.

  He pressed down the clutch, shifting down to first and hitting the gas before the man could ask him anything about Cass’s status. Women got sold here, too, seer and human. He’d rather not make his companions any more paranoid than they already were. As they slid past the entrance to the mountainous town, Revik pointed up at the skyline.

  “Mount Shkhara,” he said. “Over 17,000 feet, I think.”

  Jon’s eyes didn’t leave the band on his wrist. “You speak Russian?” He glanced up. “Any other languages?”

  Revik shrugged. “A few.”

  Cass laughed. When Revik looked over at her, she was smiling at him, but her eyes were clear. He returned the smile, shaking his head.

  “Are you ready to sleep?” he said.

  “Can you sleep?” Cass asked.

  “No.” Revik glanced at her, again surprised. He wondered just how much they’d picked up in their months with Terian.

  “…I can’t,” he said. “Not yet. But you can. I thought we’d get cleaned up and you two could rest while I do some scouting. I’m hoping we can hire a small plane, head to T’bilisi in the morning. We can probably get an international flight from there.”

  Cass was staring at him again. “Have you been here before?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  Revik glanced over at them. Jon was looking at him too, waiting for an answer. Revik shifted slightly in the snowcat’s bucket seat.

  “Awhile ago,” he said finally. “Seers have photographic memories,” he added. “I’m not unusual in that.”

  “So what next?” Jon said. “After that place that sounds like a skin fungus, where do we go?”

  Revik had been thinking about that, too.

  He knew where he wanted to go, but he also knew he’d be a fool to risk it. He could think of only one other place with constructs close enough and safe enough that he could reach within a reasonable timeframe. Even with that location, there were complications.

  “England,” he said finally. “London.”

  “London?” Jon stared. “Didn’t you say Allie was probably in Asia by now?”

  “Yes.” Revik glanced at the two of them, then sighed, clicking softly under his breath. “There are things I need in London.” Seeing Jon’s frown, he added, reluctant, “…and I don’t want to go straight to Allie.”

  “You don’t?” Cass’s voice held genuine surprise. “I thought you’d want to go there first.”

  Revik nodded. “I do. It’s just—”

  Jon said, “You think we’d be followed?”

  Revik glanced at him.

  Again… not dumb.

  He nodded, shrugging with one hand. “Yes.”

  Cass was watching his face. “That’s part of it.” She hesitated. “Is it also because of the stuff Terian said? About you cheating on her or whatever?”

  Revik sighed, but felt his body react regardless. Waiting for the nausea to pass, he turned the wheel of the snowcat slowly, navigating around a stone fountain in the middle of the town square. Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “…Not exactly.”

  “But that was true? You did cheat on her?”

  Revik glanced at the human, flinching slightly at the look in her eyes. “Yes.”

  Shaking her head, Cass folded her arms. “Figures.”

  But Jon looked between them, his eyes holding a faint wonder.

  “So you guys really are married, then?” he said. “That wasn’t just Terian being a dick?”

  Revik didn’t answer at first. Feeling both of them looking at him again, he turned, blowing air out from his cheeks.

  “Yes. We’re really married.” Hearing the silence this produced, he glanced over at the two of them. “Seers are different. It can happen like that.”

  “Like what?” Cass said, snorting a little. “Like… overnight?”

  “
Yes.” He made a more or less gesture with his hand. “Well. What I meant was, before the rest of the mind catches up with it. Ours happened fast. A little too fast for us.” He shrugged with one hand. “Well. For me, anyway.”

  She frowned. “Terian said you hadn’t slept with her.”

  Revik hesitated, feeling himself tense a little. Then he shrugged again. There wasn’t a lot of point in keeping secrets from the two of them. Not now.

  “We haven’t consummated, no.” He glanced at her. “That’s complicated, too, Cass. For seers, I mean.”

  She folded her arms, giving him an openly skeptical look.

  “So you didn’t want sex with her?” she said. “With Allie?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, giving her a warning look.

  “…Because a lot of guys do,” she said, pointed. “A lot of guys.”

  His jaw tightened. He considered answering, then didn’t.

  “So what, then?” she said. “You slept with someone else, so sex clearly isn’t the problem.” Her frown deepened. “Is marriage more of an arranged thing with seers? Some kind of social contract… like a business thing?”

  “No, it’s not a… a business thing.”

  “So what’s your issue with Allie?”

  He looked at her. “There is no issue, Cass.”

  “Is she not your type? Isn’t she pretty enough for you?”

  He felt his jaw harden more. “You are getting too personal for me, Cass. I don’t want to talk about this, all right?”

  Anger touched her eyes. Then she exhaled, and he could feel her thinking. Folding her arms tighter, she frowned a little, but nodded.

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “It’s fine.”

  Jon was looking at him, too, his hazel eyes thoughtful. “You think Terian let us go. To find Allie for him.”

  Revik hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I do.”

  Both of them fell silent. Revik saw them exchange glances.

  “So we can’t go to her at all?” Cass said.

  “We can,” Revik said. “First I need to go somewhere where I can jump safely. I want to see what’s going on with the Rooks… the seers Terian worked for. It’s pretty clear he and Galaith aren’t working together as they used to. I want to know how many people might be looking for us. I also want to talk to the Seven…” He cleared his throat. “…the seers who have Allie. I can’t do that here.”

  He squinted through snow on the windshield to see the sign for the hotel.

  “England could be complicated. I was owned.” He paused, letting that part sink in. “I don’t know if my employers will have my place under surveillance or whether they would turn me in to SCARB. My guess is no.” He glanced at Jon before the human could speak. “It’s more likely my stuff has been destroyed, my space given to another seer.”

  There was a silence. Some of the sharpness left Cass’s light.

  “Oh,” she said. “That sucks.”

  Revik smiled at her. “Not really.”

  “So what would we do then?” Jon said. “If that happened?”

  Revik blew air out from between his lips. “I know people in London. People who’d let me use their places to jump. People who would help us.”

  “Other seers, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  Jon nodded, leaning back in the seat and folding his arms.

  “All right,” he said. “London it is, then.”

  Jon closed his eyes. Watching him lean on Cass’s shoulder, it occurred to Revik that Jon really thought he had a vote.

  In the same moment, Revik wondered if maybe he did.

  It took him another few breaths to realize that what he felt for the humans was more than just responsibility for having indirectly gotten them into this. They felt like friends. More than that. They felt like family.

  Gazing up at the whitewashed sky, he forced the tense part of him to relax as he thought about the reasons that might be. He thought about Cass’s questions about him and Allie, and realized he already knew why that was.

  She was more seer now. He could feel it.

  Pushing the thought from his mind, he downshifted in front of the wooden hotel sign hanging from the edge of a steep roof. Bringing the snowcat to a stop where it wouldn’t hang out in the faint outline of road, he stepped on the foot brake, turning the wheel to wedge the tires into a line of rocks.

  He turned off the engine. The silence once he had was strangely disorienting. All he could hear was the wind through the thick glass, and the faint squeak of the chain holding the sign from the roof overhead.

  “Hey, Revik,” Cass said, watching him pull the keys out of the ignition.

  “What, Cass?” he said, not looking over.

  “I’m sorry about what I said.”

  He glanced at her. She looked timid, lost inside the bundle of blanket and scarf. She touched his arm with her bony hand, and he flinched a little, feeling the emotion behind the gesture.

  “I just don’t get it, I guess. You seem like one of the good guys.”

  Looking at her, he felt his fingers grip the steering wheel, still holding the keys. He glanced at Jon and saw the male human looking at him, too.

  Revik exhaled shortly, rubbing his face with a gloved hand.

  “There is nothing to get, Cass.” He met her gaze, jaw hard. “…And I’m not that good.”

  Jon spoke up, surprising him.

  “Do you love her?” he said.

  Revik looked at him. Focusing back down on his hands, he watched the leather crinkle around his fingers. After another moment, he exhaled again.

  “I love her,” he said. He nodded, half-surprised he’d said it. “Yes.”

  For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When he glanced up next, Cass smiled at him. Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his good hand, shaking him lightly in the same gesture. A faint smile tugged at his lips.

  “All right.” He smiled wider, tugging at his shoulder a little harder, to get Revik to look at him. “Come on, man. Let’s find that shower.”

  Watching Cass fumble with the door handle, Revik nodded, wiping his face before he turned to do the same.

  43

  LONDON

  I AIMED MY body in a jagged line down a London street, scanning faces.

  I took in buildings as well, and the occasional car as we strolled past yet another wooded park, a different park from the one we’d first passed as we left the tube station.

  I stopped at a newsstand and stared blankly at the morphing feed headlines blaring from a monitor over the stand window. My eyes took in the actual words beats later.

  NEW SYRIMNE KILLS 28 IN PAKISTAN BOMB BLAST! TERRORIST PLOT LINKED TO CHINA!

  Even after months of travel and India, I still commanded the front page.

  I read details as they ran out under the headlines.

  Apparently I was believed dead again. I wondered if that would make border-crossings any easier. I was still reading when Maygar came up from behind me and took my arm none too gently in his thick fingers. He led me down a street lined with white houses that looked like they’d been torn from the pages of a London storybook.

  Flags from different countries flapped over our heads. A limo slid by with tinted, bullet-proof glass and small square flags on the front of its hood. Another followed, flanked by military police on motorcycles.

  It struck me as interesting that Maygar had brought me here, where representatives from at least a dozen countries seemed to have taken up residence. Every one of the people inside those limousines would pay top dollar to see me collared and locked in a windowless room.

  Still, it was pretty, where we were.

  Dense with flowers, well-manicured shrubs and trees, the park was filled with strolling men in suits who held the arms of women wearing hats and gloves, giving it a strangely timeless feel. I looked down at my own hands, which were dyed darker than my normal skin tone. My normally stubby nails had been replaced with fakes to go with my new ID, although now
my clothes didn’t match that ID so well, or the dark red nail polish I wore. Touching the silver chain necklace I wore around my neck, I shoved my hands into my pockets.

  For the plane ride over, the seers used everything but surgery to disguise my appearance.

  They didn’t let me leave through Delhi, which was too close to Seertown. I flew out of Kolkata instead, wearing facial prosthetics, skin dye, blood patches on all my fingers in the event of a random racial screening, colored contact lenses, a wig, a hat, and several scarves over an expensive salwar kameez, a type of Indian clothing made up of a long tunic and baggy silk pants. My fingerprints and DNA matched my ident, which was that of an East Indian woman traveling for business with her merchant husband.

  My current attempt to blend was significantly more West than East, and consisted of men’s mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. Pretty low-tech, but surprisingly effective against the street-level facial recognition software employed by cameras that dotted most London public areas.

  I still wore the black wig and skin dye, blood patches and contact lenses under the dark shades, but the facial prosthetics had started to hurt, so I took about half of them off, after Maygar assured me that half would still be enough to fool the software.

  The Seven employed seers in London who could intercept a breach, as well.

  According to Maygar, London was a very “Seven-friendly” city. The Guard’s contacts in Scotland Yard and the local branch of SCARB would pick up any flags well in advance of the human authorities. The main reason for our caution had more to do with the Rooks, who still had people here, as well, although in lesser numbers than a lot of places.

  My pants and the long tee I wore were oversized and shapeless, and I wore tennis shoes, making me look like a punk American tourist. Considering the multiple versions of my face now in papers and feeds, I figured it was as good of a disguise as any.

  I glanced at another gabled house with high windows when Maygar thrust a carton of juice into my hand.

  “Stop looking up,” he said. “And drink. We’re not far.”

  “Have you been here before?”

  He grunted. “No, Bridge. Your husband and I were never on ‘dinner guest’ terms. Sadly.”