Revik raises shackled hands, blinking against the shock of light.
As I watch, the blurred lines of the faceless man begin to clarify.
Features appear behind a sheen of liquid light. I see the outline of a handsome face, not completely young, but a young middle-age.
He studies the man on the bench, smiles.
“Rolf Schenck?”
…then the four of us stand on a hill above lines of SS, where the third of three gasoline tanks already burns. When it explodes, the shock rips holes in the turf, throwing wood and iron as shrapnel, tearing into the bodies of the standing men.
Terian hits Revik playfully on the chest, then starts down the hill at a run.
“What are you?” Revik asks Galaith.
“Perhaps you should ask yourself that question, Rolf…”
I know who you are, I breathe, softer.
…and again, I fight with an espresso maker.
A monitor displays news feeds over the bar, where the President of the United States smiles at a press conference. Young, handsome, charismatic, the whole world looks up to him. Cass hangs over the lunch counter, leaning towards me in her waitressing uniform, her butt in the air, and she looks incredibly young to me now, like an overgrown child compared to the woman I was jealous of in London.
“What’s the pool up to now?” she says. “Seventy bucks? Eighty?”
…and I stand in Revik’s study, pointing a gun at Revik.
My eyes glow a pale green, faintly visible in the sunlight from the windows.
“Allie.” Tension vibrates his words. “I would tell you, I swear I would—”
Revik! I insert myself between him and the version of me holding the gun. I remember that moment in Germany, where the younger Revik seemed to look at me. I had thought he was dead then, but he wasn’t.
He’s not dead now, either.
Revik, I’m here! I wave my arms, desperate. REVIK! Look at me!
“…Even if I did,” he says to the other me. “I don’t remember—”
REVIK! I scream. I slam into him with my light. LOOK AT ME!
He turns, staring at me. The echo fades.
For an endless pause, he just stands there, looking at me through clear eyes, staring at me from only a few feet away. His eyes shift between the past me and the present…
For the moment, Galaith is gone.
It is only us.
Revik… I’m here! I leap forward, grasping hold of him with my light. When he tries to look at the past me again, the one holding the gun, I shake his arm. No! This already happened! Where are you now? Can you show me?
The London apartment melts. I feel him slowly come back awake…
Positive flashes to negative.
He hangs in a dark space, immobilized by silver strands. They feed on him. Eyes roll back in pleasure as they draw on his light, a near sensual repose. In terror, he cries out…
…and in the study, Revik staggers.
I hold his arm tighter, supporting him with my light. He looks back at the version of me frozen in time, the determination on my face as I grip the Lugar in my hand. Cass, Jon, Eddard and Maygar all stand frozen in various poses as they react to a scene that can no longer be played out. Then Revik looks at me, and his eyes change.
This time, he sees me. He really sees me.
Allie? Where are we?
Revik. You’re really here. Looking at him, my happiness fades. I feel the weakening of his light, the hunger of the beings behind him. He is dying. I clutch his arm tighter. Revik, listen to me. Can you get out, if I distract them?
Allie, he says. No. No! I won’t leave you.
I kiss his face. You won’t have to. The succession order… do you remember how it works? How the pieces fit together?
Confusion darkens his features. I don’t have it, Allie.
I have it, I tell him. You gave it to me, remember? On the ship? But all I have are the numbers. I need you to make sense of it. Can you remember enough to do that?
His eyes shine with a faint light. But something is there, some glimmer of recognition. I can only hope it is enough.
Yes, he says, still concentrating. I think so.
I kiss him again; I can’t help it. As I do, I hear it, the whispering of the numbers. It’s a sound I haven’t stopped hearing for months.
I look up at Revik. Seeing the distance in his eyes, I shake his arm, gripping him tighter. Revik, listen to me. You were working for Vash. You were a Nazi for Vash. Do you remember? You let them recruit you. You’ve carried the succession order ever since. For Vash. For all of us.
Doubt fills his face.
After a pause, he shakes his head. No, Allie.
Don’t argue with me, Revik… I know this is true. Just trust me. Trust me on this, please. You’re one of the good guys. Don’t let yourself die. Please.
I slide my light into his, and feel him react as I show him the numbers. Even inside his confusion, his light connects with them easily, with a familiarity that is clear in the space. I watch him unlock the key to the succession order, until I can see it, too.
It expands around us in clean, geometric shapes, rotating with a visual mathematical dance I cannot look away from. There is beauty in this thing, despite how it’s been used. I see that beauty. Feel it. Awe steals over me as I realize he created it.
This is Revik’s work I am seeing––Revik’s mind.
I see it, I tell him, that awe in my thoughts. Do you?
When the numbers light up around us, a faint wonder touches his eyes.
Yes, he says.
They’re ready, I tell him. Vash and the others. I think I can get a signal to them. Wait for me. I kiss him again. I love you. Wait for me. Please.
His eyes change. Before he speaks, his outline fades.
Terror reaches me, that feeling of being ripped in half. I feel it fleetingly in my heart, that I may never see him again.
Then I am alone, in an endless chasm of dark.
But light lives in the tiniest of fragments, and I finally know exactly what it is I’m supposed to do.
Drawing the numbers, Revik’s numbers, up and out of my light, I superimpose them over the model of the Pyramid itself…
…and imprint the succession order simultaneously into every seer in the Rooks’ network.
As I do, I know.
I’ve known all along who the Head is.
49
REALIZATION
ONE SEER WATCHES quietly, from a dark, remote corner of the Pyramid where he hides.
There are crevices even here, even in the group mind.
Places to hide between the connectivities the Pyramid cultivates. Places where the others don’t often go, where constructs live inside constructs and one can disappear into the silver strands, become a bare whisper within the intricacies of the landscape.
The structure rotates in a prismatic dance, every light connected to every light.
He hides in that dance, still as death.
It is not easy to remain unseen while crouching inside these lit strands, yet the Pyramid is his home. It encompasses everything he knows, terrifying and magnificent. It keeps him from the void. Its music lulls him, singing to him in the dark.
For the same reason, he feels it when she comes.
Her music is different than his. So different, he knows the precise instant when she enters his home. He feels the conflict, the chaos she evokes. He feels her with Galaith.
For a long time, he puzzles over what she is doing there.
Then, out of nowhere, he sees it.
The succession order is laid out neatly before him, a map of light connecting one Rook to the next, spread before him in perfect, beautiful lines. Like his brothers and sisters, he looks for the Head, tries to count how many steps he is from that highest, most coveted spot.
The Pyramid shakes.
Reflexively, he makes his light even more dim.
It takes him another moment to understand the cause of that instab
ility.
They are killing one another. All around him, seers are attacking seers, hammering blows at one another, trying to destroy one another. Lower-level seers attack the lights they see above them, pausing only to defend against those seers who strike at them from below.
He sees lights flicker and snuff out. He sees death around him, pain. Ambition, fear and triumph war on all sides of the silver threads. Resentments long held flare up in the dark, turn to hatred and hotter flashes of light. He watches them feed on one another. Silence and rippled light show places where Rooks are dimming themselves as he has, trying to disappear.
Already, though, more than half have joined the fray.
Terian is lucky. Lucky he will not be missed.
He feels the structure tremble. It shudders more seriously that time, more dangerously. He still cannot see the successor’s chair, but he is getting closer, rising higher all the time as he seeks it, ever-groping through metallic dark. He counts each place in the hierarchy, follows each piece as one fits into the next. He ignores the chaos in his single-mindedness, as he traces them all the way up to where his light hovers.
Until he can see no further.
It is quiet there, and he is alone.
Eventually, the reason dawns on him.
Excitement flares his light, so that he makes himself briefly visible. He barely feels the ensuing blows, barely hears the cracking in several branches of his aleimi. They can’t touch him. Not anymore. A smile lights up his entire being.
He occupies the successor’s chair.
He. Terian alone.
As the realization hits, he is already giving the signal.
50
PYRAMID
PRESIDENT DANIEL CAINE blinked to clear his vision.
Frowning, he stared around at the mostly older faces. Something was wrong. He could feel it, with every particle of his living light. He needed someone else at the table who felt it, too. Someone besides Ethan, who, for obvious reasons, remained in absentia.
Caine barely noticed the silence as he surveyed the oval room.
That is, until the Secretary of State broke it.
“Sir?” As per usual, the man sounded as if he were about to go into cardiac arrest. “Sir,” he repeated, as Caine knew he would until he turned and met the man’s gaze.
Once he had, the Secretary resumed in the same, caught-breath voice.
“The terrorists have been isolated, sir,” he said, flushing a darker red. “They no longer appear to be fighting back. The Prime Minister is asking whether you still recommend an air strike. They now estimate forty to fifty-five civilian casualties from that approach, sir, even with the evacuations. They also no longer feel it’s necessary. Their Home Office Security is now recommending gassing the top floors, prior to any gunplay. I really think you should consider this approach, sir…”
Caine rose to his feet.
Normally he would smile here, even tell a joke. His ability to play that role evaporated about thirty minutes earlier, however, when the network reported that his friend, Doctor Xarethe––the real one––could not be located.
He now had to assume that Terian, in one form or another, had killed her.
The prospect more than displeased him.
To call Xarethe irreplaceable was an understatement in the extreme.
Other unresolved questions tugged at his mind, pulling on him with increasing urgency.
Alyson managed to evade him somehow within his own network, a feat that should have been impossible, yet happened. That left the outstanding issue of what to do with Dehgoies if Caine found himself backed into a corner, forced to kill yet another of Revik’s mates.
As much as Caine hated to admit it, Terian was right.
The entire cycle would be disrupted if he killed the Bridge now. Before, when he’d thought Dehgoies dead, that prospect bothered him less.
Now, it struck him as borderline reckless.
The rest of The Four were already here.
Making up his mind, Caine walked to a telephone sitting on an antique wooden cabinet to the right of the couches and chairs where all of his advisors stood and sat. Without thinking, he picked up the old-fashioned receiver, held it to his ear and waited. Feeling eyes on him, Caine realized only then that he could have used his earpiece to make the call. Or, more efficiently still, he could have used his newly implanted impulse-activated network, or IAN.
He ignored their collective stares.
Well, he did until it struck him that the old land line telephone might be purely decorative.
It was one problem with a long life. Old habits had a tendency to return under stress.
Caine lowered the handset to hang it up, when a voice rose, sounding tinny and far away. He returned the receiver promptly to his ear.
“You needed something, sir?” the voice repeated.
“James?” Caine felt his shoulders unclench. “Where’s Ethan?”
“Sir?” His security chief’s puzzlement wafted through the line.
“Ethan. Our Vice President. Where is he?”
“The Vice President is still housed at his residence, sir,” James said. “You said not to wake him.”
“Yes, well, I’ve changed my mind. I want him brought here. At once. To the bunker.”
The bunker. It was what Caine’s wife nicknamed the newly-renovated Oval Office when she first saw it with its bullet-proof window coverings and armored outer walls. The moniker stuck. She also called the Cabinet’s main conference room the War Room, after that Peter Sellers movie mocking the 1950s paranoia about the Russians hoarding telekinetic seers.
That name stuck, as well.
Like a faraway strain of music, Caine felt something crack. He knew it was another piece of the Pyramid fissuring off. He realized James remained on the line.
“Wake him, will you?” Caine said. “Tell him it’s an emergency.”
He was in the process of hanging up the old plastic handle, when the door to the Oval Office slammed open.
Caine’s eyes swiveled along with the rest. He found himself staring at the leaning, gasping figure in the door’s opening. For a long moment, nothing else broke the tense silence of the room. Everyone watched the man standing there clutch his chest, but like Caine, they didn’t move.
“Ethan,” Caine said at last. He cleared his throat, recovered slightly. “Ethan. My God. You look terrible. What happened?”
Ethan Wellington, the Vice President of the United States, gripped the door frame, leaving a smear of blood on the white-painted wood. He still breathed in pants, holding his chest with one hand, wearing a trench coat over what looked like bare feet and pajamas.
How in the hell he had gotten there, from the Vice Presidential mansion through security? Caine’s mind began to turn over possibilities, concerns, worries.
Then, in the same set of breaths, he dismissed his lingering doubt.
This might work even better.
Let the whole Cabinet see the terrorist attack with their own eyes. Whatever Ethan said at this point could hardly matter, when Caine could simply have his seers manipulate the memory of every human in the room.
“Ethan.” Caine’s voice emerged stronger. “I just called James to fetch you. Are you all right? What happened?”
Ethan gave a half-gasp. It resembled a laugh.
He raised his head to stare at his friend and President, and the expression on his face took Caine aback. A lot more of Terian lived inside that single body now. A lot more.
Caine’s infiltrators had been busy.
Turning from Caine, Ethan addressed the others, his brown eyes flashing amber in the reflected light.
“I have ordered the Secret Service to arrest President Caine.” He gasped, forcing out words. “I’ve asked for him to be detained.”
The Secretary of State laughed nervously.
“What charge?”
Galaith turned. Rogers had spoken, his Chief of Staff.
“Attempted murder,” Ethan s
aid. Wincing in pain, he clutched his side. “Conspiring with enemies of the United States.” His eyes flickered up like spotlights, meeting Caine’s. “I’ll probably know of a few more things he’s done by the end of the day… he’s mentally unhinged.”
Caine shook his head in bewilderment. “What possible benefit can you see from this, Ethan?”
The question meant more than anyone at the table could know.
Taking a step towards the door, Caine snapped his fingers at the porter standing at the back of the room. “What in god’s name are you waiting for?” he thundered. “Call for medical help. Now. The Vice President’s obviously been hurt!”
Caine walked towards Ethan, thinking he would just use the Barrier to knock him out.
Ethan backed away with another short laugh.
Before Caine could reach the door, Jarvesch, the Secretary of Defense, got to her feet and inserted herself between them. She approached Ethan’s bent form, touching his shoulder even as a kitchen staffer wheeled in their breakfast on a pushcart stacked with silver trays. Caine heard the porter ask for the White House physician over the central speaker as the wheels of the cart squeaked jerkily across the carpeted floor.
The kitchen staffer brought everything to a table that stood to the right of Caine’s desk. He began loading the breakfast trays laboriously.
The secret service agent by the door clicked his fingers to get the staffer’s attention, frowning when the man didn’t turn.
Caine only noticed this peripherally.
Tensing, he watched Jarvesch take Ethan’s arm, looking into his face. Then she cried out, opening his coat.
“He’s been shot!” She turned to the rest of the room. “He’s been shot several times! God, Ethan! What happened?”
The kitchen staffer stood stock still, gaping, holding a towel in one hand and the handle of the cart in the other. He stared at the Vice President along with the others.
Then he turned, facing President Caine.
Before anyone could move, before Caine even glanced at him really, the staffer raised the towel and squeezed off three rounds in rapid succession.
Rook (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #1): Bridge & Sword World Page 47