It occurred to him again, that Allie had wanted to come out through the front door.
Gods almighty.
Another gun went off, seemingly right by his head.
Balidor ducked. He turned reflexively, staring down into the crowd and meeting the gaze of a seer he recognized from the ranks of the Rebels. The female disappeared before he could get a lock on her, melting into the uneven line of bodies pressing in on all sides.
He sent her image to the Lao Hu commander, an older, silver-eyed infiltrator named Ditrini, who acknowledged the imprint with a pulse of appreciation. He sent it to the others under his command before he’d withdrawn from Balidor’s light.
Whoever she was, she’d been strong enough to see through his shield.
Ute, his mind supplied. Her name was Ute.
He sent the name to the Lao Hu commander, as well, though he doubted it would be of much use here.
They’d finally reached the glass doors. He flashed a Barrier structure at the Lao Hu security detail for entry, but scarcely paused, still holding Cass in front of him to get her inside the bullet-proof walls first.
Seconds later, all three of them stumbled out of the crush of uniformed bodies and into the building’s main lobby. The organic-paned doors shut behind them with a sucking sound.
The deafening sound of screams and distant gunshots instantly muted.
The three-story lobby was eerily quiet.
The chaos in the Barrier didn’t lessen, however. The urgency Balidor felt there kept his fingers tight on Cass’s arm, his legs moving in a near jog for the corridor housing the suite of elevators that led to the upper floors.
The main lobby was empty of anyone apart from human private security. The military must have evacuated the building when they realized what was going on outside. Either that, or they’d restricted movement to the upper floors until the disturbance could be contained.
Lao Hu infiltrators stood watch over the elevators themselves, however.
Flashing those guards a second Barrier signal as he passed, Balidor ignored the few curt nods he received in greeting. Instead he sent a packed missive to their leader that Allie and her protection unit would be leaving within the hour.
Seeing the male acknowledge this with a seer’s gesture, Balidor didn’t wait, but pulled Cass in after him once the first set of elevator doors opened.
He prayed no one had deviated from protocol as he hit the button for the top floor, motioning Baguen to hurry up as he shuffled his considerable bulk in after them.
Allie could be damned persuasive when she wanted––and stubborn.
If she convinced the others to go along with some mad scheme of hers that involved her being visible to anyone outside the building, he’d roll some fucking heads. Hell, there were seers outside who wouldn’t hesitate to blow up the whole damned building to get at her.
Leaning against the blue-tinted mirror that made up the far wall, he released Cass only after the elevator car began gliding upwards on smooth rails.
Cass looked dazed, her coffee-colored eyes partly out of focus as she glanced at the same mirror Balidor leaned against. She lightly touched her forehead, staring at the blood on her fingers once she had, as if unsure how it got there.
Baguen loomed over her in seconds, using a cloth from his pocket to daub gently at the same threading of blood. He put some pressure to the cut on her forehead when it started to drip down to her eyebrows and eyes, making her blink and wince.
Balidor watched them without speaking, wiping sweat from his own forehead with his sleeve, only to find at least some of that was blood, as well.
Touching his face more tentatively, he glanced back at the mirror, too. His fingers and eyes marked the length of a long graze by one ear and over one cheek. He couldn’t help marveling that he hadn’t felt it, or how close he’d come to seeing his own end out there.
He carefully smoothed the sweat-stuck hair back from his forehead.
Glancing at the other two, he was rewarded with a scowl from Baguen, who clearly blamed him for the state of his girlfriend’s head. Clicking at the Wvercian mildly, Balidor chose not to remind the giant seer that in injuring her, he might also have saved her life.
He supposed he might not have appreciated it much, either, if their positions were reversed.
“Are you all right?” he asked Cass instead.
Still dazed, she nodded, looking up at the cut on his own face. When Balidor reached for her, Baguen hit away his hand, grunting in irritation.
“Don’t touch,” he said in accented Prexci.
Glancing at Cass, Balidor raised an eyebrow, and she laughed. Reassured, he leaned back against the brass rail, closing his eyes.
They reached the correct floor a few seconds later.
Balidor’s eyes opened with the doors.
He felt something in his chest relax when his gaze immediately found the second security detail out in front of the correct room. He noted their raised weapons with approval even as he flashed the third Barrier countersign, walking out in front of Baguen and Cass.
It was protocol of course; the two seers at the door knew him.
He bowed only enough to acknowledge theirs, then pushed against the heavy, dark wood of the conference room doors.
He stopped dead when he saw her, half in relief and half in frustration.
She still had that effect on him, even now.
2
DEMONSTRATION
ALLIE AND JON looked up from where they huddled together at the far end of a long, polished oak conference table. The table took up most of the center of the wide room, surrounded by high-backed and expensive-looking office chairs.
Allie appeared dwarfed inside the dark brown leather of hers, and out of place in her jeans, clinging T-shirt and laced combat boots.
Her face held an almost unnerving focus, however.
She looked away from Balidor after barely looking at him at all.
He followed her gaze to a large monitor on the wall.
The wall-length screen showed realtime footage of the mob outside, but it was a different scene from the one Balidor had just left. Bodies had been replaced by avatars and the Hong Kong streets by a virtual landscape. It took a few seconds of squinting at the long monitor before he could reorient himself enough to superimpose his memory of the actual place.
Once he had, he got his first unobstructed view of the sheer size of the crowd.
He winced when he heard shots still going off, watching the Lao Hu infiltrators along with SCARB using organically-enhanced rifles to fire strategically at individuals in the crowd. It was clear they were trying not to hit civilians, but there were too many of them.
Humans and seers scrambled back, trying to run away from another succession of gas canisters that bounced on the pavement in the thickest crush of bodies. The Hong Kong police appeared to be reinforcing the barricade where they could, but weren’t having much luck. As soon as the gas dispersed, the crowd surged back, trying to force their way up the steps.
Balidor tried to track the direction of the gunfire coming from the other side. He was a little nonplussed to note that most of it came from windows and rooftops, not from the crowd itself. Dark forms in SCARB uniforms started to disperse in those areas as well, and a few shootouts began on building rooftops as flyers cruised overhead, making another loop back towards the tall office building, which in the virtual landscape appeared to be made of gold glass.
Balidor flinched when he saw another civilian body fall as the crowd rippled backwards.
He could feel frustration off the Lao Hu infiltrators, and the Adhipan.
The latter took an oath not to take life unnecessarily, human or seer. The Lao Hu were loyal to the Chinese, and didn’t look kindly on being forced to fire into a crowd of civilians who technically fell under their protection.
The image capturing device swiveled, zooming in on faces of humans and seers in the crowd. One collapsed right as the flyer turned, half of his h
ead missing from a rifle’s bullet. The avatar of the seer wavered, then showed his true face, once it was clear he was dead.
His eyes stared upwards, half of his temple exploded into bone shards and brain fragments.
For a moment Balidor could only watch with Allie and Jon, equally silent.
The crowd surged again, trampling over those wounded and killed even as screams filled the room from the conference room’s built-in speakers. More shots went off.
The chants grew louder in the pause, and Balidor realized they’d never really stopped.
“Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge!”
“Vengeance for the Sword! Give us the Sword!”
“Save our Savior! Save Syrimne! Death to the blood traitor!”
The image broke into three separate sections as text scrolled at the bottom of each.
In one, a rooftop battle raged between SCARB and armed seers wearing street clothes. In the second, faces of the crowd contorted in anger as they shook signs, screaming when bullets came too close. In the third, a woman carrying a megaphone led a group of seers and humans in singing an old seer protest song by one building.
Balidor didn’t bother to try and make out the words. He knew the tune from the original protests, back in the 1920s, when the first set of racial purges took place.
The Evolutionist Movement.
Gaos, Balidor thought. That was one movement they didn’t need rising up again.
Clicking his tongue, he felt his anger worsen.
“Are you satisfied, Bridge Alyson?” he found himself saying, not caring how cold his voice sounded. “Are you ready to abandon this fool’s errand at last? Or would you prefer to be dead, as well as despised?”
Turning, she only stared up at him, her pale green eyes like mirrors.
Looking at her face, he found his anger draining away, replaced by something closer to frustration, maybe even grief. At times, she looked more like her husband than he felt comfortable acknowledging, even to himself.
Lately, that tendency had been worse.
Whatever she’d done in the end, to get him out, she’d spent months with him there. She’d spent months entwined with his energy, and with the light and energy of his people. She'd spent months as one of the pawns of the Dreng.
More than that, she’d fallen for him.
She could pretend all she wanted that she only loved the person her husband used to be, before he went back to being Syrimne, killer of worlds. Balidor knew the truth. He’d seen it on her face, in her eyes, as soon as he’d watched her look at her unconscious husband in the back of that private plane. This wasn’t just about the man she’d married, not anymore.
She loved him now, too. She loved Syrimne.
It didn’t seem to matter to her how evil the son of a bitch was, or how many people he’d killed. Somehow, he’d won her over anyway, and now she loved both of them, the old version of Dehgoies Revik and the new one. She’d kidnapped him for that reason. She’d risked all of them for that reason. She’d risked war––real war––for that reason.
Dehgoies, of course, had wanted her with him, too.
He’d done everything in his power to strengthen that connection between them, to grow it any way he could during the six months she spent with him and his “Rebellion.” He’d wanted her to fight side-by-side with him, to help him take over the world.
Of course he called it “freeing the seer race” from their human overlords.
Sometimes Balidor wondered if Allie saw it that way, too.
Since she’d come back, she’d been different. Colder somehow.
Even what she’d done to Dehgoies himself contained flavors of that cold.
It wasn’t that she’d gotten him out, or even that she’d kidnapped and collared him. She’d managed to deceive her husband at a far greater level than Balidor ever envisioned when they’d planned that mission together. She’d also done it with a ruthlessness that Balidor wouldn’t have thought her capable of before all this.
The very fact that she had been capable of it made him uneasy, truthfully.
She’d used Dehgoies’ own devotion to her against him.
She’d used his trust of her, his love for her, his need for her, as his mate, against him. She’d used sex against him, too, in a way most seers didn’t do to one another, mainly due to the vulnerability of all seers in that area. Moreover, it was an achilles’ heel that had been exploited in seers by humans since the time of First Contact.
That vulnerability was multiplied exponentially in bonded mates.
When Balidor really thought about it from that perspective, the whole op made him feel faintly ill. He also felt somewhat responsible, since he’d been the one to train her for it.
In a way, he almost understood the outrage in the seers protesting below.
She’d gone after her own mate.
She’d done that to her own mate.
The fact that Balidor truly believed her husband to be evil, and a deadly threat to the continued existence of both races didn’t change that fundamental fact overly. It only made him wonder about her, as well.
He knew he wasn’t alone in feeling the Dreng seethe through the edges of her living light. Truthfully, he’d felt the change in her aleimi even before she’d left with Dehgoies for that Rebel stronghold in the mountains. He’d felt it since her husband turned back into Syrimne.
It was worse now, though––undeniably worse.
When she answered him, he even imagined he heard the Dreng in her voice.
“Yeah,” she said, still holding his eyes with that empty gaze. “I’m ready, ‘Dori.”
Feeling his anger deflate still more, Balidor just looked at her, at a loss.
He glanced at Jon. After the barest pause, he realized the human felt it, too.
Jon was human, but he felt a lot. More than he should, really.
Balidor stared briefly at Jon’s mutilated hand, the place where two of his fingers had been removed with a jagged knife by a psychotic seer.
“What about you, ‘Dor,” Jon said, glancing up. “Are you ready?”
Balidor met his gaze. Seeing the creases in the human’s forehead, he saw that Jon had been noticing the expression in his face, too.
Nodding a little to the human, Balidor forced a sigh, clicking.
He needed to talk to Jon––and to Vash. Maybe one of them could get her to see reason. Balidor himself certainly couldn’t. Maybe it was his own fault; he couldn’t exactly separate out his own feelings in a way that made sense these days.
Somewhere in that pause, her eyes returned to the screen.
Balidor watched her stare up at the flickering images jerking along the wall. He could discern nothing there, not from her face or light. He couldn’t tell if she felt the deaths they’d caused in coming here, or if she’d even acknowledged such a thing to herself at all.
Jon took her hand as she continued to stare up. He gripped her fingers tightly, as if trying to reach her behind that flat gaze, as well.
Just when Balidor was about to give up, to usher both of them out of the room and to the waiting helicopters, he saw Allie stiffen.
”What the hell?” Jon muttered, frowning from next to her. “Jesus. What now?”
Balidor followed their eyes back to the screen. It occurred to him only then, the crowd had gone silent. It was as if the monitor had been muted, but no one touched the controls.
The chanting stopped. So did the gunshots, and the screams.
A group of tall figures wearing all black formed a line in the middle of the crowd.
They stood in a newly-cleared circle in what had been the thickest part of the crush. Balidor could not tell how they’d managed to create that space so quickly, but assumed they must be seers. Like some kind of street performance troupe, they now stood perfectly still in a straight line, as if waiting for a signal to begin.
Balidor frowned, stepping deeper into the room.
Something was definitely wrong h
ere. He could feel it, more than see it.
He glanced at Allie, but she was frowning too. He saw no emotion there, but a clinical kind of puzzlement stood in her eyes as she watched the row of black forms on the screen.
Realizing she was trying to see them with her light, Balidor did the same, dipping into the Barrier to try and get a better look at the row of people in black kevlar.
When he focused his aleimi on them, however, he hit a solid wall.
He couldn't see past it, even after repeated tries, using a number of different sight tricks to try and get around their shield. All he could say for certain was that the shield was being reinforced from somewhere else. Somewhere not in Hong Kong––or even Asia.
Whatever created it, it was damned strong.
“Sweeps?” Allie asked him, without turning her head.
Balidor split his aleimi so that he was looking at the shield from several different angles. With the portion of his aleimi still in the room, he turned his head, glancing at her.
“No.” He knew that signature well enough. “No connection to World Court at all. Or the Lao Hu. It’s not even related to Rook technology under Galaith, not unless it’s new.”
“Could they be Rebels?” Jon said, looking between them. “Salinse’s people?”
That time, it was Allie who shook her head. “No. I don't think so.”
“Can you get through?” Balidor asked her.
After a pause, she shook her head again.
“No,” was all she said.
The men in black kevlar raised heavy weapons, aiming them at the crowd. They didn’t carry regular rifles, Balidor noticed, but dark green, semi-organics with stubby, thick barrels, too wide for normal bullets. They looked like different models of what the Hong Kong police had been using to send tear gas into the crowd.
Before he could say anything, Balidor heard the lower-pitched thunk of the propulsion devices going off, a heavier and slower sound than regular gunfire.
Once again, Balidor saw gas canisters bounce on the pavement.
White clouds exploded in round bursts as soon as they hit, briefly obscuring avatars, as well as virtual buildings and street kiosks near where the canisters landed. The clouds didn’t linger, as the previous gas clouds had done. Nor did Balidor hear the screams he would have expected with most nerve agents used on crowds. He didn’t see anyone in range of the smoke coughing, or rubbing watering eyes. The gas dissipated quickly and invisibly into the air, so it hadn’t been designed to create a diversion, either.
Shadow (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #4): Bridge & Sword World Page 2