Shadow (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #4): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  “I don’t suppose she told you why she agreed to fuck me, did she, Rook?” he said.

  Revik flinched.

  He couldn’t help it.

  Pain whispered around his light, throwing it off its neat rails. Darkness tried to cover it, but the pain lived there too, so much older than––

  “Ah, yes.” Balidor’s eyes remained grave. “You do not like the blunt accuracy of my words. But I do not cater to your sensitivities, Dehgoies. For we must all be men one day, yes? And you are getting older now. You cannot continue in this way. Even for a Rook, it is undignified, to be such a child. Do you not think?”

  He paused for another lingering set of seconds.

  “But you did not answer my question. Did she tell you why? Why she did it?”

  When Revik didn’t speak, the other man’s smile grew more knowing.

  “No, she wouldn’t have. It was part of the infiltration, you see. Part of her deception of you. Given that, you can hardly be angry at her for not explaining her true reasoning.”

  Revik bit his tongue. It hurt, but not as much as he needed it to.

  The collar prevented him from holding back the anger that rippled his light, doubtless sparking where Balidor could see it.

  He would lose. He would lose everything, if he didn’t––

  Gods. His uncle would kill him.

  Or worse. He wouldn’t kill him.

  He would kill someone else.

  “…I trained her for months, for that op,” Balidor added. “I pretended to fight her on it, of course, to disapprove. I argued over every detail of her proposal, but still, I trained her. I fed her every scrap of intel and technique she needed to know in order to deceive you, Dehgoies.” Pausing, he gestured fluidly with a hand. “Then,” he said, sighing a little. “When she was well and truly invested, I helped her to realize it was the only way to be sure.”

  Balidor smiled, his eyes carrying a faint steel.

  “I explained to your wife that it was the only way to know for certain if she could shield from you well enough to infiltrate you. We had to be intimate. If she could keep that from you, then she would be ready.” He spread his hands. “Given that, she really had no choice.”

  Revik felt his heart stop in his chest.

  He stared at the other man, unable to hide his reaction entirely.

  At the same time, he remembered. He’d been obsessed with why he hadn’t felt it, why he hadn’t known the instant his wife let another man touch her.

  He still didn’t understand.

  How had Allie done that to him? Why?

  What had happened to her? What had this man done to his wife?

  Pain flickered off him, a grief so unbearable, he really thought it might kill him. He wanted it to kill him.

  The Adhipan leader gestured towards him, an affirmative in seer.

  Revik followed the motion, uncomprehending.

  “Simple,” Balidor said thoughtfully, studying Revik’s face. “Deceptively simple. She really was an easy mark. So desperate for any means to get close to you.”

  The dagger slid into his chest, hitting its mark.

  He fought to keep the pain of it from his light, but he couldn’t. He knew the Adhipan leader felt it hurt him. Gaos, it hurt him so badly.

  He would lose. He was going to die here. He would finally die.

  The thought brought a near-relief.

  “Then it was just a matter of using my light.” Balidor paused, his voice musing as he gazed into Revik’s eyes. “I admit, I was unprepared for how much it would affect me. She whimpered at the end. Actually whimpered… like a child. Does she do that for you?”

  Revik lunged against the chains.

  They caught before he made it more than a few feet.

  His whole body strained forward, as if trying to rip off his own limbs. The posture hurt like hell within seconds, and the collar kicked in as his light fought to reach the older seer, but he didn’t back down. He couldn’t back down.

  His mind didn’t work. He couldn’t think a single coherent thought.

  The chain caught when he was less than a foot from the other man’s face, but he couldn’t close the gap. A string of words came out of his lips that he barely heard, that didn’t penetrate his mind until later, and even then didn’t come close to expressing what he’d felt in that moment.

  “…rip your goddamned heart out of your chest… feed it to you…” he finished, fighting to breathe. “…give me time… give me time, you fucker…”

  The collar let off a higher pulse, blinding him with pain.

  In some back part of his mind, he realized it was cycling upwards as he tried to reach the other man with his light.

  He gasped when the pain worsened, turning to fire under his skin.

  He barely felt the metal cutting into his arms, into his wrists, closing off his chest. He stared into that face his wife had wanted hanging over her, and his mind fell into such a blackening rage it passed through him briefly that he might never get it back.

  For a long moment, he and Balidor only stared at each other in that space.

  He hung there, sweating with pain, staring into those gray eyes.

  Eventually, the collar did its work.

  Revik slumped back against the wall.

  He landed there in a heap, muscles twitching.

  He stared up at the other seer still, fighting to stay conscious, his mind shifting into a blank, lightless space. The fragments churned, leaving him desolate, lost in that dark, watching it wait for him. Adrenaline hurt deep in his abdomen, shaking his arms and hands, even his fingers. Vulnerability washed over him, fear––of being lost, of insanity, perhaps––but it felt deeper than mere madness. The physical pain didn’t come close to touching it.

  But the training remained there, too.

  Even now, parts of him assessed, calculated, catalogued.

  Even now, when he wanted to be dead, his uncle’s training kept him alive.

  For example, he knew something about the collar now.

  Even in those moments of blank near-death, he noticed that the pain wasn’t as bad as it could have been, with collars of this kind. The light muzzle they had on him was thick, but it concentrated mainly on the structures he used to perform telekinesis.

  The device did little to nothing to moderate emotions. They seemed to have left that part of his light raw on purpose. While a liability in some ways, the opening would cut both ways, leaving room for vague impressions of emotional reaction and even thoughts from them, if they thought loudly and consistently enough around him.

  He might be able to use that. He might.

  He would be able to feel her.

  For a moment he could only lean there, panting.

  Even in the midst of assessing his predicament, emotion continued to flare in his chest. When he blinked, he realized tears ran down his face––although, what they were from, he could no longer tell anymore.

  The older seer nodded, still staring into Revik’s face.

  “Yes, my friend,” he breathed, softer. “Yes, I understand. I surely do.”

  For the first time, the gray eyes smoldered with real anger.

  “Despite what I said, I regret very much that I let her go with you.”

  Balidor spoke low––so low, Revik doubted it would be picked up by surveillance.

  “I knew it was a mistake,” he murmured, softer. “It is one I will not repeat. Not ever. Do you understand me, Rook?”

  He stared at Revik, as if willing him to speak. Willing him to say he understood.

  Revik did understand, but kept it off his face.

  Finally, Balidor sighed, clicking a little in irritation.

  “I don’t think it will be an issue for long, Rook,” he said. “She will see your true face now. She will understand what you really are, under that costume they gave you.”

  Revik didn’t move his gaze, even when the other averted his.

  The knees straightened, bringing the older seer
gracefully back to full height.

  “So we each have made our promises to one another, yes?”

  Revik couldn’t form words, but he felt it through his entire body. Pain wrapped into grief, leaving only that darkness… the demon below.

  Promises.

  The Adhipan leader could phrase it to himself however he liked.

  He would be free one day.

  He would be free, in one way or the other.

  She would be waiting for him there, on the other side.

  And this time, Revik would be ready.

  4

  HOPE

  I SAT AT the table with the rest of them, silent with the rest of them.

  No one spoke until the recording finished playing, and even for a time after it ended.

  I felt Jon’s eyes on me as I slid fingers through my long dark hair, combing it out of my face.

  My adoptive brother Jon was the only human in the room. As I continued to watch his face, he clasped my fingers in his, using the hand that had lost two of its fingers.

  He never used to touch me with that hand, I thought, staring down at it. He seemed to have gotten over being self-conscious about the missing fingers.

  Lately, he touched me with that hand all the time.

  I had a brief flash of how he’d been in San Francisco, superimposing the old Jon over the new. I saw him back then, when he’d worked in a kung fu studio half the day, co-managing a tech company with some friends the other half. I remembered the guy who would rant about politics whenever he drank, who volunteered at homeless shelters and taught self-defense to domestic abuse survivors, who dated a different guy every few weeks, who just about every kung fu student of his had a crush on, male and female.

  He’d laughed all the time back then.

  He was so different these days, I barely remembered that other Jon.

  He was starting to look like the old Jon again, though.

  He’d regained most of his muscle from dedicated work in mulei, the seer martial art. He’d even gotten involved in politics again, with his boyfriend, Dorje. He sated his philosophical leanings by sitting in on teachings with Vash and his monks, and by studying these dense seer tomes that frankly would have bored me to tears. He was even meditating again, maybe more than he had when we lived in California.

  But his face would never be the same as it was back then.

  His features had hardened. Something in his hazel-colored eyes carried an intensity that hadn’t been present before. Sadness lived there too, even when he smiled. Even when he seemed otherwise happy, that more complex intensity flickered behind his irises.

  His hair had grown out in the past few months, a dirty blond, the same color as our human father’s. He wore it in a clip at the base of the neck, seer-fashion.

  I wondered if Dorje had given him the clip.

  I felt him staring back at me. I saw the worry in his human light as he studied my eyes.

  I knew my face showed something, but I didn’t know what.

  Looking up, I stared at the image that hung frozen on that wall monitor, of my husband, Revik, staring coldly at the man in front of him, eyes vacant of any expression, of anything I recognized. I saw nothing of the man I’d married in that stare.

  I didn’t even see anything in it I recognized from Syrimne, the man I’d grown to know while living with the Rebels.

  The person in those security feeds, I didn’t know at all, and while they’d explained it all to me, numerous times, I still didn’t understand.

  Maybe I didn’t want to understand.

  We sat around a heavy, semi-organic table, housed in a conference room that lived probably fifteen stories underground.

  The whole complex felt old and weirdly futuristic at the same time.

  Rooms combined an odd mix of seer tech and furniture that looked to date from the late fifties or early sixties. I’d even found a stack of records in one of the lounge areas, with singers like Dean Martin, Ella Fitzgerald, Buddy Holly, Elvis and Johnny Cash. I think the newest thing they had was Bob Dylan, which kind of jived with the dated feel of the caves in general.

  We‘d brought Revik here because of the tank.

  The organic holding cell, which we’d all come to call “the tank,” was the only thing we knew of that was strong enough to cut Revik’s light off from the light of the Dreng.

  Hopefully.

  It worked well enough in the past to nearly kill me when Balidor used it to cut my light off from Revik’s. It had been designed to remove a seer totally from the Barrier proper––meaning the space from which seers derived all their powers, and where over half of seer consciousness normally lived. Since the Barrier also housed pretty much every connection seers had to one another and to other beings, removing a seer from it entirely was no mean feat.

  Most devices that claimed to do it, only accomplished it at certain levels or frequencies, by housing them in a shielding construct of some kind.

  The tank was different.

  Which meant, in theory at least, the Dreng shouldn’t be able to reach Revik in there.

  It also meant I couldn’t reach him, not from outside the tank’s walls. On the plus side, it meant no other seers could track or find him, either.

  That same tank might be killing him, if I could believe what these seers were telling me––and not due to his separation from me.

  Maybe it just hurt that he actually did need the Dreng more than he needed me.

  “You’re sure that’s what’s wrong with him?” I said, looking at Vash.

  The old seer’s eyes held compassion. “Yes. I am so sorry, my dear.”

  “Have you done anything else to him?” I turned to Balidor. “Since I tranked him on the plane. Did you give him anything? Anything at all?”

  “We stabilized him in transport––”

  “I mean since he got here.”

  Another seer answered, speaking up from the other side of the room. Poresh, one of the senior infiltrators working under Balidor in the Adhipan, made a line in the air with his finger, a seer’s no. He’d been overseeing the care of Revik’s physical body, and now he looked me directly in the face, his voice falling into the cadence of a formal report.

  “There have been sedatives a number of times, Esteemed Bridge,” Poresh said, bowing. “These have merely been attempts to help him deal with anxiety, and the overt irrationality and aggression that accompany this state. Nothing we have given him would cause the effects you are witnessing. In fact, the drugs have mitigated those effects. Marginally, it is true, but they have kept him from hurting himself several times.”

  I grimaced, but didn’t speak.

  “Is he being fed enough?” Jon said. “He looks like he’s lost weight.”

  “He is fed enough.” Poresh looked at Jon. “He does not always eat. He is fed a lot, Esteemed Bridge,” Poresh added, glancing at me, taking in my more pointed look. “Three meals a day. Sometimes more. And as much water as he can drink.”

  “Is it seer food?” I said.

  “Seer food only, Esteemed Bridge. You had told us he would be unlikely to eat anything else. We also supply him with specific items when he asks, such as hiri.”

  “He likes curry,” Jon said. “It’s about the only human food he’ll eat a lot of.”

  Balidor gave Jon an openly disbelieving look, one laced with irritation.

  I’d watched the Adhipan leader change, too, since I’d first come to know him. I knew I was partly responsible for that. I also knew there was absolutely nothing I could do to fix it.

  For the same reason, I shoved the thought away from me.

  My mind was caught in a loop, and I couldn’t get out of it. I stared at Balidor, but not for who he was to me. I stared at him because he was still the best infiltrator we had of all the seers, and because I needed him to help me fix Revik.

  I’d already been told by a number of the older seers that Balidor was an expert when it came to deprogramming Rooks. He’d been doing it since the Ro
oks first appeared openly on the scene, in the period before World War II. He’d been fighting the Dreng for even longer than that. When it came to various corruptions, symbioses and dependencies that could damage a seer’s light, Balidor knew what the hell he was doing.

  I just hoped he understood his role here.

  I still worried he was running his own game alongside mine. I already knew he was capable of it. If he thought my judgment was compromised, for example, he wouldn’t hesitate––and he could easily argue it was, considering who Revik was to me.

  Really, what was an infiltrator, if not a professional liar?

  “‘Dori?” I said. “I need you to explain this to me. He wasn’t like this. Even on the plane. He was angry at me, and harsh. He even threatened me. But he wasn’t like this.”

  It wasn’t the Adhipan leader who answered my question.

  Vash spoke up instead, from the other side of the long table.

  The decision to include Vash in this little pow-wow had been mine. Balidor didn’t want to drag the elder Council member into a discussion he felt was too “low-level” for Vash’s senior status. Balidor argued it was more of a technical meeting, not a general strategy session, that we’d be wasting the elder’s valuable time.

  I insisted.

  In the end, I flat-out refused to have the meeting without him.

  Vash still had the best sight of anyone I knew. Moreover, I knew Balidor’s real reason for wanting Vash out, whether he’d admit it to himself or not. Balidor and a number of his Adhipan infiltrators saw Vash as “emotionally compromised” on the subject of Revik, due to his past with my husband, and their previous relationship.

  Vash loved Revik. He viewed him almost as a son.

  To the others, that made him biased.

  To me, it made him an ally, and someone I could trust.

  Now Vash sat on the opposite side of the rectangular table from me, wearing his usual uniform of a sand-colored robe. He’d sat there quietly through most of the discussion so far, his long hair tied loosely back in a clip, his expression unmoving as they played the surveillance footage of Revik collared inside the tank.

  I could tell by looking at him that he hadn’t been unaffected by what he’d seen. Vash’s narrow face almost always appeared to be smiling in some form, whether at his sculpted lips or in his dark, fathomless eyes. He wasn’t smiling today, though.