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

by JC Andrijeski

  Jon just shrugged, leaning back in the padded chair.

  Resting a hand on Dorje’s thigh, he sighed, staring up at the ceiling as he massaged the muscle there slowly.

  “All right,” he said peaceably. “Whatever you say, Dorj.”

  “It’s not going to work, Jon.”

  “I heard you, man. Chill.”

  Jon continued to massage the seer’s leg, working on muscles he knew the other liked.

  When he still hadn’t stopped a few minutes later, Dorje leaned back, his arms still tense where they crossed over a chest that wasn’t large, but muscular from mulei. Jon saw the other man’s eyes close after a few minutes when he continued to massage him.

  Jon waited a little while longer, still working over the muscle in his leg. When he felt the other starting to give in, relaxing more, he slid closer to him. The seer winced, but didn’t meet his eyes, or push his hand away. He sat there, silent, as Jon worked his way up his leg. After a few more minutes, Dorje made a low sound, even as his breath came harder.

  “You’re a bad man, Jon. Even for a human.”

  “It didn’t seem like you minded all that much.”

  “I mean it. Not cool, Jon.”

  Dorje’s long fingers gripped Jon’s shirt though, pulling him closer.

  “I know,” Jon said. He kissed Dorje’s neck, then his mouth. He lingered just long enough that the seer followed him when he raised his head.

  “I won’t forget this,” the seer added, short. “It’s taking advantage, Jon… taking advantage of what I am.”

  “Like you do, every day, with the seer super powers?”

  “This is different. This is personal.”

  “My mind isn’t personal?”

  “I don’t always mean to do it––” Dorje began.

  “Not always?” Jon smiled. “Whatever you say, cousin.”

  “I mean it, Jon. Things will not be cool with us, if you keep doing this…” Dorje’s voice dropped off as Jon reached for his belt. It grew husky as he closed his eyes, fighting to control his breathing. He gripped Jon tighter, pulling him closer.

  Jon felt desire flush off the other, like a pulse of heat in his chest, right before Dorje’s hand clenched.

  “…Goddamn it. I hate it when you do this. You know I do.”

  “I know,” Jon murmured, still watching the other’s face. “You’ll forgive me though, cousin.” Kissing him again, he smiled faintly, knowing he’d won when he recognized the glazed look he could see forming in the other’s eyes.

  “Maybe I won’t. I won’t forever, Jon.”

  “Yes, you will,” Jon said. “Forever and ever, cousin… just like I will you.”

  7

  FIRST CONTACT

  DESPITE WHAT HE’D said to Dorje, Jon entered the tank cautiously.

  Pushing his way through the heavy green portal, he waited until he heard the lock click as the seal set against the dense organic wall.

  He knew Dorje stood at the console––that he probably ran there after he locked the door behind him with the keypad and the pressure-sealing wheel. Jon also knew he likely stood with his hand poised over the gas contingency, cursing both of them under his breath.

  The gas had been one of the first safety features Balidor ordered installed. Anyone messing with the door who didn’t have the right pass-key triggered it. Anything breaking the seal of any one of the chains around Revik’s limbs triggered it, unless that breach was authorized in the system via an elaborate Barrier and physical key process.

  The collar malfunctioning triggered it.

  The collar breaking its seal triggered it.

  The chains breaking any element of their connection to the wall triggered it.

  Every single person comprising the security team could also manually trigger it, either via voice command in their headsets, a VR trigger, or a Barrier impulse. They also had a sequence that could be hand-keyed into the console itself.

  According to Allie, the gas was no joke.

  If Jon did get gassed in there, he’d likely sleep a few days and wake up with a hell of a hangover––once he’d finished barfing up whatever acid remained in his stomach and recovered from the painful diarrhea, that is. It could even kill him, but she said that was pretty unlikely.

  Pretty unlikely Jon thought to himself.

  Smiling at the phrase, he shook his head as he glanced around the inside of the tank.

  It was such an Allie-esque type of reassurance.

  When it came to Revik and drugs, they couldn’t screw around, though. The guy had some kind of weird tolerance that made drugging him almost impossible, at least in normal doses. Balidor theorized Menlim was behind that, too––that he’d done something to train Revik or fortify his immunity to resist drugs that might otherwise incapacitate him.

  Jon had a feeling all of their precautions would be moot if Revik ever really did get free. He’d seen him fight from the verge of death before, and it had been terrifying.

  Taking another step deeper into the green-walled space, Jon glanced around again briefly at the room's proportions. Despite the tank’s vast size, Jon found himself reminded uncomfortably of the cell where Terian kept them in the Caucasus Mountains. Taking another breath, he fought to relax. Once he had his heart rate under control, he edged a little further away from the door.

  Revik didn’t seem to have seen him yet.

  Jon wondered if the Elaerian was sleeping.

  His head slanted sideways against the organic green wall, showing his profile in stark, black and white relief. The jade green walls made his skin look paler, his hair blacker. Under their odd, shimmering glow, the chained seer stood out as the only thing that seemed to be sitting still.

  Jon studied that glow briefly, reminded of what Allie had said again, that the walls of the tank were somehow more alive than most organics.

  They’d been feeding him––a lot, Dorje confirmed, to support Poresh––but Revik had lost weight. His features were taking on that more angular, hunted look that Jon most associated with his friend's face.

  In fact, how he looked now was still how Jon saw Revik in his mind.

  That was in spite of the fact that Revik himself hadn’t really looked much like this for the past year or so. While leading the Rebels, he’d buffed himself out. He and Wreg, Revik’s second-in-command, were a kind of walking muscle squad, and most of the younger Rebels seemed to have copied their example.

  Jon even wondered, once or twice, if Revik had done that in part to impress Allie.

  Although maybe he’d done it more to shake an image of himself he didn’t like.

  Allie told him once that, despite his adult height, Revik had a bit of a thing about being small. Apparently, he’d been unusually small as a kid. He’d been teased for it, beaten up for it, bullied for it, ridiculed, rejected by girls he’d liked, and so on.

  Jon could relate.

  His childhood had been pretty similar. As much as he hated to admit it, he’d started training in martial arts for almost identical reasons. The fact that he was gay only made it more necessary. Even in San Francisco, he’d had to deal with idiots.

  Wreg, who’d known Revik as he was still climbing out of adolescence, still called him “runt” on occasion, although always with affection, and despite the fact that Revik now had a couple of inches on him.

  Allie said Revik flinched every time Wreg said it.

  Jon didn’t know Allie’s own preferences, in terms of her husband’s body type, but personally, he thought Revik looked better leaner. It suited his face more, but it also suited what Jon suspected to be the more authentic expression of Revik’s personality. Revik always had a feral quality to the way he moved, even to his facial expressions.

  Jon took another step, moving closer to the line that had been painted on the floor, several inches thick and encircling the place where Revik sat. He’d been about to clear his throat, to try and get the seer’s attention, when Revik turned his head.

  Surpri
se flickered over the angular features, the pale eyes.

  Right before he let out a coarse laugh.

  “Gods. They’re sending in the fucking worms, already.”

  Jon flinched, but more in surprise.

  He sounded almost exactly like the Revik he knew. The faint German accent in his English was thicker than Jon remembered, but otherwise, identical. He even seemed to have relaxed somewhat, seeing Jon standing there.

  Revik gave him a wry smile. He gestured at Jon’s face, his long fingers draping down from the hands on his knees.

  “What do you want, cousin? What’s this game they’ve pulled you into?”

  Jon studied his face. Once he had, he exhaled a breath he hadn’t known he held.

  So Revik didn’t see him as a complete enemy.

  Not yet, anyway. Not until he gave him a reason.

  Jon shook his head, his hands still on his hips.

  “I don’t want anything, Revik. Not like you mean.”

  “Are you here to speak reason to me, Jon? Help me find my inner human?”

  “No, man.”

  “You want to fuck with me? Play with my head a little?”

  Jon smiled, shaking his head. “No, man. You know who’d win that little contest anyway. Collar or no.”

  “Did Balidor send you?”

  “No.”

  The seer’s gaze darkened. Jon flinched a little at the hatred he saw there.

  “Did Allie?”

  “No, again,” Jon said. “Jesus, man… Vash is right. You’re like a broken record.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” The Elaerian’s eyes shimmered with a pulse of anger. “I don’t want to talk to you, Jon.”

  “Sure you do.”

  “You can go back to that bitch and tell her she can damned well come herself––”

  “She’d like to. They won’t let her. Not until you chill out a little bit.”

  Revik laughed again. For the first time, though, Jon saw pain in his eyes.

  He hesitated, trying to decide if he should try to follow it.

  “Yeah,” Revik said. “Right.”

  Jon waited to see if he’d say more. He didn’t.

  Finally, Jon took a breath and walked the final steps to reach the edge of the line drawn on the floor––the same line Dorje warned him emphatically that he must not, for any reason, cross. He lowered his weight once he had, sitting cross-legged on the floor across from the chained seer, propping his upper body up with his hands.

  For a long moment, Revik didn’t look at him directly, although Jon caught a few glances at his face. Revik couldn’t scan him, which Jon supposed was a good thing, all in all, but it was also likely making him more paranoid.

  He looked for that instability Balidor and Vash warned him about. He saw glimpses of it, but nothing like what he’d expected. No frothing at the mouth, no death threats or even irrationality.

  He did see a hell of a lot of emotion, though.

  Anger fought its way across the seer’s features in erratic bursts. Some of these brought near waves of heat, an electrical-type charge Jon could almost feel.

  He waited to see if it would pass, if the other would talk to him.

  But Revik just sat there. After a few minutes of silence between them, Jon realized he recognized that expression, too, from their time together as Terian’s captive. Only Jon had become the interrogator now. Revik was waiting him out, hoping to elicit a reaction maybe, or maybe just convince him to give up.

  Jon could see why the other seers thought maybe he wanted to be hit. On a certain level, maybe it was easier for Revik to resist pain than attempts at conversation.

  It was clean. Simple, too.

  So easy to know who the real enemies are.

  Jon exhaled, letting his gaze rest on the other’s face.

  “Well,” he conceded, using a seer gesture with one hand. “They might have given up on you chilling out by now. They might just wait until they’ve finished with all the security protocols. Before they let Allie near you, I mean.”

  When Revik glanced up, Jon shrugged, smiling a little.

  “They’re realists, you know?” he said. “Infiltrators.”

  Revik frowned, but didn’t answer. His eyes looked bored now.

  But Jon had caught the other look there, too. Her name still got his attention. That was probably good to know.

  He didn’t know if it was necessarily a good thing in general, however.

  As he sat there, watching him, Jon saw the anger in Revik’s eyes flare again. For the first time, he also glimpsed what Dorje, Vash and Balidor had mentioned. A kind of disjointed, hard jerking pulled across his expression. Whatever it was, it seemed to throw him off-balance, leaving the emotions there intense but confused. Anger mixed with a kind of animal cunning briefly, only to be replaced by fear. Whatever lived in his clear, almost colorless eyes, it seemed to remain only long enough to be replaced by something else.

  If Jon hadn’t known better, he would have sworn the seer had been drugged.

  The version of Revik he’d met in Delhi, the one the Dreng commanded, had been a prick in many ways––and definitely on the crazy side––but there hadn’t been any confusion in his light. Nor had Jon gotten any sense that Revik’s different personality components weren’t all working more or less in the same direction.

  Jon honestly couldn’t decide if the change was an improvement or not.

  Finally, Revik seemed to exhale.

  His light stabilized somewhere, and his broad shoulders gradually relaxed.

  Jon almost smiled when he heard him clicking softly, nearly under his breath.

  “Do you have a cigarette, Jon?” he said. “A hiri?”

  Pulling the pack he’d brought with him out of his pocket, Jon put one of the thin, dark, seer cigarettes to his lips. Jon himself didn’t smoke. In fact he’d never smoked, in any of the human or seer variants. But he knew his friend.

  He’d bought the pack off one of the infiltrators on his way to the tank, knowing it might come in handy. Lighting the hiri he held in his lips with the single match he’d brought, he took a mouthful of the honey-tasting smoke to ensure the end would stay lit, coughed it out, then tossed the thin-papered weed towards the seer.

  “Don’t let it go out,” he said, wheezing a little, holding his hand up for a final cough. “I’ve got more hiri… only one match.”

  He was still waving smoke away from his face as Revik leaned forward, picking the stick off the floor delicately from between his cuffed ankles, and putting it to his mouth. He took a long inhale, leaning his head against the wall behind him.

  After a few seconds where he held the smoke in his lungs, he opened his eyes, exhaling it out through his lips.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Hiri smoke smelled a lot less reprehensible than human cigarette smoke, but Jon found himself shaking his head a little anyway.

  “You seers and your long lives,” he said. “Makes you cocky.”

  “You think so?” Revik said, his voice a faint smile.

  “You think you’ll live forever.”

  Revik grunted, but Jon heard the humor in that, too.

  For the first time, emotion reached Jon himself. For the first time, he saw his friend chained to a wall, looking depressed, a collar around his neck.

  “How are you, man?” He managed a smile.

  Revik’s expression grew cold. He took another long drag off the hiri, his eyes narrow as he exhaled smoke in Jon’s direction. Ashing on the floor of the cell as Jon waved the cloud away, Revik paused another beat before glancing up.

  “I’m great, Jon. How are you?”

  “Revik. I mean it. Are you all right?” Jon hesitated. “I heard… well, they said you’re not eating.”

  “If I wasn’t eating, I’d be dead, Jon.”

  “You look thin, man. You’ve lost weight.”

  “Some exercise wouldn’t hurt.” Revik held up the cuffs, smiling a little, but that predatory glint w
as back. “Want to help me out, Sporto?”

  Jon swallowed. Terian called him that, while they were imprisoned together.

  “I’d love to, man,” he said sincerely. “But I can’t trust you right now. You know that. You wouldn’t trust me either, under the circumstances.”

  “Yeah.” Revik lowered the cuffs. His eyes held that same hard shine. “I guess not.”

  “Revik, man.” Jon studied his eyes, his voice cautious. “They said you’re having a hard time. That being in here is rough on you. Cut off from the Dreng…” He shrugged, faintly apologetic. “They made it sound like you’ve been going through some kind of withdrawals. Like DTs. Like you can’t really function right on your own.”

  “Did they?”

  “Something like that, yeah.”

  Revik continued to study Jon’s face, his eyes predatory behind a thinner sheen of disinterest.

  “Why are you here, Jon?”

  “I’m worried about you, man. I wanted to talk to you. Before they…” Jon hesitated, gesturing vaguely. “You know. Before they do their thing.”

  “No, Jon,” he said, taking another drag of hiri. “I don’t know. Before they do what?”

  Jon shrugged. “Before they start, I guess. On you.” At the other’s continued empty stare, Jon gestured towards him a little lamely. “…You know what I mean. You know more about that stuff than I do, Revik. I’m just a dumb worm, remember?”

  “Before they start what, Jon?”

  Jon just looked at him, perplexed. Uncrossing his legs, he propped his arms on his knees, continuing to study the Elaerian’s angular face.

  “Why do you think you’re here, man?” he said.

  Seeing those clear eyes turn cold, Jon cut him off before he could speak.

  “…You know what I mean,” he said. “Why do you think you’re really here?”

  For an instant, the disinterested look returned to the seer’s face.

  “You mean, besides the fact that my wife is a whore?”

  “Revik.” Jon clicked at him softly, almost without knowing he did it. “Don’t even try it, man. I’m not Balidor.”