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

by JC Andrijeski

  He watches them, trembling, knowing only that he won’t run away.

  He won’t.

  He is sure it will be more of the animals, more creatures come to pick the bones dry. He is deathly sure it will be them, so when the tall, gaunt seer with the skull-like face appears out of the dark, a feeling that is almost joy floods his heart.

  He begins to cry.

  One of his own people has found him. They will help him. They will bring her back.

  They will find his father––

  But the thought dies there, with nowhere to go.

  He doesn’t look at the boots that face him from the ground nearby, the man’s crumpled body in the mud. He doesn’t look at the girl lying beside him.

  The aged seer walks over to him, his long face grave.

  It is not an angular face, like his father’s. This face is almost devoid of flesh entirely, with a small, strangely thin nose, eyes that are a pale yellow.

  The boy sees the animals who are with him, but the seer is their master, so he forces himself to relax, to only look at them in darting glances.

  The seer whispers in his mind, a careful caress.

  I am so sorry, nephew.

  And now he knows the old seer can’t bring her back. He can’t find his father. He can’t reverse anything that happened all those hours before.

  Elashi.

  The name burns in his throat.

  The boy can’t answer the old seer. He tries. He fights to remember his voice, to pretend none of this is real. His words come out in choked attempts at air.

  The old seer speaks to him again, before he can make his voice work.

  Where is your other family, my son? Are they near?

  The boy is confused. He gestures a thank you to the seer, but it is not for his words.

  He cannot think of words to speak back. His words have all left him. He tries to understand the old seers’ words instead. Other family? What other family?

  The thought is debilitating. Too foreign to be real.

  I am so sorry for this terrible thing that you have suffered. I am so very sorry, my son.

  The boy tries again to speak to the tall seer with the skull-like face, fighting for words, even in his mind, using hand-language when he can’t speak past the clouds in his mouth.

  The old seer seems to understand. His long fingers stroke the small, black head, tightening briefly on his narrow shoulders.

  We will bury them, he whispers softly. We will bury them together.

  The boy can’t breathe.

  He can’t breathe.

  But he can gesture yes.

  At the tall seer’s prompting, he reluctantly releases the woman’s dress, clutching her silver ring in one hand as he moves his feet to follow.

  17

  WHAT I DO TO YOU

  I BROKE OUT of the space, sweating.

  The room was deathly silent.

  The floor under the pallet hurt my back. My muscles felt cramped into knots, as if I’d been clenching them, nonstop, the whole time I was under. There was no gentle transition, no period where I was half in and half out, floating in the ocean of light with Vash and Tarsi.

  Vash and Tarsi weren’t here.

  They would have seen it all on the screens, as my experiences were recorded via the virtual reality device in my headset. But they weren’t here, in my light. We were alone.

  The tank felt dead inside. Cold.

  I still saw Menlim’s skull-like face behind my eyes, those cold, urine-colored eyes. I knew now, that he didn’t look as much like Salinse as Revik had told me.

  I heard my own breaths, but they didn’t penetrate that silence. It only deepened around me as I stared up at the dark. Aloneness trembled my light, a feeling of being lost, so endless-seeming and profound I couldn’t see past it.

  I wanted to cry, to express some of it, somehow. But whatever I felt couldn’t come out through tears. I broke out into a sweat instead, sick with it, sick with that feeling that it would never end, that I’d never see the other side of it.

  I fought to breathe for what felt like an endless stretch of time, that cloying sickness stuck in my throat. I was sure I would throw up if I tried to move.

  My hand clenched the front of the cotton shirt I wore, sweated into a fist, white-knuckled.

  I stared up at the ceiling as that nausea coiled through my body, tightening my lungs, making my bowels loose.

  That some of this was cold, naked fear only reached me afterwards.

  It was more fear than I’d ever felt in my life, even when I’d been captured by Terian––even when I thought he’d killed me. It was more fear than my body could handle.

  Immobilized, I tried to move through it some way, to let it pass, even as it seemed to be crushing my chest.

  I remembered this. I remembered tastes of it, anyway.

  I remembered the intensity of feeling from when I’d been in the cave with Tarsi.

  The same influx of emotion met me every time we followed the boy’s footsteps through that broken trail of memory. Tarsi had me study Syrimne, before I knew who Revik really was. The familiarity of it struck me now, the sameness of that lost feeling.

  I remembered wondering how one person could feel so much, without going insane.

  But that had been different, too.

  Here, the filters were gone. This time, I hadn’t been watching a Barrier imprint from the outside. As much as I’d picked up then, it was nothing like now

  This time, I’d been inside it, feeling it with him.

  I also understood something else.

  That very thing that made him so happy as a kid had been the thing to destroy him afterwards. I loved my human parents––a lot. I know they’d loved me, and that Jon loved me, and Cass. But as strong as that love was, they’d never been capable of being as open and loving to me as Revik’s family had been for him.

  He’d been open to them in a way no human being could comprehend.

  I realized now that Tarsi shielded me from that, too.

  She’d protected me from the worst of it, probably to keep me going as we studied his past. It wasn’t until after everything happened in D.C. that I realized the true purpose of her little exercise. She’d been introducing me to my mate.

  After another long collection of minutes, I realized I felt him, too.

  More precisely, I realized I’d never stopped feeling him. He’d been there, with me, the whole time. Even now, I was so immersed in his light I could barely pull apart the threads.

  I heard him breathing.

  I thought I imagined that part at first. I thought it was some echo in my mind, some remnant of the place I’d just left.

  Before that, I thought it was me.

  Then I heard him in it. I heard his voice.

  He spoke through his attempts to breathe. I listened for a long time before I realized he was reciting something. I didn’t recognize it. It might have been prayers, or maybe the same snatch of song lyric over and over, like I’d heard him do earlier that day.

  This was different.

  Rather than some exercise in whistling in the dark, he was choking for air, as if fighting each breath past a thick weight sitting on his chest.

  Realizing it wasn’t coming from the Barrier, I turned my head.

  He lay half on his side, his legs coiled in a strange crescent shape, close by his body, his arm over his abdomen. Still choking and breathing, he whispered more words while I watched, as if unable to keep them from spilling through his lips. He didn’t look at me for a long time. He lay there, sweating, his eyes staring at nothing when they weren’t closed.

  He muttered quietly, reassuringly, as if talking to himself.

  Then, all at once, he felt my stare.

  His eyes shifted, meeting mine from the other side of the room.

  The look on his face shocked me, bringing my heart to my throat.

  “Revik.” I couldn’t find words to follow. An image of the boy slid forward into my mind
and I had to fight not to burst into tears. “Revik… are you all right?”

  “Stop,” he said. His voice was nearly a groan. “Allie… gaos. Please stop.”

  I continued to stare at him, fighting what I saw, what I heard in his voice.

  It crossed my mind that it was a trick, that he was imitating me where I lay on the blanket, but his voice was barely a murmur.

  “Please,” he repeated. “Stop this, Allie… please…”

  “I can’t,” I said, almost helplessly, still lost in his clear eyes. I’d never seen so much emotion in his eyes. Never, not as long as I’d known him.

  “Yes, you can. Please… please, Allie. I’ll do anything…”

  His voice pleaded with me, pulling at me through the bond.

  Tears came to my eyes, feeling him there, too, in my light. I couldn’t stop them before they nearly blinded me.

  “I can’t. I’m so sorry, Revik.”

  “Allie, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for what I did to you…”

  “That’s not why. I’m not trying to hurt you.”

  “Please… gods, please… don’t do this to me…” His voice broke. “What did I do to make you hate me so much? What was it, Allie?”

  I found myself unable to look away from his pale face, at the look of anguish there, but more than that, fear––more fear than I’d ever seen in anyone’s face, much less his. He looked lost in it, his eyes half-focused in his narrow face, his chest still laboring for breaths. His hair looked sweated to his head; his fingers clutched his shirt in the same place I’d clutched mine, as if trying to crush his own heart, to keep it inside his chest.

  “Was it D.C.?” he said. “Have you hated me since then?”

  “I don’t hate you, baby… I don’t. I swear to the gods, I don’t. I’m trying to help you.”

  He closed his eyes, shaking his head as if to push my words away from him.

  Then I felt the other thing.

  His grief expanded over me, bringing a low cry from his throat.

  “Allie…”

  A sob broke out of him, so young-sounding I flinched.

  I continued to watch him, helpless, as he choked on another cry. He was talking again, murmuring words in a litany I’d never heard, that sounded foreign to my ears, even more than his singing had earlier. It struck me again that they were prayers.

  I’d never seen him pray before, although he’d hinted around to being religious. I knew from Balidor that Syrimne left coded messages in religious texts and spoke in scripture during the war. I watched as his whole body was wracked in another heavy sob. He looked like someone had just gauged his heart out of his chest and stabbed it over and over again.

  I didn’t want to look at him anymore. I didn’t, but I couldn’t look away.

  And somewhere in all that, I understood. Really understood.

  I wasn’t going to “fix” Revik, at least not in any of the ways I’d told myself that this process would fix him, when Vash and Tarsi explained to me how it worked. There wouldn’t be some mystical moment where the gods on high poured magic Barrier juice over his head, flushing out everything horrible that ever happened to him.

  I was simply going to make him feel it.

  I was going to make him face every excruciating frame.

  I was there to ensure he felt it, despite the collar. I would take him through it, emotions and all, as I looked for the source of the initial breaks in his light.

  Swallowing at the look on his face, and a rising swell of guilt I couldn’t think through, I finally tore my eyes off his. I didn’t know if he understood yet or not, but I knew that if he didn’t, he would soon.

  In any case, I’d been wrong. More wrong than I possibly could have guessed.

  I would be torturing him. I’d be doing far worse to him than anything Terian could have devised.

  I was going to make him relive his own life.

  18

  UNEXPECTED CALLERS

  “WHO IS THIS?” Jon repeated, his voice still carrying a thread of disbelief. “I’m pretty sure I didn’t hear that right the first time. Could you repeat it?”

  “It is Chandre, cousin Jon.” The seer clicked in irritation. “Please stop pretending you have some form of worm-amnesia and do not remember who this is…”

  “Oh, I remember my cousin Chandre, all right,” Jon said, incredulity still in his voice. “I just can’t believe you’re calling me. Aren’t you, like, one of terrorists now?”

  Pushing out her lip in frustration, she clicked at him more loudly through the line.

  “Is Balidor there?” she said. “Or not?”

  “I told you, he can’t come right now. He’s busy.”

  “Fine. Then just give them the message. Tell Balidor, or someone else in the Adhipan.” She paused, barely a beat. “…Or Allie. Tell them I have a lead on the occurrence in Hong Kong. I will make contact with a new source in two days. After that, hopefully I will know more."

  “Is that it?” Jon said, skeptical. “That’s not much. In fact it’s nothing, Chan.”

  Chandre hesitated. Then she shrugged, seer fashion.

  If the line was tapped, whatever she said wouldn’t matter now.

  “It could be a disease,” she said, blunt. “Not poison, but something communicable. A weaponized virus.”

  There was a silence.

  “Man-made?”

  Chandre ignored his question. “Be clear with Balidor, also, that more than one faction is looking for you. At least one group is expending considerable resources to that end.”

  After a pause, Jon seemed to let his previous question go.

  “Yeah,” he said, sighing. “So what else is new?”

  “Well, if that is the case, I would think you would be glad I am keeping an eye on them for you,” she said shortly. “And glad, as well, of the information I am indirectly sharing with you, as to the inadequacy of your current security protocols…”

  “What?”

  Chandre sighed, hiding her impatience badly.

  She indicated to her own person, holding out her hands, knowing her avatar would copy her visual cues if he had his VR option switched on.

  “If I can find you, cousin…”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Jon said, seeming to have caught up. “Okay. I get it.”

  “Exactly where are you, cousin Jon?” she said. “If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Where?” He laughed. “You called me, remember? And yeah, I do mind you asking. Terrorist, remember? As in, last we knew, you worked for him.” He paused. “And just how did you know how to find us? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  “I found you, Jon. Not ‘us.’” She hesitated, barely a beat. “And I called via an Adhipan secure line, one they gave us in the event of emergencies,” she lied. “They patched me to you. GPS is obscured to all but a rough area of the continent, so you can tell Balidor that much is secure, but it still narrows down the search for whoever might be looking.”

  “Oh.” After a bare pause, Jon’s voice grew openly skeptical. “I see. So you’re telling me Balidor, the most paranoid man on the planet, apart from maybe Revik, didn’t change a secure number after you and Garensche defected to Revik’s camp?”

  Chandre bit her lip.

  For humans, neither Jon nor Cass struck her as being quite as stupid as they perhaps should have been. Clicking again, more sharply that time, she told him the truth.

  “I work for SCARB. I tracked you through your implant.”

  “My what?” he said.

  “Your government chip. The one under your tattoo. GPS is disabled, as I said, but I was able to get a rough section of the continent via satellite. It is not an area with wide network reach, so I had my search queue scan open lines in the vicinity until I found yours.”

  “I don’t have a chip, Chandre. I opted out of getting that when I was eighteen.”

  She smiled. “Really? Then you tell me. What am I looking at on my screen right now?”

  “How?” he demanded
. “And since when?”

  “Since always, little brother,” she said, rolling her eyes. “You humans are so trusting. Believing everything your human government tells you, yes? Like when it says it removes an implant from your skin and replaces it with an ident tattoo, even though that implant provided them exponentially more valuable intel for their own internal security.”

  She paused at the silence this produced, shrugging with one hand as she tossed the braids out of her face.

  “Most of the seers have theirs altered already, cousin. It may not have occurred to Balidor to do this for you, as well. I would look to that, if I were you. Before the possibility occurs to one of the Sword’s people.” She paused again, feeling her jaw harden.

  “I would tell Cass to do the same,” she added tersely.

  “Cass isn’t here,” Jon said.

  “Where is she?”

  She felt the human’s mind through the line, his reaction to the pointedness of the question.

  “Forget it,” she said in a clipped voice. “It does not matter. As long as she is somewhere other than where the Bridge is, she poses no risk to you.” After another bare pause, she added, “I would move whatever you are doing, though, cousin. In case they have already determined to track you through your implant. In any case, given the danger, it would not be wise to stay too long in one place––”

  “Yeah, okay, Chan.” He hesitated. “Look, about Cass––”

  “I told you, it is not my concern,” she said.

  Before he could take another breath to respond, she added crisply,

  “Peace to you, cousin Jon. And honor to the Esteemed Bridge, as well as her mate, the Illustrious Sword.”

  Without waiting, she disengaged the signal.

  Pulling the headset off her ear, she found she was still angry, however.

  With a few key touches and a DNA scan, she erased all record of the call, replacing the log entry with a dummy call to a fellow seer in New Orleans she’d been running simultaneously in the background. She matched up the time signatures, using every trick she knew to make the trace signatures disappear, but still, risk remained, particularly if anyone happened to be monitoring her communications already.