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

by JC Andrijeski

  “I am loyal to that Rook,” Chandre said through gritted teeth.

  Maygar grinned wider. “Sure you are. I could kiss you, sister Chandre. I really could.”

  “I wouldn’t advise that, Maygar… especially now.” Scowling at him, she added, “And Varlan is right. It wasn’t Allie, it was Balidor. I doubt Allie knows anything about it. He couldn’t risk telling her, given who she is mate to.”

  Still grinning, Maygar shook his head, whistling softly.

  “Chan the man,” he said.

  “Do not call me that,” she warned, holding up a finger.

  Varlan acted as though neither of them had spoken.

  “Do you have the chip, brother Maygar?” he said. “We are waiting.”

  Chandre watched Maygar hand over the plastic bag with the memory chip, giving it to one of Varlan’s people. The female seer took it from him, then promptly ripped it out of the plastic casing. Once she had it free, she attached the port end to a hand-held monitor.

  Chandre watched as the seer brought up the holographic file directory for the chip.

  Rapidly, the female began scanning the chip’s contents, including three-dimensional diagrams, what looked like government documents, at least one map, blueprints. The seer opened each only to close the file swiftly, scanning them with her eyes and aleimi.

  “It’s the correct chip,” she said a few seconds later, glancing at Varlan. “It doesn’t appear to have been altered in any way.”

  “Is everything there?”

  “I’ll know in a minute,” she said, not taking her eyes off the screen.

  Varlan nodded, his expression motionless.

  Chandre hesitated, then said, “Can I know what your contract entails exactly, brother? The one relating to this disease?”

  Varlan smiled faintly. “What motivation do I have to tell you?”

  “A simple courtesy, brother. To the Esteemed Bridge and her mate.”

  He nodded, expressionless as he exhaled sweet-smelling smoke. “That is a motivation that does not interest me, I’m afraid, sister Chandre.”

  Watching him smoke, Chandre felt her jaw harden. She was about to try again, when the door to the corridor opened sharply behind them, banging into the wall.

  Light flooded the dim room, momentarily blinding her when she turned at the sound.

  Holding up a hand, she found herself looking at another seer, likely whoever Varlan had stationed outside to keep a watch over the building’s entrance. He wore the same organic armor as the others, and carried another modified Mossberg with an organic scope. He wore a long coat, however, likely to keep the armor and gun hidden while he waited outside.

  In his other hand, he held a human.

  He gripped his captive’s collar tightly with his fingers, holding the Mossberg to the man’s back. The man he held balanced precariously on his toes, looking rather like a frightened rodent. The effect was heightened by the human’s small frame, as well as his old-fashioned eyeglasses and thinning brown hair.

  Next to her, Maygar stiffened. She felt the familiarity he aimed towards the human, even before he spoke.

  “Eddard?” His voice grew openly disbelieving. “Eddard, is that you?”

  The human turned, eyes confused, probably blind in the relative darkness.

  One of the seers by the door leaned over and switched on the light, causing most of the seers in the room to raise hands to shield their eyes from the abrupt change. The human seemed more at ease, however. He glanced around at faces, until he was staring at Maygar, too.

  “Maygar?” His voice held bewilderment.

  “Of course it’s me,” Maygar said, sounding borderline irritated. “This is my damned place.” Pausing, he said, gruffer, “What are you doing here, Eddard?”

  “I, too, would like an answer to this question,” Varlan seconded, narrowing his gaze on the human.

  Eddard glanced at Varlan, and then at Chandre. His eyes traveled around to the other seers in the room, taking in faces, clothing and weapons. He pushed his wire-rim glasses up his nose with one finger, swallowing nervously.

  “Are you the contractors?” he asked. His voice was out of breath from the hand on his collar, but he spoke English with a refined British accent. “Do you all work for Shadow?”

  There was a silence where every seer in the room stared at the human. Maygar finally spoke, drawing Eddard's eyes back to him.

  “Who the fuck’s Shadow?” he said.

  Before Eddard could answer, Varlan focused on Maygar, his voice impatient.

  “You know this worm. How? Explain.”

  Maygar’s jaw hardened. He gestured vaguely towards the human, looking at Varlan. “I don’t know him. He used to work for Dehgoies. The Sword. He was like his butler, I think.”

  Incredulous, Chandre turned, staring at the male human.

  “This is the human who aided you in London? With the explosives?” To Chandre, he looked like a human accountant. “What would he be doing here now?”

  Maygar shrugged. “He worked for British Intelligence. Dehgoies thought he did, anyway. I assume that’s why he’s here.”

  Varlan clicked humorously, nodding towards the seer holding Eddard’s collar.

  “Yes,” he said. “You may bring him here.”

  The hulking seer tightened his grip, pushing Eddard forward past Maygar’s queen-sized bed and towards the desk. The human wore a long raincoat over a tailored suit and slacks with polished, Italian-made shoes. Not exactly a normal outfit for this neighborhood.

  Not exactly a normal outfit for a butler, either.

  Varlan studied his face. “Who are you, worm?”

  Eddard motioned towards Maygar. “He’s right. I work for MI6.” He glanced around at their faces. “I've been looking for you. For all of you.”

  Varlan indicated for the seer holding him to release him.

  Once he did, Eddard rubbed the front of his throat, where the collar of his shirt and tie had dug into his skin. His face slowly returned to a normal color as he straightened.

  “And?” Varlan said. “Why are you looking for me, worm?”

  Eddard blinked. “I thought you knew,” he said, looking around at them. “I’m here about the disease. The one released in Hong Kong. I’d already dropped my name in a few circles, making it clear I was available to provide intel on this.”

  There was a silence.

  Then, something clicked, and Chandre’s jaw dropped.

  “You’re the contact?” she said, bewildered. “The one Talei told me of?”

  Eddard gave her a faintly apologetic look. “Well… yes. I meant for us to speak in D.C., but then news of a contract for the acquisition of the disease came to me. I got the name of the contractor,” he said, nodding to Varlan. “…but not the client, at least not apart from the code name, ‘Shadow.’ I was planning to come to New York anyway, to follow up. Then I heard Maygar had gotten possession of the materials instead––”

  “You know a lot, worm,” Varlan observed quietly.

  If he heard the threat behind those words, Eddard’s expression didn't show it.

  “Not really,” he said seriously, in his clipped accent. “Not as much as I’d like, certainly. But I’m hoping that, between us, we might know enough to stop this thing.”

  At the silence this produced, Eddard pushed his glasses up again.

  “I need to speak with you.” He glanced at Chandre and Maygar before looking back at Varlan. “…To all of you, really. It's damned lucky I found you before you’d executed the contract. Some of your intel might be corrupted. You’re planning to destroy the disease, correct? That’s what you were contracted to do?”

  There was another silence.

  Chandre turned, staring openly at Varlan.

  “Destroy?” she said in surprise. “That’s what you’ve been hired to do? To find the lab and destroy the biological agent? Really?”

  Varlan sighed. Exhaling a cloud of hiri from a new stick he’d lit, he shrugged. “Does
this bother you, sister? You would rather if I deployed this thing?”

  “No,” Chandre said. “I do not wish that.”

  “Well, then. Our interests seem to align,” he said. “As do those of my client.” He looked at Eddard, cocking one iron gray eyebrow. “Unless, of course, the human objects to our eliminating a human-killing virus…?”

  “I do not.” Eddard pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, smiling grimly. “…In fact,” he added, meeting Varlan’s gaze. “I’m going to help you.”

  22

  TORTURER

  HE DIDN’T BEG me the next time I went in.

  He didn’t curse me either, or try to bargain.

  He watched me from the wall instead, his face and eyes expressionless.

  Looking at him, I couldn’t help but be reminded of cornered animals I’d seen, those who’d been hit one too many times with something hard. He looked thinner too, as if he’d lost weight even in those twelve or so hours since I’d left him. His expression still showed remnants of our first jump––meaning, I could see a lingering grief and tiredness that went beyond captivity and lack of sleep––but mostly what I saw behind his stare was anger.

  The war with me had begun, I suppose.

  That had been over a week ago.

  According to Jon, he hadn’t eaten at all in the past two days. He drank water from the spigot on the wall, even stuck his head under the same faucet and splashed cold water on his face, but he pushed away the food they brought him without even looking at it. The sandwich from that morning’s meal still sat on the floor on a metal plate, a few feet away from the stub of the last hiri he’d smoked, which Jon gave him when he delivered the food.

  He leaned his back against the organic tile, his long legs drawn up in angles so his forearms could rest easily on his knees.

  From there, he stared at me, as if I were another animal.

  Each day I entered, I braced myself for another back and forth with him, another series of taunts and attempts to provoke me or knock me off balance. Those back and forths never came, though. I didn’t know if he was studying me, trying to determine a new approach, or simply taking a new approach by being silent.

  He might have simply given up trying to reach me at all.

  I tried not to contemplate any of the things he might be thinking as I walked in and set my bottle of water on the floor. I told myself it was irrelevant, but I knew that wasn’t entirely true, either. The truth was, I couldn’t tell if what we were doing was even making a dent. I didn’t know if him seeing these things, re-experiencing his past, was accomplishing anything at all, other than making both of us miserable.

  I’d done what I could to strengthen the connection between us.

  Even as early as the second day, I’d spent the night in the tank with him, leaving for only a few hours the next morning to shower and change my clothes and debrief with the others.

  The decision to sleep in there with him had been pretty straightforward.

  I’d felt the connection between us strengthen significantly after those initial two sessions; but after a night spent apart, with him in the tank and me out in the barracks, that connection felt only about half as strong as it had by the next morning.

  The Barrier shield in the tank was just too strong for me to be away from him for long.

  Vash already warned me I would need to develop a stronger connection to him, if I wanted to get at the memories he most didn’t want me to see. So I resigned myself to the fact that I would essentially be living in the tank with him until that happened.

  Balidor hated the idea, of course.

  They’d gassed Revik not long after the first session ended––partly to give him a shower and a change of clothes, and partly because I think Balidor wanted to silence his cries, which went on for several hours even after I’d left.

  Everyone who’d been watching at the security station had been spooked.

  No one said anything to me directly, but no one quite looked me in the eye when I came out, either. I read whispers off a few of them who thought I’d done something to really hurt him in the Barrier––maybe as revenge for what he’d done to me earlier that day. More than one seemed to think he deserved it, but they still gave me plenty of space when I came out, and looked at me as if appraising me with new eyes.

  I had become his torturer.

  The seers seemed to respect that fact as much as they feared it.

  Only Jon followed me back to my room that first night.

  He didn’t come out and ask me anything. Instead he just hung around while I ate, making jokes every now and then when the silence got too thick, and offering to spend the night if I didn’t want to be alone.

  Finally, when he couldn’t coax me into going to the other room to watch an old movie with him and Dorje on the feeds, or play chess, or the seer card game rik-jum, or even just go to sleep with him there, sleeping on a pallet next to me, he gave in to my desire to be alone and left.

  The days started to bleed together after that first one, just like they had in Tarsi’s cave.

  I knew Revik and I were both likely overdue for another break and a serious hosing off, but I didn’t want to do anything that might slow things down just yet. I also wasn’t sure if I could make myself come back in as easily or as quickly if I stopped for too long without having made any noticeable progress whatsoever.

  In the addiction-type sense, it really was like Tarsi’s cave all over again.

  Only it was worse, really––a kind of sick voyeurism that both repulsed me when I let myself wonder about my own pulls and motives, and drew me like a drug, making it hard to end sessions.

  I couldn’t afford to let myself think about that for long, either, or what this might be doing to me as well as him. If I was going to finish this thing, I was pretty sure it had to happen in one shot. Until that hard push was done, until I had some idea if any of this might work, I didn’t have the luxury to factor myself into the equation much at all, really.

  He’d begged me one other time, since that first session.

  Lifetimes seemed to pass between the first time he asked me to stop and the second.

  In reality, only about six days had gone by. Seven at most.

  Over the course of those days, we spent as much as seventeen hours in the Barrier in any one twenty-four hour period.

  The gap between the two didn’t make it any less horrible to listen to, or make me feel any better when he started screaming obscenities at me after I tried to talk him down.

  I made myself sleep in there that night, too.

  I laid there through most of it, not sleeping, but I didn’t let myself leave.

  About three days in, I had the Adhipan set up a protected space so I could go to the bathroom in there, on the opposite end from where he’d been chained, so they wouldn’t have to put me through security protocols every time I needed a toilet or to wash my face. Using the organic functionality, I could even take a shower if I wanted, have the wall barf out shampoo and soap, even a clean towel and clean clothes.

  When I stopped answering his attempts to provoke me that second time, he just lay there, crying––which was worse.

  I think what we were doing affected his dreams, too.

  I know it did mine.

  I woke up unsure if my mind still lived solely inside the Barrier, feeling his light weaving through mine in erratic pulses as it looked for an escape, for any way out. I dreamt about caves and shackles that tied my wrists to my ankles. I dreamt of the smell of urine and blood, the sound of rats, the feel of insect legs and pinchers piercing my skin under my clothes. I woke up with weights crushing my chest, in pain like I was dying.

  I woke up screaming once.

  I don’t know if I scared Revik, but Jon told me that Yumi, who had been monitoring the security console, nearly jumped out of her skin.

  The gaps between jumps got shorter, as sleep became more and more pointless for both of us. Some part of me was even trying to wear
him down, I think, to make him so tired it was harder for him to fight me.

  That quickly became strategic too, almost coldly so. I started sleeping whenever I could, even when he lay there gasping. I was consciously trying to save my own energy, hoping he would stay awake, hoping the pressure and exhaustion would force him to submit, hoping he would do it before his mind broke totally.

  A few times, I wondered if I might have a torturer living in me after all.

  It was a terrifying realization, but one I didn’t let myself get too close to, as I began to view him as a puzzle that needed cracking, a thing I had to open up from the inside out, and hopefully without breaking the overall design. I saw myself dancing on that line at times, even pushing on it, to see if it might bend, drawing back when the strain seemed to be moving him into a space I couldn’t control.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wondered if I drew on Revik’s experience in that, too.

  Maybe being a torturer was just one of the many skill sets I’d inherited as a part of the bond.

  I didn’t want to think about whether that made it better or worse.

  …HE SCREAMS, LYING face-down on a heavy wooden table.

  He is hoarse from screaming, deaf from it. He can’t make himself stop.

  Panic smashes into his light; he fights to get free, his left wrist shackled to the wood. The human works over him with slitted eyes, his mouth twisted in a half-smile as he raises the brand from his skin, looking at the end that still sizzles with fat and blood.

  In here, I can’t not be here.

  I can’t not be him.

  But I can look away.

  I can’t stop myself looking away, willing myself into some other part of the room, some other place where I can hear it and smell it, but at least fewer of the images are burned into my brain, making me feel like it’s me that’s doing this to him.

  I see the old man watching passively from the base of the wooden stairs, his long hands folded at his spine, his skull-like face unmoving over the motionlessness of a gray cloak and hair a darker shade of iron.