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

by JC Andrijeski

  “Fuck the lesson!” His eyes rose, meeting those of the other seer. “I’ll never be able to do it! It won’t matter what you do! And you’ll have killed them all for nothing!” He raised the gun back to his head, pressing the end against his temple.

  “If I do this, it stops. It… all… stops!”

  The old seer folds his hands, clicking again softly as he shakes his head.

  “No, brother,” the seer says simply, using the designation of equals for the first time with him. “This war will still be happening, with you or without you. There will be many deaths, with or without you.”

  “We’re not at war!”

  “We are at war, Nenzi… only you are still too far away from it to feel the effects of it!” The old seer’s eyes narrow. “Right now, as we speak, your brothers and sisters are being butchered in Asia. They are being relocated. Enslaved.”

  “I don’t care.” He puts his finger back by the trigger. “I don’t… fucking… care.”

  “The war will happen, whether you are here or not,” the old seer repeats heavily. “But if you are not here, Nenzi, then we will lose. The seer race will cease to be.”

  Nenzi shakes his head, jaw clenched.

  The old seer clicks at him, louder.

  “We are not ready for this fight, Nenzi,” he says, sharp.

  When the boy only shakes his head again, Menlim speaks louder.

  “We have spent too many centuries in caves. Praying to our Ancestors. Telling ourselves that our ability to see into the Barrier will protect us from what happens down here. Our brothers and sisters are superior beings, Nenzi, and they are being slaughtered right now, for the simple reason that they do not have the mental strength required to fight back.”

  “I can’t change that,” he says.

  “But you can, Nenzi! Don’t you see?” Menlim leans forward, clasping his long hands. “You can teach them. You can teach them to fight. You can teach a whole generation how to fight back… how to survive!”

  Nenzi holds the gun in his lap again, but he shakes his head, looking at it.

  “Maybe we aren’t meant to survive, Uncle,” he says.

  The old seer frowns, shaking his skull-like head.

  “We are meant to lead humans to their next evolutionary state, my friend,” he says, his voice matter of fact. “Your wife will do that… and you must be ready for her. You must prepare things for her.” His voice grows more gentle still. “Will you abandon her here? Will you let her come here, expecting to find you, only to find herself alone? Would you do that to her?”

  Pain clutches at his chest, tightening his hands on the gun.

  “Gods,” he says, his voice a near cry. “I can’t do this. Not even for her.”

  “You can, Nenzi,” the other says. “And you will. I see it in your light. You are so close now, you have only yourself in the way.”

  “But I try. I try every day… even more than I tell you. I try all the time!”

  “Then stop doing it for me,” the old seer says, his voice stern for the first time. “Stop doing it to avoid pain, Nenzi! Stop doing it to make your life easier. Do it because it is what you are meant to do. Do it so you can fulfill your purpose. Do it for her!”

  The young seer’s jaw tightens, but he doesn’t answer. He stares at the gun in his hands, and doesn’t move when the old seer regains his feet.

  “I cannot help you with this, Nenzi,” the old man says. “If you choose to end yourself, to take the coward’s way out, when you are so close––”

  “I’m not a fucking coward!”

  “Then prove it to me!” the old man returns shortly, his voice impatient. “Prove it to the gods! Be a man, Nenzi! If you do not like the direction your life is going, change it. Do not whine about it like a broken animal! Do not expect someone to come along and hand your power to you. Men with lesser powers than you… with lesser potential than you… have fought harder for what meager lots they were given!”

  The young seer feels his jaw clench harder, hurting his face.

  He doesn’t look up though, or respond to the seer’s words.

  He doesn’t move, in fact, as Menlim leaves him, walking away through the thigh-high grass covering the hill. He sits without moving, holding the gun in both of his hands, staring at it. It isn’t until the old seer is well and truly gone that the boy realizes he meant what he said.

  Even after everything, his uncle is not coming back.

  He will let him end his life.

  Clenching his jaw, Nenzi rises to his feet.

  He doesn’t want to think about his uncle’s words, but he can’t seem to help that, either. His uncle is right. He is weak. He has always been weak.

  Aiming the gun at one of the remaining panes in the wall of rusted metal, he fires. The rectangle of glass explodes, breaking into larger shards and a circle of powdered glass. Fighting to breathe, he is still staring up at the building, holding the gun. He considers firing again, then lowers it, so that it is pointed at the ground by his feet.

  He finds himself thinking about the old man’s words again, repeating them in his mind.

  But his mind rebels, too.

  He has tried. He has tried everything. He has endured everything. For years, he has swallowed his anger, his want of revenge. He obeyed even when it meant beatings, even when he didn’t understand why. He took all of it, did everything they told him to do. He didn’t run away, didn’t kill himself. He did everything they asked of him.

  Every single thing.

  But he is done. He isn’t following orders anymore.

  He isn’t following the scripture, or his uncle, or Merenje.

  If he is really meant to do this, then the gods would want it of him. They would tell him how to do it. They would tell him what he is supposed to do. But the gods are silent for him. They have been silent for years. They abandoned him, like everyone else, when his parents were murdered by humans in those mountains. The world behind his eyes is flat and empty, made of dead walls and smoked gray glass.

  There is nothing for him here. With no feeling there can be no purpose. He does not know what he is doing here. No matter what his uncle says, he feels none of it. It has no meaning to him, not anymore. It is gone. All of it… gone.

  He did all of it for nothing.

  He endured all of it, let them kill everyone around him, all for nothing. He can’t do what everyone tells him he must do.

  He is weak.

  Anger fills him.

  “Fuck you, Bridge.” Raising his eyes to the clouds, he raises his voice. “Fuck you! Come here, if you want me! Come here and fucking help me!”

  He stares up at a blue sky patterned with darker thunderheads. Pain fights to break open his chest but he can’t breathe past the anger. He can’t feel anything but that hard pain, the shell that wants to fight or fuck or hurt something––to keep hurting it until he’s broken it with his hands, until he can’t feel any of it.

  Light ripples through his aleimi, making patterns he can’t see. He’s tired of parlor tricks. He’s tired of using his light to win at fights against humans, to mind-wipe teachers and town authorities, to coerce blank-eyed females to lie down with him.

  Pain hits him harder, along with another realization.

  He’ll never do it. Never.

  They’ll never give him the ability, because every ability he has he’s only abused.

  He’s not just impure. He’s corrupted.

  The anger turns into fury, a pulse of grief he briefly can’t control.

  It bursts out of him in a hard, bright stream of light. Somewhere, in the midst of all of it, his grief reaches up, feeling for something familiar––for anything he used to know.

  He looks for himself first, some hint the person he barely remembers still lives there, somewhere. But that is gone too. He wonders if it ever truly existed.

  In the darkest, most futile moment, he surrenders.

  He gives in to death, to meaninglessness… to the hopelessness of
his life.

  He gives in to his own worthlessness, to how little power he really has.

  He gives in to having been left alone, left to die.

  He feels something in his light open, like the breaking of his heart. When it does, he glimpses a golden valley, filled with red clouds. An ocean lives there, made of diamond light, and he is there, briefly, surrounded by liquid warmth. The sky is crimson and gold, the water and waves filled with so much light he can barely hold it inside himself.

  He knows this place. Gods, he knows it. It is so familiar to him it hurts.

  The pain changes, turning into something closer to love.

  He isn’t alone. He was never really alone.

  Atoms vibrate the air around him, a pulse of living light he can feel in his fingers, electric currents that raise the hairs on his arms. He lets out a low gasp, feeling another presence there, a presence so familiar tears spring startled to his eyes. His throat closes as his chest catches, as his light expands, rippling outwards, stuttering in its rhythms––

  And then he hears it.

  A sound like the swell of an ocean wave.

  He knows this. He knows this, too. It is familiar to him.

  He knows that light from the golden valley, he knows it from other times, other places. He knows it so well it worsens the pain in his chest, and then his light is moving, flickering, changing course down trails so familiar they bring tears to his eyes.

  A folding sensation starts over his head, a feeling like a part of him collapsing inside, and it fills him with so much he can’t hold it all; he can’t hold even a portion of it. A jolt of hot light floods through him without warning, forcing another gasp, and he has to let it out, he can’t hold it in––

  He lets out a cry, a near scream as he looses the fist around his light.

  There is a silence where every bird in the sky holds its breath.

  Then, above him, it starts.

  The sound of breaking glass fills his ears.

  He opens his eyes, unable to see for the light. There is so much light, he is blind with it, but still he sees somehow, looking beyond it, looking past it and through it, through those vibrating strands…

  He laughs, shocked by joy.

  Every glass pane in the rusted building in front of him bursts outwards in the same instant. Shards fly from rusted metal frames. They cascade down around him in a rippling arc, raining down and out like a glass umbrella with the strength of his light. He watches them float, filling the sky like the calls of a thousand birds. They leave their frames before bursting, one by one, into a shroud of fine powder, whiter and finer than sand.

  And he is laughing, laughing…

  Light fills every pore in his being.

  He can’t express all the joy he feels. It bursts out of him in another ripple of light, a love he wants to share, that he pushes out and away from him, to reach anyone it might touch. In it, he finds himself. In it, there is a feeling of belonging, of rightness so strong he cannot help but see it as divine. He is who he is. He is who he was always meant to be.

  He is alive, and the world has not left him alone.

  In that moment, he loves her so much.

  She answered him.

  She answered his call when he needed her most.

  He will wait for her. He will wait forever if he has to.

  All the rest of it feels trivial. All of it feels like nothing, a short path filled with muddy ruts before the longer highway stretched out before them…

  35

  SUBSTATION

  CHANDRE COULD NOT keep the skepticism from her mind, or her words.

  “You are sure this is it?” She frowned, looking down the hill. “I admit it does not look right, brother, but security is too light. There is a fence––that is all.”

  Varlan barely looked up.

  “You are missing things, sister,” he murmured.

  Chandre could see from his eyes that he was mostly in the Barrier.

  They were in California, a few hours inland from San Francisco. It was strange to think the Bridge had grown up only a few miles from where she now stood.

  She and Varlan, along with Maygar, Eddard and the rest of Varlan’s team, were spread along a concrete wall bordering the hills around what appeared to be an electrical substation. The wall likely marked the edges of the government property, perhaps doubling as a retaining wall in the event of mudslides, since this area was prone to them.

  The substation lay below them, nestled on the edge a green, tree-filled valley.

  A high, dead-metal fence rimmed the substation complex. It was topped with razor wire, and something about it shimmered and hummed, so she assumed it must be electric. Still, it was only a fence, hardly a real discouragement to anyone determined to get inside.

  “Organics?” she said.

  He continued staring down the hill. “Look closer.”

  Despite Varlan’s use of the Barrier, Chandre chose to remain outside of it, if only to minimize the number of Barrier presences projected by their small team. Since they still had no idea if this facility had seers guarding it, such precautions seemed prudent.

  Anyway, she wasn't a rank 11 or 12 infiltrator. Chances were, if anyone was listening, it wouldn’t be Varlan they overheard.

  “I appreciate your silence, sister,” Varlan said quietly, answering her thoughts. “It is most helpful. And the complex is designed to look this way.” He nodded down the hill. “We are not supposed to see the second line of security at all.”

  He gave her a thin smile, that whisper of elsewhere still visible in his violet eyes.

  “Were you expecting a sign, sister Chandre?” he said in his dry voice. “One with an arrow, perhaps, that reads, ‘human-killing virus to be found here’?”

  Chandre’s frown deepened. She didn't answer.

  When Varlan handed her one of his organic rifles, she took it, examining the touch controls to make sure she was familiar with all of them.

  It bothered her when she realized she wasn’t.

  Before she could ask, Varlan sent her the gun’s schematics in a single, packed thought. He indicated she should wear the organic harness in the same set of instructions. She accepted the gift with a nod of thanks, but couldn’t quite return the Rook’s smile.

  He’d been friendly to her, more or less, ever since Eddard got them all to agree to work together on this little job. The fact that Chandre wasn’t interested in a cut of Varlan’s contract fee probably had at least something to do with his cheerfulness.

  Of course, there was no possible way she could trust him.

  She remained curious about him, however.

  From the scar on his face, clearly he was one of those who survived the death camps run by the Germans. He must have been working in Europe when the SS began rounding up seers. Once the Nazis started housing them in Auschwitz and other large camps, they also began cutting their faces, dipping their blades in acid to make the marks permanent.

  A lot of seers wore those diagonal scars. Still, it was unusual to see one on a seer of his age, particularly one with such a high sight rank.

  Varlan signed to one of his seers, telling her to keep an eye on the road.

  Hooking the rifle to the organic harness she wore and comparing it to the schematics Varlan sent, she couldn’t help but remember Dehgoies’ scathing remarks about the antiquated equipment in use by the Seven. Varlan’s toys seemed to put proof to Revik’s words; everything she’d seen his team use was pretty much state of the art.

  Then again, she struggled to disagree with many of Dehgoies’ positions on such things.

  She looked down the oak and scrub-covered hill to the fenced clearing, focusing on the four-story, glass-encased building to their right. A high wall of green-tinted glass stood in front of it, with a security terminal for entry and what looked like bullet-proof organic doors. Landscaped trees and a few dozen parking spaces flanked the wall on either side.

  Only three cars stood in parking spaces clos
est to the door: a black SUV, a European sports car, and what looked like an antique American car refurbished to run electric.

  X-ray surveillance of the covered parking lot in back showed the main parking lot to be nearly full, even on the weekends, and despite the fact that modern substations were almost fully automated. Like the cars she could see now, the covered lot also housed much nicer automobiles than one might expect from low-level techs and government employees.

  Moreover, Chandre had seen no one enter or leave either parking lot.

  Their teams had been in place since dawn, and they’d only seen one person, period––a gardener watering landscaped trees and bushes around the green-glass doors.

  Chandre had to admit it was strange.

  “What am I missing?” she said to Varlan. “About this security?”

  “Look to the perimeter,” he said. “That is not just an electrified fence.” He slid his rifle up to his shoulder on its jointed harness, peering through the scope. Glancing over, he gave her a wry smile. “How many electrical substations do you know that have next-generation OBE fields guarding them?”

  Chandre didn’t answer. Swallowing, she extended her light to confirm his words.

  Once she had, she clicked out, frowning.

  OBE fields, or organic binary electrical fields, were generally only found on military bases, and not often around those. The semi-organic fields were made by Black Arrow Industries, the same group that collected most of the big ticket defense contracts involving seer tech.

  Gazing down the hill at that shimmery line she could now see with her light, she wondered again what possessed her to come along on this little jaunt, even though she hadn't been able to clear it with Balidor.

  Gazing down the line of the concrete wall, she saw Maygar nodding to one of the other seers, a rifle identical to hers gripped in both hands, his brown eyes serious as they gazed down the scrub brush hill. Eddard crouched on his other side, showing a female infiltrator something on a portable monitor.

  True to his word, Eddard provided them with a lot of intel for this job––more than Varlan had previously, and some that directly contradicted information Varlan was given by other sources. The human also promised he could help them with security keys and lock-down procedures once they were inside.