Frowning in disapproval, Galaith decided to let it pass, gazing down at the long, white cruise ship, which had unmistakably come to a halt on the dark water.
Plumes of fire rose to the low deck of clouds, staining them red and gold.
Galaith watched the flames mix with the early dawn’s light, reflecting against the falling rain. Another blast lit the nearby land mass, illuminating dark, featureless hills, and his eyes studied the scrub evergreens and broken boulders, blinking against the sudden brightness. People the size of ants jumped off the tall sides of the ship as he watched. Even under the steady pulse of the helicopter’s blades, Galaith heard screams, and impact sounds as they hit.
Feeling the other occupants of the helicopter looking at him expectantly, Galaith made the sign of the cross.
Then, fixing his brow and mouth in the proper display of anger and grief, he signaled to the pilot with his hand, pointing towards the shore.
It wouldn’t do to be caught gawking at the scene.
Anyway, for all intents and purposes, his work here was done.
Alyson’s last known location was the starboard end of the stern, where his team set and detonated the first set of explosives. Galaith would have his seers look for her in the aftermath, of course, and retrieve her body if at all possible, but it was over.
That was a decision he’d made before he arrived. Better to send her back to those beyond-the-Barrier shores of which she was so fond. Better that, than to let her go alive to Terian and whatever dark scheme he’d concocted.
It was a good thing Galaith had that second team in place, watching Terian.
Even so, he’d almost reacted too slowly.
Whatever had been set in motion on the ship a few hours previous, it had been less of a plan by Terian as it was a reaction to an unexpectedly opened window of opportunity. Perhaps Terian had even imagined it would be so. It was the only way he could have moved his team swiftly enough to avoid any ripples of warning through the network Pyramid.
As he watched smoke billow out the bottom decks, Galaith knew any hope of her survival had to be slim. He retained a glimmer of optimism that the temperature of the water might preserve some bio-samples, however.
Ironically, it was she who called him here.
It was a genuine pity he’d arrived too late to reason with her.
As for Terian and whatever he’d been up to...
“I’ll be back for you, old friend,” he muttered under his breath.
He didn’t let himself think too closely about the loss of Dehgoies. That would have to be contemplated on another day.
“Sir?” the pilot shouted.
Galaith met his questioning look, wiping his face with one hand. Luckily, the gesture fit the moment, and played all the more convincingly for its sincerity, whatever its true cause. One of his secretaries, Martha, touched his arm in sympathy, and he clasped her fingers, letting his face show a flicker of gratitude.
He told the pilot, “Take me to the airport, Gene. We’ll coordinate the rescue teams from there.”
“Aye, sir.” The man saluted, grinning with obvious pleasure that Galaith had used his first name. Popping the wad of gum jammed into one corner of his mouth, he let out a half-shout above the rotary blades, “Wow! What a day!” Seeing Galaith’s dark look, his smile faded. “Of course it’s terrible, sir...terrible. All those people. No one deserves to die like that.”
Galaith did not give him a reassuring smile.
Still, he found the man’s comments amusing in their blatant insincerity.
Pity there was no way he could let any of them live.
ABOVE ME, ROSETTES bloomed in a bland sky. Clouds shone red and gold in billowing tongues of reflected flame.
I was still pretty sure I was dead.
Then a wave rolled up, filling my mouth with salt water.
I choked, only to be fully submerged. Physical pain brought my world sharply into focus as my head and mouth once more broke the surface. Salt sank into cuts in my skin. My knee felt like it had been pulverized. I forced my limbs forward through the blue liquid ice. I gazed at the fire and a dense wave of pain hit me again, not all of it physical.
Water filled my mouth and I spit it out.
Then, it hit me. It really hit me. For a moment, I disappeared.
Shouts overhead and nearer screams snapped me out. Another wave submerged my head as I groped around for something to hold on to, something to support me. I grabbed at something as it floated by. It turned out to be a soaked life jacket.
I let it go, paddling like a wounded dog with one leg.
Trying to follow the others, I gasped out steam, glimpsed the burning white hulk behind me as I pumped my arms harder. The ship continued to belch smoke, but it no longer produced a churning wake. Instead it sat lower in the water, like a child squatting in a stream.
I had to find Jon.
The thought repeated, irrational.
Rain had begun to fall, along with soot, white ash, pieces of fabric and paper. I heard screams all around me...I closed my eyes, still trying to get my limbs all working in the same direction, when someone grabbed my arm.
When I turned, Chandre’s reddish eyes met mine.
She looked afraid. I gazed up at black-tinted clouds, a white tower rising from the middle of the ship where a blue, tail-like fin rose to meet the sky. A burning figure stood on the fourth deck, fighting to climb the railing. The wind flared the fire on his body.
Chandre yanked harder on my arm. “Come. This will get ugly, and fast! The Rooks are exterminating witnesses...”
She began to drag me through the water, and I let her. A plane skimmed overhead, lights ablaze. No one paid any attention to us.
Revik’s face rose in my mind. My sight flared, bringing even more pain. More death. Images of falling bodies ripped apart by ice-cold water. Mom’s face. Dad’s. I missed Jon so badly it hurt. I needed him, had to find him. I floated, fighting to push past it, dragged through the current. Chandre didn’t stop pulling on my arm. It felt like she’d pull it out of the socket.
“There’s some chance,” I managed, talking to her, or maybe myself. “I saw him alive. Terian could have him. He could still have him...”
Chandre looked at me. She struggled words out between breaths as she stroked hard with her free arm, pulling me with her.
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “No. Bridge...you must face facts. I am sorry. Dehgoies is dead...different light signature. We tracked it...we saw him die...”
I shook my head back at her, trying to free my arm, but she only pulled harder.
“You must feel it.” She looked at me. “...Separation sickness...it will get worse. You have to stay out of the Barrier. Do whatever you have to, only don’t go in. He will have died for nothing. Don’t let them see you...”
I didn’t answer, remembering Eliah saying the same thing.
When I didn’t fight after a few seconds, her expression softened.
“I am sorry, Bridge,” she said.
I didn’t look at her again.
We remained a few hundred yards from shore when a sudden, sharp boom jerked both sets of our eyes back towards the ship. Like something from a dream in the rising light, yellow and orange plumes billowed upward. The ship sank fast after that. I saw glass blow out as windows exploded, pouring water, flames...more smoke. The wind changed, bringing us more screams, the smell of charred flesh and burning plastic.
Chandre resumed swimming.
Between strokes I heard her speak through clenched teeth.
“Hopefully they will believe we are dead, as well...”
A wolf runs on the tundra, tongue lolling past its blood-stained grin—
When I came to, I was aware of hands on me, people pulling me out of the water. Rough gravel and dirt met my bare skin, and nothing ever hurt so much. My legs dragged like dead weight. I couldn’t move my knee and my thigh felt like it was bitten to the bone by some kind of sea monster or shark. Someone wrapped a
coarse blanket around my back, talking over my shoulder to Chandre.
I felt grief on the man holding me and realized I didn’t know him, or the woman standing next to him, watching me with pity in her dark eyes.
Only Chandre’s voice remained.
The rest stood silent, emotional despite their weapons and training, unable to tally what they’d lost.
...and the wolf still runs, his feet sending up puffs of white snow.
I want to tell them it’s all right, I know I’m safe.
For now, at least, my body at least. The wolf is no longer looking at me, but runs at a single dark form marring the white plain. Again it is dawn, and a black shape burns in the distance on a flat horizon that sparkles like diamonds...and my chest feels as if someone has taken an ice pick to it, hitting it again and again, digging out a pale light at its core.
It is a feeling worse than death.
22
INDIA
NEWS FEEDS RAN nonstop in the background.
I tried not to look at their fast-moving images, or hear anything the avatars said. Still, broken pieces reached me, burning me like heated stones.
“...dead now tallied at four hundred and sixty-two...with over a hundred still missing, most of whom are also believed to be dead...”
“...believed to be the work of the terrorist Alyson May Taylor and her organization of renegade seers. Initially thought to be killed in the attack, it is now believed Taylor escaped alive and is still at large, following...”
“...where she was last seen in Europe, at a café in Spain where she...”
“...eluded authorities outside a train station in Munich, now believed to be headed east as she reunites with the larger terrorist cells that placed her all those years ago as a sleeper agent, somewhere in the depths of Asia...”
I heard my name, over and over, and saw my face.
I saw pictures of people I loved, heard strangers argue about how many of my family and friends were already dead...until my brain fuzzed over, counting floor tiles in a hotel bathroom while someone pounded on the door, trying to get me to unlock it.
I traveled everywhere in a faceless cloud of seers.
They bought me wigs, wrapped scarves around my head, gave me earpieces to wear, make-up, prosthetics of various kinds, contact lenses. They forced me to eat, drugged me when I wouldn’t sleep in the constructs we hopped in and out of, shoved me into vans and cars and trains to move me every few days, scolded me when I drank too much or stood next to windows without the curtains drawn. I stared at the landscape of different cities across land masses I didn’t recognize through the windows of whatever vehicle they put me in, sometimes for days at a time where I couldn’t sleep, where I could barely tell where I was.
They treated me differently now. All but Chandre, anyway.
Despite their attempts to keep me alive, most of the seers seemed afraid of me. It was a reverential kind of fear, like they saw the end of the world reflected on my face.
At that point, I wasn’t sure I disagreed.
When Chandre came in alone to talk to me on the third day, telling me the latest news from San Francisco, my mind cut out entirely.
The static remained for days...flavored in flashes of moving scenery, movies shown on flights between Calgary and Montreal and Berlin, images on the vid player one of the seers gave me, hotel rooms and, let’s face it...a hell of a lot of alcohol.
Through it all, the feeds ran.
I couldn’t block it all out, no matter how much I tried to kill my mind.
Some cult started worshipping me. The cult’s followers petitioned for space on the US feed network and got denied because of my terrorist status, causing a wave of sensationalist headlines both for and against. There had been protests. At least one actual riot happened, too, apparently in Los Angeles and mostly between Christians and human Third Mythers.
Seers got dragged into it, too, of course. I saw pictures of a young female seer being beaten with tasers and pipes. The newscasters on the feeds clucked about it in regret, but none put down their cameras long enough to stop the men doing it—men who would never be able to afford a seer like her, even for a few hours.
Rumors spread about me being the Bridge.
Black market feeds had whole sites devoted to me and Revik. Human women loved Revik, especially after it got out that we’d been married. It didn’t seem to matter that he was dead.
World governments were already negotiating over rights to my telekinetic “powers.” The United States and China dominated the discussions, of course, but Russia, Germany, England and Japan vied to be allowed at the bargaining table too, hiding behind the veneer of scientific curiosity. Speculation erupted that I might have been impregnated. Telekinetic rumors and rumors of sightings spread, more so after I was officially blamed by SCARB for the sinking of Royal Faire cruise ship, The Explorer. People who lost loved ones in the bombing posted bounties, wanting me neutralized...dead or alive, but preferably dead.
The feeds fed on the hysteria, fanned it.
More people went missing, presumed dead.
One was my brother, Jon. Another was Cass, who I’d known almost as long as my adoptive brother. Cass and I had finger-painted together while Cass’s mom worked and her father drank. By high school, Cass had her own section of my closet. Every year she celebrated two of every holiday, one at my place and one with her mom and dad and her deadbeat Uncle Phan.
With the last two people in my family gone, I didn’t much care what the world thought of me, or even if I survived it.
Weeks passed. Longer.
I wait for sleep. I crave it, but it doesn’t help.
I can’t reach him, no matter how often he asks. The asking hurts, more than the other ever did, and I feel him in pieces...a darker feeling that is self-hate, emotions that are infinitely more complex.
Still, he doesn’t feel alive.
The numbers return. They are separate from him, but connected somehow. I dream of my father, the engineer. He jokes that numbers are our secret language, so we can speak to one another in code. They are an autistic’s mantra, a broken song I can’t get out of my head.
...17, 10, 42, 12, 1, 57, 12, 20, 332, 178, 12, 102, 9, 13, 15, 2, 2, 2...
I AM SOMEWHERE else.
I’d never been here before, but it felt familiar somehow, or maybe just closer in feel to places I recognized. After the clean, picturesque towns, mountains and chateaus where we’d spent the last few weeks in Europe, the grittiness of this new place felt almost...welcome.
Circling cities to avoid detection, we’d been traveling through farmlands and villages for months. We’d stopped in safe houses to sleep. Churches, warehouses, hotels, mosques, a winery in the hills, a bombed out Jewish temple. I told myself I didn’t know what was worse: the nights I wasn’t able to sleep, or having to suffer through the dreams and waking when I could.
But that was a lie, too.
I missed him by the time we hit the next construct, by the time I could dream again. I missed him, looked for him, and when I found him, we would...
Here it was dirty, loud, colorful, hot, poor, crowded.
I walked up a dirt and stone street where a mound of brightly-colored trash covered an open sewer grate, stinking already at seven o’clock in the morning. A shrine draped in winking Christmas lights and gold foil stood in a crack between buildings, a monkey god cavorting among flowers and stick fruit covered in buzzing flies. A caramel-colored cow stood chewing over a pile of rotting greens and egg cartons and chicken bones.
When I paused to pat its backside, it didn’t look up.
Most of my face was wrapped in gauzy cream cloth, but I nodded anyway to a monk in red robes on his way up the street, wearing sunglasses and carrying an espresso in his hand. I felt oddly content with the horrible smells of human excrement and rotting melon and maggot-covered meat. Even with the stench slowly heating in the morning sun, for some reason I felt like I could almost breathe here.
I
chuckled at the next shrine, which held a picture of me covered in pink flower petals surrounded by white, paraffin candles. It was my high school end-of-year picture, and my hair had a streak of lime green in it...me and Cass’s idea of rebellion, which infuriated my mother at the time, since she’d already purchased a photo package to give pictures to all of our relatives. Because of the ban, real pictures were expensive as hell, and needed special permission. She still had a job back then, working for the post office, and she made me pay for the photos out of my meager tip money from an earlier crap job I had, which had taken months. It was probably the last time we really screamed at each other since my father...
I made my way up the hill, using the cane.
The mountains loomed over the town, breathtakingly tall, draped in snow and wisps of low-lying, fog-like clouds. Colorful prayer flags flapped in the breeze, hanging from wires sagging between buildings painted in bright greens and blues.
Most windows had no glass, just wooden shutters and tarps covering square openings. A black paw emerged from one of these as I watched, a second story window in a hotel with tables and chairs on a roof where people sat and drank hot chai, speaking Hindi and Tibetan and seer pidgin. Following the paw came the rest of a squat, tan-colored monkey. Its furred face remained etched in a frown despite the sticky piece of mango clutched in one paw. Gripping wooden slats with its free hand and feet, it climbed nimbly up to the roof.
When it reached the railing a yell pierced the early morning quiet, and a white-haired Indian woman swung at the monkey with a long-handled broom.
The monkey screeched and held his ground, still clutching the mango...and I laughed, watching the grumpy thing vault to the roof of a shack that housed the steaming chai pot from which a girl maybe twelve-years-old ladled tea.
Allie's War Season One Page 32