Shield (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #2): Bridge & Sword World

by JC Andrijeski

  The guard’s scanner clicked off. The human spoke nonverbally into his headset, then looked down at their driver, Wreg. Using his fingers, the guard motioned for him to take the car through the gate.

  Revik felt his heartbeat quicken.

  One barrier down.

  They reached the East Wing entrance, where they’d been instructed to enter, both by the client and by the unwilling Revik was now impersonating. Checking out the security markers he could see with his eyes alone, it occurred to him that he’d never actually been inside this building before, not even as a tourist.

  He glanced over the facade and to either side of the East Wing entrance. He’d barely taken in the walls and a glimpse of garden and trees when the car came to a full stop. He couldn’t see the more famous porticos of the north and south entrances or the garden on the south side, not with the building in the way, but the impact of the structure and what it represented still hit him harder than he’d expected.

  It was strange to think Galaith had lived here.

  Revik would have been here often, if he’d made a different choice earlier in his life. In fact, he likely would have been on Galaith’s staff.

  A guard approached, peered inside, then stepped out of the way of the car’s door, motioning for him to exit the vehicle.

  Revik snapped the door’s latch and slid over on the seat.

  He stepped his full weight onto his good leg, then rose in a single motion. They’d padded his shoes to change his gait; it was the limp he had to watch. He hit his hurt leg hard as he stepped forward with the other, distributing his weight evenly. Sliding between the other three infiltrators as they left the car behind him, he exuded boredom with his light, winking at the guard when the man seemed to be looking at him too closely.

  Frowning, the human averted his gaze.

  Like Revik, the other three infiltrators’ records were made to match the bone structure, light markers and facial features of three specific seers from the same house.

  Unlike him, they’d done all of this by falsifying records, and without wearing prosthetics. It minimized the chances of being caught if fewer of them were relying on organics to fool the scanning equipment. Besides, there was no reason any of the other three would be sought out by security.

  Still, there was some risk. Terian might be aware of some of his contacts in the States. The likelihood that he would be monitoring any of the security feeds himself was pretty slim, though, no matter how many bodies he had.

  Anyway, the plan was to delay discovery, not prevent it entirely.

  All three of them wore expensive suits, their sight-restraint collars the thin, lightweight variety easy to miss in a casual glance––a casual glance from a human, anyway. Revik knew the facade wouldn’t fool anyone who actually worked there, seer or human.

  He kept his light focused on the imprint of the unwilling he was mimicking.

  Their clothes, hair and general appearance kept most of the humans they passed in the corridors from looking at them too closely.

  At least two Revik saw noticed the collars, but they didn’t react apart from a slight double-take. One glanced at a colleague, raising an eyebrow. Apparently most of the staff were well aware of the tastes of some of the higher-ups.

  And the women got looks, of course.

  The most nerve-wracking part was psychological rather than due to any specific threat. Walking past the visitor’s entrance on the east side of the main building, he found it difficult not to stare around at various parts of the interior as they entered the center hall, passing by some of the more famous of the ground floor rooms. The foot traffic immediately increased as well, and he noticed the addition of at least three more humans watching them from the sides, unobtrusively of course, but clearly Secret Service, and armed.

  Revik kept his eyes down, focusing on the man leading them, like the guards had instructed them at the gate. Even so, he noticed things. A door here, a set of windows there, a passageway he tied to one segment of the map or another in his head. He hadn’t been well versed in the layout of the building before he started this op, but he recognized paintings, glimpses of carpet runners and stair landings, the placement of windows and walkways.

  He had to rely on his physical eyes and ears alone, of course.

  He wore a mock-up of a collar that exuded Barrier interference rather than a true block of his sight, but even a casual scan wouldn’t go unnoticed in here. He could feel the construct shields in random touches of his light, and they were dense, multi-layered.

  The team outside should still be able to feel him, though.

  They reached the other side of the center hall, past the two porticos, and he felt himself relax slightly. He could smell the kitchen, so he knew they were getting close to the elevator, which the unwilling told him was the only way he’d ever reached their destination on the second floor.

  It was time to throw up a flare––a small one, anyway. Give them something by which to gauge the passage of time on his end.

  He entered the elevator with the other two seers and folded his hands at the small of his back, whistling softly.

  Raspberries, he thought clearly, letting a whisper of hunger join the word.

  He let his mind wander, sliding back into the boredom of the unwilling, thinking about what he would do afterwards, if he and his friends would get high and watch old movies while they came down from the stims the client would want him to do to jack up their reactions to one another.

  He let himself think about the client as well, what kind of mood he might be in, how many others might be there.

  As he let the thought form, he glanced at Tobias, one of Wreg’s men posing as another unwilling. He was the only one of Wreg’s team able to mimic the light markers of a pro, at least to the appropriate degree.

  They’d sold him as a newbie to the client, which of course intrigued him.

  Revik shrugged subtly with one hand.

  “Ten dollars it’s four,” he said.

  “Twenty,” Tobias countered. “And dinner.”

  The guard glanced at them, allowing a faint smile.

  “He knows something,” Revik said. “How many?”

  The guard shrugged, human fashion, but the smile remained on his face. “I don’t know how you ice-bloods do it… honestly.”

  “Come on,” Kat smiled, from the other side. She touched his arm, letting a tendril of her light snake out, wrapping around his leg. “Come with us,” she murmured. “I’ll show you, since you’re so curious.”

  The guard glanced down, letting his eyes travel deliberately over her body. She, like Ullysa, wore a form-fitting, tailored suit. He raised an eyebrow.

  “Not in the slightest,” he said flatly.

  Even so, Revik felt the man reacting to her. He had to fight not to step away from where they stood. Keeping it off his face, he looked the human over, too, giving Tobias a sideways smile.

  “You work for them year-round,” Revik joked. “We’re here a few hours. Who’s the crazy one?”

  “Don’t tease him, Lewellyn,” Ullysa said, touching Revik’s arm.

  Tobias laughed, but the guard’s mouth tightened just before he shook his head. He smiled at the joke, but stepped deliberately away from Kat, giving Ullysa a look that lasted a little longer.

  He didn’t talk to them again.

  The elevator reached the top floor, then stopped for a security scan. That one took longer.

  As he waited, Revik felt his light contract sharply around his form.

  He was reacting to her again. It could be in his head. He couldn’t feel her exactly, but he could feel something––like catching a scent that was faint, wholly dependent on wind. It was maddening, and he realized he was sweating again.

  He forced his light deeper into the mobile construct, seeking the cold stability of the silver light. He was having a physical reaction, too.

  He realized suddenly that the other seers were focused on him, in more ways than one.

 
; Christ. She was here. He knew it suddenly, in his whole body. She was in this building somewhere. Thinking about it sent another ripple through his light, strong enough that Ullysa laid a hand on his arm.

  “Llewellyn,” she said softly. She waited for him to turn his head. “Honey, did you take anything?”

  Hesitating, he shuffled his feet, folding his hands. Following her cue, he muttered a low response. “Not much.”

  “D’gaos, Llewe,” she said in her soft voice. “What were you thinking?”

  He didn’t answer, but let a flavor of annoyance flare his light.

  “He won’t mind.”

  “We’ll see if Jo says the same,” she murmured.

  His hunter cloak wavered, then kicked back in. He squeezed Ullysa’s fingers in a silent thanks. He kept the forward part of his mind off Allie, but a second train whispered in the background, hopefully too quiet for the construct to pick up.

  They wouldn’t have her up here. She’d be in the basement somewhere, if on the grounds at all. The plan hadn’t changed. This was still the best way to get them to come to him.

  The doors let out a soft ping, and slid open.

  Standing on the other side was a human in his late sixties, with a head of thick, white hair. He grinned when he saw Revik, then glanced at the other three.

  Revik bowed, formal seer fashion, as he might do to Vash, or any in the Council of Seven. The human loved the ceremony, mannerisms and turns of phrase of formal seer culture, despite his ignorance of their correct context.

  The bow Revik had just performed belonged in a monastery, not a government building, but the man had no clue as to the significance of any of it.

  The real Llewelyn had simply experimented with fragments of seer culture until he figured out what was suitably dramatic for the old man’s tastes.

  “Hello, Mr. Vice President,” Revik said. “You are looking fine this evening.”

  “Come here, my boy!” the human said, holding out his arms.

  Revik walked into them without hesitation. He gave the old human a hug.

  The man immediately looked down, and his grin widened.

  “You missed me, Lou?” he said.

  “Of course, sir,” Revik said, smiling a little.

  “Well, then… bring your friends! Come inside!”

  Revik barely spared the others a glance before following the old human, his hands folded formally in front of his body. Again, right posture… completely wrong setting.

  He’d played such games himself, of course––although with a bit more respect for the religious forms, perhaps. All his life he’d been forced to accommodate humans curious about and who liked to dabble in seer culture, style, language, manner, art, religion… and especially their sexuality. Even so, he was nervous. Nervous in a way he hadn’t been for this kind of work since he’d first started.

  He wouldn’t have to fuck the old man.

  Travers was a voyeur, and impotent. If he knew more, he’d probably be dangerous, but as it was, he was a relatively benign form of the sub-category who got off watching seers being together. He knew only the basics of seer physiology and psychology, and nothing but the human-held theories of their aleimi.

  There were those who knew enough about separation pain and the bonds of mates to be full-blown sadists in their kink.

  Anyway, being uncollared in the White House was out of the question for security reasons. Under normal circumstances, that protected the seers somewhat, too.

  Clearly Travers felt safe indulging here, due to the layers of security from outside eyes and a discreet nod from Terian. From a seer’s perspective, though, the human had an odd idea of “safe,” given that every seer in the construct could see and hear everything he was doing. There was no way around it, really, due to the necessities of keeping the space open to maintain it from outside encroachment.

  Terian obviously wanted the insurance, in case Travers stepped out of line.

  He certainly had that by now.

  Despite the ban on imaging devices inside the White House itself, every seer inside the construct had an unparalleled view of Travers’ “parties.”

  Travers seemed oblivious to this, or, more likely, he didn’t care. Seers didn’t really factor into his thinking around privacy, only other human beings. Seers became dangerous only when they worked for someone else––someone who might expose him to other humans.

  Or, more importantly in his case, to the human media.

  Anyway, he was too afraid of disease and pain to want contact himself.

  His fears weren’t wholly unjustified, either. The few diseases that seers could sexually transmit to humans were deadly as hell––to humans. The most common of these, the seers called “white blindness” in Prexci. It could kill a human in as quickly as a few days. For seers themselves, it could be a rather tenacious virus, but only deadly in extreme cases, similar to pneumonia in humans.

  Seers didn’t suffer from as many problems in that area for a number of reasons. If they could have caught any of the more serious human varieties of STD, they’d probably be extinct by now, given how most of them were used in the human world. As it was, they mainly had to worry about parasites of various kinds and infections, particularly if the client (or owner, or rapist) was unclean, or liked to hurt them.

  They entered the room.

  Revik took in the five humans who waited for them.

  Dressed as if for a cocktail party, they sat on chairs not far from a white marble fireplace with a fire burning high in the grate, on the opposite side of a low coffee table covered with a tray of glasses, along with several bottles of hard alcohol and two ice buckets.

  They stared at the four seers in open curiosity.

  Revik nodded politely, bowing as he’d been told.

  Then, avoiding eyes, he glanced around the room itself, taking in furniture that looked more than a century old. Love seats with gold embroidered fabric and dark cherry wood matched a king-sized bed with an elaborate headboard of the same wood. The headboard climbed up the wall, ending in a set of snow white drapes hanging down in arcs by the giant pillows.

  The room wasn’t particularly big by modern standards, but it wasn’t small, either. The sitting area stretched from the double doors to two large windows with heavy gold drapes that someone had already drawn. A cherry-wood desk stood in one corner, a dressing table with a matching chair sat against the opposite wall. The lamps were on low settings, but the fire in the grate provided most of the room’s lighting.

  Revik felt his nerves return.

  Keeping it off his face, he glanced at Ullysa, then back at the old human, watching as the latter arranged himself on one of the elaborately carved love seats before the fire, directly across from the seated humans who had been waiting for them.

  Revik felt more than saw the door close behind them.

  He heard the outer locks slide into place, felt the security team outside the door. Nothing out of synch so far. It was all pretty much exactly as Llewelyn told him it would be. Even so, he didn’t move for a few seconds, watching as the old human fixed himself a drink and exchanged pleasantries with several of the humans.

  Finally, the Vice President looked at him.

  “Are you coming?”

  Revik barely hesitated. “Of course, sir.” He adopted the formal tone and posture. “I was waiting to be invited.”

  The man smiled. “You’re tense tonight, Lou… relax.” He patted the space next to him on the couch. “Have a seat.”

  After the barest pause, Revik walked over and sat beside him.

  He nodded to the humans who seemed to want to engage him, but didn’t quite meet the gaze of any one of them. He was trying to focus again, to get his head back in the game. He found himself thinking about Allie again, though, trying not to wonder if she could see anything inside the construct, or if she was reacting to him being there as much as he was to her.

  He lost himself in those thoughts for long enough to miss a few seconds of spe
ech from the human.

  “…a little under the weather tonight?”

  Revik glanced over, bringing the cloak he’d woven of Llewelyn’s energy more tightly over his. “I’m fine, sir.”

  “Would you like a drink, Lou?”

  Llewelyn had instructed him on this, too. “No… thank you, sir.”

  The human smiled. “Have one anyway.”

  “Yes, sir.” Following their little ritual, he accepted the glass and took a cautious sip, feeling his nerves rise as the human motioned over Kat. Pretending to misunderstand, Ullysa stepped forward, but the old man insisted.

  “No. The blond one. You.”

  Ullysa stepped back, folding her hands formally in front of her body.

  Revik felt a sharp spike of nausea. He tried to kill it with more swallows of the drink, but all he could think of was Allie again, and what this would do to him if their positions were reversed.

  He would lose his fucking mind.

  Maybe she wouldn’t be able to see anything. Maybe she would only get a glimpse, and then it would all be over and he could explain to her how he’d done it to get in. How it was the least risky way, how he couldn’t afford to wait when he had no idea how long Terian would keep her here…

  Kat knelt in front of him.

  Revik averted his eyes as she unfastened his pants, feeling the nausea worsen. He finished the drink, but didn’t put it down. It wasn’t the nausea he’d felt around Allie, which was as much nerves and adrenaline and desire as anything else. Revulsion hit him instead, a feeling that made him actually, really sick… but that didn’t seem to harm his physical reaction any.

  He’d sworn to her he’d never do this.

  He’d told her she’d never have to worry about him, that he’d never do it to her again, not for any reason.

  He’d meant it. He could feel she didn’t trust him, that it might even be years before she fully trusted him––years where he’d be more than happy to prove to her that she could trust him.

  Gods. What if he was wrong? What if the boy didn’t come? What if the plans were wrong, if Terian or Travers had some kind of imaging device in here, or found some way to show her through the Barrier? What if all of this ended up being for nothing?