…had to get to him… not get you killed…
He took hold of my arm.
I felt the caution in his fingers, but also his worry, his wanting to get us out of there––and an almost desperate protectiveness that threw me after everything else. I could feel a commotion in the Barrier, getting louder the more I listened to something besides him, the more I tore my attention off the room and the other seers.
The others began walking down the hall.
Revik pulled me to follow and I stumbled to keep up.
I remembered the boy then and turned my head, staring down at the broken body on the carpet. But not entirely broken. The boy had turned his head.
The glazed eyes were staring at me.
They were looking at me and at Revik, and I saw his lips moving, the chest fighting for another breath, his eyes fighting back to life.
The spark in his eyes flickered, began to glow.
Revik must have felt it through me. He turned, and the gun was back in his hand. I hesitated, the barest instant… but even that was too long.
“Wait!” I yelled.
I said it right as the gun went off.
The bullet hit the small head between the eyes. At that close of range, no one could have missed, much less Revik. I saw the boy’s head break apart, then slump. I felt him die as much as I saw it.
The end was abrupt, and as soon as it happened…
I felt Revik stumble.
I grabbed his arm.
A surge of panic hit me; it quickly overshadowed everything else. His knees buckled. I tried to catch him, but he was too big for me. All I could do was grab hold of his shirt and his waist, fighting to hold him up. I went down with him instead. I ended up kneeling on the carpet next to where he lay on his side, gasping for breath.
I yelled out for the others, bending over him.
“Revik!” I gripped his hair, looking into his face. “Revik, no. No, no, no…”
His eyes muddied. I watched it happen. I could only kneel there, helpless as he changed in front of me. He fought to breathe, looking up at me, but it was too late. I felt it in his light. I felt it reconfiguring, pooling around and slamming into him.
I knew. I’d known, even before I knew––maybe even in Tarsi’s cave.
“No, baby. No.” I whispered it, caressing his face. “No… please.”
“What the fuck happened?” Kat demanded, standing over us. “What did you do? Did you stab him, Bridge?”
“No,” I said.
“He did it to save you! He did it for you, Bridge, you ungrateful bitch––”
“Shut up, Kat.” Ullysa knelt on Revik’s other side. When she reached for him, fury blazed in my light. I shoved her away, harder than I intended.
“Don’t fucking touch him!” I snarled.
She stared at me, her eyes nervous.
When I struggled to breathe, I realized my own eyes were glowing. I could see them reflected in Ullysa’s, tainting her face the palest shade of green.
It had been so long, it shocked me.
Looking away from her, I focused back on him. I gripped his shirt, fighting to control myself, staring into his face. His eyes were glowing, too. He stared up at me, and for an instant, I saw the boy in his eyes.
“Allie,” he said. “What happened?”
I stroked his hair back from his forehead, caressing his face. “You’re all right, baby. We have to get out of here.” I fought to speak, to get past the lump in my throat. “Can you walk?”
I felt it, though, snaking around him, and around me.
He stared at me, and the light in his eyes dimmed, then flashed brighter.
“Allie.” I heard fear in his voice, but it was Revik again. “Allie… what happened? What happened…” He turned his head, staring at the broken body of the boy on the carpet. The small corpse didn’t look real to me now.
I realized it never had been.
It hadn’t been anything but a vessel––a broken doll.
I saw Revik begin to understand, and somehow that was worse. It was worse than anything I’d ever seen in anyone’s face in my life.
“It’s all right,” I said, helpless. “It’s all right.”
“Allie…” Terror eclipsed his expression. “Allie…”
“Later. We’ll talk about it later.” I fought my voice steady, tugging on his hand. “Revik. Please, baby. We have to go. Now.”
His expression broke, then seemed to… fragment.
I watched him trying to incorporate what he felt, then to push it away. It was like watching two people––more, maybe––vying for the same space.
“What the hell is going on?” Kat muttered.
She sounded afraid now, though. When I looked up, still clutching his shirt, she was staring at Revik. I could tell she was looking at him with her light. She was in the Barrier, and her eyes and face held nothing but shock.
“What the fuck is wrong with him?” she said.
I stammered, trying to speak, but couldn’t seem to form the words.
“It’s him,” a different voice said.
I turned. Ullysa had spoken that time. She was so pale I didn’t recognize her. Her skin was almost gray. She gripped my arm.
“It’s Revi’… the boy. He was Revi’. He was split. Like Terian.”
“Yes,” I managed. “Yes… please, don’t touch him.”
“I won’t.” She took a breath, but her color didn’t come back. “Allie!” Ullysa gripped my arm again, so tightly it hurt. “D’gaos! What do we do?”
“What does this mean?” Tobias said, speaking Prexci now. “What is this?” His voice was angry, but I could hear the fear behind it, too. He was staring at Revik’s glowing eyes. “Explain this!” he demanded.
Ullysa still stared at me. She looked at me like I was a lifeline. Like I could save them all, or maybe just save Revik.
“Is he…” She swallowed. “Who is he, Alyson?”
I debated not answering, then realized it was no use.
“You already know,” I said, clenching my hand in his shirt.
Miserably, I looked at her.
Seeing the horror in her eyes, I hardened my jaw against a rush of protectiveness that hit me like a physical force.
I was still holding his shirt when he sat up. He stared at my face, and I could feel it suddenly; I could feel his light. I still felt him within it, but it was totally different––so different it blanked out my mind. I felt him reading me and my heart pounded in my chest, making it difficult to breathe.
There was just so… much of it.
It was like he’d expanded to three times his size.
The confusion in him remained, but it was changing again. Turning.
“Terian.” His expression contorted in rage. “He did it. You fucking lied to me, Allie. He’s the one who hurt you.” His jaw hardened, pushing out his cheek. “Goddamn it. Why did you lie to me?”
“Revik.” I reached out with my light, trying to calm him, but he pushed me back angrily. “Revik, it’s all right. You’ve had a shock, you need to calm down––”
“How many times? How many, Allie?”
I flinched. “Jesus. That’s hardly the point right now, is it?”
“Where the fuck is he?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t.”
His face changed again. His eyes grew cold, fathomless. They looked like a snake’s eyes.
No, I thought. They looked like the boy’s.
“Maygar’s here,” he said.
Looking at Ullysa for help, then at Tobias, I realized this information meant nothing to either of them. I looked back at Revik, saw him studying my light, his expression openly wary, angry with suspicion. I realized what I felt on him was desire, but so twisted and dark it no longer felt like anything I’d ever felt on him before, or on any other seer. I couldn’t even be sure it was aimed at me.
I wondered if that was how the boy felt, too, if this was what I saw in his eyes all those nights in
that cage.
Other things were wrong with his light, too, I realized. I recognized the flavor I’d felt on him before. It was the Rooks. He had the silver light of the Dreng seething through parts of his aleimic structure like a bad smell.
I remembered the look on the boy’s face, him insisting I wanted him, that we belonged together and suddenly I was fighting tears.
“I repulsed you,” he said.
“No!”
“Bullshit. You’d rather let Terian rape you than let me touch you!”
“Revik… christ. I didn’t know––”
“That’s not my name. And you know it.” His eyes hardened to glass. “Did he get you to like it, Allie? Is that why you lied to me? To protect him?”
I couldn’t find words. For the first time since I’d known him, I was afraid of him.
I looked between his eyes, the same clear eyes I’d looked at in that cabin in the Himalayas… and I didn’t know him.
He pushed me out of his way, dragging himself abruptly to his feet.
I watched as he walked away.
I knew, somewhere, in the background, that I was in shock.
After what must have been some passage of time, I heard Tobias mutter the same.
They tried to get me to stand on my own, using words. After a few minutes, Ullysa and Tobias gave up and pulled me physically to my feet, bringing me along between them.
By the time the four of us made it to the elevator, Revik was gone.
45
FAILSAFE
BALIDOR WATCHED CASS follow the three-dimensional display with her eyes.
She paused only to glance up at the giant Wvercian, patting one of his thick hands absently with her delicate fingers.
The giant was awake now, at least, Balidor mused.
He’d spent the past few hours napping on the floor of the cave, where he’d irritated Balidor to no end with his unbroken snoring like a diesel engine.
The Wvercian hung close to Cass now, staring down at the same screen with a puzzled expression on his broad face. Balidor couldn’t help but wonder if he had any idea why they were even there.
He watched, frowning as the giant stroked Cass's back.
He averted his gaze when Cass glanced up at him.
She smiled when she saw Balidor squinting at the same set of readouts.
“Well?” Balidor said. “Did it work?”
“I think so.” She pointed at the arc of light on the display, then sighed, blowing up her bangs. “Honestly, I have no idea.”
“So what? Do we stay in this godforsaken cave until we are mystically enlightened as to how this machine actually works?”
Cass nudged him with a shoulder. “Cranky, cranky,” she chided.
Balidor was getting cranky, he knew. Seeing the Wvercian pawing at the human, when it had been more than a few months since he’d felt anything but separation pain himself, wasn’t helping.
He exhaled, letting a sharp clicking sound come out with his breath.
“We don’t even know what it will do, Cass! Why are we messing with this?”
“Just a little longer,” she said, exuding more of that cheery confidence.
He rolled his eyes, seer-fashion, but didn’t bother to argue.
They’d been in the cave for days, it felt like, doing everything but reprogramming every machine in the place while Cass tried to figure out how to bring “Feigran” down from his cocoon in space. It took Balidor using his sight on the organics, and a lot of trial and error working with Cass, to even get the machine to talk to them.
She’d figured out some kind of key in the margins of Galaith’s book.
Once he got the machine talking, she and Balidor together used that key to decipher the encryption sequence to get into the mainframe. All the while, she’d hammered him with questions about Terian and his bodies. She wanted to know seemingly every detail of what they’d discerned about the Rook over the years the Adhipan had been studying him.
As if reading his mind, she started up again.
“So the bodies don’t age?” she asked him again. “Why not?”
She continued poring over the console, her eyes showing her to be reading the small lines of symbols even as she waited for his response.
Still, when he didn’t answer right away, she looked at him.
“Hey. The ageless thing. How does it work?”
Balidor gestured vaguely with one hand. “They are essentially dead, Cass. They are reanimated corpses. The only way Terian could take over a body so thoroughly is to kill the body’s original host. He then readies the physical vehicle through some kind of reanimation process. He only holds onto a small portion of their aleimi to tie himself to the host body. In essence, it is like a puppet, Cass.”
“A meat puppet,” she said, grinning.
Balidor shook his head, clicking softly. “Yes,” he said. “If you are a depraved human, with no regard for the living light of others… it is exactly that. A meat puppet. With posable limbs.”
She snorted a laugh and Balidor smiled, in spite of himself.
His irritation returned when the Wvercian’s light coiled around her once more, even as the thick fingers caressed her arm.
Goddamn it. Was he really going to try to seduce her in front of him?
“So how does he control all of them?” she said.
Balidor sighed again. He shook off the other, pulling on his shirt to straighten it.
“In that, we have only theories,” he said. “We thought we knew, before the downfall of the Pyramid… but it is more complicated than we had imagined.”
When her hand prompted him to continue, he clicked again, mildly.
“Within the Pyramid, Cassandra, Terian held all of his different personalities together through the use of a construct… a construct within the larger construct of the Pyramid itself. He used the Dreng to non-localize that construct so the bodies could travel anywhere in the physical world without losing their connection to the host.”
Thinking aloud, he folded his arms, his voice musing.
“Come to think of it, we never tried collaring one of the bodies. That might have been interesting. Theoretically, it is possible they might have lost their connection to the host body and thus died. Although I don’t know of any collar that lets nothing through.”
He watched her hit a new sequence of keys on the board, her eyes concentrated.
Clearly, the idea didn’t hold as much intrigue for her.
He added, “We have evidence that each of Terian’s bodies could, at the time of the Pyramid, all speak to one another, no matter what the distance. As long as he wasn’t cut off from the Pyramid’s structure, he remained relatively intact as a single entity, no matter how ‘compartmentalized’ he was.”
“And after the Pyramid died?” she prompted.
“After it came apart,” he amended politely. “Terian managed to keep all of his bodies. We do not know how, precisely. We had assumed they would all die without the unifying structure of the Pyramid… so we have been forced to amend our theory. It could be that he kept his bodies merely because he was the new Head of the Rooks network, and thus their direct connection to the Dreng. It is possible that the Dreng aided him in this, or that we were wrong in our original suppositions about how he maintained the integrity of his overall aleimic body.”
He glanced down the row of organic machines, avoiding looking at where the Wvercian was once again stroking her back.
“We did discover that, since the Pyramid’s demise, he is cut off from ongoing communication between the different bodies,” he said, still staring into the darker part of the cavern. “His bodies no longer operate as part of a single, fluid mind. They behave much more like individual persons… like miniature or partial personalities occupying different physical vessels. They communicate through machines, just as you and I do, or through the Barrier when they are able, like any infiltrator or regular seer.”
Still thinking, he shrugged with one hand.
“Of course, being so close to one another energetically, and originating from the same source, it must be assumed that they can find one another in the Barrier very easily. The principles of resonance dictate that it be so. Like a mate with their partner, a parent with a child… only more so. Do you see, Cassandra?”
She nodded, her eyes still running over symbols.
Balidor wondered how much of what he’d said she’d even heard.
He’d noticed she seemed to get quite a bit in theory, but the whole concept of aleimi and its different functionalities remained mostly a mystery to her.
“So explain the Feigran thing to me again,” Cass said, glancing up from the glowing console. “Why is the original body different?”
Balidor stretched his back from too many hours hung over the same blurry monitor. Rubbing his eyes from fatigue, he glanced at the sweaty face of the female human, marveling that she still looked wide awake––more awake than he felt. His eyes drifted to Baguen with reluctance, then away when he saw the giant’s eyes on her body along with his light, which was now caressing her more intimately.
He could feel the male wanting him to leave.
He was damned if he was going to go outside and wait while the monster tried to coerce her into rutting with him in the cave, though.
Biting back what he would have liked to have said, Balidor looked back at Cass. He couldn’t help wondering how much the giant’s light was affecting hers, but remained unwilling to scan her to find out.
“The original body is the anchor, Cassie,” he explained. “If you kill the original, then all of the bodies die. There is no longer any tie to the physical world.”
Seeing the puzzled look return to Cass's eyes, he clicked at her impatiently.
“Just trust me on this, Cass. We’ve studied Terian and his bodies for years now. The principle is simple enough, although the process is fairly complicated. Like I told you, it becomes much simpler if you can grasp that seer consciousness does not exist in our physical bodies at all, but in our aleimic bodies instead. Seers use their physical brains like a radio. It is the device that plays the signal, but it does not generate the signal itself. Understand?”
Shield (Bridge & Sword: Awakenings #2): Bridge & Sword World Page 50