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

by JC Andrijeski

  Cass made the “more or less” gesture with her hand, but her eyes seemed to reflect the “less” part of that in greater quantity than the “more.”

  “I get that,” she said. “I know you guys live half here and half in the Barrier, right? That’s what Allie says, anyway.”

  Balidor gestured affirmative. “Yes, the Bridge is right. But our aleimi is tied to a particular physical body. It is coded to it, you could say. Kill the body, and we return to the Barrier. The body dies… and so forth.”

  “Okay.” Her eyes remained puzzled. “So explain the Feigran thing again.”

  Balidor exhaled, rubbing his temples. He glanced at the giant, who was listening to the exchange without comprehension in his eyes.

  Balidor focused back on Cass.

  “Terian splits his aleimi,” he said. “Originally, Feigran alone contained everything that is now spread across all those other bodies. He did not create anything new to house in those personalities. He simply divided himself.

  “…Inside the Barrier, we seers are made of many different parts. These fragments each consist of their own structures, traits, abilities. Even memories. Terian has found a way to crystallize the different pieces of himself into partial personalities. He breaks his aleimic body, then artificially ties these pieces to different aleimic bodies… that are anchored in different physical bodies. This is where the reanimation process gets complicated. He can only use freshly dead bodies, in part because he needs to retain some of the aleimic structure of the original host.”

  Seeing from her eyes that he was losing her again, he changed course.

  “But the original… the true, living body of Terian… still, of necessity, forms his only real anchor to the physical world. The most complicated part of the process is how he keeps those other bodies alive.”

  “Yeah.” She waved this part off. “Don’t go into the genetics thing again. It gives me a headache.” She paused, looking up. “But you’re really sure we can kill all of him? If we kill Feigran, I mean?”

  “If this Feigran is the original body, then yes.”

  “So I guess that explains the putting it in space thing.”

  “Yes,” he conceded. “It is the thing that gives me hope for this crazy plan of yours.” Balidor bent over the console once more, reading the symbols. “But we have no way of knowing what this sequence actually does, Cass.”

  “What do you think it does?”

  He shook his head, clicking again softly. “I cannot read this text any more than you can. Based on these symbols, though…” He pointed to a sequence of pictographs. “…I think it actually brings him back to Earth.”

  He scanned more of the text, trying to puzzle it out.

  “It is this second part I cannot comprehend,” he confessed. “It looks like some kind of failsafe. As best as I can make out, it is saying that this will do something to the other Terian bodies if Feigran were ever to return to Earth. There is no way to tell what.”

  Clicking again, he sighed. “For all we know, it will tell them to return to the host body to protect it. We do not even know whether it was Terian who put all of this here, much less what the motive was.”

  “Galaith.” Cass looked up, her eyes sharp. “You think it was Galaith who built this? As a way to pull the plug on Terian, if he needed to?”

  “I don’t think it was anyone,” Balidor said.

  His voice turned grudging.

  “But it is his diary. This could have been built on his instruction.”

  “But didn’t Galaith already try to kill Terian once?”

  “Yes,” Balidor conceded with a gesture. “But perhaps he hadn’t quite made up his mind to annihilate all of him, Cassandra.”

  His eyes scanned pictographs once more while she appeared to be thinking about this. After another pause, he clicked to himself in consternation.

  “Cassandra… this is all theory. We cannot read it.” He touched the screen again, but the new sequence didn’t illuminate anything. “In any case, it is too risky to tamper with this. It could be some kind of weapon, or––”

  “Weapon?” She looked up. “You’re kidding, right?”

  “We do not know what contingencies Terian himself might have in place.”

  “Bullshit!” Cass said, her voice suddenly sharp. “He has Allie, Dori’! Revik could die, going after her. So could Jon. Hundreds of seers are already dead from those bombs. I promised I’d try to help them. I’m not going to wuss out now.”

  Looking at her, Balidor hesitated.

  He had to admit, she had a point.

  “It is possible,” he said, cautious. “Only possible, mind you… that the mechanism for keeping his aleimi in discrete pieces has something to do with the container for the original body in space. If that were the case, this could be a warning that if we brought Feigran down, then the other bodies will die.”

  He shrugged with one hand.

  “Dehgoies told me once that Galaith kept a close eye on Terian. He knew how unstable Terian was. It could be, if Galaith did this, that he created this failsafe as a way to bring him down. In the event he needed to.”

  He caught Cass's eye. When the human burst out with a wide smile, he couldn’t help but join her.

  “All right,” he admitted. “The prospect is intriguing.”

  “You want to do it?” she said, squeezing his arm. “Or should I?”

  Balidor chuckled, in spite of himself.

  “Now?”

  “Why wait?” she grinned.

  Smiling at her in return, he touched her cheek with the back of his fingers. He didn’t think about what he was doing until he felt the Wvercian’s light react in a burst of possessive irritation. Glancing up at the frowning seer, Balidor removed his fingers, clearing his throat.

  He looked directly at Cass, folding his arms.

  “I think it is yours to do, Cassandra,” he said.

  He watched her lean back over the console, reading the symbols. If she’d noticed the male posturing, she didn’t let it show. He smiled faintly at the concentration on her face as she fingered in the sequence they’d uncovered.

  Once she had, another set of instructions flashed on the screen.

  “What do you suppose this means?” she said.

  Balidor leaned over where she sat, looking at the line of flashing text. Reaching out with his sight, he did his best to work through the symbols, using his seer’s photographic memory to compare them to others he’d seen in the book. As he did, he felt something deep in his chest begin to relax. Reading the whole thing a second time, he glanced down at Cass, smiling in spite of himself.

  “Well, my friend,” he said. “I believe this is what you were looking for.”

  “Meaning what?” she said, frowning deeper.

  With her face only a few inches away, he found himself looking at her again, re-discovering the fact that she really was an exceptionally attractive human.

  Seeing her returning grin, he realized he hadn’t been quite as subtle as he’d intended.

  Clearing his throat, he turned, tapping the screen.

  “It is asking us if we wish to ‘consolidate Feigran’.”

  “Consolidate?” She frowned again. “What does that mean?”

  When he only smiled, understanding reached her coffee-colored eyes. Slowly, a kind of dim hope flashed across her face.

  “Could it really be that easy?”

  He grinned. “I don’t know. Shall we experiment?”

  Laughing, she clasped his hand. Balidor once more felt a swell of irritation from the watching Wvercian.

  That time, he didn’t care.

  46

  RETURN

  I STOOD IN the trees outside the long corridor on the south side of the East Wing of the White House.

  I didn’t let myself think too clearly about where I was, or the surreal quality of seeing it empty of people, but for the occasional uniformed figure I glimpsed darting from one lit segment of corridor to another. I saw
another man’s lips moving as he communicated through a headset, then he was gone, too.

  He’d been clutching some kind of automatic weapon.

  I tried not to think about that, either.

  We hadn’t been able to find him.

  The others wanted to leave, and I could hardly blame them. The East Wing was ablaze in lights. I heard the sporadic sound of automatic gunfire in several parts of the lawn-covered grounds to the south. People moved in erratic formations across the grass, some running in SWAT-like military uniforms, probably everything from SCARB to the FBI to Secret Service.

  Most of them had been human so far, so easy to side-step.

  Even so, I was growing increasingly nervous at what I could hear on the streets outside the White House gates.

  If it wasn’t a shooting war yet, it would be soon.

  Even as I thought it, Tobias handed me his headset, signaling for me to listen. Once I had it situated around my ear, sound exploded into my mind, difficult to think past. I could barely make out the words at first.

  “…is now confirmed. A terrorist attack is taking place inside the White House as we speak…”

  Visuals eclipsed my view of the darkened grounds, forcing me into the sharply lit newsroom of the feed broadcasters. I glimpsed the gold hair of the newscaster, Donna, who I’d met in the Oval Office. Next to her sat an African-American man wearing a grim expression under furrowed brows.

  I only got the barest glimpse of their faces before the sound of firing rose in the headset.

  In the foreground, an image arose of military personnel covering the mall area of the city. A shootout was taking place between dark-clad figures and what looked like metro police in another corner of the same screen. A third image showed soldiers wearing the black uniform of the military branch of Seer Containment running alongside an equal number of human marines as they breached the White House grounds.

  They wore so many weapons and organic arms, I couldn’t quite see them as real.

  The male newscaster’s voice shocked my ears.

  “They haven’t yet determined the exact source or motive for the attacks, but there is no doubt renegade seers are involved. Four unregistered, foreign seers were caught in the course of the initial fighting. Several more non-humans were documented shooting out of the first floor of the White House itself, and now are rumored to be holding the Vice President hostage upstairs.”

  The man’s brown eyes seemed to meet mine through the VR space.

  I wondered what he looked like in real life.

  “President Wellington himself was removed from his residence by Secret Service, and brought to a safe location along with most of his cabinet and senior advisors. He will be making a statement to the media once the situation at the White House is secure. At this time, he had only one message to us. It was one of resolve. He said, and I quote, ‘Tell them, we will do whatever is necessary to ensure that the culprits do not succeed in their aims to destabilize our great nation…’”

  A dramatic pause.

  “Donna? You have an update?”

  The blond reporter smiled, her digitally altered voice holding a false outrage that barely concealed the thread of excitement underneath.

  “We just now received news that the terrorist, Alyson May Taylor, appears to have escaped custody as a part of this attack by the seers. Using their powers of mind-control, her accomplices managed to thwart Secret Service teams, as well as the Pentagon security team assigned to watch over her while she was being debriefed. A terrorist cell of seers appears to have broken into the underground bunker where she was being kept, underneath the White House itself. It now appears that her release may have been the purpose of this attack––”

  I focused on an image of my face, which reared up in VR.

  “Called ‘the Bridge’ by seer religious fanatics, Taylor has done little else but incite violence and other forms of dangerous fanaticism in the seer community since her true race was discovered last year. Masquerading as a human prior to her discovery, Alyson acted as a sleeper agent in San Francisco, where her identity is now believed to have been protected for over twenty-five years by her adoptive human parents and brother, as well as a number of her friends, now believed to be sympathizers to the seer cause…”

  Donna put on her serious face as the cameras zoomed in on her enhanced avatar.

  I noticed it shaved a good fifteen years off her real age, as well as giving her a nose job and fuller lips than the woman I’d met in person.

  “The question everyone is asking is this: is Alyson Taylor truly telekinetic? Is that the real reason these terrorists are protecting her? So they can use her as a weapon against the entire human race? The answer to that question is sure to force some tough decisions in the military leaders tonight, especially given the history of the last known telekinetic seer…”

  Hearing the blades of helicopters, I looked up once I realized the sound wasn’t coming from the broadcast. Tearing the headset off my ears, I watched a formation of military helicopters skim the grounds, passing from the north to the south side of the main building in a diagonal line.

  Ducking out of sight in the shadows, I turned to Ullysa, hesitating before looking back at the White House itself.

  I thought about the feeds, the number of marines and SCARB agents headed our way.

  They might have visually enhanced the number to put on a good show, but somehow, I doubted the reality would be far behind.

  I handed the headset back to Tobias. It wouldn’t help me, not anymore.

  “You three go ahead.” I kept my voice low, looking between Ullysa and Tobias. “I’ll find him. I know the layout. It’ll be faster if I go alone.”

  “Allie, no!” Ullysa said. “That is crazy!”

  “I can’t leave him here!” I said in a loud whisper. “Do you understand? I can’t do it! So either shut up, or help me, goddamn it!”

  The three of them just looked at me.

  Then Tobias gestured in affirmative, glancing at the other two.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll come.”

  I looked at Kat. Briefly, I thought about protesting her inclusion. She jutted her chin, and I could see on her face that she fully expected me to leave her behind.

  But fuck it. Maybe she’d go down in the firefight.

  She surprised me, grinning. “That’s the spirit, Bridge.”

  “You’d better stay out of my line of sight,” I warned.

  I expected this to piss her off, but instead she surprised me again, grinning wider.

  “You sound just like him. You know that?” she said.

  I pretended to ignore that, too, but it made my heart hurt anyway.

  We made our way back through the garden, heading for the rounded portico of the South entrance. We crouched in the shadow of the line of trees, outside the ring of illumination created by the lights ablaze on the lower floors. We hadn’t yet gotten up to make our way to the nearest of the ground level doors when the planes came roaring back.

  Before I could let out a sound, Tobias grabbed me around the middle, yanking me back, deeper into the grounds, sheltering me with his body.

  I struggled, fighting his hold. Fear slid to the forward part of my light.

  I knew what was coming. I could feel it.

  “They’re going to bomb it!” he said in my ear.

  The scream of the falling bombs slowly built in sound until I couldn’t hear anything else, not even my own anguished yell. Tobias was right; they weren’t just going to hit the grounds, or even the surrounding areas.

  It wasn’t the four of us I was yelling for, though.

  The unreality of what was happening got overshadowed by my terror about what it meant for me.

  They were bombing the White House.

  And he was inside.

  47

  REINTEGRATION

  TERIAN FELT IT again.

  Something in his light seemed to phase out.

  It came back seconds later,
as if on its own.

  He stared up at the low ceiling, frowning as he strained his gaze. A part of him listened as well. It was as if he believed on some level, if he tried hard enough, he might determine what was wrong with the construct using his physical senses alone.

  Even as he thought it, the sound came again.

  Impact concussion. It was some kind of explosion, and it sounded like it came from directly overhead. The lights flickered again, going from the white lights of the conference room to the rotating orange of the emergency lights… then back again.

  The flicker of lights continued, mirroring the strange phasing occurring in his aleimi.

  After a few more seconds, the white lights rose slowly, until the room appeared ordinary once more.

  Terian blinked, adjusting his eyes to the sudden brightness. He wasn’t really worried about the walls caving in, not down here.

  It had been the easiest thing in the world to turn the power off downstairs, then to convince the humans they were under attack, that they needed to evacuate the capital buildings at once due to the threat of terrorist seers.

  Who knew he’d actually be right?

  Revi’ really hadn’t been screwing around, in his attempt to get Alyson back. Blinded by emotion or not, he’d coordinated this jailbreak more like a military operation than his usual one-man frontal.

  Terian could only suppose he’d had help, and help on a seemingly significant scale. He should have remembered his old partner wouldn’t be the only seer deeply motivated to liberate their precious Bridge.

  Even so, from all appearances, Revi’ appeared to be holding more of a grudge than usual.

  The entire cabinet, along with Wellington himself and Xarethe, had been disappeared almost two hours ago, along with a handful of aides. Everyone else had been sent home, some with police escorts or even SCARB agents. Once the perimeter breach had been confirmed, the entire grounds were evacuated of staff.

  Thanks to Terian also, Vice President Travers and his little entourage hadn’t been able to be found. He had their vehicles moved as well, to avoid suspicion.

  Now they were listed officially as “hostages” of the seer terrorist army.