He surrounds me, and then—
I am back in that quiet place.
It is the place he took me when my mom died. We float over a valley of sunset red. Towers of light billow like gold silk before an ocean of liquid diamonds and light. Normally, I think of it as his place...or maybe ours...but this time, it feels like mine. Friends surround me, try to comfort me. So much relief exists in being with them, in knowing it is finally finished, that it is finally over. That I don’t have to go back.
I don’t have to go back until...
Revik is there, too.
He is a different Revik, though, just as I observe a different me standing in waist-high water, in that golden ocean with my friends, relieved to be done. That other Revik talks to me in a low voice, and we are alone together now, and he holds me. He has perhaps been talking for some time, as if parts of us never stopped whispering in the dark.
I feel myself grow calm.
His light coils deeper into mine and the pain worsens.
There is familiarity there, beyond what I’ve felt from anyone...beyond what I’ve felt from him. We know each other here. We are more than friends. It is his comfort I seek, above all the rest. I know he understands. He understands in a way that none of the others can, in a way they never will, no matter how hard they try.
He succumbs to the pull, without reservation, and wishes—
STOP! STOP IT!
Panic fills my light. This time, it’s not mine.
STOP THIS, ALLIE! Please, stop...!
I have not come to this paradise alone. The other Revik’s light flashes out.
The arc blows us apart like dead leaves, until—
I TOOK A breath. I took another.
Air shocked my lungs. I choked on it, fighting to work the rhythms of my physical body, fighting to align myself, to exist inside myself.
Eventually, I found I was lying on the floor.
Virtual stars met my eyes, flooding the ship’s stateroom and the ceiling above where I lay. Flat-seeming now, those stars shone palely as they ran down pastel walls.
I felt him move next to me.
When I glanced over, he raised a hand, covering his face, but I saw his jaw harden before he did it. I realized only then that I clutched his shirt in my own hand, right before he pushed my fingers off roughly, forcing me to let go.
Some emotional kickback made it hard for me to look at him, but also hard to look away. I watched him sit up, trying to wrap my head around him again, around his familiarity, even through the shield he wore around himself like a wall.
I couldn’t reconcile the impression of complete impenetrability I got off him with the sense that I knew him behind it, somehow.
I tried to push both feelings away, if only so he wouldn’t notice me thinking about him. I tried to pull my mind back into one piece, but could only breathe, watching him as he fought to do the same. I don’t remember moving, but somehow, I was sitting up, too, watching him breathe. I couldn’t seem to unclench my hand.
He looked at me. His eyes held the same expression they had that morning in Seattle.
Even as I thought it, he shook his head.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.
His voice was hollow, lost-sounding.
Whispers of that other place remained, pulling at his light and mine; I felt him wrestle with it, forcing it out of his light only to be compelled to look at it again. Pain wafted off him, for the first time in weeks, and he didn’t seem to be trying to hide it from me. Without thinking beyond a vague desire to reassure him, I reached for him, touching his face, pausing to finger his longer black hair back behind one ear.
He jerked from the caress, but afterwards he stared at me.
His eyes flickered to my mouth, lingered there.
For an instant, just an instant, he hesitated. Then I saw his eyes change. They grew openly angry...just before the light in them died.
“I can’t do this anymore,” he said again. His voice roughened. “I want to sever us. Do you understand me, Alyson?”
I didn’t understand, not really. But he waited for an answer.
“I think so,” I said. “I mean, I—”
“Will you agree to it?”
“I don’t really know what...” I trailed, seeing his eyes harden to glass. I softened my voice. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you want, Revik.”
“Good.” He nodded, once. “Thank you.”
Without waiting, he regained his feet. For a moment he only stood there, over me, as if catching his breath. Then he moved, stepping around me to reach the stateroom door.
He opened it without hesitating, without a backwards glance.
I saw him murmur something to the guard, too low for me to hear, and probably in a language I didn’t know. The man standing there stared first at him, as though he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard, then at me, his expression openly bewildered. The guard continued to stare at me, his eyes a near question, when Revik’s voice sharpened, bringing his eyes back to him. As I’d suspected, Revik didn’t speak Prexci, but something else...one of the languages he hadn’t decided to teach me.
Eventually, the guard stammered a reply, bowing to him.
I watched Revik slip around the guard an instant later and disappear.
After a last, piercing look from the guard himself, the door closed.
I heard the lock glide into the wall with a soft click.
Through all of it, the stares and Revik’s anger, it slowly sank into my awareness that something had just happened...something decidedly more than one of our bantering back and forth bickering matches, or even the fight around Kat in Seattle. Even knowing this, I found I couldn’t move, or think really, not at first. I could only sit there, fighting to control whatever rose in me at his absence.
But I knew. Maybe I’d known for weeks now.
I was in love with him. Like, really in love with him.
Clearly, that wasn’t going to work for him, either.
18
BETRAYAL
TERIAN STUDIES THE construct, mesmerized.
Like all constructs, the images that obfuscate the border between it and the Barrier proper contain some flickering of truth. Like now, they show a monolithic parade of living stills that coalesce around certain themes despite how quickly they morph and change. Water figures in abundance of course; given their mode of transport, that is hardly surprising. The construct flashes with waterfalls, waves, cracking ice in metal trays, rivers and streams gushing over dark stones, puddles on city streets, saliva, sweat, tide pools, rain.
Terian recognizes some of these images from providing light to Dehgoies in the past.
Others must belong to Alyson, or one of the Seven’s Guard, whose lights watch over the edges of the construct walls.
Terian has studied the construct for days.
It takes that long to notice differences in the ripples of light. Now he knows the rhythms and moods of its normal state, as well as the range of its oscillations.
Therefore, when a shift occurs in those rhythms, even a relatively small one, he cannot help but taste the new flavor, the faint whisper of something he hasn’t felt before within the churning pulse. The difference weaves into water and ice and cold night skies. The change is subtle, but distinct enough that Terian picks it out before it can be reabsorbed.
A flicker of warmth greets him, a fleeting image of limbs entwined, clouding breath and glowing eyes, gone as soon as he catches the scent.
He has felt masturbation before this, of course.
There are over twelve seers inhabiting this particular construct. Only a few of those seers are female, including the Bridge. Even fewer of them are currently having sex.
Terian even swears he’s felt Dehgoies masturbate...although he can’t be certain of something that specific, of course. Not from outside the construct’s walls.
This feels different.
The images stabilize, enfolded by whoever is currently tasked with monitori
ng the construct walls. Terian already knows that whoever that person is...it is not Dehgoies.
An old steam engine floats by, whispers of blood and illness, and then back to water and night, ice and mountains, eagles winging silently over cold waves and tastes of Asia and even flickers of Germany and the war, South America and the United States, Russia and the Ukraine.
Withdrawing more of his consciousness from the Barrier, Terian pinpoints the new flavor again, rolling it over his tongue, so to speak, as his light acquaints him with the difference it carries, making sure he understands what it means.
Once he is sure, he snaps out entirely...
...and his blue eyes focused on polished wood.
Alone in the fireplace-heated room, he laughed aloud.
The raw flavor of sex was a new development, clearly.
It could be one of the other seers, of course, but the impact it had on the construct made Terian doubt that very much. No, it had to be the Bridge...or Dehgoies himself.
Probably both of them.
Which meant, first and foremost, that Dehgoies had been uncharacteristically restrained with her. Terian couldn’t help but wonder why. In any case, it was almost a pity he would have to interrupt them so early in their little courtship ritual. If Terian had more information from behind those construct walls, he might choose not to, given the option.
After all, nothing was more vulnerable than a seer in the first stage of a mating ritual. As it was, Terian strongly suspected they had not yet consummated. Likely because Dehgoies did not wish to be that vulnerable, either.
Still, Terian wondered if there was more to it.
Terian had flown several of his bodies to this base in Alaska, to be on the waiting end of their slow excursion through the inside passage up the Canadian coast. Most cruises took a week to make the journey north to Anchorage. Likely to throw them off, Dehgoies and the Bridge followed a route that spent nearly a month on the coasts of the United States and Canada before entering the open seas for Russia. Terian had examined the route carefully, of course, as soon as he knew which ship they would take.
He would take them then, he’d decided...as soon as they had no place left to run.
Once the ship left the shores of Alaska and entered the open ocean, Terian’s people would move on the Seven’s Guard, and then on to Dehgoies and the Bridge.
Which meant they needed to be in place well before.
Despite his careful planning, though, Terian was growing impatient.
Given all the movement in the Pyramid of late, he feared Galaith might be angling another of his squadrons into place to make the collar on the Bridge.
Terian knew how things worked.
One minute your team led a key op. The next, it was relegated to clean up duty. A security mechanism in part, the changes often had a mechanical component, built into the fabric of the Pyramid itself. The rotating tiers formed the primary defense that secured Galaith’s position as Head, by keeping all of the tiers below him in constant flux, and thus all of Galaith’s potential successors in flux, too. Despite the mechanical aspect of the rotating hierarchy, however, Terian happened to know that Galaith still had discretionary control at the top.
Terian would only be pulled if Galaith let it happen.
But Terian didn’t trust Galaith anymore.
In fact, Terian had been getting the feeling for awhile now that the boss wanted to put some distance between himself and Dehgoies...maybe even between himself and the Bridge, too. Maybe Galaith thought he’d pull a stunt like Dehgoies had, try to tie the Bridge to him by gaining access to a more intimate level of her light.
In any case, Galaith had grown secretive again, telling Terian next to nothing about his overall plan. He’d been stalling on the final approach for weeks now. It almost seemed like he wanted Dehgoies and the Bridge to remain free awhile longer.
Terian knew he would never know if he’d been sidelined, either.
All he could do was run his own secondary op, and ignore the edicts from above if they seemed to pull him further and further away from the center of the action.
He wasn’t just any second tier aspirant.
In fact, Terian was pretty sick of being second-tier altogether.
The Org would have grabbed Dehgoies years ago if Terian had been in charge, not left him in the Seven to rot. Terian would have done for his friend what he hoped Dehgoies would once have done for him—help him see reason. Help him realize the depth of his mistake, and that it wasn’t too late to make things right.
He thought of Dehgoies as family.
He was certainly the closest Terian ever had.
Gods knew, his own biological roots hardly qualified. In fact, Terian had most of those early memories of dear mum and dad on back-file, inaccessible unless certain key words triggered their download. The system worked well enough, in that no one had ever stumbled upon those words inadvertently. Terian himself found those memories both useless and uninspiring.
A faint pulse sounded from the implant he had grafted to his spine at the base of his neck.
A voice eclipsed the construct. “Sir? Are you there?”
Terian adjusted his focus. “Yes, Varlan...I see you.”
“Has something changed, sir? Shall we continue to hold?”
Galaith had been unambiguous; he wanted Terian to hold back on a direct assault, to wait until the force could gather in Russia. Terian read additional motives in Galaith’s desire to wait, too—likely so that Dehgoies had time to grow more attached to his new charge—but Terian hadn’t told Galaith everything he knew about that yet, either.
He glanced at the little girl curled up on a stuffed chair, her face slackened in sleep. He knew what that part of him would say, if he asked.
It meant insubordination.
And yet, Terian had a good feeling.
Rarely had his good feelings steered him wrong.
“No,” Terian said to the seer on the line. “No more holding. It is time. Engage silent mode from the hierarchy proper. Report only to me, and wait for an opening. I strongly suspect we will see one, soon enough...”
The seer acquiesced silently, just before his presence faded.
COLD WATER. IT was exactly what Revik needed.
Unfortunately, the pool water didn’t look at all cold.
Steam rose over shallows filled with splashing kids wearing cartoon-covered flotation devices. Revik stood at one side of the arch leading to the covered, lagoon-shaped pool with its glowing, underwater lights. So far he hadn’t done anything but walk.
He’d contemplated a drink, but couldn’t bring himself to act, not yet.
“Fuck,” he muttered.
Hearing him, a woman glanced up as she walked towards the pool, wearing only a bikini and a towel. He didn’t return her look directly, but his body responded to her stare, enough that he tensed.
Feeling his mood worsen, he made up his mind before he’d really thought about where. Somewhere in the background, he ticked through options. He automatically rejected the atrium or any of the casinos. There was a neon affair with a dance floor and padded leather bar crammed with drunk tourists, a poolside bar on the other side of the ship, a few scattered piano bars...and a smaller, faux-colonial British pub, replete with high-backed chairs, bamboo tables, potted palms and a real tiger skin on the wall over a fireplace.
Poor taste, touring the remnants of what had been some of the world’s most stunning glaciers, now a meager white only in the dead of winter, with the skin of an extinct animal nailed to the wall.
Snorting in a dark kind of humor, Revik decided it was perfect.
He walked in that direction, passing the entrance to the salon and gym. He located the pub the next floor down, and after a quick scan, found an empty barstool that placed him with his back to the wall on the far corner.
He hesitated only another breath before extracting a copper-colored clip from his pocket and hooking it to the collar of his shirt.
He hadn’t bee
n careful. The bartender frowned.
Pretending not to notice, Revik waved for a drink, pointing at one of the taps. Reluctantly, the human took a glass off the back shelf, and filled it.
“You got a permit?” he grunted, setting down the pint in front of Revik.
Revik ignored the man’s hostility, nodding.
“The management wanted it discrete. Clips only...no wires.” He lifted the beer, and the thread of the man’s mind.
...we’ll just see about that, ice-blood. Can’t hurt for me to check with “the management,” after all...
The human’s thick fingers were already reaching for his earpiece when Revik brushed the thought from his mind.
Instantly, the large hand dropped.
The bartender stood by the computerized cash register, puzzled.
By the time he’d moved a few steps away, he forgot Revik entirely.
Sighing, Revik moved his stool further into shadow and settled himself in to wait. On a ship of this kind, most wouldn’t even recognize the clip. He might have a long wait before he got approached, if he relied on that alone.
Still, it felt cleaner this way. If he got no interest after a few more drinks, he’d reassess. He let his eyes go to the monitor over the bar, which displayed the day’s news. He got through a few beers watching brightly-colored avatars argue about terrorism and China’s inadequate response to the threat of renegade seers on their own soil.
An hour later, he’d switched to bourbon.
He contemplated a walk to the neon bar to try his luck, when he felt eyes on him and turned. A slender woman in tan slacks and a form-fitting ivory sweater stood a few paces behind him, probably in her early forties.
He’d seen her walk in, but dismissed her when she pulled out a book and settled in a corner to read, an appletini parked on the round cocktail table in front of her. She had money, clearly, but looked the type who wouldn’t go near a seer bar if her life depended on it. The kind whose human husbands tended to be Ullysa and Kat’s most regular customers.
He saw her study the clip on his collar, then glance down the length of his torso and legs. Seeing his eyes on her, she hesitated only a second longer. Clutching a small black purse in one hand and the martini glass in the other, she walked briskly up to the bar, her lips pursed.
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