Rook

by JC Andrijeski

  He didn’t flinch until the remaining body moved in the tank, opening its eyes to stare at him. Gritting his teeth, Revik walked around the transparent window until he found the control panel. Using his sight to discern keystrokes...then to speak to the organics...he gained access to the main computer. He turned off all of the functions supporting life support he could find.

  When he looked back at the tank, the tubes leading into the suspended body were no longer pumping liquid.

  It took a few seconds for the man in the tank to comprehend the change.

  Then Revik watched him start to suffocate. He banged on the plexiglas...sharp at first, almost a demand. Then he thrashed, screamed, beating against the transparent wall.

  Revik felt sick, wondered if he should try to break it, to snap the creature’s neck. He could feel more of them now, somewhere.

  But no other seers. Terian didn’t seem to have housed anyone here but himself. Before he could confirm this by looking physically, a voice nearly made Revik jump out of his skin. He slammed his back into the plexiglas tank, hard enough to hurt himself in his effort to get away.

  “Jon! Look! Look!”

  Revik fell into a half-crouch, wishing he’d started with weapons.

  Unable to comprehend at first what he was seeing, unable to get over the fact that they could have shot him if they’d been armed, he didn’t move at first, fighting to get his equilibrium back.

  He found them then, with his sight.

  Still, he couldn’t make himself relax.

  He crossed the room, knelt down in front of the low cages he hadn’t seen buried in a military gray wall. He peered inside, confirming with his eyes what he’d already felt with his sight.

  “Revik! Holy shit!” Jon banged on the hard plastic of the kennel. “You got out! How’d you get out, man?”

  Revik barely heard.

  He jumped into the Barrier the second he verified their appearance.

  ...and now he is lost there, scanning their light...something he hasn’t been able to do since he got here. He studies every structure and segment in their aleimi. He works carefully, risks going deep, needing to be sure. He checks it twice, then rechecks it. After a few moments, he feels his shoulders begin to unclench for real.

  He checks each of them again, just to be thorough. No threads are leaving them into the Barrier, no sign or flavor of the Pyramid, the Dreng, Terian. Nothing lives in their light but themselves, their ties to him and each other, their ties to Allie and their other friends and family...everything dampened by the overall fog of this place. He checks them again, going over every inch of their aleimi a last time.

  Then, he lets himself smile.

  Clicking out, he met Jon’s hazel eyes.

  “It is you,” he said.

  “Well, yeah. Who did you think it was?” Jon grinned at him, though, banging on the glass. “Come on, man! Get us out!”

  Revik glanced at Cass. She clutched the transparent wall of her four-by-six box, staring up at him. Her splayed fingers reminded him of a tree frog in a glass aquarium, especially with her wide eyes in a too-thin face. A mixture of fear, hope and another emotion he couldn’t identify shone from her eyes.

  Revik barely hesitated, then rose to his feet.

  Crossing the room, he opened the weapons’ locker, where he found four custom Berettas M9s with organics, a Steyr TMP, and six SCAR-H fully automatic rifles. Stacks of magazines for all of the weapons filled metal shelves above and below the main locker, which had hooks on the back wall for the handguns and slots for the rifles.

  Grabbing one of the Berettas off the wall, Revik loaded a full magazine of 9mm shells, chambered a bullet, and walked back to the cages. He motioned Cass back first.

  “More,” he said, until her back was pressed to the wall. “Cover your face.”

  The mixture of relief and fear and...gratitude, he realized...returned to her gaunt face.

  “Did you kill him?” Her voice was muffled, but raw.

  He nodded, barely meeting her gaze.

  Raising his arm, he aimed the gun at the lock, and fired.

  LESS THAN AN hour later, Revik sat at a desk chair over a flat computer console, chewing on a piece of canned meat with his back molars and thinking he’d never tasted anything so sharp, salty, tangy...and just so damned good in his entire life.

  He exchanged grins with the two people sitting across from him, who were chewing with equal enthusiasm from separate containers.

  While Jon and Revik hunted down the remainder of the bodies and deactivated their stasis chambers, Cass had found them food...and clothing. With the dozen or so different bodies, there had been more of both than they possibly could use.

  Extending a filthy arm in a designer wool shirt, Revik pointed at a juice carton sitting on the table next to Jon, making an unintelligible noise. Jon threw him the carton, laughing when Revik missed and it went spinning to the floor. Scooping it up, he ripped the paper open with his teeth and drank deeply, washing down the meat and belching.

  “What is it you said?” he gasped. “Holy fucking God...that’s good.”

  Cass laughed, shaking her long, black hair with the dyed, bright red ends. It was still thick with sweat, blood, water...gods knew what else. Both Jon and Revik had beards. Jon’s red-blond hair fell past his shoulders, still streaked with black and green at the ends.

  “So why are we still here, man?” Jon said. He propped up his bare feet, wearing pants from one of the Terian bodies. He was so thin they bunched up baggily around his waist, held there by an expensive-looking leather belt.

  Revik took another long pull of the juice. He motioned at the console.

  “We need to figure out where we are.” He belched again. “...Find a shower, maybe. But not here.”

  Jon laughed, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with my plan?”

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Getting the hell out of here now...walking out. Now.”

  Revik motioned towards the metal ladder built into one wall, and the round, submarine-looking hatch that stood at its top.

  “Be my guest,” he said. “You might want a jacket, though.”

  Hearing this last, Cass frowned.

  Before Jon could move, she dragged herself to her feet, and crossed the room to the green metal ladder and its circular cage. She climbed up it with her bare feet, dwarfed in a dark sweatshirt and a pair of jeans left by one of the female bodies. Revik watched her carefully. She had barely spoken since he’d gotten her out of that cage, but she felt open to him still, strangely clear in her mind. Clicking out, he was still watching when she reached the top of the ladder and twisted the locking mechanism counter-clockwise to open it.

  “Careful,” Revik warned. “Hold on to the rungs.”

  She opened the door. Immediately, sound filled the metal chamber. Bits of white were blown in through the open portal. Wind echoed down, filling the small space, beating against the walls, penetrating Revik’s clothes.

  “Jesus.” Jon stared up as Cass yanked the metal door shut, spinning the wheel to close it. “Where are we? The North Pole?”

  “The North Pole is water, Jon,” Revik reminded him.

  “That’s not what I—”

  “My guess would be Russia,” Revik added, stretching his arms. “Maybe the mountains in Norway...or Asia. Could even be Greenland, but that’s a bit much, even for Terry.” He grunted. “I don’t think he’d risk the Himalayas...even in winter. But there are many places to hide on the southern border of China.”

  Jon looked at him. “You could feel that out there? The snow, I mean? You knew what it was like?”

  Revik shrugged. He stuffed another piece of meat into his mouth, chewing. Both humans were staring at him now.

  “So what do we do?” Jon said.

  Revik hesitated. He’d thought about that, too, but he doubted the humans were going to like what he’d come up with. “We have to walk, Jon. But we’ll need to gear up. And we might have to go the long
way, in case Terry’s sent for reinforcements already. Cass found us heavy jackets...and boots. You’ll both need guns. At least two...and a rifle, if you can carry all that. We need to leave within the hour. Less, if you think the two of you can be ready.”

  Cass nodded in agreement, returning from where she’d finished descending the ladder. She sat cross-legged on the floor and began to eat again, silent.

  Revik checked her mind. He clicked out seconds later, exhaled.

  “We’ll need water,” he added, turning to Jon. “As much as we can carry. And food, of course.”

  Cass looked up at them suddenly. Her eyes widened, grew bright...as if a light had just gone off somewhere in her head. Revik didn’t read her, but both men watched as she got to her feet and crossed the small space. She opened one of the lockers she’d explored earlier, began rifling through the back of it. Revik took another drink of juice, still watching her warily.

  She turned then, jingling something in her hand.

  When they only stared, she jangled the metal harder. Revik’s eyes snapped into focus. In her hand dangled a set of keys, clearly fitted for some kind of vehicle.

  “Shotgun,” Cass said, grinning.

  It was the first time Revik had seen her smile since watching her and Allie together in that diner in San Francisco.

  Meeting her gaze, Revik grinned back.

  CANDAR WAS A poor city, even smaller than its sister city of Mestia in Upper Svanetia, the higher half of the Svaneti region in the country of Stalin’s birth.

  Georgia is smaller than most people imagine, at the southernmost tip of what had been, once upon a time, the Soviet Union, and closer to Tehran than Moscow. In the winter, like now, the Caucasus Mountains were buried in snow and ice, more so since the climate started changing and increased the average snowfall across most of Asia, at least in the past few centuries.

  Historically speaking, the town of Candor was also new, grown up from the slave trade between Asia and Europe that erupted after the second world war.

  Trade in young seers remained the town’s only real industry.

  Sight slavery was, of course, legal in Georgia.

  Ironically, the dearth of visiting free seers made it easy to slip past racial checkpoints unnoticed, even in the heightened paranoia caused by rumors of a telekinetic seer terrorist.

  No one expected a free seer to walk into Candor willingly.

  At present, Allie was supposedly training seers in India, readying her nascent army to wage war on the United States and China. While no one in Candar was overly fond of the governments of either place, purges had occurred there as elsewhere, in reaction to the news of a telekinetic seer in their midst. Bids on her blood and any genetic “samples” were whispered on the sidelines, too, of course, but Sark settlements in places like this were work camps, or else holding pens...and recruiting grounds for the Rooks.

  They wouldn’t get any real bounty hunters sniffing here.

  Revik was able to think through this much just from his own knowledge of the area combined with what they heard on the live news feeds. The snowmobile was fitted with organics like their prison had been, in this case to give it satellite capability. Even so, the weather interfered at times, and he avoided any feeds with two-way capability, which meant most of the majors as they tended to cull demographics for ads.

  Jon and Cass didn’t look like seers, so that would help. Revik’s blood type would help them fly under the radar, as well.

  No one stopped the snowmobile as they approached the town.

  At the registration checkpoint, the guards seemed bored. Dirty, horny and bored. They only noticed Cass with any real interest. They wanted to know race-cat, local contact, settlement preference...the usual for clan-based systems. Revik knew they’d bother him less if he was specific, so after giving them all the ID info they asked for, he told them he wanted the 4th, nearest Multe markets, hoping they hadn’t burned down in any recent riots.

  They hadn’t. The human took their blood on the spot, and Revik waited, the snowcat’s engine still on, while they ran it.

  In the pause, he assessed his two charges, who still looked dazed and dirty, which luckily wasn’t unusual up here. Their condition couldn’t have been helped by staring at nothing but snow for two days straight. It occurred to him how thin all three of them really were. The same thing seemed to have occurred to Cass, who had wrapped her face and neck in a thick scarf just before Revik rolled down the window to speak to the guard.

  Thinking about this, he smiled at her again. For a human, she wasn’t stupid. Neither was Jon, for that matter, who kept his hand by his gun the whole time the guards were gone, his hazel eyes alert even through their fatigue.

  The guard returned. He motioned towards Revik’s arm.

  When Revik held it out, the man clamped a white wristband around his bony wrist. The guards continued to look bored, and now slightly drunk. Cass and Jon followed Revik’s lead, sticking out their arms. Revik watched them look at the wristbands, dazed, and realized again it was probably the first time they’d ever seen anything like them before.

  The guard motioned to Revik again, speaking in heavily accented Russian.

  “...You know where to go?” He glanced at Cass.

  Revik nodded, giving him a quick three-finger salute in thanks.

  He pressed down the clutch, shifting down to first and hitting the gas before the man could ask him anything about Cass’s status. Women got sold here, too, seer and human. He’d rather not make his companions any more paranoid than they already were. As they slid past the entrance to the mountainous town, Revik pointed up at the skyline.

  “Mount Shkhara,” he said. “Over 17,000 feet, I think.”

  Jon’s eyes didn’t leave the band on his wrist. “You speak Russian?” He glanced up. “Any other languages?”

  Revik shrugged. “A few.”

  Cass laughed. When Revik looked over at her, she was smiling at him, but her eyes were clear. He returned the smile, shaking his head.

  “Are you ready to sleep?” he said.

  “Can you sleep?” Cass asked.

  “No,” Revik said. He glanced at her, again surprised. He wondered just how much they’d picked up in their months with Terian. “...I can’t,” he said. “Not yet. But you can. I thought we’d get cleaned up and you two could rest while I do some scouting. I’m hoping we can get a small plane here, go to T’bilisi in the morning. We can probably get an international flight from there.”

  Cass was staring at him again. “Have you been here before?”

  “Yes.”

  “When?”

  Revik glanced over at them. Jon was looking at him too, waiting for an answer. Revik shifted slightly in the seat.

  “Awhile ago,” he said finally. “Seers have photographic memories,” he added. “I’m not unusual in that.”

  “So what next?” Jon said. “After that place that sounds like a skin fungus, where do we go?”

  Revik had been thinking about that, too.

  He knew where he wanted to go, but he also knew he’d be a fool to risk it. He could think of only one other place with constructs close enough and safe enough that he could reach within a reasonable timeframe. Even with that location, there were complications.

  “England,” he said finally. “London.”

  “London?” Jon stared. “Didn’t you say Allie was probably in Asia by now?”

  “Yes.” Revik glanced at the two of them, then sighed, clicking softly under his breath. “There are things I need in London.” Seeing Jon’s frown, he added, reluctant, “...and I don’t want to go straight to Allie.”

  “You don’t?” Cass’s voice held genuine surprise. “I thought you’d want to go there first.”

  Revik nodded. “I do. It’s just—”

  Jon said, “You think we’d be followed?”

  Revik glanced at him.

  Again...not dumb.

  He nodded, shrugging with one hand. “Yes.”

 
Cass was watching his face. “That’s part of it.” She hesitated. “Is it also because of the stuff Terian said? About you cheating on her or whatever?”

  Revik sighed, but felt his body react regardless. Waiting for the nausea to pass, he turned the wheel of the snowcat slowly, navigating around a stone fountain in the middle of the town square. Then he shook his head.

  “No,” he said. “...Not exactly.”

  “But that was true? You did cheat on her?”

  Revik glanced at the human, flinching slightly at the look in her eyes. “Yes.”

  Shaking her head, Cass folded her arms. “Figures.”

  But Jon looked between them, his eyes holding a faint wonder.

  “So you guys really are married, then?” he said. “That wasn’t just Terian being a dick?”

  Revik didn’t answer at first. Feeling both of them looking at him again, he turned, blowing air out from his cheeks.

  “Yeah. We’re really married.” Hearing the silence this produced, he glanced over at the two of them again. “Seers are different. It can happen like that.”

  “Like what?” Cass said, snorting a little. “Like...overnight?”

  “Yes.” He made a more or less gesture with his hand. “Well. What I meant was, before the rest of the mind catches up with it. Ours happened fast. A little too fast for us.” He shrugged with one hand. “Well. For me, anyway.”

  She frowned. “Terian said you hadn’t slept with her.”

  Revik hesitated, feeling himself tense a little. Then he shrugged again. There wasn’t a lot of point in keeping secrets from the two of them. Not now.

  “We haven’t consummated, no.” He glanced at her. “That’s complicated, too, Cass. For seers, I mean.”

  She folded her arms, giving him an openly skeptical look.

  “So you didn’t want sex with her?” she said. “With Allie?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said, giving her a warning look.

  “So what, then? You slept with someone else, so sex isn’t the problem, clearly.” Her frown deepened. “Is marriage more of an arranged thing with seers? Some kind of social contract...like a business thing?”