“No, it’s not a...a business thing.”
“So what’s your issue with Allie?”
He looked at her. “There is no issue, Cass.”
“Is she not your type? Isn’t she pretty enough for you?”
He felt his jaw harden a little. “You are getting too personal for me, Cass. I don’t want to talk about this, all right?”
Anger touched her eyes. Then she exhaled, and he could feel her thinking. Folding her arms tighter, she frowned a little, but nodded.
“Okay. Sorry.”
“It’s fine.”
Jon was looking at him, too, his hazel eyes thoughtful. “You think Terian let us go. To find Allie for him.”
Revik hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I do.”
Both of them fell silent. Revik saw them exchange glances.
“So we can’t go to her at all?” Cass said.
“We can,” Revik said. “First I need to go somewhere where I can jump safely...see what’s going on with the Rooks...the seers Terian worked for. It’s pretty clear he and Galaith aren’t working together as they used to. I want to know how many people might be looking for us. I also want to talk to the Seven...” He cleared his throat. “...the seers who have Allie. I can’t do that here.” He squinted through snow on the windshield to see the sign for the hotel.
“England could be complicated. I was owned...” He paused, letting that part sink in. “I don’t know if my employers will have my place under surveillance or whether they would turn me in to SCARB. My guess is no...” He glanced at Jon before the human could speak. “...It’s more likely my stuff has been destroyed, my space given to another seer.”
There was a silence. Some of the sharpness left Cass’s light.
“Oh,” she said. “That sucks.”
Revik smiled at her. “Not really.”
“So what would we do then?” Jon said. “If that happened?”
Revik blew air out from between his lips. “I know people in London. People who’d let me use their places to jump. People who would help us.”
“Other seers, you mean.”
“Yes.”
Jon nodded, leaning back in the seat and folding his arms.
“All right,” he said. “London it is, then.”
Jon closed his eyes. Watching him lean on Cass’s shoulder, it occurred to Revik that Jon really thought he had a vote.
In the same moment, Revik wondered if maybe he did.
It took him another few breaths to realize that what he felt for the humans was more than just responsibility for having indirectly gotten them into this. They felt like friends. More than that. They felt like family.
Gazing up at the whitewashed sky, he forced the tense part of him to relax as he thought about the reasons that might be. He thought about Cass’s questions about him and Allie, and realized he already knew why that was.
She was more seer now, he could feel it.
Pushing the thought from his mind, he downshifted in front of the wooden hotel sign hanging from the edge of a steep, slate-tile roof. Bringing the snowmobile to a slow stop where it wouldn’t hang out in the faint outline of road, he stepped on the foot brake, turning the wheel to wedge the tires into a line of rocks.
He turned off the engine. The silence once he had was strangely disorienting. All he could hear was the wind through the thick glass, and the faint squeak of the chain holding the sign from the roof overhead.
“Hey, Revik,” Cass said, watching him pull the keys out of the ignition.
“What, Cass?” he said, not looking over.
“I’m sorry about what I said.”
He glanced at her. She looked timid, lost inside the bundle of blanket and scarf. She touched his arm with her bony hand, and he flinched a little, feeling the emotion behind the gesture.
“I just don’t get it, I guess. You seem like one of the good guys.”
Looking at her, he felt his fingers grip the steering wheel, still holding the keys. He glanced at Jon and saw the male human looking at him, too.
Revik exhaled shortly, rubbing his face with a gloved hand.
“There is nothing to get, Cass,” he said. He met her gaze, his jaw hard once more. “...And I’m not that good.”
Jon spoke up, surprising him.
“Do you love her?” he said.
Revik looked at him. Focusing back down on his hands, he watched the leather crinkle around his fingers. After another moment, he exhaled again.
“I love her,” he said. He nodded, half-surprised he’d said it. “Yes.”
For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When he glanced up next, Cass smiled at him. Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his good hand, shaking him lightly in the same gesture. A faint smile tugged at his lips.
“All right.” He smiled wider, tugging at his shoulder a little harder, to get Revik to look at him. “Come on, man. Let’s find that shower.”
Watching Cass fumble with the door handle, Revik nodded, wiping his face before he turned to do the same.
27
LONDON
I AIMED MY body down a London street, scanning faces.
I took in buildings as well, and the occasional car as we strolled past yet another wooded park, a different park from the one we’d first passed as we’d left the tube station.
I stopped at a newsstand and stared blankly at the morphing feed headlines blaring from a monitor over the stand window. My eyes took in the actual words beats later, which went something like this:
“NEW SYRIMNE KILLS 28 IN PAKISTAN BOMB BLAST! TERRORIST PLOT LINKED TO CHINA!”
Even after months of travel and India, I still commanded the front page.
I read details as they ran out under the headlines. Apparently I was believed dead again, I noted. I was still reading about how I’d died when Maygar came up from behind me and took my arm none too gently in his thick fingers. He led me down a street lined with white houses that looked to me like they’d been torn from the pages of a London storybook.
Flags from different countries flapped over our heads.
A limo slid by with tinted, bullet-proof glass and small square flags on the front of its hood, too, then another flanked by military police.
It struck me as interesting that Maygar had brought me here, where representatives from at least a dozen countries seemed to have taken up residence, most of whom would pay top dollar to see me collared and stuck in the back of a windowless van.
Still, it was pretty, where we were.
The park flourished in the background, dense with green, filled with strolling men in suits who held the arms of women wearing hats and gloves, giving it a strangely timeless feel. I looked down at my own hands, which were dyed darker than my normal skin tone. My stubby nails made me look like a drug addict, or some kind of street kid. Touching the silver chain necklace I wore around my neck, I shoved those same hands into my pockets.
For the plane ride over, the seers used everything but surgery to disguise my appearance. I flew out of Kolkata wearing facial implants, skin dye, blood patches on all my fingers in the event of a random racial screening, colored contact lenses, a wig, a hat, several scarves. My fingerprints and DNA matched my ident, which was that of an East Indian woman traveling for business with her merchant husband.
My current attempt to blend was a bit more West than East, and consisted of men’s mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. Pretty low-tech, but surprisingly effective against the street-level facial recognition software employed by cameras that dotted most London public areas.
I still wore the black wig and skin dye, blood patches and contact lenses under the dark shades, but the facial implants had started to hurt, so I took most of them off. Maygar seemed to think we could avoid the higher grade facial-rec stuff as long as we weren’t picked up...and as long as we stayed away from banks and private residencies in the more exclusive areas.
The Seven employed seers in London who could intercept a breach, as well.
&nbs
p; According to Maygar, they would pick up any flags well in advance of the humans...if not perhaps in advance of the Rooks.
Still, despite all the precautions they insisted upon, most of the Seven’s Guard seemed fairly comfortable with my proposed trip and destination. London remained a Seven town, at least in terms of operational majority.
My clothes were men’s, oversized and shapeless, and I wore tennis shoes, making me look like a punk American tourist. On the other hand, considering the multiple versions of my face now in papers and feeds, I figured it was as good a disguise as any. I glanced at another gabled house with high windows when Maygar thrust a carton of juice into my hand.
“Stop looking up,” he said. “And drink. We’re not far.”
“Have you been here before?”
He grunted. “No, Bridge. Your husband and I were never on ‘dinner guest’ terms. Sadly.”
I focused down another row of attached houses adorned with white pillars. Each one had a main story above the road that stretched up double the usual height, with heavily curtained windows. I found myself thinking about seeing Peter Pan as a kid, in the theater.
“Maybe you got the area wrong,” I said.
“And maybe I didn’t,” Maygar said. “You know who he worked for, don’t you?”
I focused on a bronze lion’s head with a ring in its mouth. It stood on a pole in front of steps leading to an entrance framed by more white pillars and perfect, corkscrew shrubs before a heavy oak door. I saw cameras on both sides of the door, but otherwise, I half-expected Mary Poppins to walk out, singing a song.
“No idea,” I said.
Maygar clicked at me softly. “Bastard didn’t tell you anything.” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “Do you want me to tell you, Bridge?”
I had to think for a minute. “No.”
He shrugged. I could tell he still wanted to tell me.
“Vash had to approve it,” he said, trying to tantalize me instead. “Dehgoies was still officially in penance, so the work he did remained under scrutiny.” Stopping then, he pointed up the street. “There. That’s the one.”
I swallowed when I saw where his finger pointed.
The corner building dominated half of one street block, also white, but taller than any of those we’d passed. Given the height of the windows, at least one of the eight floors came equipped with 20 foot ceilings. Ionic columns of a similar height supported that floor, with smaller versions of the same on two of the other floors, each with ornate capitals in the shape of four-cornered scrolls. Flags rippled above the main entrance, displaying a distinctly British-looking coat of arms. Small trees decorated the upper balconies, cut in precise shapes.
“He lived there? Seriously?”
“Yes.” Maygar let out a quiet snort. “His employers let him have it for security reasons...and because their main buildings are nearby. The penthouse flat was his. It takes up the entire top floor. The rest is leased out to rich humans and foreign dignitaries.”
I focused on the doorman out front, who stood with clasped gloved hands over a fitted jacket. He bent to open the rear door to a stretch limo that pulled up to the curb, taking a woman’s hand to help her out a few seconds later. Watching as more doormen bustled around to remove packages from the inside and trunk, I swallowed.
“Okay,” I said. “You’d better tell me who he worked for.”
Maygar smiled, his light exuding a warm flicker of triumph. “This building, my dear Bridge, is owned by the British government. Around the corner, on that square we just walked through...which is the famous Belgrave Square, by the way...is the Royal College of Defense Studies. Your husband worked there as an instructor.” He gave an odd kind of laugh, shaking his head. “Dehgoies taught worms how to fight seers.”
I turned slowly, staring at him. “You’re not serious.”
“I am,” Maygar assured me. “From what I understand, his addition to the faculty upped the international student count considerably.” Again he grinned. “His name wasn’t given out, of course. Hell...for all I know, he only taught from VR, using an avatar. He contracted for them on the side, as well...but a good seven months of the year he taught tactical inter-species warfare to rich military brats from all over the world.”
By then we were approaching the high-rise building. I stared up at it, gave a half-laugh.
“Then the big secret is...he was legit? He had a real job?”
“A real job?” Maygar’s mouth hardened from its previous glee. “Bridge, do you have any idea how many seers would have actively tried to kill him if they knew he did this ‘real job?’ If there ever was a blood-traitor job, that was it.”
Grabbing the juice from me, he took a long drink. Once he’d lowered the carton, he gave me another look, humor once more teasing his full lips.
“...The joke among those of us who knew was that Dags was a worm fucker.” He grinned wider before clarifying, “...that he preferred worms to seers. Given that he married one, and the Kraut daughter of a Nazi General, at that, I don’t think it’s such a stretch, do you?” Tilting his head back to drink more of the juice, he swallowed as he lowered the carton, his eyes still on me. “Come to think of it...he picked a human over you, didn’t he, Bridge?”
“And a seer,” I said.
He grinned. “Yeah. That’s right. But he fucked the human, yes?”
I felt this as a sucker punch to somewhere in the navel region. The irony should have struck me, but it didn’t.
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, he did.”
Maygar grinned again, clapping me on the shoulder.
“Don’t be so sensitive, Bridge. He’s dead.”
By then we’d reached the front door. The doorman opened for us once Maygar showed his ID, but not before giving me a down-the-nose disapproving look for my attire. A security guard walked us to an art deco elevator and stepped inside after motioning us ahead. Stepping just inside the door, he inserted a key, twisted it sideways, then punched in an access code before pressing the top button labeled ‘Penthouse.’ Watching all this, I felt a little sick.
“Maybe you were right,” I muttered to Maygar.
“About what this time?”
“I’m beginning to think this was a bad idea.”
The security guard gave me a questioning look, but I barely registered it. Did I really want to see where he’d lived? I was pretty sure I’d find out yet more things I didn’t want to know. My stomach continued to hurt the higher we traveled, until I started to wonder what the hell was wrong with me. Maygar apparently wondered the same thing. He nudged me with an elbow.
“You look like you’re going to throw up,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “What is wrong?”
I shook my head, giving him an irritated look.
The elevator let out a soft ping, and the doors slid open. The security guard used gloved fingers to point us down the hall. He smiled at me as we exited, giving me a wink as he hit the button to go back down.
He needn’t have bothered with directions. There was only one door. It had no markings, no identifiers of any kind. A small eye of God stuck out of the ceiling, one of those cameras with a darkened bubble guarding the lens.
“Do we knock?” I whispered it for some reason.
Maygar held up a set of keys, jangling them. “Why?” he said. He bent to the lock, but the door suddenly opened, revealing a small, wiry man in his thirties with a wide face and thinning brown hair. Maygar and I both lurched back in alarm.
The man appeared startled too.
Looking at him, I wondered if they’d rented out the apartment. The man stared between Maygar and me, then focused on me, almost like he knew me.
Hesitantly, I stepped forward.
“We’re friends of Dehgoies Revik,” I said. “He used to live here. We’ve only just now come around to pick up his things. If we’re too late, maybe you could tell us where they’ve been moved...?”
“I know who you are,” the man blurted.
I f
elt Maygar tense behind me.
Taking a breath, I said, “I don’t think so, Mister...?”
“Eddard,” he said. He stepped out of the doorway, moving almost gracefully. “Please follow me.” When I hesitated, Eddard said, more insistently, “Please...ma’am. Come with me.”
I glanced back at Maygar, who was shaking his head minutely, eyes adamant. When I indicated with my head that we should follow, he shook his head again. When I stepped forward, however, he did the same, only pausing to hold up his hands as if to say, Fine, but this is a terrible idea.
I knew I was being reckless. Neither of us could risk using our sight; the apartment was likely to be under surveillance no matter who this guy was. But, I figured, we could either risk going in now or bolt out and hope they let us leave. With the former I at least had a chance of getting what we’d come for.
So I followed Eddard inside.
When the human got a few paces ahead, Maygar stepped closer, lowering his mouth to my ear.
“We’re in a building owned by the British military,” he murmured. “Following a man who says he knows who you are.”
“It’s going to be okay,” I told him.
“Really? How reassuring.”
“Just trust me. Please, Maygar.”
He looked at me like I had brain damage, but shrugged when I didn’t flinch, falling in step behind me.
I focused so intently on the man in front of us that I barely took in the house itself. Once we’d reached the first staircase, however, I found my eyes pulled off his back, and suddenly I was seeing the high, wood-paneled walls and ceilings, bronze sculptures, paintings and stone floors. Hanging tapestries the size of my apartment floor covered one of the high walls of the main hallway. Faded with age, they looked like they belonged in a museum.
Even the walls had been polished recently. A blanket-sized thankah of that Buddha with the many heads drew my eyes as we passed to the left of the giant marble staircase. Staring at the thankah, then up to the landing below the second floor where I saw another Asian vase, I found myself thinking that maybe these were Revik’s things after all, waiting for auction. I let my eyes travel further up, taking in the domed cupola above the stairs, an oval window with smaller but equally ornate ionic columns ringing it like the bell tower of a cathedral.
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