Revik didn’t bother answering that time. Lowering his hands somewhat, he looked around at the rest of them. “So what do you think? Do we just ignore it?”
“We could,” Jorag said, still frowning, his expression puzzled as he stared at it.
“What is wrong, husband?” the apparition asked Revik. “Are you angry at me?”
Revik’s jaw hardened that time. He stared at the thing. “Now you’re not even trying. What is this thing, Cass? It’s not just a hologram. It’s not even just you.”
“I’m your wife. Don’t you recognize me?”
“My wife?” Revik retorted. For a second he looked like he might say more, or maybe hit it again. Stopping himself, he clicked softly instead, the sound disgusted.
“Did you feel any blood, laoban?” Jax said, also staring at the Allie-looking thing.
“No,” Revik said, without looking away from it. “It was solid. More like hitting a heavy bag. Some sense of contour, but not enough.”
The fake Allie continued to ignore the rest of them, looking only at Revik.
“Revik,” she said, softer, her voice cajoling. “Come on, baby. I thought we were past all of this distrust stuff now. Didn’t we talk about this?”
Jon couldn’t help noticing Revik visibly flinch at the endearment.
“Maybe we should just ignore it,” Jon said. “It’s creepy, whatever it is.”
Wreg snorted a laugh. “That’s the fucking truth.”
Revik continued to stare at the thing.
Jon strongly got the impression the tone of voice the apparition used that time bothered him, and while he didn’t recognize that tone personally, he could imagine it might be one Allie used with her husband alone. Frowning, he looked between Revik and the hologram, wondering if he should intervene, pull him out of this.
“I’m fine, Jon,” Revik said.
“You sure, man? I think we should just go.”
“I’m sure. I just want to know what the fuck we’re dealing with.”
“This thing isn’t going to tell us that,” Wreg said, glancing at Jon, as if noticing his reaction to Revik. “He’s right, laoban. This fucking machine is wasting our time.”
The fake Allie clicked at all of them, eyes incredulous. “Machine? Seriously, Wreg? Jesus, why are you listening to them, Revik? I’m telling you, I’m fine. Quit with the domestic violence thing, okay? Just talk to me, baby.”
Revik flinched that time, too.
The harder look never left his eyes.
“Domestic violence?” He stared at her, his voice openly contemptuous. “I think you’re mixing my wife up with someone else. She loved to fight.”
Something about the way he said it made Jon grin. When he glanced at Wreg, he saw a sharper gleam in the Chinese seer’s eyes, as well, along with a faint smile.
“…She especially liked to fight me,” Revik added, his voice colder.
The fake Allie folded her arms, giving him a coy smile. “Are you sure that was about the fighting, lover?”
Revik’s jaw tightened, pushing out a muscle in his cheek.
He looked about to answer, then didn’t, but Jon saw the anger that rose briefly to his eyes, flashing hotter right before a coil of pain left the other man’s light, strong enough that Jon stepped back, swallowing. He fought the impulse, but ended up glancing at Wreg anyway, his face growing hotter when he saw the look of discomfort on the Chinese seer’s face.
“Uh-huh,” not-Allie said softly, clicking again. “That’s what I thought.”
“Don’t listen to her, laoban,” Wreg advised. “She’s just a cheap copy. They’re trying to fuck with your head, is all.”
The apparition’s eyes slanted, glancing coldly at Wreg. Her irises turned a sharper green before they shifted back to Revik.
“Well?” she said. “Are you really not going to talk to me, husband?”
“I’ll talk,” Revik said. “But I want you to hit me, first. Try anyway.”
His voice came out quieter that time, deathly quiet.
He stepped gracefully to one side as Jon watched, circling in front of her, his steps casual, but holding that catlike grace Jon remembered from the few times they’d been in the ring together. The fake Allie’s eyes followed his movements, but she didn’t try to mimic them. She only turned her head as Revik stepped around her in a slow arc.
A kind of impatience lived in the way Revik moved while he fought, Jon thought. It was as if he didn’t want to fuck around with preliminaries. He just wanted to get down to it, as soon as possible.
Come to think of it, Allie was a little like that, too.
The memory brought another sharp pain to Jon’s chest, even as it forced another smile, an involuntary one that time, one that nearly hurt his face. He felt similar things going on with Revik––a kind of see-saw of emotions around remembering Allie as she was and getting hit with the lack of her within the image in front of him.
He felt anger on the other man more than anything else, but also grief… and frustration… and disbelief… as he looked at the bad copy of his wife.
Still, something in the fact that he could just hit her like that, and in the face, told Jon that Revik was doing this for himself, too. He was showing himself it wasn’t her; from the look on his face, he catalogued the details of it not being her, even now.
Jon realized something else, even as it struck him that the same thing must have occurred to Revik already. This wasn’t just some prerecorded program created by Cass and Feigran. It wasn’t even solely an AI program, set to look and sound as close to Allie as possible.
Cass was operating the damned thing.
Cass was behind everything it said and did, even now.
“I agree, brother,” Wreg muttered.
Revik gave him a bare glance, and Jon saw the understanding in his clear irises as well. Something about seeing that knowledge in Revik’s face made Jon relax, at least in terms of the Elaerian’s mental state. The thing about Cass roiled in his head on a different track, somewhere between disbelief and disgust.
Cass was doing this.
She was directly behind this thing, controlling it, speaking through it. Cass’s light was somehow mixed up in and projecting this fake version of Allie’s, which meant she’d gone out of her way to feel like Allie, too.
The realization made him sick.
Like, really sick.
Feeling his jaw harden, Jon watched Revik’s face, wondering how he was really doing with this. He couldn’t help wondering if Revik was starting to lose his grip on the situation, out of anger now, as much as grief. The Elaerian was breathing harder, and Jon could tell by looking at him, he wasn’t out of breath, not from exertion anyway.
Revik made that motion with his fingers again, to the fake Allie.
“Come on, bitch,” he said.
The hatred in his words, particularly the last one, made Jon flinch.
Revik’s tone turned cajoling, mocking, without losing that harder edge.
“You want to be Allie, Cass? Is that what this is about? Go ahead. Prove to me you can be my wife. Show us how you can be all the things she was… that you can have her heart and light and mind. Then you can tell us all how you deserve it so much more than she did. How you’re really the better person.”
There was a silence.
The apparition only stared at him, that predatory look back in its jade-green eyes.
Then, with a complete lack of fanfare––
It vanished.
45
THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING
REVIK BLINKED AS the lights rose.
His hand fell to the butt of his gun.
He unholstered it seconds later, still looking around the cavernous space, looking for doors, people, ways in and out. His sight flared out, checking every inch of what grew visible around them, even as he kept it behind Jon’s shield.
The apparition of Allie had disappeared.
He felt it go. It hurt, somewhere in his heart, even
though he knew it wasn’t her.
The irrationality of his own reactions hurt him, too, but he couldn’t indulge any of those feelings, not now. He needed to hold it together, for the rest of them, if not for himself.
He needed to hold it together for his daughter.
Remembering her, the tiny being with Allie’s face, brought his mind more sharply into focus, even as he took a deep breath. As he exhaled that breath, he felt the more strategic parts of his mind kick back into gear.
They were running out of time; he could feel it.
Why hadn’t they tried to kill him yet?
When he first found himself in that stone corridor under the elevators, he thought for sure that was it. They were lost in another of Shadow’s fucked up fun houses. They’d lost their line to Balidor on the outside. They’d lost half their team. He figured it was only a matter of time before they were down, either captives or dead.
He’d meant it when he told Balidor they’d be dead if they couldn’t crack that lower-level construct.
As far as Revik could tell, they hadn’t cracked it.
Yet, Revik was still on his feet. Why?
They obviously wanted him for something. Possibly they wanted all of them; Menlim was never one for wasting resources.
He knew his inability to wrap his head around that was a form of avoidance––one he’d been actively indulging since he listed off the names of those seers he wanted with him for this. He’d been signing their death warrants, bringing them here. Some part of him knew that. He just hadn’t really admitted it to himself, not until now.
He wondered if Allie would ever forgive him for putting Jon on that list.
He couldn’t think about that now, either, though.
Whatever Menlim wanted––his blood, his son, his friends, his light––Revik couldn’t help but think they could have gotten it by now. Which meant either they were waiting for something, some element of timing, or they wanted something else.
He hadn’t voiced any of his thoughts to the others, but he knew Wreg, at least, had to be thinking along roughly similar lines. Out of all the others, Wreg would be fully aware of how dim their chances got, once they found themselves in this maze.
Moreover, Wreg knew Menlim. He knew what they were dealing with.
Revik thought all this in the background, still gazing around the warehouse-sized space. He kept his gun raised, his eyes on the corners of the room, his light scanning the walls. Even after his scans, he had no idea if they’d been in this room all along, or if they still stood in that eight-foot-wide corridor––or a different-sized room altogether.
He knew the vast majority of what he saw now had to be pure illusion.
He gazed up the high rock walls, which were done in that same, medieval castle-like decor. His eyes shifted across oak beam ceilings and then down, to the thick torches standing in rows of iron brackets above old-looking wooden tables.
The whole ambiance of the massive hall, despite the height of the ceiling and the columns of cut stone that dotted the larger, more open space, evoked feelings and associations markedly similar to that hunting lodge-slash-château in Argentina.
Embroidered tapestries hung from the walls, depicting pantheon images similar to those of the Pamir––but bloodier and darker interpretations than what Revik remembered from his time with the monks. The images held none of the fragments of light and presence he remembered, either. They flickered like shadows, holding a disorienting and more violent presence, like the construct itself.
His eyes returned to the front of the room, where a fire raged in a stone fireplace. The head of the horseshoe of banquet tables crossed the front of the hearth, ringed by high-backed wooden chairs and decorated with a blood-red rug.
It looked like castles he’d seen in Europe, only a nightmare version.
Menlim always favored medieval aesthetics.
When Revik was a boy, he bought into that vision of stone castles as opulent and impressive. Maybe he’d been too close to his uncle’s mind back then, or maybe he thought they could protect him from the outside world, evoking the image of a king, someone who didn’t have to fear anyone––or so he’d been naive enough to believe at the time.
Now all he could see was the blood soaked into the stone.
Blood… and ego.
Those two things were usually paired, in his experience.
He stood perfectly still as he looked around, drinking in the dimensions of the room, trying cautiously to see behind the images to the physicality beyond.
Being Elaerian, he could catch glimpses of the physical structure, but he could also feel the construct messing with his senses. Most of the fragments he caught had a distorted feel to them, and didn’t match up with other elements of the room. The stone columns would feel real, but in the wrong place, out of synch with the wall he could feel cutting the room in half, and a lower ceiling made of organic metal instead of stone.
A number of the components felt more or less “real” but the dimensions and distances felt off, which rendered those glimpses only marginally helpful, at least when it came to mapping out a workable schematic.
Even so, he shared what he saw with his people, watching them frown and look at the features of the room in confusion as they followed his Elaerian glimpses into the physical structure of the walls, floors and ceilings.
He was still looking around when a half-circle of forms appeared in the middle of the room, facing them directly.
Revik blinked, staring at them.
They’d appeared so silently and immediately, he doubted his senses at first––then doubted whether he’d somehow missed seeing them before.
But no, they were new––despite the utter lack of change in the room’s vibration.
The shape of the half-moon they formed struck him as deliberately menacing, almost trial-like. Revik noted he stood in the very center of that arc.
He felt his people react around him, sparks of fear coming off their light as they took in the group of newcomers. Neela raised her rifle. So did Jax. Jon held his gun in his good hand, covering Revik from his left. Wreg did the same from his right. Revik didn’t take his eyes off the people facing them, but he felt Maygar on his other side raise his gun and unlock the harness on his rifle. Chinja swiveled her rifle down and forward, as did Jorag.
Only when Revik finished taking stock of his own people did he focus specifically on the newcomers. His jaw hardened as he met the gaze of the yellow-eyed seer in the center.
He could feel her here, somewhere.
Not his daughter––Allie.
He knew it wasn’t real, that it couldn’t be real, but the whisper of her presence hit him hard anyway––even harder than it had with that replica in the corridor. It took him a few seconds to recover and adjust, to control his heart rate, his breathing, his light.
He could feel her, and gods, it hurt.
He forced his eyes to the image of Menlim.
“Hello, nephew,” the gaunt-faced seer said.
Revik didn’t bother to answer.
He didn’t believe the seer to be physically “there,” any more than he believed he’d punched his wife in that stone corridor. He didn’t believe in the walk-in stone fireplace, or the wine glasses that stood like sentinels filled with blood along the length of the nearest wooden table. Menlim and the other bodies were just more fabrications of the construct.
Like everything in here.
Even so, the presences imbuing those forms made it hard to dismiss them entirely.
He hadn’t faced his uncle in over one hundred years.
Reactions sparked in his light and his body, regardless of what he knew. They worsened the longer he stared at the aged seer. With Allie’s light still coiling around his, the emotions that rose as he looked at Menlim only intensified––they also grew harder to catalogue, much less control.
Menlim stared back at him, his face as skull-like and expressionless as Revik remembered. While not quite a Tarsi or
a Vash in years, he was definitely into old age, at least a hundred years older than Balidor––if not a hundred and fifty, or two hundred.
Whatever his exact age, he had not aged from when Revik saw him last.
Menlim’s appearance didn’t seem to have changed at all in the intervening years, not in the color of his hair or skin, not in his weight or the depth of those yellow eyes, not in the set of his sculpted mouth. Revik couldn’t help but look at the man’s form in detail, reminding himself of its basic shape, the feel of the male seer behind it. He tried to sort fact from fantasy, from the nightmares of his childhood, which had likely blown the seer into mythic proportions in his mind, but he found that almost impossible to do, too.
He started with clothes, which also hadn’t changed significantly from what Revik remembered. He wore dark suede pants. He’d tucked a cream-colored collared shirt behind a plain, black leather belt. A dark-green calf-length jacket framed his narrow form, also of some soft leather, possibly calfskin. His iron gray hair was tied back exactly the way Revik remembered from Bavaria, in a plain metal clip at the base of his neck, pulled severely off his skull-like face.
The goatee was new, but it fit what Revik remembered.
It also fit with how Menlim liked to present himself, as a retired professor type, outdoorsy, highly educated, and well-read.
Revik shifted his weight between his feet, feeling irrationally younger as he stared at that face. Clenching his jaw didn’t help. Remembering Allie––remembering his daughter, or Cass, or the seers standing protectively around him––none of that really helped, either.
His heart pounded in his chest.
He wondered if they could hear it.
His eyes shifted to the others in that half-circle, scanning past faces without fully letting himself see them. He paused on Terian’s familiar features for less than a breath, then spent even less time on Cass’s, noting only the lack of the Nazi-like scar before he moved on to the next. He barely looked at Salinse, or the old woman he remembered from some feed broadcast or another about the White House under Wellington.
The next four faces Revik didn’t know at all.
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