The seer purred, inclining his head.
“Do you understand?” he asked.
She looked at him, nodding slowly. “Yes.”
“It is his honor. And his curse. It is why we could not accept failure in him––for failure in him meant failure for all his brothers and sisters, too.” The old man continued to watch her, his gold eyes cautious. “In time, he grew to understand his role, War Cassandra. He accepted it. He was rightfully proud of it, too, until his wife convinced him it was something to be ashamed of, rather than something to be revered.”
Cass nodded, feeling her jaw tighten.
She’d definitely seen Revik’s shame.
She understood about sacrifice, too.
The old man clicked softly. “We did not design his fate, War Cassandra. He understood that, too, once upon a time.”
But something else bothered Cass.
“According to scripture, the Bridge is in charge,” she said, pressing her lips together as she refolded her arms. “Doesn’t that mean I’m supposed to obey her, too?”
The seer made a noncommittal gesture with one hand.
“Not according to the scriptures I believe.”
At her questioning frown, he sighed.
“All beings can be corrupted, Cassandra. One must not close their eyes to circumstances and obey blindly, particularly when one’s assigned leader has been compromised.” Pausing, he added, “Also, there is more to that piece I quoted above. Would you like to hear it?”
She didn’t answer aloud, but he felt her agree.
“‘...The last spark of all will need the least to ignite, for Hers shines the brightest, in the very darkest of times.’”
Meeting her eyes, he made his voice serious, almost stern.
“You trained for this, Cassandra. Knowingly or not, you took in the lessons of the human world, in part to lead if the Bridge were unable. You are the Fourth of the Four, the being of last resort, who finishes things when the others cannot.”
An image flickered in Cass’s mind, of her own father, drunk, kicking in the door handle to her room, his face shining with sweat from the hallway light. Her mother’s voice rising on the other side as her father’s eyes lit on Cass.
She remembered the hatred in his stare.
He shouted at her in Thai, then in broken English, then more Thai… his words slurring until Cass was grateful, relieved she could no longer make sense of what he said.
The old seer’s voice gentled.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, it was hard for you, War Cassandra. Those who should have loved you most among the humans only hated you for your light. What should have been the very best of your experience of the human heart told you the most about the depths of their depravity. You know what they are capable of… more than most. More importantly, you face that truth honestly, with dignity. With truth itself. That is something the Bridge could not do.”
There was another silence, then Cass nodded slowly.
Exhaling, she looked up at Menlim.
“How long?” she said. “How long will it take to find out if I’m telekinetic?”
“The duration will be short, even subjectively. A mere blink in the totality of this life that spreads before you––”
“Like Revik?” She gave him a slightly harder look. “You said thirty years is nothing for a seer. Will it be that much of a blink?”
He smiled, clicking softly. “No.”
“How long?” she pressed.
“A fortnight at best,” he replied, surprising her by being specific. “As much as ten months, if it turns out you carry one or more skill sets I cannot awaken through the techniques I currently know. But I don’t foresee that will be an issue, frankly, and I am rarely wrong about such things. One of the benefits of old age.”
Smiling, he paused, as if waiting for her to think about his words.
When she remained quiet he added, “Joking aside, I am rarely wrong about such things, Cassandra. I also generally estimate in the conservative.”
She snorted, smiling. “Do you, now?”
“Without exception,” he said, smiling back. “We all have our basic natures, I’m afraid.”
Nodding, and trying to relax, she exhaled, her eyes shifting back to the glowing current on the other side of the view portal. Now she could see nothing but vague shapes in the curl of water pushed backwards by the prow of the underwater ship. After watching water shimmer past for a few seconds, she sighed, feeling her stomach grow cold.
…the flash of a gun under the Arizona sun.
Blinking, she shook her head, folding her arms tighter.
Something about the old seer’s honesty was a relief. Previously, his honesty about the pain had reassured her, too. She wasn’t used to people being honest about unpleasant truths.
Most lied, said it wouldn’t hurt much, or it’d be over fast.
“Your fear of pain is mostly a remnant too,” he told her gently. “After what you’ve experienced, pain will be nothing to you, Cassandra. That twinge of fear you feel now is the last of your animal side, telling you that it will kill you. But it will not kill you… and when we are finished, that fear won’t bother you again, either.”
She refolded her arms, exhaling. “Everyone gets afraid.”
“You won’t.”
She looked at him, frowning, but his expression didn’t move.
“You will soon come to find that many things you were told happen to ‘everyone’ will no longer be relevant to you, War Cassandra,” he said. “Those things are true of humans, of seers who do not transcend these mental limitations, who retain their animal consciousness like it is something ‘natural,’ something to be proud of. I assure you, none of this is either inevitable or ‘natural’ in the way you have learned. Your fear will be mastered. Just like any learned behavior, it can be unlearned. I promise you that, my dear. I vow it to you.”
Thinking about his words, she nodded again.
She believed him.
Moreover, it felt true.
Sighing, she felt her shoulders relax. She followed bubbles with her eyes as they cascaded up and back across the thick, organic pane, moving faster as they reached the widest edge of the curve. She watched them glom together at the edges and followed a new set of bubbles.
She knew, in the way a person always knows such things, what she wanted.
Maybe she’d always known.
4
HUMVEE
WE WERE IN motion. Finally.
At last, we were on the verge of doing something, even if we hadn’t actually done anything yet. Movement alone felt good. It felt like the beginning of doing, at least.
We were in New York still––meaning the state.
I might not have believed it, if someone sent me the images cold, or even via the non-network feeds. We’d left Albany a few hours earlier and were heading south to eventually reach the shores of New Jersey, and from there, we’d hopefully leave for Manhattan. A lot of other people were driving in that direction, too.
I wondered if even half had a prayer of getting where they were going.
Unlike San Francisco, which implemented a military-grade quarantine locking all infected humans inside the city––New York, meaning Manhattan, opted to lock all the sick people out.
Both international airports and three private airstrips located in the surrounding boroughs closed as soon as the epidemic began moving east from Los Angeles and Chicago like a brush fire across the plains. Not long after, the disease also began traveling north, likely from Miami and Mexico, where experts theorized it may have jumped from Cuba and South America.
Now all air traffic over New York had been suspended indefinitely.
Anyone who dared breach the “safe zone” radius would be shot down by giant anti-aircraft guns jutting out over the waters of both the East River and the Hudson, as well as those aimed roughly in the direction of Staten Island. Loaded private security boats patrolled the waters, guarding a perimeter held by ma
ssive organic binary electric (OBE) fields jacked up to their highest settings.
The OBE cut off the northern part of the city from the outside, as well.
The dark feeds showed images of that field cutting down the middle of buildings and ripping into streets in Yonkers, Mt. Vernon and New Rochelle, right above Van Cortlandt Park and Pelham Bay. They’d evacuated the areas, of course, but there had been casualties.
Those fields could cut an airplane cleanly in half––and apparently brick and metal buildings, too––much less a human being.
The mayor of New York City, an ex-special forces commander and five-tour veteran of the wars against Greece and Pakistan, put the city under martial law as soon as news of the disease’s spread hit the feeds. He moved so quickly, in fact, Balidor and the rest of the senior infiltration team strongly suspected he’d been tipped off.
At the very least, he had detailed contingency plans in place for a situation very much like this one––unlike just about every other city in the world dealing with the same event.
New York City’s mayor also ordered all water sources to be cut off from the outside and all delivery of food to be suspended.
He shut down all bridges, blocked tunnels with explosives and armored tanks, and covered the river banks and harbor on every side with mines and razor wire. He cranked up the already impressive organic grid around Manhattan itself and added an even more deadly OBE field that stretched up into the skies, forming a dome around the entire city.
The older grid in place was initially erected primarily to keep the rising Atlantic at bay and to protect the city from increasingly intense tropical storms. Now, combined with the newer OBE, it would fry anyone who got within a dozen meters of the official boundaries of Manhattan, assuming they weren’t hit earlier by one of the other security systems in place on the water, in the air or on the ground.
I’d honestly begun to wonder if OBEs had been created for this exact scenario. They appeared out of nowhere about a year ago, and now they seemed to be everywhere.
We were even using a version ourselves, on the roof of the hotel where we all lived in Manhattan. Ours was designed by Arc Enterprises to compete with the Black Arrow versions, but the concept was more or less the same. From talking to Arc’s CEO, I knew they’d created theirs, in part, to ensure that not only human multinationals, the World Court and seer terrorists under Salinse were recipients of that particular tech.
How long the city could remain locked down was anyone’s guess.
Manhattan, even stripped of its eight or nine million commuters and everyone who lived in the surrounding boroughs, had a hell of a lot of people to feed, given that downtown Manhattan wasn’t exactly a hotbed of agricultural development.
From what I’d seen on the networks, the previous mayor built some massive water tank and water de-salinization and purification plant under the city itself, in the event of an emergency like this, but no one seemed to know just how well the city was fixed for food.
I couldn’t help thinking the more wealthy residents would find some way to solve that problem, at least in the short term. The poor and middle classes might not be so lucky, unless dynamics in the city had changed a lot in the weeks we’d been gone.
Next to me, Revik gave a low grunt of agreement.
We’d already heard there’d been purges since the quarantine walls went up.
Most of these had been done under the auspices of “removing contamination risks,” which seemed to mean that anyone with a head cold could be picked up as an “immunity risk” and forcibly removed via a one-way boat trip back to disease planet.
Again, I kind of doubted the rich were included in these purges.
Again, Revik grunted in agreement next to me.
Given how well-prepared the mayor was to face this crisis, we had to assume a number of Shadow’s “chosen” were hunkered down in New York.
Shadow, the mysterious being who’d engineered and dispersed the deadly virus, seemed to have his own ideas about who among the human race deserved to live. The new virus––now officially labeled “C2-77” by the Center for Disease Control (CDC)––seemed to have been designed specifically to cull pretty much everyone else.
The feeds were now calling it the “Apocalypse Plague.”
A certain percentage of humans were immune, but that percentage was abysmally small, given how fast the disease spread and how quickly it killed those it did infect. If the apocalypse plague were allowed to fully run its course, less than one in four humans on the entire planet might survive. That left nearly seven billion people who might not.
It also made C2-77 the deadliest known disease by nearly a factor of a hundred, if the projections on spread and the 100% fatality rate in those infected held up globally.
Extreme weather events had been exacerbating problems over the past few weeks. Those events were believed to be spreading the disease, as well. Water levels had been rising for the past two decades, of course, from ice cap melt and whatever else, but everything seemed worse this year. The storms weren’t dying down, either, despite the end of the hurricane season. Instead, winter kicked in, bringing colder versions of the same destructive weather.
Everything seemed to be hitting some kind of critical mass.
For the first time, force fields around some of the islands were failing. Also for the first time, previously “rescued” cities and countries were finding themselves underwater again, even in places as well-populated and technologically advanced as Japan and London.
According to Balidor, unprecedented seismic activity was making that worse, and also causing force fields to fail in more than one location.
For the first time in my life, I started questioning some of my assumptions around what might be causing some of the weather problems to worsen. I even found myself wondering if some of the conspiracy nuts on the dark feeds might have it right, and that someone had found a way to weaponize the planet itself. It really did seem like the uptick in environmental problems was awfully well-timed with the release of the virus.
Regardless of where the extreme weather events came from, monsoon-type storms and increasingly powerful hurricanes had been reported as far north as Maine in just the past two weeks. There’d been similar problems on the west coast, as well, including in Los Angeles, Seattle and Vancouver BC.
On the other extreme, Texas and Mexico were so dry they’d probably be completely unlivable if not for massive, underground greenhouses they’d built outside most major cities. Those areas were still subject to periodic flooding, too, and Galveston had been completely wiped from the map a few weeks earlier when their containment field failed.
Fresh water was becoming a serious issue globally, even apart from threats of contamination. Rich coastal cities had high-tech desalinization plants, but areas inland and in poorer countries and continents weren’t as well set up.
Revik told me there’d already been rumors of invading forces by Nepalese, Indian, Pakistani, Mongolian and Bhutanese troops making land grabs to secure access to water from the Chinese. The whole line of the Himalayas, on both sides, was now essentially a militarized zone over water rights, with tensions ratcheting higher by the day.
Now that increasingly large numbers of people were being forced out of cities and away from the coasts to escape the spread of the disease, the water problems would only get worse.
We figured the growing scarcity of resources must form part, if not the primary reason, Shadow and his people were killing off a large chunk of the human population in the first place. It was certainly starting to look as if the quarantine cities functioned mainly as safe zones for his favored few to wait out the plague.
We hadn’t gotten much news out of the city itself, not since the feed blackout spread across most of the Americas. We kept our Barrier communications to a minimum and cryptic, but as far as we knew, the remnants of the Adhipan and Seven were still in Manhattan, hunkered down in the House on the Hill, a five-star hotel on Central Park
South.
We did receive a few scattered, rumor-like reports from a network that maintained emergency broadcasting, claiming that riots continued to break out inside the city as people fought over water rations, food, gasoline, electricity, batteries, feed bandwidth, housing and whatever else. Most of those disturbances were put down with brute force by the NYPD and private security firms hired to assist in resource allocation.
From what we’d also heard, that force wasn’t being applied with a lot of finesse. To call it martial law even struck me as euphemistic; we’d intercepted more than one message warning New Yorkers what would happen to anyone caught attempting to steal rations.
The military representative used language like “sentences executed without delay,” “requirements to warn waived,” and “single-point decision-making,” so we figured most were simply being shot on the spot––or deported, if they were lucky.
Para-military groups working for those same private contractors guarded food and water reserves and doled out rations once a day, generally in the morning, starting around dawn. Those reserve dumps reportedly existed in only three locations around the city, so people waited for hours, often in lines that were blocks long, just to get basic necessities to stay alive.
In addition to resources located inside the city, the United States military had a lockdown over the power grid historically used by Manhattan, as well. Mysteriously, similar resources didn’t appear to be available for power stations in any other part of the state, or in most parts of the country. They’d still had outages, of course, primarily from cables being dug up and cut, although they had flyers patrolling most of the cable route in the past week, so that appeared to be a lessening issue, as well.
We’d already heard stories about people hoarding food.
We’d also heard reports of “territories” being carved out, some protected by yet more private security and OBEs, but a few probably being run by organized crime syndicates. I imagined a few new faces were in the mix––individuals whose more psychopathic tendencies were aroused by the Lord of the Flies-type environment erupting in the city.
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