War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  I hadn’t attended Balidor’s debriefings of Chandre in Albany.

  I knew it had to have been rough. I knew I needed to look at the intel from those debriefings; I just hadn’t managed to make myself do it yet.

  I also knew it must have hurt Chandre on a personal level. She loved Cass.

  That said, Chandre was about as no-nonsense as a person could get. She might not have a lot of patience for emotional displays, if I tried to talk to her about it.

  Still staring at her, I realized I’d missed her––Chandre. I’d missed her more than I’d wanted to admit to myself, and in more ways than one.

  I’d missed her as a friend. I’d also missed her voice and mind on our team.

  Also, there were few people more badass than Chandre in a fight.

  I hadn’t shielded my thoughts very well for any of that, and I saw Chandre smile, right before her reddish eyes slanted towards mine.

  “You’re quite the flatterer today, aren’t you, Bridge?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Flatterer. That’s me. You heard the part where I wanted to punch you, right? I’m not totally over that part yet.”

  “I heard.” Chan’s smile faded. “Thank you.”

  Flushing a little, I made a dismissive gesture with one hand.

  “I was thinking I was an asshole mostly,” I said. “You heard that part, right? I’m not sure ‘thank you’ is the appropriate response, considering how I treated all of you.” Looking at her, I made my voice open, apologetic. “I am sorry, Chan. You didn’t deserve that. Neither did Cass. I wasn’t very kind to most of my friends back then.”

  Chandre dismissed this with a wave. “You were not yourself.”

  Her voice was definitive, final, as if that were the end of the topic.

  Her dark red eyes met mine, her light open as she studied my face.

  “Allie, I am sincerely sorry I did not fight Dehgoies on his plan to play prostitute for those worms.” Frowning, she shrugged. “If it helps, none of us were thinking very rationally at that time, either… your husband least of all. I should have realized that working inside the same construct with him would bend us all to his will, given the intensity of his feelings.”

  She exhaled, clicking as she shook her braids.

  “…Jon noticed this. He tried to warn me. He said I was being unduly influenced by Dehgoies’s trauma. He said the Rebels were corrupting his light, via that trauma. He said I was speaking your husband’s words, not my own. I did not listen to him.”

  Blinking a little, more in surprise that time, I just nodded.

  “Trust Jon,” I muttered.

  “Yes,” she said, glancing at me more sharply. “I have been meaning to ask about this. Does Shadow know what he is? Jon?”

  I pressed my lips together, then exhaled. “I honestly don’t know. I was hoping you and some of the others might be able to tell us that.”

  Chandre nodded, but her sculpted lips flattened. “Our host in Argentina was not particularly forthcoming. I told Adhipan what I could. I let them read my light extensively. I fear it was not enough to give them much new information.”

  “Did you ever see him, Chan?” I said, turning. “Shadow? Or an image of someone or something who claimed to be Shadow?”

  Chandre’s eyes grew more opaque. “Only what you saw, when you came to that hall.”

  “Menlim.”

  She nodded, once. “Yes. Menlim.”

  Silence fell between us.

  Something about it felt less awkward that time. I realized again how happy I was to have her back, despite everything going on around us.

  “Thank you,” Chandre said, smiling wanly. “…Again.” She gestured with a hand, indicating the seers hunched over consoles on the bridge. “I admit, it feels very good to be missed here. It has been… isolating. Working these last few assignments.”

  In the silence that followed, she cleared her throat, gazing back out the view port and into the greenish-blue water.

  After the faintest pause where I only looked at her, I took her hand, pulling it off the railing to wind my fingers into her long brown ones.

  She let me, clasping my fingers strongly in her own.

  When I saw that her eyes were bright, I looked away from her face. I let my gaze follow hers, staring into the gray-green depths of the New York Harbor. I watched muddy-looking fish swim by the window, following them with my eyes.

  I don’t know how long we stood there together, not talking, but something about it relaxed me in a way I hadn’t been, not since we’d first climbed through that hatch.

  It was also strangely companionable.

  After a few minutes more, it felt like no time had passed between us at all.

  12

  POT, KETTLE

  MY MIND NEVER drifted far from Cass, even standing there with Chandre. I watched the submarine make its way through those narrow channels between OBE fields, and I thought about my oldest friend in another part of my light.

  That seemed to be true most of the time now, no matter where I was, what I was doing, or with whom.

  Of course, I could tell myself I had to think about her.

  I could tell myself Cass wasn’t just important to me, Jon, Chandre and Revik anymore. As War, the fourth of the Four, she’d become a strategic and military priority.

  I could tell myself those things, sure.

  I knew it was just another damned excuse, though.

  The grief and guilt that came over me when I thought about Cass was almost debilitating at times. I thought about things I could have done differently, ways I could have intervened before things got to this point. I thought about how I’d essentially left her on her own in this world, while I obsessed on Revik. Because of me, Cass lost her old life, her old way of seeing the world, all her friends. Because of me, Terian nearly killed her.

  Then, before she could recover from any of it, I abandoned her.

  When I thought about her with Shadow, that guilt twisted into a kind of desperate powerlessness. The feeling made me sick, to the point where I couldn’t eat.

  It was more than just being afraid of what Shadow and Feigran might be doing to her right now. It was more than what I was afraid she might become. It wasn’t even just the guilt and sadness around what happened to her before, when she, Jon and Revik had been Terian’s captives in Russia. It was Cass herself.

  It was this fucking life she’d led.

  It was the life she’d had before all this, even in San Francisco.

  It was her damned father and brothers, her mother who lived in denial, the jerks who went after her in school and later at bars and at her work. It was the shitty luck she’d had, pretty much from the second she’d been born. It was how she always managed to make the wrong choice, in the midst of whatever life or God or karma threw her way. It was knowing I’d never been able to make any of that better for her, no matter how hard I tried.

  It was Cass, once again, getting the short end of the stick, and for something that wasn’t her fault. It was me, once more missing something traumatic going on with her, until it was entirely too late.

  The thought made me feel sick.

  It made me tired, frustrated.

  It also made me really fucking angry. It filled me with dread.

  It scared the hell out of me.

  I tried to feel her now, to find her with my light. I got nothing. A kind of blank darkness lived around where Cass should have been. Glimmers of grief, glimmers of that smirk she’d aimed at Jon in Argentina, the amused way she’d watched him and Revik while Feigran groped her. The way she’d stared, that bored disinterest on her face while Shadow came close to killing my husband––a man I knew she loved.

  I was terrified, honestly.

  I was terrified that this time, above all others, I’d finally, royally screwed up with her. This time felt unlike any of the times that came before––her month-long drug binges with Jack, her running away from home when we were kids, her getting arrested in Los Angeles, h
er hanging out with those Mythers in college, punching her dad when he went after her in one of his drunken rages, or even her hanging around those seer terrorists in Seertown.

  This time felt different. This time, it felt like there was no coming back.

  This time, I’d let her get too far away.

  I ordered Balidor, along with a squad of his seers, to follow the helicopter carrying Feigran and Cass away from the shores of Patagonia. ‘Dori chased Cass and Feigran as far as Ushuaia, but they’d already been gone by the time he found the landing strip they’d used.

  Feigran logged no flight plan. He also wiped the memory of every human working air traffic control. We had no idea of even their short-term destination, much less wherever they’d been going after that.

  By then, humans were dying all around us––in Ushuaia, too. We couldn’t chase them any further, not with so many of our own people at risk in New York.

  We had to get back. We had to secure the people we still had, first.

  I knew all that. In the end, I was the one to make the call, even with Jon and Balidor halfway protesting. Calling off that search, even knowing it was temporary, was the hardest order I’d ever had to give. No matter how I rationalized it to myself, it also felt like a betrayal.

  I knew Revik would want to go after them, even before he voiced it aloud.

  He would’ve wanted to go after Cass regardless, but I knew that impulse likely intensified once he found out she was one of the Four. Being one of the Four made Cass family in a whole different way, in Revik’s eyes.

  I still didn’t know what that meant exactly, to be one of the Four. I definitely didn’t understand it the way Revik did––or feel it on as personal of a level.

  Now, I needed to understand, though.

  I needed to know what Cass being War really meant. For the first time, I wanted to learn everything I could about the Four, and who we were supposed to be.

  From what Vash had told me, the person and the role weren’t exactly the same thing.

  In fact, according to Vash, they could be diametrically opposed––something I’d witnessed in Revik more than once, and even in myself. If War followed the same pattern, the Cass I knew in San Francisco might not be the only driving force in her mind anymore. The being, War, could now ride her like a bad suit.

  At times, it might even eclipse my friend, Cass, entirely.

  Whether Cass was still technically a human being or not, I also had no idea.

  Galaith was born human, but he’d shown up on the intermediary list as a “crossover.” We were pretty sure War had been on the list of intermediaries, but without knowing any of the stats on Cass’s blacked-out details, we had no idea if she was a crossover like Jon, or just a regular human being who happened to house the soul of an intermediary.

  And that was just the intellectual crap.

  None of it came close to helping me think about my best friend since pre-school, Cass, or what any of this meant for her. The fact that she’d willingly left with Feigran meant all bets were off, in terms of how the old Cass would be viewing this. I had to contemplate different scenarios now, whether the others wanted to go there yet, or not.

  First among those, I had to contemplate whether she was loyal to Shadow now, and what that even meant. I had to consider whether she might be loyal in the way Revik was once loyal, and how far she might go, if that were the case.

  I also had to consider whether she might be telekinetic.

  The fact that Shadow gave up Maygar and Stanley so easily, despite their intermediary status, told me there was a good chance she was––or something worse.

  Moreover, I had to contemplate these things on my own, at least for now. I was pretty sure no one else on our team was thinking along those lines yet, not even Balidor, and I wasn’t ready to share my own thought processes yet.

  I knew Cass. The being, “War,” wouldn’t wipe all of that Cass away.

  Like Revik, Cass had always been extreme in her beliefs, right or wrong. She also couldn’t really be reasoned with, not once she made up her mind about something. Yet, I’d listened to her carefully in that house in the Andes Mountains, and truthfully, I hadn’t heard a lot of ideology there. That whole scene at Shadow’s felt more like a big fuck you than any kind of ideological shift––fuck you to me, to Jon, to Revik, maybe. Maybe even to Chandre.

  What I didn’t understand was––why?

  Why had she turned against us so completely? What had Shadow offered her? Had he simply brainwashed her into thinking we were the enemy? That we didn’t give a shit about her, or that we’d abandoned her out of indifference or even spite?

  Watching Cass let Feigran paw at her at Shadow’s house nearly made Jon and Revik sick. Given what they’d likely witnessed Terian doing to her when they’d all been imprisoned, I couldn’t blame them.

  I took that whole thing differently, though.

  To me, Cass hanging on Feigran felt calculated to elicit the exact reaction it got. It was Cass 101, truthfully, although she’d never aimed that kind of b.s. at me. She’d never aimed it at Jon either, as far as I knew––much less Revik.

  I’d never seen her aim it at anyone who loved her, not until that day.

  But had I seen that side of Cass before? Sure, I had.

  She’d even used it in my defense, screwing with Jaden or one of the girls in school she collectively referred to as “the cunts,” or “the sad little whisperers.” She’d used it against Tina after Jaden and her hooked up. Shadow’s sick dinner party could have been me and Cass at a bar back in San Francisco, only in this version, all of Cass’s friends and family somehow got miscast as “the cunts.”

  Jon held onto the belief that she’d been brainwashed. He thought she’d been confused by the same hall of mirrors construct that nearly got him and Wreg.

  The theory wasn’t completely out of left field.

  I suspected most of them believed that, to be truthful.

  Chandre told Balidor that Shadow’s construct had been messing with all of them since they arrived at the seaside château––Maygar and Cass maybe more than the rest. Jon reasoned that, since Cass was there without protection for weeks on end, she must’ve been overwhelmed. He thought if we could just get her away from Shadow, detach her from that toxic construct and what it was doing to her light, she’d go back to being Cass again.

  Revik didn't say much, but I got the feeling he doubted it would be that simple.

  So did I.

  Truthfully, I strongly suspected Cass herself was driving this in some way. When I fought to think about what I’d seen and heard and felt, objectively, that felt more true.

  Menlim must have offered her something––something Cass wanted.

  Maybe something as simple as power. After everything Cass had been through, in all the years I’d known her, I couldn’t say it was impossible.

  I still wasn’t sure how to broach this topic with the others. Regardless, I knew I needed to lead the team looking for Cass.

  I was prepared for both Balidor and Revik to push back on this, given how it might expose me to Shadow, but I strongly felt I was the right person for the job. Truthfully, I wasn’t convinced Jon or even Revik could be totally objective when it came to Cass. I knew I couldn’t be objective either, but from talking to both of them, I couldn’t help thinking they’d missed a lot, in terms of Cass, and how her mind worked.

  Maybe Cass was different with them, so they never saw those other sides to her. Or maybe it was simply because they were men, so missed a lot of the ways women exercised power, or coveted it in others.

  Whatever the reason, I didn’t fully trust Balidor or Chandre to bridge that gap, either.

  Besides, I didn’t want Revik anywhere near Cass or Feigran. I didn’t want him anywhere near those constructs––much less Shadow himself.

  I knew kicking him off those projects would handicap us in some ways, especially the infiltration team. We now strongly believed Shadow was employing his own kind
of networked amplification system, similar to the Pyramid but potentially more sophisticated, so I knew the team would want Revik’s help to discern how it worked.

  Revik––especially the Revik with full access to his memories, like he was now––had once been the primary architect for Galaith’s most sophisticated constructs, not to mention the Pyramid itself. He may have borrowed heavily on the conceptual end from Menlim’s organization of the Rebels, but he was still the only person we had who’d actually built models for Barrier infrastructures that could be supported and maintained by the Dreng.

  Vash told me Revik was a kind of genius with multi- and non-dimensional design, anyway. Revik downplayed that with me, of course, but I knew him better now, so I could see it––and hear it––whenever he and Wreg began discussing Barrier models seriously.

  The thing that worried me was how Revik acquired most of that knowledge.

  The only seer who could have matched him in that area was the same one who taught it to him in the first place.

  In other words, Menlim.

  “What are you thinking about, wife?” a voice said on my other side.

  I’d been so far in my own head, I jumped.

  Glancing around, I realized Chan had left the catwalk. I hadn’t even noticed.

  To my right now stood Revik, his lean, tanned forearms exposed from rolled up sleeves as he laid his palms against the same railing where I leaned. I found myself thinking it was strange that I could get turned on by such an innocuous-seeming body part, when it belonged to him.

  “Don’t change the subject,” he murmured, pressing his side into mine.

  I felt another flush of heat in his light, but he pulled it back almost at once.

  Reaching up with a hand, he caressed the hair back from my face, then knocked into me playfully with his shoulder.

  “Really,” he said. “…what is it? You had that look on your face for most of the trip here. When it’s there, your light is locked up tighter than a security vault.”