War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  I felt his light react to my words with another surge of heat. He’d heard me wavering.

  Nothing changed in his expression, or his voice.

  “They don’t expect us to go back in there.”

  I snorted. “I know that. But maybe we should surprise them. Act professional for a change.”

  “I think that ship has sailed, wife. For today, at least. Balidor’s good at shielding, but he’s not that good. At least some of them felt what we were doing in here.”

  I bit my lip, watching him study my face, that heat now visible in his eyes.

  I knew he was right. I also knew what we both wanted to do right then. His mention of the strap hadn’t exactly discouraged me. Truthfully, it turned me on. Enough that I was having trouble caring about blowing off the third strategy meeting in under a week.

  “Is this your way of keeping me off the front lines?” I said, my voice a touch harder. “Are you managing me right now, using this as a way to keep me out of things with the others?”

  He grunted, clicking in half-annoyance. “You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you, wife?”

  “So this is our sex life now? Us working each other?”

  For the first time, a faint smile crept to his lips.

  Taking his weight off the narrow table, he stalked over to me, moving in that graceful, cat-like way of his. Once he was near enough, he grabbed me roughly around the waist, yanking the length of my body up against his. He was already hard.

  Lowering his face, he murmured into my ear.

  “Work, work, work…” he said softly.

  I laughed, then began half-heartedly trying to writhe out of his grasp. He only strengthened his grip, curling his arms around me tighter. His hand wrapped around my ass, even as he began steering me with him towards the closet door.

  Heat bloomed in my chest before we’d made it even a few steps.

  I already knew we weren’t going to make it back to that meeting.

  “You’re an asshole,” I told him, even as my voice caught. “You call me manipulative. You could write the book on manipulative, passive-aggressive, sex crap…”

  “Keep fucking with me, wife,” he murmured, kissing my face as he tightened his hands on me. “Keep going there, please. I’ve got a whole list of reasons to use that strap already… but the more you give me, the happier you’ll make me right now.”

  Pain bloomed in my chest, even as I clutched at his arms.

  I opened my mouth to speak again, and he smiled down at me.

  When I hesitated, he gripped my ass tighter, pressing into me as he reached for the door handle behind me.

  “Say it,” he urged. “Go on. Say it, wife… add to the list. I’ll keep you up there for a week at this rate. You should already expect to have to stand at the next few meetings.”

  I laughed, even as another shard of pain left his light, tightening my chest, making it hard to breathe. I was nervous and turned on and faintly amused and my light hurt.

  I wanted to be angry at him. I really wanted to be.

  Truthfully, though, even with how damned maddening he’d gotten––not to mention his stubborn, annoying refusal to tell me jack shit about anything––I couldn’t really find it in myself to get mad at him, either.

  When it came down to it, I wasn’t any better than he was.

  35

  FATHER

  REVIK ASKED ME to come with him.

  It surprised me that he’d wanted me along, truthfully, but it made a certain kind of sense, too. Revik hadn’t talked to Maygar at all since we’d gotten back from Argentina. The last time they’d spoken face to face had been in Cairo, before Revik knew he was Syrimne.

  More to the point, this would mark the first time Revik talked to his son since either of them knew Maygar was his son.

  He’d put the conversation off too long already, he said.

  He’d wanted to do it, he said––he just hadn’t wanted to do it at the wrong time.

  He wanted Maygar to feel comfortable here first, to recover a little from his ordeal with Shadow. He wanted him to get to know some of the seers on the team again, spend some time with friends from Seertown and the Seven’s old guard. He also wanted Balidor and the other infiltrators to get the interrogation and debriefing-type work with Maygar out of the way, so his emotional and personal issues didn’t cloud the more important work of making sure Shadow hadn’t done anything to Maygar’s light that posed a risk to all of us.

  Even now, he didn’t want to do it alone.

  He didn’t need or want me to go into the actual cell with him, he said, but asked me to wait outside during the interview.

  And, well… just to be there, I guess.

  Truthfully, I was touched. Not only that he asked me, but that he was so nervous to talk to Maygar in the first place. I hadn’t been sure how he’d react to Maygar, now that he knew he was his son. It could have gone any number of ways, given everything that had gone on between the two of them in the past, and Revik’s less than stellar relationship with Maygar’s mother.

  He seemed willing to try and start over, though, even after everything.

  Despite my own conflicted views about Maygar and what he’d done to me, I couldn’t help but be touched that Revik was willing to try.

  I wanted to talk to Maygar, too, of course––for a lot of reasons––but whatever Maygar and I had to say to one another could definitely wait.

  So I stayed in the security station while Revik went inside.

  Maygar hadn’t been fully cleared by security yet, so they still had him in holding. It was a pretty low-security version, though, even compared to Varlan or Surli––much less Ditrini or any of the high-risk prisoners we currently held at the hotel.

  I knew Revik felt uncomfortable with Maygar being in a cell, even so; I knew he also was relieved he was locked up, mostly because of me. He’d left all of those decisions with Balidor and Wreg, probably because he knew he couldn’t be wholly objective, in either direction.

  I knew Revik felt responsible for Maygar having been picked up by Shadow in the first place. Despite his leaving security up to Wreg and ‘Dori, I also knew he’d be scanning Maygar minutely in there, looking for any lingering resonances with Shadow or the Dreng. Revik still was one of the best infiltrators we had––if not the best––at recognizing those flavors of light, especially in their more subtle manifestations.

  Since I was outside the cell’s construct, my impressions through the one-way window were a lot more gut-level.

  It was strange to see him at all, to be honest.

  I’d seen him most recently in Washington D.C., but my few glimpses of him there were a blur, given the condition I’d been in. My last real memory of him was in that dirt ring in Seertown, and the last time I’d really talked to him had been a few weeks before that.

  All of that felt so long ago now.

  So much had happened to me since that sparring match at Vash’s compound, I didn’t even feel like the same person. I couldn’t help noticing more and more changes in him, too, including a somber, quiet look in his eyes I barely recognized as belonging to him at all.

  Objectively, he didn’t look very good.

  He’d lost weight. Despite the intervening weeks, he still looked tired, beat up, on edge. His face was narrower, exaggerating the slant of his cheekbones. His mouth wore a scar, reminding me faintly of the scar on Wreg’s lips. His neck had some kind of burn mark on it that showed above the collar of the T-shirt he wore. His hair was shorter than I’d ever seen it.

  Prior to Argentina, I hadn’t seen him in months––over a year, really––so the differences shocked me. Even in Argentina, I’d been a little too preoccupied to take in his appearance all that carefully, although I’d been startled by how he looked there, too.

  Like in Argentina, he still wore a kind of defeated air. That fire in his eyes I remembered had dimmed somewhat, making him look older.

  I knew from the med techs that, unlike any of the oth
ers, Maygar had been tortured extensively by Shadow’s people. The infiltration team, including Revik, all theorized Shadow had been trying to learn about Maygar’s light, given who his father was. Torture was a crude but often effective way of testing a seer’s aleimic reflexes, and also highlighting dormant structures in their aleimi.

  Obviously, Shadow would want to know if Maygar was telekinetic.

  Part of Menlim’s treatment of Revik as a child had been an attempt to terrorize him into losing control over his light. The idea was to make him panic, and thus flex his aleimi to try and defend himself. Torture was unlikely to ever be sufficient to activate those structures, at least not without years of training woven into the abuse, as had been done with Revik, but it potentially could have given Shadow a pretty clear map of Maygar’s potential.

  None of this exactly eased our minds, vis a vis the whole “Shadow is Menlim” theory, but Revik was the first to point out that Salinse would have known this as well, and likely would have employed the exact same strategy.

  When I voiced that at least Maygar wasn’t telekinetic, given that Shadow would never have let him go if he was, Revik only shook his head.

  He confessed he’d actually been thinking the opposite––that Shadow’s strongest motivation to let Maygar go would be so Revik could train him. According to Revik, just being around the two of us would make it about a hundred times easier for Maygar to access that ability in himself.

  As Revik taught me years ago––light affected light.

  Light taught and developed other light, just from contact alone. Similar, resonant, or connected light did this exponentially more and faster. Similar structures affected similar structures; they awakened, stimulated, learned from one another, interconnected.

  It was the nature of being a seer.

  Which again lent credence to the theory that Shadow knew exactly where we were. It also suggested he believed he could overcome us when and if he wanted.

  And yeah, none of that was reassuring.

  Revik and Balidor both assumed Shadow and Salinse had given up on any serious effort to convert Revik back into the fold. With his bond to me, they’d have to convert both of us, something they appeared to have written off, if their treatment of me in Argentina was any indication. Now that Revik’s light was mostly repaired from what Menlim had done to him as a child, he was a lot less vulnerable to them, as well.

  Of course, none of that meant Revik and I were no longer targets; if anything, we figured Shadow would just try to kill us now. Possibly the only reason he hadn’t done so already was so we could help Maygar and/or Cass access their telekinesis.

  Sighing, I pushed that from my mind too, propping my feet on the console in the security booth as I watched Maygar.

  According to the logs, he’d spent a lot of time alone these past few weeks.

  Med techs checked on him regularly. He’d been interrogated extensively by various members of the infiltration and military teams in Albany, but he hadn’t seen a lot of people apart from that. According to the logs, the only non-security person who’d been down to see him since we’d arrived back at the hotel was Chandre.

  So much for his old friends from Seertown, I guess.

  Even now, I was the only one in the security booth. One other guard watched the construct from that part of the basement, but they mostly left Maygar alone. The session would be taped, including the aleimic signatures, but that was just protocol. I wouldn’t be tracking any of it; nor would I be feeding Revik prompts based on what I saw.

  I was really just there in case Revik needed me.

  I knew he was afraid the meeting might go badly. He was hoping it wouldn’t go badly, but he knew the chances it would were pretty high, given their past interactions.

  Feeling that hope in his light touched me, even though I could tell Revik was worried I might be offended by it, given what Maygar had done to me. I assured Revik it didn’t offend me, that Maygar and I would work our issues out on our own, some other day.

  I wasn’t positive Revik believed me.

  I also knew he still had his own feelings about what Maygar had done.

  As Revik entered the cell, I didn’t know if he had any kind of plan, or just intended to wing it. I couldn’t tell much of anything by looking at him, other than the fact that he was nervous. His expression went infiltrator blank as soon as he opened the door.

  Reading Maygar’s physical cues was easier.

  I saw him jump when he saw Revik standing there. His faced paled to the color of chalk, visible even under the fading bruises on his skin.

  His light jumped visibly on the monitor, too.

  Chandre told me Maygar had a rough time of things after he left Seertown, even before Shadow picked him up. In an odd coincidence, he lived in New York for most of that time, passing as human in a run-down apartment building on the Lower East Side and working the odd infiltration job, mostly with ex-Rooks. He’d been on the run from Revik’s people as well as his mother’s, so he’d spent most of his time hiding and playing human.

  Chandre seemed to feel sorry for him.

  Looking at him now, I couldn’t help but feel the same, despite my lingering anger at him for what he’d done to me.

  The few times I’d scanned Maygar in Albany, I’d felt a lot of loneliness in his light. He wore it heavily, like a shroud of deprivation verging on separation sickness––and not the kind you got just from going a little too long without sex. Rather, it was the kind that had been there for a while, long enough to sink into the overall flavor of his aleimi. Revik had that same flavor of loneliness in his own light, so I knew the difference.

  Watching Maygar now, it occurred to me again that he probably knew about Raven and Revik’s affair before all this, even if he hadn’t fully admitted it to himself. Maybe he even blamed Revik for leaving his mother with the Rooks.

  When I asked Revik why he’d left Raven behind, he only laughed.

  He said Raven would’ve been first in line to tell Galaith, had she known he planned to leave––but only after she tranked him, collared him, handcuffed him, and locked him in a closet to keep him from escaping. According to him, she was only with him in the first place due to his high status in the Pyramid. If Galaith hadn’t been happily and very monogamously married, Raven most certainly would’ve tried to seduce him, instead.

  I still hadn’t heard that whole story, meaning about Revik’s time with the Rooks or what finally got him to leave. I’d wondered, sure, but I’d never asked him outright. I knew something pretty serious must have happened at the end, but no one seemed to know the details except Revik himself, and so far, he hadn’t volunteered them.

  Maygar said Revik only asked for refuge out of sheer desperation.

  Then again, according to Maygar, Revik hadn’t turned himself in so much as he’d been caught. The Guard picked him up outside Vash’s compound, in direct violation of the treaty between the Rooks and the Seven. Revik had been beaten up, exhausted, and going through some kind of drug withdrawal. He also claimed his own people were trying to kill him.

  His initial deprogramming from the Pyramid by all accounts had been violent, extremely public, and dramatic enough that Revik remained a social pariah for decades after the event. He was still pretty much a pariah when we met, some thirty years later.

  Revik’s ex-Rook status was Maygar’s excuse for hating him, too.

  Even back when I first met Maygar, though, I suspected it was more personal than that.

  Now I watched Revik approach the low cot, his face unreadable.

  Maygar’s hands and ankles had been cuffed loosely to the wall and one another, but they’d left him a decent range of movement, maybe half of the cell around the cot, and well within range of the chair, table and the organic toilet and shower that lived against one wall.

  Revik picked up the chair and carried it to within a yard or two of the cot.

  I watched him set it down, then sit backwards on it, leaning his long arms on the chair
’s back. I saw the nerves on him, from the up and down nervous tic of his foot, to the way he gripped the chair’s back.

  He cleared his throat, looking Maygar directly in the face.

  Maygar, for his part, continued to stare at Revik warily, his hands folded loosely in his lap.

  He looked like he couldn’t believe Revik was there at all. He looked tired, too, and something about the pure look of defeat that rose to his chocolate-colored eyes as Revik sat across from him brought my heart to my throat.

  I’d never seen him look so sad, or so utterly broken.

  Something in that look was so vulnerable, it made my heart open to him, almost in spite of myself. I saw Revik reacting to him in a similar way as he looked over Maygar’s face, body and probably his light. I knew on Revik, the grief likely mixed with guilt, as well as an almost crippling sense of responsibility.

  Given that Maygar wore a collar––albeit one of those simple, one-way-blocking types––I doubt Maygar felt any of that from Revik himself. Unless he was a lot better at reading Revik’s physical cues than I suspected, he likely had no idea what Revik was thinking as he sat there. I remembered trying to read that expression myself when I first met Revik, and how impenetrable it seemed to me back then.

  Now, I could see all the subtle flickers, winces and twitches––well enough, it was almost like reading his light.

  After the two of them had been looking at one another for a few seconds, Revik cleared his throat, making a reassuring gesture with one hand.

  “Are you comfortable here?” he said, polite. “Can I get you anything?”

  Maygar’s expression grew even more wary.

  He glanced over Revik’s shoulder, then his own, as if wondering if Revik was actually speaking to him, or if he’d missed something as he walked in.

  “Are you hungry?” Revik continued. “Would you like anything to read? A portable monitor, maybe?”

  Again, Maygar only stared at him.

  Then he moved his arm, revealing a monitor partially obscured by a blanket on the cot. Turning his head to look at it, Revik paused, reading. He let a thin smile touch his lips as soon as he understood whatever was displayed on the screen.