War_Apocalypse

by JC Andrijeski

  Hesitating, Ditrini glanced at Revik. After the barest pause, he pulled his sidearm out of its holster, aiming it at Revik’s head.

  “You can see me, can you not?” he said. “Are you understanding me now, my friend? Call your girlfriend and tell her. You’d better call your friends in the Adhipan, too. Tell your mistress that unless she wants the Bridge, the Sword, and that fucking baby her husband just told me about to die very tragically and suddenly, she will do as I say…”

  Revik felt a flush of pain mixed with relief even as something else in the seer’s words registered, bringing a cold feeling to his stomach.

  He knew, now, who the Lao Hu infiltrator was speaking to.

  Feigran. Or, more realistically, Terian. Either way, Ditrini’s on-the-ground contact was Revik’s old partner in the Rooks.

  Revik also knew now without doubt who was running this operation.

  Cass.

  It was really Cass doing this. She wasn’t simply a messenger or a message. She wasn’t simply being used by Shadow to screw with their heads, or make them hesitate, or get them to comply with Shadow’s threats. Cass was actually running things.

  Cass had replaced Revik himself as Menlim’s weapon of choice.

  Moreover, it was definitely Cass who had his wife.

  43

  NO GOODBYES

  BALIDOR STOOD AT the entrance of a sewer tunnel, staring into the dark. His mind combatted darting and conflicting thoughts that were, somewhat ironically, difficult to think past.

  They’d traveled more than a mile from the hotel basement, chasing Ditrini and his people. Balidor and Wreg’s teams had to stop three times to find ways through or around obstructions left in the tunnel, including a full-on structural collapse they’d been forced to blast their way around and through.

  They’d also been held up by live-fire situations, specifically when they’d been forced to exchange volleys with several units of infiltrators who’d clearly been left behind to slow their attempts to track their missing people.

  Wreg and a few others under the military branch had taken down the last of those infiltrators about ten minutes earlier. According to Wreg, none of them had belonged to Salinse. All appeared to have some training in the Lao Hu, but they weren’t utilizing a Lao Hu construct.

  Whoever they had been, Balidor had no doubt they belonged to Shadow now.

  He could feel Dehgoies again.

  Thanks to Wreg, Yumi, Tarsi, Chandre, and even Varlan, who joined them on the lower levels a few minutes earlier, they finally managed to hack the mobile construct being used by Ditrini and his guards. Balidor hadn’t yet gotten much in the way of intel, or even much insight into Ditrini’s thoughts, but they knew for certain he had Dehgoies, Jon and Maygar.

  They also knew exactly where they were.

  Dehgoies was surprisingly calm. Perhaps too calm.

  His mind felt stripped bare, coldly strategic, clear.

  It was good news, but it also worried Balidor, since he knew that state of mind couldn’t possibly last. He could only hope it would hold until they could get to him. Then he’d at least have the light and support of the rest of them to help stabilize him until they found Allie.

  Since the Elaerian was in a lot of physical pain, and appeared to have been beaten severely––far more severely than the other two prisoners––they’d need to have medical standing by, too. Balidor knew they couldn’t waste a single minute if they were going to get to the Bridge in time, so the priority had to be to retrieve Revik, stabilize him, and use him to track his wife.

  Now that he could feel them, Balidor was truthfully amazed he hadn’t before.

  Dehgoies’ thoughts alone were a beacon in those dark tunnels.

  While it was true he’d retained that eerie calm and wasn’t panicking, his separation pain, along with his near-constant attempts to find Allie, pulsed out of him like screams in the dark. He compulsively looked for them, as well, meaning Balidor and Wreg. His light switched between each thing seamlessly: looking for Allie, looking for his team from the hotel, attempting to use his sight and the damaged structures of his telekinesis… back to looking for Allie.

  All of it put together made him shine like a sun in the Barrier space, even through the collar and whatever drugs they’d given him.

  According to Tarsi, he was doing even more in the higher structures of his light, those inaccessible by any but Allie and other Elaerian.

  Jon and Maygar’s fear echoed in the space as well, loud when not compared to the Sword, and louder probably to Wreg than the rest of them.

  Even so, the Sword’s light easily overpowered both of theirs.

  Dehgoies clearly knew his wife had been taken.

  His calm definitely didn’t stem from that, not directly anyway.

  As for Balidor, Wreg and the rest of their team, their hesitation now came solely due to strategy. The near-constant earthquakes and the tsunami warnings had everyone on edge about pressing further underground without some kind of definite extraction plan.

  All of them worried Ditrini would just put bullets in his prisoner’s heads if they got too close, particularly Jon and Maygar.

  Wreg and Balidor agreed: Ditrini would likely start with Jon.

  “We’ve got specs on the collars they’re using,” Chandre said, glancing over from where she was sight-paired with Varlan. “Sark collars, fairly standard. They’ve got the pain controls cranked up to maximum. Lethal or near-lethal triggers.” She gave Balidor a serious look. “Varlan’s also got the cuff configuration. It’s the same for all three of them, with the exception of a choke-chain Ditrini’s got on Dehgoies. He’s pretty badly injured, too. Much worse than the other two.”

  Balidor gave her a grim nod.

  He’d known about the injuries. Chandre waited, silent, as he went over the specs of the collars and chains she’d given him via her light.

  “If the water levels rise much more, they’ll be in trouble,” Chandre added, seconds later. “I don’t think Dehgoies could swim much at all, not in his condition. Maygar’s got a few broken ribs, a fractured left ulna, and his right knee is slightly out of joint, so he wouldn’t do much better. Jon would fare the best of the group physically, but the manacles on all three of them would prevent them from using their arms.”

  Balidor nodded again, frowning.

  None of that was good.

  They had more information on the seismic activity now, too.

  Earthquakes were being reported across every feed station Arc Enterprises could tap from inside the city. They even tapped a few outside, in the contamination zone. Some reported quakes as high as 8.5, with epicenters in Manhattan, Long Island and New Jersey. One earthquake, which occurred a few miles off the coast, had been reported as a 9.3 or 9.4 on the Richter scale. There’d been a lot of damage already, especially in the boroughs, but also in Harlem, the Village, a few areas in the Upper West Side, and pretty much anywhere that still had a significant number of original brick buildings that hadn’t been brought up to code.

  The most reputable Manhattan-based feed claimed 32 confirmed dead so far, with hundreds wounded, and a few dozen trapped.

  Unfortunately, Balidor and Wreg’s team hadn't gotten a transmission from Arc in at least ten minutes, and there’d been at least two good-sized earthquakes in that time.

  Balidor was glad all the ex-Rebels with them in the sewers had worked or spent significant time in Asia, so were accustomed to earthquakes. Balidor knew how crazy they could make people, if they hadn’t been conditioned how to react. He and Wreg needed everyone focused, not panicking, especially if they ended up having to evacuate due to structural damage––which was growing increasingly likely, too.

  The team upstairs had beefed up physical security over the hotel itself, adding a multi-layer OBE over the basement levels for the first time, and enhancing and adding several more anti-breach systems. Gas had been added to every elevator, along with a second set of cameras, and the organic plating in the lobby and o
n the upper floors had all been reinforced.

  After Tarsi was forced to crash the hotel construct to rid it of Shadow’s influence, she’d put every available seer to work compensating with physical back-ups. Her quick moving on that front made Balidor grateful beyond words; not for the first time, he counted his blessings that she’d remained with them in New York after the wedding.

  She was already working on the next construct too, at least with the few people she could spare. The last time they spoke, she told Balidor she intended to include enhancements that would knock out any non-ID’d seer before they made it to the Lobby.

  Of course, the lack of a working construct currently was the main reason they weren’t getting timely reports from the hotel. They’d been worried about their hardware being hacked, so Vikram was overseeing all individual communications personally, checking every line prior to anything being sent, even though the transmissions themselves were coded.

  Balidor had yet another group of seers tracking the helicopter that left the roof, but he hadn’t heard from them, either, despite the regularity of their reports up until the last quake. Since Garensche was with that group, Balidor trusted those transmissions, as well.

  “Do we have anyone up top yet?” Balidor asked, turning to Wreg. “On the street, I mean. Above the sewers where they are.”

  The muscular seer nodded, without clicking out of the Barrier.

  “Two blocks,” he grunted. “Directly over Ditrini. They’ve encountered some traffic upstairs. Hondo is attempting to determine now if it’s affiliated with Ditrini or any other arm of their extraction team. In any case, they’re well-armed, official, and out in force. SCARB, NYPD. Possibly Home-Sec and private security, as well, but it’s being coordinated through SCARB, so it’s not about the earthquakes… or the breach in the containment fields.”

  Balidor frowned. “Can we put Chan and Talei in touch with them?”

  Wreg nodded, giving Balidor a dense look that told the Adhipan leader more than his words. Wreg didn’t like handing something that important to Talei, since he didn’t know her.

  Balidor agreed with him, but didn’t see that they had much choice.

  “What do you want to do, brother?” Balidor asked him, gentler.

  Wreg’s expression relaxed. “Would you let me take a few and head up? If they’re human, I’ll push them into helping. If not, then I can’t do any worse than I am down here.”

  Balidor thought about his words, nodded.

  “Agreed.” Hesitating, he added, “Remember, it’s not just Jon. Don’t let them kill Nenz, brother. However clear his thinking process feels right now, you know he’s probably half-crazed, and the hyper-control is there to compensate. It wouldn’t take much for him to tip over that line… or to act on it. He’s liable to take any number of risks.”

  Wreg nodded, his eyes holding a harder understanding. “Yes. I know.”

  The silence between them lasted another beat.

  Then Wreg clapped Balidor on the back, his touch carrying more warmth than perhaps Balidor had ever felt from him, right before the muscular seer switched on his link to pull Jorag and Neela to join him as he went aboveground.

  Balidor tried really hard not to feel that last pulse as a goodbye.

  44

  FOURTH OF THE FOUR

  I SAT IN the padded jump-seat of a military-grade Sikorsky helicopter, feeling a debilitating sense of déjà vu, if only for the pain that wanted to blot out my mind.

  I fought not to think about Revik––about where he was, or if they already had him.

  I had to believe they didn’t.

  I had to believe he was still free, that he would come for me. I had to believe he would find me like he had when Terian took me out of that cabin in the Himalayas.

  I had to believe he would come for both of us.

  At the thought, I touched my belly unconsciously. The pain worsened when I noticed, more so after I removed my hand.

  Terian didn’t sit across from me this time. Shadow didn’t, either. Raven wasn’t in the front seat smirking back at me, asking about my sex life while she looked me over like I was a farm animal. I wasn’t naked, or even all that banged up. I was even more or less coherent, despite my seer’s sight being basically worthless, even apart from the heavy sight-restraint collar weighting down my neck.

  I couldn’t see the pilot at all from where I sat.

  Instead, my best friend since pre-school sat across from me.

  Compared to how she looked the last time I saw her in the flesh, she looked even more like she had back when we were friends in San Francisco––only I didn’t recognize her.

  Her brown eyes watched me. A smile tugged at her full, red-lipsticked lips.

  Even the smile looked foreign, painfully so in that shockingly familiar face.

  Someone had fixed the scar Terian cut into her face. The skin of Cass’s cheek and mouth appeared flawless now, inhumanly perfect under a smooth layer of perfectly blended and contoured make-up. Sharper colors highlighted her eyes and lips––pale and dark reds to match her lipstick and hair. Faint sparkles glowed from the skin of her shoulders and arms.

  She looked made of bone china, decorated with fine lines of paint.

  She also looked stunningly beautiful, if in a way I didn’t fully recognize.

  Cass’s black hair hung in a long, inverted sheet down her back and forward over her shoulders. Shocking, blood-red dye colored the lower third, blending upwards into the midnight black of her natural hair color so perfectly it looked like scarlet flames licking up a silk mortuary curtain. The colors were so perfect, the cut and style so artistically done around her jawline and face, it looked like she’d paid hundreds of dollars to get it done in a high-end salon.

  With the hair and her perfectly made up face, she wore matching red leather pants and a cream, off-the-shoulder blouse. Both looked a lot more expensive than her dye job, and were accessorized with diamond earrings and high-heeled black boots that probably cost more than both of us made, combined, in a whole year of working that crappy diner on Geary Street.

  Her eyes were what kept drawing me back, though.

  On the surface, they were the same light brown I remembered, almost a coffee color, shining with a similar inner sharpness and light.

  Below that surface, something in them had changed.

  I could feel the difference––even before I saw that flicker of something else from behind her natural coffee brown. A pale gold glow, Cass’s irises edged into the lighter green of Revik’s whenever his aleimi got activated by fear or lust, anger or intention.

  Like my eyes did, too, I suppose, although mine were even lighter than Revik’s.

  Regardless of differences in shade and tint, the meaning of that glow wasn’t lost on me.

  I’d understood it from the very first instant I’d seen it.

  I’d just opened the steel-plated door to the roof of Tower One for the hotel. I’d just walked out onto that roof, and raised a hand to shield my eyes while I looked up at the ominous gray-black clouds hovering over the city. Even then, my mind had been split, with more than half of it focused on Revik and Maygar downstairs in that interrogation cell, on the new life I carried, on the fact that I didn’t know the first thing about seer pregnancy or even how long before I would give birth. I’d been cataloguing the growing list of questions I wanted to ask Revik, pretty much the instant I got him alone.

  Even though I’d only known about the pregnancy for less than an hour, I had zero doubt it was true. It explained everything. More than that, it just felt true.

  I even found I knew her.

  I knew it was a her.

  I knew exactly when she’d been conceived. I didn’t have to think about that at all. It was the same day Vash died, the morning we woke up from that long nap, after Revik got injured helping me rob a bank in midtown Manhattan.

  The thought made my heart tighten, even then.

  One life ends, another begins.

  My
mind had been full with this, with the knowledge of her, of the presence I realized I already knew in whispers and soft breaths. I’d barely seen the sky over me. I’d barely been aware of where I was, or that Jon was with me.

  Then I saw her: Cass.

  Maybe if I hadn’t been so lost in the light of my own pregnancy, I would have picked up on the warning signs Jon was giving off. Maybe if I wasn’t so terrified of being a mother––or so unbelievably happy, or so stunned––I would have recovered faster once it grew crystal clear something was wrong. Maybe if I hadn’t assumed this was something to do with Jon, not with me, I would have paid more attention before it was too late.

  Or maybe all of that is just an excuse.

  Maybe it never occurred to me to question Jon in the relevant ways because it never would occur to me to question Jon, or anything Jon asked me to do, no matter how strange. The fact that his request made absolutely no sense, especially in retrospect, barely made me blink at the time.

  I mean, it puzzled me, sure.

  It crossed my mind that this might be about Revik’s surprise party, and the ludicrous things I had planned. Jon had said it was about Cass when he pulled me out of that security station, so I wondered if Jon learned something, something he didn’t want to share with the others. I wondered if it had something to do with his upcoming marriage to Wreg.

  I never thought Jon would let anything bad happen to me, much less cause it himself.

  I worried something bad had happened to someone else.

  I worried they’d kept me out of the loop… again… on something that would upset me personally. I worried I was about to have a bomb dropped in my lap. I worried it had something to do with the pregnancy. I worried it really was about Cass, that they’d avoided telling me something awful, something Shadow had done to my best friend, or to someone else I loved. I worried someone in my family had died, or was missing.