Allie's War Season Four (10 page)

JON WATCHED AS Revik laid his body down in the coffee-brown, leather chair. They’d literally converted the ‘jump seat’––as the other infiltrators called it––from an old recliner.

Jon continued to watch Revik’s face as two other seers, Garensche and Loki, strapped him in with canvas and organic-paneled straps, beginning their work soundlessly, and only seconds after Revik situated his long form. Jon noted that the blank look remained in Revik’s colorless eyes throughout the process. He tolerate the ministrations of the others without seeming to be present for them, even though he corrected them with minor adjustments to anything containing a sensor panel...including the one that rested in the middle of his chest and another across his throat.

That last panel had a retraction belt on it, of course, in case he convulsed during the jump, or had a panic reaction and tried to free himself. The danger of choking would have made it more practical to use electrodes, like in the old-style chairs Jon had seen back in Seertown, but these new straps worked better, Balidor told him.

Jon remembered seeing the old jump chairs when they’d all still been in New York. He’d seen images of the old set-ups on one of the research feeds he’d been trolling with Wreg, learning how infiltrators actually worked.

He remembered how that particular lesson had ended, too. That had been after Revik and Allie’s wedding. He and Wreg had already been dating, although Jon hadn’t admitted it to himself yet. He told himself it was just sex, or maybe just comfort...anything that allowed him to not think about it very much, or at least not very deeply.

In any case, they’d ended up on the floor of the media room that day, too.

Most of their ‘practice’ sessions ended that way in those weeks, with Jon losing control of his light, pulling on the other man, or Wreg asking him outright for––

Cutting off the thought, Jon shoved the memory out of his mind.

He got it out, too, but not before it brought an unwelcome pulse of his own pain, separate from Revik’s for a change.

Distracting himself, trying anyway, Jon glanced around the room, which contained the same mish-mash as the rest of the house. Rich, modern upholstery and drapes covered couches, chairs and windows, giving it a goth feel, but the truly expensive version, not like what a lot of his friends used to cultivate with their second-hand finds from the street or the odd sidewalk sale of thrift store Victoriana.

Heavy, blood-red, velvet curtains blocked most of the daylight through the reinforced storm-windows, which, despite the cloud cover, could still reflect significant glare from the hidden sun. Wallpaper with burgundy and cream-colored stripes covered the walls, and the built-in, walnut bookshelves remained stocked with all of their original––and highly-expensive––library of paper books. Next to wall-to-wall and sometimes ceiling-to-floor monitors that probably cost a good twenty thousand dollars apiece, Jon could see what had to be genuine and probably ridiculously expensive antiques and original paintings.

Now that the seers had taken over the space, their own high-tech gadgets, illegal organic-modified components and weapons had been added to the mix, left on decorative tables, book shelves and even resting on the carpet by one of the four, high-ceilinged walls with their elaborate baseboards and sconces. Because they’d only recently converted this particular room, there also remained a more sunk-in shabbiness that hadn’t yet been eradicated, that struck Jon as more likely a token of the squatters and looters who had been more recent tenants before they arrived. Jon could see more obvious evidence of the same in carpet holes and smoke damage, burns to one of the couch armrests, along with green spray paint of a sloppy, teenaged-looking tag over what looked like an original oil painting. Jon saw a spray-painted smiley face on one of the burnt umber walls, too, right next to the stone fireplace.

Really, though, the damage was pretty minimal.

The same hadn’t been true of all of the houses on the square, Jon knew.

He’d personally toured a number of them, and helped move furniture and set up bedrooms and semi-apartments for group housing. Most of those had been to accommodate local seers who moved to the square when they found out Revik was in town. Jon didn’t know if they moved near the Sword for religious reasons, or in the hopes he might protect them from the seer purges occurring periodically in other parts of San Francisco. In any case, it began to feel like they’d created their own city within a city, a miniature seer Mecca on the West Coast.

Jon had been warned already by Jorag and Neela not to leave the confines of their ‘territory’ for security reasons. In particular, he was told never to go to the Mission District, but Chinatown was off-limits, too, along with most of Pacific Heights and North Beach, as well as the Marina.

Revik was more blunt...and more specific.

He laid a map out on the mahogany table, pointing out the limits of their staked territory. Indicating the various cross-streets, he told Jon not to cross Fillmore to the east, Geary to the north, Oak to the south or Stanyan to the west, even if he went heavily armed. According to Revik, he’d worked out deals with human gangs running each of those areas, and that they’d be well within their rights to shoot, if Jon or anyone else crossed those lines without obtaining explicit permission. According to Revik, permission meant payment.

More or less.

Revik also told Jon that he was well within his rights to shoot anyone who crossed into seer territory. Jon hadn’t asked Revik whether that was an implied order or not.

He let his eyes drift to the wall closest to the two rows of leather recliners, where the in-built monitor had already been modified and an organic panel fed into the original dead-tech console. Glancing back down at his brother-in-law’s angular face, he watched absently as Garensche and Loki prepped Revik for the jump. He occasionally watched Revik’s hands, as well, as the Elaerian motioned in sign language for a secondary tech––Kandash, Jon believed it was––to record everything that happened, including any Barrier imprints that might be pulled once they began.

Jon had noticed Revik using sign language a lot lately.

They used to joke about Revik being reticent before, him and Allie and Wreg and anyone else who knew him well enough to give him crap about his expressive silences.

Revik had taken that whole thing to new levels in the past months, though.

Revik’s silences maybe weren’t as expressive these days, but they were infinitely more common. In fact, the silence around Revik grew painful at times, if only due to its complete and utter impenetrability. He rarely stayed in a room long enough past when they finished working for anyone to dig him out of that silence, either. Really, just getting him to make eye contact could be a chore, unless Revik wanted something in particular.

Jon tried, of course.

He knew he hadn’t been the only one to try.

He’d seen Wreg try, and Balidor. He’d seen Jorag try, and even Garensche...and Chandre, while she’d still been here. He’d heard from others that Tarsi called from New York, attempting to corner her nephew...maybe the only times Revik stopped long enough to even pretend to listen. He still had that old-school respect thing, enough that he apparently couldn’t bring himself to blow Tarsi off outright. Even so, it was pretty clear from where Jon stood that Revik had no intention of opening up in a real way to any of them, Tarsi included.

Jon had even seen Yumi hanging around him a few times, attempting to find an entry, although truthfully, she’d only managed to get near him on those few occasions when Revik had been visibly drunk.

Jon strongly suspected Balidor had put Yumi up to it, in any case.

The last time Jon witnessed one of those attempts had been at the downstairs bar at the black house on Hayes Street. The seers always seemed to find a bar, Jon noticed, no matter how dire or unlikely the circumstances. This time, it came in the form of a rec room they’d converted in the basement of one of the houses serving as a quasi-seer hotel.

Jon remembered Allie liking the house, back when she lived on Fillmore.

Maybe Revik even knew that, since he’d been the one to pick the place.

However the location had been chosen, a handful of seers––mainly refugees from San Francisco that Wreg’s people and the other security teams had collected in the past few months––took it upon themselves to remake it into an off-hours hangout. Between them, they somehow found enough remaining liquor stores and bars around their part of the city to keep the place more or less stocked. Now that Wreg had procured a number of armored vehicles, employing Arc Enterprises engineers to retrofit them to run on some combination of organic-component solar and a combustion engine fed by seawater, supplies were easier to collect in general.

Jon never ceased to be amazed at what seers knew how to do, or had no qualms about figuring out how to do on the fly, when it came to adjusting to circumstances that would have left most humans hungry, cold and without any ability to pretend at civilization.

Then again, seers had lived at the fringes of human society for over a hundred years. Maybe scarcity didn’t panic them so much, in general.

Even Revik could be coaxed to the bar now and then.

The bar provided one of the few opportunities to get near him when he wasn’t actively working...although truthfully, Jon had his doubts about the not-working part, even there. Revik rarely spoke to anyone at the bar, either, and could often be seen sitting alone, sketching on napkins when he wasn’t staring off into space, a concentrated look in his pale eyes.

Most of the seers and humans left him alone...instinctively, maybe. Or maybe out of that sense of hierarchy that all the military seers seemed to share.

Occasionally, though, someone would approach him.

One of those people had been Yumi.

Jon watched her do it. He’d found himself weirdly fascinated to see her try, even as her approach caused Jon to tense involuntarily.

He needn’t have bothered with either reaction, as it turned out.

Without even looking at her, Revik shoved the pad of paper he’d been writing on into the inside pocket of his jacket. He then grasped the neck of the bottle he’d been pouring drinks from at the bar, recapped it, and walked straight for the front door, his half-filled glass caught between two fingers of the same hand. He didn’t even bother to explain his actions with a semi-vague hand gesture, much less actual words.

He hadn’t looked angry.

Mostly, to Jon anyway, Revik just looked sort of blank.

Maybe blank verging on puzzled...as if Yumi and the rest of them constituted game pieces to be moved around while he worked...a semi-irritating television set he hadn’t quite figured out how to turn off when he didn’t need one of them specifically.

From his face, Jon got the impression Revik hadn’t even considered whether his actions might be rude. He’d been borderline unsteady on his feet, but his focus on the door never wavered. He left without seeming to notice any of the eyes turning to watch him go.

Jon ran into Revik later that same night, too...purely by accident.

He’d opted to walk through the park at around one that morning, and saw Revik only when he passed within a few feet of where he stood. His brother-in-law had just been standing there, leaning his back against a tree, staring up at the sky. Jon hadn’t really understood the expression on the seer’s face, but he’d understood the tears.

He considered approaching him that time, too.

When Revik lifted the bottle, however, drinking as he continued to look up at the stars, Jon thought better of it.

Revik could be unpredictable when drunk, Jon knew.

Well, if he got drunk
enough,
anyway. That had been true even before Cass tortured and nearly killed his wife, wiping out most of her mind with the wires or whatever it was Cass had done to Allie exactly.

Cass, who used to be Allie’s best friend.

Cass, who’d been Jon’s friend, too...and Revik’s, for that matter.

From what Jorag told Jon, Revik’s telekinesis started working again pretty much the same day they found Allie’s body in their mother’s old house. Whatever Balidor might believe, Jorag and some of the other, more myth-oriented seers, seemed to treat Revik’s sudden ‘recovery’ as a nearly apocalyptic (or perhaps
more
apocalyptic) sign from the gods. They viewed him as the wrath of the Sword incarnate these days, handling him, and his somewhat overly-taciturn moods, with a kind of reverence rather than concern for Revik himself.

It bothered Jon, but he didn’t know what he could do about it, either.

Anyway, after Revik’s little visit of the night before, Jon felt even more wary of approaching his brother-in-law than usual.