Allie's War Season Four (12 page)

JON HADN’T BEEN on any combat-type jumps.

Meaning, he hadn’t been tasked with any Barrier jumps that had a specific target, one with actual stakes attached...stakes that Jon cared about, anyway.

He’d done a few spying, remote-viewing type things.

He’d even been brought along on a few trips out to look for Cass and Terian, paired with members of Yumi and Balidor’s infiltration units. Mostly, he’d been there to provide resonance...not to actually
do
anything. He’d been paired with Jorag for the first few of those, Balidor himself for the last one. They’d tapped his aleimi with his consent, using his childhood memories of Cass to try and track her. Balidor also attempted to utilize Jon’s connection to Terian/Feigran, who Jon had spent more time with than most of the other seers, apart from Revik himself.

Neither thing had yielded much.

Jon suspected both Cass and Feigran were locked behind a Fort Knox type shield run by Shadow and his people by now. Resonance alone wouldn’t be enough to crack it.

Jon also suspected that both Feigran and Cass resonated on pretty different frequencies these days, anyway. Compared to when he’d known them, that is.

Even so, for those few, serious infiltration forays to which Jon had been invited, Jon took an utterly passive role. He was just...there. For the most part. He lingered near enough to watch the others do their thing, but far enough away to avoid interfering with any of their light. Mostly, Balidor treated these as training exercises, instructing Jon to follow along with his own aleimi as best he could, in the hopes that Jon might understand what they were
trying
to do, in the event they ever needed him to attempt something similar.

Jon couldn’t even really tell how successful the jumps had been, not until the debriefing after the fact. As for following what Balidor did behind the Barrier, Jorag smiled when Jon told him he’d tried, clapping him sympathetically on the back. Jorag didn’t say much, but Jon got the message; he had about as much hope of following Balidor during a hunt as he did of flying off the roof of the four-story Victorian mansion by merely flapping his arms.

Even before he closed his eyes, Jon realized this would be different.

He wouldn’t be able to just ‘hang out’ in the background for this one, letting seers scan him for resonances of various kinds.

Revik wouldn’t tolerate it, for one.

Jon felt his nerves ratchet up a few more notches, right before Balidor’s voice rose in his earpiece, seeming to echo inside Jon’s very skull.

“Ready for immersion?”
the Adhipan leader said.

“Yes,”
Revik answered.

“We’ll use the past jump hits, to try and speed things up with––”

“Yes,”
Revik cut in.

Jon felt Revik’s impatience. It sharpened in the brief silence after he cut Balidor off.

Jon didn’t have long to think about that, either.

Everything around him––the feel of the worn leather chair, his sore ankle where he’d twisted it in mulei the day before, the soft bleeps of nearby machines, traces of Wreg’s anger and hurt still circulating through his light, the rustling of clothing and murmurs of the techs and other sounds that Jon didn’t even know he could hear until they disappeared––abruptly cut out.

Jon fell.

...HE’S NEVER BEEN on a jump with Revik before.

That doesn’t occur to him until now, either.

The darkness moves so quickly, he can’t orient himself at first, can’t make sense of where he is. He knows, of course––knew before they started, really––that Revik wouldn’t move through the stages of the Barrier jump with the usual 1-2-3 used by Jon’s trainers as part of the standard protocol. Even so, he finds himself utterly lost in the span of seconds after he first notices the room fade. He can’t pull apart the resonances buffeting his light; he knows only that they come from Revik, that he feels familiarity in them, and familiarity from the other seers who have collected them...but those resonances are fleeting, impossible to pin down.

He feels something familiar in what is coming, too...something...

Gods...Allie. He feels Allie.

The pain that rises in Jon is unbearable. He tries to pull it back, to shove it into some recess of his heart before Revik can feel it...

...but by then he’s moving so fast, lost inside the wave of light, buffeted by more feelings of her, of Cass, of a strange flavor of his childhood, almost like a scent cloying in his aleimi, something so a part of him he rarely sees it as a separate thing. Memories rush forward, things Jon hasn’t felt in years, things he forgot about, not all of them good or particularly nostalgia-inducing, but so damned familiar and shockingly
immediate
...in that achingly clear-cut way emotions and feelings arise and get stuck in one’s mind and light in childhood.

He remembers Mom drunk on the couch, helping Allie carry her. Allie hollow-eyed, blank, still drunk herself after they went out to drink on Dad’s grave.

Younger than that, he remembers making cookies with their parents.

Christmas with Cass showing up at their door, crying, Mom giving her a glass cat with her name on it and the beaming smile on Cass’s face.

He remembers Allie fighting at school, that pack of assholes who would harass her, who wouldn’t leave her alone, led by Mickey, that prick who seemed to be obsessed with her, pretty much from the second he laid eyes on her. Mickey...jesus. What happened to that guy? He’d been like four years older than her.

Four years and they all made fun of him because he shaved.

He disappeared at one point, didn’t he?

Before Jon can puzzle through this, before he can sort his way through images of Allie crawling on the carpet at age three and their mother wearing her uniform for the post office as she washes dishes and sings in a kitchen bright with a happiness he only dimly remembers, that still hurts and comforts him somewhere, in the softest, most vulnerable part of his heart, when their father was still healthy and still working as an engineer for Intirdan Corp., coming up behind their mom to grab her and make her shriek in delight...

Jon finds himself standing on sand.

Wet sand.

He is confused at first, unsure how he got there.

The sand doesn’t leave when he blinks. It squishes softly between his toes.

It shines a glowing white under Jon’s bare feet, finer than any sand he’s ever felt.

Jon turns his gaze up, his eyes that aren’t really eyes, not in here...and a few hundred yards, or maybe only a few dozen yards, or maybe only twenty or so feet...a massive rock configuration sits buried in that fine, white sand, its sides steep and marbled green and red and black. Waves break at the rock’s base...waves from a glittering, gold-plated ocean...and it looks like someone dropped that giant piece of jagged earth, trees and birds and all, into the shallows near the shore, and left it there.

Jon blinks up at the forest sitting atop that rough, wild-looking hill.

He sees eagles soaring and circling above, more colorful birds, tropical and incongruous with the jagged appearance of the cliffs and their gold and green textures that remind him of the north Pacific coast back home. Sea birds nest there, too. Cormorants with their shimmering green-tinted black feathers, puffins with colorful beaks, seagulls of such a blinding white that Jon finds them difficult to look at...

The sky above arcs a perfect, cobalt blue.

Dotting that azure dome float clouds so white and high they don’t look real, despite the swirls of blue and gold that lighten and darken their crevices.

The whole landscape looks like a breathing, living painting.

Jon has never seen anything so beautiful, so completely filled with life. Everything has presence. Not only the birds and dolphins he can see and feel...the latter jumping and playing in the surf of those gold-tinted waves, those same waves bleeding sunlight and teeming with fish of all sizes and shapes...but every grain of sand, every feather in every wing, every drop of water and curling wave and breath of wind exudes life. Every waving green leaf, every branch, every stone, every mist of white-foamed spray...

...it lives.

It all lives. Moreover, each exudes its own peculiar jumble of living frequency. Complicated, dense, meaningful...totally unique to itself.

It is immediate. Immediate...

Jon can’t articulate this part to himself, but he feels it. Feeling swells his chest, and he is lost here, in the power of this place. He can’t make sense of how he reacts to it, but it feels like every part of him bursts into tiny, white-hot flames, shifting his vibration to some higher level he can’t comprehend, a sound only dolphins can hear. White light fills him, a feeling of stillness so profound he barely knows himself in it.

Even as he feels like he’s starting to adjust, to fully relax into being in this place, to letting in the myriad of densities and light...

The scenery changes again.

Detail floods his consciousness.

Any one thing Jon focuses on grows so detailed to him that he becomes lost in it.

The veins in leaves shock his awareness, showing tiny cilia and drops of water, insects with so much presence he feels a flush of guilt for every ant he’s ever stamped on, every mosquito he’s ever squashed in thoughtless irritation, every fly he’s swatted with a shoe or piece of cloth. He sees the deep black eyes of birds. The depth he feels there pulls on him, beckons him to seek its source...but he only gets lost in those depths, lost in something he can’t understand, in a mind or minds that move so differently from his own that Jon can only puzzle at them.

He feels their own puzzlement reflected back, their attempts to understand him.

Jon tries to remind himself why he is here.

He forces a wider perspective, a tenser focus on his surroundings.

Staring back at the horizon, he again notices the curling, perfect waves as they make beautifully precise, green-glass tubes before they crash into clean, white foam. Jon is lost again in the beauty, in the perfection of what he sees. He loses himself there willingly at first; feeling overwhelms him as he stares into the crystal blue-green waters beneath the golden slant of sunlight that coats the ocean’s surface.

The sun is white. Young and white, eclipsed with a ring of rose fire.

Then he sees her.

She stands, waist-deep in the water, a single form, looking strangely small in the immensity of blue-green ocean and high azure sky. Like a shadow, her reflection darts behind her as the water shifts and moves in gentle swells. When Jon continues to stare, that same reflection resembles an oddly-shaped fish teasing at her legs and back.

She is alone.

For the barest of seconds, he envies her.

This place...this beauty feels like hers. It belongs to her somehow.

It is a part of her.

Dark hair coils and unfurls gently and languorously in the breeze, hanging down her back in a thick curtain. Strongly contrasting the color of her hair, a filmy, green-gold dress, low-cut in back, hangs off her small form, seemingly with nothing worn under it. The dress floats around her like the single petal of a golden lily, moving gently in the passing swells without leaving her narrow waist.

Before Jon can make sense of her, before he can let her in or let his mind categorize anything about her, he sees another form plowing through the waves. The other form is taller, walks with long strides, seemingly oblivious to the crash of water as it pulls him to and fro, teasingly impeding his attempts to reach her. Jon watches that dark-haired form without moving, watches as the tide pulls him sideways as he walks inexorably towards that lone woman looking out to sea. He walks without hesitation, with an impatience Jon can feel, moving towards her in a straight, unswerving line...