Allie's War Season Four (136 page)

Raddi was already walking towards the door.

Revik turned to follow him.

He watched as the other male reached the wheel on the outside of the tank’s compartment, taking hold of it in one hand and then looking backwards, waiting for Neela to finish the sequence on her end. Unlike Neela, Revik couldn’t help noticing that Raddi’s overall light and demeanor exuded approval when he glanced at Revik, especially when the tall seer let his eyes linger on the gun Revik held in his right hand, its barrel pointed at the floor.

Revik thought he even saw a glimmer of smugness there.

In any case, Revik couldn’t help picking up smatterings of the overall feeling of
good fucking riddance
in the other man’s light.

“Got it,” Neela said.

Revik felt his jaw harden. They’d put a few extra codes on this particular cell.

Made sense. He couldn’t say he disapproved of that, either.

He watched Raddi give a single nod to Neela, right before he keyed a whole separate set of security numbers into the outside panel, along with the aleimic keys in the outer construct. The panel opened on that one, too, indicating the secondary IDs required, and Revik watched as Raddi leaned over a retinal scanner, even as he pressed his hand to the flat sensor panel on the wall. Revik knew the keys and even the procedures would change with each rotation, and that no one seer would be able to access any of the cells on their own.

Further, the codes would be checked upstairs. Every time this door opened, someone upstairs got a ping that it was happening.

This last part concerned him....but only just.

It just meant he couldn’t dick around in there.

He wouldn’t have a lot of time before they’d know where he was, in any case. Then, knowing Balidor and Wreg, he’d have company.

Even as he thought it, Revik clicked impatiently at the other man again. “Are you almost finished?”

Raddi gave him a respectful nod and keyed through a last sequence, turning at once to the wheel on the door after he finished and gripping it in both hands. Revik heard the low tone from the panel as the security code was accepted.

“Do you require back up or assistance, sir?” Raddi asked politely, even as he gave a hard twist to the wheel. He glanced pointedly at the gun Revik held.

“No,” Revik muttered, feeling his jaw harden more.

The man smiled again, subtly that time.

“Very good, sir.”

Raddi twisted the organic-component wheel a few more times without speaking, before an audible click echoed in the narrow hall, all the way up to the high ceiling of the converted cargo bay, four stories above. Revik glanced up at the outer hull of the cell door, just in time to see the light switch from green to red, then to pulse, indicating that the seal had been broken on the Barrier field, that it had already begun to lose its integrity.

Revik knew that once that red light stopped flashing, the room could be accessed by the Barrier proper. Which meant it could be accessed by the Dreng, by Menlim...and whoever else.

He didn’t intend to leave the door open that long.

As soon as Raddi swung the heavy, three-foot thick panel open far enough for Revik to squeeze his body through, Revik got through the opening and into the roughly eight by ten meter cell. He knew the exact size, because the cell was identical to the one where he slept, at least in terms of the bare bones of its dimensions.

Glancing behind him before scoping out the space, he gestured a brief command for Raddi to close and lock the door. He felt and heard as it clanged shut behind him, but didn’t turn to verify. Instead, he began to scan the greenish-lit space.

Despite the cell’s equivalent size, it bore very little resemblance to the room he shared with Allie. He gave the furnishings a cursory look, mainly to know his environment in case something went wrong. That, too, was a habit he brought with him from his childhood, and one that had saved him more than once, if only because he couldn’t shut it off, no matter where he was.

Still, the look was brief, a mere tabulation of the individual physical components.

Unlike his room, they hadn’t given her much.

No monitor, console, books, headsets, hand-holds or anything like the size of the bed where he and Allie slept. His eyes glanced over a single, gray-sheeted, prison-type bed, shoved in one corner of the room next to a metal table and chair. The latter two furnishings were bolted to the floor, likely connected to the internal electronics, and therefore at least partly organic. The bed and bedding were adequate, he surmised. Not meant to be punishing, per se, but definitely prisoner bedding, not guest bedding.

Nothing diverting had been left in the room.

Revik himself had personally ordered them to rip the one monitor out of the wall before she regained consciousness the first time. Thinking about what Terian had just done, how he had accessed his and Allie’s room, Revik could only frown now, not exactly “glad” he’d done it, but more feeling like they might have dodged a potentially serious bullet.

Not like the cell’s sole occupant had much intelligence to share with anyone.

Either way, Revik could feel the difference in the walls from the one and only other time he’d ever been in here. They’d upped some of the measures from the original configuration. If they’d done that since the breach this morning, too, the security team hadn’t wasted any time. He couldn’t have been upstairs for more than twenty minutes.

From what he got off of Allie, the breach happened something like an additional fifty or so minutes before he got back to their room from his wander. Add the additional twenty or so minutes when he’d been hell-bent on fucking her...

He brushed that out of his mind, too, but not before it made his jaw harden.

Ninety minutes, then, since the breach. Minimum.

Revik found the cell’s occupant in that first, cursory sweep with his eyes, even as he thought the rest of it. He just didn’t bother to focus on her, not until he’d ascertained every detail of the layout, both those he knew from before, as well as any deviations.

The woman in front of him could access both the table and the bed, despite the long chains she wore that attached to the furthest wall. But only just, Revik noted.

He made a note of her range, too, but really, it didn’t concern him.

Not for this.

He knew if it hadn’t been for his wife, this room would be significantly less comfortable than it was. Some of the infiltrators on the team still had to be warned against coming in here. Revik knew from Balidor and Wreg that Allie issued threats about what would happen if this particular prisoner experienced any deliberate physical or mental abuse.

The threats were neither idle nor unnecessary, from what Revik heard via the infiltrator grapevine onboard the ship. Turns out, a number of their team still had lingering “issues” from what had occurred over the past year. There had been threats of all kinds, including rape, which wasn’t an idle one for most seers, if only because they didn’t generally threaten it unless they were pretty damned pissed off.

Revik hadn’t threatened her, though.

He knew Allie stepped lightly around him when it came to this particular prisoner, but he’d never said a word...never done anything, never even asked to interrogate her.

He’d let Allie decide every aspect of this prisoner’s treatment, stayed out of every discussion around whether they should kill her or keep her alive. He’d already decided he wouldn’t weigh in on that issue even if Allie asked him outright...which she never did. He’d known he couldn’t possibly be rational about it, so he didn’t give himself the option. He stayed out of it. He handed all discretion to his wife, without protest.

Until now.

She looked up at him when he entered.

Revik saw her brown eyes widen when she saw him standing there.

He saw her now-flawless face go slack with surprise, absent the scar he’d known since he shared a prison cell with her in the Caucasus. He just stood there, letting her look him over, her eyes showing a kind of blank incredulity.

He saw other things, too, including the disjointed currents flickering through her light, how they seemed almost entirely out of synch with her body, with her very light structures, with the refracted glimpses he could get of her mind. Cut off from the Dreng, whose frequencies had been woven into the very fabric of her newly activated aleimi, Cassandra Jainkul, or War, looked strangely out of time, as if the two different versions of her didn’t quite fit together anymore. Really, she looked as if she wore light that didn’t belong to her at all, that came from somewhere else, another being or body...which also wasn’t entirely untrue.

Revik knew Allie broke a few things, too.

When his wife smashed through the door of that upscale apartment in New York, where Cass had been keeping their daughter, Allie crushed just about every higher aleimic structure Cass possessed. In particular, Allie nearly annihilated all of those structures Cass would have utilized to perform her nascent telekinesis.

That thought gave him more satisfaction than perhaps it should have.

Cass continued to stare up at him, as if not sure he was real.

Then a slow smile spread over her full lips.

Revik watched the spark fire in those brown eyes––eyes that looked unfocused, even lost, just a few seconds before––and he raised the gun he held in that same pause, pointing it at her head. He was fine with her smiling at him.

It made what he’d come here to do easier, seeing that smirk on her mouth.

“Hey, big guy,” she said.

Unfolding her body where she’d been sitting cross-legged on the floor, she pulled herself languorously to her feet, chains and all. Revik watched as she shook out her long black hair, the chains making a dull thud as they hit the floor from where they’d been coiled around her legs. He noted that the red tips of her black hair didn’t look quite as dramatic in the green-walled cell as they had the last time he’d seen them, under the bright lights in that monitor of his bedroom suite in New York. Nor did they contrast her skin as dramatically when she wore no make-up on her face, especially without her trademark red lipstick or that dark kohl eyeliner she used to give herself a punk rock geisha-like appearance.

He let the gun follow her head easily as she rose.

He didn’t take his gaze off the sight.

“Hi, Cass,” he said.

Unlike her, a returning smile never touched his narrow lips.

13

PULLING RANK

“BREAK DOWN THE fucking door!” Balidor thundered.

He took the stairs two at a time, pausing only long enough to glare at Neela through his virtual link, then harder at Raddi, whose image showed the tall seer leaning against the door jamb belonging to security station’s back room, a faint smirk on his face.

“...Gods!” Balidor said, exploding in anger. “How could you let him in there?”

“He’s the boss,” Raddi said.

“Actually, he’s not,” Balidor reminded him coldly. “Did you raise her, at least?”

Raddi’s expression remained wholly unapologetic.

He, like Jorag and a few of the other ex-rebels, didn’t even try to hide his desire for the Sword to put a bullet in Cass’s brain. It wasn’t a lack of respect for Alyson, exactly, or her orders. They viewed it more along the lines of a mate protecting his family, at least when they bothered to rationalize it to themselves at all.