Allie's War Season Four (15 page)

Jon catches a hold of my left hand, holding up my fingers. “You aren’t wearing a ring, Al. So either he didn’t show, or that was the quickest, quickie-divorce in history.”

“Yeah. Well. We decided to wait.”

“You
decided this?” Jon says, his voice pointed.

I exhale, fighting to think, to remember how the conversation went exactly with Jaden in front of that chapel in downtown Portland. Remembering the look in his eyes, the way he acted as soon as he showed up in the green park next to the chapel itself, I shake my head.

“I don’t know,” I say. “I really don’t, Jon.”

“So he spent all that time talking you into this,” Jon says, his voice holding that denser edge. “Weeks and weeks. Months. Got you to agree to marry him. Got you to buy the rings, the dress, the hotel room, whatever...to blow off your family, not invite any of your friends. He does all that, just so he can back out at the last minute? What, was he done
proving
to himself he could get you to do it?” Jon’s hazel eyes spark with a deeper fury. “Did you even make it to that fucking Elvis place he wanted you to go to, Al?”

I nod, feeling a pall of something like humiliation wash over me.

“Outside of it anyway,” I mumble.

Wondering suddenly why I’ve come here, why I went out of my way to ruin Jon’s night, too, without giving him so much as a warning call or a head’s up, I shiver inside the towel. My whole body feels frozen from the twelve-hour trip on the back of Jaden’s bike. I feel cold beyond where I’ll ever be warm again, colder than I’ve ever felt in my life maybe.

Jon seems to sense this, somehow. Instead of lecturing me more, he rubs my arms and back, rubs my hair under the towel, using it to soak up the water that still drips down onto my shoulders. I relax into the motion, but it doesn’t really help.

I feel like nothing will help after this. Whatever ups and downs Jaden and I have been through over the past few months, somehow this feels different from all of those. I don’t even want to go back to our place on Fulton Street by the park. I don’t want to face him, to pretend this didn’t happen. I don’t know how to pick up the pieces of our shared life together.

Something about this feels like a turning point. Or the end of one, maybe.

I’m just not sure if I’m the one who actually made that decision.

“You’re cold,” Jon says, rubbing my arms. “Let me go run you a hot bath, Allie––”

JON SUPPRESSED A shiver, gripping the handle tighter.

Taking a deep breath, he opened the door to her room soundlessly.

His heart already thudded painfully in his chest. No guards had been stationed outside, which surprised him, but Jon strongly suspected that this room had a hair-trigger wire to the construct as a whole, and that it wouldn’t be long before someone knew he’d breached the entrance.

Shoving the thought aside, he walked silently over the white shag carpet, one of the few wall-to-wall carpets in the whole house.

This had been the previous owner’s master bedroom. Apparently, whoever owned the house before didn’t like waking up to cold feet. They’d fitted the whole room out in a more modern style than the rest of the house, especially the bathroom, which had heated tiles and a shower equipped with at least six jet faucets, along with a sauna and bath.

Jon walked barefoot, his eyes aimed at the four-poster bed.

Unlike the four-poster in Jon’s room, the posts on this bed were relatively short, too short to house a canopy. The bed itself looked modern, too, and not only in size, which had to be bigger than anything made during the Victorian era. The shelves built into the wall behind the headboard only strengthened that impression. Jon saw dead-metal electronics housed there, including for VR hookups and what might have been controls for the bed itself.

The comforter looked like real down though, and shone the same creamy white as the carpet. Drapes hung down on either side of the open, glass, balcony doors––a jade green in color, which struck Jon as an interesting coincidence until he remembered that Revik had been the one to stake this room out as hers.

Well...theirs, he supposed.

It occurred to Jon only then that he’d never bothered to ask anyone where Revik actually slept. He knew some of the seers took turns watching over him, for a couple of reasons. Balidor told him that both Cass and Shadow had attacked him through the construct, and that on each occasion, it happened at night, while Revik was asleep and dreaming. Those attacks had been severe enough that Balidor and some of the others had forced Revik awake a few times, pulling him out of the Barrier so they could disentangle his light from the invading aleimi.

Jon hadn’t asked for details, but he got the impression the content of those attacks disturbed everyone involved...and not only because Shadow could apparently penetrate their Adhipan-designed construct at will.

Remembering the night before, that odd, empty look in Revik’s eyes when he showed up at his door, Jon frowned, slowing his approach to Allie’s bed.

He didn’t stop, though.

Once he reached the left side of the thick mattress, he forced himself to look at her. He realized only then––or admitted to himself, maybe––how rarely he’d let himself do that, since they found her comatose at their mother’s house.

Jon didn’t know what he expected actually, but the simplicity of what he found forced him to stop, if only for a few breaths.

She looked asleep.

The sight didn’t fill him with relief, but it managed to drain most of the overt tension from his limbs. Somehow, without knowing
what
he’d expected exactly, he’d expected something worse. To see her emaciated, maybe. A skeleton lying there, eyes sunk in her head...or maybe the opposite, bloated and flabby-looking, scabs on her face, like junkies Jon had seen, back when he lived in San Francisco the first time.

Allie looked pretty much exactly as he remembered her, though.

It was strange, standing there, watching her chest move up and down, her eyes closed on that smooth face, her dark hair framing her cheekbones and hanging down past her shoulders on the white comforter and even whiter pillows. She’d lost weight, sure, but not that much. He knew some of the other seers took care of her body. He knew they watched over her almost as if she were a holy relic, bathing her, turning her frequently to prevent bed sores, using electrodes to stimulate her muscles, feeding her and wiping her face and feet and whatever else.

That is, when Revik didn’t do those things himself.

Even as Jon formed the thought...

...an exhale broke the silence, a soft shift of clothing and limbs.

Jon froze, heart hammering in his chest.

Turning his head, breath still held in his lungs, Jon focused on the shape curled up in a squat lounge chair parked on the opposite side of the bed. Since the chair’s back had been turned to face the door, and stretched up high enough to obscure the body ensconced within the lower cushions, Jon hadn’t seen him until now.

He stared at Revik’s face.

He watched it grow taut in sleep as the male seer shifted again, seemingly trying to make himself more comfortable in the confining chair.

Revik had pulled the dark-green lounger as close to the bed as it would go. Even now, one of the Elaerian’s pale arms hung over the comforter, following his last rearrangement of limbs. It struck Jon as somewhat ironic that he would have seen Revik lying there when he stood at the door, if the male seer had adjusted himself even two minutes sooner.

Jon wondered if he would have dared enter the room at all, if he had.

Another, duller pain in his chest started to throb.

Seeing Revik so near to where he stood––even restless, easy-to-wake Revik who probably still wanted to beat the hell out of him––wasn’t enough to dissuade Jon from what he’d come here to do. He hesitated only a moment more, and that time, it was purely logistical. For those few seconds, Jon weighed between sitting on the floor, where Revik wouldn’t see him if he opened his eyes...or on the bed, where Jon could actually touch her. After going back and forth in his mind, he carefully...and achingly slowly...lowered his weight to the mattress, letting himself sink so gradually that he didn’t shake the bed at all.

He ended up less than a foot from her torso.

Jon reached out in the dim light, carefully picking up her hand. He lifted it gingerly from where it rested on the top of the white comforter and gripped her fingers. They felt cold to him, even after he wrapped both of his hands around them.

He fought to warm her skin, even as tears rose, wanting to choke him briefly.

But he hadn’t come here for that, either.

Closing his eyes, Jon let his light slide back into the Barrier. He did it without electrodes, without jump chairs or even Revik...without anything but himself.

He knew what he was doing might get him killed.

He didn’t care. Death hadn’t scared him for a long time now.

Death wasn’t the worst thing, not by a long stretch.

LIKE THE JUMP with Revik earlier, Jon doesn’t feel any sense of motion or travel.

He simply finds himself in a new place.

The place makes him sick...really fucking sick, nearly instantaneously.

The instant he arrives, he wants to leave.

He’s never wanted to leave any place so badly in his life.

Fear overcomes him. That deeper disgust and sickness is almost worse, a scent of rot and death and brokenness, a revulsion so deep it feels instinctive, animal-like, triggering a base form of self-preservation. Jon thinks he might retch, as if he’s suddenly been thrown into a sewage tunnel and bathed in every imaginable foulness, forced to drink it and breathe it in, to make it a part of himself. Every atom of his being, every tiny particle of his aleimi, wants to leave.

He forces himself to stay.

He forces himself...

How he stays, how he manages to be here at all without screaming or retching or crying out, he does not know. He would rather be dead, really dead, then be lost in this place.

Somehow, it is that thought that stabilizes him.

It is that thought that reminds him...he is not alone.

The world around him begins to slip incrementally into focus. Jon’s mind creates images out of that foulness, trying to understand it, to put it in a context, a set of references that his conscious mind can understand. Whatever this place is, it is dark, suffocatingly dark. Everything around Jon feels like death, like the stink of death smells and tastes and images all rolled into one, but his mind fights to sort through them all, to make sense of where it finds itself.