Allie's War Season Four (150 page)

What might have been the remnants of a resort hotel sat on a slight rise above the beach itself, not far from where we first landed. The beach look strangely steep in parts, like a lot of the coastal areas we’d come across lately, and yeah, it was pretty much covered with fallen trees and what looked like human trash and building materials of various kinds.

Balidor told me he’d picked this area in part because the southeastern edges of Sri Lanka had mostly been evacuated. He claimed that had been more due to erratic weather and human pirates stealing women and children and supplies than it did the human-killing virus itself.

Either way, it was pretty eerie standing there, on what looked like a worn-down concrete slab dotted with fallen trees. I could see clothes wrapped into some of the branches and tree trunks, along with other trash, and what looked like an old advertisement sign had been worn down to a muted gray color, with only the faint outline of a woman drinking some kind of soft drink showing through the wear from seawater and air.

While we waited, the only sounds I heard came from seabirds and crashing surf.

I still couldn’t get over how quiet the world was these days. I might have grumbled, once upon a time, about how hard it was to get away from human-generated sound. With it gone, the Earth’s stillness seeped over everything, disorienting me, even beyond the ambient noises of animals and birds and running water and wind and whatever else.

Of course, tsunamis were loud. So were hurricanes...and earthquakes.

We’d had a fair few of those, too.

In San Francisco, though, no matter where I was, I could always hear something related to human civilization. Machines. Horns honking. Airplanes flying overhead. News pundits on outdoor feeds. Sports games. Children laughing. Dogs barking. Music. Breaking glass.

Here, there was none of that.

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a plane in the sky, at least that wasn’t one of ours. We never ran into any other ships, either, apart from when we got close to one of the Shadow cities, and then we avoided them as best we could.

The only time I ever really saw strangers anymore was during field ops.

It felt eerie to be here, on the shore of Sri Lanka, watching our motorboat bob in the waves with only Jorag in it, managing it against the currents to keep it ready in case we needed to leave in a hurry. I watched dark clouds where they clustered over the ocean and found myself hoping like hell that an earthquake didn’t hit while we were out here.

Revik grunted a little, from next to me.

I glanced at him, smiling, but found myself staring at his face more closely than usual.

He was nervous.

I could feel his nerves. He’d been acting strange since we’d set up this meeting, and while I was trying really hard not to connect it to the whole Dalejem thing, it wasn’t easy. For one thing, Revik was trying a little too hard to hide his nerves from me, and to pretend everything was perfectly normal. I felt myself shielding from him more than usual because of it, which didn’t exactly help.

I fought to focus back on why we were here...and how I could keep this short.

I knew Jon, Wreg and a few others were already in a second boat, heading further north to find Loki and his team and signal them when it was safe to fly the Chinook in to the carrier. They weren’t bringing Dante along, Jon told me, right before they left. Apparently some of the tech geeks, and even Wreg and Jon themselves, wanted to surprise her, by bringing her mom to her.

I knew that wasn’t all of it, though.

In truth, they didn’t want to risk her.

Dante was increasingly becoming the real tech chief, even if Vikram held that role in name, mostly due to his age and his background with the Adhipan. After losing Garensche, they were all feeling protective of their teenaged whiz kid. Some of that was personal, too. In fact, whatever their military reasoning, I knew a lot of it was personal.

Either way, I knew they should have Loki’s team back on the carrier, along with Dante’s mother, long before we got back there. Which meant I’d miss the reunion itself, which was kind of a bummer, although I knew we’d hear all about it when we got back.

We’d decided to do both things at the same time, instead of sequentially, partly to minimize our time and exposure out here, but also to provide each group a form of potential help, in the event one of us needed backup. For the same reason, Wreg and Jon planned to patrol the waters offshore in the boat after they saw Loki and the others off...just in case anything went wrong with our team.

Not that we expected anything to go wrong.

I fought to keep my light and focus off Revik, but it was hard when I felt his nerves abruptly worsen, hitting his light with enough charge that I looked up at him again, in spite of myself. He didn’t return my gaze exactly, but I felt him react to my stare, too, so eventually I looked away. Fighting to focus on the meeting itself, I shoved my reactions to him out of my mind.

Even so, I still had to bite my lip and tell myself not to read too much into whatever the hell was going on with him.

When I felt the group of aleimic lights approaching, my own nerves worsened.

I fought that out of my light, too, throwing on a harder, more leadership-type cloak, along with a somewhat less friendly expression on my face.

I didn’t know what to expect when the Children of the Bridge finally emerged from the trees, but the sheer number of them took me aback.

I counted at least forty seers with my eyes, most of them well-shielded.

Infiltrators.

Well, not all of them. But most of them.

I picked Dalejem out of the line, and frowned a little, in spite of myself. That frown deepened when I saw him looking at Revik, his green and violet eyes reflecting sunlight.

Jerking my eyes off his dark hair and high-cheekboned face, I forced my gaze over the rest of the group, noting they covered a pretty broad age span, but the majority were probably somewhere in the two-hundred to three-hundred year range.

In the middle I saw a woman, who might have been even older.

She didn’t feel like an infiltrator, though.

I didn’t really have a basis for knowing either of those things, really.

It was more a feeling. She looked young, like most seers tended to look young...I would have pegged her at early forties, if she’d been human, maybe even younger. She had an Asian cast to her features, like a lot of seers, and bright green eyes that were a few shades darker than mine. They were actually closer to Dalejem’s in color, although without the violet ring that made his stand out so intensely.

As for the not being an infiltrator thing, well...I was more certain about that, but it was harder to put into words. She just didn’t
feel
like an infiltrator. Her light had a different quality. It wasn’t soft exactly, but it didn’t have that charged aggression I associated with infiltrators, either. It also felt more open...maybe even more transparent...than that of most infiltrators.

She looked familiar to me somehow.

I couldn’t put my finger on it at first, what it was or who it was she reminded me of. I knew I’d never actually met her before, at least not since I’d known myself as a seer and had learned how to directly access a seer’s photographic memory.

A man stood next to her, too.

After a few seconds, I found myself staring at him, as well.

He had blue eyes, like a really light, turquoise blue, that seemed to shine with their own inner glow. He was handsome, and his light brown hair was bleached almost full blond in the sun. The blond color alone was unusual enough on a seer that I couldn’t help but stare at him, and at his tanned features, that almost reminded me of Balidor’s, they were so human-like.

But his eyes betrayed him as seer, even more than his height. That, and the way he moved, even apart from the heavier stillness I could feel around his light.

He didn’t feel very young, either.

He might have been older than the woman or younger, but I still didn’t understand seer aging well enough to be able to guess either of their ages with any certainty.

Next to me, I felt another spark of reaction off of Revik’s light, a denser, more complicated one that time. I fought not to look at him, but felt an apology in that somewhere, too, what might have been guilt, strong enough that it felt tinged with fear...what might even have been panic. He reached for my hand then and I finally looked up at him, half-expecting to find him staring at Dalejem again. But he wasn’t.

Instead, he was staring at the woman standing in the middle of the group, the one with the green eyes and the long, straight, black hair.

Revik gripped my hand tightly in his, even as his mind opened to mine suddenly, blurting words, a string that came out so fast it was almost unintelligible.

Gods, Allie,
he sent, that panic rising in his light.
Allie...honey. I’m so sorry. I’m so fucking sorry I didn’t tell you. I couldn’t...I couldn’t tell you. She made me vow it. When you were fucking
born
they made me vow it...before I knew you at all. I’m so sorry, Allie. Please forgive me...

I stared up at him, my mouth curling into a frown, confused.

Sorry? What the hell was he sorry about? Tell me what?

My confusion only deepened as I sorted through his words, then followed his eyes back to where he was staring at the green-eyed woman again.

That time, though, I paused on her face.

When I did, something clicked.

Once it had, I couldn’t unsee it, even as I found myself understanding suddenly why her narrow face looked so familiar.

She looked like me.

Replaying Revik’s words, I stared at her, then at the taller, blond-haired and blue-eyed seer who stood next to her, smiling at me. I realized then, that both of them looked like me, albeit in different ways. I saw myself in those faces...and even in their bodies, especially hers.

It hit me then, that both of them were looking at me, too.

As in, they were looking
only
at me, ignoring everyone else in our party, including Revik.

I also realized both of them had tears in their eyes.

Pain ripped through my light in that bare whisper of a half-second. Some part of me reacted before my brain had time to catch up, igniting a fire in some fucked-up, broken-down, shadowed, hidden crack in my heart that I hadn’t even known existed.

Then I did exactly what Lily had done, when she first recognized me.

I burst into tears.

17

MOTHERS AND DAUGHTERS

I’M NOT SURE how we ended up where we ended up.

I felt like I got led around in a daze, like people were talking to me but I couldn’t comprehend any of their words.

I don’t know if I blacked out, exactly...or even lost time.

When I could finally focus my brain again, though, I found myself sitting on a blanket on the grass. Other blankets were spread around me, also holding seers sitting cross-legged and kneeling, sharing drinks and even eating.

I heard them talking about the Displacement Lists.

I heard them talking about the seer we’d learned about in Macau, the one who was collecting seers and humans from those same Displacement Lists, and bringing them to Dubai.

The Displacement Lists that apparently my mother...as in my biological mother, who until now I hadn’t known existed...had put in a bank vault in New York for me to find.