Allie's War Season Four (169 page)

Truthfully, the silence worried me more. In any case, I knew we were operating on borrowed time. We needed a more permanent solution.

I hadn’t pushed the point overly in our planning sessions yet, but I increasingly believed that permanent solution required Terian.

After assessing me and Revik and Lily’s light, the infiltration team unanimously decided to move forward with the Dubai op. I had no idea if I’d made the op safer or more dangerous by what I’d done, but it was decided the risk was acceptable given the possibility of acquiring so many List seers and humans. I wanted to believe I’d made the op safer, of course, but as I listened to the infiltration team voice their various opinions around the table, I realized none of us really had any idea what the effect would be.

Either way, they had little choice but to clear us for living outside the tank.

They moved Revik and me to the flag cabin, not far from the CIC.

In here, we remained connected to the wider construct, if still somewhat separate via the private construct Balidor’s people provided. I could feel whispers of other minds past those construct walls, especially from the CIC itself, but it was still pretty quiet.

The private construct had already been here, of course, even though no one had been using it. The flag cabin had always been intended for Revik and me, although this past week constituted the first time we’d actually slept in it.

Next door to us, a smaller cabin belonged to Lily now, too. It was connected to this one via a door between bulkheads, but lived inside its own construct. Even with the separate constructs, I could feel her all the time now, which made me smile whenever I focused her way––even though Revik and I had to shield from her too, especially at night.

That thread to her never got broken.

In the short term, at least, my experiment in the tank had worked.

Being upstairs was definitely “noisier” though––in the Barrier sense, I mean. Only a few corridors down from us, the CIC––“Combat Information Center,” Balidor informed me when we first came on board––lived and breathed military strategy, infiltration and defense, twenty-four hours a day. The CIC connected via a narrow corridor to a longer, more open space, what had originally been a bullpen of cubicle-type offices before Balidor’s construction team tore them down to create a larger conference room.

Despite the redesign, most seers still called it the bullpen.

We now had most of our major strategy meetings in there.

I’d been told my parents would be staying with us, too, at least until they left with the majority of the civilians on the List. Balidor marked off a whole segment of bunks near the stern for Kali and her leadership team, including Dalejem. Some of Kali’s team already slept with the regular seer crew, however––meaning those vetted by Wreg who had been integrated into our infiltration and military teams by mutual agreement.

I hadn’t really gotten involved in any of that though.

I also hadn’t visited that part of the ship.

The bullpen itself sat on the deck directly under the hard deck, along with the captain’s cabin, (which currently housed Balidor and Yarli), and a larger, second, command-center type room that handled air traffic control and routed radar information from the tower.

The comp nerds, led by Vikram and Dante, sat on our other side, towards the bow. They pretty much owned the entire tech enclave that took up a good chunk of that half of our level. From what Balidor told me, that segment was growing.

It had grown more since Loki and the others brought back all of that crap from D.C.

Sighing up at the ceiling, I tried to push all of the other voices out of my light.

I still struggled with the whole thing. With Revik knowing about my parents, with Dalejem leaving Revik to work for my mother, with whatever the hell had happened between my mother and Revik that still had my father watching Revik like a hawk.

I’d asked him about that, too, but for once, he hadn’t said much. He admitted he’d had a crush on her when he first met her in Saigon, but it felt like there was more to the story than what he told me.

He was vehement that they had never been physical, which was a relief, at least.

Anyway, I couldn’t tell which part of it bothered me more. All of the stuff with Revik, the bullshit secrets for all of these years with Balidor and whoever else...or my mother apparently instructing Dalejem to leave me under a fucking
overpass
in the middle of a human city, when I was too young to even crawl.

Revik claimed he knew nothing about that, either, and I believed him.

It didn’t really answer any of my questions, though. It also didn’t make me want to talk to either of my parents, really, much less Dalejem himself.

I knew Revik felt he couldn’t tell me any of that stuff before.

I knew he’d made a vow, and that not breaking vows was a big deal to him. I also knew he’d obeyed Kali in part because of her intermediary status... and, indirectly, because of mine. I knew that got into his religious beliefs, which was a whole other part of his psyche I only partly understood but also knew mattered to him a lot.

But yeah, it bugged me.

Plus, there was that whole other question that nagged at me.

“How many men have you dated?” I asked him finally. “And why didn’t you ever tell me about any of them?”

That made him roll his eyes, too, and probably deservedly.

He told me, though. A funny thing about him ever since that blow up with me walking out: as annoyed as he might get with me for worrying about that stuff, he never refused to answer any of my questions. The answer to that one was pretty brief, though.

“None other than Dalejem,” he said, shrugging with a hand. “Other than Terry...and you already knew about that.”

A flicker of shock slid through my light. “I did?”

Revik turned his head, staring at me. His German accent grew more pronounced. “Allie! How did you not know about that?”

“I don’t know,” I said, clicking in annoyance. “Maybe because you never
told
me?”

But Revik seemed to think that the fact that he and Terian had once dated should have been completely obvious to me, even though he claimed that had only been sex, too. He claimed all of his relationships with men had been sex, that there hadn’t been any real “dating” going on with any of them, apart from Dalejem himself.

Revik further said he only called it a relationship with Terian because they’d been exclusive for awhile. He then pointed out that he’d been a Rook at the time, too, so hadn’t even been the same person he’d been with Dalejem, much less with me.

When I asked him if he’d slept with any of the male seers I knew on the ship, he’d gotten even more frustrated, but he’d told me the truth there, too.

“Yes,” he said, blunt. “Why? Do you want a list of names?”

I did, actually, but I hadn’t exactly wanted to tell him that.

Anyway, as much as I did want to know, I
didn’t
want to know, too. I was pretty tired of the
Alice in Wonderland
rabbit hole that was Revik’s sexual past. As soon as I thought I was more or less cool with all of it, something else appeared to smack me across the head and unbalance me all over again.

So instead I’d countered, “If we were in Beijing, would you want to know?”

But that made him angry for real.

Angry enough that we pretty much dropped the discussion after that.

I fought to think past everything we’d said though, even now, through the heartbeat of the ship, as I lay curled up against Revik’s side, my head cushioned on his bare shoulder. We hadn’t stayed angry at each other... we never did these days, not after we’d both apologized... but I felt that my comment about Beijing had hurt him. I could also tell he was still pissy about the whole thing with me staying with Jaden, even though he pretended to blow it off.

I’m pretty sure he knew I went there to see Angie, not Jaden himself, but yeah, it still bugged him. And yeah, I couldn’t exactly blame him for that, given my own lingering issues around Dalejem and Ullysa and whoever else.

Besides, Revik was probably right. I probably still loved Jaden in a way, too.

But I also saw him clearly now.

Clearly enough that I knew us even being
friends
was still a good ways off, and may never happen. Most of that wasn’t bitterness, at least not on my part. We just saw the world too differently now––I’d changed too much since those years. I could barely remember what I’d been like back then, meaning the version of me that first fell in love with Jaden.

Regardless, I couldn’t sleep.

The tension in my light didn’t feel like it was about Revik, though, not really. Not the bulk of it. Truthfully, I was feeling kind of down.

The world felt darker to me again.

I hated how little we really knew.

I hated how much everything we did these days seemed to rely on some form of bullshit or another, too––”prophet’s fumes,” as Revik called them, but essentially bullshit.

My bullshit. Kali’s bullshit. Tarsi and Balidor’s bullshit.

The so-called insights of the Council. Dreams. Time Jumps. Weird flickers of the future and deconstructions of the past.

It was all so damned nebulous. I was beginning to think I wasn’t much different from one of those ancient human kings who cut open chickens and had some weirdo pull apart their guts to make decisions.

I hated how little we actually
knew,
and how completely unreliable most of our sources were. I hated the fact that we all knew we probably had more Shadow plants on the ship. I hated that some of the things I dreamed might come true.

I hated that
Terian
was beginning to feel like one of my more reliable sources of intel.

We had planning sessions just about every day. Long ones, especially since Revik and Lily had come out of the tank. Those sessions could stretch for friggin’ hours and drive me crazy with the vagueness and b.s. that was all we had to work with.

Loki’s team had successfully pulled everything they could from that wall safe in the bunker under the White House in D.C. I’d probably been more skeptical than any of them about finding anything there... at least until Loki, Rex and Mika dumped out a bunch of data drives on the tech lab storage tables, along with organic machines I’d never seen before and reams of what looked like actual, dead-tree paper.

The techs were still going over all of that stuff, but we’d gotten some preliminary intel from the cache. Most of it––apart from some stuff on emergency weather planning, OBE fields and underground crop development––pertained to genetic experimentation. A lot of that focused on fusing machinery into humans made of seer parts.

Yeah. That.

From what Revik told me, that kind of thing had been going on for years, even though it was deeply illegal under the now-defunct World Court. Galaith had labs all over Asia working on similar problems, including the one where we’d found the original Barrier-enclosure, or “Tank,” in Southwestern China.

Vik now thought whoever was running this current crop of experiments might have had some success, though. Unsurprisingly, initial funding started under President Wellington.

A.k.a., Terian.

From what Revik told me, Terian had an obsession with genetics that dated back to the 1920s, before Revik even met him. At the end of World War II, Terian even roped Revik into coming with him to pillage Nazi concentration camps and hospitals before the Russians or Americans could get there. He’d stolen data, tissue samples, even live specimens pertaining to some of the fucked up experiments the Germans did, again mostly on seers. Galaith went on to fund Terian’s obsession for decades after that under the Rooks.

Revik explained he’d been tasked with keeping an eye on these projects as Terian’s superior. He’d even been brought in once to shut a facility down, when Terian played a little too fast and loose with his charter.

I didn’t ask for details.

Honestly, I didn’t really want to know what levels of grossness
that
must have entailed. For Terian to have slid past acceptable levels of sheer ick even for the Rooks, I knew it had to have been pretty godawfully bad.

Anyway, someone buried Wellington’s pet project when the new president, President Brooks, took over following his death. Or maybe they’d simply never told her about it.