Allie's War Season Four (170 page)

Either way, we all had a pretty good idea who funded Terian’s hobbies now.

Why any of that had been left behind in the evacuations was anyone’s guess.
 
Then again, a lot of things probably got lost with the panic around C2-77, and even earlier, when Wellington showed up dead. Revik told me Terian always did things off the books, no matter who he worked for. He’d hidden things from Galaith the whole time he was in the Rooks, or tried, anyway. Which told us something else.

Either Terian forgot he’d left that stuff there––presumably in his transition into Feigran and then back into Terian––or he’d deliberately kept that information from Shadow.

Revik seemed to think Shadow wouldn’t have left it there, if he’d known.

While I suspected he was right, I wanted to ask Feigran those questions himself.

Although, yeah... I knew how useful that might end up being.

Apart from intelligence and military strategy sessions and planning for the landing in Dubai, personal drama, of course, also unfolded... and not all of it around me and Revik. The drama quotient seemed worse lately in general.

Maybe because, yeah––giant boatload of seers.

I’d already heard about the whole shit-storm that broke out when Dante’s mom came back from the United States. Apparently Dante caught her mom in the middle of some weird light-bonding thing going on between her and
Loki,
of all people.

Yeah, Loki. The one guy in the senior team who talked even less than Revik.

From what I’d been told, it started pretty much the instant the two of them laid eyes on each other.

The other seers in the team, especially Mika and Rex, seemed to find the whole thing extremely funny. Dante threw a fit, however, which I guess was understandable. She accused Loki of mind-fucking her poor mother to get into her pants and a bunch of even less-complimentary things involving gang rape and racism against humans. Somewhere in the middle of all that, Loki felt the need to inform Dante that he hadn’t had sex with her mother yet, but that only blew Dante up more.

Maybe it was the “yet” part of that sentence?

Anyway, I barely got the story for all of the giggles from the seers who told me about it, and okay, from a distance, yeah, it was pretty funny. Since I’d been raised human, I maybe had a little more sympathy for Dante than a lot of them. I remembered all the crazy shit I used to believe about seers and tried to imagine walking in on my own mother (meaning Mia Taylor) with Balidor or one of the other infiltrators and the whole thing was just too disturbing to contemplate.

Of course, it was
also
only funny to us because we knew it wasn’t true.

Meaning, we knew Loki wasn’t raping her.

We could see it, even if we had no reason to believe his words. The first time I saw Loki and Gina together, I could see that she was into him. Heck, she could barely keep her hands off him, even sitting in a plastic booth in the mess hall.

I looked at Loki’s light pretty damned closely, too, and I couldn’t see him manipulating her at all. In fact, I could feel a lot of paranoia on him around that very thing, resulting in more of a hands-off approach to her light than might have been the case between two seers in the middle of a similar crush-type thing.

But yeah, I’m sure to Dante it was a lot less funny.

It would likely remain unfunny to her until we managed to convince her that no one had actually done anything crappy to her mom.

I already really liked Gina, Dante’s mom, from the small amount I’d talked to her. It was kind of weird to realize we weren’t that far apart in age. In fact, we basically
were
the same age, give or take a few years, and from a human perspective, that put us solidly as peers.

The reality of that age similarity made me look at Dante a little differently, too. Not quite in a “motherly” way, but yeah, maybe a bit more how the seers saw her, and a lot younger than I’d been seeing her back in New York.

Of course, having my own daughter might have influenced that.

The thing with Gina was funny, though––meaning the age thing––if only because it made me realize how much I’d changed, in terms of my own perceptions. Something about living among seers and constantly being told how young I was must have skewed my previous ideas of what certain ages meant, from the human point of view...where, yeah, I
would
have been old enough to have a teenage daughter, if I’d still been living a normal human life.

I still think Gina had Dante pretty young, because she couldn’t have been over thirty-five or thirty-six, which put her in late teens or early twenties when she gave birth. That was even assuming she looked a few years young for her age.

Still, it was nice to have another woman on board that I could more or less relate to.

I mean, sure, I could relate to the other female seers a lot better now, but there was something different about being with a human who had been raised human versus a seer who had been raised seer. In some ways, I could still relate a lot more to the human experiences and perceptions, since they’d still shaped the majority of my own life.

Moreover, yeah, Gina was cool.

I’d remembered Dante telling me she had a “cool” mom, and I guess I’d pictured cool moms like when I was a teenager...not someone more or less my age, who was maybe was a senior while I was a sophomore in high school. The biggest differences between us, in fact, came more out of the New York versus San Francisco thing, not the human to seer thing.

I could tell Revik found it funny, too.

He told me he found it interesting hearing me and Gina talk. It reminded him of watching me with my human friends back when he’d been my bodyguard. He told me I hadn’t talked to Jon like that much for years now, that I tended to treat Jon more like I would another seer, with only occasional forays into private jokes and San Francisco-specific things.

Also, Revik knew Jon, and so did I; people act different with someone they know.

Some of the drama had been around me and Revik, too, of course.

There was what I’d done to his and Lily’s light, which caused a stink with some of the senior infiltrators and the Council. There was the whole thing with my biological parents being on board. And yeah, probably most of all, there was the blowout with me and Revik, and the thing in my light that changed afterwards, which apparently was pretty obvious to just about every seer who looked at me now. There was also some lingering gossip about the blowout itself.

I apologized to Jon. And to Wreg.

Both of them basically told me to forget it.

I tried apologizing to Ullysa, but she wouldn’t really let me. Instead she fell over herself to apologize to
me,
which, yeah, was awkward.

She was less understanding with Revik’s side of things.

Revik finally admitted to me, after I bugged him about it, noticing how cold she’d been to him, that Ullysa wouldn’t speak to him at all anymore. She’d essentially severed their friendship following what I’d done in the mess hall, and told him so.

When I asked him why, Revik rolled his eyes, clicking at me.

“Because she thinks I misled her,” he said, his voice impatient. “And she’s probably right. I did tell her that I’d talked to you about it.”

I stared at him, surprised. “You actually lied to her?”

He clicked at me louder, leaning against the wall behind the bed.

“I meant about
needing
that...and about telling you I wanted it. But yeah, she obviously thought I meant I’d talked to you specifically about why I was there. I didn’t dissuade her.” Seeing the incredulous look on my face, he rolled his eyes again, but colored that time, exuding embarrassment. “All right. I misled her.”

“Why?”

“Because Ullysa is religious,” he said, giving me an angrier look. “And a fuck of a lot more devoted to
you
than you seem to realize. I knew she wouldn’t do it if I didn’t tell her I had permission...so I let her think I did.”

I’d continued to stare at him, still blown away that he’d lied.

“And you thought that wouldn’t get back to her?” I said finally. “Or was it me you were hoping wouldn’t find out?”

He’d combed his fingers through his hair, exhaling again.

I felt the grief in his light that time, though, even before I heard it in his voice.

“I lied to myself about that, too.” Glancing at me, he let some of the defensiveness in his voice drop. “Allie, I really thought of it more like going to Yumi. I wasn’t thinking clearly, but I never intended to lie to
you
about it. I lost a friend over it...and I deserve that...but I don’t want you to think that I deliberately went in there, knowing it would hurt you. I convinced myself it wasn’t a big deal.”

I hadn’t said anything after that, mostly because I didn’t have to.

He was right. He’d already lost a friend over it.

“...And nearly a wife,” he muttered, his voice holding that grief again. “Believe me, Allie, there is no confusion in me on that point. There won’t be. Ever again.”

I’d frowned at that, too, but wasn’t sure what to say.

I could see how he’d rationalized it to himself. I could also see how Ullysa had seen it, and I couldn’t help but be more sympathetic to her viewpoint than his.

I suspected he even felt the same. Somewhere in that, I’d asked him how he would have felt if I’d gone to Jaden for something that personal, and I could tell that stung him, too.

I could also tell the comment hadn’t quite left his mind yet.

Anyway, he’d hardly fought me on any of it. Rather, he’d basically promised me he wouldn’t so much as take his shoes off in front of someone else without my permission, ever again...or at least not any time in the foreseeable future.

I hadn’t asked that of him, either. Nor did I really want it, truthfully, but he didn’t seem to want to even discuss it with me. In any case, I could tell he meant it.

Still, things continued to be strange with us.

Maybe because my light had changed again after that whole blowout, or maybe because of what I’d done to his and Lily’s light in the tank the next day, but Revik and I were going through one of our “things” again...a lot more intensely than when we’d first been reunited after we left New York. Revik had given me a bunch of reasons around why he thought that was, and while they all made sense intellectually, the way I experienced it was a lot more straightforward.

Meaning, yeah, I wanted to touch him pretty much constantly.

I wanted to be in his light constantly, too, and when we weren’t with Lily, I pretty much wanted us to be naked constantly...to the extent that I was having trouble keeping my hands off him in front of other people, which hadn’t been much of an issue before.

As a result, we weren’t getting a lot of sleep.

As we parked in the staging area on the North Indian Coast and plans started firming around Dubai, I knew I needed to do a few things before we went live.

Things other than the endless planning sessions, that is, and the arguments about who would go ashore and which of us would lead what extraction teams for what parts of the city and what might happen to me and Revik inside that construct, especially if Shadow managed to cut us off from one another...and a million other things.

At the top of that list, I had to bite the bullet and talk to Cass.

I FOUND MYSELF inside a virtual depiction of the inside of the tank quadrant all at once, and without preamble. I didn’t know for sure how it looked from her end––I assumed it included the door being opened from the outside, complete with sound effects and whatever else––but from my perspective, I just appeared there.