Allie's War Season Four (171 page)

Ignoring her at first, I walked directly to what for me was a virtual chair, and sat in it.

We weren’t playing this little game in virtual just to be jerks.

I couldn’t be cut off from Revik and Lily, not even for a short interview, so I was in a specially-designed virtual jump room, lying in a vat of pink jelly stuff that reminded me of the green slime we used to buy at the joke shop as kids. It looked pretty gross and felt wet even though it wasn’t––but now that I lay in a bathtub of the stuff, it allowed me total freedom of movement. Balidor likened it to floating in salt water, which made sense.

In any case, Cass shouldn’t know I wasn’t really there.

Over the past few weeks, they’d equipped her quadrant of the tank with a pretty fancy virtual reality interface. Dante had taken it as a personal affront that Terian’s VR transmission inside the tank was more sophisticated than anything she’d worked out on her own. As a result, she made it her personal mission to figure out how he’d done it.

She and Jaden had been working on widening the bandwidth that could operate inside the tanks for awhile. Dante redoubled her efforts on that, too, once she realized she’d need it to pull off Terian’s trick.

I was the test run. If we’d done everything right, Cass shouldn’t even know I wasn’t really there, not wearing a collar.

She hadn’t spoken to me yet, or even acknowledged me apart from a faintly-amused grunt as I first lowered myself into the chair. She didn’t look up as I continued to sit there, but only shook her head, exuding anger. I couldn’t feel that anger, of course.

Well, not really.

I could see it on the Barrier readouts being recorded via cameras inside the room, and Dante’s new, enhanced VR program now translated those imprints into actual emotional feelings that hit my light. So yeah, with the virtual program translating those imprints into actual sensations, it
felt
like I could feel it...if that even remotely makes sense.

The truth was, I didn’t want to be here at all, not even like this.

I knew I had to talk to her though. Even if I didn’t know exactly why.

Anyway, anger wasn’t the predominant emotion I felt on Cass. Not real anger.

Most of what I felt via that Barrier-virtual-recording interface was excitement.

I’d halfway expected that, too, from our last little interaction. It reminded me of Ditrini, that wanting of engagement. Maybe they both looked for any opportunity to feel important. That, or they needed the distraction from the silence when they were left alone. I’d known for awhile now that this new version of Cass got off on any excuse to fuck with people––with me, Jon and Revik especially––but the reality of that excitement still made me grimace.

Since that whole blowout with Revik, so many things were just
clearer
now, including around Cass, both the old and new models. Some part of me had known from the beginning that this personality transplant wasn’t wholly new to Cass...not entirely anyway. She’d always liked fucking with other people a little too much. She’d always liked power games and gossip and revenge a little too much. She’d always gotten off on “winning” a little too much, or at least the illusion of it. I knew she could be incredibly passive aggressive to those ends, in addition to aggressive-aggressive, especially when the theatrics suited her.

I also knew she invented a lot of these dramas in part to fight depression.

But all that had been softened by other things, back when we were friends.

Now, it was like the person I knew was still there, but warped and distilled through a pane of glass that only let through the ugly bits. None of it was
unfamiliar
exactly, but it definitely had a harder, meaner flavor. There were also a lot fewer glimpses of the vulnerability of the person behind the veneer, the one I actually gave a shit about.

What had been occasionally irritating but overall kind of sympathetic and
human
before, now just felt petty and dark.

That core of vulnerability and heart that had once softened and wrapped itself around those other parts of her was gone...or hidden, at least.

I’d seen her play victim in here, sure, but that just felt like more bullshit, one other tactic in an arsenal meant to control, not to connect.

Now, with so much of her light structured by the Dreng, Cass seemed to have given herself permission to live in that shallow, power-obsessed place pretty much full-time.

Because of that, I could only see the parts of her I’d chosen to overlook in the past––the parts of her that liked to chip away at people, to undermine, to run little agendas and games. To lie. To steal boyfriends from the girls she was jealous of. To turn perceived slights into full-fledged wars. To manipulate people. To drive wedges between them. To sabotage other people’s good fortune or find some way to make their victories about her.

Basically all the parts of her I used to pretend she’d grow out of.

It was looking less and less likely she would grow out of it anytime soon.

Considering where her mind and light lived these days, it was pretty much a given that Cass looked forward to seeing me. One thing I’d learned over the past few years, especially in Beijing: people who lived to exert power
always
looked for an excuse for engagement. Any excuse at all. Being ignored was like a death sentence for them. It was also pretty much a given that the mere fact so much of their energy was focused on fucking with other people’s heads, inevitably they’d be good at it.

So when I sat there, looking at her, I saw Cass ignoring me.

More than that however, I saw the button she was aiming at, trying to get a reaction, by the precise
way
she ignored me.

Sighing, I looked around the small space. I made an instant decision. It might tip her off that I wasn’t really there, but I didn’t care all that much.

As I thought it, it happened. The virtual space reconfigured around us both.

I found myself sitting on a stretch of sandy beach that I knew so well it caught my breath, even though I’d been the one to summon it.

The beach no longer existed in reality, so maybe that was part of it.

Back when we were kids, Cass and I visited the real place a lot... to chase birds, to make sand castles and collect shells... and, more than anything, to use our bikes to get as far away from the adults as we could. Later, when we were in high school, Jon would come with us, and sometimes others in the old crew. We’d sit on the dunes and talk shit and smoke and drink from the flask Cass always managed to fill up from her dad’s liquor cabinet.

Eventually, Jaden and I would come out here too.

Thinking about those days, I looked at the red-painted Golden Gate Bridge on my right in the distance, and felt a pain in my chest.

Most of those people were dead now.

Something about that realization, along with the memories themselves, combined with my recent few days of watching Sasquatch and Jaden get stoned and play video games, made those days seem strangely closer and yet further away than they ever had.

That version of me just felt... gone.

Maybe even more gone than the version of Cass I remembered.

I sighed as the hard metal of the virtual chair from Cass’s cell vanished.

Now I rested on a grassy dune of virtual sand, just southwest of a cliff that sat far out in the water, cutting off the north end of the beach to my right. Drawing my knees in to my chest, I circled my shins with my arms, hugging my legs tight to my body. I looked out over the dark blue water and the lightly crashing waves.

Cass stared out over the same view.

I could even
feel
the coast inside the VR, so there must be some lingering Barrier imprint catalogued in the program...that, or my mind and light manufactured that feeling from resonance and memory alone. Whatever the source, for the first time, I let myself go there. I let myself feel that this was Cass, my best friend for as long as I could remember.

I knew the dangers of doing it, even as I let it happen.

I didn’t need any reminders of how dangerous she was now...even locked up in here. Balidor lectured me on that point again and again in the lead up to this little interview. Those warnings felt beside the point, truthfully. Looking out over the sunset-kissed image of the Golden Gate Bridge hanging over the water, smelling rotting fish and salt as I listened to the cry of gulls, I found myself seeing Cass as a person again, beyond the twisted thing that she’d let herself become under the Dreng.

I also saw how I
hadn’t
been doing that before.

Really, since we’d found her down in Argentina, I’d let myself forget about Cass as a person... as opposed to an operational priority of one kind or another. That might have made me feel guilty at one point. Now, I didn’t feel anything.

Maybe because, for the first time, I didn’t kid myself that the person sitting in front of me was my best friend, Cass. I didn’t know what she was anymore, or where Cass had gone, or even if Cass still existed the way I remembered her, but pretending this was my best friend, no matter what this thing looked like, wasn’t going to do me any favors.

Nor did it feel particularly accurate.

This wasn’t even like Revik, where I could still glimpse him inside the mess he’d become while trapped inside the Dreng. All I saw when I looked at Cass was a blank wall. So yeah, for now, at least, I assumed I was dealing with the Dreng directly when I spoke to her.

“Hey...are you okay?”

Revik, via the link in my ear.

I nodded, barely perceptible. I knew he would see it.

They’d decided to leave me alone inside the interrogation room so that I would have less Barrier interference. They hadn’t left me alone entirely, of course.

I felt a flush of worry on Revik’s light. I knew he didn’t want me talking to Cass in the first place. I knew why, too.

I knew Balidor agreed with him, if for different reasons.

The truth is, Kali was the only other person who thought I should come in here. As much as I hated to admit it, I appreciated her for that. I knew they would’ve fought me if I’d been forced to make the argument alone, but they seemed to listen to her, as the resident prescient. The bottom line was, I needed to talk to Cass before we hit Dubai. I didn’t know why––which irritated me, yeah––but the feeling held, so I was doing it.

Even Revik didn’t argue once Kali backed me up.

Anyway, it seemed to have become the Allie and Kali magical bullshit hour lately, so no one questioned my nebulous impulses anyway, maybe partly from having her around. I still didn’t like that fact––not at all, really––but it was what it was.

Now that I was here, I decided to let Cass open things up.

I didn’t have to wait long.

Turns out, the new and not-so-improved Cass didn’t like silence anymore than Ditrini did. Eventually she seemed to realize I wasn’t going to push her to talk. She let out another of those laughs that contained not a single shred of real humor.

Leaning back, she plopped her palms in the soft sand, shaking out her long, red-tipped black hair under the last light of the sun. Lifting her hand a moment later, she shielded her eyes from that same virtual sun as she aimed her gaze further west. Again, fitting in a way. We’d watched more sunsets on the real Baker Beach than I could count. We generally ended up here after school and homework, and went home not long after dark.

I watched Cass’s eyes follow a pelican skimming over the tips of white-crested waves as they curled gently into foam.

Lowering her hand, she let out a louder snort.

“Baker Beach,” she said. “Wow. How corny could you get?”

She looked at me in annoyance, her brown eyes unknown to me, so distant I didn’t even bother to look for her in them. I looked at the electronic conversions of her aleimic signature instead, using invisible-to-her VR screens I pulled up behind her, so that they floated over the reddening mouth of the bay.

I wondered again if I might be able to pull the same structures off her that I’d pulled off Revik and Lily. I’d already been warned it was less likely in Cass’s case, and not only because Revik and Lily wanted theirs gone.

Still, I didn’t really get why until I saw the structures themselves. Now that I could see her through the changes in my own sight, I noticed a lot of rebuilding by the Dreng. Not really
more
than what I’d seen on Lily or Revik, but different. It was like they’d created whole sections of her structure from scratch, maybe to jumpstart the telekinesis.