Allie's War Season Four (2 page)

Wait. Wait for him here.

Wait for both of them, maybe.

If I waited long enough, some part of me would figure out how to reach him...to reach her. Or maybe just to forget.

Forget that I’d failed. Forget the pain I left for both of them.

Failure for me is nothing new. My course through lives could be tracked by the failures, big and small that attach to my name.

The feeling matters. It is all that matters, that feeling.

I love them both so much. I love...and even that word feels inadequate.

A promise broken, not by me, but broken nonetheless. All feeling lives in me still, but I can’t use it to help either of them. I am gone but not gone. I cannot even return, not until something in this glass case breaks, setting me free.

They destroyed me, but not. I still am, but not. I still love. They haven’t taken that from me, even if I can’t breathe in this place, I still have that.

I have to trust that the bare bones of me still exist, somewhere. I have to trust that I’m still here, just temporarily stuck, temporarily on hold, since I can’t reach anything, since I can’t feel my own body or find my way back on my own. The small things elude me...I elude myself, who I was. I can’t find him...

I try to hold on to the other. I live for those occasional glimpses...like a poster print of a master that has faded in direct sun. She teases me, pulls at me, just enough to remind me that I can’t get to her, either, not now, when she is the smallest and most vulnerable.

She is lost to me, but I cannot stop myself from trying.

I can’t get to her, and she is alone. She cries out to me, but I can only feel her grief, her loss. I cannot soothe her, cannot keep that promise, either. Nor can he. I feel his heart breaking, and I can only...watch. I can only watch them both.

I cannot bear that I have left her there. I cannot bear that I left him.

Words live there, but they contain too much. Too much for me to hold.

Husband. Father. Daughter.

Daughter...

I try to reach her, but I cannot. I hear his cries, too. The pain in his heart, as he tries to reach her. Those golden waves come when they want to come...leave when they want to leave, and leave me a shell in the spaces between.

I am nothing here. I am all, but I cannot help them.

I am the empty vase.

I dream for her. I imagine innocent light, a wealth of feeling and intensity. Up and down feeling, remorse and fear, intensity and deception, heights that soar only because plains and valleys live below. I remember that person, who might have once been me, once upon a time...whose light looks dirty to me now, confused and dim, but who could touch those golden shores. I try to share that with her, too. But the gear shaft is broken. All of the connecting points between no longer work.

This can’t be right. Things can’t end this way.

This empty, nothing place, it can’t be right.

Her being alone here, without either of us...that can’t be right.

That grief over the golden waves...

The being alone...

It can’t be the way this story ends.
 

When I concentrate on him, I get only vague feelings, images, a pain I can’t control or categorize or make less. The reality of him, the certainty of him remains...a constant flicker of difference in the pit of nothing in which I live. Some promise, a fervent wish for possibility. Another part of me knows that as delusion, or maybe just wishful thinking...wanted so much it spins across the surface of my mind, trying to rationalize, trying to convince myself I will get better, that there is something left of me to save.

A voice. Soft, so familiar.

...And in those ending moments, she will die. But it is not a quiet death, for a part of her will remain. It will stay and be lured back into the light, back into one final struggle against the dark. The birth comes from that death. The final form comes from its ending...

I listen to him.

I try to reach him, to comfort him, but I cannot.

He reads to me, for hours sometimes. Days maybe...weeks.

I drift inside his words, lost there.

I try to understand, but the words disappear like a sand sculpture in wind, as gusts slide roughly across the face, turning features smooth and bland, empty of him.

...The battle will not end this way. Death will neither bring it forth nor its end. Death will break the last hold of the spark into the fire, luring from the place of lost between...

Some part of me cries, hearing his words. It cries and cries.

He doesn’t always read. Sometimes he cries there, with me.

I see him, from a long way away, holding a body I almost recognize.

...Don’t leave me,
he says.
Gods, baby...don’t leave me here alone...

I can feel that...I can feel his words. But not him, not his tears.

I cry, but I can’t move, nor crawl my way out of that dark.

I can hear him, but I don’t know how to help him.

I remember, though.

I remember everything.

1

MOTHER

I FEEL HER there, alone. I feel the bite of that silver light.

I see the smoke-filled glass that corrupts her light, making it rigid in all the wrong ways, breaking her on the inside, cutting her off from her heart, from all of that love that lives above and around her...terrifying her. Lost in the dark. There is no horror deeper than this. It is beyond fear. Beyond loss. The abyss beckons, pulling at her gently, promising her that she will succumb. She reaches for me, but she cannot touch me here. She reaches for him, but cannot feel his light, not in all of that dark. She reaches for the only thing she has left, the one hope, the one thing that seems to love her...

Mother. She has a mother.

The thought makes me scream inside.

I cannot let them have her. I cannot let them break her.

I cannot...

CASS SNAPPED OUT, frowning. She felt whispers like that sometimes, closer to hallucinations than real thoughts. The presence behind it felt real, but then, Cass had known Allie for nearly thirty years, so she could have done that part herself. Cass could conjure Allie’s presence just fine all on her own, no outside intervention required.

This seer business was still new to her, though.

Menlim told her that picking up a flotsam of random impressions, resonances and information from the Barrier constituted part of Cass’s new normal. Meaning, it was just part of being a seer. Menlim also said she should be receiving significantly
more
of that crap, actually. The construct over the ship shielded her from the worst of it, blocking or deflecting the vast majority of what would’ve hit her otherwise.

Menlim assured her that he would always protect her in this way.

Still, she wondered what those weird, ghost-like whispers from Allie meant.

Could it really be Allie’s ghost?

More likely it was just her, meaning Cass’s own brain playing tricks. Some part of Cass imagined Allie’s thoughts simply to entertain itself. Or maybe Cass compulsively and stubbornly continued the argument with her ex-friend, knowing the other’s mind well enough to act out both ends of the stupid drama, even with Allie out of the picture.

Or was there some other, deeper-seated psychology operating there? Was it some half-assed attempt to keep Allie around?

Snorting a little, Cass shook her head.

Not likely.

Still smiling at the thought, Cass gazed out over the wake of the ship, feeling the deck below her feet roll up and down. It moved sensually, comfortingly, sliding over and under a series of long-appearing waves. Those waves glided toward her in an odd, inexorable silence, their white crests visible all the way to the eastern horizon.

Cass’s mind fell into a gentle hum. She let her knees and weight grow loose under the motion, let her whole body conform to its rhythms, lulling her.

She shook her hair into a gust of spray from the tailwind, exhaling in a near-sigh.

She’d spotted whales alongside the ship yesterday.

Even in so short a time, the whales seemed to sense that the threat from human predators had significantly diminished over the past several months. Whales had been protected for the past three decades, but poachers never bothered to read the fine print, especially given the lucrative market in whale meat in both Asia and North America. Cass’s own family had been buying black market whale meat since she was a kid. She remembered Allie coming over for dinner once and frowning down at it, her nose crinkled.

Her dad probably never brought home whale meat.

At the thought, Cass felt her face tighten in the wind. Her jaw ground her back molars together, even as she fought to push Allie from her mind.

She’d done this to herself.

Allie had no one to blame but herself.

Cass liked her ocean-bound existence, although she missed living in cities, too. Sleeping on and under the ocean had grown so familiar, she scarcely noticed the motion of the water other than to relax into it. She’d been warned about sea-legs, of course, more than once while preparations had been underway for excursions onshore, both in Europe and the Middle East.

They’d left those land masses behind weeks ago, though.

Cass’s seer bodyguards, currently consisting mainly of Salinse’s people, along with several left over from the guard that once protected Shadow’s dwelling in Patagonia, assured her that shore excursions would be limited to the quarantine cities from now on.

Everywhere else, the human-killing disease continued to rage. That same disease now chewed through every continent where humans lived. Which, at this point in time, with the exception of what remained of Antarctica, included all of them. Of course, every human onboard the ship had already been vaccinated for the disease. All of the seers had been vaccinated, too, on the slim, off chance that C2-77 mutated into something seers could catch directly.

So yeah, the disease wasn’t the issue, really.

The issue was Revik.

For the past few months, a black hole lived in the Barrier where Revik’s light used to live. They’d lost their direct line to Jon, too, and through him, to Wreg. Cass and the others got glimpses...mostly of Revik himself, and mostly while Revik slept, as he had a tendency to wander outside his own construct at night.

Shadow smilingly called it Revik’s tendency to ‘hunt in his sleep.’

Unfortunately, none of those glimpses did much to illuminate Revik’s waking state.

Shadow seemed to find that strange. More than strange, perhaps. He didn’t say why, exactly, that he found it so strange. He only commented that he’d never been so thoroughly cut off from Revik’s light before, even in those years when Revik’s light had been split.

Cass knew Shadow wasn’t telling her everything.

That was okay, too...for now.

She
 
glimpsed enough to know that Shadow’s concerns had something to do with Revik’s light, with the way Shadow usually accessed him in the dark. As far as their inability to penetrate Revik’s mind while he slept, well, Shadow seemed to find that less unusual. Revik had been trained to protect himself in his dreams. He’d been trained to shield while he slept, to fight while he lay unconscious. Cass and the others could
feel
him, mostly through emotional links and triggers of whatever kind. None of them managed to translate those feelings into real intelligence, however...at least not yet.