Allie's War Season Four (60 page)

Well. More nervous, anyway.

This whole thing, them being here and Revik being half out of his head with grief and anger and whatever else...it just felt wrong. Something about even the quality of the silence made Jon feel off-balance and weirdly out of joint with time, with their physical location, with his own mind and light...even his body, as well as the presence of the other seers.

Jon didn’t know if the construct over Manhattan created or worsened that feeling, but he suspected the latter rather than the former. This didn’t feel like a military operation at all. Instead, Jon found himself as lost in denial as Revik––not only about their own chances inside, but even the idea that they had any agency left at all.

Moreover, something about the group of them standing here, pretending like nothing was wrong, made Jon feel oddly like he’d been transported back to high school, and was in the process of breaking into a building as part of a teenage prank.

Nothing he felt about Allie seemed real. Some part of him, and not a small part, didn’t believe her to be dead at all.

Revik turned his head, giving Jon a sharp look.

For a second, all of the confusion faded from the tall seer’s eyes. He stared at Jon like a predator, like a wolf staring at a rival. The look chilled Jon somehow, even as it snapped him back to the present.

“Don’t,” was all Revik said.

Jon nodded.

Swallowing, he looked away, gripping the handle of his main weapon, an organically modified Glock 21. Jon looked down at it, fingering the molded triggers, including the switch on the outer barrel that gave it fully automatic capability. It looked and felt a lot like the Glock 18 Revik had originally given him, back in London. That had been Jon’s first gun––to fire, much less to own. That seemed like a million years ago now, too.

On this op, Revik advised him against bringing a rifle while they’d been arming up. Revik stated bluntly he wanted Jon to have his hands free and be more mobile and adaptable than a rifle would easily allow. Others must have gotten the same advice, because Jon could see now that only about two-thirds of them carried the heavier weapons, and most of those were in Loki’s group, not Revik’s. Revik was rifle-free, too, as was Maygar. Wreg carried one, but it was smaller than what Neela and Chinja wore attached to harnesses, and he wore it wrapped around his back by the strap, more like a bow or a quiver.

Loki didn’t carry one of the big guns, either, but even he had a larger weapon, that same completely custom, short-barreled and weirdly seer-looking rifle that he kept strapped to his back whenever he went on military ops.

Jon knew he was distracting himself, thinking about weapons, but that was okay, too.

Harboring delusions about Allie, especially where Revik could feel them, would only get them all killed.

“Fun house, remember?” Jorag muttered, on Jon’s other side.

Jon looked up at him, and found the dark-haired seer frowning under his blue eyes.

“They’ll show us things in here,” Jorag added, softer. “Things none of us want to see. You need to be ready for that, brother. Boss knows...he’s already expecting it.”

Swallowing, Jon nodded to that, too.

That pain in his gut only worsened, though.

When he glanced over at the rest of the group, he found Revik’s eyes on his again, now holding a machine-like coldness that Jon found even more disconcerting than the anger he’d seen there, only a few seconds before.

“Are you ready?” Revik said, glancing around at all of them.

The other seers nodded, but Jon knew he couldn’t be the only one to feel their uncertainty. Jon didn’t feel fear on the others, not exactly. Instead, a lower-level tension lived there, vibrating their light, their very skin like a live wire against nerve endings.

Wreg, as per usual, was the one to break that moment.

The Chinese-looking seer motioned towards Garensche a second time. As he did, the muscular seer stepped deliberately in front of Revik, without being told to do so. The clear intention behind the act didn’t escape Jon’s notice, or seemingly that of the others, either. That impression grew stronger when Neela stood to Revik’s left across from Jon, who still stood at his right. Maygar remained slightly behind the two of them, with Jorag on Jon’s other side. Jax stepped closer to the front, by Garensche and Chinja.

Clearly, Wreg saw their job––meaning that of the other seers, and probably Jon’s, too––as being primarily to keep Revik more or less alive long enough to complete his goal. Loki and Illeg stayed slightly back, but Jon saw their eyes on the surrounding buildings and street, and knew they saw their own job in roughly the same terms.

For the first time, it really sank in for Jon that he and Wreg probably wouldn’t come out of this alive, either.

Looking at the muscular, broad-shouldered seer’s back, he could only feel regret. Regret that he hadn’t said more to him, even as recently as in that high-end office in the hotel, or before they got to Revik and Allie’s suite on the sixtieth floor. Regret that he hadn’t been able to pull his shit together in San Francisco. Jon couldn’t find the words for what he wanted to think about him, or towards him, maybe to say to him before all of this really ended.

He’d waited too long with Wreg.

He’d waited too long with Allie, too.

“After you, my brother,” Wreg said to Garensche, a pale humor in his voice.

Something about how he said it dispelled the barest layer of that tension coursing through the rest of them. It wasn’t enough to relax the group, but it was enough to bring a few exhales that came closest to laughs.

Garensche himself rolled his eyes, clicking at Wreg in mock disapproval.

He did as Wreg indicated, though, walking forward without hesitation.

Jon watched Garensche walk towards the glass doors, realizing again just how large the seer was. Garensche had always reminded Jon of a pirate, with his full mouth and swarthy complexion and barrel-chested body. The diagonal scar he’d gotten in a Nazi work camp during World War II only added to the impression, as well as the way he dressed, which had even more of that nomadic, ex-Mongolian flair than how Wreg sometimes dressed.

Wreg told Jon once that they speculated that Garensche had more than a little Wvercian blood in him, and that therefore, the giant seer constituted the only known evidence that the two variants of seer could actually reproduce––a joke that made Gar scowl and cracked up everyone else who’d been in the bar that night. Obviously, it was an old joke, though, because the giant seer shrugged it off, making some crack about Wreg and his ‘human names.’

Whether part-Wvercian or not, Garensche was tall. In fact, he was the only seer in the group who stood taller than even Revik. Even Jorag was about a half-inch or so shorter than Revik, and Wreg, while being larger than the Elaerian overall, wasn’t as tall as Revik, either. Garensche, on the other hand, probably had three inches on him, which put him in the neighborhood of seven feet. As Jon looked up at the other man’s massive shoulders and back, Garensche grabbed the handle of the door with one meaty hand.

Despite the test with the plastic bottle, Jon saw the relief in the giant’s hazel eyes when he glanced back at the rest of them.

“Looks okay,” he said, grinning.

He opened the door.

A flash of light made Jon cry out in shock.

He wasn’t the only one.

He heard Chinja yell out, and Jax. Jon jumped violently back with the rest of them, nearly hitting the cement sidewalk, only stopping when Loki grabbed his arm from behind, pulling him up and back to safety. A sickening squelch of sound hit Jon’s ears, what sounded like sizzling fat, somewhere between a knife and throwing a hunk of raw meat on a grill.

Bending his knees, Jon dropped to a combat crouch despite Loki’s hand gripping his arm. He blinked, shocked by the sound, even more than by the sharp dagger of flame that seemed to come out of the door itself...and the accompanying white light.

By the time Jon could see again, his mind had already started putting it together––the sharp light, those horrific sounds, the thick inhales from the seers around him, a hard stab of pain from Wreg. Before he’d looked down, Jon could smell it, too.

Something about the immediacy of that smell hit at his mind in a more visceral way than any of the visuals or sounds, including the plumes of black smoke that rose in an already-dissipating cloud, or the sight that greeted his eyes once he could see again.

“Gods,” he heard Jorag gasp next to him.

The tall seer clung to Jon’s arm on the other side of Loki. Jon hadn’t even noticed, even though Jorag’s grip bordered on painful.

Jon couldn’t look away from the sight of Garensche. Some part of him felt sick, maybe even sick enough to throw up...but even that reaction felt far away already.

Fragments continued to assemble, turning into a coherent picture, one he didn’t really need detailed but that his mind detailed anyway. A second OBE had ignited as soon as Garensche opened the door. That secondary defense cut Garensche cleanly in half, slicing his head, neck and a good chunk of his chest and upper body off from the rest of him, and leaving the good-natured, pirate-like, mastermind with organic machines and notoriously perverted Garensche in two, smoking, oddly-bloodless pieces on either side of the sparking and buzzing membrane.

Jon could only stare down at what remained of the seer he’d known for almost four years, almost as long as he’d known Revik himself. He stared at that smoking, meat-smelling pile of flesh and bone, paralyzed.

None of the others moved at first, either.

Jon still stood there when a curse came from Revik’s lips, in a language Jon had never heard from him or any of the others before. Fury burst out of Revik’s light. That fury brightened, turning colder and hotter in different threads, seemingly at the same time. The combination felt irrational, maybe even completely unhinged, but Jon couldn’t disagree with any of what he felt. The other seers standing around him only seemed to mirror those feelings, too.

Then a flush of hard light left the shield around Revik.

That time, it was pure fire.

A scream broke from Revik’s lips as the light left him. Not quite a scream––too much anger lived there for it to be a real scream, at least how Jon normally thought of screams.

Jon felt it like a slam in his chest.

Not pain, but something in him just...left. A drain so severe his knees buckled, even though the light traveled through him, not from him, or even from any of the others. He felt Jorag stagger next to him, even as he gripped Jon’s arm, as if to keep both of them standing. Wreg let out a snarling kind of yell, too, and suddenly, Jon felt all of them around him, furious, but strangely focused. He didn’t feel grief, not then.

It was pure, unbridled fury.

The gap between Revik’s light leaving him and the outcome must have been short, but it felt long. Silence lived there, where Jon could only hear the loud, hollow thuds of his heart, the rush of air as Revik’s light pushed it out of the way, the gasps of their breaths...

Then the organic wall exploded.

The panes didn’t crack; they fragmented, turning to powder.

Somewhere, second and third transformers exploded in a shower of sparks. Dim, in the background, Jon knew he should stand back, that he should get out of the way, or at least shield his face, but he only stood there, staring up at that shadowed wall, feeling the construct reel and contort around him, feeling the flare of presences behind the Barrier as those inside the Manhattan construct reacted to the influx of light. For the first time, Jon grew consciously aware of what must be SCARB agents, NYPD, seers working for FEMA and the other governmental bodies ostensibly in charge of keeping order in the city...

Around them, the organic panes continued to shatter...falling straight down like water in a single sheet to explode onto the pavement just outside of those double doors.

Jon watched it fall, watched the metal twist and crack, almost in awe.

He felt a series of sharp blasts of fear ripple the edges of his light. That time, the fear didn’t come from the group of seers clustered around the Sword.

Even so, Jon couldn’t bring himself to feel vindicated by that fear, not yet.

All Jon felt was the rage in Revik’s light, along with a focus that grew unnervingly sharp as the seconds passed, inexorably slow as Garensche’s death grew permanent to all of them. Jon felt Revik’s rage pound the light of the other seers who stood with him outside the building, but it didn’t weaken them; if anything, it sharpened their own light, until the shield around Revik stood diamond hard, seemingly impenetrable.