Allie's War Season Four (67 page)

“Laoban.
Nenzi. Listen to me...listen, brother...right now. Look at me, Nenz...”

Jon swallowed, feeling pain in his light, so crippling his legs went nearly to jelly.

He continued to grip Revik, but felt a nausea so deep inside his body and aleimi that he could barely look at the other man’s face, or feel Revik’s tightened muscles under his fingers. Somewhere in that, Jon realized he still held the gun out in front of him, only now, he gripped it in a single hand, and didn’t look at where he aimed it.

For a few seconds, all he could hear were the low, steadying words from Wreg’s lips, even as the larger seer held Revik closer, gripping him around the back and shoulder.

“Steady,
laoban...”
Wreg murmured. “Steady...you knew this. You knew they would do this. We all did. Let yourself adjust...let yourself remember what you’re really seeing...”

Somewhere in that stream of words, Jon found himself lost.

“It’s not her, Nenz,” the seer said, firm. “It’s not
her,
brother. It’s not her...you need to hear me on this. Look at me, Nenz...”

Jon didn’t turn his head to see what Wreg was talking about.

He didn’t need to.

“You knew they would use her,” Wreg said, his voice still low. He shook Revik by the shoulders, lightly, gently, still crushing him in his muscular arms, despite Revik’s greater height. “...You
knew
this, Nenz. It’s not your fucking wife,
laoban.
I don’t know how they make it feel like her, but it’s not her...remember that. Remember why we are here, Nenzi. What we are doing. Remember what they did before, with Dorje...”

Jon flinched at the name, but hearing it cleared his head somewhat.

He still didn’t look down the corridor, however.

Revik nodded, but Jon could tell from his face that he only heard the barest essence of those words, and maybe believed them even less than he heard them. Revik continued to stare forward, although Jon could see his jaw hardening, the brightness that had come to his clear-colored eyes, nearly making them glow once more in the flickering half-light provided by the torches. Those torches seemed to have flared higher in the pause, providing more illumination from where they’d been screwed into iron brackets in parallel lines down both walls.

Jon felt that vise tighten in his chest.

He felt Revik’s pain, a kind of lost disbelief that unmoored him from his physical body; it left Jon light-headed, unable to think clearly about how to help the other man. Jon knew what he would see when he turned his head in the direction Revik stared. He didn’t want to look, but he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes from shifting in that direction anyway, like rubbernecking an accident, or staring at a dead body. Before he’d made a conscious decision, Jon found himself looking down the corridor, then focusing on the figure that stood there.

She wore all white.

Jon let out a low cry, involuntary.

He couldn’t help it.

His reaction was visceral, outside of his control. His heart started hammering in his chest when he saw her, even as adrenaline shot through his veins, a denser nausea hitting at his gut, along with a pain in his heart he almost couldn’t stand. His light reached towards hers, even as he heard Wreg’s words, even as he comprehended their meaning. He couldn’t even imagine how Revik must have reacted, but he could feel glimmers of it, even as Jorag and Wreg continued to try and restrain and calm his light.

She didn’t just look like Allie.

She
was
Allie.

Worse, she was Allie before the wires. She was Allie before they’d found her hollowed out and unconscious on that bed in San Francisco.

She was Allie before Jon gave her to Cass.

Jon tried to remind himself how impossible that was. He clenched his hands into fists, biting his tongue until he tasted blood as he tried to
force
himself to remember where he was, who and what lay behind this illusion, and behind that ‘real’ feeling the apparition evoked. They’d done this to him before. They’d done it to Revik, to Wreg...

They’d done it to Jon himself.

Jon tried to bring those memories back, the immediacy of how those illusions had looked and felt the first time. He tried to remind himself how similar this was to what he’d faced in that château in South America...particularly with the apparition of Dorje. Just like now, Jon had felt Dorje’s presence in the illusion they showed him that time, too.

That presence hadn’t made Dorje any less dead.

This presence wouldn’t make Allie any less dead, either.

Even as he thought it, Revik tore his eyes off her.

He turned, staring at Jon instead. The pain in the other man’s expression briefly grew to be more than Jon could stand. He gripped Revik’s arm tighter, tightly enough that he must be hurting him. Revik scarcely seemed to notice though, even when Jon grabbed the other man’s hair, refusing to let him turn, refusing to let him stare at that image of his wife a second time.

“Revik, man,” Jon managed. “No. Wreg’s right. It’s not her. She’s dead, man.”

Revik stared at him, his clear irises almost opaque. Even so, some element of his words must have reached him, seemingly more than Wreg’s had.

“Remember, Revik. Remember what they did to you before...with Menlim.”

Revik nodded, once. His eyes didn’t really clear. He tried to look at her again, but Jon’s fingers clenched tighter in the other man’s hair.

“Don’t. Don’t look at her. Give yourself a minute, okay? And don’t open your light. Stay with me. Stay with Wreg...stay with the rest of us...”

The other seers had fallen silent. Jon realized only then that they’d all stopped in the stone corridor, that they’d surrounded Revik in a kind of protective shield. Now they all just stood there, listening to Jon, touching Revik with one or more of their hands. All of them touched him, even Neela...even Maygar.

Jon didn’t look at the apparition of Allie again, either.

Not for those few seconds, anyway. He stared only at Revik, looking for any sign that the other man was starting to snap out of the shock at seeing her...and likely even more, of seeing that look in her eyes, that faint whisper of humor and sharper glint of intelligence that Jon remembered. They’d captured something in that illusion that Jon wouldn’t have been able to put into words before now...mainly because it had always been there, until Cass wiped that part of Allie away with the wires.

There had always been a lightness to her before then...maybe it was her actual
light
Jon felt, only he hadn’t realized at the time. Anyway, it was something he hadn’t known how badly he missed it until he felt it again, until a being stood in front of him that looked like her, and that emanated what felt like the exact same frequency.

Jon had known in South America, too, that the figment of Dorje he’d seen carried some element of the real man. Shadow’s construct didn’t only copy Jon’s ex-boyfriend’s physicality down to the last detail, but his light, too.

His very personality.

That illusion
felt
like Dorje...like the real Dorje.

This felt like the real Allie, too.

But it wasn’t. It wasn’t her. It could never be her.

Revik winced as Jon thought it, half struggling against his hold again.

Jon tightened his fingers on him, gripping him around the back of the neck with his other hand, realizing only then that he still held the gun, only now he had the side of the barrel half-pressed against Revik’s neck.

“No, man,” he murmured, still holding his gaze. “Come back. We need you to come back, Revik, okay? Remember your daughter. Remember why we’re here...”

Revik’s jaw hardened.

Something in his eyes changed though, sharpening into focus like a light switch being turned on, somewhere in the back of his mind. Abruptly, Jon felt Revik’s light densify once more, and realized only then that it had scattered like smoke in those few seconds when he’d first been hit with the shock of seeing that image of Allie.

“Gods,” Revik said then, still looking at Jon. He said it almost like an exhale, like he’d been holding his breath until then. “...I expected this. I fucking expected it...”

“I know,” Jon said. “We all did. That doesn’t make it any easier. Don’t blame yourself, man. Seriously. I felt the same way, and I wasn’t married to her. Just don’t open your light to it, okay? It’s not her. They’re fucking with your head, Revik...remember that. It’s not her. It will never be her. She’s not coming back...”

Revik nodded, his jaw still hard.

“You okay, man?” Jon said.

Another pause. Then Revik nodded a second time, rubbing his face with a hand.

Jon couldn’t help noticing that Revik’s hand shook while he did it, or that he still wore their father’s ring. Even so, he could feel Revik coming back. He could feel the Elaerian’s light reconfiguring, even before he could see it in Revik’s angular face.

The clear irises sharpened more, until they once more belonged to the man Jon knew. They clicked back into more of a military-like sheen a few seconds later, almost business-like, even as glimmers of anger at himself remained fleetingly in the background. Revik seemed to have his balance back, though. He gripped Jon’s arm, tightly for a beat, then looked at Wreg, without glancing again at the woman in white in front of them.

“Hit me next time,” he said to Wreg, his voice holding a thin humor. “Really hard,” he added, pointing to the back of his head with a smile. “Don’t hold back, brother.”

“Sure thing,
laoban,”
Wreg said, quirking an eyebrow at him.

Jon felt the Chinese seer’s relief though, even as Wreg sent a grateful smile in his direction, along with a denser pulse of heat.

Fuck, I love you,
he sent.
Stay with him, okay little brother?

Jon nodded, feeling his face flush. That time, the distraction was welcome.

It grounded him somehow, too.

Taking a breath, Jon looked back at the image of Allie, which had also come to a stop in the middle of the stone floor. That time, when Jon looked at those sharp, green eyes, he found himself seeing the lie behind it, or at least the half-truth. It
did
feel like her...he hadn’t been imagining that. There was something of his adopted sister there...somehow...but it felt fake to him now, as well...like a memory of her, rather than the real thing.

A carbon copy.

Maybe a reflection, even.

They’d dressed her in that same white outfit Jon remembered from the Forbidden City in Beijing. Jon couldn’t help thinking the clothes had to be for Revik’s benefit, as well.

Her ghost wore the same thin, almost-sheer top Jon remembered from that day, hanging from a collar-like strap of cloth that cinched her throat, just above where the real sight-restraint collar had once sat. The top left her arms completely bare, along with most of her shoulders and her back...assuming the back of this outfit had been designed the same as the clothing Allie wore in that reception hall of the Lao Hu.

Her midriff showed from just below her breasts down to the bottom of her belly, and the skirt she wore below that had wide slats cut in the sides, slats that revealed bare skin all the way up to a belt-like loop of gold cloth that hung low on her hips.

Jon couldn’t help thinking that she looked more naked than if she’d actually
been
naked.

The only difference in how they presented her here versus Voi Pai’s little show involved the style of her hair. From what Jon knew of Revik, that difference was likely for his benefit, too. Rather than being up in the complicated set of braids and loose strands that Jon remembered from China, Allie’s dark, heavily-curled hair hung straight down her back, only a few, crimped waves in front keeping it off her high-cheekboned face.

Jon glanced at Revik again, in spite of himself.

The other man had let go of his arm.

Revik’s hand now rested on the gun on his right holster instead, and he faced forward once more, his clear eyes narrowed, hard as glass. Jon considered touching him again, trying to assess his state of mind that way, but when Revik glanced at him, his light appeared to be locked behind a shield so dense that Jon almost flinched. Revik had erected the second shield inside the one Jon held for him, and behind it, he looked intimidatingly cold, as if every part of his light had been stripped of any feeling whatsoever.