Allie's War Season Four (69 page)

Something about the way he said it made Jon grin.

When he glanced behind Revik’s back to Wreg, he saw a sharper gleam in the Chinese seer’s eyes, as well, along with a faint smile.

“...She especially liked to fight me,” Revik added, his voice colder.

The fake Allie folded her arms, giving him a coy smile. “Are you sure that was about the fighting, lover?”

Revik’s jaw tightened, pushing out a muscle in his cheek. He looked about to answer, then didn’t, but Jon saw the anger that rose briefly to his eyes, flashing hotter right before a coil of pain left the other man’s light, strong enough that Jon stepped back, swallowing. He fought the impulse, but ended up glancing at Wreg anyway, feeling his face grow hotter when he saw the look of discomfort on the Chinese seer’s face.

“Uh-huh,” the not-Allie said softly, clicking again. “Okay.”

“Don’t listen to her,
laoban,”
Wreg advised. “She’s just a cheap copy. They’re trying to fuck with your head, is all.”

The apparition’s eyes slanted, glancing coldly at Wreg. Her irises turned a sharper green before they shifted back to stare at Revik.

“Well?” she said. “Are you really not going to talk to me, husband?”

“I’ll talk,” Revik said. “But I want you to hit me, first. Try anyway.”

His voice came out quieter that time, deathly quiet.

He stepped gracefully to one side as Jon watched, circling in front of her again, his steps casual, but holding that catlike grace Jon remembered from the few times they’d been in the ring together. The fake Allie’s eyes followed his movements, but she didn’t try to mimic them, only turning her head as Revik stepped around her in a slow arc, his eyes measuring her face. A kind of impatience lived in the way Revik moved while he fought, Jon thought. It was as if he didn’t want to fuck around with preliminaries, but just wanted to get down to it, as soon as possible.

Come to think of it, Jon thought, Allie had been a little like that, too.

The memory brought another sharp pain to Jon’s chest, even as it forced another smile, an involuntary one that time, one that nearly hurt his face. He felt similar things going on with Revik, too, a kind of see-saw of emotions around remembering Allie as she was and getting hit with the lack of her within the image in front of him. Jon felt anger on the other man more than anything else, but also grief...and frustration...and disbelief...as he looked at the bad copy of his wife. Still, something in the fact that he could just hit her like that, and in the face, told Jon that Revik was doing this for himself, too.

He was showing himself that it
wasn’t
her, and from the look on his face, he catalogued the details of it not being her, even now, as he watched the apparition’s face.

Jon realized something else, too––even as it struck him that the same thing must have occurred to Revik already. This wasn’t just some prerecorded program created by Cass and Shadow and their minions. It wasn’t even solely an AI program, set to look and sound as close to Allie as possible, using Cass’s memories and whatever else.

Cass was operating the damned thing.

Cass was behind this thing even now, somehow.

“I agree, brother,” Wreg muttered from his other side.

Revik gave him a bare glance, and that time, Jon saw the understanding in his clear irises as well. Something about seeing that knowledge in Revik’s face made Jon relax a little, at least in terms of the Elaerian’s mental state...but the thing about Cass roiled in his head on a different track, somewhere between disbelief and disgust.

Cass was doing this.

She was directly behind this thing somehow, controlling it, speaking through it. Cass’s light was somehow mixed up in and projecting this fake version of Allie’s, which meant she’d gone out of her way to
feel
like Allie, too.

As soon as he thought it, Jon knew he was right.

The realization made him sick.

Like, really sick.

Feeling his jaw harden, Jon watched Revik’s face, wondering how he was really doing with this, regardless of what he knew. Jon couldn’t help wondering whether Revik was starting to lose his grip on the situation again, out of anger as much as grief at this point. The Elaerian was breathing harder, and Jon could tell by looking at him that he wasn’t out of breath, not from exertion anyway.

Revik made that motion with his fingers again, to the fake Allie.

“Come on, bitch,” he said.

The hatred in his words, particularly the last one, made Jon flinch.

Revik’s tone turned cajoling, mocking, without losing that harder edge.

“You want to be Allie, Cass?” Revik said softly. “...Is that what you want? Go ahead. Prove to me you can be my wife. Prove to all of us that you can be all of the things that she was...that you can have her heart and light and mind. Then you can tell us all how you
deserve
it more than she does. You can tell me how you’re really the better person...”

There was a silence.

In it, the apparition only stared at him, that predatory look back in its jade-green eyes.

Then, with a complete lack of fanfare...

It vanished.

21

THE COURT OF THE CRIMSON KING

REVIK BLINKED AS the lights rose.

His hand fell to the butt of his gun. His sight flared out, filling the cavernous room he found himself in, even as he kept it behind the shield Jon held along with Wreg, Jorag, Neela, Chinja...and whoever might still be helping them from the hotel, if anyone.

The apparition of Allie had disappeared.

He felt it go. It hurt, somewhere in his heart, even though he knew it wasn’t her.

The irrationality of his own reaction to seeing her disappear hurt him, too. He’d hit it in the face, whatever that thing was. It brought a sick feeling to his gut when he thought about that, but he couldn’t hold onto those feelings, either, not now. He needed to focus, to at least pretend his mind still worked in the same basic directions as before.

He could feel the clock ticking over him again.

Why hadn’t they tried to kill him yet?

He’d practically dared that Cass-Allie thing to kill him in the corridor just now.

When he first found himself in that stone hallway under the elevators, he’d thought that was it, that they’d played their last hand, by letting themselves into this fucked up hall of mirrors and losing their line out to Balidor and the others. The fact that Revik could no longer hear or see anyone from the hotel through that construct told him pretty much everything he needed to know.

He’d meant it when he told Balidor that they’d be dead if they couldn’t crack that lower-level construct.

As far as Revik could tell, they hadn’t cracked it.

In fact, he couldn’t help but feel like a mouse trapped in a maze, just waiting to be slaughtered, or perhaps experimented on by lazy and sociopathic scientists. The dying part might have bothered him if it wasn’t inevitable anyway, but even with the others, death struck him as more or less beside the point. They’d done nothing but go along with the trail set for them by Shadow and Cass and whoever else, so presumably, Shadow’s people wanted something from at least one of those in their party, if not all of them.

Revik had to guess likely him, meaning Revik himself.

Possibly Jon, too...or Wreg.

Maygar might be one of the targets of whatever this was, too.

The specifics almost didn’t matter...not anymore.

Well, other than in forcing Revik to decide at some point, whether or not to try and order the rest of them to leave, try and get out of this maze and leave him here to hunt for Menlim, Cass, Terian and the child on his own.

It felt too early to think about that, though.

He needed a better idea of what Shadow and Cassandra had in mind, and he didn’t have that yet, either. He knew his inability to wrap his head around why they would have brought him here was a delusional kind of avoidance too, and one he’d been actively indulging for hours now, pretty much since he’d listed off the names of those seers he wanted along with him on this venture. He’d been signing their death warrants. Some part of him knew that, but he hadn’t really admitted it to himself fully until now.

Whatever Menlim wanted––his blood, his son, his friends, his light––Revik couldn’t help but think they could have gotten it by now. Which meant that either they couldn’t take those things for some reason, or they wanted something else. Something Revik hadn’t yet discerned from the shifting strands of the construct around him.

He wondered if Allie would ever forgive him for putting Jon on that list.

He couldn’t think about that now, either, though.

Revik hadn’t voiced any of those specific thoughts aloud to the others, but he knew Wreg, at least, had to be thinking along roughly similar lines. Wreg, especially, would be fully aware of how dim their chances got, once they found themselves in this maze of bullshit without a compass, and no way to communicate with their allies outside. Moreover, Wreg knew Menlim. He knew what kind of mind they were dealing with, even if he didn’t know Cass.

Revik thought all of this, watching the lights in that larger auditorium grow brighter.

Of course, he had no idea if he’d been in this larger room all along, or if, conversely, they still stood in that eight-foot-wide corridor with the fake stone walls...or, more likely still, in a differently-shaped room entirely.

Revik didn’t bother to try and discern the truth.

He knew the vast majority of what he saw now had to be pure illusion, too. He gazed up at the high rock walls, still done up in that medieval castle-like decor. His eyes shifted across the oak beam ceilings and then down again, to the larger, branch-like torches standing in rows of iron brackets above long and old-looking wooden tables.

The whole ambiance of the massive hall, despite the height of the ceiling and the columns of cut stone that dotted the larger, more open space, evoked feelings and associations in Revik’s mind markedly similar to that hunting lodge-slash-château in Argentina. Detailed, embroidered tapestries hung from the walls, most of them depicting images from the caves in the Pamir, only in significantly bloodier and darker translations. The images held none of the fragments of light and presence that Revik remembered from the ancestral caves of the original Sark settlers, either, but instead seemed to flicker like shadows, holding a disorienting and more violent presence, like the construct itself. Those paintings mixed with the strange, altar-like stage in front, and the blood red rug before the fireplace, giving the room the quality of a nightmare.

Menlim had always liked the medieval aesthetics.

When Revik had been a boy, he bought into that vision of castles as something opulent and impressive, too. Maybe he’d been too close to his uncle’s mind back then, or maybe he thought of it as something that could protect him from the outside world, even as it evoked the image of a king, someone who didn’t have to fear anyone.

Now all Revik could see was the blood soaked into the stone.

Blood...and ego.

Those two thing often seemed to be paired, in his experience.

Revik stood perfectly still as he looked around, drinking in the dimensions of the room, trying only cautiously to see behind the images to the physicality beyond. Being Elaerian, he could catch glimpses of the physical structure itself, but he could already feel that the construct had been built to mess with his own sense of physical dimension and geography, too. Most of the fragments he caught had a distorted feel to them, and didn’t match up with other element of the room that swirled around his light. The stone columns would feel real, but in the wrong place, out of synch with the wall he could feel cutting the room in half, and a lower ceiling made of organic metal instead of stone.