Allie's War Season Four (7 page)

JON STOOD BY Balidor on the other side of a one-way window.

He stared into the featureless room of the new, ‘Tank-Jr.,’ as some of the seers had taken to calling it. He scanned the sentient walls and their shimmering green glow before his eyes returned to the two men standing in the middle of the smooth, skin-like floor.

Jon fought to keep his thoughts and his mind neutral as he watched them work, as he listened to Revik threaten and cajole, encourage and ridicule, pushing at the other’s light...slamming it, jerking on it and even breaking parts of it at times...all to get Maygar’s aleimi to move and behave the way Revik wanted.

Jon didn’t know if he found it more or less comforting that Revik would treat his own son this way, to prepare him for what lay ahead. Jon had to remind himself of the less-friendly aspects of Revik and Maygar’s relationship over the past few years.

The dynamic between the two of them seemed so different as of late.

Not more friendly, exactly, even now...but different. Mutually focused. United. Compatible in a strange way, although Jon had never once seen them discuss anything personal.

Jon shifted on his feet as he watched them, even with his own mixed feelings about Maygar. He couldn’t help but be uncomfortable with the obvious expression of pain that came to Maygar’s face when Revik once again hit at him with his light. Maygar had already emptied the contents of his stomach on the floor of the cell twice that morning.

Revik hadn’t even stopped long enough to let someone clean it up.

It had to smell in there. Bad, by now, baking under those hot, organic lights.

Jon couldn’t see exactly what was happening between them. He lacked most of the requisite structures in his own aleimi to see anything remotely approximating actual telekinesis...but it wasn’t difficult to discern that the process hurt. In fact, Jon strongly suspected that whatever Revik was doing with Maygar, it hurt a lot.

Maybe more than Maygar was trying to let on.

Just watching them for the past few hours made the sight training Jon received from Wreg seem like child’s play.

Jon felt the surreality of doing this in an abandoned Victorian mansion on Alamo Square in San Francisco, only a few blocks from the house where he and Allie had grown up. A house like this probably cost around twenty million, easy, while Jon had been in high school. More, by the time he got out of college. Revik and his two lieutenants, Wreg and Balidor, fortified the place into a military base in the months since they’d landed, ripping out decorative landscaping, boarding up windows and even building walls to give them protection from the street.

They’d transformed the four-story mansion into a garrison, of sorts.

Jon knew Wreg even elicited help from Tarsi to build a construct around the square unlike anything seen outside of maybe the Pamir.

They didn’t want Shadow anywhere near Allie...or Revik himself, for that matter.

Jon still felt strange whenever he walked outside and remembered where they were. He knew this whole stay in SF was temporary, but being here at all felt like sheer madness, given the earthquakes and whatever else. Of course, Jon understood where that decision came from, too, and why no one argued it too loudly, especially around ‘the boss.’

Everyone was pretty careful around Revik these days.

They had discussed returning to New York, of course, not long after they first arrived in San Francisco. Revik vetoed it, without a lot of explanation really, but Jon found he could guess his brother-in-law’s probable motives. Revik didn’t want to risk anything that might worsen Allie’s condition. But it was more than that, too, and all of them knew it...although no one voiced it aloud, not even with Revik out of the room.

Jon even understood, in a way, why Revik wouldn’t want to leave here, under the circumstances––whether to go to New York or to the new proposed base outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Leaving here with Allie still in that coma-like state felt tantamount to admitting she might remain that way. It felt like acknowledging this as the new normal.

It also meant letting the rest of her people see her like this.

Both thoughts made Jon more than a little sick.

Pushing the pain that wanted to rise out of his mind, Jon felt his mouth harden as he motioned with his jaw and head towards the scene on the other side of the one-way glass. He gave a bare glance to the seer standing next to him.

“Is he making progress?” Jon said, his voice neutral. “What do you think?”

When Balidor didn’t answer right away, Jon found himself looking back towards the tank replica itself. They’d built this cell specifically for the telekinesis work. For that reason, they cut it off from anything explosive in the house. Revik even instructed them to move a few of the natural gas lines, as well as the water heater and any ammunition they happened to be storing in the lower floors. All of the walls except the one Jon and Balidor currently looked through had extensive padding, as well.

Other than Revik and Maygar, only a table stood in the middle of the room.

On that table lay a number of assorted objects. One, a glass wand with intricate patterns running up and down its crystal sides, Balidor called an
urele.
According to Balidor, urele were designed a few thousand years ago to help seers direct and control their light. Jon had never seen one before, but Balidor claimed he and Wreg had both used them in the Pamir.

The other objects on that table were more random-seeming...and varied.

A gun lay there, the only technically combustible object in the room, presumably to help them work on igniting those elements to disarm it, whenever they got to that point. The rest consisted of various blunt objects, including a heavy-looking and rusted piece of machinery, a glass ball resting on a piece of fabric, what looked like an semi-organic or dead-metal rod...

“He is making progress,” Balidor said after another pause.

“Enough?” Jon said. “How much time is Revik giving this approach?”

Balidor shook his head, but not in a no. The head shake, followed by a seer’s hand gesture, made it into a seer’s ‘I don’t know,’ instead.

“And what about him?” Jon pressed. “Revik? Is his telekinesis completely back now?”

Balidor repeated the same gesture as before, only with a slightly more knowing incline of his head.

“Seems to be,” he said, his voice neutral.

“How is that possible?” Jon said, frowning. “Didn’t you say it would take longer? I remember you and Wreg saying
years
...that you thought the damage so extensive that it could take him years to get his abilities back, assuming he ever did.”

“I do not know that either, brother,” Balidor said, giving him a warning look. “Tarsi seems to think he had outside help of some kind. In any case, it won’t do him any good if he overstrains himself...which he certainly is doing.”

“What kind of outside help?” Jon persisted.

Again, Balidor made a noncommittal gesture with one hand.

“And Maygar?” Jon said, not willing to let it go yet. “How long will that take? Before he can do the paired thing, like Revik proposed?”

“I do not know––” Balidor began.

He was interrupted when the hard glass ball flew sideways, impacting the one-way window. Despite the thickness of the surface, the noise shook the walls.

It sounded like a gun’s report.

Balidor and Jon both flinched, holding up their arms to shield themselves. The ball hit hard...hard enough to crack the organic glass...and both of them froze as the sound echoed in the small, dead-metal room. Balidor had already fallen to one knee, as if he really had just been shot at. Jon’s reflexes weren’t quite so fast. He just stood there, breathing hard, staring at the crack in the window, his heart thudding loudly in his chest as the glass ball fell with a heavy thud to the floor inside the cell.

When he glanced down, Balidor had a grim smile on his face.

“It seems, perhaps, significantly less time than we thought,” the Adhipan leader said.

He accepted Jon’s helping hand, pulling himself back to his feet with another wry smile as he surveyed the damage to the window.

“...Particularly if Nenzi’s teaching style remains this unrelenting,” he added ruefully.

Jon nodded, looking at the crack in the glass. His stomach was starting to hurt from the adrenaline that slammed his bloodstream.

He’d watched them install that organic pane.

He knew the thing was something like eight inches thick.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

When he looked at Balidor again, he saw the faint tension in the other man’s face, right before Balidor wiped it smooth.

“What?” Jon said. “You don’t think he can pull this off?”

Balidor shook his head, clicking a little sharper that time. “It is not that.”

“Then what?”

“Nenz,” Balidor said simply, indicating towards Revik through the cracked glass, using the Elaerian’s older name. “...The Sword. I cannot help but be concerned about him.”

Jon followed his intent gaze. “Yeah.” Exhaling between pursed lips, he frowned. “You haven’t actually seen him like this before, have you?”

“This....motivated?” Balidor shook his head again, his voice and smile humorless. “No. I suppose I have not.” He glanced at Jon, curiosity in his gray eyes. “Have you?”

Jon’s own frown deepened as he looked back through the glass.

“Yes.” Amending his words, he said, “Well, no. Not quite like this. It’s different this time.” Still thinking aloud, he admitted, “Honestly? It’s almost worse. Better and worse. He’s...I don’t know...” Jon struggled for words. “...
In
it more. Deeper this time, I mean.”

“The job in D.C.,” Balidor said, either reading it off Jon’s mind, or picking the memory out of his own. “Yes. I had forgotten that.”

“It’s not exactly the same,” Jon muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets.

Balidor just looked at him for a moment. The older seer hesitated, then shrugged, asking the question that hovered there.

“I would be interested in knowing the differences,” the Adhipan leader said. “...Given the circumstances, brother. If you would be so kind as to share.”

Jon thought about the seer’s words, forcing himself to be objective.

He remembered how Revik had been back then, the look in his eyes while they’d been working around the clock in that brothel outside of D.C. That had been about Allie, too. That had been what the military seers called an ‘extraction’ job...meaning, they’d gone there specifically to get Allie away from Terian.

Remembering how Revik seemed then, including how the Elaerian woke up every night in the early hours of the morning, crying, Jon felt that pain in his heart worsen. Motioning towards the window with the hand missing fingers, he exhaled, trying to be precise with his words.

“He’s less angry...less openly afraid,” he said after a pause.

Jon continued to watch Revik as he thought aloud.

“...More sad. The focus is the same. More intense this time, like I said. That feeling like he’s got a clock ticking over his head, even when he’s eating. Or sleeping. Or showering. He’s just as shut down in a lot of ways. He’s also just as harsh, and just as unforgiving with everyone else. Even so, he feels less openly dangerous...”

Thinking harder on that last part, Jon frowned, shaking his head.

“...Well, different, maybe. His anger is more internalized, I guess...and more contained. He’s sober this time, too, for the most part,” Jon added, glancing at Balidor. “I think he was drunk through most of that op in D.C. Maybe more drunk than I realized, even at the time. He drank to dull the pain, I think...from the bonding...to keep himself in the game. We could see the pain on him a lot. He couldn’t sleep. They were only half-bonded back then. I know they are now, too, but it feels different...”

Realizing Balidor knew that, Jon flushed, seeing the patience in the older seer’s gray eyes. Brushing off his own words with a wave of his hand, Jon added,

“More than anything, he feels sad to me now. Really damned sad...and defeated. And guilty. He blames himself, for letting Ditrini get the jump on him...for not noticing whatever they put in my light before it was too late.”

Feeling his own face redden, even as his jaw clenched in an anger he briefly couldn’t control, Jon forced himself to shrug it off.