Allie's War Season Four (80 page)

Rig nodded, but his expression looked faintly impatient.

Truthfully, the Bridge didn’t look particularly heavy in his arms. Chandre knew that might change, however, depending on how high the old woman intended to take them.

Hell, one of them might end up carrying Tarsi.

Tarsi chuckled softly at her thought, even as the old woman started to follow Rig through the door.

Watching the others start to disappear after her, Chandre remained where she was, holding a gun on the lobby as, one by one, they followed Anale and then Rig and Tarsi through that same door. While she waited, Chandre found herself staring again at the jacked open elevator doors, frowning. Anale was right. It was too damned quiet. No matter if the fight had moved elsewhere or not, it didn’t feel right here. It felt like something wrong was happening, and that it was happening below ground, not upstairs.

Chandre didn’t voice the thought aloud, though, not even to Stanley.

When she was the last one outside the stairwell, Chandre backed towards the door as well, her gun still aimed into the dimmer light by the entrance of the Tower.

No one came through.

Not a sound stirred the bodies or burned holes or broken organic glass scattered around the tile-covered room.

A FEW DOZEN flights later, Tarsi still hadn’t told them anything.

She wouldn’t even tell Chandre how high she wanted them to climb inside the Tower.

She certainly hadn’t told any of them what she expected to find.

She didn’t respond when Chandre pointed out that all of their scans, even those conducted by Varlan, told them that far fewer people could be felt on the upper floors than on any of the lower ones...and that few occupied those lower floors to begin with. Tarsi wouldn’t tell them why the Bridge’s body needed to be carted along with them, or why that body needed to be ‘closer’ before they made their next move...much less what that move would be.

Chandre couldn’t help wondering if the old woman had developed some kind of human-like senility. She verged on making a crack at Tarsi on that very subject, when, at the lower landing below the forty-second floor, Tarsi suddenly instructed them to stop.

Standing outside the metal door that led onto the floor, and what was presumably a row of office suites, Tarsi cocked her head, as if listening.

After what felt like an interminable pause, she looked directly at Chandre.

“Four of them. Only four. Can you feel them?”

Puzzled, Chandre glanced at Stanley, then at Varlan. Seeing Anale’s eyes on the old woman, too, her sculpted mouth pursed, Chandre shrugged.

Looking around at the rest of them, Tarsi suddenly changed demeanor entirely. A military-like glint sharpened in her eyes and light. Her voice grew openly impatient, carrying a stronger accent in her English-Prexci patois.

“You want my nephew to die?” she said, her voice cold.

“No, sir,” Varlan said at once.

Chandre only stared at her, taken aback. Tarsi clicked at her more sharply, but some of the anger in her eyes faded when she motioned towards the door.

“Blind as bats,” she muttered. “You do not need break shield,” she added, her voice carrying that harder edge. “Just feel them. Feel them from here. They human...blind like you.”

“Human?” Chandre stared at her, confused. “You brought us up here for four humans?”

“Not only them, no,” Tarsi said, clicking.

Her voice sounded more amused that time, though.

Before Chandre could think of a suitable retort, Tarsi motioned for Rig to put the Bridge’s body down on the landing.

“Okay,” Tarsi said. She sounded matter-of-fact that time, as if contemplating what to have for breakfast, or maybe which feed broadcast to watch before her nap. “I think now is good. We can’at wait longer. Must be now, anyway.”

“Now is good for what?” Chandre said. She still held her gun in her hand, although she had it pointed to the floor. Or, more specifically, straight down at the metal, corrugated stair on which she stood. “Old woman?” she prompted, when Tarsi didn’t answer.

“Shhh,” Tarsi chided. “I need to concentrate for this...”

“For what?” Chandre persisted.

Tarsi gave her a hard look with those colorless eyes. “Control yourself, sister,” she said. “You’ll have answers, soon enough. I can’t risk there being leaks before then.”

“Leaks?” Chandre muttered. Still, she fell silent when Tarsi gave her another glare.

Fighting a swell of irritation mixed with genuine bewilderment, Chandre holstered her gun more forcefully than necessary, crossing her arms as she stared down at the old woman, who now bent over the body of the Bridge. Rig had lain the Bridge carefully, almost reverently, on the textured metal of the staircase landing. Before he straightened, he pulled Allie’s hands and arms over so they would cross her chest, leaving room for Tarsi to kneel beside her...which Tarsi did, her joints creaking audibly.

Chandre bit her lip, but forced herself to stay silent that time.

Her mind couldn’t help grinding over the other thing Tarsi said, about the Sword. Were they really wasting time up here, if his life was in danger? What could be so important, that they wouldn’t go to help him first?

Even so, she found herself watching the old woman along with the rest of them. When nothing happened for what felt like a long set of seconds, she glanced at Stanley again, her chest tight with held breath as she tried to decide what to do. Had Tarsi really lost her mind? Or was she to trust the old woman, simply because she was an elder, and had spent so many years communing with the ancestors in those caves?

Chandre knew which thing tradition told her to do, but then again, tradition gotten them into a lot of this mess in the first place.

Below her, Tarsi chuckled faintly, but her eyes never left the Bridge’s face.

“I know you worried about him,” Tarsi said, softer. “She is, too.”

Chandre didn’t know what to say that, either. She didn’t even know for certain to which of them Tarsi was speaking...or referring to. Biting her lip, she shifted her weight as she stared down at the old woman.

Stanley didn’t share Chandre’s glance the second time she looked at him, either...or the third time...or the fourth. Instead, the dark-skinned seer watched Tarsi alone, his expression holding an open interest, along with a dense form of concentration Chandre hadn’t seen on him before, either. She found herself remembering that the African-born seer had also spent many years in caves, meditating, just like Tarsi had. Maybe he understood this better than the rest of them, for that reason alone. In any case, his dark, full mouth pursed in a slight frown as he watched the ancient seer grip the shoulders of the inert body of the dead Bridge.

Tarsi leaned closer to the Bridge’s pale ear as she began to murmur in old and soft words, words Chandre could feel but not understand.

Even Dante shut off her hand-held long enough to stare and listen to the old woman, her dark eyes holding as much puzzlement at Rig and Chinja’s. She didn’t look away, though, but fell silent with the rest of them, peering down through the curtain of her blunt-cut, dark hair.

The silence stretched.

It must have gotten a lot more still on that landing than Chandre realized.

When a sharp, shocked-sounding gasp broke the silence, she must have jumped a foot in the air. The shock of that sound paled in comparison, however, to when she looked down, and saw the faintly glowing green eyes of the Bridge.

Chandre felt her jaw go slack. Every muscle in her body went limp.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t formulate words...or move.

She still struggled to wrap her mind around what she was seeing, when Vikram shouted from next to her, nearly making Chandre jump out of her skin.

“Holy fucking gods in the heavens!” he said. “What in the
di’lanlente a guete
is
that?”

For some reason, Varlan burst out in a laugh.

Chandre couldn’t laugh, though. She still couldn’t even make her jaw move to form words, to even ask the question. Swallowing thickly, she stared down at the Bridge’s face, watching her look up, not at Tarsi, but at Stanley.

Even so, it crossed the infiltrator portion of Chandre’s mind that someone might have heard Vikram in the hallway outside that metal door.

If so, that possibility no longer seemed to alarm Tarsi.

Maybe it was too late for that to matter.

Chandre was still staring down, fighting to move her thoughts in anything close to resembling straight lines...when the Bridge spoke.

“Hey,” she said, blinking those glowing eyes up at Stanley. She squinted, as if trying to see past that light. “...Is that rabbit?” she said.

Staring down at her, Chandre realized she saw nothing of the blank-eyed stare she remembered of the Bridge the last time Chandre had seen her awake. That had been through the virtual connect with Dehgoies, when she’d seen the Bridge curled up in the lap of her husband in that Victorian house in San Francisco.

That had been unnerving too, yes...but somehow, this was worse.

Staring at Allie’s face, seeing
her
in that expression, brought tears to Chandre’s eyes so suddenly that they blinded her. She blinked to clear them, but didn’t bother to wipe them off her cheeks. She still couldn’t make herself tear her eyes off the Bridge’s glowing irises.

Allie seemed to be struggling to work her jaw. She still stared up at Stanley, though, as if his face grounded her, or held some kind of deep significance.

“Is anyone going to answer me?” she said. “I mean...that’s him, right? That’s the rabbit. Stanley...am I right?”

At that, for some inexplicable reason, Stanley burst out in a laugh, too.

24

HEAVEN’S DOOR

REVIK STOOD IN a fighting stance.

They’d backed him up against the wall.

Well, as far as he could tell, anyway, given how the room looked to his physical eyes. He couldn’t use his sight. There might be another trap door behind him...or an electrical field, for all he knew, or drug darts, or any number of other means of getting him down. If so, they hadn’t used any of it so far. His eyes told him he stood in the corner of a low-ceilinged, cement-walled room. He’d spent the last twenty minutes, his internal clock calculated, in the same low-ceilinged room where he’d landed on the floor, the wind knocked out of him and his ankle and one of his knees hurting from the fall.

He’d also spent that time fighting them off, or at least avoiding being cornered.