Allie's War Season Four (81 page)

He knew his time was winding down, though.

He’d been in enough fights to know he wouldn’t be on his feet much longer.

What he didn’t understand was why he was on his feet still.

He didn’t understand why they hadn’t just knocked him out.

His mouth tasted of copper. So yeah, he was bleeding. A few of Menlim’s guards were decent fighters, which didn’t surprise him, given where he’d learned it as a kid. Three or four of them had gotten in some good hits. He grimaced as he wiped his mouth in the pause, giving a bare glance to the blood that landed on the light blue carpet.

The row of faces still watching from the semi-circle on the other side of the room didn’t flinch, nor would he have expected them to. He’d kept their soldiers away from him up until now mainly with his fists and feet. He’d managed to stay out of the Barrier since he’d emptied around eight magazines on the men trying to corner him, men Revik suspected were real, although he felt less sure about the apparitions of Menlim and the other seers standing nearby, even now.

When he’d tried to shoot those people down here, the bullets ricocheted off them, implying some kind of shield in the physical. So yeah, different from upstairs.

Even that didn’t convince him they were real, though.

Real or not, he could feel them working on the edges of his light, trying to get in. He had no shield. He had nothing down here. He could feel them trying to resonate with him, trying to adjust the frequency of Revik’s own aleimi to where he would have to fight harder to feel and see the problems in their light, and the lack of connection in his.

Vash was gone.

He couldn’t feel Jon. He couldn’t feel Wreg...or Maygar, his son. He couldn’t feel any of them. He could only hope they were still alive, somewhere.

He could only hope he might be buying them time, even now. Time for them to get back upstairs. Time to give the order to Balidor to bomb the building, which he’d authorized Wreg to do, in the event he got killed or incapacitated.

Revik wondered if that would do any good at this point, either.

Why hadn’t they knocked him out?

The guards felt more or less real. Even hitting them felt different than hitting that illusion of Allie upstairs. He felt bones under his hands and feet and elbows and arms. He felt flesh and skin and the contours felt about right to a real human or seer face.

The remaining five guards out of the several dozen Menlim initially instructed to collect him had backed off for now. The closest of these stood a few yards away, watching Revik warily, his cheek swelling from a cross Revik got to his face. All five of them were out of breath. One of them scowled at Revik when he glanced at their leader. Red-faced and breathing, he looked to Revik like he might go into cardiac arrest any moment.

Thank the gods he’d spent the last few months in the ring.

Even as he thought it, Menlim let out a purring sigh, clicking at him softly.

“Nephew,” he said. “This is pointless. You will come with us. Whether you want to do so or not is beside the point now.”

Revik let out a low laugh, wiping his jaw again with the back of his hand.

Even so, he couldn’t argue with his uncle’s basic logic.

Why hadn’t they just drugged him?

When one of the soldiers moved closer again, Revik repositioned his body, his peripheral vision focused on the other men who hung back. He wondered if they’d called for reinforcements yet. He wondered if he was buying them time, too, even now, while the rest of Shadow’s people evacuated through the lower floors.

He wondered where his daughter was.

When the guard got closer, Revik didn’t wait. He darted out, avoiding a blow to his face even as he countered it, kicking low, twice and hard, knocking out the man’s knee before spinning on his back heel, a sharp jerk to back-fist him in the throat.

He didn’t wait for the guard to fall but slid sideways, trying to get out of the corner. One of the others saw what he intended and tried to block his way, but Revik had counted on that, too. He’d already tagged the shorter, red-haired man as the worst fighter of the bunch.

Grabbing that same man by the shoulders after Revik slipped behind him, Revik used him as a shield as he backed out of the corner and into the wider room.

Once he got far enough back, he shoved him forward, tripping his ankles to send the man sprawling into the others. They stepped aside, and the red-haired one fell face-forward onto a low table.

Even Revik heard the crunch as the man’s nose broke.

Anyway, he’d gotten what he wanted...more space.

Stepping deeper into the room, he kept his eye on the door. He happened to look there right as three more guards appeared. Two of them blocked the door, keeping him in the low-ceilinged room, while the third entered, joining the others.

Reinforcements. Big guy, too. Moved like a fighter, like maybe they called him here to beat Revik down.

From the two at the door looking backwards, more would be on the way.

Revik glanced at the empty guns on the floor, and noticed none of his new attackers carried side arms, either, again probably so Revik couldn’t take them away. He tried to decide if he should start using his knife, just to even the odds a little.

Revik felt more threads pulling at his light.

He blinked back sweat, fighting to think.

“Look at yourself, nephew,” Menlim said. He clicked softly, a faint, sad smile on his lips as he shook his head, folding his hands at the small of his back. “Are we really back to this...to that more physical phase of your childhood? The childhood you left behind years ago now, my son?”

The ancient seer paused, studying Revik’s face, his yellow eyes suddenly harder, carrying a denser thread of light.

“...Will you really force us to take you with us by force? Bleeding and bloody...in chains? The greatest of our intermediaries? Will you require me to visit this indignity upon you, my beloved nephew?”

Feeling his jaw harden, Revik looked around at the row of faces. He felt his puzzlement leak into his expression as he focused on Terian and Cass.

Why hadn’t they just drugged him?

The answer was obvious, but knowing the answer didn’t clear anything up.

They wanted him conscious. Why?

He looked hard at Cass, seeing her watching him, her arms folded, lips pursed.

He’d kept his mind occupied earlier, during pauses between fights, trying to decide which of the seers standing in front of him might actually be in the room. He’d wavered back and forth on all of them, but eventually decided he was better off assuming that none in that row of Shadow’s inner circle were here at all. This was another hall of mirrors, only one with more physical props. Another layer deeper in the rabbit hole...but a simpler reality, in most respects.

A capture cage, for all intents and purposes.

The guards were likely real.

Knowing that didn’t really help him very much, either. Nor did it answer his question about why the guards hadn’t simply filed out the door, shut it on him, and gassed the fuck out of him until he passed out. Even he couldn’t stay conscious if they hit him with enough.

They needed him awake.

But why?

“It is pointless to ask yourself these questions, nephew,” Menlim said. His voice lowered, holding that maddening thread of empathy. “We cannot answer them. You are intelligent to ask them, but you must know, I will not give you an answer that satisfies you...”

Revik found himself believing that, too...but not in the way his uncle meant it.

It struck him that the way they wove into his light felt familiar, too.

He knew this sensation from before, from his time with Menlim, then after Menlim, with Galaith, when he worked under the Pyramid. Something he’d known all during his youth, that whole period where he’d been growing up...something he’d taken pride in, thinking it marked him as special. That amplification of his light felt false as soon as he stepped away from it, but he remembered it, like a taste in his mouth, a certain type of current, running through his aleimi. He’d felt the same way when he worked for Salinse, even just for those few months where he stood at the head of the rebel army.

It reminded him of doing drugs, back when he worked for the Rooks.

Back when he’d done a
lot
of drugs, usually with Terian, but with others, too.

That bitter tang in the back of his throat and nose after he snorted a line had a similar quality. Addictive, yes...but also harsh, disgusting really, if he let himself taste it and view it objectively. The addiction part scared him less than it used to, because the drug itself held less appeal than it used to. But maybe that would change in time, too.

That current tasted stronger down here.

Even now, it was stronger. They’d only just begun to crack his light, but that feeling strengthened, every passing second. Not only the feeling of being invaded. That feeling of being...amplified. He felt it stronger now than he’d felt it since...

Revik’s mind stuttered. Nearly ground to a halt. As it did, the truth hit him like a punch to the face, so obvious, so totally fucking obvious, he couldn’t make himself unsee it.

Gods, he was an idiot.

He was such a blind fool.

It was his light.

They wanted him awake, because his own fucking
light
was powering some vital section of the construct, maybe even the part that kept his friends trapped upstairs. They’d been using him all this time...likely in South America, too. Balidor said they only cracked that damned construct in Argentina after Revik’s light got blown out, after his structures got damaged to the point where they stopped working. Balidor confessed he hadn’t been able to break into the primary structures of that construct at all, really, not until after that happened.

Meaning after Revik himself was on the ground.

He remembered Balidor telling him that it was as if Shadow had somehow hurt the construct itself by hurting him.

And Revik hadn’t seen it, even then.

They’d been using his light, all this time.

They were using it now...and probably his daughter’s light by now, too. They’d been using his structures––his very abilities––to power their main construct since he first landed in Manhattan. Maybe even before that time. That was why Allie felt the construct so clearly when they returned to Manhattan after South America. That was why
he’d
felt it so clearly, why he’d felt so completely immersed in those sickly strands, from the very first second they’d breached the quarantine walls. Even after Balidor told him how subtle that construct felt to the rest of the infiltration team––to Tarsi herself––Revik hadn’t realized the truth.

He was one of the fucking pillars of their non-dimensional network.

He was
the
pillar...the one Balidor hadn’t been able to identify.

No wonder Menlim didn’t want him using his telekinesis. He hadn’t only been protecting Revik’s light from damage––he knew that Revik using the telekinesis in here would blow out his own fucking construct, and probably free Wreg and the others upstairs.

And no wonder he and Wreg hadn’t been able to map the damned thing. Revik’s being a part of that construct, as well as a part of the construct of the Adhipan and Seven, functioned to obscure the primary structural points of both in the Barrier.

It had always been true that those operating inside a particular construct had the least accurate vision on its overall structure. They’d been blinded to the construct simply due to that universal quality of all constructs, the fact that you had to be able to operate fully
outside
of a construct in order to see it accurately.

Turning the facts over in his mind, Revik couldn’t make them come out any other way.

He stared at the row of faces in front of him, and he knew, suddenly, what he needed to do.

Maybe he could even do it in time for Balidor to find where he was, to find Menlim and the others in his sick little circle in the flesh. Maybe he could do it in time for Balidor to find Cass...Terian, too. Maybe he could do it in time to blow this whole fucking mess sky-high, and end all of them...him and his daughter most of all.

“Nephew!” Menlim held up a hand. “Do not be rash, my son!”