Allie's War Season Four (84 page)

Most of all, though, I thought about Revik.

25

HUSH

REVIK FELT SICK. Pain wracked his body, more than he could deal with.

More than he could think past.

Nothing felt real anymore. Nothing. He couldn’t decide anything about what he’d felt in those few minutes before they’d finally brought him down. He’d watched them locking cuffs on his wrists, numb, unable to think past the reality as it happened.

He found himself fighting that feeling that he’d been tricked, that they’d been fucking with his head again, just to get him to lower his guard, to get him to stop fighting. He’d stupidly fallen for it...like he always fell for it. As always, Menlim honed in on his weak points with a laser-like precision, once he tired of screwing around with his charge.

Revik was their pillar down here.

The thought repeated in his mind.

They’d been using him, just like they always used him. They hadn’t even bothered to drug him, or take him down physically. They’d gotten him to go down on his own, using his heart against him, his light, just like they’d always done.

He felt broken...but he was angry, too.

He was really fucking angry.

He didn’t think, though, not really. He felt like he’d defaulted to where his mind went as a child, those secret compartments he built in those years where even Menlim couldn’t reach him. They barely constituted places of thought at all. Instead, he floated there, his mind doing sums, working through more complex problems, counting ceiling tiles, flecks of dust, colors in the patterned carpet, anything to drown out those whispers in the background, the ones that lived and vibrated somewhere high up in the structures and threads of his telekinesis...although he hadn’t known it then.

He hadn’t known those places were the very thing Menlim wanted, the same thing everyone wanted from him, craved from him, stole and cheated and robbed him of, pretty much since he’d been exposed to anyone outside his immediate family.

It had always been that way, until Vash.

It had been that way again, until Allie.

He felt like his life consisted of a series of pits he dug himself out of, using his bare hands, his broken hands at times, his torn fingernails and skin ripped down to the bone.

She’d promised she wouldn’t take his child from him.

Had that been Cass talking again?

Cass fucking with his head, trying to climb inside of him, to aid Menlim in his fucked up goals? He knew, by now, that Menlim had some idea that he could keep Revik alive without Allie, that he could bind Revik to the very fabric of the remaining Four here on Earth, use them to keep him at least physically alive through structures that had been built into the foundations of who he was. He knew that they’d kept him tied into them, into the construct, for that very reason, as soon as they decided to get rid of Allie.

Revik knew a lot, really, now that he knew where he connected to them.

Like the Head of some fucked up network, he could see all the way down and through, from the highest, most intimate part of his light, and he didn’t even know if they could see him doing it, given that the whole reason they’d chosen him for this role was that he had structures none of them shared, that none of them could even touch.

Only Allie could touch him there.

Only
Allie...and Allie was gone.

They’d done all of this...all of it...just so they could take her from him.

They’d lured him to New York so they could take her from him.

He could even feel, from that high up place, that they hoped he would bond with Cass and Terian well enough to forget about Allie entirely, begin to build a new life without her. They thought that the love of his child, love of Maygar, would be enough to cement him to the rest.

But Revik knew what he had to do.

The phantom Allie had told him to wait. He didn’t know how long he could. She’d told him to stall, too, but given they had him in cuffs, with a collar around his neck, he couldn’t be sure what that meant at this point, either.

He dug quietly, slowly, patiently, at the scar in his arm.

The scar he had the medical techs create in San Francisco, the same one that lived in the sliver of fat tissue they injected into his forearm, sewing the tool he’d asked them to create out of bone and organic into his very skin.

Confusion hit him, more tiredness that might have been blood loss...but that could have been the drugs they fed him, too. They did drug him, just not enough to knock him out.

Even past the drugs though, past the loss of blood...something changed. In the construct, in his light, he felt a difference, one he didn’t think he’d imagined. He hoped it meant that his friends had gotten out...not that Shadow’s people had killed them like dogs on one of the higher floors, or worse, captured them alive.

The two guards holding him had shoved him to the back of the elevator.

Big mistake, letting him hide his hands, but they probably figured it was a moot point now, that it couldn’t possibly matter.

The elevator was large, more of a cargo elevator than one he associated with passengers. Revik knew they were taking him somewhere outside of New York. He could feel that high up in his light somewhere, too. He thought about the word ‘distraction’ in that higher reach of his aleimi, mixing it in with other symbols, reciting scripture he’d learned as a child in the forefront of his light...

He could use the telekinesis still.

They might short it out, like before.

Maybe they wouldn’t care anymore, now that they were already on the run. Maybe they would let him knock himself out cold again, knowing they could build him up faster than before. He wondered now if they’d deliberately not repaired it after Argentina, meaning the last time it got damaged, so that he wouldn’t be able to interfere while they took Allie.

While they took his wife and child.

He wondered if that was the real reason his light repaired so quickly in San Francisco once Allie and their child were gone...once they no longer needed Revik out of the way.

Revik could feel it now, what they’d done up there, in his light. A kind of safety-defense mechanism. He couldn’t turn his telekinesis on anyone high up inside the construct, anyone above maybe the third or fourth tier. It instantly created a kind of feedback loop, overloading the structure and damaging it, and him, like shorting out a fuse by pumping too much electricity through it all at once.

Only, instead of electricity, triggering the failsafe in this instance brought down a massive dump of hard, silver-gray light, like pouring mercury over his head, or maybe just into his heart.

Revik’s mind spun around the mechanism at those higher levels, looking at it, all the while his fingers and hands worked in the physical, pulling out the tool, sawing at the cuffs on his wrists. In the foreground, he found himself reciting the succession order of the old Pyramid he’d built for Galaith.

...1, 1, 9, 2023, 12, 2878, 23, 21, 3, 4, 17, 188, 192, 101, 1, 3, 3, 2, 5...

“Stop that,” the seer holding him muttered, shaking his arm.

When Revik looked up, the man was wiping his nose with a gloved hand. His gloved fingers came away covered in blood. Revik continued to recite the numbers, looking for a way out, looking for a part of the construct where they couldn’t find him.

That part of him seemed almost to operate independently of the rest.

It looked like threads now, strangling him from all sides. In those telekinetic structures, so high up above where he normally operated, he hadn’t been able to see it...Balidor hadn’t been able to see it. So deeply interwoven into who he thought he was, Revik hadn’t known those extra pieces in his light as not-himself.

Allie might have figured it out eventually.

Maybe that was another reason they had to get rid of her, before she’d been trained well enough to feel what the Dreng had done to him.

...987, 231, 11, 11, 11, 57, 63, 44, 1, 2, 2, 2, 6, 6, 8, 2, 1, 6, 6, 887, 900, 600...

“Fucking stop it!” The guard next to him lost control, cuffing his head.

Revik felt Menlim’s light in his––invasive, uncompromising. They never left him alone. Menlim always acted like Revik’s light belonged to him as much as to Revik himself.

More, really. He thought it belonged to him more.

“Your light is a gift to the world,”
he would tell Revik.
“A gift to the world...”

Thinking about that now, Revik laughed.

He leaned against the wall between two of the largest of Menlim’s guards, both of whom had nose-bleeds now, neither of whom noticed Revik’s own blood running down his arm behind his back, where he extracted the tool he now used to saw at the organic cuffs. Revik felt something in their minds start to unravel as he laughed, and he laughed harder.

What the fuck is he doing?
Terian sent to Menlim, his words floating somewhere in the construct. Revik saw the words, saw them drift below those higher structures in his own light.
What the hell did they give him? Is he having some kind of psychotic break?

Menlim’s presence floated above him, too, along with Terian, and the lizard lady.

Cass had disappeared. Cass...she was gone.

A harmless sedative,
Menlim sent back.
It was meant to calm him, nothing more.

Does he strike you as particularly ‘calm’ right now?
Terian sent, his thoughts holding more punch.
What the fuck happened down there? You felt it too, didn’t you?

Of course I felt it,
Menlim sent back, his thoughts cold as ice.
It doesn’t matter. Whatever trick the Adhipan and that old woman are playing, it is too late. We have him. There is no way they can stop us from leaving with him now...

Yeah,
Terian sent back, sharp. He sounded genuinely angry, furious at the older seer.
We only had to sacrifice Cass to do it...and the child. And he’ll probably just die anyway...

He won’t die,
Menlim sent, his mind firm.
And we will get Cassandra and your daughter back, my son. Do not worry about that. I promise you they will not be separated from you for long. They have no one to protect them from us now, and I can easily track the girl.

Terian’s thoughts felt significantly more skeptical.
You’re sure about that? In fact, are you sure you killed the Bridge at all? She didn’t feel all that dead to me.

She is dead. We confirmed it brother, believe me.

Terian clicked at him in the space, sounding unconvinced.

Revik felt Terian’s light darting around his in electric twitches and jerks, still reacting nervously to whatever he could feel emanating off Revik’s own aleimi.

Did you evacuate the rest of your little council?
Terian asked Menlim.
What are we doing next, if you’re serious about going after––

He is listening to us,
Menlim sent, cutting him off.
We will discuss this later, Terian.

Revik chuckled, glancing at the two guards he stood between.

They glared at him in return, but Revik saw the nervousness in their eyes. Six others stood in front of them, nearly filling the metal box as it descended down through the floors. He could taste water now, feel a boat, but somehow, he had to fight not to laugh again. Menlim was right. He could hear them. He could hear every fucking word. Not only that, he could feel where they were now. He could feel them below him, a few floors underground.