Allie's War Season Four (85 page)

What had Terian said? That they’d lost the child? That they’d lost Cass, too?

Of course, the child was dead, Revik knew that...Allie told him that much. But why had Menlim claimed he could get them back? Was Cass dead, too?

He could feel that something had happened to Cass’s light. Something Menlim hadn’t planned for. He knew it was probably all just another trick, another attempt to screw with his head, but Revik couldn’t help thinking it might be more than that. Something had happened. Something unplanned for by Shadow and his crew.

Something that was making Menlim very nervous.

Revik knew he hadn’t done it, but someone had.

The thought made him smile, even as he turned that word over in his head a second time. Distraction. Maybe he could be doing something, after all. Maybe he hadn’t been chained as much as he’d originally thought. Maybe he wouldn’t need to use only his body, or even the tool that he’d now used to cut most of the way through the first cuff.

After all, he was the head of the fucking construct. That meant he could rewrite that construct, right? In theory, anyway.

So he did. He just went around that whole land mine entirely, rerouting his light at the source, fixing the connections and broken pieces of his structure at the top of the silver-threaded Pyramid he could see in the lower levels of the Barrier.

The first thing he did was to eliminate that fucking feedback loop.

He just got rid of that sucker entirely.

Once he felt pretty certain he’d managed that, he let his eyes click back into focus. He waited for someone to react. Menlim. Terian. One of the guards down here. He waited for them to freak out, to try and reverse the changes he’d made, to go back to leashing his telekinesis from behind the Barrier. No one did.

Revik wondered if he should test it.

Concentrating briefly, he focused on something small. Something inconsequential.

Stall them,
she’d sent.
Give me some time.

He decided to stop the elevator.

The car complied with a hard jerk.

The motion nearly threw him off his feet, making the seers and humans around him sway and slam into the walls. A few fell, grabbing onto the uniforms of the seers and humans closest to
 
where they stood. The alarm went off, exploding into harsh clanging overhead.

The guards gasped, even the ones holding Revik, wincing and covering their ears, one-handed. The two guards closest to him looked bad now, as did the other six crammed into the elevator in front of him. Four humans, the rest Sark.

The two holding him, as well as one other, each had actual ranks of about six.

Revik could feel all of it now.

The seer directly in front of him felt like a rank two or three––the fighter from before, so more of a physical guy. The woman next to him felt like a seven. Another female and two males all fell into the five and six range. Another rank two. A four. Another five.

He could see all of them, their structures, spinning in the construct below him.

The really big gun stood in the opposite corner. Female. Had to be a rank nine or ten, actual. Close to Wreg’s in potential, if not his equal in actual, not yet.

He started with her.

No one heard the cracking sound that came right before she crumpled to the carpeted floor of the elevator car. The alarms were too loud.

Well, no one but Revik. He only heard it in that high up, distant place in his light.

He felt the others react when they realized what he’d done, though. He heard a yell, with his physical ears, felt the panic as their lights flared out, one by one, starting with the seers and humans who stood closest to her.

He didn’t give them a lot of time to react.

Tapping into the higher light of the construct, he picked them off, one by one.

She’d wanted a distraction. She’d wanted him to stall.

The more he thought about it, the more he doubted that had been Cass, talking to him. He didn’t know where she’d spoken to him from, what it meant, but it felt like Allie.

Allie, and she’d told him that their child was dead...that he didn’t need to worry about her anymore. He could go back upstairs. He could go up, and tell Balidor to use the bombs. He could tell Balidor what he’d seen about that underground escape...what the ship looked like, how to find their main transport when they hit the ocean. He could tell them everything, and they could blow the damned thing out of the water before it even surfaced.

Or, he could do that part himself.

He could go downstairs right now, while they were all still in the building, and take that fucker out himself. Take Menlim’s magic council and just crack their spines, one by one. Sever the threads that held them to this world.

Even as he thought it, the elevator groaned.

Revik blinked his eyes, staring around the elevator car, realizing it hadn’t been the drugs, or some kind of dream. Bodies littered the bottom of the car now. He was covered in blood. He stood there, panting, nearly losing his balance without the seers to hold him on either side.

He still hadn’t managed to saw all the way through the organic cuff.

It only occurred to him then that he still wore a collar.

They must have done something to that collar so it wouldn’t interfere with Revik’s hold on the construct from those higher structures. He couldn’t help finding that funny, too, given that he’d used that same construct to climb into a part of his light that could move the construct around like so many tiny filament-like puppet strings.

Staring up at the god’s eye camera in the corner over the elevator’s control panel, Revik laughed. He was still laughing when the elevator jerked back into motion, the alarm shutting off without warning.

That time, it was traveling up.

The motion threw him to the ground as the car began ascending rapidly.

Revik struggled back up to his feet, climbing over bodies awkwardly, slamming his own body against the car’s walls by the control panel and using that to leverage himself back up to his feet. He’d dropped the tool by accident when the car lurched, and now he fought to pick it up, banging his side into the metal hand-rail that rimmed the back three walls of the car. He barely felt it enough to curse before he fumbled over the bodies lying there, looking back to try and locate the dropped tool. When he couldn’t find it, he stood up, fighting his way over the console instead, looking for the controls.

He couldn’t stop the elevator car with his mind that time...something was interfering. Something was in the way...something not in the Dreng’s construct at all.

Turning his back on the console, Revik tried hitting the emergency stop button with his fingers. He pressed it in, but it did nothing.

Pulling it out with his fingers and thumb, he pressed it in again, but still, no response.

“Fuck,” he muttered.

He looked back, once more trying to locate the cutting tool, but he couldn’t see it. One of the bodies or limbs must have rolled over on top of it.

He tried to use the telekinesis to undo the collar, but that time, it shocked him, hard enough to make him gasp, and to disorient him. It shocked him again when he tried to use those same structures to open the cuffs.

He needed too much of his lower aleimi to manage either thing, apparently.

He tried hitting other buttons, but when he looked down at the console, none of them would stay lit. Someone had hijacked the elevator car. Menlim must have had his people override the signal to get him to the lobby. But why couldn’t he reach it with the telekinesis? And why were they having him go up now, when before they’d been bringing him down? Why the lobby and not the roof, if they still planned to relocate him?

Using the construct, carefully that time, he tried to see who they were.

Cass remained invisible.

He could see Terian, briefly, standing in a cement tunnel, his clothes jerking under a heavy wind. Revik felt the cold air, the spray from a tunnel river, then saw the long, narrow boat docked behind him, it’s oval cabin door open and spilling light down a lowered staircase in the near-dark. Revik vaguely recognized the amphibious vehicle, but knew it had been heavily modified. He scanned briefly, looking for serial numbers...

When something slammed him, hard, knocking him out of the construct.

Revik gave a low laugh, leaning against the wall.

Fuck. They’d figured out how he was getting in. For some reason, the thought only made him laugh again, and he grinned up at the camera, tasting blood as his nose bled onto his lips from the hit. It still didn’t explain why the elevator was going up and not down.

“Kiss my ass,” he said up at the camera. “I guess you’re just going to have to kill me...uncle
dickhead.”
He let out another course laugh. “Fuck you, and the horse you rode in on...”

Even as he finished speaking, the elevator car lurched to a stop.

Revik managed to remain on his feet...but only just. He stared around at the stopped car, knees bent, panting. He half-expected to be shot. Some part of him felt an irrational flush of hope, wondering if they were going to leave him behind, if he’d proven to be too much trouble. Of course, they might just try to kill him anyway. Gas him. Or maybe just lock him up in here, collared, and let him starve to death, surrounded by the corpses of the seers and humans he’d slain. Maybe the Dreng hoped he’d go all Donner Party and eat them.

The thought made him laugh again, although it wasn’t really funny.

It had to be the drugs.

Even as he thought it, the doors in front of him pinged.

Then, slowly, they began to open.

REVIK FOUND HIMSELF staring into a familiar-looking space. Dim, covered in gray, marbled stone tile. Expensive looking...or it had been, before bullet holes riddled the walls.

He stared at the girl standing there, blinking at her from the lit car into the dark of the high-ceilinged business lobby. Revik recognized her blunt-cut black hair, but she looked thinner than he remembered, her face paler. She held a console between white, small hands, her face a blueish glow from the monitor itself, even as she keyed through commands. He saw that her hand-held had been connected to a panel outside the elevator with an organic filament.

Revik blinked at her, taking all of that in. He still leaned on the elevator wall, half-swaying on his feet, even with the support.

Then he saw Vikram standing behind her, and blinked again.

The girl with the short, black hair blinked back, an open-mouthed surprise changing her features as she took in the vision he must have presented.

He remembered her name then, as she stared at him.

“Dante,” he said. His voice sounded hoarse. “It’s Dante, right?”

“Yeah,” she stammered at him.

She looked behind her, then, over her own shoulder at other figures lost in shadow. From the expression on her face, she was asking for help. Following her gaze, Revik realized a lot of other people stood there. More than he could probably handle, if they turned out to be unfriendly. He felt his muscles stiffening anyway, tensing around the handcuffs that still kept his wrists behind his back, wishing he’d finished with the cuffs instead of screwing around with the elevator buttons, trying to get downstairs. Forcing himself the rest of the way to his feet, so that he stood more or less under his own power, he blinked into that dark, fighting to see.