Allie's War Season Four (86 page)

He was still staring when one of those figures moved forward from the dark, until she fell under the light washing out of the elevator doors.

“Well,” she said, smiling at him. “Are you coming out of there, husband, or not?”

Revik stared at her, feeling his mind go completely flat line.

That time, for those few seconds anyway, he almost didn’t mind.

BALIDOR JUMPED DOWN the last set of stairs, landing in knee-deep, ice cold water. The rushing sound down the sewer tunnels in front of him unnerved him. Still, he grasped Hondo’s arm in a friendly way when he saw her, smiling in spite of himself.

“You made it, my sister,” Balidor smiled. “We were worried.”

Hondo grinned back at him, clapping him on the back.
“You
were worried? I hear we all owe you a drink,” she added. “Maybe a few cases’ worth of drink, in fact...”

Balidor focused down that tunnel, shivering in the freezing cold water. “I suspect I won’t be turning that down,” he said. Exhaling as much to fortify himself as anything, he saw the cloud of steam his mouth exuded and frowned again. “How much has it risen?”

“It only just started to rise,” Hondo informed him. “Maybe three inches in total...but they’re saying we need to hurry.”

“Are we the last of them?” Balidor said, looking around. He saw Tenzi shivering on a higher stair. He smiled at him wanly, despite the fact that the other man was obviously freezing. “Really? No one else?”

“We are indeed the last, Adhipan Balidor.” Despite how cold he looked, Tenzi spoke with obvious pride. “Most of them are already off the island, sir.”

Balidor felt a sigh of relief leave his body somewhere.

He didn’t ask about the Sword.

He would deal with the bad news later.

Blowing on his hands and releasing another cloud of steam, he motioned for Tenzi to join him and Hondo on the lower stairs, just above where another seer––Balidor was pretty sure her name was Wanai––struggled to hold a thick-looking raft more or less even with their makeshift dock at the bottom landing before the stairs disappeared under the water entirely. Balidor nudged Hondo then, smiling at the other female as he gripped her arm, then leaned down to help Wanai hold the raft so the other two seers could board.

“Let’s go, then,” he said, glancing up at Tenzi. “I don’t want to wait for that water to rise, do you, my friends?”

Tenzi shook his head. Even so, he made an obviously pained face when he stepped deeper into the water. “Gods!” he said.

Stopping when the water reached his shins, Tenzi began cursing much more elaborately in Prexci. Balidor couldn’t help laughing at a few of the phrases. Tenzi gave him an indignant look when he heard him laugh.

“You just got here,” he reminded Balidor. “I’ve been here for hours, El Capitan. So has Hondo!”

“Of course, of course,” Balidor said, making a polite gesture.

“Smug bastard,” Tenzi muttered.

Even so, Balidor could feel that all of their spirits had lifted somehow. Maybe just the fact that they’d gotten so many on the Displacement lists out of Shadow’s reach. Maybe just the fact that they were still alive, in spite of everything.

“Did you really shoot him right in the head?” Tenzi said, using Balidor’s shoulder for balance as he climbed into the boat in front of him.

“Yes,” Balidor affirmed. “One shot.”

“What about Ute?” Hondo asked, moving to step onto the raft after Hondo.

Balidor shook his head, once. “No,” he said. “I got two of the others. We exchanged fire for a few minutes, but they must have thought there were more of us up there than there were...”

“Than just one, you mean,” Hondo said, gloating with pride as she shook her long hair. “Just one Mr. Balidor, and you had those fuckers shitting their pants...”

Tenzi burst out into another laugh.

The other female, Wanai, exchanged a grin with Balidor, too.

“So what happened then?” Hondo said.

Balidor shrugged, motioning politely with one hand for Wanai to get on in front of him. Hondo was leaning over now, holding the raft to the concrete landing, gripping the metal pole of what had once been the staircase’s guardrail in one very cold-looking hand. Her long, dirty-blond hair fell part of the way into the water, and Balidor heard her teeth chattering as he started to follow the other two onto the raft.

“They went over the wall,” Balidor said, shrugging.

He stepped onto the raft, using Wanai and then Tenzi as balance. Stepping into the center, he crouched and sat where they’d left him a spot that would balance the overall weight of the boat, across from the taller Tenzi. The placement made sense, given the gun Balidor himself still wore and the armor around his chest. Hondo, although muscular and tall for a female, would still make a better counterweight to Wanai than either Tenzi or Balidor. Balidor saw that they’d put a box of what looked like ammunition magazines more on Wanai’s side, too. Between the four of them and that, they should be able to keep the raft from capsizing.

“Thank you for waiting for me, brother and sisters,” Balidor said, realizing suddenly that they had done just that, and risked their own lives in the process, especially given the rising waters. The realization touched him. “It means a lot.”

Tenzi waved off his words, but smiled a little.

“So they’re gone?” Hondo said, even as she released the pole.

Balidor sucked in a breath, gripping the sides of the raft as the dark tunnel into the sewers rapidly approached.

“They’re gone,” he affirmed, speaking louder over the rush of water.

A bare breath later, the raft was plunged into darkness. Ducking down, more out of reflex than because he could feel or see the tunnel’s curved ceiling, Balidor fought to control his breath, fighting to peer down the tunnel in the dark with his eyes and light.

“It’ll be okay,” Tenzi assured him, raising his voice over the sound of the water in the hollow pipe. “They’ve all gone through just fine. We’ve got Ullysa on the other end, and they’re still monitoring the water levels...”

“Unless there’s an earthquake,” Balidor muttered, still crouched down in the front of the boat.

Laughing, Hondo, who sat closest to him, clapped him on the back.

“Unless there’s an earthquake,” she seconded.

JON WALKED BESIDE Wreg.

He fought not to grab the seer’s hand, knowing it wasn’t the time for that, either, even though they were finally on their way out of this goddamned place. For the past hour or so, spent in that chamber of horrors under the Tower, Jon felt like his nerves had been run over a cheese grater. Now he felt almost like he’d been drugged.

A dense, white, but somehow crystal-clear light hovered over the whole group. It made them all act pretty strange...not bad strange, really, but yeah, strange.

He couldn’t look at her directly, not yet.

At the same time, he found he couldn’t look away. He couldn’t seem to keep his light away from hers, either.

They were in the park now.

Jon tried to focus on that fact, on what he could see and feel around him, in a location that should be at least vaguely familiar at this point. Even so, his mind kept returning to the woman who walked ahead of them, flanked by Jorag, Chandre, Chinja and Neela. Jax walked with that group too, Jon noticed, still limping and pale, but keeping up without too much visible strain. Jon got the sense that the soft light flooding their small group probably benefited him even more than the others, given how much light he’d lost from his injury.

Jon had been told that Tarsi, Vikram, Yarli and Anale, along with Loki’s team, already waited for them at the Chinook.

There’d been a minor argument in the lobby of the Tower.

Wreg, Neela, Jon and a few others wanted to go after Terian.

Revik wanted to go after Menlim.

They hadn’t been able to get a hold of Balidor at that point, to tell him to bomb what remained of the building. Anyway, Revik seemed to think it wouldn’t do them any good, that they needed to go after some ship he could still see and feel through the construct, before it disappeared under the ocean with Menlim and Terian and the rest of Shadow’s inner circle. Unfortunately, they had no access to the rest of the hotel seers, either, so they had no way to confirm Revik’s words, or even of communicating what they wanted those other seers to do, if something like a bomb or missile were still possible at this point.

It had been one of the strangest conversations Jon had ever been a part of. Revik wouldn’t look at Allie at all. He answered her words a few times, argued with her––mainly through the others––but mostly just stood there, staring at the floor, his jaw hard.

Thanks to Jon’s relatively new and still mostly annoying photographic seer memory, he remembered the conversation word for word.

“We need to go after him,” Revik had said. “Now. It’s probably our last chance.”

“No,” Allie had said, shaking her head. “No, Revik...you don’t know what you’re saying. It would be completely pointless. Moreover, I’m positive it’s what he wants.”

Revik shook his head, still refusing to look at her. “We have an actual chance to take him down now. We can’t pass this up. We can’t just let him––”

“No!” Allie cried out. “No, Revik...we aren’t doing that. Not now. We
have
to let him go this time...we have to. Don’t you see?”

She’d sounded exasperated, Jon remembered, but he couldn’t help wondering if it was more because Revik wouldn’t look at her, wouldn’t even stand next to her, and had his light locked up tighter than Jon had ever seen it.

“No, absolutely not,” she’d repeated, in either case, shaking her head when he didn’t answer. “We can’t. We really can’t. I understand why you want to, but it’s a really bad idea.”

“Why?” Revik demanded. “Why is it a bad idea, Allie?”

“Because he’s one of the Dreng,” she said.

Not only Revik had looked frustrated at that one.

Wreg blinked at her, too, glancing at Jon and Jorag in disbelief before he frowned along with Revik and the others, facing Allie.

“Aren’t they
all
Dreng, Esteemed and Revered Sister?” Wreg said.

Despite the disbelief in his voice, Wreg asked the question politely.

More than politely, Jon thought with a grunt. He’d treated Allie more like a walking relic, some kind of resurrected holy ghost, rather than a person. And really, Wreg’s reaction to seeing Allie walking and talking had been significantly more sane than most of theirs, which had ranged from Jax touching her constantly and grinning...to Neela making religious gestures around Allie’s body and touching Allie’s hands every few minutes...again, like she was some kind of Buddha statue that was walking and talking and breathing...to Rig insisting on keeping his head and face below hers, even though he stood something like half a foot taller than her.