Allie's War Season Four (88 page)

Jon pushed those images away, but the feel of them lingered, difficult to ignore, or even to think past. He once more grew aware of Wreg by his side...not touching him, not speaking, but his warmth somehow seeping over into Jon’s light anyway, bleeding away the worst of his anxiety, or at least blunting its sharpest edges.

They walked silently over the grass and into the trees rimming the edge of the road, and Jon found himself reaching for the butt of his gun in reflex.

He had no specific fear, or even an abstract one, but the feeling of the conflict earlier that day lingered, and it tensed his muscles all over again as they broke through the trees on the other side of the street.

No one greeted them on the other side. No shots rang out.

Jon didn’t feel anyone either, even through that hyper-awareness he now had of the construct, presumably because Revik now knew how to access that construct directly. Jon felt shimmers of Maygar at the thought, and glanced over at the Asian-looking seer, catching him staring at Allie. Unlike his father, Maygar barely seemed able to take his eyes off of her. Maygar hadn’t spoken to Allie directly, not that Jon had seen, nor had he approached her directly, or hugged her like Chinja and a few of the others. At the same time, he seemed hyper-aware of her, almost to the detriment of anything else.

Jon found himself remembering a few key things about Maygar’s reactions to Allie before, and frowned, almost without knowing he did it. He also forgot how closely connected he and Maygar’s light remained, and the fact that he hadn’t been shielding his thoughts from any of the others in their strange quartet, either.

Even as he thought it, Allie glanced over her shoulder, giving both Jon and Maygar the barest of glances before her eyes faced forward once more. The stare Jon caught from Maygar held a lot more meaning, and significantly more anger than that glance of Allie’s.

I’m not like that anymore,
Maygar grumped at him.

Sorry, man. Can’t help it.

Well, find a way to help it. Get off my back!

Jon shrugged, not feeling particularly apologetic, and Maygar hit at his light.

I mean it. Or you’ll have him crawling all up in my shit again, too...

Jon nodded that time, but still didn’t answer. Shoving that whole dynamic out of his mind, he faced forward once more, and immediately made out the outline of the Chinook. The cockpit light was already on. Jon found himself squinting at the man he could see sitting there, until he realized it was Revik.

Shit. He was going to fly them out of here.

In the same set of seconds, Jon realized he wasn’t really surprised.

Revik would want something to do right then. Preferably something that took all or most of his concentration. He also probably didn’t want to have to sit in the back with the rest of them. Thinking this through as he approached the lowered ramp in the back, Jon watched Jorag go in ahead of him and walk straight to the cockpit, probably to co-pilot for Revik.

Walking up the ramp with a few of the others, including Jax and Neela, Jon blinked into the overhead lights of the cabin when those in the passenger hold suddenly flickered to life, too. He held up a hand, gripping the back of one seat, feeling more presences dart around his awareness in that brief silence, including Tarsi...and Vash, with her. Jon took in the row of headsets slung next to each chair, feeling dazed all over again.

They were really leaving.

Probably never to come back this time.

The thought hit him strangely, almost painfully, but Jon shoved that aside, too.

Then another sound jerked him completely out of his own head, shocking him so much that Jon froze, mid-step. He still nearly fell onto the aisle between rows of seats, but caught himself, grasping a chair in one hand as he listened, panting.

It was a baby crying.

26

THERE IS AN OCEAN

WE REACHED THE ship right around dawn.

The thing was pretty much a floating zoo.

Somehow, that single fact amused me more than worried me, at least upon seeing it initially. I had to hand it to Balidor for his ingenuity. He’d taken another aircraft carrier, and while he and everyone else in San Francisco were getting ready to go after Cass, he’d spent months fixing it up and making it livable for us as a kind of moving base, until something more permanent could be constructed, likely in New Mexico or Colorado in the United States, or possibly further up in North America, in Montana, Canada, or even Alaska.

So yeah, taking a page out of Shadow’s book.

Or maybe it just made the most sense right now, to find a means of riding out the crazy on the ocean itself, given the chaos that still reigned on much of the land. Anyway, we needed to keep the humans under our charge safe. Safe and disease-free, in the event the virus mutated, or somehow transcended that magical
twenty-six percent immune
barrier in some way.

Pretty much everyone in the passenger cabin of the Chinook spent the vast majority of the flight playing with Lilai.

She still seemed pretty weirded out by all of us.

She cried a few times, confused and her light scattering with fear as she remembered Cass falling down in that high-end apartment. Since she’d been surrounded by cooing seers who flooded her with warmth and reassurance and light, the tears hadn’t lasted long, but they still cut at me. Most of the time she spent in Chandre’s lap, playing with her black braids, and touching her high, angular cheeks. She seemed strangely fascinated by Chandre’s eyes, and stared into their reddish-black hues for minutes at a time without blinking.

I let them all play with her, thinking they needed the downtime more than I did.

Anyway, I would have as much time as I wanted with her, soon enough.

Jon sat in the seat across from Lilai and just stared at her, stunned, for most of the flight. I think she didn’t seem quite real to him, either. Or maybe she seemed a little
too
real, given everything that had happened over the past few months.

Cass remained unconscious.

They locked her arms, elbows, wrists and ankles together, to one another...and to a metal bar over the emergency exit door on the back starboard side of the Chinook. Neela also put a second collar on her, which was a new one on me.

I could feel a few of them wanting to do more, but I told them that no one was to touch her. Not now...and not when we got back to the ship. I promised them that we’d deal with her, but that wasn’t going to consist of us taking turns beating the piss out of her.

I had no intention of letting them descend into animalistic behavior, no matter how upset or traumatized they were. Not now...not ever.

I couldn’t exactly blame them, though.

As for Revik, I left him alone. I couldn’t help but be aware of him, though...pretty much nonstop the entire flight. I felt sparks of his light, here and there, but for the most part, the construct over the cockpit remained deathly still, with only murmurings from Jorag occasionally breaking that silence. I could tell that Jorag had been trying to reach Revik, too, but that he hadn’t been having much success.

As for Revik himself, he didn’t direct so much as a whisper of thought towards me, or even towards Lilai. He felt locked inside a glass ball, completely outside of my reach. I tried to respect that distance. For the most part, I did. He only had to push me off him once, when I’d crept over into his light subconsciously, not even realizing what I’d done until I felt him flinch from the Barrier, asking me without words to leave him alone.

After that, I did.

The flight over New York itself was one of the more eerie experiences I’ve ever had.

I’d never seen the city so dark...or so quiet.

Lower Manhattan had flooded once more, partly from the storm, but mostly because the fields had failed in a few key points. The hotel, when we passed over it, looked completely deserted. The armored tanks that Tenzi and others had reported on the streets in front had already gone, presumably because SCARB, FEMA, and the United States military found the hotel empty, too.

Chinja claimed to have seen those tanks grinding their way up the west side of the park, aiming uptown, as we left the North Meadow.

The ocean looked dark.

I saw white crests from the wind and rain, but most of it looked like a dark blanket past the last strip of land. We saw fires dotting the shores, but not a lot of artificial light. It felt like looking out over a simulation of some primeval world, of a time before electricity, when everyone still used fire in various forms to heat and light their homes.

It bothered me, yeah, but strangely, I felt hope in those glimpses, too.

Life would overcome. Even here.

Even among those who hadn’t the resources or the luck to get to one of the high-end quarantine zones, people were surviving the disease.

Anyway, I suspected we’d seen the last of the quarantine zone over New York, too.

I don’t know if they thought they could keep the waters back forever, or if they’d simply been arrogant enough to think that they could wait things out long enough to be able to return to the mainland. Perhaps they thought they could claim what they seemed to feel was their natural birthright once the danger had passed, reaping the benefits of a depleted population and with no major losses of their own.

Either way, I expected that a lot of the ‘better classes’ of people who’d taken refuge on the island would be leaving soon.

I couldn’t help thinking, good riddance.

I’d never liked New York all that much anyway.

Maybe in its next incarnation, it would be a different kind of place.

Or underwater. Whichever.

Even as I thought it, though, I found myself wiping away tears.

27

WALK THE LINE

I FOUND HIM where I expected to find him.

Balidor explained what they needed of him, and he’d seemed to understand... as much as he seemed to be present for much of anything since we’d landed.

In any case, Revik got the gist. He didn’t seem surprised, and really, why would he be? He’d been the one to discover the connection himself.

Still, given the associations it must have evoked, Revik likely hadn’t been thrilled. Especially since the requirement remained somewhat open-ended at this point, at least until they got more eyes on his light.

I knew I’d be pulled into that soon enough, too.

In any case, we were ready for it this time, at least. Balidor had spent months working on another version of the tank, like where we’d kept Revik in those mountains. The infiltration team had a few projects going that I’d only been marginally aware of, in fact, meaning projects that started long before I got knocked out by the wires. One of those even involved using the wires to train humans to see the Barrier––a pet project of Jon’s and Balidor’s that pretty much got dumped entirely after they found me unconscious in San Francisco.