Allie's War Season One (111 page)

Revik was less than a third of the age of most of the seers tracking with him, but out-of-shape from his time with Terian and almost no real exercise in the months since. He found himself limping along like a middle-ager, fighting to keep his breathing quiet enough to avoid pissing off the rest of the team.

His muscles had started to protest less than halfway through day one; now, on day three, he was doing marginally better. He’d been going out of his way to eat a lot and then powering through, pushing himself when it hurt. The least he could do was start building back some muscle while he was out here.

They hadn’t had a lot of solid hits, but they were still on the trail.

That fact alone told Revik one thing; whatever it was they were following, it likely wasn’t a Terian body. Unlike for Galaith, improvisation wasn’t entirely unheard of for Terian, but it was still exceedingly rare.

Only two seers left the Sikkim school on this particular trail.

The Adhipan picked them out initially because among all those who survived, they alone left with human guides. Their emotional signatures didn’t match that of the rest of the survivors, either, and instead of heading south with the other refugees, towards Nayabazar or Darjeeling, they headed due north, into the mountains. Later, they found a resonance between one of those seers and the origins of the blast.

The day before, Revik had walked the interior of a cave with the others.

They’d found evidence of a campfire and discarded bedding...as well as imprints from humans and seers having slept there. The imprints were already a few days old, but blood stains on the cave floor made a trail into the trees.

At the end of that trail, they’d found two rough graves, only half-finished, illustrating the end of the two human guides. Revik and several in the Adhipan found child-sized footprints in the dirt. They’d done extensive scans, but came up close to blank.

Someone was protecting the two seers they followed. Whoever was doing it, they were likely operating from elsewhere, not with them on the ground.

Sensing movement, Revik glanced sideways.

Balidor met his gaze, then motioned to him with his eyes.

Revik followed the seer’s fingers as they indicated up the nearby bank. He was being asked to scout the ridge. Nodding once, he kept his feelings to himself as he turned and began vaulting, as quietly as he could, up the hill.

He knew he was clumsy by Adhipan standards, but he’d already gotten better in the days he’d been out there. Balidor made it pretty clear he wanted Revik along for his own reasons, at least in part—both to test him, and to get a sense of how he fit in with the rest of the group. Given how rarely they admitted new seers to the Adhipan, as well as Revik’s reputation with the Rooks, Balidor also likely hoped Revik might prove himself to his team.

Maybe because he was genuinely beginning to like the Adhipan leader...or maybe just pride...Revik found he was trying to meet Balidor’s expectations.

Or, at the very least, to not embarrass himself.

Reaching the top of the hill only slightly out of breath, he remained in the trees dotting the steep edge of the highest point. He kept his silhouette off the ridgeline as he scanned the valley below.

Splitting his consciousness between his eyes and the Barrier, with some small portion still with the Adhipan in the ravine on the other side, he looked for movement. From the Barrier, he looked for any sign of life bigger than your average monkey.

He got nothing.

He made roughly the same sweep twice, just to be certain. He was about to make his way back down the same incline...

When something pinged his consciousness.

It was sharp enough, and near enough, that he jumped. He turned his head as if it had been pulled by a puppet wire.

...and found himself looking at a very young, very dirty seer.

Maybe twenty years of age—so appearing closer to thirteen in human years—the boy stared at him from less than fifteen feet away. His face wore strong, Asiatic features.

His black eyes seemed to bore into Revik’s.

The boy gripped the bark of the nearest tree with corpse-white hands that might have been completely untouched by sun. He wore what looked like misshapen adult’s clothes, also Asian, and human-made. He’d belted the shirt and pants around himself to keep them up, but his feet and head were bare. Red with scratches and coated in mud and bits of greenery, his feet had swollen from walking.

Revik blinked in surprise, sure he was hallucinating.

When his blink ended, the boy had gone.

Revik felt the seers in the valley below reacting before he fully believed what he’d seen. He hadn’t lost his connection to the Adhipan throughout the brief encounter, and now he felt them vaulting up the hill behind him, faster than he had—a lot faster, he realized.

The part of him that had felt a brief flush of pride at how quickly he was regaining his speed realized he’d been kidding himself. Now that they were motivated, they moved through the trees almost too quickly for his light to track. Watching them close the gap, he thought he’d need to train every day for months to be able to match even the slowest of them.

The female, Laren, reached him first.

Without a word, Revik pointed to where the boy had been, sending her a more detailed imprint as a snapshot from his light.

She disappeared into the trees without hesitation.

Revik stood there a second longer, then followed to cover her even as four other seers reached the same part of the ridge, Grent and Balidor among them. Embarrassed now that he’d hesitated, Revik fanned out with the rest of the team down the opposite hillside, following Balidor’s commands from the Barrier, doing his best to move as quietly and as quickly as the rest of them. As the fan spread down the hill, he kept his consciousness split, scanning and shielding more tightly as he was forced to cover more ground.

Then Laren signaled all of them, and he got the image of the boy again, clearly, standing on the branch of a tree above ground, on the other side of a grassy clearing. The boy stood about thirty yards away from her.

Like the rest of them, Revik shifted direction at once, running through the trees at top speed to reach where she stood. He’d been closer than over half of them, but he still reached the clearing dead last, and the most out of breath.

He approached the area where Laren and four others had their guns trained on the kid, moving cautiously until his physical eyes pulled the boy’s outline from the trees.

He studied the dirty face.

That feeling of familiarity was back, although still vague, more of a flicker than anything. He was still trying to decide its source when he realized the boy was staring at him, too.

In fact, the boy stared at him alone...ignoring the Adhipan seers.

That fact didn’t go unnoticed by the others.

They looked between him and the boy, and Revik felt a few in the Adhipan scan him—less than politely, in that they neither asked nor were they open about it—in an attempt to discern if Revik recognized the boy as well. He let them in, partly in irritation, but mainly to see if they could determine the nature of the connection.

None did, at least not that they were willing to share with him.

The boy’s expression remained flat, but the intensity of his interest in Revik shimmered off him in waves.

Revik found himself moving closer in reflex, when Laren and then Balidor each held up a hand, motioning unmistakably at Revik to remain where he was.

Hold your position!
Laren sent, sharp.
Look at the structures!

Revik focused above the boy’s head.

Blinking his way from the Barrier to his physical eyes then back again, he focused his aleimi, sure he’d scanned him wrong. Convinced at his second look, he watched the crystalized geometries rotate in awe.

When the boy didn’t seem to be blocking him, he tried to get a closer look.

He recognized some of the basic shapes from Allie’s light, but not in the configuration he could see now. Aleimic structures changed from use; they grew, but they also reconfigured and clustered when specialized functions were exercised, particularly if those functions involved using more than one structure at the same time. The geometries that spiraled up from the boy’s head looked like a fountain of mathematical fireworks, highlighted from recent use...but also from repeated use, over a long period of time.

From the Barrier, he looked like Allie would look after about fifty years of manipulation training, followed by ten more in the field.

There was no way the boy standing in front of him could be old enough for what lived above his head.

STOP!
Balidor sent sharply.

Revik hadn’t realized he’d taken another step.

His eyes remained on the boy. Somehow, the emotion that rose in him came closest to pity.

Laren took a step forward, too, shielding Revik.

The boy switched his focus to her.

Revik tensed. He watched Laren rearrange her hands on the gun. Her aim never left the boy’s head. He looked between Laren and her target, then focused back on the boy, studying his mirror-like eyes.

Laren took another step and Revik felt it—without knowing exactly what
it
was, or where it originated above that small head.

He lowered his own gun reflexively, raising a hand.

“Stop!” he said aloud. “Laren! Don’t move!”

Holding his own gun out, away from his body, Revik raised his other hand, straightening out of a combat crouch. He stepped out from behind Laren.

“Hey!” he yelled in Hindi, drawing the boy’s eyes. “Over here! Will you talk to us? We won’t hurt you!”

For a moment, no one moved.

Revik felt the charge of light snake around the boy’s head.

He felt the other members of the Adhipan focus on those same structures, watching light flicker in concentric rings through minute geometries above the small, dark crown. He felt the same tension in the other infiltrators that had risen in his own light. Like biting a live wire, it flowed from one of them to the next, sparking their own aleimi.

Revik held the gun further out from his body.

On impulse, he tried sending to the boy.

Are you all right?
he sent.
Are you hurt? What can we do for—

You,
he sent.
I know you.

Revik felt the Adhipan looking at him again. He swallowed thickly, but kept his thoughts even, and unshielded.

Are you sure?
he sent.

The boy smiled. His eyes looked cold, predatory.

Okay,
Revik sent.
Okay. I don’t remember everything, I—

You can’t hurt me. Not anymore!

Revik gestured in agreement.
We won’t try...I promise.

Anger curled out of those detailed structures.

‘
We?’
he snarled.
You’re a ‘we’ now? You left me there!
You
did it! You promised you wouldn’t, and you did it anyway!

Revik tensed. At a loss, he glanced at the Adhipan hunters. He didn’t have to scan them to know what they were thinking. But explaining to this kid with the nuclear bomb hovering above his head that he had probably left him while he’d been working for the Rooks—and that since then he’d had his memory wiped and had been doing everything he knew to try and make amends—probably wouldn’t help.

Not given what they’d found at that burnt-out school.

Not a school,
the kid sent.
You know it’s not a fucking school! You lied about that too! You lied about everything!
The older look returned to his eyes, the predatory one.
But I’m not alone now. And I’m not as stupid anymore. So you can tell your dogs to go home. I won’t go
anywhere
with you...

A tremor rippled Revik’s spine.

Yeah,
he sent to the boy.
You don’t seem stupid to me.
He fought to think.
I’m sorry. I really don’t remember...

I should kill you.

Revik felt light spark around him dangerously once more. Holding his free hand higher in the air, he set his gun down on a flat rock near his feet.