Allie's War Season One (40 page)

His light coils deeper into mine and the pain worsens.

There is familiarity there, beyond what I’ve felt from anyone...beyond what I’ve felt from him. We know each other here. We are more than friends. It is his comfort I seek, above all the rest. I know he understands. He understands in a way that none of the others can, in a way they never will, no matter how hard they try.

He succumbs to the pull, without reservation, and wishes—

STOP! STOP IT!

Panic fills my light. This time, it’s not mine.

STOP THIS, ALLIE! Please, stop...!

I have not come to this paradise alone. The other Revik’s light flashes out.

The arc blows us apart like dead leaves, until—

I TOOK A breath. I took another.

Air shocked my lungs. I choked on it, fighting to work the rhythms of my physical body, fighting to align myself, to exist inside myself.

Eventually, I found I was lying on the floor.

Virtual stars met my eyes, flooding the ship’s stateroom and the ceiling above where I lay. Flat-seeming now, those stars shone palely as they ran down pastel walls.

I felt him move next to me.

When I glanced over, he raised a hand, covering his face, but I saw his jaw harden before he did it. I realized only then that I clutched his shirt in my own hand, right before he pushed my fingers off roughly, forcing me to let go.

Some emotional kickback made it hard for me to look at him, but also hard to look away. I watched him sit up, trying to wrap my head around him again, around his familiarity, even through the shield he wore around himself like a wall.

I couldn’t reconcile the impression of complete impenetrability I got off him with the sense that I knew him behind it, somehow.

I tried to push both feelings away, if only so he wouldn’t notice me thinking about him. I tried to pull my mind back into one piece, but could only breathe, watching him as he fought to do the same. I don’t remember moving, but somehow, I was sitting up, too, watching him breathe. I couldn’t seem to unclench my hand.

He looked at me. His eyes held the same expression they had that morning in Seattle.

Even as I thought it, he shook his head.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said.

His voice was hollow, lost-sounding.

Whispers of that other place remained, pulling at his light and mine; I felt him wrestle with it, forcing it out of his light only to be compelled to look at it again. Pain wafted off him, for the first time in weeks, and he didn’t seem to be trying to hide it from me. Without thinking beyond a vague desire to reassure him, I reached for him, touching his face, pausing to finger his longer black hair back behind one ear.

He jerked from the caress, but afterwards he stared at me.

His eyes flickered to my mouth, lingered there.

For an instant, just an instant, he hesitated. Then I saw his eyes change. They grew openly angry...just before the light in them died.

“I can’t do this anymore,” he said again. His voice roughened. “I want to sever us. Do you understand me, Alyson?”

I didn’t understand, not really. But he waited for an answer.

“I think so,” I said. “I mean, I—”

“Will you agree to it?”

“I don’t really know what...” I trailed, seeing his eyes harden to glass. I softened my voice. “Yeah, sure. Whatever you want, Revik.”

“Good.” He nodded, once. “Thank you.”

Without waiting, he regained his feet. For a moment he only stood there, over me, as if catching his breath. Then he moved, stepping around me to reach the stateroom door.

He opened it without hesitating, without a backwards glance.

I saw him murmur something to the guard, too low for me to hear, and probably in a language I didn’t know. The man standing there stared first at him, as though he didn’t quite believe what he’d heard, then at me, his expression openly bewildered. The guard continued to stare at me, his eyes a near question, when Revik’s voice sharpened, bringing his eyes back to him. As I’d suspected, Revik didn’t speak Prexci, but something else...one of the languages he hadn’t decided to teach me.

Eventually, the guard stammered a reply, bowing to him.

I watched Revik slip around the guard an instant later and disappear.

After a last, piercing look from the guard himself, the door closed.

I heard the lock glide into the wall with a soft click.

Through all of it, the stares and Revik’s anger, it slowly sank into my awareness that something had just happened...something decidedly more than one of our bantering back and forth bickering matches, or even the fight around Kat in Seattle. Even knowing this, I found I couldn’t move, or think really, not at first. I could only sit there, fighting to control whatever rose in me at his absence.

But I knew. Maybe I’d known for weeks now.

I was in love with him. Like, really in love with him.

Clearly, that wasn’t going to work for him, either.

18

BETRAYAL

TERIAN STUDIES THE construct, mesmerized.

Like all constructs, the images that obfuscate the border between it and the Barrier proper contain some flickering of truth. Like now, they show a monolithic parade of living stills that coalesce around certain themes despite how quickly they morph and change. Water figures in abundance of course; given their mode of transport, that is hardly surprising. The construct flashes with waterfalls, waves, cracking ice in metal trays, rivers and streams gushing over dark stones, puddles on city streets, saliva, sweat, tide pools, rain.

Terian recognizes some of these images from providing light to Dehgoies in the past.

Others must belong to Alyson, or one of the Seven’s Guard, whose lights watch over the edges of the construct walls.

Terian has studied the construct for days.

It takes that long to notice differences in the ripples of light. Now he knows the rhythms and moods of its normal state, as well as the range of its oscillations.

Therefore, when a shift occurs in those rhythms, even a relatively small one, he cannot help but taste the new flavor, the faint whisper of something he hasn’t felt before within the churning pulse. The difference weaves into water and ice and cold night skies. The change is subtle, but distinct enough that Terian picks it out before it can be reabsorbed.

A flicker of warmth greets him, a fleeting image of limbs entwined, clouding breath and glowing eyes, gone as soon as he catches the scent.

He has felt masturbation before this, of course.

There are over twelve seers inhabiting this particular construct. Only a few of those seers are female, including the Bridge. Even fewer of them are currently having sex.

Terian even swears he’s felt Dehgoies masturbate...although he can’t be certain of something that specific, of course. Not from outside the construct’s walls.

This feels different.

The images stabilize, enfolded by whoever is currently tasked with monitoring the construct walls. Terian already knows that whoever that person is...it is not Dehgoies.

An old steam engine floats by, whispers of blood and illness, and then back to water and night, ice and mountains, eagles winging silently over cold waves and tastes of Asia and even flickers of Germany and the war, South America and the United States, Russia and the Ukraine.

Withdrawing more of his consciousness from the Barrier, Terian pinpoints the new flavor again, rolling it over his tongue, so to speak, as his light acquaints him with the difference it carries, making sure he understands what it means.

Once he
is
sure, he snaps out entirely...

...and his blue eyes focused on polished wood.

Alone in the fireplace-heated room, he laughed aloud.

The raw flavor of sex was a new development, clearly.

It could be one of the other seers, of course, but the impact it had on the construct made Terian doubt that very much. No, it had to be the Bridge...or Dehgoies himself.

Probably both of them.

Which meant, first and foremost, that Dehgoies had been uncharacteristically restrained with her. Terian couldn’t help but wonder why. In any case, it was almost a pity he would have to interrupt them so early in their little courtship ritual. If Terian had more information from behind those construct walls, he might choose not to, given the option.

After all, nothing was more vulnerable than a seer in the first stage of a mating ritual. As it was, Terian strongly suspected they had not yet consummated. Likely because Dehgoies did not wish to be that vulnerable, either.

Still, Terian wondered if there was more to it.

Terian had flown several of his bodies to this base in Alaska, to be on the waiting end of their slow excursion through the inside passage up the Canadian coast. Most cruises took a week to make the journey north to Anchorage. Likely to throw them off, Dehgoies and the Bridge followed a route that spent nearly a month on the coasts of the United States and Canada before entering the open seas for Russia. Terian had examined the route carefully, of course, as soon as he knew which ship they would take.

He would take them then, he’d decided...as soon as they had no place left to run.

Once the ship left the shores of Alaska and entered the open ocean, Terian’s people would move on the Seven’s Guard, and then on to Dehgoies and the Bridge.

Which meant they needed to be in place well before.

Despite his careful planning, though, Terian was growing impatient.

Given all the movement in the Pyramid of late, he feared Galaith might be angling another of his squadrons into place to make the collar on the Bridge.

Terian knew how things worked.

One minute your team led a key op. The next, it was relegated to clean up duty. A security mechanism in part, the changes often had a mechanical component, built into the fabric of the Pyramid itself. The rotating tiers formed the primary defense that secured Galaith’s position as Head, by keeping all of the tiers below him in constant flux, and thus all of Galaith’s potential successors in flux, too. Despite the mechanical aspect of the rotating hierarchy, however, Terian happened to know that Galaith still had discretionary control at the top.

Terian would only be pulled if Galaith let it happen.