Allie's War Season One (66 page)

“You don’t?” Cass’s voice held genuine surprise. “I thought you’d want to go there first.”

Revik nodded. “I do. It’s just—”

Jon said, “You think we’d be followed?”

Revik glanced at him.

Again...not dumb.

He nodded, shrugging with one hand. “Yes.”

Cass was watching his face. “That’s part of it.” She hesitated. “Is it also because of the stuff Terian said? About you cheating on her or whatever?”

Revik sighed, but felt his body react regardless. Waiting for the nausea to pass, he turned the wheel of the snowcat slowly, navigating around a stone fountain in the middle of the town square. Then he shook his head.

“No,” he said. “...Not exactly.”

“But that was true? You did cheat on her?”

Revik glanced at the human, flinching slightly at the look in her eyes. “Yes.”

Shaking her head, Cass folded her arms. “Figures.”

But Jon looked between them, his eyes holding a faint wonder.

“So you guys really are married, then?” he said. “That wasn’t just Terian being a dick?”

Revik didn’t answer at first. Feeling both of them looking at him again, he turned, blowing air out from his cheeks.

“Yeah. We’re really married.” Hearing the silence this produced, he glanced over at the two of them again. “Seers are different. It can happen like that.”

“Like what?” Cass said, snorting a little. “Like...overnight?”

“Yes.” He made a more or less gesture with his hand. “Well. What I meant was, before the rest of the mind catches up with it. Ours happened fast. A little too fast for us.” He shrugged with one hand. “Well. For me, anyway.”

She frowned. “Terian said you hadn’t slept with her.”

Revik hesitated, feeling himself tense a little. Then he shrugged again. There wasn’t a lot of point in keeping secrets from the two of them. Not now.

“We haven’t consummated, no.” He glanced at her. “That’s complicated, too, Cass. For seers, I mean.”

She folded her arms, giving him an openly skeptical look.

“So you didn’t want sex with her?” she said. “With Allie?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said, giving her a warning look.

“So what, then? You slept with someone else, so sex isn’t the problem, clearly.” Her frown deepened. “Is marriage more of an arranged thing with seers? Some kind of social contract...like a business thing?”

“No, it’s not a...a business thing.”

“So what’s your issue with Allie?”

He looked at her. “There is no issue, Cass.”

“Is she not your type? Isn’t she pretty enough for you?”

He felt his jaw harden a little. “You are getting too personal for me, Cass. I don’t want to talk about this, all right?”

Anger touched her eyes. Then she exhaled, and he could feel her thinking. Folding her arms tighter, she frowned a little, but nodded.

“Okay. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.”

Jon was looking at him, too, his hazel eyes thoughtful. “You think Terian let us go. To find Allie for him.”

Revik hesitated, then nodded. “Yes. I do.”

Both of them fell silent. Revik saw them exchange glances.

“So we can’t go to her at all?” Cass said.

“We can,” Revik said. “First I need to go somewhere where I can jump safely...see what’s going on with the Rooks...the seers Terian worked for. It’s pretty clear he and Galaith aren’t working together as they used to. I want to know how many people might be looking for us. I also want to talk to the Seven...” He cleared his throat. “...the seers who have Allie. I can’t do that here.” He squinted through snow on the windshield to see the sign for the hotel.

“England could be complicated. I was owned...” He paused, letting that part sink in. “I don’t know if my employers will have my place under surveillance or whether they would turn me in to SCARB. My guess is no...” He glanced at Jon before the human could speak. “...It’s more likely my stuff has been destroyed, my space given to another seer.”

There was a silence. Some of the sharpness left Cass’s light.

“Oh,” she said. “That sucks.”

Revik smiled at her. “Not really.”

“So what would we do then?” Jon said. “If that happened?”

Revik blew air out from between his lips. “I know people in London. People who’d let me use their places to jump. People who would help us.”

“Other seers, you mean.”

“Yes.”

Jon nodded, leaning back in the seat and folding his arms.

“All right,” he said. “London it is, then.”

Jon closed his eyes. Watching him lean on Cass’s shoulder, it occurred to Revik that Jon really thought he had a vote.

In the same moment, Revik wondered if maybe he did.

It took him another few breaths to realize that what he felt for the humans was more than just responsibility for having indirectly gotten them into this. They felt like friends. More than that. They felt like family.

Gazing up at the whitewashed sky, he forced the tense part of him to relax as he thought about the reasons that might be. He thought about Cass’s questions about him and Allie, and realized he already knew why that was.

She was more seer now, he could feel it.

Pushing the thought from his mind, he downshifted in front of the wooden hotel sign hanging from the edge of a steep, slate-tile roof. Bringing the snowmobile to a slow stop where it wouldn’t hang out in the faint outline of road, he stepped on the foot brake, turning the wheel to wedge the tires into a line of rocks.

He turned off the engine. The silence once he had was strangely disorienting. All he could hear was the wind through the thick glass, and the faint squeak of the chain holding the sign from the roof overhead.

“Hey, Revik,” Cass said, watching him pull the keys out of the ignition.

“What, Cass?” he said, not looking over.

“I’m sorry about what I said.”

He glanced at her. She looked timid, lost inside the bundle of blanket and scarf. She touched his arm with her bony hand, and he flinched a little, feeling the emotion behind the gesture.

“I just don’t get it, I guess. You seem like one of the good guys.”

Looking at her, he felt his fingers grip the steering wheel, still holding the keys. He glanced at Jon and saw the male human looking at him, too.

Revik exhaled shortly, rubbing his face with a gloved hand.

“There is nothing to get, Cass,” he said. He met her gaze, his jaw hard once more. “...And I’m not that good.”

Jon spoke up, surprising him.

“Do you love her?” he said.

Revik looked at him. Focusing back down on his hands, he watched the leather crinkle around his fingers. After another moment, he exhaled again.

“I love her,” he said. He nodded, half-surprised he’d said it. “Yes.”

For a long moment, neither of them spoke. When he glanced up next, Cass smiled at him. Jon clapped him on the shoulder with his good hand, shaking him lightly in the same gesture. A faint smile tugged at his lips.

“All right.” He smiled wider, tugging at his shoulder a little harder, to get Revik to look at him. “Come on, man. Let’s find that shower.”

Watching Cass fumble with the door handle, Revik nodded, wiping his face before he turned to do the same.

27

LONDON

I AIMED MY body down a London street, scanning faces.

I took in buildings as well, and the occasional car as we strolled past yet another wooded park, a different park from the one we’d first passed as we’d left the tube station.

I stopped at a newsstand and stared blankly at the morphing feed headlines blaring from a monitor over the stand window. My eyes took in the actual words beats later, which went something like this:

“NEW SYRIMNE KILLS 28 IN PAKISTAN BOMB BLAST! TERRORIST PLOT LINKED TO CHINA!”

Even after months of travel and India, I still commanded the front page.

I read details as they ran out under the headlines. Apparently I was believed dead again, I noted. I was still reading about how I’d died when Maygar came up from behind me and took my arm none too gently in his thick fingers. He led me down a street lined with white houses that looked to me like they’d been torn from the pages of a London storybook.

Flags from different countries flapped over our heads.

A limo slid by with tinted, bullet-proof glass and small square flags on the front of its hood, too, then another flanked by military police.

It struck me as interesting that Maygar had brought me here, where representatives from at least a dozen countries seemed to have taken up residence, most of whom would pay top dollar to see me collared and stuck in the back of a windowless van.

Still, it was pretty, where we were.

The park flourished in the background, dense with green, filled with strolling men in suits who held the arms of women wearing hats and gloves, giving it a strangely timeless feel. I looked down at my own hands, which were dyed darker than my normal skin tone. My stubby nails made me look like a drug addict, or some kind of street kid. Touching the silver chain necklace I wore around my neck, I shoved those same hands into my pockets.

For the plane ride over, the seers used everything but surgery to disguise my appearance. I flew out of Kolkata wearing facial implants, skin dye, blood patches on all my fingers in the event of a random racial screening, colored contact lenses, a wig, a hat, several scarves. My fingerprints and DNA matched my ident, which was that of an East Indian woman traveling for business with her merchant husband.

My current attempt to blend was a bit more West than East, and consisted of men’s mirrored sunglasses and a hoodie. Pretty low-tech, but surprisingly effective against the street-level facial recognition software employed by cameras that dotted most London public areas.

I still wore the black wig and skin dye, blood patches and contact lenses under the dark shades, but the facial implants had started to hurt, so I took most of them off. Maygar seemed to think we could avoid the higher grade facial-rec stuff as long as we weren’t picked up...and as long as we stayed away from banks and private residencies in the more exclusive areas.

The Seven employed seers in London who could intercept a breach, as well.

According to Maygar, they would pick up any flags well in advance of the humans...if not perhaps in advance of the Rooks.

Still, despite all the precautions they insisted upon, most of the Seven’s Guard seemed fairly comfortable with my proposed trip and destination. London remained a Seven town, at least in terms of operational majority.

My clothes were men’s, oversized and shapeless, and I wore tennis shoes, making me look like a punk American tourist. On the other hand, considering the multiple versions of my face now in papers and feeds, I figured it was as good a disguise as any. I glanced at another gabled house with high windows when Maygar thrust a carton of juice into my hand.

“Stop looking up,” he said. “And drink. We’re not far.”