Allie's War Season One (75 page)

After a pause, he shakes his head.
No, Allie.

Don’t argue with me, Revik,
I send.
I know this is true. Just trust me. Trust me on this, please. You’re one of the good guys. Don’t let yourself die...please.

I slide my light into his, and feel him react as I show him the numbers. Even inside his confusion, his light connects with them easily, with a familiarity that is clear in the space. I watch him unlock the key to the succession order, until I can see it, too. It expands around us in clean, geometric shapes, rotating with a visual mathematical dance I cannot look away from.

Relief fills my light. Awe, too.
I see it. Do you?

When the numbers light up around us, a faint wonder touches his eyes.

Yes,
he says.

They’re ready,
I tell him.
Vash and the others. I think I can get a signal to them. Wait for me.
I kiss him again.
I love you. Wait for me...please.

His eyes change. Then, before he speaks, his outline fades.

Terror reaches me, that feeling of being ripped in half. I feel it fleetingly in my heart, that I may never see him again.

Then I am alone, in an endless chasm of dark...but light lives in the tiniest of fragments, and I finally know exactly what I’m supposed to do.

Drawing the numbers, Revik’s numbers, up and out of my light, I superimpose them over the model of the Pyramid itself...

...and imprint the succession order simultaneously into every seer in the Rooks’ network.

As I do, I realize I know.

I’ve known all along who the Head is.

ONE SEER WATCHES quietly, from a dark, remote corner of the Pyramid where he hides.

There are crevices even here, even in the group mind. Places to hide inside the inter-connectivities that the Pyramid cultivates. Places where the others don’t often go, where constructs live inside constructs and one can disappear into the silver strands, become a bare whisper inside the intricacies of the landscape.

The structure rotates in a prismatic dance, every light connected to every light...from Galaith to Xarethe to Dehgoies to himself.

He hides here, still as death.

It is not easy to remain unseen while crouching inside these lit strands, yet the Pyramid is his home. It encompasses everything he knows, terrifying and magnificent. It keeps him from the void. The shining, silver strands play a slow, intricate dance, one he knows better than the beats of his own heart. Its music lulls him, singing to him in the dark.

For the same reason, he feels it when she comes. Her music is different than his...so different, he knows the precise instant when she enters his home. He feels the conflict, the chaos she evokes...but at base, she is a tourist. Her husband is all that truly connects her to them.

Then, out of nowhere, he sees it.

The succession order is laid out neatly before him, a map of light connecting one Rook to the next, spread before him in perfect, beautiful lines. Like his brothers and sisters, he looks for the Head, tries to count how many steps he is from that highest, most coveted spot.

The Pyramid shakes.

Reflexively, he makes his light even more dim.

It takes him another moment to understand the cause of that instability, too.

They are killing one another. All around him, seers are attacking seers, hammering blows at one another, trying to destroy one another. Lower-level seers attack the lights they see above them, pausing only to defend against those seers who strike at them from below.

He sees lights flicker and snuff out. He sees death and pain. He sees fighting and screaming...but also silence and rippled light, places where Rooks are dimming themselves as he has, trying to disappear. Already, though, more than half have joined the fray.

Terian is lucky. Lucky he will not be missed.

Lights flash brighter, then wink out. He feels the structure tremble, shuddering more seriously that time, more dangerously. He still cannot see the successor’s chair, but he is getting closer, rising higher all the time as he seeks it, ever-groping through metallic dark. He counts each place in the hierarchy, follows each place as one fits into the next. He ignores the chaos in his single-mindedness, as he traces them all the way up to where his light hovers...

Until he can see no further.

It is quiet there, and he is alone.

Eventually, the reason dawns on him.

Excitement flares his light, so that Terian makes himself briefly visible. He barely feels the ensuing blows, barely hears the cracking in several branches of his aleimi. They can’t touch him...not anymore. A smile lights up his being.

He
occupies the successor’s chair.

He. Terian alone.

As the realization hits, he is already giving the signal.

31

PYRAMID

PRESIDENT DANIEL CAINE blinked to clear his vision.

Frowning, he stared around at the mostly older faces. Something was wrong. He could feel it, with every particle of his living light. He needed someone else at the table who felt it, too. Someone besides Ethan, who was, for obvious reasons, in absentia.

Caine barely noticed the silence as he surveyed the room.

That is, until the Secretary of State broke it.

“Sir?” As usual, the man sounded as if he were about to go into cardiac arrest. “Sir,” he repeated, as Caine knew he would until he turned and met the man’s gaze directly.

Once he had, the Secretary resumed in the same, caught-breath voice.

“The terrorists have been isolated, sir,” he said, flushing a darker red. “They no longer appear to be fighting back. The Prime Minister is asking whether you still recommend an air attack, sir. They now estimate twenty to fifty-five possible civilian casualties from that approach,
 
sir, even
with
the evacuations...and they no longer feel it’s necessary. Their Home Office Security is now recommending gassing the top floors, prior to any gunplay. I really think you should consider this approach, sir. I really do...”

Caine rose to his feet. Normally he would smile here, even tell a joke, but his ability to play that role evaporated about thirty minutes earlier, when the Pyramid network reported that his friend, Doctor Xarethe––meaning the real one––could not be located. He was now forced to assume that Terian, in one form or another, had killed her, too.

The thought more than displeased him.

To call Xarethe irreplaceable was an understatement in the extreme.

Other complications remained as well. Alyson managed to evade him somehow within his own network. That left the outstanding issue of what to do with Dehgoies if Caine found himself backed into a corner, forced to kill yet another of Revik’s mates.

Further, as much as he hated to admit it, Terian was right.

The entire cycle would be disrupted if he killed the Bridge now.

Making up his mind, Caine walked to a telephone sitting on an antique wooden cabinet to the right of the conference table. Without thinking, he picked up the old-fashioned receiver, held it to his ear and waited. Feeling eyes focused on the back of his head from the direction of the oval table, Caine realized only then that he could have used his earpiece to make the call. Or, more efficiently still, his newly implanted impulse-activated network receiver chip, or IAN.

He ignored their collective stares anyway. At least, until it struck him that the old land line might be purely decorative.

It was one problem with long life. Old habits had a tendency to return under stress.

Caine lowered the handset to hang it up, when a voice rose, sounding tinny and far away. He returned the receiver promptly to his ear.

“You needed something, sir?” the voice repeated.

“James?” Caine felt his shoulders unclench. “Where’s Ethan?”

“Sir?” His security chief’s puzzlement wafted through the line.

“Ethan. Our Vice President. Where is he?”

“The Vice President is still housed at his residence, sir,” James said. “You said not to wake him.”

“Yes, well, I’ve changed my mind. I want him brought here. At once. To the bunker.”

The bunker. It was what his wife nicknamed the Cabinet’s main conference room when she first saw it, and the moniker stuck. She also called it the War Room, after that Peter Sellers movie mocking the 1950s paranoia about the Russians hoarding telekinetic seers.

Like a faraway strain of music, Caine felt something crack. He knew it was another piece of the Pyramid fissuring off. He realized James remained on the line.

“Wake him, will you?” Caine said. “As soon as possible. Tell him it’s an emergency.”

He was in the process of hanging up the old plastic handle, when the door to the bunker slammed open.

Caine’s eyes swiveled with all the rest. He found himself staring at the leaning, gasping figure in the door’s opening. For a long moment, nothing else broke the tense silence of the room. Everyone watched him clutch his chest, but like Caine, they didn’t move.

“Ethan,” Caine said at last. He cleared his throat, recovered slightly. “Ethan...my god. You look terrible. What happened?”

Ethan Wellington, the Vice President of the United States, gripped the door frame, leaving a smear of blood on the white-painted wood. He still breathed in pants, holding his chest with one hand, wearing a trench coat over what looked like bare feet and pajamas.

How the hell he had gotten there, from the Vice Presidential mansion through security, Caine’s mind began...

Then, in the same set of breaths, he dismissed the lingering doubt.

This might work even better. Let the whole Cabinet see the terrorist attack with their own eyes. Whatever Ethan said at this point could hardly matter, when Caine could simply have his seers manipulate the memory of every human in the room.

“Ethan.” Caine’s voice emerged stronger. “I just called James to fetch you. Are you all right? What happened?”

Ethan gave a half-gasp. It resembled a laugh.

He raised his head to stare at the President, and the expression on his face took Caine aback. A lot more of Terian lived inside that single body now, Caine realized. A lot more.

Caine’s infiltrators had been busy.

Turning from Caine, Ethan addressed the others, his brown eyes flashing amber in the reflected light.