Allie's War Season One (76 page)

“I have ordered the Secret Service to arrest President Caine.” He gasped, forcing out words. “I’ve asked for him to be detained...”

The Secretary of State laughed nervously.

“What charge?”

Galaith turned. Rogers had spoken, his Chief of Staff.

“Attempted murder,” Ethan said. Wincing in pain, he clutched his side. “Conspiring with enemies of the United States.” His eyes flickered up like spotlights, meeting Caine’s. “I’ll probably know of a few more things he’s done by the end of the day...he’s mentally unhinged.”

Caine shook his head in bewilderment. “What possible benefit can you see from this, Ethan?”

The question meant more than anyone at the table could possibly know.

Taking a step towards the door, Caine snapped his fingers at the porter standing at the back of the room. “What in god’s name are you waiting for?” he snapped at the man. “Call for medical help. Now! The Vice President’s obviously been hurt!”

Caine walked towards Ethan, thinking he would just use the Barrier to knock him out...

Ethan backed away with another short laugh.

Before Caine could reach the door, Jarvesch, the Secretary of Defense, got to her feet and inserted herself between them. She approached Ethan’s bent form, touching his shoulder even as a kitchen staffer wheeled in their breakfast on a pushcart stacked with silver trays and crystal juice containers. Caine heard the porter ask for the White House physician over the central speaker as the wheels of the cart squeaked jerkily across the floor.

The kitchen staffer brought everything to the long cabinet nearest Caine and began unloading trays laboriously.

The secret service agent by the door clicked his fingers to get the staffer’s attention, frowning when the man didn’t turn.

Caine only noticed this peripherally.

Tensing, he watched Jarvesch take Ethan’s arm, looking into his face. Then she cried out, opening his coat.

“He’s been shot!” She turned to the rest of the room. “He’s been shot several times! God, Ethan! What happened?”

The kitchen staffer stood stock still, gaping, holding a towel in one hand and the handle of the cart in the other. He stared at the Vice President along with the others.

Then he turned, facing President Caine.

Before anyone could move, before Caine glanced at him really, the staffer raised the towel and squeezed off three rounds in rapid succession.

Caine turned towards the sound, but too late. The slowed-down vision of the Barrier allowed him to witness the last shot, almost as an abstraction.

It didn’t allow him to get out of the way.

Smoke came from the gun’s end, the hand jerked, and then...

Panicked yells fill the bunker.

Caine is somehow on the floor.

He fights to breathe, but he’s got a frog in his throat. He tries to clear it, chokes. He hears them, hears the shots echo in his ears well after the fact, but really all he sees is the towel, the blank look on the man’s face, the strange clarity in his eyes.

Caine stares at the ceiling, wonders that he felt no warning from the Barrier. He breathes in labored inhales and stuck exhales, breathing as if through water. He hears a struggle, the breaking of glass, but that’s far away, too. He wonders how anyone could have gotten past his security, that of the Pyramid more than that of the human compound, although that’s not inconsiderable either.

Then he remembers.

Something was wrong. Something happened to the Pyramid.

Liego disappeared, and then...

Ethan is there. Ethan kneels heavily, still clutching his own side. Ethan Wellington, Harvard graduate and decorated soldier, is an entity almost separate of Terian in Caine’s mind. Their wives are best friends. Their kids go to the same school. They vacation together, stood up at each other’s weddings. As Ethan crouches next to him, Galaith and Caine bleed over as well; for an instant, he believes his friend is there to help him.

Then he sees the gleam in Ethan’s eyes, the yellow glow behind brown irises, threads of those other fragments woven into the stable facade of his friend from Massachusetts.

The Pyramid shudders in those eyes...and the threads cross.

Caine feels grief. Fewer bodies exist in which Terian can hide. Fragments of his aleimi crystallized into darker stains weave in with the rest, looking through the same amber irises. Caine knows insanity lives there. He feels responsible.

Ethan leans closer. Anyone watching would see a concerned colleague reassuring his mortally-wounded friend.

“We may indeed prove to be the inferior race,” he breathes to Caine. “...But at least we can shoot straight.”

Gazing up at the antique lamps hanging over the war room table, Galaith chuckles, in spite of himself.

Then, emotion overcomes him, bringing tears to his eyes.

“Feigran,” he chokes through fluid. “Forgive me.”

He can no longer see the Bunker. Lying on the grass, he gazes up a dense clouds. He is surprised when an opening presents itself there, where for the barest instant, he sees the flames of a blue-white sun. But the sun does not brighten his eyes for very long.

Through that same gap, a glint of asteroids beckon, cold but beautiful. Below, in a room filled with humans, the body Galaith used in this very long lifetime finally gives out.

As it does, the Thousand roll over, claiming him for their own.

I FEEL HALDREN expel his last breath. A flurry of lines and pulleys unravel as he does, leaving with what remains of him. I watch the Dreng gather up those fragments, pulling him into the cold, flaming center of their silver clouds, claiming him as one of their own. I watch his aleimi...or soul, or whatever is left of him now...as they take it away, disappear him into those dense, metallic strands.

I am shocked by a sharp flicker of grief.

But I cannot dwell on that for long, either.

His absence leaves a hole at the top of the Pyramid. The structure loses its silver sheen as the cold of the Dreng’s light evaporates. They disappear like inhaled smoke from the physical world, leaving an oddly full silence.

I send up a flare.

I don’t have long to wait. Vash and his seers: Yerin, Jalar, Mutkar, Fley, Maya, Itru, Tarsi, Samantha, Inde, Argo, Jet, Anale, Keeley, Maygar, Naomi, Hondo, Dorje, Tan, Inge, Derek, Ullysa, Mika, Chinja, Alex, Garensche, Tenzi, Cohen...they all come. They come separately and together, along with countless lights I don’t know, faces I’ve never seen in outside.

Late to the party, Revik joins us, too.

He is battered, beaten up, but he is there.

They greet me and one another, lights interwoven, combining and recombining in new patterns. I flash the plan, the plan they created, and we unite in concert...a single vision.

Human lights shine with us, too...Jon, Cass, Jaden, Sasquatch, Frankie, Angeline, Sarah, Nick, the man at the toll booth on the way into Canada, the couple who paused at the door of the diner because they were worried Revik would hurt me. The people on the Royal Faire cruise ship. My mom and dad. My uncle Stefan.

Feeling them all there together brings a wash of hope, a sudden laugh.

And then, in a flash, we disperse.

“NO!” TERIAN SCREAMS.

He watches the receding cloud of the Dreng, realizes the danger too late. He feels the shift below his feet, and struggles to counteract, to weave himself into the void above.

“
NO! NO! NO!”

Out of nowhere, seers surround him.

These aren’t the seers of the Rooks. These wield a sharp, white, painful light, one that burns everything in its path, everything it touches, ripping through strands and connections that hang dead and lifeless, temporarily inert without the Dreng.

And not just seers...he feels
humans
among his attackers.

The Pyramid fights to reform, to pull him up and out, to align him with the top spot, but the murderers intervene, again and again, ripping apart threads each time they touch his light, killing or disconnecting more and more of his drones.

He feels her. She laughs at the carnage...
laughs.

His hatred rises, a crushing need to kill, even as the last whispers of light connecting him to the Dreng’s clouds snap and fray.

The Pyramid teeters.

Pieces unlock, above and below. Terian hears it, as the cracks build momentum, as the fissures move from segment to segment, tearing through dark, quiet structures, one by one. More and more of them fall, breaking apart like compressed ash, until he can only stand there and watch, unable to believe what he is witnessing.

Thrown clear, Rooks scatter like so many
rik-jum
cards, ripped from their moorings like birds thrown from straw nests. Light from the feeding grounds disperses, dumping power from the Pyramid’s base. The seers of the Rooks begin to panic.

Those still hooked into the network begin feeding off one another, killing one another for light. Terian watches in horror as more pieces fall, crushing panicking seers, tearing abilities and knowledge from the communal pools. Lifetimes’ worth of accumulated structures crumble to dust, no longer able to hold to the shared mind of the Pyramid, useless without it. Terian’s own structures begin to flicker, too, then to crack, dimming more as the pools unravel.

He feels it as a drop in power so severe that at first he thinks he is dying.

Then, it gets worse. He feels the Pyramid detach.

It breaks away, Headless.

Terian feels her again. She laughs happily above that whispering dark, and he hates her for the sheer joy he feels in her light.

He screams into the reaches of the Barrier, calling the Dreng back.

But it is too late. The gap between the silvery clouds and the creation stretches too long.

The Dreng are nowhere to be found.