Allie's War Season One (82 page)

Sir? You have seen enough?

I turn my head, my consciousness still split. I focus on his face, watching it flash back and forth to his physical one, positive to negative...and I lose it.

My mind snaps back.

I leave the Barrier, and my consciousness resumes its march in real time...

Sound exploded around me. Whirring helicopter blades slammed overhead, thudding and rotating in a deafening heartbeat, long metal wings blocking the sun in and out with shadow. Hair whipped my face. I locked eyes with the pilot, a tall, Chinese-looking seer named Tenzi.

We are too close,
he sent, apologetic.

I cursed, angry at how easily I’d been pulled out.

I needed to get better at being in both places at once. For awhile, working with Yerin and Maygar daily, I seemed to be improving. Lately, I’d plateaued, hitting a wall I couldn’t seem to make my way over. I could hold both places simultaneously if no one bothered me...or if nothing startled me. Which meant if I stayed away from the world and people, I was fine.

Sometimes, like now, I could even hold the split for a few seconds of distraction.

Sometimes, I flat-out couldn’t do it at all.

It was especially irritating to note in juxtaposition to my aforementioned husband, Dehgoies Revik, who could split his consciousness four or five ways, his attention focused on each to greater or lesser degrees, seemingly for as long as he wanted.

Most esteemed Bridge,
Tenzi sent politely.
We cannot stay.

I gestured dismissively with my hand, seer-fashion.

Let’s go a little further in,
I sent.

No, Esteemed Bridge.

I glanced over, eyebrows raised. I hadn’t gotten a flat-out no in a while.

Tenzi’s thoughts remained stubborn.
Sir, we must go back.
He surprised me by smiling.
You promised, Esteemed One.
Vash said to remind you. He said to tell you ‘no do-overs.’ If you persist in arguing, I have license to rule your judgment irrational, and bring you back of my own authority...

I laughed in spite of myself. “Esteemed one my ass...” I yelled over the heartbeat of blades.

Still, he’d managed to make me laugh, no mean feat these days...and while he might be overdoing the politeness thing, he had a mind of his own. Glancing down through the plexiglass window, I watched the fires burn, this time with my physical eyes. I focused on the line of smoke through the trees.

A loud whistle broke into my thoughts.

Tenzi swerved the joystick-like cyclic sideways, alternating his feet on the anti-torque pedals. Lurching sideways and feeling my stomach drop as we lost altitude, I grabbed the opening of the helicopter door, catching a glimpse of something sliding by above as he went down. Whatever it had been, it was loud, and moving fast.

They are shooting at us, sir,
Tenzi sent.

I caught that.
I grinned at him, and he surprised me, grinning back. “Okay. Take us back,” I said aloud. “You win...this time.”

He was already turning us around, accelerating as we rose above the canopy and headed for the snow-covered mountains looming to the southwest. I remained where I was, gripping the door as I looked back into the near dark. Holding onto the harness strapping me into the chair, I watched flashes from small arms fire light up the dark mass beneath the treetops.

Then we banked, accelerating faster for the border to India. Infiltrators back at Seertown held a shield around us to hide us in the Barrier, mainly from seers working for either the Chinese or the Americans...but those same seers still had eyes. From the lack of Barrier imprint, they’d also know we were being protected by seers, which could only mean one of three things: we were seers ourselves, we were important...or, we were rich.

I remembered Maygar’s grumpy warning the last time I went out. He’d tried guilt that time, and it had come closest to working. If I were to be captured now, he’d reminded me, it would affect more than just Tenzi and myself.

I’d come anyway.

Sitting back on the ripped vinyl seat, I closed my eyes, taking in breaths of cold morning air. I had plenty to do back at the compound. I now had crates of Galaith’s papers to go through. I’d have more in a few days, assuming the team I’d sent to Bavaria found anything. I could have given some to Vash’s seers to sort through, or even the Adhipan, now that they were starting to trickle into town...but that would mean telling more of them what I’d been up to.

So far, only a handful of the Seven’s Guard knew what those trips were about. I couldn’t even afford to tell Jon and Cass the whole story. They were human, and vulnerable to being read by any seer for information. I’d let Cass come along, and gave her the same story I gave Vash—that I was looking for artifacts from the Rooks’ pyramid now that it was destroyed.

Which, essentially, was the truth.

I found myself staring at seas of ice and snow, lost in my own thoughts as we slid through passes in the high mountains. We rounded a sheer rock outcrop, and a green and brown valley appeared at my feet. Familiar tile rooftops began to break up the long valley floor. Houses, shrines and larger structures quickly appeared with more frequency, along with white-painted cairns and colorful flags hanging from the roofs of buildings. Then I saw the stone house of Old City high on the crest of the hill with its sprawling gardens and white statuary.

Seertown market and commons, including Vash’s more modest-looking compound, stretched down the hillsides below, where buildings had a much more lived-in look. Laundry hung from balconies, even at the compound itself, and most of the houses had peeling blue and green paint. Monkeys stood on several balconies and roofs, looking over at the noise. Tenzi brought us to the center of the white cross marking the helipad above Vash’s house.

We landed with scarcely a bump.

Hanging up the sound-muffling headphones, I climbed out of the battered seat as the rotating blades powered down with a descending whine. Ducking low, holding my hair ineffectively off my face, I walked out of their range, smiling at the four people waiting for me on the other side.

I grinned at Jon first.

“Miss me?” I said.

“No,” said Chandre pointedly, but she smiled.

“He’s coming back, you know,” Jon shouted over the blades. “Would be nice if you were alive when he got here...”

“Who?” I said, giving Jon a quizzical look.

Cass laughed, long, dyed-red hair whipping around her delicate, Asian face.

I grinned at her, only wincing a little at the thick scar that ran down one side of her forehead and nose, throwing her wide smile off-kilter. I saw her look down the hill from where the helipad sat, taking in the view of Seertown with its colored prayer flags and bamboo-walled houses.

“I assume he means your husband,” Yerin answered for Jon, drawing my eyes.

The narrow-faced seer stood perfectly still on the platform, despite the robes whipping around his elongated form. His dark eyes held a thread of humor.

“...And I must say, he is likely right that Dehgoies Revik would not approve of these excursions of yours, if my last conversation with him was any indication. He expressed concern that you were not better protected, even in Seertown. He fears you are too visible, given the number of people who already—”

“Where’s Maygar?” I said, cutting him off.

They exchanged looks.

Every last one of them knew Revik and I had agreed to not talk during the period he was away. Even so, no one seemed to get that I didn’t want to hear about them talking to him either.

Looking around, partly to distract myself from their meaningful silence, it occurred to me that Maygar really was missing. Still my official bodyguard, he never failed to be present on the landing pad to lecture me on the pure stupidity of letting myself be seen beyond the compound’s walls. I would have loved, one day, to tell Revik just how alike the two of them really were.

“Really,” I said. “Where is he? Is he sick?”

“He’s gone to Cairo, Bridge,” Chandre said.

“Cairo?” I turned on her in surprise. “Why?”

“Who knows?” Chandre shrugged. “Good riddance.”

“Maybe Revik missed him.” Cass gave me a slanting smile.

There was a silence, filled with nothing but powering down helicopter. Then I choked out an involuntary laugh. Jon and Chandre laughed with me, and even Yerin, who rarely understood our humor, smiled at the joke.

Revik would be about as happy to see Maygar as he would to be dipped in an unwashed septic tank...naked.

2

FEIGRAN

FEIGRAN FLOATS. DREAMING...he creates things with his mind. Discordances live inside the rolling waves, musings previously held in check behind one or more locked doors. He builds mansions with his mind. He builds and builds...

The Pyramid is gone.

He struggles to feel. He struggles...

Wisps of mind twist into and around themselves like dead flowers through cloudy wraiths of light. They belong to him, those clouds, yet their exact relation to himself eludes him. Freed from the constraints of meat and bone bodies...freed from the Pyramid...a crowd congeals over whatever form remains.

They bring...unease.

Some in this crowd frighten him.

He sees shadows and wonders...

The walls are gone. The part of his mind stuck inside a pale, twisted body inside a drifting metal cone finds this sad.

His father is gone. Galaith is gone.

Feigran sleeps. Hurtling through the dark beauty of night and its endless carpet of stars, he slumbers. Dangers lurk just out of reach, in a different darkness, one so deep he cannot bring himself to imagine its folds.

Pain lurks there, and worse. It is not the womb-like darkness where he dreams, but the dark of silence, death.

The end of being.

Voices whisper, reminding him, causing him to doubt, to wonder at...

But he is good. He who has suffered misery and redemption, containing more light and intelligence and imagination than a thousand of the ordinary.

He would save the world.

God watches his footsteps. He has seen it, how God singles him out.

DEEP IN THE basement of a house in the Bavarian mountains, a man dug through piles of papers, cursing. Papers circled him in a thick, teetering ring. A fire burned in the grate and he fed handfuls in periodically of those documents he’d already deemed useless or that simply annoyed him by their monotonous, bureaucratic prose.