Allie's War Season One (110 page)

Wedged in a crack between flagstones, something reflected back light from the torch’s flame. Sweeping the fire back and forth again, he located the exact spot and bent down to pick the object up.

It was a key. It had an organic coating on it, but the skin was so old and hard that Revik barely recognized it as an organic at all.

It looked like it could be World War II...maybe even earlier.

Holding it up under the torch, the sick feeling came back, this time stronger. He found he didn’t want to hold the key with his bare skin.

Covering his hand with his sleeve, he stuffed it in a pocket.

He made his way slowly back up to the surface.

When he reached the doorway and outside, he walked away from the tower at about twice the speed he’d walked towards it. He climbed over broken stone and debris to where Balidor stood, smoking a hiri.

After being crammed inside that black hole, the air outside smelled almost fresh, despite the still-strong odor of burnt hair and skin and decaying flesh from the crater a few hundred yards in front of him.

He waited until he stood alongside Balidor, then reached into his pocket for the key, using his sleeve again and holding out his hand for Balidor to take it. He didn’t say anything while the other seer examined the organic metal. He just stood there, taking deep breaths of the cold air, trying to get his equilibrium back.

“Where did you find this?”

“Third landing,” Revik said.

“Do you know what this is?” he said. When Revik glanced over, the gray eyes looked hard again, the color of steel. “It looks exactly like the keys we used on the early restraint collars. The ones the Germans used in World War II...”

Revik nodded, gazing out over the courtyard. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” Revik said, his voice close to normal again. “But I know what crossed my mind. That whoever they were holding down there was stuck in that pit for about seventy years...maybe longer.”

Balidor continued to study Revik’s face for a moment.

Then he sighed.

“That’s what I thought too, brother.” Touching his arm, he gestured towards the desolate tower. “...They weren’t able to determine what caused the first blast,” he said. “No residual powder. The only incendiary is natural gas present in deposits in the mountain bedrock itself...but there’s no way that could have been ignited without some way to pierce the stone. There’s no sign of drilling. Surveys show it would have been trapped behind several feet of solid granite. Something natural could have caused a fissure to form, of course, but there would have been some sign. We checked for seismic activity and found none...”

Revik looked up at the sky. It stretched blue overhead, despite dark clouds pooling over the mountains.

He glanced back at Balidor.

“Could we be talking about a seer?” he said.

Balidor didn’t move for a moment.

Then he whistled softly, giving him a sideways smile. “Brother, I am impressed. My own people haven’t come up with that yet, and many of them have been here for several days. As unlikely as it seems, yes, I believe that is a possibility. One we should explore, at any rate, given the evidence...”

“A manipulator?” Revik said in Prexci. “Telekinetic?” he added in English.

“Possibly, yes. It would explain a number of factors.”

Revik felt himself fighting to breathe again.

After a moment, he shook his head. “Someone would have felt them behind the Barrier.” He looked at Balidor, fighting the remnants of pain lingering after his stint in the chamber of horrors. “...There was a child down there,” he said. “After the blast. Could someone be breeding manipulators? Terian’s always had that thing with genetics...”

Balidor shrugged with one hand, his face unreadable.

“Your observation about the child is troubling,” he said. “...But a lot in this incident is troubling.” He gave Revik a thin-lipped smile. “I must remind myself that the Displacement is coming. That perhaps it is not so strange that more than one intermediary being might be on Earth at this time.”

At Revik’s frown, his eyes grew thoughtful.

“Do you still think Terian is connected to this somehow?”

Revik glanced at the tower.

He felt the nausea return, the feeling of despair. Brushing it out of his light as best he could, he rested his hands on his hips.

Instead of answering Balidor’s question, he asked another.

“Why children?” he said.

Balidor shrugged again with one hand, his face impassive. “Perhaps the children were incidental. Or...” he said more gently. “Perhaps he thought he was helping them. Freeing them, perhaps?”

Revik stared out over the broken courtyard. His eyes traveled back to the edge of the crater where members of the Adhipan could still be seen picking through body parts and rubble.

Whoever the seer was, if there had been a manipulator locked down there—or any seer, for that amount of time—they would be insane.

If it was a telekinetic seer, their existence had been kept incredibly quiet. If they’d been found in the forties, or even the thirties...after Syrimne, or even while Syrimne was still alive, it would explain why someone had hidden them away so thoroughly. Whoever it was could have figured out a way to clone Syrimne. The child could be the product of that.

Or perhaps it was just someone from the school who wandered down there after the blast, looking for a place to hide.

Seers didn’t do well alone. In fact, they usually died. Whoever that seer had been, if they’d been locked up alone for seventy-plus years, they should be dead.

He thought of Allie then, and for an instant, the separation pain grew debilitating.

A manipulator. Whoever they were, they would be interested in her.

Especially if they were male.

He shook it off, clenching his jaw before he looked at Balidor.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

Taking another deep breath, he began walking back over the rubble to join the remainder of the search team. As he walked, he felt the hunter’s mask fall back over his mind, stripping his thoughts almost entirely of emotion.

That time, when Revik walked, Balidor followed him.

REVIK LAY ON a single bed in the temporary barracks Balidor set up outside of Darjeeling. This would be the last night in these accommodations—at least for him. He would be joining Balidor’s ground team for the next few days, which meant sleeping in tents on partially frozen ground, at least until the helicopter picked him up, which Balidor promised him would be within four days...five at most.

He’d still had no word from Allie.

Staring up at a whitewashed ceiling, head resting on his arm, he found himself thinking about the last message from Balidor.

Tarsi had extended her timeline. No reason given, not even a hello aimed in his direction...not from either of them.

In any case, it spurred his offer to stay on with the Adhipan.

He wondered now if that had been such a great idea. Despite Balidor’s assurances, he wanted to talk to Allie himself. Obviously, she wasn’t going to ask for him, so he needed to make it clear to her that he wanted to see her. He couldn’t leave India with her without breaking the law. Hell, he didn’t even know if he could take her from Tarsi’s legally, at least not without formal permission...but he could probably convince Tarsi to let him talk to her, at least.

He’d shared all of his various imprints of Terian and Terian’s different bodies with the Adhipan already. No one knew Terian’s light as well as he did, so they’d welcomed his offer to help...but they were better trackers than he was.

They didn’t really need him.

It had been nine days since he reached Seertown from Egypt.

He’d been delayed in Cairo, too. First by the paranoia of the infiltration team, then by Maygar and his ridiculous attempts to buy him off, then to piss him off. Since he’d left her in Gatwick, pretty much nothing had gone the way he’d planned. He’d thought he would be lying in a very different bed right now...not surrounded by half-clothed infiltrators, staring at a water-stained ceiling, wondering if he should take a shower just so he could jerk off without one of the other seers making a crack, or worse, offering to help.

Because he’d focused on her and sex in the same breath, he felt her.

She backed off the instant his light coiled into hers, but the pain lingered, making it impossible for him to disconnect. He stayed with her, like he did every time they bumped up against one another in that space, pulling at her for fleeting impressions, but they weren’t enough to calm his paranoia.

She was busy. Working. Tarsi had her hard at work on something. It was stressing her out, whatever it was, upsetting her—

Tarsi appeared.

Unapologetic, she slammed him out of their Barrier space.

Revik was left lying there, half-crippled as the connection severed. He lay there a few moments longer, fighting to slow his breathing as the pain gradually dissipated. When he recovered enough, he sat up, holding the blanket around his waist as his feet touched the floor.

He found a female seer also awake, and watching him. She smiled when she caught his gaze, humor in her eyes.

When he looked away, she laughed aloud.

“Hey. Newlywed,” she said in Mandarin. “What the hell are you doing out here? Why aren’t you at home? I’d be pissed off, if I was your wife...”

Without answering, Revik pushed the covers aside, getting to his feet.

“Hey,” she said, laughing. “Can you walk?”

Grabbing a towel off the chair at the end of the bed, he headed for the shower without giving the female so much as another glance. Her laughter followed him out...until the closing corridor door cut it thankfully off.

REVIK BLINKED BACK sweat.

Reinforcing his grip on the Chinese-made QBZ-97 assault rifle they’d given him, he held it in both hands as he walked through the trees.

It had been a long time since he’d done this kind of field op.

He’d also never favored this particular gun. He preferred the LR-300s and M16s, where he could fire sighted from full cover; he couldn’t do that with the 97. He also didn’t like where the magazine sat on the gun; it made for a slower reload, and the safety was oddly placed...not like he’d need that much out here.

The Adhipan moved fast, and nearly silently through the forested hillsides.