Allie's War Season One (112 page)

I’ve got a mate. Do you want to kill her, too?

The boy’s eyes narrowed. Revik hesitated at the look there. When the boy’s eyes remained ice, Revik raised a hand.

No cave,
he sent.
No guns. No wires. No schools. No one will take you anywhere you don’t want to go. No one will hurt you...

Liar,
the boy sent.
You’re a liar!

Not this time.

You killed me! You destroyed me!

His words hurt Revik somehow.
You’re still here,
he sent.

You’re a bad man...a bad fucking man!

Not anymore,
he sent.
Whatever I did before, I’m sorry.

The boy gave a thick laugh, older than his body’s years. The hatred in his thoughts grew more palpable.

Nervous, Revik glanced at Balidor. The older seer signaled with his hand for Revik to keep going, but to be careful. Revik gestured in affirmative.

Then the woman, Laren, rearranged her hands on her gun. As she did, she took a half-step forward.

The movement swung the boy’s eyes back to her face.

Before Revik could warn her, something slammed at his light.

His energy dropped so severely that his knees crumpled. It came out of nowhere, pulling at him from above...like a vacuum to his light from above his head. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw several members of the Adhipan stagger as well. He held out a hand in a daze. His knees hit the dirt as his fingers smacked the same rock where he’d placed his gun.

He heard Laren give a strangled cry...

Just before there was a loud cracking sound.

Then something flew past him, pushing air out of the way so quickly he ducked, flinching from its path in reflex. When he could focus again, he saw another seer between him and the downed female.

“Laren!” the male screamed.

Grent ran for his mate.

He moved so fast that Revik couldn’t follow the motion with his eyes. He couldn’t move, in fact...he watched the other male in shock as his mind replayed the sound of bone cracking. He realized what Grent had already felt.

Laren lay where she’d fallen in the undergrowth, blood on her lips.

Grent cradled her in his arms. Her neck hung at a wrong angle. Her eyes remained open, staring up at the trees.

The male screamed, a sound that ripped open Revik’s heart.

None of the Adhipan moved.

Then, slowly Revik staggered to his feet.

Dazed from the hit at his light, he stared at Grent and Laren.

Fear, then rage wound through him. He saw the shock hit Grent’s light in concentric waves. Unable to watch the male’s realization of what had occurred, he looked for the boy. Finding him standing motionless beside the same tree, Revik focused on the smile playing at the bow-like lips. Without thinking, he snatched his gun off the rock and raised it to his shoulder...

The metal stock ripped out of his hands.

Something slammed him in the middle of the chest. Whatever it was, it had the weight of a thick, oak plank. The force behind it was almost mechanical, like being hit by a wrecking ball.

It threw him off his feet.

Arms and legs pin-wheeling, he tried to slow himself. Greenery streaked by as he experienced another sharp drop in his light.

Then his back hit something hard. His head, too.

His body crumpled to the wet ground. Protruding objects met his back, legs and arms. Everything around him started to gray. Warmth covered his head and neck; he smelled his own blood. He looked up, fighting to focus his eyes as a tall form stepped out of the trees near him.

The female seer looked down at him, her blue eyes shining a turquoise that was nearly iridescent. Like the boy, her face was Asian, with high cheekbones. She held a long gun fitted with organics that made the Chinese models carried by the Adhipan look like children’s toys.

Blowing hiri smoke through straight black hair to get it out of her eyes, she walked over to the tree where he lay.

She dropped the thin cigarette, grinding it out with the toe of her boot.

“Hello, lover,” she said in Russian.

Raising her heel, she aimed it at his face.

Everything went dark all at once.

14

HUSBAND

FIRE BLOOMS OUT in crimson waves over a field. I watch the bodies blown back, a whisper of light trailing around the second tankard before it ignites...

He is here, with me.

It bothers me, how familiar he feels...

How much I know him already.

He watches the devastation from above, directing like a mathematician conductor, all of his focus inside elaborate geometries of light. They rise above us in a column, sparking and igniting as he combines and recombines their intricate threads.

It is beautiful. My admiration is heartfelt, almost shy.

He is beautiful, in his orchestration of this precise work.

The work is still work to him. It requires concentration, will, purpose...yet it fills him with such freedom, of muscles flexing, utilizing complexities in himself heretofore unused. It allows him to breathe. After years and years of repression and hiding and pretending to be what he is not, he lets it exhale outwards rather than eating him from within...

It makes my heart hurt, this freedom.

An explosion rocks the ground nearer to where he stands in the physical world. Shrapnel flies towards him and the two seers protecting him.

I fear for him for an instant...

Then he throws up a shield of white light. It is dense; it pushes the force outward, protecting him and the two males beside him. Fire and iron and wood slide over and around them in a hot wind of explosive air. They are like rocks in the midst of a fast-moving stream. I feel the gratitude of the two seers with him.

They adore him. They absolutely adore him.

It is what he is born to do. He knows nothing else for which he is suited. Here it is less a question of right or wrong, but of untapped functionalities expressed outwards to some purpose...even if that purpose is not really his own.

He knows now, that these potentialities had to come out eventually. In one way or another, they would have been forced to express. While he can’t trust those for whom he exerts himself now, he trusts himself even less. So he works for them, and considers himself lucky.

He has a purpose.

He helps to make the world better, somehow...if only temporarily.

Memories break inside my mind, pieces of him mixed with pieces of myself, or maybe just memories of his memories. A historical moment lives here, as well...something of import, that lives beyond what any one seer or human remembers. A knowing imprints all of them, like a notch in their collective DNA, all of those who witnessed those years.

Somehow, we are all responsible.

He is not born. He is created...through indifference, through patience and intention.

A man holds a gun to his head.

It is a small head, only slightly larger than the one I know from the forest. Dark hair obscures his round face and slanted eyes. I can’t see his eyes though; they are invisible to me, as are most of his features.

It is not only other seers who work to break him. This one is human. Young. Mean. He works for the other, but he is devoted, not a slave.

“Disarm!” the human snarls. “Disarm, you fuck! Do you think he’ll let you live if you don’t? Disarm or I’ll blow your head all over this wall—”

It shocks me, to hear him talk that way to the boy.

But the boy is both strangely old and strangely young for his years. He copes and shuts down and learns and strategizes, all in turn...or perhaps all at once.

He fights them, too. His mind fights, for his body is fragile.

His tormenters writhe through his aleimi like metal snakes, but he fights them anyway. He holds onto memories of parents, some glimpse of what it was to be loved. He remembers affection, but it slides out of his grasp so easily.

It isn’t long before he questions if any of that had been real.

The human’s name is Merenje.

“You snot-nosed prick...you don’t care about your life, eh? What about your little girlfriend? How many of us do you think it would take to break her?”

I feel something in the small chest give out.

They find his weakness...they always find it.

I see her then. Large eyes, dark hair. A prostitute they brought him; she is young, almost as young as he is. He knows she was sold to him; she doesn’t care about him, either...but she is all he has. She begs him for protection. She begs him, touches him when he wants it. She tells him lies...

She knows...he is her only hope of getting out of there alive.

They beat her, too. They beat her, and use her, but she is...

The cave wavers, breaks apart.

It collapses around us both. His mind stops.

A wall of windows appears. In the shifting glass shards of his mind, I dart between fragments like an insect’s erratic battle with wind.

A burnt out factory stands in a field. A long row of thin, glass panes stand in metal frames, sporadic holes already punched by rocks thrown as rust grew up rows of corrugated iron.

He is there, a boy again, still smaller than his years, though not as small as when I saw him beaten and cut and raped in the woods. The emotion remains intact but it is more focused from the years.

Structures spark around his light. Fear lives there, covered over now in blinding rage...and something else, a feeling of growing purpose, mixed with that wildness, the temperament of an animal.

Emotion pulses out in erratic bursts.

I feel his mind reach out. I feel it start, that folding sensation.

It unfolds entirely, stirring something inside me as he aims. Pent up feeling courses outwards, meeting shimmering squares of glass panes in a rusted, corrugated wall. The power behind it terrifies me.

I’ve glimpsed that fire-like potential before, in seconds crawling by as I flex a muscle unused. I’ve seen it in me, this fire. Only a half-memory guides me to be cautious, to not fall into it...to not direct any strength or intention its way.

I am careful as I look at it, like a giant picking up a snail.

The boy is past that. He uncaps that force, a writhing, boiling pit below a thin membrane he uses to hold it back. When he slides back that veil, he screams from the power of it. It feels good, so much better than he’s ever felt before...and I lay there, panting in the dark, remembering that feeling somewhere inside my own being, jealous of him for not caring.

He exhales it out, and...

Windows explode inside rusted frames.

They shatter outwards. The release is so profound he is filled with something close to joy. The folding turns into a merging, a oneness with all lights, everywhere, and he sees inside every atom, every moving and shining particle.