Allie's War Season One (130 page)

Revik wondered if there’d ever been a time when the world seemed so simple to him.

He was unable to find out from them if the Council of Seven escaped intact, or even if Vash had lived. They were able to tell him that the compound suffered multiple and direct hits, and that the old House on the Hill had been hit as well. The stone structure predated first contact with the humans, and was one of the oldest known seer-built structures standing in nearly its original form. The archives and the catacombs underneath the stone mansion housed irreplaceable artifacts, even bodies of the first race prior to their extinction.

Revik had never been invited down there, but the place was considered sacred.

He tried to think if he, himself, had any contacts living nearby. His mind drifted to Tarsi. She wasn’t exactly a soldier these days, but he didn’t have a lot of options.

The reality was, Revik didn’t have many friends in India. He hadn’t spent much time in Asia at all since his “rehabilitation”...and he’d spent that period in caves, in a kind of hell of his mind and light, with only monthly visits from Vash to monitor his progress.

He certainly hadn’t made any friends. Those years consisted of meditation and light restructuring, mostly under the guarded eye of a sect of monks who didn’t speak.

When that period of his penance ended, Vash relocated him immediately, first to Russia for more time alone and then Revik had been found a paid position in Europe, working for humans. At the time, Vash made that sound like it was part of his penance, too, so Revik hadn’t felt like he could exactly refuse. Either way, he had been out of the Pamir’s caves for less than a week before he was handed a new passport and a bus ticket to Delhi, followed by a flight to Berlin and then on to Moscow where housing for him had already been arranged. He hadn’t been back to Asia since, not until now.

Galaith never had him working in Asia much, either, at least from what he could remember. Well, apart from Vietnam, but even that was a short tour, and he’d spent most of it underground, conducting interrogations.

After the restructuring under the monks of the Pamir, he’d been in a kind of daze those first few years...and even after he got sent to London. Not long after he’d left those caves, he’d been formally tasked with protecting Allie. He’d been connected on and off to seers in the Pamir to be briefed, but he wasn’t invited back. In fact, Vash actively discouraged him from coming to Asia at all...for any reason. He didn’t want him in Seertown, China or Southeast Asia. Eventually he didn’t want him in Russia, either, or even Eastern Europe, not even for visits. When necessary, they met in the Barrier, in one of Vash’s many constructs.

When Revik got restless, he headed west...not east.

He’d tried not to take it personally. It had to have been a controversial decision to allow him back at all, given who he was. He knew he was chosen to guard Allie partly because no one would have believed Vash would give him such an important responsibility. And there was Allie herself. Her security had to be a priority, as well as the necessity of keeping her, and therefore her protection, anonymous. He couldn’t be a regular fixture in Vash’s circle, or someone might decide he was worth monitoring a little more closely.

The cover had worked well. No one came near him in those years. He’d worked for the humans dutifully, and that felt appropriate too.

He woke up when the roan splashed into a stream.

Jerking his head, he looked around in some alarm, realizing he’d dozed off. From the horse walking beside the roan, the seer with the scar on his face was watching him, curiosity in his dark eyes. After a pause, the man grinned, pointing vaguely at Revik’s genital area.

“Married?” he said, leering. “Good, eh? The Bridge?”

Revik stared blankly at the seer. Biting back what he would have liked to say, he pulled the canteen off his belt, taking a long drink of water. He was a little feverish. He couldn’t afford to get sick, not for any reason.

How long?
he asked the leader.

Not long, Small. Not long now.

Where are we going?

Not far. They are waiting for you already.

Waiting for me?
Revik felt a brief flicker of hope.
Who? Adhipan?

The man made a ‘more or less’ gesture with his hand.
Some Adhipan. We save who we can. Of the worthy.

“The worthy?” Revik said aloud. He fought his voice neutral. “Aren’t we all worthy...friend?”

The leader smiled.
Can’t save everyone, little brother. Victory without quarter, yes? Have to keep your eyes on the end point...

Revik didn’t answer, but his nerves rose. Something in the wording of that response hit a less-often accessed part of his mind...and resonated with an after-tone he didn’t much like.

He glanced down at his leg, wincing as the horse jostled it again. Blood was starting to seep through the organic bandages.

Whoever they really were, it didn’t matter.

He didn’t much care whose side he played on, not anymore.

20

REBELLION

THE EXPLOSION FLARED up out of darkness.

Cass watched it go, feeling a part of her go silent inside.

That hadn’t been a bomb. But then, the fires had been igniting fuel and ammunition stockpiles since about an hour after the first run by the planes.

She’d never been in a bombing before. If someone had told her a year ago that she would be in the mountains of Asia now, running from bombs dropped by American planes, she would have laughed.

She wasn’t laughing now.

The explosion seemed to originate from the area of town Balidor called the 8th District...where Chandre had been heading. She’d gone down there looking for cargo ships and ground transport to hire after the humans (the humans...Cass found it interesting how easily the words formed that way in her mind) bombed the Adhipan’s small fleet, along with the helicopters and the rust bucket Russian drop plane nursed up into the air by the sheer willpower of the engineers working for the Seven’s Guard.

Cass had seen bombs fall on the 8th earlier, so the fires must have found something, ignited something larger and more flammable. It looked like half the District was on fire now.

Balidor said it was a big district, and that most of it lived underground.

Chandre had probably heard the planes coming, just like they had. Chan was an infiltrator, so she’d been in lots of things like this. Well, maybe not lots, but she hardly compared to one of the barista and musician slacker crowd Cass hung with back home.

Chan would know what to do. She would have heard the planes, found cover, protected herself somehow. She had her seer powers. She could sidestep an explosion, just like Balidor had steered Cass away from that large castle-like building right before the upper windows blew out from heat and flame.

Cass hadn’t let herself think about Jon, not yet.

The planes hadn’t left. Even as she thought it, a formation of them came around for another pass, veering lower to shoot at the town of Seertown proper. Cass winced as the guns went off, as rockets connected with buildings, trembling the ground. Explosions echoed through the small valley.

The whole thing felt unreal, but for the smell, the screaming and the people she saw...like the monk now running down the street, his robe on fire, his dark face covered in blood.

Swallowing, she looked away, up to the sky as another formation flashed overhead. Gripping her gun tighter, she blinked sweat and smoke out of her eyes, fighting to block out the screams.

It was light out now, so they could be different planes...there was no way to know, really. It felt like this had been going on for days.

The planes themselves still looked American to Cass, but she’d heard the seers arguing back and forth about that too, on the VR network. The one advantage to being in a fight; Cass could actually hear what was going on as seers dropped out of the Barrier to hide from other seers. They relied on technology to communicate instead, ironically because they were less likely to be overheard.

Cass herself was a risk factor for the team...but not a very big one. Their attackers might be more likely to look for seers where they saw a lone human hiding in the woods. Or they might just as easily think she was just a dumb worm, hiding out in the trees from the bombs.

Which wasn’t all that far from the truth, really. Being human, she was visible in the Barrier all the time, but also inconsequential to the vast majority of seers. Her main protection was that they simply didn’t see her as a threat.

The castle-like structure seers called simply “the Old House” or “the House on the Hill,” burned high above Seertown itself, as well as the castle’s own strangely symmetrical gardens with their white stones and even whiter-skinned trees. The bare-looking white trees with their animalistic-looking branches decorated the sprawling manicured lawns in spirals from above. They also dotted sandy paths, interspersed with moss-covered statues and benches made of aging white stone.

The trees caught fire too, as Cass watched, until the building and its grounds looked like something out of an Apocalyptic fairytale.

She watched fire blow out more windows on the upper floors, ribboning tapestries. It climbed higher when a breeze caught hold of the flames, jumping them to the next set of rooms...or the next set of branches. Ashes thrown by the wind joined black smoke clouds in the sky, twisting into cyclone-like shapes.

The scream of planes back to the far end of the valley snapped her out of her trance. Down the hill from where she and Balidor stood, a second explosion trembled the ridge, shaking the ground under their legs.

Then a third.

They were still dropping bombs. It had been dark when they started, and now the sun had passed the zenith in the sky and headed west towards the opposite ridge of mountains.

They were trying to annihilate them. To kill the seers off for good.

“Maybe,” Balidor said quietly, looking out over the same scene.

Cass jumped a little. She had forgotten seers could almost always hear her when she stood this close. She looked back at the 8th District, watching it burn.

“It ignited something,” she said, unnecessarily. “Just how much ammo and fuel do you guys have stored up here?”

He focused on the same area of the 8th District, his face granite.

Cass looked at him. “Allie. Have you heard anything from—”

“No,” he said.

Plumes of fire rose to the clouds, staining the black briefly to red and gold. Cass watched a second mushroom of fire reach up towards blue sky, again lighting up the blanket of smoke. She blinked in the sudden radiance as it lit the 8th District, as well, and the disjointed array of mud buildings scattered around a long, flat landing strip covered in ships.

It was the first real look she’d gotten of the 8th. She’d been pretty much warned off going there...first by Chandre, and more recently by Balidor and his pals.

The 8th wasn’t technically part of Seertown proper, but part of the parcel of land allocated by the human government of India for seers. From what she could tell, the 8th District was Seertown’s dark underbelly...its Tenderloin, or maybe something closer to the mafia district. It consisted mostly of smugglers...purveyors of illegal seer tech and organic machines, brokers for sight trading and seer children, prostitution on a grand scale, even kidnappings for upper-end purchases. Unlike the monk-like exterior of even the civilians who lived in Seertown itself, the demeanor of those in the 8th seemed closer to pirates...at least if she could believe Maygar.