Allie's War Season One (98 page)

Ducking his head under the metal rim, he waited for his eyes to adjust to the absent glare and looked for Balidor. The Adhipan leader was alone on the plane so far, so Revik walked down the aisle and slumped into a seat across from him.

“You couldn’t have found a new plane?” he said.

Balidor glanced at him, a faint smile playing at his lips. “We find these older models are less likely to raise questions.” He raised an eyebrow. “You aren’t afraid of flying, are you, brother?”

Revik propped his cuffed hands on the seat in front of him. “Afraid? No. Cautious when it comes to flying in things I shot at sixty years ago? Yes.”

Balidor laughed, even as he glanced back at the others now boarding. “We have made a few repairs since then...”

Revik’s eyes followed his as seven more seers entered through the same rear-wing door. They scattered themselves over the thirty-odd seats inside the plane’s cabin.

Two were the males who had driven him from Seertown. They’d been friendly enough on the way down, talking to him about the work they’d been doing tracking Terian bodies and the status of the human war.

Even so, the collective demeanor of the group put his nerves on edge. They didn’t laugh or joke, or even act like they were on the job. They all looked grim, even emotional. A pall hung over the squad, even with them shielded up tighter than any group of seers Revik had ever encountered.

All were male but one, and, from what Revik could tell, all were older than him—the next youngest being at least three hundred years old.

The one female walked up the aisle to sit with Grent, the only seer on the plane with whom Revik had spoken more than a few words before today. Catching Revik’s eye, Grent gave him a welcoming wave. Then he glanced up at the female and his face changed, sliding from grief into a smile as she leaned over to kiss him on the face, caressing his cheek with her hand and then kissing him again.

Revik noticed the telltale then, woven into a structure of aleimi over each of their heads.

Mates. Interesting.

Revik found his mind drifting towards Allie, and shifted his focus back to Balidor.

“So what is this?” he said. “Where are we going?”

Balidor’s humor faded at once. He gave Revik a grim look. “To investigate a mass killing. A bomb of some kind. Likely several actually...the damage is pretty phenomenal. Hundreds were killed.”

Revik nodded. He didn’t get it though. That didn’t explain the mood of the group.

“Seers?” he said, glancing around at the others.

“Brother,” Balidor said gently. “...They were children.”

There was a silence. Revik felt a knot form in his chest. Instead of loosening, it worsened with time, like someone had grabbed one of his lungs and squeezed it with their bare hand.

“Seer children,” he said. It wasn’t really a question.

“Yes. At least five hundred...maybe as many as seven.”

Revik felt light-headed. He didn’t move for a moment. “Seven hundred,” he said. His voice sounded far away. “...It’s verified?”

Balidor nodded. “We have feed images. Underground, of course. None of the human stations are carrying it...at least not yet. We got the intel from an operative in Darjeeling. Some of the survivors fled there. We got amateur footage from the team who picked them up.”

“Source?” Revik said.

Balidor flipped his hand sideways. “Unknown. None of the ID’d Terian bodies were anywhere near the area. They’re all accounted for...the ones we know of, that is.” Balidor hesitated.

“There are plenty of other possible culprits,” he said. “At this point, we suspect retaliation. A number of slave camps run by Rooks had similar incidents when we first started liberating them, after the Pyramid went down. Killing the inventory, as it were...in this case before it could be identified through the trade routes and brought over to our side.” Balidor’s lips thinned.

“My seers may have caused this...inadvertently, of course. We had just started investigating that area for rumors of a school...”

“Christ,” Revik said in English.

Wiping his face with one hand, he looked out the window of the plane as the prop engines geared up.

A seer at the back of the plane swung the door shut with a sucking sound. Revik watched him lock it with the bar. He was buckling himself into the seat then, as the plane began rolling down the dirt runway.

8

CHILDREN

TARSI WALKED ALONGSIDE me on a steep, wooded path. She didn’t stray far, but let me absorb the recording on her portable reader on my own.

Looking at the images of the miniature broken bodies, shown in full color and in every sickening detail of non-avatar flesh, it struck me with a fresh wave of nausea that these were the first seer children I’d ever seen.

Pregnant seers were usually sent away as soon as they learned of their condition. Seer children were born in secret, and sent not long after to schools set up as monasteries, far outside of any official settlements. Those not run by Rooks lay deep in the mountains to discourage slave traders, and were heavily guarded by specially trained squads under the Adhipan called Lokapaala, which translated roughly as “Guardians of the World.”

It all seemed a bit overdone to me until Vash explained that each healthy child, once sight trained and “made docile,” fetched anywhere from 100-500K Euros on the black market...higher if they fit one of the rare categories of coloring or sight rank, or if they displayed any one or combination of a few dozen preferential traits.

With seer traders, prevailing wisdom was the younger the better. Girls were prized more than boys, for reproductive capability and perceived “relative docility,” which was frankly laughable to me, given the female seers I’d met so far. Sex was almost always a factor, too, for those high-end purchases. The majority of customers were still men.

I closed my eyes, breathing in cold air.

I couldn’t help but wonder how many were left...in total, I mean. Had that been a third of the seer children currently alive? A fifth? A tenth? Half?

The complex where the massacre occurred had been located in the mountains of Sikkim, a kingdom in the far Northeast of India. It called itself a “school,” but the recording I saw showed sensory deprivation cells, collars, restraints, iron bars and evidence of extremely crowded living conditions. Whoever shot and narrated the film speculated that it had been a training and recruiting ground for Rook infiltrators.

At least 1,100 kids had been interned there, ranging from 5-25 years...which meant some had been babies.

I’d learned a few things about seers and their children since I’d first arrived in India. For one thing, seers didn’t reproduce as easily as human beings. Children were a big deal, even before the trade wars following World War II. There were a number of reasons for this. A disproportionately high number of adult seers were completely sterile...like over a third, maybe as many as half who made it to child-bearing years would never be able to conceive.

Fertile couples were lucky to have one. More than one was unusual...anything more than two extremely rare. Even fertile females were completely sterile for more than a decade after they were impregnated, whether they carried to term or not.

Seers didn’t reproduce until they were older, too—a few hundred years old, at least. Now that life spans for all seers had generally decreased, seer children were considered a matter of community interest. Most diplomatic battles fought by the Seven involved the safety of their children in some way.

But it was more than that. A profound silence lived around the subject of seer children and reproduction, despite frequent jokes and banter about sex. Even among friends it was a sensitive topic. Many older seers had lost children through Rook recruitment, war, religiously-motivated purges, murder, communism, prison, internment, laboratories or outright stealing. Parents mourned having a female child as they had to immediately be sent away, perhaps never to be seen again until they were a full-grown adult, and then only if they were lucky.

Children were only discussed in the abstract, or if a parent initiated a report of some good news relative to their offspring. When they did, everyone took a sincere and somber interest.

Maygar told me once that children were even buried in adult-sized coffins.

I handed the reader back to Tarsi. “Do I need to go back?”

“No.” Folding up the organic monitor, she stuffed it into a bag that hung sideways across her body. She shrugged with one hand, seer-fashion.

Not yet. The Adhipan will go there.

I hesitated, not sure if that was good enough. After a pause, I decided to push past it. Balidor knew what he was doing.

I looked out over the trees, trying not to worry about how long we’d been walking, or how dark it was getting. I had planned on walking, and putting a good distance between myself and the compound...but when Tarsi led me on and on, trekking over a dirt trail that wound between two mountains, I found myself getting nervous. The sun was sinking between the mountains before us, and she still showed no sign that we might be getting close to our destination.

She wasn’t doing anything to my light that I could notice though. I wasn’t blocked from scanning for Vash or Balidor or anyone else.

I considered checking in with Revik...then didn’t. I had no idea what to say to him, at least not yet, and I still wasn’t ready to deal with whatever emotional reaction he might have had to the thing with Maygar. Tarsi told me she’d instructed all of them to leave me alone.

Even Revik, she said.

A number of feelings arose around that, not all of them relief.

A few times she stopped, breathing hard as we shared views of valleys filled with lush green and the occasional outlying farm.

I tried to engage her in questions, but only got vague or no answers. At one point, she lay a finger to her lips and gestured around us. I took that to mean that she wanted to wait until we were in some kind of construct.

After that, I left her alone.

A stillness lived in the Himalayas, even in their lowest foothills. Spring had wound its way into the woods. Greenery erupted under my feet, turning the soil beneath a dark brown. A cry sounded overhead and I looked up, watching another gold-feathered eagle wheel in looping circles against the blue sky, its shadow flickering between cracks in the dark curtain of evergreen trees. I decided to just be here, forget everything else.

Time passed easily from that space. We reached our destination as the first stars grew faintly visible in the east.

Due to the angle and its position half-immersed in rock, I didn’t see the door to the crouched dwelling at first. I just stood there, breathing hard, thinking we were resting on a grassy knoll before the next steep cliff, when I noticed light flickering between cracks in the rock face.

I stared at that flame-like light for close to a minute before my eyes drew the correct lines out of the natural fissures.

The clearing around her home was small, half-shielded by a copse of hard, twisted trees. By then, my breath plumed out in clouds from the cold air, but my t-shirt stuck to my back with sweat from the last half-hour of hiking, most of it straight uphill. Pine needles and mud caked my boots. Winded from the thinned oxygen, I had trudged without stopping for the last mile, marveling that the ancient seer seemed to weather the climb better than me.

Patches of snow still dotted the ground, and cracking fingers of ice framed the water in a stone basin outside the wooden door. Recent snowmelt trickled down one side of the path in a ribbon-like stream. I continued to suck in breaths as we stood there, knowing my face was bright red from exertion.