Allie's War Season Three (14 page)

"This didn't go unnoticed," I reminded him softly. "They'll be waiting for us...probably with baseball bats and a few thousand words' worth of lectures..."

He nodded, but didn't smile, or speak, or let go of my hand. I didn't exactly get the sense he was agreeing with me either, at least not about what he'd asked before.

We stayed like that pretty much until we pulled up to the hotel a few minutes later. The sun had risen completely by then, and we were caught in the early morning commuter traffic on our way around the bottom of the park. I looked at the driver’s clock and saw that it was close to seven a.m. So it had been later than I’d thought when we left that storm drain in the park.

Either that, or it had taken longer than I realized to get to the road and hail a cab.

I blew another mild memory distortion over the driver, paid him, then climbed out and walked around the back of the cab to help Revik out on the other side. I knew the surveillance around the hotel was all seer-controlled, but being out in the open just off Fifth Avenue made me more than a little nervous. Anyway, humans stayed at this hotel too, not only seers. Revik leaned on me as we walked into the lobby. I was leading him past the front desk and the scattering of expensive, plush couches and antique tables, when a voice brought me up short.

I'd half-expected that, of course, but still hesitated before stopping, wondering if it was feasible to make a break for the elevators.

"Can you run?" I murmured to Revik.

He glanced at me, his light exuding a pulse of alarm. "What?"

Guilt seized me when I felt his scan flicker out, looking for the source of danger. I reassured him with a pulse of warmth, caressing his back.

"We're fine, baby...we're fine. I was joking...I'm sorry," I murmured, my eyes now fixed on the seer who was walking aggressively towards us.

He barely glanced at Revik other than to take in his obviously wounded condition; his eyes bored into mine with restrained fury, so it was pretty clear who he held responsible for this little jaunt of ours. I could see the words of those three or four dozen lectures I'd imagined already forming behind his light-gray eyes, and in several different languages.

None of this surprised me.

What did surprise me was that Wreg appeared at my other side. He slid a muscular arm around Revik, giving him a larger body to lean against. He must have scanned him first with his light, because he avoided the area of his wound completely. Wreg turned his glower on Balidor, the other seer, before I could think of anything coherent to say to either of them.

"Later, Adhipan," Wreg growled in a low voice. "He's hurt."

"And whose fault is that?" Balidor snapped back, still glaring at me.

"Fine," I said, holding up a hand. "Yell at me after we get him down somewhere..."

Wreg grunted, making a respectful gesture towards me before he began half-carrying and half-leading Revik towards the elevators. It wasn't until then that I realized the ex-rebel with the long, black braid and the tattooed arms was wearing combat gear.

"They went out," I said, glancing at Balidor. "They went out? For us?"

Balidor gave me a curt nod. He waited until the two of them disappeared, then grabbed my arm just above the elbow. "Might I have a word with you right now, Esteemed Bridge?" he asked. His voice was polite, but cold as ice.

"Not here," I said, glancing around the lobby.

"Of course, Esteemed Bridge," the Adhipan leader agreed smoothly, guiding me towards the elevators as he spoke. His grip wasn't overly tight, but I could feel the command there, and didn't have the strength to fight him really, even though I technically outranked him and he'd probably back down if I told him how exhausted I was.

I didn't, though. I figured I might as well get it over with while I was too tired to argue back. After all, it's not like I hadn't known this one was coming. Anyway, I was hoping I could get Balidor to work on cracking the...no doubt high-level and extremely complex...security encryption on the data key we'd found.

That way, when I woke next, I'd know just how guilty I should feel that I'd risked all of our lives yet again.

5

LISTS

"THEY’RE BACK,” THE chained seer said calmly, not looking up from his drawing pad.

He sat on a rust-colored carpet in blue and white striped, cotton pajamas. As per usual, he only wore the bottoms, leaving his still-thin but significantly less emaciated chest bare in the heated room. A thin, silvery-green collar circled his long neck and light manacles held him to his half of the room, in that they led to chains that bolted directly into the organically-enhanced wall.

The Adhipan had reconfigured this room as a kind of cell and suite wrapped into one, but Jon knew they continued to keep a Barrier detail on the seer as well.

There was still no way to know what he might do, really.

Jon found himself studying Feigran's bare feet, noticing for the first time that he had tattoos on his toes...odd, spiral, blue patterns that looked like they belonged to some kind of sea creature.

"Revik and Allie?" he said after a pause. "Is that who you mean?"

Feigran nodded, his amber-colored eyes still focused on the motion of the charcoal he held in his fingers.

"Are they all right?" Jon said.

"Brother Sword is hurt." When Jon stiffened, Feigran glanced up, smiling that odd, off-kilter smile that still managed to make Jon nervous. Feigran twitched his head sideways then, a parody of the reassuring gesture used by Asian seers. "...It is not serious, Jon. He hurts more in the other way. He is looking for his wife..."

"I thought you said she was with him?" Jon said. "Didn't they come back together?"

"They did."

"Then why is he looking for her?" Jon said.

Feigran made another noncommittal gesture.

Jon frowned.

Despite what he told the others, he never felt fully at ease with Feigran. This was in spite of the vast improvements in apparent sanity the seer had made in the two-plus years since he'd been 'reintegrated' into a single body from the dozens of bodies that had once housed different pieces of his mind. Feigran, a.k.a. Terian, had once split his own light body into a veritable army of different aspects of himself.

Some of those personalities had been relatively benign...even good people, if Jon could believe Dorje and others in the Adhipan. Some, including the one who held Jon captive for several months in the Carpathian mountains, were sadistic, highly-intelligent sociopaths with a deeply fucked up sense of humor. Now that those different personalities all resided inside the same physical body, Jon was never quite sure to which one he was speaking.

He suspected it probably varied from minute to minute, anyway. But Feigran was beginning to learn which of those personalities were socially acceptable, too.

Jon wasn't sure if that made him more or less dangerous.

It did make conversations with him easier, however.

And anyway, Jon hadn't been able to sleep when he got back to the hotel with Wreg and the others...and not only because Dorje had been so pissed off at him for leaving with Wreg without waking him up, he'd basically kicked Jon out of their room. He'd since called and apologized, but Jon was still too wound up to try and lie down.

He supposed he'd been waiting for Allie, if he were being honest with himself.

"Adhipan has her," Feigran said absently. His focus remained on his moving hand with the charcoal, but Jon saw his lips twitch in another of those off-kilter smiles. "She's been a bad, bad girl, Jon. She's getting her spanking..."

"Balidor," Jon muttered, shaking his head. "I should have known."

The Adhipan leader still had a tendency to chew Allie out for anything she did without his approval, big or small. The thing was, Jon strongly suspected that Allie ended up going behind Balidor's back more often than not for exactly that reason. In this case, it was something pretty big, sure, but Jon couldn't help being curious about what she and Revik had been doing...and whose idea it had been, really. He'd already decided to wait on trying to talk to either of them until after they'd been through all the formal debriefing hoops.

Jon had a feeling Balidor was right on this one, though.

This had Allie written all over it for some reason.

Which was probably why Balidor felt justified in chewing her out, since he'd been her main advisor for over two years now. The only difference was that now, in an ironic twist, Balidor usually overreacted to what he perceived as her willingness to take advantage of Revik.

Thinking about this, Jon chuckled a little, in spite of himself.

"What is funny, Jon?" Feigran said, without looking up.

"Balidor," Jon said, answering him honestly for some reason as he ran his fingers through his long hair. "Defending Revik...after the two of them spent over a year wanting the other dead. When they weren't actively trying to kill each other, that is..."

Feigran smiled, but the concentrated look in his eyes didn't lessen.

"That
is
funny, Jon," he agreed seriously.

For another few minutes, the seer continued only to draw with the one hand, his other resting in front of his crossed legs, the fingers coiling and uncoiling and recoiling around his bare toes. Jon couldn't really follow the erratic motion of his sketching hand, but he could tell it was an image this time, not one of Feigran's elaborate Barrier maps or reams and reams of quasi-scientific equations on genetics or inter-dimensional physics or whatever else.

"What are you working on?" Jon said finally.

"I am drawing the future, Jon," Feigran replied.

"The future, huh?" Jon folded his arms. "And how does it look?"

"Not too good, Jon," Feigran replied, just as seriously. "Not too good at all..."

Jon was tempted to get up, to move close enough to peer over the seer's shoulder, but he'd already been warned repeatedly by both Dorje and Balidor to keep his distance. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that Feigran and Terian were still the same person. Even so, Jon was cautious enough to not want to test the boundaries of that change. He considered asking the seer to show him the drawing, then decided to wait until he had finished.

"So what did Allie want with you the other day?" he asked Feigran casually instead.

Feigran laughed.

"What?" Jon said. "That's funny?"

"You are conducting your own interrogations," Feigran replied, still smiling.
"That
is funny, Jon. You are perhaps smarter than Balidor. Certainly smarter than they think..."

Jon smiled in spite of himself, clicking softly as he folded his arms over the front of his light blue T-shirt.

"Yeah. Sure, I am," he said. "Genius guy. That's me."

"I'm serious, Jon."

Feigran didn't look up, but Jon didn't hear any humor in his words.

"So?" Jon said after another pause. "Are you going to tell me what you talked about? With Allie?"

"Certainly, Jon," Feigran said, blowing some charcoal powder off one corner of the drawing before bending over it once more. "...She wanted me to verify a drawing I'd made for her. She wanted to know if I thought it depicted the past, future or present...and if it had any prescient meaning, or if I was merely hacking into her subconscious and transcribing what I found..."

Jon frowned, puzzled. "Really? Which one?"