Allie's War Season Three (29 page)

Cass was the one Jon worried about.

She'd hidden it well, especially around Allie, but Jon knew she was still working through a lot of the fear and anger and whatever else that had been left behind by Terian. Maybe because she'd always seen herself as strong, as someone who could never be beaten down, Cass had taken the thing with Terian really badly. As a kid, she'd dealt with a fair bit of crap with her family, from her mother's multiple boyfriends to the drunk uncle who would 'accidentally' pass out in her room every weekend he was in town...so she probably thought she was tougher than most.

But that was all normal, human crap, nothing like what Terian had done to her.

Something about the thing with Terian stripped every last piece of her confidence. She still played the part of the tough and worldly city girl, but she didn't seem to believe it anymore. Instead she started hanging out with seers like Baguen...the ones who straddled that line between well-meaning rebels and out-and-out terrorists.

She'd done that even before she'd broken things off with Chandre and started sleeping with Baguen himself.

Jon didn't minimize what she'd managed to do on her own at all, in terms of working through her issues after Terian...but he'd worked with enough trauma victims that the gaps there made him nervous. The fact that she acted like she was fine only made Jon's nervousness worse. She'd been decidedly cool to him, too, ever since she found out he'd been visiting Feigran on a semi-regular basis. She seemed to view his interest in their ex-captor as an overt betrayal, and Jon couldn't really blame her for that, either.

In any case, he was worried.

The silence from her end felt ominous to him, in a way it never had before, even when she first disappeared after the thing with Allie in China. He couldn't tell if he was just being paranoid, though, or if it was some guilty conscience thing from hurting her with his visits to Feigran.

Jon hadn't said anything to Allie about his fears.

He hadn't said anything even when Allie had been wondering aloud at some of the more obviously strange things Cass was doing. Like, for example, Jon hadn't told Allie his own theories as to why Cass had chosen a giant, hyper-protective and somewhat simple-minded seer as a boyfriend...over say, Chandre, who had noticed Cass' trauma right off, and tried to get her to face it head on. Chandre at least tried to get Cass to talk about it.

Jon hadn't mentioned any of his thoughts on Cass' mental state to Allie, though, for obvious reasons. The three of them, meaning Revik, Jon and Cass, pretty much had an unspoken pact that Allie couldn't know too much about what happened with Terian in that cell under the Caucasus Mountains. She already felt guilty enough, and there wasn't anything she could have done.

Also, Revik hadn't come out and said anything point blank, but he made it clear he didn't want Allie hearing about the vast majority of the sexual things that Terian had forced on them, especially those involving him.

Now Jon wondered, though.

He was beginning to think maybe he needed to have a talk of his own with Revik. He also wondered if they would need to involve Allie at some point, if it was even fair to keep her out of the loop on this, given her own relationship with Cass. They'd been friends since they were in diapers. Jon already felt guilty for not voicing more of his worries about Cass' mental state, but he'd rationalized it by telling himself that Allie had enough on her plate. Now that Revik was better, that excuse didn't feel as valid as it once had.

Someone would need to talk to Cass...especially if she really was off doing something crazy. She wouldn't listen to Jon at this point, not on his own anyway. Maybe she
would
listen to Revik, though. And if not Revik, Cass would definitely listen to Allie.

Thinking about the pluses and minuses of where Cass might be and what she might be doing only settled the worry into a deeper, colder pit at the bottom of Jon's stomach. He didn't have an answer for any of the possibilities her silence raised. He couldn't help but think Revik was their best chance of finding her, too. Cass didn't seem to want Allie to know anything was wrong with her. She could b.s. Allie about how fine she was and how badass she was with the seer rebels, but she couldn't b.s. Revik about it.

Truthfully, Jon doubted Allie couldn't see past it, either. She'd just been too preoccupied to do much about it, and Jon knew Allie tended to have a hands-off approach in general when it came to her friends, unless they specifically asked for her help. Usually that was a good thing...she didn't tend to psychoanalyze people she cared about, or push 'help' on them when they wanted to work through things on their own.

This time, Jon thought an actual intervention might be in order, though. He felt sure Allie would agree, if she had more of the facts. If the three of them hadn't kept most of that stuff from her in the wake of the whole Terian thing, she probably would have confronted Cass already.

When Jon glanced sideways, he caught Wreg watching him. The mask had faded once more, leaving a more complex array of feelings on the seer's face...the primary one being a dense empathy, real enough and immediate enough that Jon found he couldn't look away.

After another pause, Wreg himself broke the stare.

As if remembering himself, he glanced behind them, in the direction of the atrium they'd just left. For the barest pause, Jon saw him hesitate, as if struggling with something in his own mind, or maybe fighting some kind of decision he'd already made. When he looked back at Jon, however, he only shook his head.

Speaking in a quiet voice, he said, "I'm sorry, brother."

Before Jon could think of a reply, the seer clasped his arm, gripping him tightly enough that Jon felt the pulse of warmth Wreg sent through his fingers. When Wreg released him, turning back to stare at the closed elevator doors, the look on his face bordered on confusion...mixed with a frustrated anger that lay nearly on the surface.

Jon was still staring at the Asian seer's face when the doors pinged in front of them and began slowly to open.

8

GUESTS

CHANDRE STARED AT the high, organically-reinforced gates at the base of the long driveway where they'd parked the jeeps.

The fence looked out of place.

Tall, clearly organic, and machine made, it starkly contrasted the buildings of the village below, much less the stretch of wilds they'd passed to reach the coastline, bouncing and jostling for hours around rocky trails and steep cliffs circumventing the last, petering edges of the Andes Mountains. It took them hours to reach the small village where the boss man's "hacienda" lived...long enough that Chandre had to wonder whether they usually received their supplies via airdrop, or possibly by ship. Given where they were, it probably would have been equally efficient riding horses for the last leg of their trip...or even donkeys. The final ten miles of track could more accurately have been called a dirt trail littered with small and large boulders than it could be considered a real access road.

It was cold, too.

The heavy coat she'd brought probably wouldn't be sufficient, at least not for being outside at night. Hopefully, she wouldn't be required to do that for any extended period of time...like, say, because she was forced to run for her life back across those mountain peaks on her own.

To Chandre, the hacienda looked a lot more like a stone castle than any kind of peaceful ranch house surrounded by quaint villagers. The driveway leading up appeared to be made of hand-hewn stones, maybe a few hundred years old, but obviously refurbished to handle gas-powered and solar vehicles. It looked as smooth as cement, but the different-colored stones lent it an opulent and strangely 'clean' feel, as if one could eat a meal directly from the rock without getting so much as a speck of dirt in their mouth.

She understood now why so few in Ushuaia, the nearest town with a real airport, had ever visited this place. Most wouldn't admit to even having heard of it, although her and the other seers' scans soon revealed otherwise.

They knew of "the patron," of course. They also knew it was better not to speak of him, especially not to strangers with red-tinted eyes.

Chandre understood that fear. She understood even before she saw the high-grade construct over the village and preceding segment of road...and before she felt the several dozen seers who seemed to be watching over it. Those construct guards hadn't even bothered to hide their presence from the Barrier...if anything, they were deliberately overbearing, edging into Chandre's light in a way that felt invasive, if not downright threatening.

The land, being held in private ownership pretty much from the border of Chile up to the break to where Patagonia met with the rest of mainland Argentina, clearly carried the stamp of its seer overlords. That private tract included Ushuaia itself, as well as the northern town of Rio Grande, and basically consisted of the entire southernmost tip of the continent...at least the parts that weren't technically a part of Chile.

Chandre happened to know a good chunk of that land, especially on the coast north of where she now stood, used to be a military holding for human government powers, mainly American and British. That was prior to its being taken over by its current owners, which seemed to have happened about two decades earlier. Chandre found it interesting that the land had changed hands so quietly, making not so much as a ripple in the human news feeds.

This town and the grim facade of its overlords' mansion felt much older than either of the last two landlords' presences, however.

Chandre had been told that it could be warm down here, that it was a bit of a tropical pocket amongst the currents of the nearby bays where the Pacific and the Atlantic met.

So far, however, she hadn't seen a lot of evidence of that, either.

What she still couldn't figure out was what she was doing here...why they had let her inside in the first place. She had to assume it was because they viewed her as some kind of emissary of the Bridge and the Sword. Given how well-connected these people appeared to be...and how well-fortified...she found it extremely unlikely that they wouldn't know who she really worked for, given that Varlan had access to that information himself.

She also found it unlikely that whoever was hosting this little party didn't know that the Bridge and the Sword were working the same side of the fence again, too.

Given what they'd had to go through to even get this far, Chandre mostly just hoped her head on a spike outside the hacienda gates didn't end up being the message these people wanted to send to her bosses.

So far, Varlan's take on the whole thing hadn't exactly been reassuring.

He'd been relatively thorough in his debriefings on the way out to the remote location, as far as Chan could tell. It was hard to know for
certain,
of course, given that he was a good four ranks above her in actual infiltration skill. So if he left out key details...or even planned on betraying her entirely...she likely wouldn't know.

Still, Balidor seemed to trust him. Balidor was probably the only seer alive that Chandre would believe could actually infiltrate a seer of Varlan's capability, at least well enough to discern his motives.

Even Balidor could be fooled, of course.

He also could have gotten over-eager, seeing an opportunity to get close to the beings who were pulling the strings on the Lao Hu, Salinse and whoever else. If enough seers were monitoring this area...and Chandre was beginning to think the number was significantly higher than what she could feel...she was pretty much on her own.

Hell, even her allies here weren't allies in the truest sense. She scarcely knew the three seers with whom she traveled, and had only been working with them for a bare handful of months. They'd been united in their desire to find Maygar and Eddard following the op at the labs under the Hayward substation. Even for that, however, their reasons had been different. Varlan merely wanted to complete the job for which he'd been contracted; which meant destroying
all
of the virus, including the samples they all suspected Eddard had stolen during the op.