Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (32 page)

Revik found himself in a high-ceilinged apartment, sitting on a couch that looked like it might be made of real tiger skin. It smelled like real skin, which frankly made Revik uncertain if he should even sit on it. Of all of the decadent things he’d encountered in his life, either under Menlim or during his time working for various human governments, he’d never seen anything like that before.

In the end, he opted to move, sitting on one of the leather chairs instead.

Weaving his fingers together between his knees, he fought to calm himself.

He could feel the construct messing with his light, which didn’t help.

They still kept a slight distance, however.

Probably to keep him from freaking out, at least until he’d been interviewed by a few more layers of security and they had more idea of what his light might be connected to outside of this construct. No way in hell would anyone here trust that he came back due to some change of heart. He’d never intended to try and tell them that, either.

He’d never intended to try and tell them anything other than the truth.

He’d already spent several hours at the dock’s main security station while they ran him through about ten different forms of physical and aleimic IDs. They’d taken blood samples, recorded multiple and increasingly invasive imprints of his light, forced him to strip naked and documented every inch of his body, including close ups of his scars, tattoos and genitalia. He’d been x-rayed, scanned, fingerprinted, they’d recorded his gait at different speeds…

By the end of it, Revik had been nervous, yeah.

He didn’t think he’d ever been so thoroughly tagged and catalogued in his life.

When they finally finished, one of the guards brought him up here.

The seers manning the main wall had been nothing like the dock rats Revik met when he landed. Wearing crisp white uniforms with the Hong Kong Homeland security badge on every shoulder, they’d been polite, professional to the point of mechanical and unerringly precise with their commands.

Even so, Revik felt the denser coils of silver light strangling their aleimi. At times it had been intense enough to set the hair on his arms and the back of his neck on end.

He’d forced himself to submit to all of their ministrations, though.

He reminded himself that none of this mattered anymore.

There would be no more hiding.

A tone sounded from the apartment door.

Revik looked over, his heart instantly beating louder in his chest. It occurred to him only then that he’d never bothered to try the handle of the door. He had no idea if it was even locked, whether from the inside or the outside. As a result, he didn’t know if the tone was a courtesy or a real request for entry.

Even as he thought it, the tone sounded again.

Revik hesitated only a second longer.

Then he rose slowly to his feet.

At the third door tone, he felt a corresponding ripple of impatience from the Barrier from at least one being on the other side of that door. He began walking jerkily towards it, his hands and shoulders clenched, his weight lowered. It hit him that he was moving like he expected to get into a physical fight with whoever stood on the other side.

It also hit him that he was afraid. Maybe more than just afraid.

He shoved that thought from his light, too.

When he reached the small foyer and the door itself, he placed his hand on a panel that stood about chest-height on the right wall. Glancing at the panel itself, he realized he likely could have triggered the mechanism from the leather chair, using a voice command.

Too late now.

The door was already opening.

Revik just stood there, feeling his body tense more as the sliding panel opened. As it did, it revealed a group of seven seers.

In the middle stood Menlim.

Briefly, the sight of him sent Revik into a kind of paralysis, and not only because he in no way expected to see him in actual person so soon.
 

He stared up at his ex-guardian, seeing the yellow eyes focused on his face, a strange confluence of impressions gliding off his highly-structured light. Fighting the young feeling that crept silently and insidiously over his light, Revik jerked his gaze sideways. He next found himself meeting the gaze of Ute, one of his commanders under the Rebels. Seeing her stare at him, a heightened and much more believable confusion of emotions visible in her eyes, he swallowed.

He couldn’t hold her gaze for long, either.

He glanced around at the rest of the seers standing there and found he knew all of them.

Salinse. Rigor. Tan. Eren. Kidi.

He’d been close to several of them at different times…as close as anyone could be inside any construct of the Dreng. Some, like Kidi and Eren, he’d known under Galaith while he’d been with the Rooks. The rest he’d known in one or both rebellions.

Something about seeing all of them there, even with Menlim standing among them, brought up an irrational wave of emotion in him. Revik stared at Tan and Eren the longest, realizing he hadn’t let himself think about their fates after they’d decided not to follow him out of the Salinse’s army.

They’d thought him brainwashed by the Adhipan.

Ute called his wife a psychotic bitch. She accused Revik of being hypnotized by her.

She’d also been crying as she left.

Clearing his throat, Revik took a step backwards, then another.

Swallowing, he tore his gaze from Eren’s face, making a polite gesture with one hand to invite them in even as he focused on details of the room rather than any one of them. Still avoiding looking at individual faces, he stepped the rest of the way out of the foyer as they began to file into the room after him.

None of them sat until he did.

Eren and Kidi planted themselves by the far wall, their hands visibly resting on the butts of their side arms. They gripped the guns without any particular menace in their postures or faces, but the message couldn’t have been more clear.

Returning to his place on the leather chair, Revik gestured vaguely with his fingers, watching the other four seers and Menlim sink to the tiger-skin couch.

He waited until they all sat more or less across from him.

“Anything to drink, brothers and sisters?” Revik said then, aiming his fingers at the bar that stood on one end of the living room.

He watched Eren and Kidi both follow the direction of his eyes with theirs, and frown. He felt more than saw them quirk their mouths at him.

Revik decided not to react to that, either.

And yes, it might be strange for him to be playing host in here, given it was more or less a holding cell, but didn’t let himself care about that, either. When he looked back at the seers on the couch, he found them all staring at him blankly.

They looked at him as if he’d just offered to strip for them.

Making a polite noise and gesture of refusal, Menlim answered for the rest of them.

“No, brother Syrimne,” he said, his voice holding the barest bite of cold. “We are all quite comfortable, thank you.”

None of the other seers spoke, or even looked away from Revik.

They seemed to be looking at his light as much as his face and body.

Revik did a quick scan of faces, his hands clenching where his fingers wove together between his knees. He cleared his throat, looking at the carpet for a beat before he looked back at Menlim. Again, he noticed that creeping sensation of youth, of a child about to be punished for doing wrong. He fought it, knowing the construct might be playing that feeling up in his light.

Eventually he had to let it go.

The silence had stretched too long already.

“You knew I was coming?” he said, directing the question at Menlim.

“Yes,” the old seer said. He quirked an eyebrow, looking Revik over unsmilingly. “I was informed yesterday morning.”

So basically not long after Allie would have found the note.

Revik nodded, still looking down at his hands. He didn’t bother to state the obvious around Menlim’s timely information.

“Then you know why I’m here, too,” he said.

At that, Menlim clicked in a low voice.

The sound held as much disbelief as acknowledgment.

Glancing sideways at Ute, then at Tan and Rigor, he let a thin smile touch his colorless lips. Revik saw no humor in the expression, or any emotion at all, really. But then, he found himself looking at Menlim in a way he never had before. Maybe it was Allie’s influence…or maybe he was less a prisoner of his childhood these days in general, despite the creeping emotional doubts stirred by those older resonances.

He wondered how much New York and San Francisco might have played a part in forging that difference, in addition to his wife’s light.

Either way, he found himself studying the skull-like face almost clinically.

All of it was familiar…the nearly translucent skin stretched taut over high cheekbones and the bones around the orbits of his eyes. The pale yellow irises. The iron gray hair and goatee. The long fingers and hands…his nearly-emaciated shape.

Even his clothes. The gray dress shirt might not be familiar per se, but it looked similar enough to things the aged seer had worn in the past that it fit with Revik’s memories perfectly.

Even so, despite all of that familiarity, he might have been a different being entirely.

He wondered how he ever could have seen the Sark as alive. It seemed so obvious now, what it really was. What it had always been.

“Do I know your reasons for being here?” Menlim said, his voice as cold as ice. “No, brother, I do not. I know the reason you gave your wife in the note you left. I know the reason you pretended to give her, at least…whether her understanding might be different due to conversations the two of you may have had alone.”

Revik didn’t bother to ask what he meant.

“My true reason isn’t much different,” he said, gesturing dismissively. His voice remained level. “I am here to bargain for the lives of my family. To offer myself in trade.”

Menlim was already shaking his head, though.

“Nephew, nephew, nephew…” He clicked at him, the sound holding a faint regret. “…You disappoint me. You must truly think little of me to believe I would fall for a ruse of this kind. I almost feel pity for you, if this is the best you and your wife can manage in response to what you learned in Dubai…”

Revik didn’t bother to react that time, either.

He also didn’t bother to deny the implication of the words. There would have been absolutely no point. He knew that the second he entered this construct, any pretense to privacy in his own mind would be gone. That was assuming it hadn’t been gone already.

At Revik’s last thought, Salinse let out a low grunt, almost a laugh.

Revik glanced at him.

Giving the aged seer an openly dismissive look, he aimed his gaze back at Menlim.

“Whatever I think of you is irrelevant,” Revik said.

His voice came out blunt, surprisingly calm to his own ears.

“I did not say I offered myself without stipulation,” he continued. “Nor did I say I would ever be loyal to you or yours in any way, ever again. I of course assume you would want safeguards of various kinds to ensure I cannot harm you…assuming we can agree on terms at all.”

Taking a breath, he shrugged with one hand, inclining his head.

“…I assume also that you would never allow me anywhere near any sensitive information,” he added. “I came to negotiate a trade that I could live with. One that might buy my family their lives. Nothing more. If you want to believe some elaborate ruse lives behind this, that is your prerogative. I won’t discourage the idea…but it might waste a significant amount of time. Particularly given your awareness of the limitations of my own light in regard to yours.”

Menlim’s eyes narrowed.

Some of that humor-that-wasn’t-humor faded from his eyes, as did the put on regret, or pity, or whatever the other had been. The seer in the gray dress shirt frowned, leaning back into the cushions of the tiger-skin couch. His back remained perfectly straight as he wove his own hands together in his lap, halfway mirroring Revik’s pose.