Allie's War Season One (109 page)

A kind of dread washed over me as I took in her words.

We’d only just started. That glimpse of childhood brutality had been the prelude to our hunt, not the hunt itself. It was simply her way of introducing me to our quarry.

I could feel from her that it was also a test.

She wanted to know if I could handle this.

Thinking about how that one scene likely fit into the longer timeline of this being she called Death, I honestly didn’t know if I could.

Again, I remembered something Revik said to me.

To find anyone or anything in the Barrier,
he’d said.
You must become what you seek. The Barrier is resonance, Allie. It is what we seers do...we resonate with things. This is all we do.

To find him, I would have to become Syrimne.

13

CLAUSTROPHOBIC

REVIK STOOD ON the rim of a burnt-out crater.

The scorched pockmark ate through two thirds of a fortress-like structure made of black stone. If he hadn’t seen the pirated feeds of the building exploding outward, he might have thought a meteor had hit the mountain. The crater still smoked in discrete sections of the blackened part of the pit.

Trees had been knocked down as far away as a mile from the epicenter.

Leaning over carefully to gaze down the edge, he tracked body parts stuck in poses from where they’d been embedded in rock, earth and powder. Easing back so that his weight stood more securely at the rim, he glanced at Balidor.

The gray-eyed seer frowned without returning Revik’s glance.

They’d only been there an hour, and already, Revik was getting used to the smell. It brought back memories of wartime...especially the ovens.

Wincing, he averted his gaze, tracking the movements of the rest of the infiltration team.

Adhipan members spread out along the rim of the crater. A few had begun to climb down inside to get a better look. Revik recognized a number of faces, both from the flight from India and the training camp outside of Darjeeling. Others had been flown in from China or elsewhere just the day before. Around forty operatives were now casing the site, at least ten of which had arrived at the school before Revik and Balidor.

Revik understood why they were climbing into the hole. Not only would they be collecting physical evidence, but the best and easiest way to collect imprints of the bomber was to get as close to the bomb itself as possible. Whatever fragments may have survived the blast could be anywhere from the blast site itself to a few thousand yards from there, but they would start at the center and work out.

So he understood the logic...but he still wasn’t looking forward to that portion of the exercise.

Given the sheer level of devastation, they might have to do it the human way, at least in part. Meaning they might have to conduct an analysis and search based on the chemical imprint and other physical properties of the blast. Explosions had a habit of obliterating aleimic fingerprints even more thoroughly than the physical kind.

Something else struck him as he looked around.

“This isn’t where it started.” He spoke English, unthinking. He turned to Balidor, switching to Prexci. “...Was there any evidence that this might be a secondary site?”

Balidor gave him an odd look. “Yes.”

“Can you show me?”

Balidor motioned for Revik to follow him, stepping back from the crater’s rim. He led them across the broken field, picking his way through more cracked stones, ripped up earth and body parts, bone fragments and parts of skulls. Most of these last were small enough that Revik didn’t let himself focus on them too closely.

He kept his eyes focused forward instead, on the furthest of the three stone towers that remained standing after the attack.

Balidor pointed to the other two towers, in turn.

“Training cells. A few of the older kids survived in there. Standard protocol seemed to have been to move them inside once they were clearly salable...meaning old enough to pass for human, making progress in their studies, talented enough to effect at least a mid-range sale. It protected then from being stolen by local bandits. It’s also where they brought high-end customers...the ones with enough connections to skip the auctions and buy wholesale.”

Revik nodded, gesturing that he was familiar with such things.

Balidor pointed to the other tower. “Quarters, for the staff.”

Revik continued to focus on the third tower, the one for which Balidor’s feet aimed in a nearly straight line. It looked dead compared to the other two. The windows had no glass, and Revik could see no light inside, no sense that it had been updated since whatever warlord had built it several hundred years earlier. The heavy wood and iron door looked almost like it could be original to the structure. It came with a lock, now broken, that looked like something from a lower-level exhibit in the Tower of London.

Revik found his steps slowing as they got nearer to the entrance.

Balidor noticed, and slowed to pace him.

“Yes,” he said grimly. “...You feel it too.”

He gestured at the broken door.

“We thought this area had been abandoned at first. An old disciplinary center. Possibly even a torture chamber, left over from some particularly despotic human monarch. The imprints there are intense...but almost impossible to nail down. At first we thought perhaps whoever did this put up some kind of field...to obscure themselves, obliterate evidence and so forth. But the construct we found woven there was older...close to a hundred years.”

Balidor paused, gesturing towards the gaping maw of a door.

“Two of my people went inside,” he said. “They said it’s worse in there. The imprints are older still. As is the construct...or what remains of it. They were able to determine this was the primary blast site, as you said...but not much else.”

He glanced at Revik, and a flicker of surprise touched his eyes.

He caught the younger man’s arm, staring into his face.

“Are you all right?”

Revik shook his head slightly. “I want to go inside.”

“Are you sure, brother? You’re white as a ghost...”

“I’ll be all right.” Revik extricated his arm, and once more began picking his way across the courtyard, until he was nearly at the tower’s door.

“Be careful,” Balidor called after him. “There’s not much warning before the drop.”

Glancing back, Revik saw that the Adhipan leader had remained where he was. Raising a hand in acknowledgment, he hesitated only a second longer, then grabbed one of the torches burning outside the broken doorway.

Taking a breath and instinctively shielding his light, he walked inside to the stone foyer.

Stepping carefully across the broken flagstones, he started down the only available route, a staircase cut directly into the fire-blackened rock. Holding the torch out in front of him, he descended one step at a time, fighting the gradual closing around his chest and throat.

He’d always been a little claustrophobic.

The pitch black of the corridor combined with the imprints still emanating off the walls, making it difficult to breathe. He tried to get a lock on the imprints, to understand their source...but all he got was more of the feeling. A throbbing, sick pain, it resembled the worst kind of separation sickness...so warped and broken by deprivation that it had turned into something else entirely.

He might not even have recognized it, if he hadn’t been buried in separation himself for over a year. It combined with his own problems, twisting his need into something that made him want to die—literally.

He found himself reaching for Allie...

He stopped it.

Taking another breath, he forced his light close to his body.

The pain worsened. Out of nowhere, anger suffused his light, intense enough to blank his mind. Feelings rose, and thoughts. Things he’d been suppressing for days...ever since that morning he’d returned from Cairo.

He should have told her. Hell, he should have taken her with him right then, found a place in town, torn her goddamned clothes off...

He fought that out of his light as well.

Why hadn’t anyone explained the marriage rites to her? Chandre? Yerin? Vash? He’d been gone for months...and not exactly in a position to explain anything to her in the period before he left. He’d nearly blown everything, just because he’d assumed she understood the basics of their condition.

Gods, even before she’d asked him, her light pulling on him was enough to change his mind about waiting. She’d probably been pulling on every seer in a five-mile radius...likely for months, the whole time he’d been gone. Before that, when he’d been with Terian.

They’d been watching her masturbate.

Pain turned liquid in his light, ratcheting the intensity of emotion.

She’d agreed to engage in a full contact sport with a rival seer who wanted to bed her...if he wasn’t bedding her already.

Why? Why would she do that, unless she wanted to hurt him?

Had she lied to him? Was she still angry with him for what he’d done?

The pain cut his breath, a helplessness he briefly couldn’t control. The son of a bitch had touched her. He’d touched her in places Revik hadn’t touched her...places he’d restrained himself from touching her for over a year. He’d gotten into her light. He’d had his goddamned fingers in her. He’d also scared the hell out of her. Revik had felt it in those other seers, her terror...he’d seen it in her eyes.

Her face had been bloody.

She’d been screaming.

Gripping the rough stone, he forced his mind to shut down. It was something he would normally only do if he were being attacked.

He forced himself to breathe...

...until, slowly, slowly, the feelings unwound.

He remembered where he was; he could feel the tower as something outside himself again. It still reeked of suicide, slow madness, the kind of prolonged powerlessness that he’d never coped with well...but he could distinguish those feelings from his own light.

He made himself walk, to move one foot, then the next.

He was still struggling with his light when he reached the third corridor landing, after two flights of steep stairs winding through those fire and moss-blackened walls. Turning the corner carefully at the bottom of the second staircase, he walked through an arch and then the length of the flagstone corridor.

He rounded another turn, expecting another set of stairs.

Instead, a sheer drop greeted him.

There’d been no warning, not even a change in the quality of light. Whatever occurred there had happened far enough below ground that the aboveground structure remained intact.

A deep blackness stretched beneath Revik’s feet. He felt space in front of him for at least ten to fifteen yards.

Waving the torch over the chasm, he tried to get a sense of the depth and width of the space. He was unwilling to relinquish his torch to satisfy his curiosity...especially since Balidor’s men likely already mapped out the basic physical disposition of the scene. He turned the torch to the walls on either side of the hole, and saw burn marks flaring around the mouth.

He began walking back up the corridor, sweeping with the torch, scanning the floors and walls. He saw shoe marks scuffling the dirty floor, and what looked like bare feet...too small to be anything but a child.