Allie's War Season One (81 page)

Yay, me.

I walked to the wooden crate. It lay on a bed with broken springs that sagged nearly to the floor. The whole room smelled of mold and cat piss and rotted wood.

“Wait!”

I turned. Chandre was staring at me with her dark red eyes.

“Don’t touch it, Bridge...
d’ gaos!
You’re like a child wandering in a wild animal park covered in blood...”

I backed away from the box, even as Cass laughed at Chandre’s visual.

“I scanned it,” I said, feeling a little put out. “No bombs, Chandre. No Barrier traps. I was just going to look inside...”

“Well...don’t. You may not value your life, but I value mine. Your husband would kill me...literally...if he knew we’d even let you in here.”

“No,” I said, warning her. “Don’t bring up Revik again...”

“Does he even know you are here?” she said, giving me a narrow look.

“No.” I glanced at Cass, then more pointedly at Maygar. “...And I see absolutely no reason why he needs to find out.”

Smiling, Maygar slung his gun over his shoulder, walking back towards the main room. He blew me a kiss with his thick fingers. “You can lie to your husband all you want, Bridge,” he said, winking. “...I don’t mind.”

I watched him go, biting my tongue.

“Well, then.” Chandre said, causing me to turn. “...As Dehgoies is the only person you let order you around, someone else should get the honor, in his absence. I figure, why not me?”

Cass laughed again from the doorway, giving me an apologetic grin when I swiveled my gaze to hers. Reaching into her vest, Chandre pulled out a small, olive green device, about the size and shape of a fist-sized rock. She laid it on the crate, where it promptly began to vibrate. Tendrils erupted from the smooth surface, making me flinch.

I still hadn’t gotten used to the types and prevalence of organic machines. According to the World Court, they were supposed to be illegal, but the seers relied on them heavily, especially for military-type ops.

Fascinated and repulsed, I watched the legs softly probe the sides of the wooden box before sliding down the slats of the crate and into the papers stacked and crammed inside.

“I don’t let him order me around,” I muttered.

“Well, you pretend to listen to him at least.”

Chandre gave Cass a wink when the human laughed again. Touching her earpiece to read some kind of signal off the organic, she straightened, training her gaze narrowly on the stone-like object on the crate. The three of us watched its pale tentacles slide through layers of paper.

“Can it disarm anything that might be in there?” I said.

“Let’s hope so, Bridge,” Chandre said. “I don’t want to be picking bits of you out of my hair, with your human-like reflexes...”

I rolled my eyes, refolding my arms tighter. Insulting my seer prowess by calling me human didn’t seem weird to her, apparently, even with Cass—who actually
was
human—standing right next to her.

The psuedo-organism let out a pale tone, just before the serpentine legs retracted into a fist-sized body, leaving it smooth, lifeless-seeming.

“It’s clean,” Chandre announced.

“Grab it,” I said to Maygar, who appeared in the doorway, watching over my shoulder. “Put it with the others. And check the walls with the sonar...there could be more.”

I watched Cass follow as the seers dispersed around me, doing as I asked.

No one argued anymore when I told them to do things. Even Maygar and Chandre obeyed direct orders if I pressed the point, although they might give me a hard time as they did it. I wasn’t sure if that fact unnerved me more than eased my mind.

I was “the Bridge,” after all. I had to get used to a lot of things...and not only the fact that more than half of those in both the human and seer races believed me to be a reincarnated mythological being whose presence on earth heralded the end the world. But I didn’t like thinking about that much, either.

I had a new name. There’d been this whole ceremony.

I had to wear a blue robe. Afterwards, I was “Dehgoies Alyani,” at least on paper. The name made me nervous. Seers put family names first, like in a lot of Asian countries. It made sense to take Revik’s, I guess...at least temporarily...but I felt pretty strange about it, given the last and only time Revik and I had actually talked specifically about our marriage, he’d asked me for a divorce. Since it wasn’t really a seer tradition for females to take on the names of their husbands, I tried to just let it go. But it wasn’t easy.

The Alyani was less of a big deal. I’d asked Vash for a seer name I could still shorten to Allie. Alyani was as good as anything.

I couldn’t remain Alyson May Taylor...for a lot of reasons. Not the least of which being that Allie Taylor was wanted for alleged terrorist acts in like 20 countries. But I wondered if we were really fooling anyone, with Terian alive.

I still didn’t have a clan tattoo. Apparently that had more serious ramifications, in terms of familial duties and all that, so Vash gave me permission to wait. Regardless of what Revik thought about our ‘marriage’ these days, I got the impression he didn’t like his adoptive family much. I didn’t want to use them as a fallback for something I couldn’t reverse...not without talking to him first. All of the clans had petitioned for my inclusion in their lineage, now that my position had been legitimized by the Seven, so I had options.

Which also meant, no matter what I did, someone would be pissed off, basically. When I told Vash that, he smiled and said, “Welcome to leadership.”

He wasn’t wrong. Still, he didn’t have to be so blatantly happy about the fact that it was no longer him in the hot seat.

The truth was, I don’t know why they bothered with the whole fake identity thing in the first place. Everyone but Cass and Jon called me “Bridge.” I had to deal with human and seer religious types coming to Seertown to pay homage, some from as far away as the United States. They had this big festival just three weeks earlier where I’d blessed babies. I was pretty sure at least a few people filmed it, even though any kind of imaging device was technically illegal within the compound walls.

My face still showed up in the news here and there...my real face, not an avatar...which was extremely rare for anyone still alive. It also meant I was still officially classified as a terrorist and enemy of the World Court.

So I don’t know who they thought they were fooling.

In any case, the last thing I needed was more people giving me shit about Revik.

June 12th, 1944

Journals of Roderick Biermann (aka Galaith), later known as US President Daniel Caine

Berlin, Germany

...I THINK WE may finally have enough force to exert an influence for good. Young Dehgoies is a blessing. Already, I find myself wanting to give him more responsibility, to see how far that talent for strategy might stretch.

He will be my architect of this new world. Across this racial divide, he feels like a true collaborator. A visionary.

I so wish to trust him. With all of my being, I wish to trust that he will help me with this, my greatest burden. The boy is the key to peace. Not peace in the short term. Ending these wars is just the start, a prerequisite for all that must follow. Nor do I mean the kind of peace that implies capitulation among those who should never be forced to lie down or beg.

I mean real peace...the kind that lasts.

As for Feigran, he has a role to play as well. His ambition is limitless it seems, but it is more than that. There is something in his soul, some key to the next step...the ultimate outcome of the Displacement...that I still cannot fathom.

They still have no idea of who they really are.

A STREAK OF fire illuminates the darkened space of the Barrier.

I see the cloudy, sheep-like lights of humans blown back. Some separate from their bodies, ejected at once into the Barrier’s dark sky. Attached still to my own body, I watch them. At first, when only a few died out here, I tried to help them. Now, there are too many.

I still try to reassure those who pass near me in the Barrier’s waves. From the light body I wear in the Barrier, I tell them simple things. No, you cannot return to your body. You cannot force your way back into broken flesh. Yes, the vessel really is broken. See it? That’s it, there. That was your body. Yeah, I know it looks bad. No, I’m not God, or an angel. No, I don’t know how to contact your wife...

Getting them to listen is difficult. Most run from me. Their fear causes them to resonate with other lights, to disappear, ‘poof,’ into some other, more confused Barrier place. They are unused to the Barrier’s dark clouds and shifting appearance. They don’t know how it works from the inside...or that, in principle at least, they can travel as I do here, if only they would just relax.

But they can’t relax. I might as well admonish a baby not to cry.

Some, a very few, do listen. Some even listen long enough to copy what I show them. Some learn by accident. Other seers try to help, but it is a discouraging process. There are too many of them. And for humans, all of this is too new.

Trying to help in outside, before they are dead, is even more futile. I’ve learned that quickly in the last few weeks, even with Jon and Cass. There are simply no words for some of what is everyday for me now. Even if the idea is interesting to them, I can feel the chasm between their imagination and reality. Like all beings, humans explain life and death in terms of what they know now. The problem is, they don’t know anything.

The Barrier, for the same reason, is officially pronounced mythology by the World Court. They describe our powers as a child does, refusing our explanations because they prefer their own. When their own do not match reality, they grow angry with us, or relegate the phenomenon to the scientific equivalent of ‘magic.’ They look for a better story...a better story being one that appears to explain what was previously unexplained, only without challenging their original assumptions.

This war, for example.

To a human, it involves fighting over land and trade rights, the potential for accumulating more little pieces of paper that mean more people will want to have sex with them and total strangers will find them impressive.

To someone like me, however, and all the seers with whom I work, the war and all the reasons leading up to it are simply the invention of a mad seer’s mind...a mad seer who hates humans and would like them all to disappear. A mad seer I put in power, in a country capable of making war on all the rest simply by shouting emotion-laden slogans.

The other seers tell me it’s not my fault. No part of me believes that, though. My heart hurts, but not enough. I am numb, unable to feel as much as I should.