Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (81 page)

Then he realized what it was.

It wasn’t a construct.

It was the room itself.

The room pulsed with life. Not guard-dog life, like what he’d felt in that sentient elevator…something else.

The longer he tried to discern the nature of what he felt, the less adequate the term “life” felt to describe it. Life didn’t really encompass what he felt. Awareness lived here. More than awareness…more than sentience even…

Revik couldn’t find the words in his mind for what he felt inside that space.

Something…something really fucking different lived here.

Pain filled him, more fear as he thought of Allie…of how he might have just fucked things permanently for both of him. Whatever this thing was, it was really fucking dangerous. Lethal dangerous, but more than that…more than just his body’s death.

This thing felt like the end of the world.

A real end, maybe for the seers as well as the humans. He couldn’t explain why he thought so, or even any kind of images of the exact scenario he had in mind. He just knew what he felt. Which was that this thing might just have the ability to end things for Earth…for this entire fucking life wave.

Even as he thought it, it felt like the truth.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t live yet. It wasn’t operational or online, but it would be. Once this thing went active for real, the Dreng might not need any of them anymore. At least, not in any kind of living, sentient state.

This thing might negate everything…render humanity and seers obsolete.

He sucked in a breath.

The thing was fucking scanning him.

Even that was too simple a word for what it did.

He felt the touches like skin on skin, like it caressed the unclothed parts of him as it circled his light and body in that open space. Light and air shimmered; he caught flickers of images, like it was presenting different aspects or projections to him to see how he might react.

Fingers, hands, eyes, a tail coiled around his leg…a cock rubbing against his ass, making him flinch violently.

He lurched forward, unable to help himself.

The feeling of being touched there withdrew with the rest.

Revik felt his bowels tighten. He looked around, glimpsed more of those flickers and shapes even as that sickness coiled deeper in his gut.

It writhed closer…suffocatingly close.

It circled Revik’s light a second time. Pulling on him again, this time on his actual light instead of his body. He felt the separation pain highlighted, images of Lily flickered behind his eyes…Allie…Maygar…his mother.

Allie with that other guy…Allie opening her light. Allie feeling pain for him, for whoever that motherfucker was…pushing Revik out…

His pain grew excruciating.

Making another pass, it enveloped all of him that time.

Not bothering with flickers, it invaded his light totally, absorbing him inside a physical-feeling wave of presence and energy. The sensation made Revik freeze, losing his breath again. The fear grew indescribable, more than he could think past…worse than any case of claustrophobia or trauma he could remember in his light. It raised the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck, the reaction intense enough that he stopped breathing. He knew he might have voided his bladder if it hadn’t been clenching him up there, too.

He couldn’t move.

Or maybe he just knew not to move.

Maybe he knew if he moved, this thing might decide to snap his fucking spine.

Presence. Life and mind and presence. Intent. Knowing.

None of those words encompassed the myriad of meanings for which Revik’s light continued to search. He felt so much coming off the thing and through it, he couldn’t capture most of that with any part of his mind or light.

He caught snippets instead…impressions.

The thing’s curiosity, its annoyance with what Revik had done to its pet AI left guarding that outside wall…layers of emotionless indifference…calculation, assessment…what might have been contempt, or perhaps simply dismissal of him, now that it could see him for what he was. Revik felt it assessing something around his being here at all, some connection to outside events, some wave of intricate threads and timelines that he couldn’t glimpse.

Those weren’t simply about the City or the Dreng or his wife or the world.

They expanded outward, encompassing a timeline so intricate Revik couldn’t make sense of it even in the highest parts of his light. Threads weaving in and out and into one another, clicking across tracks. The thing manipulated levers, strands, nodes, pieces, moving them in concert or one by one simply to see the effect on the rest.

Revik only felt most of that as a bare whisper in the highest parts of his light. Those same parts of his light could see more than just about any seer on Earth––more than Balidor or Tarsi or even Vash––more than anyone apart from his wife.

All it told him now was that he was outclassed by whatever this was.

It was too different. It had too many moving parts, too many structured pieces…too many different ways of thinking and analyzing and understanding. Revik saw no way of even accessing most of it, no matter what he did with his light. So much structure and awareness lived there. More than he could think around. More than he could categorize or name.

His mind swam through those morphing and reformulating pieces of light, fighting to understand, without any ability to even catalogue most of what he saw. He couldn’t comprehend it; he could feel that much. No amount of looking would yield true understanding. It felt like being lost inside a dense sea of writhing lightning.

His vision phased, filled with complex structures like breathing mathematical equations…

Silver snakes. Cold fire.

He felt that animal panic worsen.

He felt it sum him up in a myriad of ways, like a human dissecting a frog on a metal table. He knew the thing might kill him simply because it found him uninteresting.

The metal snakes writhed, deciding. Deciding what to do with him.

Deciding his fate.

He knew the flavor here. He knew it…

He let out a gasp…

Then everything went dark for real.

26

NEPHEW

He opened his eyes, gasping at the shock of light and sound.

He wasn’t where he expected he would be. His mind coiled around him in impotent circles, fighting the pain that wanted to rise, feeling it creep up on him as his light returned to his body, pounding already at the back of his head, his neck, his kidneys.

He felt like he’d just had the shit kicked out of him.

Not just his body…his light, too.

He wasn’t in the right place.

The thought repeated, even as he fought to clear his eyes.

When he could finally see, he found himself kneeling on a lawn, his hands and arms bound behind his back. A collar circled his neck. He could feel it was attached to something straight and metal, something held by the guard standing at his back; they’d also locked the collar and his wrists and arms to his cuffed ankles.

The fact of the collar sank in slowly, but hit hard once it had.

He also realized that he’d been struggling to see with his light, that his eyes were fine, it was his light. His light was…

Well, it didn’t hurt. He didn’t feel anything really.

His light was just gone.

The collar didn’t even hurt.

It just killed…fuck, it killed
everything.

Everything. Like all of his aleimi had been stripped from his body.

He’d never felt anything like it before. Like that presence in the organic room, the alienness alone scared him. The fact that he couldn’t see at all scared him.

He gasped, fighting against it, trying to find those higher structures in his light…but those were gone too. All of it was gone. He felt like he’d been more than just blinded.

It was like they’d stripped every ounce of feeling from him, cutting him off from the world. More than that…they’d cut him off from most of himself. Fear rippled his mind as it occurred to him what that might mean.

Gods.

What it might be doing to his wife and daughter…

“No…” he gasped. “No, gods…you can’t. Take it off me…take it off me! You’ll kill them…you’ll fucking kill them…please…”

He stared up, fighting to focus his eyes.

“Please…” he gasped. “Please…you have to take it off me…please…”

Menlim stood there.

His outline came into focus all at once.

Urine-tinted eyes stared down at Revik’s face. Motionless at first, his eyes remained unblinking as he surveyed Revik with that same clinical nothingness Revik felt from that sentient room. Then Menlim frowned, and those eyes seemed to darken.

“You really do think me a fool,” he said.

He stared down, his gaze still unwavering. After what felt like a much longer beat of time, his mouth firmed on that skull-like face.

Clicking softly, he spoke so low Revik had to strain to hear him.

“You really thought you and your wife could fool me with this ridiculous charade of yours?” he said, his voice laced with contempt. “You believed…what? That I would not
know
that I was being infiltrated, nephew?”

Revik felt his heart clench, pain hitting at him somewhere far away.

He opened his mouth to speak, but the seer talked over him.

“…Did you think pretending to be a drunk degenerate would actually fool me…
nephew?
When I was the one who designed that very same role for you…years ago, now?” For the first time, a harder cold colored his words. “I
trained
you…you arrogant, ungrateful
coward.
I
taught you to feed egos, to disarm…to manipulate.
I
taught you to let others underestimate you…to play the fool.
I
taught you to play multiple cons, one on top of the other…”

Revik felt his chest clench more, until he couldn’t breathe at all.

Straightening somewhat, the Rook let out a humorless grunt.

“I am now beginning to think you took that persona a bit too much to heart in your youth, nephew…” he muttered. “Perhaps you are far more of a fool than even I suspected.”

That pain in Revik’s head worsened. Some part of him fought to think, then to fight back. That same part of him worked to scroll his thoughts ahead, to try and salvage this, to use his light, talk his way out of what––

“Don’t waste your breath…nephew,” Menlim said. His eyes shimmered like mirrors, strangely bright in the outdoor spotlights covering their corner of the lawn. “I know exactly what you and that whore wife of yours have been up to. I knew before you arrived on that dock in Hong Kong…I knew before you left Bangkok. So do me the courtesy of
not
treating me like the idiot you obviously think I am…”

Revik felt his jaw harden more, hurting him.

But the fear overpowered any anger he might have felt.

Allie. He had to warn Allie.

She’d been coming here.