Allie's War Season Three (127 page)

Despite the bad weather, and the reminder about Vash and Dorje’s deaths, Balidor found himself smiling a little as he thought over Chandre’s question, especially coupled with the near-interrogation he’d gotten from Jon about Wreg’s past.

Chuckling, he gave Chandre a friendly slap on the shoulder as she continued to stare backwards at the section of warehouse where Jon had stood, seconds before.

There is a lot we must catch you up on, my dear sister,
he told her softly.
So much, in fact, that I might only get myself in trouble if I were to attempt to do it alone...

Chandre’s frown deepened, but that time, she only nodded.

Still smiling, Balidor glanced behind himself as well, wondering vaguely where Jon had wandered off to, even as he followed the other two out to the docks.

THE SUN MUST have already been above the horizon to our right as we made our way down to the main docks. I say ‘must have’ because there was no way to see it in the black clouds that swirled over the tarmac by the time we left the storage warehouses from our pillaging.

The only way I could tell that the sun had come up at all was that I could see the tarmac now, along with the water just past the cement lines of the pier.

I saw the rows of vehicles without artificial light, too, and even a few ships where they bobbed crazily in their moorings, slamming into the docks and one another with just about every series of waves. White-tipped swells crashed and buffeted the invisible containment fields as we got closer to the water itself, making for a dramatic view, if a somewhat alarming one, when it occurred to me what would happen if any one of those fields failed. So far they seemed to be holding, even restraining the ocean in the nothingness above the land itself, where the lines of water didn’t really recede all that much with each passing wave.

But yeah, I couldn’t see any part of the actual sun.

Despite our location, I also couldn’t glimpse so much as a single skyscraper in Manhattan itself. Really, it didn’t get ‘light out’ at all, in the conventional sense. I could see, yeah, but only while I wasn’t being blinded by wind or rain or both.

My face felt raw from rain, actually...and a wind that still smelled like smoke, in spite of the briny smell and wetness that should have overpowered it.

Revik had gotten an earful from Balidor when he called in to confirm the rendezvous, but despite that...and the typhoon that now raged around us...the three of us remained in relatively high spirits. We'd commandeered a jeep-like vehicle with a long storage bed for carrying all of our booty. Revik cranked that thing up to around sixty miles per hour on the straightaways, so we weren't all that long in making the distance across the length of the monstrous-seeming forward operating base, or ‘F.O.B.’ as Wreg and Revik kept calling it.

We were soaking wet by the time we arrived, though, and shivering like dunked dogs, even though we’d been crouched behind the windshield to avoid the worst of the slanted sheets of rain. The flat-bed’s jeep had only that low windshield and no roof at all, though, so was basically useless against the elements.

We were also late, so, there was that.

Revik initially told Balidor that we'd be back before dawn, so I could understand why he might be annoyed. I knew Jon would be more than annoyed.

He’d probably be
furious
. Especially with me.

He'd expect me to be the rational and responsible one of the three of us, and fair enough, I guess. I owed him about ten times over in that area, and both of us knew it. Complicating that, he’d view it as a betrayal of sorts that we’d left him behind in the first place. He could be awfully touchy about the human versus seer thing, and still saw himself very much as ‘human.’ Which was funny, really, since I’m pretty sure he was the only one who did.

So yeah, I knew I’d be in trouble with Jon, even before.

After Wreg got shot, I knew I was totally screwed.

It didn't help that Wreg and Revik kept looking at one another and saying, "It's just a flesh wound!" in falsetto British accents as they laughed like idiots.

I still couldn’t quite believe it even happened, truthfully.

Revik, of all people, had been acting as our lookout.

Despite that, he’d...one...somehow
not felt
the approaching military patrol of seers in the first place and...two...allowed them to get close enough to fire the first shot once they must have ID’d us as not belonging there, either as soldiers or private contractors. Granted, they appeared to have decent sight rankings, all three of them, and even Wreg conceded that some kind of unusual shield protected their light. Nevertheless, he didn’t let up the whole way back in giving Revik crap for being a ‘horny, easily-distracted youngster.’

And yeah, it was weird.

Weird enough that it made me worry a bit. About Revik, that is.

Revik himself pretended to blow it off, but that could easily have been for my benefit. He groused at Wreg instead, accusing him of making too much noise and spending too long in the warehouse picking through experimental tech when he knew they’d be able to ID tag our aleimi as not belonging now that we were operating outside the mobile constructs they’d been using around the Humvees.

I wasn’t buying it, myself.

The damage to his aleimi must have been worse than I’d been admitting to myself...or maybe worse than Balidor, Yumi or Poresh admitted to me. Either way, he shouldn’t have missed three seers to the extent that they walked right up on us like that, and even got off a shot.

Luckily, his proficiency with a gun didn’t seem to be hampered at all.

He got two of the three seers the old fashioned way, meaning by shooting them in the legs and shoulders as soon as he turned. The third he fought hand to hand, and had him out in about five minutes, although it felt a lot longer than that while I watched him.

Meanwhile, Wreg's shirt was soaked with blood from the bullet that Revik dug out of his arm with a knife and "probably ruined his favorite tattoo," as Wreg grumbled to me at least three times. After I finished knocking the remaining two seers out with my aleimi, Revik did his best to clean Wreg up, then showed me how to fashion a makeshift tourniquet on his upper arm. Minutes later, we were back to doing crime, only now with Wreg moving a lot slower, and three strange seers in military uniforms asleep on the hangar floor.

Revik had me experiment with the whole ‘healing ability’ thing, when Wreg's pain became an issue. Revik and Balidor were both convinced I'd started to develop some kind of special skill in that area, so Revik was eager for me to use it, presumably so that I could both test the ability and begin to hone it for use in the field. Personally, I had my doubts it did much, although Wreg insisted he felt better.

Anyway, I couldn't help seeing the wound through Jon's eyes, which I knew would be a lot less blasé than Wreg’s.

Revik had been pretty pleased with my attempt at the healing thing for some reason.

He gave me a warm kiss before he finished re-bandaging Wreg's arm, ignoring additional ribbings from Wreg about 'public displays of horniness.'

I could tell Revik felt pretty off-balance from not being able to do much with his own light. He did a pretty good job of hiding it, but I still noticed the difference. He was jumpier than usual, for one thing. Even before Wreg got shot, he kept insisting I stand behind him, even though I was in a better position to defend him than the reverse.

Luckily, that same paranoia had him on those seers the instant they fired at Wreg...but, of course, it also made it weirder that he hadn’t seen them coming in the first place. The fact that
I
hadn’t seen past that cloak bothered me, too. Usually I was pretty sensitive about that kind of thing. Meaning people wanting to kill me, Revik, or my friends.

All in all, I felt pretty wound up, and not only from the crime.

I don’t know if it was one of those warning bell things I get sometimes, or if I was feeling something in the F.O.B. construct more generally, but my aleimi felt jagged with extra current by the time we finished loading the last of our new ‘acquisitions.’

Whatever that thing I was picking up on was, it remained faint enough, vague enough and elusive enough for my denial to kick it, so that I found myself pushing it aside, at least until we were back with the others.

It turned out, we needn’t have worried about Jon, at least in the short term.

Someone had already locked Jon up in the quarantine crate down below. Some security measure or other demanded it, I guess, since his blood still technically showed up human. So Revik, Jorag, Neela and I finished unloading crates from the jeep’s cargo bed by the crane next to the larger of the two hatches, while Wreg got escorted off by a few other ex-rebels to visit the infirmary down below.

Everyone had been waiting for us, so they'd already lowered both quarantine cells into the hold. Really, that ended up being a a good thing for us, too, in that we were able to determine how best to use the free space, mostly by jamming all of our booty into every crack and crevice that remained.

By the time we were done, only a thin trail led to each of the crates’ doors.

Minutes later, and now sweaty and hot despite the cold air, driving rain and whipping winds, Revik and I struggled our way through that upper hatch and into the relative silence and stillness of the lower hold. By then, I was exhausted, worried about Wreg, worried about Jon, worried about Revik, wondering about the storm and FEMA protocols in the city and whatever else. On the plus side, I also felt strangely purged of the worst of the death and chaos we'd witnessed on the way from the airport. I had that lingering anxiety thing going on, but I still couldn’t quite get a thread on where it came from, so I blew it off for the moment.

Climbing down the ladder after Revik, I hadn't even turned around yet when a familiar voice brought me up short.

“You both look almost as bad as Wreg,” the voice observed.

When I turned, Balidor was watching us, his gray eyes unreadable.

“Was this meant to add suspense to our trip?” he queried next, raising an eyebrow at me. “Or are you just testing my emotional responses? Making sure they are as unshakable as what must always be expected of the leader of the Adhipan?”

I felt a small smile teasing my lips, almost before I could hold it back. “Do you ever just come out and
say
things, ‘Dori?”

“I don’t want to be around when your brother sees Wreg,” Balidor returned easily, smiling back at me more genuinely that time. “...How is that for ‘saying’ something?”

"Yeah,” I sighed in agreement. “You and me both.”

“You made a liar out of me, too,” Balidor added. “I had just spent more than a small amount of my time reassuring brother Jon that you would let no harm come to that monster...”

Revik chuckled, caressing my back as I stepped closer to him.

“How did it happen?” Balidor asked next, glancing up at Revik, watching as his fingers tugged me to stand closer to him still. His eyes held a flicker of worry, there and gone almost before I caught it. “Wreg said they got past you. Some kind of new shield technology? Of course he was more colorful about it...”

Revik grunted, but he gave Balidor a less dismissive look than he’d given me.

“Yeah,” he said, combing the fingers of his free hand through his black hair. “Neither one of us had seen it before. Tied to something mechanical, Wreg thought...in the armor, maybe. Semi-organic. But there was definitely a closer source. Non-dimensional, I mean...”

I blinked, glancing at Revik, half in surprise, half in irritation. He’d clearly noticed a few more things about that armor than I had, and more than he’d deigned to share with me.