Allie's War Season Three (174 page)

So when Revik went to talk to him that morning, I was the only one sitting in the security booth. One other guard watched the construct from that part of the basement. Despite everything, or maybe because of it, Maygar was being allowed a certain amount of privacy, although his cell remained hooked into the main security grid along with all the rest. As per protocol, Revik set up everything to tape the session, including the aleimic signatures, but I wouldn't be tracking them the way Garend had been when I went in to talk to Ditrini. Nor would I be feeding him prompts based on what I saw Maygar reacting to as they talked.

I was really just there in case Revik needed me, I guess.

I could tell he was afraid the session might go badly. I could also tell he was hoping it
wouldn't
go badly, but the chances that it would were pretty high, given their past interactions. The last of those, if I wasn't mistaken, had been in Cairo, when Revik punched Maygar in the face after Maygar lied to him, telling Revik that he'd been sleeping with me.

Feeling that hope in his light touched me, even though I could tell Revik was worried I might be offended by it, too, given what Maygar had done to
me
in Seertown, and not only the lying about us sleeping together thing. I assured Revik that it didn't offend me, and that Maygar and I would work our issues out on our own, some other day.

I wasn't positive Revik believed me, but I knew he probably still had his own feelings about that whole incident, too.

So when Revik finally entered that smaller, less-organically-reinforced cell, I didn't know if he had any kind of plan, or just intended on winging it. I couldn't tell much of anything by looking at him, other than the fact that he was nervous. His expression went infiltrator blank as he opened the door. Even his light through the bond grew difficult to read.

Reading Maygar was easier.

I saw him jump when he first noticed Revik standing there, his face paling enough that I saw the difference under the bruises.

His light jumped, too, probably visibly on the monitor, but I didn't bother to glance at the readout. For me, personally, it was pretty strange to feel Maygar's light, after all this time, even filtered through Revik's. So much had happened since our last sparring match in that dirt ring at Vash's compound in Seertown, I didn't even feel like the same person. I couldn't help noticing the changes in his light, too, including a more somber layer that I barely recognized as belonging to Maygar at all.

Chandre told me that Maygar had had a rough time of things, even before Shadow picked him up. He'd been living in fear of being found by Revik and the rebels while Revik was active as Syrimne. In an odd coincidence, he'd been in New York for most of that time, living in the Lower East Side and trying to blend as a human. He'd been working the odd infiltration job to pay rent and buy food, but otherwise kept carefully under the radar.

Chandre seemed to feel sorry for him, even beyond what Shadow had done, and looking at him now, I couldn't help but feel the same. Even through the organic-paned window, I felt loneliness in his light, a heaviness he wore like a shroud of deprived light and isolation. It was the kind of loneliness that had been there for awhile, too, as it had sunk into the overall flavor of his aleimi. I remembered Revik's accusations of Maygar being in love with me, and couldn't help feeling strange about that, too.

Anyway, I was predisposed to feel sympathy for that kind of thing. Revik had that same flavor of loneliness in his own light.

It was the main reason I knew the difference.

Of course, I got just about all of this through Revik.

I'd noticed an improvement in my sight in the past week or so, but I knew that was only because Revik and I were more strongly connected again. My own aleimi still felt off whenever I tried closing it to Revik's. I was trying not to freak out about that, and to trust Revik when he told me everything was going to be all right. Whatever the cause of the blindness itself, he also assured me that there was nothing structurally wrong with my aleimi at all. It also didn't seem to be affecting my connection to
him
at all; if anything, it seemed to strengthen it, maybe because my light was so dependent on his to see outside of myself.

Whatever that barrier was, between me and the world, it wasn't unpleasant...apart from when I was panicking about its effects.

Revik told me that he and Balidor and Tarsi were still looking into it, but I could tell there was something he actually knew...or strongly suspected...that he wasn't telling me. It might not be something he
knew-knew
precisely, but it was more than a few streets over from a hunch, too. Which made me wonder again why no one else would talk to me about it, either.

Either way, he insisted I shouldn't worry about it, even as he obviously continued to worry about it himself.

I pushed my mind back towards Maygar with an effort.

Watching him in that cell, I realized Maygar probably knew about Raven and Revik's affair before all of this, even if he hadn't fully admitted it to himself, or what it might mean for him.

It also occurred to me that maybe he even blamed Revik for leaving his mother with the Rooks. When I asked Revik about that, though, he'd laughed outright. He said Raven would have been the first in line to tell Galaith, had she known his plans...but only after she'd tranked him, collared him, and locked him in their room to keep him from escaping. He claimed she was only with him in the first place due to his high status in the Pyramid's hierarchy...and that if Galaith hadn't been happily married, Raven would most certainly have tried to seduce him, instead.

I still hadn't asked him to tell me that whole story, meaning his time with Galaith's Rooks or what finally got him to leave. I'd wondered, sure. I knew something pretty serious must have happened at the end, but no one seemed to know the details except Revik himself.

So far, anyway, he hadn't volunteered them.

Maygar once told me he'd seen the tapes of those initial sessions between Revik and the Seven's infiltrators, when Revik first arrived back in Seertown. According to Maygar, Revik hadn't exactly been 'cooperative.’ Then again, according to Maygar, Revik hadn't turned himself in so much as he'd been caught. The Seven's guard picked him up outside Vash's compound in Seertown, and in direct violation of the longstanding treaty between the Rooks and the Seven. Maygar told me that Revik claimed his own people were trying to kill him, and that he only asked for refuge out of sheer desperation.

The deprogramming process that Revik had undergone had been violent, by all accounts, and dramatic enough that Revik remained a social pariah for decades after the event, and well after he'd officially joined the Seven.

He was still pretty much a pariah when we met, almost forty years later.

Maygar used Revik's ex-Rook status as his excuse for hating him. Even when I first met him, though, I'd always felt it was more personal under that.

I watched their faces closely as Revik approached the low cot where Maygar sat.

Maygar's hands and ankles had been cuffed loosely to the wall and one another, but they'd left him a decent range of movement, maybe half of the cell around the cot, and well within range of the chair, table and the organic toilet and shower that lived against one wall.

Revik picked up that same chair and carried it to within a yard or two of the cot itself.

I watched him set it down, then sit backwards on it, leaning his long arms on the chair's back. I still saw nerves on him, from the up and down nervous tic of one of his feet to the way he gripped the chair, right before he cleared his throat, looking Maygar directly in the face.

Maygar, for his part, continued to stare at Revik warily, his hands folded loosely in his lap. He looked almost like he couldn't believe Revik was there at all. He looked tired, too, more than anything else really, and something about the pure look of defeat that rose to his chocolate-colored eyes as Revik sat across from him brought my heart to my throat.

I don't think I'd ever seen him look so sad, or so utterly broken, yet something in that look was so vulnerable, it made my heart open to him, too. I felt Revik react in a similar way, but on him it felt mixed with guilt, an almost crippling sense of responsibility.

Given that Maygar wore a collar...albeit one of those simple, one-way-blocking types...I doubt Maygar felt any of that from Revik himself. So unless he was better at reading Revik's physical cues than I suspected, he likely had no idea what Revik was thinking as he sat there, wearing his infiltrator's mask. I still remembered trying to read that expression myself when I first met Revik, and how impenetrable it seemed back then.

After the two of them had been looking at one another for a few seconds, Revik cleared his throat, making a reassuring gesture with one hand.

"Are you comfortable here?" he said politely. "Can I get you anything?"

Maygar's expression turned even more openly wary.

He glanced over Revik's shoulder, as if wondering if Revik was actually speaking to
him,
or if he'd missed something as he walked in.

"Are you hungry?" Revik said. "Would you like anything to read? A portable monitor, maybe?"

Again, Maygar only stared at him.

Then he moved his arm, revealing a monitor that sat beside him, partially obscured by a blanket. Turning his head to look at it, Revik paused, reading. He let a thin smile touch his lips as soon as he understood whatever Maygar had left displayed on the screen.

When he looked down himself, Maygar's cheeks flushed a darker color. With that came a scowl, an expression on his Asian features I finally recognized.

Before seeing the two of them sitting across from one another like this, I would have said that Maygar inherited ninety percent of his looks from his mother, even down to his body type, which was significantly shorter and stockier than Revik’s.

Now, though, looking at him, I found myself re-evaluating that assessment.

The slant of his cheekbones suddenly looked a lot more familiar than I'd realized in the past. He had his mother's fuller mouth, but the shape of his eyes and even his arms started to look like Revik's to me, as well as the width of his shoulders, and the length of his thighs. I noticed it more now, too, because in the tank I'd seen more images of Revik when he’d been about that age. I knew roughly what he'd looked like when he'd been younger, and still working for Menlim.

Anyway, it hadn't really occurred to me before, how young Maygar was for a seer.

He'd actually gained a few inches in height even since I'd last seen him, and his face had narrowed slightly. Granted, he'd lost weight, so that might be part of the change to his face, but even so, he was still only roughly the same age as me, maybe just a few years older, which put him in the neighborhood of thirty to thirty-five. Forty at most.

I'd been told that seers didn't normally stop changing in terms of their physical appearance until they were somewhere between seventy and eighty years old. Then, when they got older, they started changing again, noticeably, that is, somewhere in the vicinity of three hundred to three-hundred-and-fifty-years-old.

The Lao Hu made it abundantly clear to me how immature my own body was, from the perspective of a full-grown seer.

I'd also been told that my body and face had aged rapidly since I'd married Revik. That was normal, though, too. Bonded seers tended to have that effect on one another.

I thought all of this, even as Maygar covered the face of his monitor with a blanket, scowling at Revik with an undisguised resentment.

"Is that why you came?" he said. "To ridicule my taste in reading?"

Revik held up a hand in a peace gesture. "Brother...no. The question was sincere."

"Why the hell would they send
you
in here to ask me that? Is this Balidor's idea of a joke? Because I'm not laughing..."

"No one sent me, brother. No one."

"Stop talking to me like that!" Maygar snapped. "What do you want from me?"

Revik sighed, running a hand through his black hair.

I watched him re-think his approach, even as he kicked himself for smiling at the book.

I couldn't help smiling a little myself when I got a glimmer through Revik's mind of the title. I'd mentioned to Revik once that Maygar was an avid reader of trashy romance novels. He didn't even just read the seer kind; he read the human variety, even the ones a lot of humans scoffed at. That had been one of the details that made Revik laugh aloud, when he started asking me questions about Maygar's personal life.

I knew Revik asked other people, too. He also looked at Barrier images of Maygar's childhood in Seertown. Some of those, particularly when Maygar's mother first left him there with Vash, bothered Revik a lot, I could tell. Maybe more than he fully let in, but definitely more than he admitted to me in so many words.