14

DEAD

I SWAM THROUGH darkness...immersed in sensual warmth.

At first, it was almost pleasant. Like waiting to be born.

I didn’t know where I was. I didn’t know...anything. Only that I floated somewhere peaceful, in something not dissimilar to hot, thick water.

The aloneness bothered me.

It bothered me a lot.

Even so, it took a long time before I felt anything other than pleasantly out of it. I might have been drugged. Or perhaps, I thought, everything would just be easier here, in this place. Forever easy. Something lived in that feeling of finality that had a comfort to it, in and of itself.

Really, honestly...I figured I was dead. 

I remembered dying. I remembered a lot of pain, a terror as I realized...as I felt it slip away from me...

It fucking hurt. Dying hurt...a lot.

I didn’t want to do it again, that was for sure.

But here, it didn’t hurt. Not at first.

Slowly, though, that began to change.

The pain started gradually, almost imperceptibly. It threaded through the tiniest of my veins like small sparks of electric current. I barely felt them at first. Then, some unclear amount of time later, they grew uncomfortable.

Then a lot more uncomfortable...

I started to have trouble dozing off. I started to dream badly.

I started to sweat.

Then I was panting, sweating all the time, sweating buckets...it felt like my skin was being ripped off my flesh.

Then my flesh off my bones.

I started to yell. I screamed for help, for someone to help me. 

I screamed for him.

It hurt more than dying had...it hurt more than anything I’d ever felt in my life. I couldn’t remain still for how much it hurt...even when it hurt more. I fought to get free of the restraints. For I could feel those now, too.

I couldn’t move. I couldn’t find or bang against the edges of whatever confined me. Dark surrounded me. Everything hung in pitch black silence...I couldn’t feel any other lights...nothing else lived in my world but me. I was suspended in a kind of hell of sensation and loss...

Then that loss got worse, too.

Grief like nothing I’ve ever felt before tried to pull apart my mind.

My yells turned to screams...deep-throated, agonizing screams that wanted to rip out my spine. I called for him. I called with every ounce of my being...

I couldn’t get away from the pain. I couldn’t stop trying.

The pain didn’t flow in pulses anymore. My light didn’t move right. Everything grew more and more heightened, more and more difficult to process. It rose higher every hour.

Every half hour...

Every twenty minutes...

I lost the ability to scream. I had no voice left, no lungs.

I panted, feeling my heart slam up against my ribs. I knew for a fact that I was dying now. I was really dying this time...maybe I was already dead. For a shorter time the thought comforted me, the idea that it had to end soon, that there wasn’t much left of me to experience this...

But the pain didn’t lessen...it got worse. It reached the upper limit, the highest amount I could even feel...then it got worse again. I would look back on the old pain with nostalgia, with a feeling like I could take that...that that had been all right...pleasant even...

It got so bad I was begging to die, willing it to end. 

He felt dead to me, too...I wanted to go to him, to meet him in that other place. He felt gone, and I drifted alone, in a world I didn’t recognize, half my light ripped off my body. 

He’d said he couldn’t...that he couldn’t live without me...

And still, the will to live kept me there. 

It kept me from letting go, from succumbing to it entirely.

I hated it. I hated that grasping...that need to hold on...

For a long, long time...for what felt like an infinity of black pain, of aloneness in a void, lightless place...I existed like this...

I wished for death.

I wished for anything to smash that grasping hold in me.

“WE HAVE TO pull her!” Dorje said. He yanked on Balidor’s arm. “We have to! It’s not working, Balidor...it’s not!”

“A little longer,” Balidor muttered. 

Still, he bit his lip, shifting his weight as he looked through the organic-paneled window, his gaze switching between it and the flat console. 

“Why?” Dorje said. “...Why are you doing this?” 

“You know why.”

“It is over! It is over, Balidor!” Dorje’s voice held tears. Eyes wet, he stared at the body suspended in the organic tank, his hand shaking. “You are torturing her! You are torturing her worse than anything the Rooks could have done to her! Please, gods, Balidor...stop this! It is done!”

“A little longer,” Balidor muttered again, folding his arms tighter.

He stared through the thick, transparent wall, squinting through the faint green cast of the organic as he studied her...her body, her features as they hardened inside the gel. He watched the articulation of her limbs where she hung suspended, restraints holding her away from the walls of the tank where they’d immersed her so that her wounds wouldn’t be damaged as the other condition worsened. 

She looked thinner again, even in just the last half-day.

The gel, which had already repaired a good section of her back where the bullet had exited, should also be providing her ample amounts of water and food through the absorption process...but it made no difference.

She absorbed the nutrients and sweated them out...vibrating water and flesh out of her skin and her aleimi faster than her skin could absorb the new. 

Faster than her body could break it down for sustenance. 

It had only been eleven days in total, but it felt like months had passed since he had stood here, watching her.

Still, each day he found himself faced with the same thing...trying to decide how far he could let things go before he killed her for real.

THE TANK HAD been built decades ago.  

Balidor stumbled upon it by accident, during one of their raids. It had been the centerpiece of one of the labs Galaith had built...one of the many labs Galaith and his people had scattered across Asia and Eastern Europe. When the Adhipan found it, and determined what it had been designed to do, they surmised that the tank undoubtedly formed the centerpiece of another of Galaith’s questionable “experiments” with seer physiology. 

Something that required cutting a seer out of the Barrier totally. 

Ironically, it had been Terian who led them there. They had been following one of his bodies, a geneticist named Yongo.

Galaith had been a firm believer in testing the bounds of manipulating the Barrier and its constructs. He had no doubt experimented on mated pairs before, using this very tank. 

Not all mated pairs of seers had interdependent lifespans, of course...but well over half did in the first decade of marriage. The numbers increased as the years of marriage increased, until the vast majority of those who had been mates for over a century tended to require their mate to survive.

With Elaerian, it had long been believed that the number of mates with interdependent lifespans must be far higher.

Vash had warned the entire Council and Adhipan that this would likely be the case with whatever mate Allie chose, and not long after full consummation.

The records of the Rooks confirmed this supposition, as well.

In any case, Balidor had no doubt that Galaith had used the chamber on mated pairs before. Interdependent mates would be the most concrete test of whether or not the shield really worked. 

For months, Balidor had found himself thinking about the tank...ever since they first encountered the re-unified Syrimne. 

He had hoped he might never need use it. He had hoped that it might be possible for her to remain outside Dehgoies’ influence enough that it wouldn’t be necessary. Since only about half of Revik’s aleimi had been intact when they’d taken one another as mates, Balidor had thought perhaps their bond would be easy to break following the full personality’s re-integration.

Seeing her with him on that dance floor in New Delhi had been the cold splash of reality to that hope. Dehgoies retained a hold on her as Syrimne...far more than she seemed willing to admit to herself.

Her denial of its import only made the bond that much more dangerous. 

Balidor held off on trying the tank until he had a good reason. He hadn’t liked the idea of forcing a split of this kind, even a temporary one, knowing what it would do to her. From the beginning, he meant not to kill her, but only to test whether it might be feasible to separate them. Even so, he had hesitated, wondering if there might be a better way.

But Vash told him that his own methods of severance would only bring the same result, and worse, for they would likely not be reversible in time to keep her alive...at least not without Dehgoies’ help.

So Balidor tabled the whole idea, thinking that their time in Delhi had finally convinced Alyson of the need to put some distance between them.

Seeing her face while Cass read that letter had changed his mind yet again.

The truth was, they had put it off too long already. 

They had to know. He had to know. 

Ultimately, he had not lied to her. It was his responsibility. Not only to keep her person safe...but to keep the world safe from her. 

Balidor needed to know what would happen if she was separated from her mate. He needed to know which contingencies were viable, given the nature of that connection. Vash had okayed the experiment as well, agreeing that it was better that they learn the truth in a relatively controlled environment, before they attempted to do a severing ritual for real...and certainly before they let her do anything so crazy as go undercover within Syrimne’s operation headquarters.

Dehgoies could not know, of course. 

The opportunity at the basement archives existed as though made for such an enactment.

If the severing worked, meaning if it managed not to kill her, Dehgoies would think her dead, which would give them time to rehabilitate her.

If it did not work...well, Dehgoies would be incapacitated too. 

It had seemed like such a neat plan. A way to accomplish at least two things, and hopefully more than that, if they could make the severing stick.

Watching her now, though, Balidor bit his lip. 

She’d stopped screaming a few days ago, but he could tell from the articulation of her limbs that the pain hadn’t lessened. Lines etched in her face from tension as her muscles clenched against some unseen agony. Her hands seemed to be permanently clenched into fists for a day after her screams ended, but now her whole body had gone limp, only to tense again periodically...enough to frighten him. 

She was willing herself to die. 

He saw it at times, in her face. But he also saw the other, as well...that thing that gave him hope. Her will to live pulsed under the despair, even against her more conscious want for the pain to end. He still retained some wish that it might outlast that darker solution.

In any case, he would have to make a decision soon. 

“Come on, Allie,” he murmured. “Come on...beat this...”

He watched her, hoping to gods she would ever forgive him.

At the same time, he got a grim sort of satisfaction, wondering how Dehgoies was faring with his end of their little experiment.

WREG STARED OUT the hotel window, watching people walk by the Harmandir Sahib, or Golden Temple of the Sikhs. They were still in Amritsar. 

Using the old-fashioned telescopic glass, he watched the pilgrims walk alongside tourists, following their footsteps without seeing their faces as they queued up to enter.

“No photographs” signs stood everywhere, of course. The ban against realtime imagery remained in effect here, as it did in most parts of the human world. The signs themselves felt almost redundant in fact, especially here, in a place holy to the local humans.

They should have left Amritsar weeks ago. 

Initially, they’d intended only to stop in the border city long enough to park the plane and transfer equipment and supplies to land transport. From there, the Sword intended that they finish the rest of the approach to Seertown by back roads, where they would be less likely to be tracked. It was certainly safer than landing in the airport in Dharamsala, where the Adhipan would surely have spies watching for them.

Their biggest concern at the time had been that the Seven might flee with her...with or without her consent. Watching from the Barrier, they had waited to see if that would be the decision by the Adhipan, upon hearing the contents of Dehgoies’ letter. The Sword himself had said almost nothing beyond telling them he wished for a broad blanket of surveillance for the hours he’d requested the note delivered. 

The note itself came as a surprise to Wreg. 

Yet he’d found it a clever move, as well as a damned touching one. 

Wreg could feel that the boss hadn’t liked the public reading very much...or the fact that she had requested it. And yet, he hadn’t been entirely displeased with the Bridge’s reaction to what she’d heard.

It touched her, too. They all felt it.

After, she immediately asked the others if she should accept. She didn’t hesitate to put the question before the group...it was as if she’d already made up her mind. They watched her argue with the Adhipan leader, who of course was adamant from the beginning that she dismiss the proposal at once. 

She continued to argue that she should be allowed to go...or at least be allowed to consider going. 

Wreg knew Revik listened on the edge of his seat, so to speak.

He heard her leaning towards taking his offer, perhaps sooner than the rest of them picked up on her preference. Wreg had seen the hope in his friend’s eyes, the relief...hell, the anticipation. Even Wreg hadn’t realized quite how badly the Sword had been missing his mate until he heard that letter read aloud to the rest of those bastards. 

He wanted the Bridge with him...more and apart from the necessity of the four being united. He’d offered to suspend his work while she stayed with him, and from what Wreg could tell, he’d meant every word of it.

But no one in the Sword’s army could have anticipated what would happen next.

The argument began to wind down. Balidor angered her, and she’d stopped playing the diplomat, finally...instead making her position clear. When he wouldn’t go along, she did as she should. She fired the bastard. 

She’d asked to be uncollared, and Wreg felt the boss react to that, too.

Then everything went horribly, horribly wrong.

That bastard Adhipan leader shot her. 

He fucking shot her...right in the heart. 

Wreg thought the Sword would have a heart attack himself on the spot. 

When the gun went off, the Elaerian let out a cry that Wreg felt down to his bones. The Sword’s light exploded out in terror, a disbelief that rapidly bled into shock...then a grief so intense it shuddered the construct... 

He’d screamed again as he watched her fall...

She crumpled on the steps, eyes glazed, and the male Elaerian’s whole body collapsed inward as he watched her die...as he fought to breathe...

That had been worse.

Then he’d disappeared. He jumped into the Barrier so swiftly and completely, Wreg almost thought the Sword had died himself. 

Wreg commanded a group to set up a perimeter around him, to guard his light as he went after his mate...but it was too late. 

The Seven must have planned the maneuver...or at least had a contingency in place to respond to it. They set up a net within seconds. A construct within the construct threw up a cloak around every Seven bastard and even the two humans who’d witnessed the event...rendering them invisible.

Wreg’s team had been able to crack that too, of course, but it took time. 

Time they hadn’t had.

During that delay, the Seven made their escape, taking the body of the Bridge with them. 

Wreg watched the Sword look for her in vain for hours. 

They made the decision to stay in Amritsar not long after the second day...once it grew obvious that her death wasn’t simply a trick of the Seven to confuse their trail, or to emotionally devastate the Sword. That much was clear within the first forty-eight hours, when he saw the Elaerian beginning to lose the ability to control his light. Even so, it wasn’t until the fourth day that Wreg admitted to himself that the Sword’s life was actually in danger. 

After the fifth day, they’d had to restrain him. 

By the end of the sixth, they’d had to drug him, too.

Even drugged, he was terrifying. They had to start pushing the humans in the hotel to not hear him when he started screaming. Within a few more days, they had to push those same humans to vacate the hotel altogether...and even began pushing humans to keep from passing too close on the street outside.

They built a construct to shield him, and warded the humans away; in effect, taking over the hotel and surrounding blocks.

His light was the real danger, of course. There had been accidents already. He’d broken the neck of one of Wreg’s infiltrators when she got too close to him. He’d broken the arm of another when a group of them had tried to use touch to calm him down. 

Wreg even considered collaring him. 

He nearly got his neck broken himself, for even thinking it.

They’d drugged him in higher doses instead, trying to cut at least the worst edges of the pain. It hadn’t really helped, but it seemed to dull his ability to use the telekinesis, which was as much as they could hope for by then.

Before things had gotten to the point where the Sword lost coherence entirely, he’d asked them to keep tracking the Seven bastard who had done it. 

He’d asked Wreg to kill him for him.

As if Wreg needed to be asked.

BALIDOR WATCHED AS Dorje paced the confines of the small room, looking at the readouts on the screen set in the console. It was a distraction for Balidor, at least, watching his friend...albeit a poor one. It gave him the excuse to look away from her, to not stare at every line of pain on her face in minute detail.

Even so, the other infiltrator was starting to make Balidor nervous.

Dorje seemed to have hit his limit again, as well.

“You have to end it,” Dorje said. “Today. She is dying, Balidor!”

Balidor felt his shoulders tighten. He folded his arms, maybe just for something to do with them while he gazed through the thick pane of organic to the tank on the other side. Staring at her, he found himself gesturing in affirmative, rubbing his stubbled face with one hand. He felt sick himself, light-depleted, exhausted.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, she is.” Anger nearly overcame him, intense enough that his muscles tightened all through his body. Irrationally, all of it felt aimed at Dehgoies.

“Goddamn it...” he burst out.

“You knew it was a possibility!”

“I thought Terian had interrupted them before they finished,” Balidor said. “Alyson said as much to me...”

“Well, clearly,” Dorje said. “She was wrong.”

Balidor stared at the readouts, feeling his own sick feelings worsen.

“Clearly,” he said. “...I had thought between that and the fact that she hadn’t bonded with the other parts of him...”

Losing breath on his words, he blinked, realized he was fighting tears. That he would have put them both through this, and all for nothing...

He forced himself to think again, to use the other parts of his light. He looked at the infiltrator standing next to him, as another possibility slid into place in his mind. 

“The boy.”

Dorje frowned. “You think the boy did it? Nenzi?”

Clicking sharply, at himself mostly, Balidor shook his head.

“...Damn it. I’d forgotten who he was, when he held her captive with Terian. He had her for weeks.” He stared through the organic window to her face. “Allie said he’d been desperate for affection...for contact of any kind. That he’d touch her any chance he got, even just to hold her hand. She didn’t have access to her light, so I assumed it was all on his end. But I wonder...”

“What?”

“Is it possible he managed to complete the bond then...?”

Dorje frowned. His light exuded nausea. “Are you saying he raped her? That this little murdering monster version of him raped her?”

“Maybe, yes. But not necessarily.” Balidor continued to think, rubbing his arm with one hand where his arms were crossed. “...The boy was the Elaerian part of Dehgoies. It is possible he would not have needed sex to finish weaving the connection with her. The bond isn’t sexual at its base...it is a weaving of light. Any intense energetic interaction between them...” 

“It could have happened in Delhi,” Dorje said.

“Yes.” Balidor frowned, remembering Dehgoies’ face on the dance floor. “It could have. He seemed intent on having her. There could have been more motive than one in that. He could have gone out of his way to force a stronger connection to her while they were together. He might have known better how to do that, in his current form...”

Clicking softly again, he added, 

“She felt different after. You noticed it...didn’t you, Dorje? She was different. Her light had changed...”

“Does it matter now?” Dorje said.

For a second, Balidor didn’t answer. 

Then he made a negative gesture with one hand, seer-fashion.

“No,” he said. “It does not.”

Turning, he walked out of the observation room. 

Walking faster, he slid around the corner to the narrow hallway beyond. In a few more steps, he stood before the doorway of the Barrier-shielded cell where the tank was housed. On the panel they’d installed to the right of the pressure-sealed organic door stood a set of readouts to the chamber beyond. A heart monitor showed a weak heartbeat that sent a pulsing, ghosting line across a small screen at each beat. Below that, a list of vitals scrolled that he had to squint to read...a truncated version of what the machines monitored inside the control room itself. 

Under that lay a combination lock, with DNA encryption.

He turned to Dorje, his mouth set in a grim line.

“All right. I’m doing it. Tell the others...they need to be ready to move, and fast.” Laying a hand on the smaller man’s shoulder, he added, “Make sure they understand, Dorje. This isn’t a drill. We need to be out of here in two hours, maximum.”

Dorje was already on his VR link.

Looking up after a pause, his eyes clicked back into focus on Balidor. 

“Tenzin wants to know. Do we inform the others of our status? If we go to them without prior warning, they will not understand the degree of urgency...”

Balidor gestured negative. “No. Don’t tell them anything. Contact them, yes, so they are forewarned of our arrival...but for now, just tell them Dehgoies’ people are on their way...” Clenching his fists under his crossed arms, he added, “...That’s not exactly a lie. We will tell them as soon as we are able, but we can’t deal with their emotional reactions until we are fully in transit. It will likely just give him an easier trail to follow...”

“We’re taking them with us? The humans, too?”

“We have little choice.” Balidor gave him a grim look. “He will go after anyone who was there, brother. For now, they’ll have to come with us.”

Seeing Dorje’s worried look, he clasped his shoulder in reassurance. 

“If we can leave them somewhere in safety...we will.” 

Gesturing in affirmative, Dorje relayed all of this, as well. He clicked out a moment later, his eyes clearing as he vacated the Barrier.

“They are in motion,” he said. “They said thirty minutes.”

“We will need longer than that, before she can travel,” he said. “...But good.”

“Start, then,” Dorje prompted, gesturing towards the panel. His eyes remained worried as he peered through the transparent pane to the floating tank. “Start, brother. Please.”

Balidor nodded, taking a breath. 

Turning, he began keying in the code that would open the door to the thick-walled, organic room. The walls, even the pressure door itself, stood at close to five feet of dense organics, exuding a Barrier signal that effectively cut her out of the lower realms entirely. It was an odd thing, really...the idea of simulating death in such a way, with her body so obviously alive. Yet clearly, it had worked. The only proof needed was to look at her wasted limbs.

Dorje remained, shifting his weight between his feet in nervousness, watching through the transparent section of wall to the right of the door. His face remained pinched as he focused on the tank. Once Balidor had the combination in motion, his eyes followed Dorje’s. 

Even in those few seconds, her breathing seemed more shallow, her heart beats softer and fewer in the monitor on the panel.

“We’re losing her!” Dorje cried.

“No. She’ll be all right.”

Still, Balidor realized these were only words. He too stared through the window at the female in the tank, his body wound with adrenaline. Dorje might be right. He might have waited too long.

If he killed her now, after everything... 

His jaw clenched, but he steeled himself, reminding himself why he had done it. They had to know. Now they did.

“You should go back,” he said to the other seer. “Engage the secondary construct. I’ll stay with her while she reconnects.”

Dorje hesitated. “You? Alone? Is that a good idea, Balidor?”

“Someone must stay with her. If we’ve left it too close, someone will need to perform the proper medical interventions...I do not want her to die either, Dorje. I am trained for this. And it is my responsibility.”

Dorje hesitated again, then gestured affirmative. “All right.” 

“Tell the others I am sorry,” Balidor said. “...make sure they know that I failed in this. Those who want to leave, they should do so now. Quickly, before he can recover enough to find us.”

He met Dorje’s gaze, knowing his own eyes likely showed his strain on the surface. He fought not to look at the lock while he waited for it to release.

“My friend, you should go, too,” he told him. “Go to the mountains. Find friends who will disguise you. We are better separated for now.” 

Dorje looked confused, and a little angry. “You want me to leave the Bridge?”

“I want to save your life, brother,” Balidor said, laying a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I want to save as many of us as I can...and we have little time.” 

He glanced through the transparent window. 

“All kinds of hell is about to rain down on our heads...”