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DEMONSTRATION

THE CROWD SURGED, shouting in more than one language beneath the running marquees lining the downtown Hong Kong streets that converged at the office building.

Signs on metal poles and even some wooden stakes waved and jostled next to VR signs flashing on shirts programmed with the same words in multiple languages. The characters danced across chests as the signs bobbed in the hands of the onlookers. The yells grew louder when more seers appeared at the front of the glass doors. Humans stood beside seers in the crush of bodies, barely seeming to notice one another; the same anger etched in lines across their faces, although their reasons may have been different. A number of them threw pieces of cement and gravel from the nearby construction pit on one side of the store-lined road.

Balidor stared around at the growing numbers, feeling his trepidation worsen.

With it, his anger returned, too.

How had they all arrived here so quickly?

But he didn’t have time to think about that, either.

“This is madness!” he shouted to Cass over the raised voices. “Suicide, at the very least! Why in the name of the gods did she want to come here?”

Cass only grabbed his arm, tugging hard on his sleeve to surf the motion of the crowd that surged again, now crushing them on either side. Secretly, she agreed with him; he felt her agreement in her light, but she didn’t say it aloud. Nor did he bother to comment on it, nor probe her further.

He looked around them instead, wondering why they had not gone directly to the rendezvous site like they’d initially agreed.

They’d only taken a different route to ensure the safe transport of Dehgoies Revik. Dehgoies, or Syrimne, or “The Sword,” as he was better known, was the reason for the crowd of angry protesters they faced now. As Allie’s former...or possibly current, Balidor honestly couldn’t tell most of the time...husband, he’d been trouble enough. As an international figure, he was a disaster, even before Allie had taken it into her head to kidnap him. She’d done it to get him away from Salinse and the rest of the rebels working for the Dreng...to try and extricate him from their ideology and their insanity, if she could.

Balidor hadn't been able to talk her out of it, or even argue the point really, not at the time. Then again, he'd been too happy to see her alive. Now he wished he'd drugged her, and left Dehgoies collared on that plane for his people to find.

But that would have caused problems too.

Maybe worse than the ones they faced now.

To the rest of the world it looked like Allie had betrayed her own husband in the worst way imaginable. Worse, she’d done it right after he’d run a major op to free a large number of seers from the institutionalized work camps that ruined so many lives.

That she’d been with him on the op was immaterial now. Clearly, none of the seers or humans present gave that much credence, since most of the signs identified her as a race traitor and an adulteress. Most assumed she’d only done the op to win his trust. In the aftermath at least, they figured the whole thing had been staged to bring him and his followers down.

Which, really, as far as theories go, wasn’t entirely devoid of truth.

Given Dehgoies’ notoriety, getting him out without anyone knowing where they were moving him, or even what condition he was in, had to take security precedence. They couldn’t have anyone follow them to the debriefing site, given what was at stake. Dehgoies was a fully trained manipulator, or telekinetic, and probably the most dangerous man alive.

For him to get free now would be an unmitigated catastrophe...even without the hordes of religious fanatics who would rally to his side, pledging their loyalty to him and worse.

Luckily, the Lao Hu understood this, too.

The Chinese seers weren’t looking to invite a murderous revenge spree from a telekinetic seer, either...particularly given their role in the overthrow of the rebel stronghold. Balidor had thought everyone understood the danger...especially Allie. He knew she was pissed off that the Lao Hu had exceeded their agreement and attacked the Rebel stronghold with force, taking prisoners. He knew she was especially upset over the deaths that had occurred, and the fact that most of the rebels had been forced to swear allegiance to the Lao Hu in the aftermath of their surrender, or lose their lives.

Balidor also knew, although she hadn’t said it in so many words, that Allie had grown fond of many of the rebels themselves. The death of one of the females, in particular, seemed to have hit her pretty hard. The seer in question reportedly took her own life to avoid capture by the Lao Hu.

Balidor knew Allie felt responsible. She wouldn’t talk about it, but they all knew.

There were a lot of things she wouldn’t talk about these days.

Even so, regardless of personal feelings, he thought Allie understood the danger they were all in. Looking around him now, Balidor could scarcely remember how he’d gotten talked out of taking that circuitous route to its end, without stopping along the way.

But he already knew how.

As angry as he was at her, he still couldn't bring himself to refuse her. That fact alone infuriated him as much as anything.

Allie snapped out of her stupor long enough to insist they make the stop. She made the decision not long after they got the invitation from the delegation in Hong Kong.

Balidor suspected she’d wanted to throw the rebels off Revik’s trail even more than splitting routes would have done on its own. She seemed, in particular, to be nervous of Wreg, Revik’s second in command. And yet she’d refused to kill him when the opportunity presented...for reasons Balidor still didn’t fully understand.

Allie seemed to think that, of all of the seers who wanted revenge and wanted Dehgoies back, Wreg would be the most difficult to shake. In fact, Allie seemed to think Wreg would die before he stopped looking for Dehgoies.

Balidor reluctantly agreed, given what he knew of the militant seer.

But she didn’t voice any of that to the others, when she brought up the Hong Kong thing.

As per usual, most of her real reasons remained fairly close to the vest. Balidor honestly found it hard to believe at this point, that she still had no formal training as an infiltrator. Half the time, she acted more like an infiltrator than those he'd trained in the arts himself.

He couldn't help wondering how much the marriage to Dehgoies played into that, too. Since the two of them shared light, Allie would have picked up a fair number of his skill sets, in addition to his emotional issues, mannerisms and whatever else.

The thought didn't exactly lessen Balidor's anger at her any.

What Allie told the others had been more political, of course. She said she needed to show her face, if only to let them know she wasn’t afraid. She’d also wanted, as she put it, “to at least try and stop some of the stupidity before it gets completely out of hand.”

Looking around where they stood, Balidor felt confident they had only made it worse.

Whether they’d accomplished her real goal, he could only guess.

Humans and seers slammed up against the barricades that the Adhipan and local police had quickly put in place to deal with the crowd. The majority of the protesters seemed oblivious to the uniforms on either side of the racial divide, fighting their way forward despite the long line of infiltrators wearing the hanfu clothing and black sashes of the Lao Hu...or the uniforms of the Hong Kong police. The calming influence that the Lao Hu and Adhipan seers attempted to descend over the bulk of the crowd shook under multiple hits from seers interspersed in the same rolling crush...as well as those watching through the feeds, most likely.

The mob didn’t want calm, and unfortunately, they had numbers on their side. The constant shaking of the construct rendered its effects close to zero, even with over a dozen infiltrators working, trying to keep the threads intact.

Anger surged higher in the crowd...high enough that Balidor could feel something had changed. Looking up, he caught a glimpse of his own face filling one of the image capturing devices. The anger intensified as his face flickered on more than one screen, rising in a sharp wave that told him that either the news of his role in the Sword’s capture had spread, or more free seers among the rebels remained un-identified than even the Adhipan and the Lao Hu supposed. Ironic, really, that he was hated for destroying the Sword's marriage.

Especially considering how things had turned out for him.

“She cannot come out!” he yelled. “They will kill her on the spot!”

Cass nodded, looking grim.

She didn’t take her eyes off the crowd. She clutched the strap of the automatic rifle around her shoulder in one hand, gripping his sleeve in the other as she looked around where they stood. Balidor glanced behind them. He noticed the giant Wvercian, Baguen, watching her minutely from a few yards away. Everyone instinctively gave the Wvercian a wide berth, even the angriest in the gathering mob. Wvercians, an ancient ethnicity of Chinese seer, stood at around eight feet tall on average, and usually had the girth of two regular seers.

Cass spoke up, her voice a near shout. “They’re losing control of them.”

Looking around, Balidor found himself agreeing with her.

Signs shook more violently over the shout of chanted slogans.

Balidor tried to feel Allie through the secondary construct they were slowly losing control of as well, the one that housed most of the rooms in the Hong Kong office building where they set up shop. They had arrived only the day before and already Balidor’s team had been forced to respond to two bomb threats, a number of skirmishes with seers trying to sneak into the protected zone with weapons, most posing as domestic help or security staff, and more death threats via the net and feed channels than they had received collectively in the six months previous.

It didn’t help, of course, that representatives of the Chinese government, meaning the Chinese human government, were known to be visiting Hong Kong that very week.

That fact only solidified Allie’s race traitor status in the minds of the majority of Western seers. There was no way in the Barrier they would be convinced that their joint arrival had been merely a coincidence. Hell, Balidor wasn’t even sure that he believed it himself.

For all he knew, Allie had planned that, as well.

In any case, any but those seers under the direct influence and control of the Lao Hu considered Allie public enemy number one. Ironic really, given that she’d been the darling of those same seers only a few weeks earlier, due to her role and visibility in the Registry job. Those recordings of her using her telekinesis on Black Arrow security had gained her hero-worship status with just about every seer not directly aligned with one of the human governments...including, Balidor suspected, many among the Lao Hu.

Her face had been plastered all over news feeds. She’d been called public enemy number one by the humans. At the same time, the very mention of her name or Dehgoies' elicited shouts of joy among most seers, many of whom had lost family and friends to the camps.

When the survivors began trickling back, the emotionalism around the Registry job only intensified. Loved ones, families, friends and even mates had been reunited, and continued to be as the weeks passed. Stories and images of these emotional reunions, some of which had been several decades in the waiting, had been plastered all over the underground feeds run by seers. Allie had been toasted in every continent where seers lived...more so in settlements heavily raided for the work and slave camps that had been liberated.

But really, Dehgoies had been credited with the jail break itself.

The fact that Allie had been involved, that they’d done the op as husband and wife, only heightened the emotional reaction to the event.

Seers liked nothing more than a story about the devotion of a mated pair...particularly when that mated pair appeared to be working for the benefit of the race. The fact that they were believed to be the Bridge and the Sword, intermediary beings famous for both their allegiance to their race as well as to one another, only drove the mythologizing more.

But everything changed after that raid on the Rebel Headquarters, north of Ladakh.

Truthfully, things weren’t even all that clear among the Chinese seers. Balidor had listened to their thoughts carefully over the past few weeks. It was obvious that most of them had mixed feelings about Allie’s actions towards Dehgoies, as well.

Those who knew of the imprisonment of Syrimne, along with the disablement of the rebel army, generally viewed her warily at best. Even those who had been directly involved in the raids themselves hadn’t all been in favor of the move.

They, too, were believers of the Myth.

Many also had relatives in the recently liberated slave camps.

The humans, of course, were doing their best to capitalize on the chaos within the seer community. Luckily, they didn’t know enough about the historical basis for the rift to take real advantage. They instead made an attempt to reach out to the various factions using their own, human-centric incentives...offering them economic and political concessions that meant little or nothing to either side of the warring tribes.

Most, thankfully, did not bother to research why this approach didn’t work. Instead, they continued to try clumsily to negotiate at the fringes, embarking on not-so-subtle ploys meant to widen the fissures between the largest of the competing groups.

Sadly, those fissures were plenty wide without the humans.

Allie herself seemed to still be struggling to place herself within these competing contexts –despite the fact that, from the outside at least, she served as the main figurehead for the forces representing the downfall of Syrimne. Given the backgrounds of the majority of seers, that wasn’t a popular stance in the rank and file of the seer community. In fact, it marked her for death among the most dangerous of them.

The humans seemed equally unwilling to embrace her.

Whatever she’d done to bring him down, Allie still reminded them a little too much of Syrimne. Few would forget anytime soon the images captured of her using telekinesis to throw armed guards forcibly through the organic windows of the thirty-five-story Registry building in São Paulo. Or the fact that she blew up the top floor of that same building moments later.

“Where is she?” Balidor yelled through his VR link. “Do you have her, Tenzi?”

“She’s on the other side...with Dorje...”

“Keep her in the goddamned room!” he yelled. “We’re bringing the transport to the rear entrance, but we’ll go up top if we have to...I don’t want her moving until I get there. Trank her if you have to, but keep her indoors...”

Shots rang out.

Balidor dropped as seers around him instinctively hit the deck.

Gunfire being more common in seer versus human-only communities, reaction times were more swift among those of his own race. Many humans continued to stand or half-crouch over the sidewalk, screaming. Their visibility doubled when the seers dropped.

On the plus side, it probably gave Balidor the most accurate seer to human count since the crowd initially gathered.

He ducked lower with the rest of the bent heads as bullets whizzed dangerously close by their small group. Yanking Cass down alongside him when her head remained too high, he turned when he heard another series of screams. Before he could shove Cass back towards the doors, another pattering of gunfire erupted, loud in the confined space between buildings.

That time, it seemed to come from both sides of the velvet ropes.

It occurred to Balidor that the Lao Hu were firing back.

A bullet came close enough to his head then that he dropped entirely, realizing he was being targeted. He landed on his hands, face down on the pavement. As he still clutched Cass’ sleeve, she landed with an ‘Oof’ noise beside him; he felt a ripple of pain from her when her weight fell hard on her palms into the cement. The gun knocked her head in the same instant, bringing another gasp of pain.

He slid an arm around her body, holding her to the ground and doing his best to act as a shield. It occurred to him in the same instant that he was thinking of Allie, even as he did that.

The thought brought back another surge of anger.

Why couldn't he purge his mind of her, in that way at least? She was his job, goddamn it. She'd made it clear enough that she would never be anything more than that, not again, not to him. She could say all she wanted that she was in love with her husband still, the man she'd originally married, but Balidor knew the truth...he'd seen it in her eyes.

She didn't just love Dehgoies. She'd fallen for that prick, Syrimne, too, while she'd been staying at the rebel base. She'd let herself fall in love with this new version of her husband, no matter how evil the son of a bitch was...or how many people he'd butchered. She'd rather stay married to a soulless pawn of the Dreng than try to build a new life with someone else.

Anyone else. Even him.

Balidor knew all of this. He'd told himself all the same things before.

But he thought of her anyway, as he shielded Cass.

The truth was, no matter how angry he was at her, he was worried about her, too. Whatever else happened at that rebel base, it had taken its toll on her, as well. If she lost another person close to her, she might crack for real.

Or worse, shut down to the point where they couldn't reach her at all.

He threw up a cloak with his light, disguising their appearance from those standing nearest. Pulling his face off the sidewalk only a few inches from the curb, he sent up a brief thanks to his Ancestors that his enemies' aim hadn't been better, then grabbed the human's arm to drag her along with him. He kept low, pulling her towards the glass doors and the armed contingent he saw standing there, rifles cocked at their shoulders, their faces grim.

Feeling Baguen behind him, along with a surge of the Wvercian’s irritation at him, he glanced at Cass and saw why. Blood ran down the side of her face where the gun had smacked the back of her skull.

Feeling a faint flicker of guilt, he pulled harder on her arm, as if to compensate.

He heard and felt the local human police in the fray now.

Gunshots echoed in the small space, right before he heard the lower thunk of gas being expelled from metal canisters. Screams erupted soon after the gas hit, echoing against the glass buildings, and Balidor felt a kind of tiredness mixed with grief come over him as he felt the fear and anger expand out of the crowd behind him.

It was familiar, but not so much that he didn’t dread what it meant.

The seer world was once more ripping itself apart.

He didn’t let these thoughts slow his progress to the glass doors. Instead, feeling the heat of emotion ripple out behind them, he pushed his way through the crowd more aggressively, fighting his way towards the lobby of the glass-walled business building. Cass remained with him, but he felt her stumbling to keep up with his long strides. Balidor only tugged harder on her arm, keeping her as low as possible without slowing their pace.

It occurred to him again, that Allie had wanted to come through the front door.

Gods almighty.

He’d managed to overrule her without the usual back and forth, but it had been hell getting her to agree to stay inside while a smaller procession of Adhipan showed their faces out of doors with the Lao Hu acting as security.

He assumed Cass snuck out on her own, Baguen in tow.

The crowd must have been waiting in nearby buildings, connected through VR or some other networking device. In any case, the normal street traffic swelled in seconds to a parade-sized crowd. Balidor also noticed a lot more diversity in faces and heights than he normally would have expected in that part of the city.

Even with the efficient dispersal of the Lao Hu, it grew apparent within a few steps out of the building that things would quickly get out of hand.

Another gun went off, seemingly right by his head.

Balidor ducked. He turned reflexively, meeting the gaze of a seer he recognized from the ranks of the Rebels. The female disappeared back into the crowd before he could get a lock on her amongst the bodies pressing in from all sides.

Even so, he sent her image to the Lao Hu commander, who acknowledged it with a pulse of thanks. He sent it to the others before he’d withdrawn from Balidor’s light.

Whoever she was, she’d been strong enough to see through his shield.

Ute, his mind supplied. Her name had been Ute.

He sent that to the Lao Hu guard, as well, though he doubted it would be much help here.

Ducking into and through the crowd with Cass, thanking the gods he’d chosen to not come in uniform, he finally reached the glass doors. He flashed a Barrier structure at the Lao Hu security detail for entry. He didn’t pause but pushed Cass in front of him even faster once they were free of the crush of bodies.

Seconds later, all three of them stumbled past the main lobby desk.

The doors shut behind them, noiseless in the melee and seemingly well after they’d passed through their bullet-proof organic panes. The deafening sound of screams and distant gunshots instantly muted, leaving the three-story lobby strangely silent.

The chaos in the Barrier didn’t lessen, however. The urgency Balidor felt there kept his fingers tight on Cass’ arm, and his legs moving in a near jog for the corridor housing the suite of elevators that led to the upper floors.

The lobby itself was empty of anyone apart from security. The military must have evacuated the building when they realized what was going on. Either that, or they’d restricted them to the upper floors until the disturbance could be contained. The only people Balidor saw, in fact, were their own people standing watch over the elevators.

Flashing those guards a second Barrier signal as he passed, he ignored a few curt nods of greeting. Instead he sent a packed missive to their leader that Allie and her protection unit would be leaving within the hour.

Seeing the man acknowledge this with a seer’s gesture of ‘yes,’ Balidor didn’t wait, but pulled Cass in after him once the first set of elevator doors opened.

He prayed no one had deviated from protocol as he hit the button for the upper floors, motioning Baguen to hurry up as he shuffled his considerable weight in after them. Allie could be damned persuasive when she wanted...and stubborn. If she’d decided to leave the protected space of the secure construct, they’d all be at risk. Hell, there were seers who wouldn’t hesitate to blow up the whole building to get at her.

Leaning against the brass rail inside the elevator, he released Cass only after it began gliding up floors on smooth rails.

Cass looked dazed, her brown eyes partially out of focus as she glanced at the mirror opposite the elevator doors. Baguen loomed over her within seconds, using a cloth from his pocket to wipe at the blood on her forehead, dabbing where it had started to roll down into her eyes. Balidor watched them without speaking, wiping sweat from his own forehead with his sleeve, only to find that at least some of that was blood, as well.

Touching his face more tentatively, he glanced back at the mirror, too. His fingers and eyes marked the length of the long graze by one ear and over one cheek. He couldn’t help marveling that he hadn’t felt it...or how close he’d come to seeing his own end out there. Likely the closest he’d been since the last world war. No one had taken a shot at his head since then, anyway, at least not gunning for him specifically...not that he could remember.

He used those same fingers to comb the sweat-stuck hair from his forehead.

Glancing at the other two, he was rewarded with a scowl from Baguen, who clearly blamed him for the state of his girlfriend’s head. Clicking at the Wvercian mildly, Balidor chose not to remind the giant seer that he might have saved her from being killed, as well.

He supposed he might not have appreciated it much either, if their positions were reversed.

“Are you all right?” he asked Cass instead.

Still dazed, she nodded, looking at the cut on his own face. When Balidor reached for her, Baguen hit away his hand, grunting in irritation.

“Don’t touch,” he said in accented Prexci.

Glancing at Cass, Balidor raised an eyebrow, and she laughed. Reassured, he leaned back against the brass rail, closing his eyes.

They reached the correct floor a few seconds later.

Balidor’s eyes opened with the doors. He felt something in his chest relax when his gaze immediately found the second security detail out in front of the correct room. Nothing amiss so far. He noted their raised weapons with approval even as he flashed the third Barrier countersign, walking out in front of Baguen and Cass.

It was protocol of course; the two seers at the door knew him.

He bowed only enough to acknowledge theirs, then pushed against the heavy, dark wood of the conference room doors.

He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw her, half in relief and half in frustration.

She still had that effect on him, even now.

ALLIE AND JON looked up from where they huddled together on the further end of the long, polished oak conference table. The table itself took up most of the center of the wide room, surrounded by high-backed, rocking swivel chairs.

Allie appeared dwarfed inside the dark brown leather, and out of place in her jeans, clinging T-shirt and laced combat boots.

Her face held an almost unnerving focus though.

She looked away from Balidor's face after barely looking at him at all.

He followed her gaze to a large monitor on the far wall, depicting the mob scene outside. Shots were still going off. He flinched when he saw a body fall as the crowded rippled backwards. The mix of seers and humans ducked and dove behind cover, but the majority scattered and shoved backwards in a panic.

The image capturing devices swiveled, zooming in on the faces of several humans and a few seers. One collapsed right there in the street, the gunshot to the head caught on screen as it happened. The avatar of the seer wavered, then showed his true face, once it was clear he was dead. His eyes stared upwards, half of his temple exploded into bone shards.

For a moment Balidor could only watch with Allie and Jon, equally silent.

The crowd surged again, tramping over those wounded even as screams filled the room from the conference room's built-in speakers. More shots went off. The chants grew louder in the pause, and Balidor realized that they’d never really stopped.

Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge! Kill the Bridge!

Vengeance for the Sword! Death to the race traitor!

Give us the Sword! Give us Syrimne d’Gaos!

Some sang an old seer song in a separate group by one building, led by a woman carrying a megaphone. Balidor didn’t bother to try and make out the words. He knew the tune from the original protests, back in the 1920s, when the first set of racial purges took place.

The Evolutionist Movement.

Gods, Balidor thought. That was one movement they didn’t need rising up again. They’d almost been worse than the overt racists, with their deification of seers, and those voodoo-like blood rituals they enacted. They seemed to believe the seers could save them somehow, rub their mojo off on them like a virus and save humanity the trouble of having to advance themselves, mentally or spiritually. They never understood why most seers didn’t feel all that ‘honored’ by their attentions. They were such fans of seers, after all.

Thinking about this, and what it had led to the last time, in terms of both World Wars and the racial purges of the fifties, Balidor felt his anger worsen.

“Are you satisfied, Bridge Alyson?” he found himself saying. “Are you ready to abandon this fool’s errand at last? Or would you prefer to be dead, as well as despised?”

It came out harsher than he intended.

She only stared at him though, her pale green eyes flat.

Looking at her face, he found his anger draining away, replaced by something closer to frustration, maybe even grief. At times, she looked more like her husband than he felt comfortable acknowledging, even to himself...even when alone.

Lately, that tendency had been worse.

Whatever she’d done at the end, to get him out, she’d spent months with him there. She’d spent months entwined with his energy, with the light and energy of his people. She'd spent months as one of the pawns of the Dreng. Dehgoies had gone out of his way to strengthen that connection...to grow it, in fact.

Since she’d come back, she’d been different. Colder somehow.

Even what she’d done to Dehgoies himself had a flavor of that cold. It wasn’t that she’d gotten him out, or even that she’d kidnapped him. There was something else in what she’d done, something that didn’t entirely sit well with any of them.

She’d lied to him, yes. But it was more than that...she’d managed to deceive him at a far greater level. She’d done it with a ruthlessness that Balidor wouldn’t have thought her capable of before all of this. The very fact that she had been capable of it made him uneasy, to say the least. She'd used Dehgoies' own devotion to her against him, and his trust of her, as his mate.

She’d used sex against him, too, in a way that most seers didn’t do to one another...mainly due to the vulnerability of all seers in that area. That vulnerability was multiplied exponentially in bonded mates.

It was like kicking someone in their achilles’ heel.

When Balidor really thought about it from that perspective, the whole op made him uncomfortable. More uncomfortable than he could fully admit to her, or to any of the others...even though he’d been the one to train her for it. In a way, he almost understood the outrage in the seers protesting below.

She’d gone after her own mate.

Balidor himself was a seer. He fully understood how the seers protesting outside would view that as evil...or at the very least, heartless in the extreme. The fact that he hated her husband didn't change that really. It only made him wonder about her, as well.

He knew he wasn't alone in feeling the Dreng seethe through the edges of her aleimi, or living light. Truthfully, he’d felt the change long before she’d left with him for that Rebel stronghold in the mountains. He’d felt it since her husband had turned back into Syrimne.

But it was worse now. A lot worse.

When she answered him, he even imagined he heard the Dreng in her voice.

“Yeah,” she said, still holding his eyes with that empty gaze. “I’m ready, ‘Dori.”

Feeling his anger deflate still more, Balidor just looked at her, at a loss.

He glanced at Jon. After the barest pause, he realized the human felt it, too.

Even though he was human, Jon picked up on a lot. He knew something was wrong with her. Balidor felt it in Jon’s light; he could see the understanding in the other man’s gaze. He also saw it in the tautness around his mouth, even before Jon reached out, squeezing his adoptive sister’s arm with his fingers. Balidor stared briefly at the human’s mutilated hand, the place where two of his fingers had been severed by Terian with a jagged knife.

“What about you, ‘Dor,” Jon said, glancing up. “Are you ready?”

Balidor met his gaze. Seeing the creases in the human’s forehead, he saw that Jon had been noticing the expression in his face, too.

Nodding a little to the human, Balidor forced a sigh, clicking.

He would have to talk to Jon...and to Vash. Maybe one of them could get her to see reason. Balidor himself certainly couldn’t. Maybe it was his own fault; he couldn’t exactly separate out his own feelings in a way that made sense these days.

Maybe Jon really could reach her.

If any of them could, it would likely be him.

For a long moment, Balidor only looked between them, watching the human look at Allie with that understanding in his eyes. Somewhere in that pause, her eyes returned to the wall screen; but Balidor discerned nothing in that empty stare as it followed the jerking and flickering images on its surface. As the seer watched, Jon took her hand. He gripped her fingers tightly, as if trying to reach her behind that flat gaze, but Allie didn't seem to notice.

Just when Balidor was about to give up, to usher both of them out of the room and to the waiting helicopter, he saw Allie stiffen, her eyes riveted to the wall-length monitor.

Jon seemed to be staring at the same image, equally mesmerized.

"What the hell?" the human muttered.

Balidor followed his gaze. It occurred to him only then, that the crowd had gone silent. It was as if the monitor had been muted, but no one had touched the controls. The chanting stopped. So did the gunshots, and the screams.

A group of men wearing all black had formed a line in the middle of the main street in front of the office building. They stood perfectly still, directly between the barricades protecting the police and the Lao Hu on one side and the demonstrating crowd on the other.

Balidor frowned, stepping deeper into the room.

Something was definitely wrong here.

He glanced at Allie, but she was frowning too. He saw no emotion there, but the same puzzlement stood in her eyes as she watched the row of men on the screen.

Realizing she was trying to see them with her light, Balidor did the same, dipping into the Barrier to try and get a better look at the row of people in black kevlar. When he focused his aleimi on them, however, he hit a solid wall. He couldn't see past it, even after repeated tries, using a number of different sight tricks to get around any Barrier shields. All he could say for certain was that the shield was being reinforced from somewhere else.

Somewhere not in Hong Kong...or even Asia.

Which meant that the black-clad soldiers were likely seers themselves; humans couldn't be guarded effectively from such a distance. Their lights were too difficult to pick out of a crowd, and their aleimi lacked sufficient structure to support a full shield without physical proximity.

If the soldiers were humans, then they had guards on the ground as well, facilitating the shield connection...but Balidor doubted it.

In any case, the shields he could see surrounding them in the Barrier space were impressive. He could get past most of the low-grade stuff. Even some of the professional shields often had chinks of one kind or another that allowed Balidor some glimpse inside.

These completely blinded him.

"Sweeps?" Allie asked him.

Balidor split his aleimi so he was still halfway in the Barrier, glancing at her.

"No," he said. He knew that signature well enough. "It's not World Court at all."

"Could they be rebels?" Jon said.

That time, it was Allie who shook her head. "No. I don't think so."

"Can you get through?" Balidor asked her.

After a pause, she shook her head again.

"No," was all she said.

The men in black kevlar raised heavy weapons, aiming them at the crowd. They didn't carry regular rifles, Balidor noticed, but dark green, semi-organics with stubby, thick barrels, too wide for normal bullets. Before he could say anything, Balidor heard the lower-pitched thup sound of the guns going off, a heavier and somehow slower sound than that of regular gunfire.

Once again, Balidor saw gas canisters bouncing on the pavement.

They exploded into clouds at once, obscuring faces of avatars, as well as the buildings and street kiosks closest to the largest crush of people. But the clouds didn't remain. Nor did Balidor hear the screams he would have expected with most nerve agents used on crowds, or see anyone in the range of the gas coughing, or rubbing watering eyes. The gas dissipated quickly into the air, so it hadn't been designed to create a diversion, either.

"What is it, then?" Allie said.

Apparently, Balidor's thoughts had been louder than he realized.

"I don't know," was all he said.

Just then, the first person collapsed onto the pavement.

Balidor watched in a kind of numb disbelief as the camera panned sickeningly, following the body to the ground. The woman's avatar faded, revealing the face of a twenty-something girl with black hair and a heavily made-up face. Trails of blood streamed from her eyes and ears and nose, obscuring her features, making trails through her foundation and lipstick.

The camera left her face in time to show the next body fall.

Within seconds, however, there were too many for the camera to capture.

Balidor watched it happen, unable to tear his eyes away, but a part of him still couldn't believe it. He was aware of the feed reporter's voice in the background, rising to a near hysterical pitch as more bodies fell. He heard more reporters reacting as the bodies seemed to domino down faster...but even with that, the silence remained in the background, making it impossible to understand the reporters' words.

It all happened too fast for Balidor's mind to catch up...yet so slowly that it seemed like an eternity before it was over. Half the crowd seemed to have collapsed on the pavement before Balidor became aware of another sound, something that also seemed to creep only slowly into his awareness.

It was screaming.

That time, the screaming had a different sound to it, though. It wasn't the sound of an angry mob, high on adrenaline. Or even the sound of people afraid of being shot.

Instead, it was a high-pitched, irrational sound, like a rabbit caught in a snare.

It was a sound Balidor associated with what they used to call 'battle fatigue,' or 'shell shock'...the sound of pure, unbridled terror, terror that ripped a person out of their moorings, sending them spinning totally out of control.

It was while the sound penetrated his awareness that Balidor noticed something else. Only one group of people in the crowd were screaming.

It was the seers.

Seers backed away from fallen, falling and swaying bodies, screaming in disbelieving horror as more and more people slammed unceremoniously into the pavement. Most of those falling were already unconscious or dead by the time their limbs gave out. They landed flat on their backs or directly on their faces. Few even had time to throw up their arms or fall to their sides. Some fell to their knees first, and a few were knocked into odd positions by the surging and fleeing crowd, but most fell like a tree falls...straight down, no resistance at all.

The seers watched it happen. They tried to move out of the way only to trip over and run into more bodies, more bleeding faces, more death. So they screamed, caught within a maze of corpses. Once they started, they didn't seem to be able to stop.

It took Balidor a few seconds more to understand why only the seers were screaming.

Then he realized the awful truth. The seers were the only ones left.

The humans were all dying, too fast for any of them to utter a sound.