13

CLAUSTROPHOBIC

 

REVIK STOOD ON the rim of a burnt-out crater.

The scorched pockmark ate through two thirds of a fortress-like structure made of black stone. If he hadn’t seen the pirated feeds of the building exploding outward, he might have thought a meteor had hit the mountain. The crater still smoked in discrete sections of the blackened part of the pit.

Trees had been knocked down as far away as a mile from the epicenter.

Leaning over carefully to gaze down the edge, he tracked body parts stuck in poses from where they’d been embedded in rock, earth and powder. Easing back so that his weight stood more securely at the rim, he glanced at Balidor.

The gray-eyed seer frowned without returning Revik’s glance.

They’d only been there an hour, and already, Revik was getting used to the smell. It brought back memories of wartime...especially the ovens.

Wincing, he averted his gaze, tracking the movements of the rest of the infiltration team.

Adhipan members spread out along the rim of the crater. A few had begun to climb down inside to get a better look. Revik recognized a number of faces, both from the flight from India and the training camp outside of Darjeeling. Others had been flown in from China or elsewhere just the day before. Around forty operatives were now casing the site, at least ten of which had arrived at the school before Revik and Balidor.

Revik understood why they were climbing into the hole. Not only would they be collecting physical evidence, but the best and easiest way to collect imprints of the bomber was to get as close to the bomb itself as possible. Whatever fragments may have survived the blast could be anywhere from the blast site itself to a few thousand yards from there, but they would start at the center and work out.

So he understood the logic...but he still wasn’t looking forward to that portion of the exercise.

Given the sheer level of devastation, they might have to do it the human way, at least in part. Meaning they might have to conduct an analysis and search based on the chemical imprint and other physical properties of the blast. Explosions had a habit of obliterating aleimic fingerprints even more thoroughly than the physical kind.

Something else struck him as he looked around.

“This isn’t where it started.” He spoke English, unthinking. He turned to Balidor, switching to Prexci. “...Was there any evidence that this might be a secondary site?”

Balidor gave him an odd look. “Yes.”

“Can you show me?”

Balidor motioned for Revik to follow him, stepping back from the crater’s rim. He led them across the broken field, picking his way through more cracked stones, ripped up earth and body parts, bone fragments and parts of skulls. Most of these last were small enough that Revik didn’t let himself focus on them too closely.

He kept his eyes focused forward instead, on the furthest of the three stone towers that remained standing after the attack.

Balidor pointed to the other two towers, in turn.

“Training cells. A few of the older kids survived in there. Standard protocol seemed to have been to move them inside once they were clearly salable...meaning old enough to pass for human, making progress in their studies, talented enough to effect at least a mid-range sale. It protected then from being stolen by local bandits. It’s also where they brought high-end customers...the ones with enough connections to skip the auctions and buy wholesale.”

Revik nodded, gesturing that he was familiar with such things.

Balidor pointed to the other tower. “Quarters, for the staff.”

Revik continued to focus on the third tower, the one for which Balidor’s feet aimed in a nearly straight line. It looked dead compared to the other two. The windows had no glass, and Revik could see no light inside, no sense that it had been updated since whatever warlord had built it several hundred years earlier. The heavy wood and iron door looked almost like it could be original to the structure. It came with a lock, now broken, that looked like something from a lower-level exhibit in the Tower of London.

Revik found his steps slowing as they got nearer to the entrance.

Balidor noticed, and slowed to pace him.

“Yes,” he said grimly. “...You feel it too.”

He gestured at the broken door.

“We thought this area had been abandoned at first. An old disciplinary center. Possibly even a torture chamber, left over from some particularly despotic human monarch. The imprints there are intense...but almost impossible to nail down. At first we thought perhaps whoever did this put up some kind of field...to obscure themselves, obliterate evidence and so forth. But the construct we found woven there was older...close to a hundred years.”

Balidor paused, gesturing towards the gaping maw of a door.

“Two of my people went inside,” he said. “They said it’s worse in there. The imprints are older still. As is the construct...or what remains of it. They were able to determine this was the primary blast site, as you said...but not much else.”

He glanced at Revik, and a flicker of surprise touched his eyes.

He caught the younger man’s arm, staring into his face.

“Are you all right?”

Revik shook his head slightly. “I want to go inside.”

“Are you sure, brother? You’re white as a ghost...”

“I’ll be all right.” Revik extricated his arm, and once more began picking his way across the courtyard, until he was nearly at the tower’s door.

“Be careful,” Balidor called after him. “There’s not much warning before the drop.”

Glancing back, Revik saw that the Adhipan leader had remained where he was. Raising a hand in acknowledgment, he hesitated only a second longer, then grabbed one of the torches burning outside the broken doorway.

Taking a breath and instinctively shielding his light, he walked inside to the stone foyer.

Stepping carefully across the broken flagstones, he started down the only available route, a staircase cut directly into the fire-blackened rock. Holding the torch out in front of him, he descended one step at a time, fighting the gradual closing around his chest and throat.

He’d always been a little claustrophobic.

The pitch black of the corridor combined with the imprints still emanating off the walls, making it difficult to breathe. He tried to get a lock on the imprints, to understand their source...but all he got was more of the feeling. A throbbing, sick pain, it resembled the worst kind of separation sickness...so warped and broken by deprivation that it had turned into something else entirely.

He might not even have recognized it, if he hadn’t been buried in separation himself for over a year. It combined with his own problems, twisting his need into something that made him want to die—literally.

He found himself reaching for Allie...

He stopped it.

Taking another breath, he forced his light close to his body.

The pain worsened. Out of nowhere, anger suffused his light, intense enough to blank his mind. Feelings rose, and thoughts. Things he’d been suppressing for days...ever since that morning he’d returned from Cairo.

He should have told her. Hell, he should have taken her with him right then, found a place in town, torn her goddamned clothes off...

He fought that out of his light as well.

Why hadn’t anyone explained the marriage rites to her? Chandre? Yerin? Vash? He’d been gone for months...and not exactly in a position to explain anything to her in the period before he left. He’d nearly blown everything, just because he’d assumed she understood the basics of their condition.

Gods, even before she’d asked him, her light pulling on him was enough to change his mind about waiting. She’d probably been pulling on every seer in a five-mile radius...likely for months, the whole time he’d been gone. Before that, when he’d been with Terian.

They’d been watching her masturbate.

Pain turned liquid in his light, ratcheting the intensity of emotion.

She’d agreed to engage in a full contact sport with a rival seer who wanted to bed her...if he wasn’t bedding her already.

Why? Why would she do that, unless she wanted to hurt him?

Had she lied to him? Was she still angry with him for what he’d done?

The pain cut his breath, a helplessness he briefly couldn’t control. The son of a bitch had touched her. He’d touched her in places Revik hadn’t touched her...places he’d restrained himself from touching her for over a year. He’d gotten into her light. He’d had his goddamned fingers in her. He’d also scared the hell out of her. Revik had felt it in those other seers, her terror...he’d seen it in her eyes.

Her face had been bloody.

She’d been screaming.

Gripping the rough stone, he forced his mind to shut down. It was something he would normally only do if he were being attacked.

He forced himself to breathe...

...until, slowly, slowly, the feelings unwound.

He remembered where he was; he could feel the tower as something outside himself again. It still reeked of suicide, slow madness, the kind of prolonged powerlessness that he’d never coped with well...but he could distinguish those feelings from his own light.

He made himself walk, to move one foot, then the next.

He was still struggling with his light when he reached the third corridor landing, after two flights of steep stairs winding through those fire and moss-blackened walls. Turning the corner carefully at the bottom of the second staircase, he walked through an arch and then the length of the flagstone corridor.

He rounded another turn, expecting another set of stairs.

Instead, a sheer drop greeted him.

There’d been no warning, not even a change in the quality of light. Whatever occurred there had happened far enough below ground that the aboveground structure remained intact.

A deep blackness stretched beneath Revik’s feet. He felt space in front of him for at least ten to fifteen yards.

Waving the torch over the chasm, he tried to get a sense of the depth and width of the space. He was unwilling to relinquish his torch to satisfy his curiosity...especially since Balidor’s men likely already mapped out the basic physical disposition of the scene. He turned the torch to the walls on either side of the hole, and saw burn marks flaring around the mouth.

He began walking back up the corridor, sweeping with the torch, scanning the floors and walls. He saw shoe marks scuffling the dirty floor, and what looked like bare feet...too small to be anything but a child.

Wedged in a crack between flagstones, something reflected back light from the torch’s flame. Sweeping the fire back and forth again, he located the exact spot and bent down to pick the object up.

It was a key. It had an organic coating on it, but the skin was so old and hard that Revik barely recognized it as an organic at all.

It looked like it could be World War II...maybe even earlier.

Holding it up under the torch, the sick feeling came back, this time stronger. He found he didn’t want to hold the key with his bare skin.

Covering his hand with his sleeve, he stuffed it in a pocket.

He made his way slowly back up to the surface.

When he reached the doorway and outside, he walked away from the tower at about twice the speed he’d walked towards it. He climbed over broken stone and debris to where Balidor stood, smoking a hiri.

After being crammed inside that black hole, the air outside smelled almost fresh, despite the still-strong odor of burnt hair and skin and decaying flesh from the crater a few hundred yards in front of him.

He waited until he stood alongside Balidor, then reached into his pocket for the key, using his sleeve again and holding out his hand for Balidor to take it. He didn’t say anything while the other seer examined the organic metal. He just stood there, taking deep breaths of the cold air, trying to get his equilibrium back.

“Where did you find this?”

“Third landing,” Revik said.

“Do you know what this is?” he said. When Revik glanced over, the gray eyes looked hard again, the color of steel. “It looks exactly like the keys we used on the early restraint collars. The ones the Germans used in World War II...”

Revik nodded, gazing out over the courtyard. “That’s what I thought, too.”

“What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” Revik said, his voice close to normal again. “But I know what crossed my mind. That whoever they were holding down there was stuck in that pit for about seventy years...maybe longer.”

Balidor continued to study Revik’s face for a moment.

Then he sighed.

“That’s what I thought too, brother.” Touching his arm, he gestured towards the desolate tower. “...They weren’t able to determine what caused the first blast,” he said. “No residual powder. The only incendiary is natural gas present in deposits in the mountain bedrock itself...but there’s no way that could have been ignited without some way to pierce the stone. There’s no sign of drilling. Surveys show it would have been trapped behind several feet of solid granite. Something natural could have caused a fissure to form, of course, but there would have been some sign. We checked for seismic activity and found none...”

Revik looked up at the sky. It stretched blue overhead, despite dark clouds pooling over the mountains.

He glanced back at Balidor.

“Could we be talking about a seer?” he said.

Balidor didn’t move for a moment.

Then he whistled softly, giving him a sideways smile. “Brother, I am impressed. My own people haven’t come up with that yet, and many of them have been here for several days. As unlikely as it seems, yes, I believe that is a possibility. One we should explore, at any rate, given the evidence...”

“A manipulator?” Revik said in Prexci. “Telekinetic?” he added in English.

“Possibly, yes. It would explain a number of factors.”

Revik felt himself fighting to breathe again.

After a moment, he shook his head. “Someone would have felt them behind the Barrier.” He looked at Balidor, fighting the remnants of pain lingering after his stint in the chamber of horrors. “...There was a child down there,” he said. “After the blast. Could someone be breeding manipulators? Terian’s always had that thing with genetics...”

Balidor shrugged with one hand, his face unreadable.

“Your observation about the child is troubling,” he said. “...But a lot in this incident is troubling.” He gave Revik a thin-lipped smile. “I must remind myself that the Displacement is coming. That perhaps it is not so strange that more than one intermediary being might be on Earth at this time.”

At Revik’s frown, his eyes grew thoughtful.

“Do you still think Terian is connected to this somehow?”

Revik glanced at the tower.

He felt the nausea return, the feeling of despair. Brushing it out of his light as best he could, he rested his hands on his hips.

Instead of answering Balidor’s question, he asked another.

“Why children?” he said.

Balidor shrugged again with one hand, his face impassive. “Perhaps the children were incidental. Or...” he said more gently. “Perhaps he thought he was helping them. Freeing them, perhaps?”

Revik stared out over the broken courtyard. His eyes traveled back to the edge of the crater where members of the Adhipan could still be seen picking through body parts and rubble.

Whoever the seer was, if there had been a manipulator locked down there—or any seer, for that amount of time—they would be insane.

If it was a telekinetic seer, their existence had been kept incredibly quiet. If they’d been found in the forties, or even the thirties...after Syrimne, or even while Syrimne was still alive, it would explain why someone had hidden them away so thoroughly. Whoever it was could have figured out a way to clone Syrimne. The child could be the product of that.

Or perhaps it was just someone from the school who wandered down there after the blast, looking for a place to hide.

Seers didn’t do well alone. In fact, they usually died. Whoever that seer had been, if they’d been locked up alone for seventy-plus years, they should be dead.

He thought of Allie then, and for an instant, the separation pain grew debilitating.

A manipulator. Whoever they were, they would be interested in her.

Especially if they were male.

He shook it off, clenching his jaw before he looked at Balidor.

“Yeah,” he said finally. “Maybe.”

Taking another deep breath, he began walking back over the rubble to join the remainder of the search team. As he walked, he felt the hunter’s mask fall back over his mind, stripping his thoughts almost entirely of emotion.

That time, when Revik walked, Balidor followed him.

REVIK LAY ON a single bed in the temporary barracks Balidor set up outside of Darjeeling. This would be the last night in these accommodations—at least for him. He would be joining Balidor’s ground team for the next few days, which meant sleeping in tents on partially frozen ground, at least until the helicopter picked him up, which Balidor promised him would be within four days...five at most.

He’d still had no word from Allie.

Staring up at a whitewashed ceiling, head resting on his arm, he found himself thinking about the last message from Balidor.

Tarsi had extended her timeline. No reason given, not even a hello aimed in his direction...not from either of them.

In any case, it spurred his offer to stay on with the Adhipan.

He wondered now if that had been such a great idea. Despite Balidor’s assurances, he wanted to talk to Allie himself. Obviously, she wasn’t going to ask for him, so he needed to make it clear to her that he wanted to see her. He couldn’t leave India with her without breaking the law. Hell, he didn’t even know if he could take her from Tarsi’s legally, at least not without formal permission...but he could probably convince Tarsi to let him talk to her, at least.

He’d shared all of his various imprints of Terian and Terian’s different bodies with the Adhipan already. No one knew Terian’s light as well as he did, so they’d welcomed his offer to help...but they were better trackers than he was.

They didn’t really need him.

It had been nine days since he reached Seertown from Egypt.

He’d been delayed in Cairo, too. First by the paranoia of the infiltration team, then by Maygar and his ridiculous attempts to buy him off, then to piss him off. Since he’d left her in Gatwick, pretty much nothing had gone the way he’d planned. He’d thought he would be lying in a very different bed right now...not surrounded by half-clothed infiltrators, staring at a water-stained ceiling, wondering if he should take a shower just so he could jerk off without one of the other seers making a crack, or worse, offering to help.

Because he’d focused on her and sex in the same breath, he felt her.

She backed off the instant his light coiled into hers, but the pain lingered, making it impossible for him to disconnect. He stayed with her, like he did every time they bumped up against one another in that space, pulling at her for fleeting impressions, but they weren’t enough to calm his paranoia.

She was busy. Working. Tarsi had her hard at work on something. It was stressing her out, whatever it was, upsetting her—

Tarsi appeared.

Unapologetic, she slammed him out of their Barrier space.

Revik was left lying there, half-crippled as the connection severed. He lay there a few moments longer, fighting to slow his breathing as the pain gradually dissipated. When he recovered enough, he sat up, holding the blanket around his waist as his feet touched the floor.

He found a female seer also awake, and watching him. She smiled when she caught his gaze, humor in her eyes.

When he looked away, she laughed aloud.

“Hey. Newlywed,” she said in Mandarin. “What the hell are you doing out here? Why aren’t you at home? I’d be pissed off, if I was your wife...”

Without answering, Revik pushed the covers aside, getting to his feet.

“Hey,” she said, laughing. “Can you walk?”

Grabbing a towel off the chair at the end of the bed, he headed for the shower without giving the female so much as another glance. Her laughter followed him out...until the closing corridor door cut it thankfully off.

REVIK BLINKED BACK sweat.

Reinforcing his grip on the Chinese-made QBZ-97 assault rifle they’d given him, he held it in both hands as he walked through the trees.

It had been a long time since he’d done this kind of field op.

He’d also never favored this particular gun. He preferred the LR-300s and M16s, where he could fire sighted from full cover; he couldn’t do that with the 97. He also didn’t like where the magazine sat on the gun; it made for a slower reload, and the safety was oddly placed...not like he’d need that much out here.

The Adhipan moved fast, and nearly silently through the forested hillsides.

Revik was less than a third of the age of most of the seers tracking with him, but out-of-shape from his time with Terian and almost no real exercise in the months since. He found himself limping along like a middle-ager, fighting to keep his breathing quiet enough to avoid pissing off the rest of the team.

His muscles had started to protest less than halfway through day one; now, on day three, he was doing marginally better. He’d been going out of his way to eat a lot and then powering through, pushing himself when it hurt. The least he could do was start building back some muscle while he was out here.

They hadn’t had a lot of solid hits, but they were still on the trail.

That fact alone told Revik one thing; whatever it was they were following, it likely wasn’t a Terian body. Unlike for Galaith, improvisation wasn’t entirely unheard of for Terian, but it was still exceedingly rare.

Only two seers left the Sikkim school on this particular trail.

The Adhipan picked them out initially because among all those who survived, they alone left with human guides. Their emotional signatures didn’t match that of the rest of the survivors, either, and instead of heading south with the other refugees, towards Nayabazar or Darjeeling, they headed due north, into the mountains. Later, they found a resonance between one of those seers and the origins of the blast.

The day before, Revik had walked the interior of a cave with the others.

They’d found evidence of a campfire and discarded bedding...as well as imprints from humans and seers having slept there. The imprints were already a few days old, but blood stains on the cave floor made a trail into the trees.

At the end of that trail, they’d found two rough graves, only half-finished, illustrating the end of the two human guides. Revik and several in the Adhipan found child-sized footprints in the dirt. They’d done extensive scans, but came up close to blank.

Someone was protecting the two seers they followed. Whoever was doing it, they were likely operating from elsewhere, not with them on the ground.

Sensing movement, Revik glanced sideways.

Balidor met his gaze, then motioned to him with his eyes.

Revik followed the seer’s fingers as they indicated up the nearby bank. He was being asked to scout the ridge. Nodding once, he kept his feelings to himself as he turned and began vaulting, as quietly as he could, up the hill.

He knew he was clumsy by Adhipan standards, but he’d already gotten better in the days he’d been out there. Balidor made it pretty clear he wanted Revik along for his own reasons, at least in part—both to test him, and to get a sense of how he fit in with the rest of the group. Given how rarely they admitted new seers to the Adhipan, as well as Revik’s reputation with the Rooks, Balidor also likely hoped Revik might prove himself to his team.

Maybe because he was genuinely beginning to like the Adhipan leader...or maybe just pride...Revik found he was trying to meet Balidor’s expectations.

Or, at the very least, to not embarrass himself.

Reaching the top of the hill only slightly out of breath, he remained in the trees dotting the steep edge of the highest point. He kept his silhouette off the ridgeline as he scanned the valley below.

Splitting his consciousness between his eyes and the Barrier, with some small portion still with the Adhipan in the ravine on the other side, he looked for movement. From the Barrier, he looked for any sign of life bigger than your average monkey.

He got nothing.

He made roughly the same sweep twice, just to be certain. He was about to make his way back down the same incline...

When something pinged his consciousness.

It was sharp enough, and near enough, that he jumped. He turned his head as if it had been pulled by a puppet wire.

...and found himself looking at a very young, very dirty seer.

Maybe twenty years of age—so appearing closer to thirteen in human years—the boy stared at him from less than fifteen feet away. His face wore strong, Asiatic features.

His black eyes seemed to bore into Revik’s.

The boy gripped the bark of the nearest tree with corpse-white hands that might have been completely untouched by sun. He wore what looked like misshapen adult’s clothes, also Asian, and human-made. He’d belted the shirt and pants around himself to keep them up, but his feet and head were bare. Red with scratches and coated in mud and bits of greenery, his feet had swollen from walking.

Revik blinked in surprise, sure he was hallucinating.

When his blink ended, the boy had gone.

Revik felt the seers in the valley below reacting before he fully believed what he’d seen. He hadn’t lost his connection to the Adhipan throughout the brief encounter, and now he felt them vaulting up the hill behind him, faster than he had—a lot faster, he realized.

The part of him that had felt a brief flush of pride at how quickly he was regaining his speed realized he’d been kidding himself. Now that they were motivated, they moved through the trees almost too quickly for his light to track. Watching them close the gap, he thought he’d need to train every day for months to be able to match even the slowest of them.

The female, Laren, reached him first.

Without a word, Revik pointed to where the boy had been, sending her a more detailed imprint as a snapshot from his light.

She disappeared into the trees without hesitation.

Revik stood there a second longer, then followed to cover her even as four other seers reached the same part of the ridge, Grent and Balidor among them. Embarrassed now that he’d hesitated, Revik fanned out with the rest of the team down the opposite hillside, following Balidor’s commands from the Barrier, doing his best to move as quietly and as quickly as the rest of them. As the fan spread down the hill, he kept his consciousness split, scanning and shielding more tightly as he was forced to cover more ground.

Then Laren signaled all of them, and he got the image of the boy again, clearly, standing on the branch of a tree above ground, on the other side of a grassy clearing. The boy stood about thirty yards away from her.

Like the rest of them, Revik shifted direction at once, running through the trees at top speed to reach where she stood. He’d been closer than over half of them, but he still reached the clearing dead last, and the most out of breath.

He approached the area where Laren and four others had their guns trained on the kid, moving cautiously until his physical eyes pulled the boy’s outline from the trees.

He studied the dirty face.

That feeling of familiarity was back, although still vague, more of a flicker than anything. He was still trying to decide its source when he realized the boy was staring at him, too.

In fact, the boy stared at him alone...ignoring the Adhipan seers.

That fact didn’t go unnoticed by the others.

They looked between him and the boy, and Revik felt a few in the Adhipan scan him—less than politely, in that they neither asked nor were they open about it—in an attempt to discern if Revik recognized the boy as well. He let them in, partly in irritation, but mainly to see if they could determine the nature of the connection.

None did, at least not that they were willing to share with him.

The boy’s expression remained flat, but the intensity of his interest in Revik shimmered off him in waves.

Revik found himself moving closer in reflex, when Laren and then Balidor each held up a hand, motioning unmistakably at Revik to remain where he was.

Hold your position! Laren sent, sharp. Look at the structures!

Revik focused above the boy’s head.

Blinking his way from the Barrier to his physical eyes then back again, he focused his aleimi, sure he’d scanned him wrong. Convinced at his second look, he watched the crystalized geometries rotate in awe.

When the boy didn’t seem to be blocking him, he tried to get a closer look.

He recognized some of the basic shapes from Allie’s light, but not in the configuration he could see now. Aleimic structures changed from use; they grew, but they also reconfigured and clustered when specialized functions were exercised, particularly if those functions involved using more than one structure at the same time. The geometries that spiraled up from the boy’s head looked like a fountain of mathematical fireworks, highlighted from recent use...but also from repeated use, over a long period of time.

From the Barrier, he looked like Allie would look after about fifty years of manipulation training, followed by ten more in the field.

There was no way the boy standing in front of him could be old enough for what lived above his head.

STOP! Balidor sent sharply.

Revik hadn’t realized he’d taken another step.

His eyes remained on the boy. Somehow, the emotion that rose in him came closest to pity.

Laren took a step forward, too, shielding Revik.

The boy switched his focus to her.

Revik tensed. He watched Laren rearrange her hands on the gun. Her aim never left the boy’s head. He looked between Laren and her target, then focused back on the boy, studying his mirror-like eyes.

Laren took another step and Revik felt it—without knowing exactly what it was, or where it originated above that small head.

He lowered his own gun reflexively, raising a hand.

“Stop!” he said aloud. “Laren! Don’t move!”

Holding his own gun out, away from his body, Revik raised his other hand, straightening out of a combat crouch. He stepped out from behind Laren.

“Hey!” he yelled in Hindi, drawing the boy’s eyes. “Over here! Will you talk to us? We won’t hurt you!”

For a moment, no one moved.

Revik felt the charge of light snake around the boy’s head.

He felt the other members of the Adhipan focus on those same structures, watching light flicker in concentric rings through minute geometries above the small, dark crown. He felt the same tension in the other infiltrators that had risen in his own light. Like biting a live wire, it flowed from one of them to the next, sparking their own aleimi.

Revik held the gun further out from his body.

On impulse, he tried sending to the boy.

Are you all right? he sent. Are you hurt? What can we do for—

You, he sent. I know you.

Revik felt the Adhipan looking at him again. He swallowed thickly, but kept his thoughts even, and unshielded.

Are you sure? he sent.

The boy smiled. His eyes looked cold, predatory.

Okay, Revik sent. Okay. I don’t remember everything, I—

You can’t hurt me. Not anymore!

Revik gestured in agreement. We won’t try...I promise.

Anger curled out of those detailed structures.

‘We?’ he snarled. You’re a ‘we’ now? You left me there! You did it! You promised you wouldn’t, and you did it anyway!

Revik tensed. At a loss, he glanced at the Adhipan hunters. He didn’t have to scan them to know what they were thinking. But explaining to this kid with the nuclear bomb hovering above his head that he had probably left him while he’d been working for the Rooks—and that since then he’d had his memory wiped and had been doing everything he knew to try and make amends—probably wouldn’t help.

Not given what they’d found at that burnt-out school.

Not a school, the kid sent. You know it’s not a fucking school! You lied about that too! You lied about everything! The older look returned to his eyes, the predatory one. But I’m not alone now. And I’m not as stupid anymore. So you can tell your dogs to go home. I won’t go anywhere with you...

A tremor rippled Revik’s spine.

Yeah, he sent to the boy. You don’t seem stupid to me. He fought to think. I’m sorry. I really don’t remember...

I should kill you.

Revik felt light spark around him dangerously once more. Holding his free hand higher in the air, he set his gun down on a flat rock near his feet.

I’ve got a mate. Do you want to kill her, too?

The boy’s eyes narrowed. Revik hesitated at the look there. When the boy’s eyes remained ice, Revik raised a hand.

No cave, he sent. No guns. No wires. No schools. No one will take you anywhere you don’t want to go. No one will hurt you...

Liar, the boy sent. You’re a liar!

Not this time.

You killed me! You destroyed me!

His words hurt Revik somehow. You’re still here, he sent.

You’re a bad man...a bad fucking man!

Not anymore, he sent. Whatever I did before, I’m sorry.

The boy gave a thick laugh, older than his body’s years. The hatred in his thoughts grew more palpable.

Nervous, Revik glanced at Balidor. The older seer signaled with his hand for Revik to keep going, but to be careful. Revik gestured in affirmative.

Then the woman, Laren, rearranged her hands on her gun. As she did, she took a half-step forward.

The movement swung the boy’s eyes back to her face.

Before Revik could warn her, something slammed at his light.

His energy dropped so severely that his knees crumpled. It came out of nowhere, pulling at him from above...like a vacuum to his light from above his head. Out of his peripheral vision, he saw several members of the Adhipan stagger as well. He held out a hand in a daze. His knees hit the dirt as his fingers smacked the same rock where he’d placed his gun.

He heard Laren give a strangled cry...

Just before there was a loud cracking sound.

Then something flew past him, pushing air out of the way so quickly he ducked, flinching from its path in reflex. When he could focus again, he saw another seer between him and the downed female.

“Laren!” the male screamed.

Grent ran for his mate.

He moved so fast that Revik couldn’t follow the motion with his eyes. He couldn’t move, in fact...he watched the other male in shock as his mind replayed the sound of bone cracking. He realized what Grent had already felt.

Laren lay where she’d fallen in the undergrowth, blood on her lips.

Grent cradled her in his arms. Her neck hung at a wrong angle. Her eyes remained open, staring up at the trees.

The male screamed, a sound that ripped open Revik’s heart.

None of the Adhipan moved.

Then, slowly Revik staggered to his feet.

Dazed from the hit at his light, he stared at Grent and Laren.

Fear, then rage wound through him. He saw the shock hit Grent’s light in concentric waves. Unable to watch the male’s realization of what had occurred, he looked for the boy. Finding him standing motionless beside the same tree, Revik focused on the smile playing at the bow-like lips. Without thinking, he snatched his gun off the rock and raised it to his shoulder...

The metal stock ripped out of his hands.

Something slammed him in the middle of the chest. Whatever it was, it had the weight of a thick, oak plank. The force behind it was almost mechanical, like being hit by a wrecking ball.

It threw him off his feet.

Arms and legs pin-wheeling, he tried to slow himself. Greenery streaked by as he experienced another sharp drop in his light.

Then his back hit something hard. His head, too.

His body crumpled to the wet ground. Protruding objects met his back, legs and arms. Everything around him started to gray. Warmth covered his head and neck; he smelled his own blood. He looked up, fighting to focus his eyes as a tall form stepped out of the trees near him.

The female seer looked down at him, her blue eyes shining a turquoise that was nearly iridescent. Like the boy, her face was Asian, with high cheekbones. She held a long gun fitted with organics that made the Chinese models carried by the Adhipan look like children’s toys.

Blowing hiri smoke through straight black hair to get it out of her eyes, she walked over to the tree where he lay.

She dropped the thin cigarette, grinding it out with the toe of her boot.

“Hello, lover,” she said in Russian.

Raising her heel, she aimed it at his face.

Everything went dark all at once.