Allie's War Season One (10 page)

Shrugging. he adds,
There are more seers here than you see now, Allie. A trained infiltrator can eliminate their frequency from regular perception in the Barrier, mainly through blending with the lights that make up their environment.

Another thought trickles in, one that has already occurred to me.

They cannot see us, Allie,
he confirms in answer to my unspoken question.
At least not in a regular scan. I am shielding us. There are ways to track anyone, of course...

I stare down, trying to count them.

It is impossible.

Seers have only three real options,
he tells me.
We can live with traditional, religious seers in seclusion, and according to their holy precepts. It is not a bad life, but it is not for all seers, just as it would not be for all humans. The second option is to be owned...to sell our sight to humans. It provides some freedoms, providing one is skilled and has an employer who is fair. But it is risky...a kind of voluntary slavery.

He adds,
The third option is to join the Rooks...or ‘the Org,’ as they call themselves. They are an underground network of seers with an anti-human agenda.

Which are you?
I say, unthinking.

He pauses, letting me know that the question is, indeed, rude.

Presently, I am all but the third,
he says then.

I watch a cluster of seers toy with a crowd of humans, changing their emotions back and forth like ocean currents. I feel their laughter as we pass.

They are no more dangerous than humans,
he says, a little defensively.
There are mature elements, and less mature. Kind, and less kind.
Thinking, he shrugs.
Some are bitter about being enslaved, of course...

I stare at him.
No more dangerous than humans?

Well, perhaps that is an exaggeration.

You think?
I burst out.
What are you all
doing
here?

Surprise and anger flare his light.

What do you mean what are we doing here? We live here! Same as you!

I refocus on the seer lights, fighting back more words.

Those lights come in more colors than my mind has names for, their textures ranging from smooth as milk to jagged electric sparks. I notice they differ far more from one another than the lights of humans do, which all seem to occupy the same rough spectrum of gray.

Moreover, the seers are chameleons, changing their skin from contact with one another and threads of light through which they pass.

I feel my companion’s light change subtly and...

We pop out somewhere else.

I find myself staring at the glowing hands of a Betty Boop clock on the wall near the ceiling and it hits me that I am in the diner where I used to work. I watch blob-like human forms move through a catacomb of vinyl booths. Unlike before, I know a few of these blobs. When I concentrate a little harder, I recognize Sasquatch the cook, Cory behind the bar.

I try to determine if any of the light blobs are Cass––

To learn a place or thing from another’s light...this is called imprinting,
he tells me.
I took this one from you.

I look down. My light-feet are standing in a man’s plate of ham and eggs. He eats through my ankles, but I feel his light fingers and tongue and jerk away, repulsed. My companion grabs my light arm before I can float across the room.

I am what is called an infiltrator,
he says.
A seer trained to find things behind the Barrier. It is a trade, one that is learned, often at a young age.

A spy?
I venture.

He doesn’t like this, I can tell.

Still, he shrugs it off.

A human equivalent might be espionage,
he sends diplomatically.
It is how my human employer sees it, certainly. For Rook infiltrators, the designation of espionage is more accurate. They do not follow Code and operate under a quasi-military structure, as you see reflected in the spatial representation of their network of seers.

At my bewilderment, he adds,

...the Pyramid.

I am back to looking around the diner.

I don’t understand,
I say.
How are we here?

Resonance,
he sends.
It is what we seers do. We resonate with things. Everything has a vibration. Every person, every place, every event. You can see a past event if you can recall its imprint, or if you resonate strongly enough with someone who was present. The future is more difficult.
His light body emits a shrug.
...For obvious reasons. Even in the present, imprints change. People change, although usually not enough to fool an experienced tracker.

His light sparks, hardening and softening in waves.

There are exceptions,
he adds.
These things are very complicated in terms of functionality, Alyson, but the principle is simple. Resonance means things that have the same vibration are drawn to one another. Everything in the Barrier operates thus.

But what
is
this?
I ask, waving a light hand over the diner.
Are we on Earth?

Yes,
he sends at once.
...And no.
Reacting to my exasperation, he adds,
It is a level of the Barrier. The Barrier is not material. ‘Where’ has a different meaning here. It is closer to ‘what.’ But we are close to the ‘what’ of Earth. Here, its ‘where’ is less important.

When I want to argue, he cuts me off.

...
Simply grasp the basics for now. Your consciousness must learn to split in order to grasp it fully, Esteemed Bridge. All seers must learn to be in two places at once...to hold two views of reality at once. It is normal for us.

Without waiting for my reaction, he sends out a flicker of warning.

One other thing,
he says, hovering over a family dining on hamburgers.
And this is important, Allie. While it is true that the Barrier is where we seers have the most power, it is also the place we are most vulnerable. When you operate outside of the Barrier, you are invisible, Allie. Powerless, like a human...but untraceable. Inside the Barrier, you can be attacked.

I don’t know what this means, but fear ripples my light.

I look around, half expecting to get smacked out of nowhere.

I feel more than hear Revik sigh. I can tell I’m taxing whatever levels of patience he possesses. He turns his attention to the blurred human lights, and for an instant, I see through his eyes, an eagle’s view of all humans, everywhere.

It strikes me that really there aren’t so many seers, after all.

We have been around for much longer than humans generally believe,
he says.
In our mythology, humans are the third race. The first is Elaerian...the second Sarhacienne, or Sark, which is us. The third is human. Each race is said to destroy itself at a certain point in its evolutionary cycle, as a means of moving to the next level. Elaerian, the first race, no longer exist outside of the Barrier.

His light turns wistful before he focuses it back on me.

Sarhacienne means “Second” in the seer tongue,
he adds.
What humans believe to be their earliest civilizations were mainly remnants of ours. Egypt. Mesopotamia. Even parts of the Americas and Europe. It is said we did not have sight before the Second Displacement.

He gazes out over the sea of humans.

We did not notice at first when humans began to appear among the animals,
he says.

I am trying to follow his words, but am lost in the images he sends me. I see white stone cities rising and crumbling to dust, chanting seers in caves high in the mountains, the strange, water-like Elaerian with giant glowing eyes and beautiful laughing faces.

We believe a third Displacement is coming,
he sends, glancing at me.

Red starbursts color my light veins, changing them to a deeper scarlet. The diner starts to shimmer like smoke, then fade...

...When fingers abruptly clasp my light wrist.

He enfolds my body with his, and in no time at all, he is all I feel. The diner reemerges, the blobs of human light, the plastic cat crouching by the old fashioned cash register on the counter.

Even after it all comes back, he doesn’t let go of me.

What happened?
he asks.

You’re kidding, right?
How would I know?

He is upset though, which startles me. He continues to hold me tightly in his light arms.
You must be calm when you are in the Barrier, Esteemed Bridge! Calm! Emotions change your frequency!

I’m sorry,
I say, more out of confusion than knowing why I’m apologizing.

Do not be sorry...do as I say!

His fear still sparks through my light. I send calm to him, warmth. I do it instinctively, without really thinking about how or why...and I can tell it startles him, but it affects him, too, enough that he opens, letting me in. After a few seconds more, I feel him beginning to calm.

His light grows more and more still, until it is nearly serene.

Dangerous how?
I ask him then.

He sighs, but still doesn’t pull away from me.

The Rooks are looking for you,
he says.
They would send many seers after us. More than I could handle.

So they really want me dead? These Rooks?

He hesitates.
Yes.
He pauses. .
..Or with them.

With them?
I think about this, remembering Terian’s words.
And that would be bad?

We should not talk about this here, Allie.

I look around the diner, then ask anyway.
So what is a Rook exactly? Just a renegade seer? One of the terrorists the news is always talking about?

He looks at me, his light once more a pale blue.

They are the enemy,
he sends simply.

6

TERIAN

THE CORPSE OF a man who died in his early twenties lay with artistic precision on a stainless steel table.

Clear tubes protruded from his throat, from veins in his arms, legs, his stomach. He was additionally fitted with several color-coded sets of electrodes that dotted patches of his bare skin, a computerized headband and the more conventional saline I.V. The organic-looking headband with its soft, skin-like texture blinked rhythmically, the only light not coming from one of the four monitors that dominated the walls of the bone-white room.

A technician adjusted settings on a rolling console beside the steel table, utilizing a standard interface and keyboard that projected data and findings to one of those thin screens that covered a portion of the organic-coated wall. Fluid coursing through the clear tubes disappeared into the same wall, changing color subtly soon after each adjustment the technician made. Temple electrodes on the corpse’s head flashed a dark blue once the fluid stabilized, signaling that another piece of the organic end of the transfer had been completed.

Fogged pupils stared blindly at the ceiling, irises and whites the same milky gray. As the tubes carried the genetic virus to their host, the eyes changed to an opaque yellow, the color of daffodils...or strong urine, the technician thought.