Allie's War Season Three (125 page)

"Nenzi and Allie are with him, Jon," he said. "I’m sure Wreg will be fine."

“There’s a friggin’ hurricane brewing outside!”

“Weather is unlikely to harm or deter brother Wreg,” Balidor said, glancing up at the ceiling. “Although I admit, I find myself glad we won’t be traveling by air anytime soon...”

Looking back at the two female seers, his gray eyes blurred slightly. Jon realized he was still reading one or both of them, tracking the details of their conversation.

The storage warehouse stood right alongside the main docks, essentially a converted airplane hangar, or perhaps an old ship-building yard switched over at the end of World War II. Most of it now appeared to be filled with those forty-foot, rectangular storage crates, what got hauled on flatbed barges from overseas, and hooked to semi trucks to transport cargo across the country. Jon glanced around the cavernous space, noting again how eerily quiet it was, apart from the storm raging outside. He knew Jorag and a bunch of the other security-bent seers were patrolling the perimeter, keeping the humans out and anyone else who might get nosy about the Humvee convey that just arrived, but the silence still made Jon nervous.

"...Anyway," Balidor added, pulling Jon’s eyes back to him. "We could all stand to blow off some steam. Nenzi and your sister more than the rest of us, I would wager. We still have no idea what we will find upon returning to the city."

Jon felt his jaw harden. "You mean they did this for
fun?"

Balidor gave him a sideways look, chuckling aloud that time.

"You'd best get used to it, Jon," he advised. "Wreg and Nenzi, they're cut from the same cloth in many ways. In fact, your boyfriend has a few hundred years’
more
military training than your sister's husband. So really, you're fighting a losing battle there..."

Jon frowned. Even so, curiosity pulled at him, too.

"Yeah," he muttered. Shoving his hands in his pockets, he grew conscious of how he must look, given the oxygen mask and the mud-encrusted armor. Blowing it off, he shrugged. "Yeah," he said again, glancing at Balidor. "I've been meaning to ask you about that. About that whole thing of Wreg being trained initially by the Adhipan...?"

"Before my time, Jon," Balidor said with a dismissive wave. "Tarsi was in charge back then. You'd best direct your questions to her."

"But you must have
known
him back then," Jon persisted, ignoring the reluctance he could see in the set of the seer's mouth. "Weren't both of you ID'd as Adhipan when you were kids? Allie told me that's how they used to do it. That they pulled kids from families, based on their potential rank, or whatever...?"

Balidor sighed. Making a 'more or less' gesture with one hand, he tilted his palm like a bird in flight. If anything, that reluctance in his mouth grew more pronounced.

"Yes," he said, blunt.

"So?" Jon said. "Aren't the two of you around the same age?"

Turning, Balidor raised an eyebrow at him. "Not exactly," he said, giving Jon a disbelieving look. "...You're only off by about two hundred years, Jon. I was already running my own squads by the time Wreg showed up in the Pamir."

"Which would have been...when?" Jon pressed.

"I don't know exactly," Balidor sighed, clicking a little in annoyance. "I didn’t do a lot with the new recruits back then. I got them when they were adults, Jon. They brought the new kids in when they were only around 14-15 years old."

"So he would have looked around six or seven in human years?" Jon mused aloud.

"Approximately, yes."

"So you never once saw him? Not even once?"

"That was the 1700s, Jon," Balidor reminded him. "...If you'll recall your human history, a lot was going on in the world. I had teams in Europe and the Americas at the time, and that was pre-First Contact, so we had to be damned careful about not being ID'd as non-human. Things worked a lot differently in the Adhipan back then, and not only because we had around twenty times our current numbers. If you think I had time to chase down every new recruit that gave their teachers a spot of trouble, you'd best think again..."

“He gave his teachers trouble?” Jon said.

Seeing Jon's expression, Balidor let out a sigh, and what looked like an involuntary smile. Shrugging, he shifted his eyes back towards Chandre and her Thai-looking friend.

"Fine. I may have seen him
one
time, Jon...just one."

Jon raised an eyebrow in an unspoken question under the oxygen mask.

Balidor shrugged. "I remember a young seer Tarsi brought me in to assess,” he conceded after another pause. “Smart kid. Aced all of his exams, even though he came from a modest background and had no clan sponsors to speak of. Had a particular knack for mathematics, if I recall...and art. But the kid was a troublemaker...a born leader, he used it mainly to incite mischief in the other recruits...and he didn’t respond well to authority figures.”

Jon grunted, smiling almost without meaning to. “Shocker.”

“...Yes, well.” Balidor’s smile crept out further. “...Not unless he’d made up his mind that they ‘deserved’ his respect...”

Jon grunted again, nodding. He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets.

Balidor added, “Tarsi brought me to see him, likely hoping I'd have suggestions on how to motivate him. Or perhaps to give her some ideas on where to place him..." He laughed a little, as if involuntarily, his eyes distant. "...When I got there, he was on the ceiling of the classroom, hanging there from these bizarre, hook-like contraptions. They turned out to be cave-crawling gloves and shoes he'd made out of a bunch of old rifle parts along with shovel bits he'd sharpened and worn down to exactly fit his knees and hands..."

Balidor chuckled again, making a conciliatory gesture with one hand.

"...It was pretty ingenious, really."

Still thinking, as if remembering the image, he grunted, breaking into a wider smile.

"...Tarsi was pissed. And a little embarrassed too, I think, since she talked him up to me on the way there. He was a pain in the ass from day one, your Wreg."

Jon flinched a little at his wording, but didn't speak. He watched Balidor's expression change as he continued to stare off, thinking...right before it grew slightly pained. The look was there and gone, but Jon felt himself frown.

"What?" he said. "What aren't you telling me, Balidor?"

The seer only shook his head, his eyes hardening to the color of iron.

"No, Jon," he said. "You'll need to ask Wreg himself if you want to know more." Shaking off whatever emotion lived there, he clapped Jon on the shoulder, his eyes losing that heavier cast. "You know, brother, I'm really not the person to convince you that you're not completely crazy to be involving yourself with Wreg. If you want reassurance on that point, I would talk to Nenzi. Or your sister...maybe one of the other rebels. Someone who knows him now, in the present."

"Ex
-rebels," Jon muttered, shoving his hands in his pockets. "And Allie hasn't exactly been part of the cheering squad for me and Wreg."

Balidor's smile grew more warm as he met Jon's gaze.

"I think you have already made up your mind, Jon," the Adhipan commander observed, his eyes shrewd. "Why unduly stress yourself, now that the decision is made?"

Jon nodded, hearing the logic of the other's words, even as his jaw hardened.

He ignored the way the Adhipan leader’s eyes seemed to look through him, perhaps to his light, or to something else he saw in him.

Had
he made up his mind? Supposing he had, what did that mean exactly? Despite what Wreg said to him before they left for Argentina, Jon wasn't seer, not really. He didn't really have to make the same life-or-death-commitment-thing that Allie and Revik had been faced with.

So why did it feel like he did?

Remembering Wreg's words the one and only time they'd broached that topic, he couldn't help but frown. Maybe he would need to find out a little more about Wreg.

He wondered if he could ask Revik. Buy him a bottle of his favorite bourbon back at the hotel, get him drunk enough to start telling stories from the war. Jon knew his brother-in-law got pretty talkative when he drank enough.

Then again, maybe he'd get
too
talkative, end up telling Jon a bunch of things Jon really didn't want to know. He could just ask Wreg, of course. But he wasn't sure he was ready to have
that
conversation, either...especially knowing where it could lead.

Standing next to him, Balidor chuckled again, giving Jon another openly amused look. "If you wanted someone easy and uncomplicated, I'm afraid you've made a questionable choice in mates, brother," he said gently.

That smile remained visible in his gray eyes as he rubbed Jon's shoulder a last time, then let him go, walking towards Chandre and the SCARB seer.

Jon watched Balidor go, still reacting to several words in the seer's last statement.

He stood there long enough for Balidor to nearly reach the two female seers.

Resigning himself to let it go for now, Jon was about to walk after him, when something caught his eye, in the shadows down the nearest row of forty-foot-long cargo crates.

That whole area of the warehouse lay in near darkness, the height of the containers blocking out most of the light from the overhead lamps before it could reach the narrow corridors between them. Jon could smell the rust from the sitting containers, along with the fainter taste of brine and a mustier smell beneath both, one that reminded him more of his grandmother’s attic when he and Allie were kids.

Jon squinted at a form standing there, sensing the presence without being able to tell anything about it. He couldn’t see them well enough to discern much, either. He stepped towards them hesitantly, right before glancing around himself again.

“Hello?” he said. “Who is that?”

He glanced around again when the figure only stood there, but now that Balidor had moved out of earshot, he was pretty much alone.

“Hey!” he said. “Not funny, with the whole freak out the human thing, okay?”

“Jon,” the shadow whispered. “Come here a second, okay? I need to show you something!”

Jon frowned.

“Who is that?” he said. “Neela? Is that you?”

“It’ll only take a minute!” the voice said, urgent. “Please! Before Balidor comes back. I need to talk to you. It’s about our sister, the Esteemed Bridge...”

Jon’s frown deepened.

He still couldn’t make out the face of whoever it was, or even much in the way of a body, other than the fact that they were female and on the small side.

Could it be Neela? Why would Neela hide in the dark, whispering at him? Why would she be so heavily shielded from him, if Jorag and the others were already policing the space? And, more to the point, why would she want to talk to
him
about Allie? Was she shielding herself to keep anyone else from hearing what was on her mind?

Jon glanced around himself again, puzzled. No warning bells were going off, though, just the weirdness of a voice whispering at him out of the shadows of a row of brightly-painted cargo crates that had faded to muted blues, grays and whites. Well, that, and a voice Jon almost recognized, but not quite...and the fact that Neela wore a shield unlike any he’d ever felt before, in all of his sight-training with Wreg.

When he glanced back at Chandre and the Thai-looking woman, they seemed perfectly at ease as they discussed strategy only a dozen meters away. So did Balidor, as he stood at a polite distance, his stance totally relaxed as he waited for them to acknowledge him.

Jorag cleared this place out an hour ago. Whoever was whispering at him, it had to be one of theirs. Anyway, Balidor was like, one of the strongest seers alive.

He would have felt if anything weird was going down.

Neela said she wanted to tell him something about Allie. Maybe she and Jorag and the others had run into Allie herself, out on the military base somewhere, and she and Revik and Wreg needed help. Maybe they’d gotten themselves into some kind of trouble and didn’t want Balidor to know, at least not yet, so they were pulling Jon in, instead.

Sighing a bit, and already irritated, Jon shoved his hands in his pockets, then walked towards the woman’s voice.

It wasn’t until he got within a few yards of her outline, that he pulled up short, staring at the woman standing there, sure at first that he must be dreaming.