Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (106 page)

“The bombs,” Feigran said, as if that were the most obvious thing in the world.

“Bombs?” Revik said.

His alarm sharpened, even as he reached out with his hands and light, clasping the other seer’s cold fingers.

“What bombs?” he said. “Who’s trying to kill us, Feigran? The Americans?”

“Everyone,” Feigran said, matter-of-fact, purring as he stroked Revik’s hand. “Everyone, brother. They will all come after us now…”

34

THE BEACH, REVISITED

It was Revik’s idea.

Most of the truly crazy plans we came up with were. The ones that required us to turn ourselves inside-out, to maybe tear some part of our souls apart in the process.

But desperate times call for desperate measures, as the saying goes.

These were desperate times.

Moreover, my husband might be a romantic at heart, but when it came to military ops, his brain was in charge. His brain was a cold-hearted bastard pragmatist, through and through. He’d warned me about that much back when I first met him.

Of course, he’d often accused me of the same.

I told myself all of those things again now, like I had been for the last eight months.

I told myself those things even as I fought to control my heart rate, sprawled on grainy sand in a ripped up silk gown covered in smoke and powder burns, panting, sand stuck to my face, sand in my mouth and fingernails and hair. I could see trash littered across the edge of the river, including around where I lay. I felt the screaming flare of injuries on different parts of my body. Burns, cuts, scrapes, bruises…and at least one bullet that found its mark with my lack of armor. I hadn’t scanned yet to check, but I was pretty sure the metal passed through.

I knew that wouldn’t matter, either.

I was already dead…I had only to wait out the finale.

I lay there, fighting the exhaustion that penetrated my bones. I told myself this had been Revik’s idea, that the plan had been his…that it wasn’t my fault.

None of it felt very convincing.

And anyway, in the end, the fault had been mine. At the decisive moment, it had been me to pull the trigger…or not pull the trigger, as the case may be.

I’d let him down. I’d really let him down…all of them, really.

The humans too.

Maybe the humans more than anyone.

In the end, it all hinged on timing, and my timing, as usual, completely sucked. No matter how carefully I tried to plan things in the end, I hadn’t gotten out in time.

I hadn’t gotten out in time.

I hadn’t even been close…

I opened my eyes, gasping.

It hit me only then…I’d been on the verge of falling asleep.

Well, passed out would probably be more accurate.

Remembering where I was, I forced myself up, sitting up on the sand in the ripped apart dress, even as I winced from the injury to my leg. Looking down, I realized whoever had shot me among Ute’s people, they’d gotten me in the opposite leg as the one Dragon branded.

Remembering Lily, I forced myself up, to my feet, gasping from the pain.

I had to get to her. I had to detach her from my light, before she died with me.

I’d been thinking about that for what felt like hours now, ever since I saw those bombs streaking down in the sky, heading towards the Forbidden City.

It was the least I could do. For Revik…for Lily herself.

I already had a plan of sorts. I would try to connect Lily’s light to that of my biological parents. Kali was an intermediary, so I was pretty sure I could do it. If I needed to, maybe I could get Maygar involved, too…even Stanley, if I needed to try something with another intermediary’s light.

The thought hurt me somewhere, deep down in my light…but it felt right, too.

Whatever my biological parents had done to me, they wouldn’t do it to Lily.

I knew that somehow. What happened to me was because I was the Bridge. Even as an intermediary, Lily wouldn’t have to suffer the same kind of fate.

Anyway, I knew Dalejem wouldn’t let them.

I doubted Maygar would let them either, come to think of it. I could trust the two of them, even if I still had too much pain around my actual parents to be able to see them clearly.

I’d barely made it to the river.

They’d chased me through gutted and burnt-out buildings once I hit the streets on the other side of the wall. I’d been forced to hide, then to backtrack, trying to lose them again inside the grounds of what looked like some kind of ancient palace by a lake, although gutted now like the rest of the buildings and with garbage and Chinese graffiti all over the walls. I’d crossed through the backyards of yet more opulent-looking houses by the lake until the lake itself started curving too far west, and I had to find my way back north.

They found me again when I reached the edges of another park on the north side of that lake…and I had to try and lose them again in another set of buildings when I ran through alleys to correct my course to due north.

By then, the drug had been slowing me down. A lot.

Enough that I’d been getting pretty damned worried.

In the end, I’d been forced to break from cover, sprinting across an abandoned highway littered with broken-down cars to get to the edges of the canal.

That was when one of them shot me. Right before I leapt over the concrete barrier on the other side of the highway and jumped into the river.

Again, I don’t know why I’d been so determined to do it. Instinct, maybe.

Or maybe stupidity.

The river was swollen from the heavy monsoon rains.

Jem and I had received local reports from some of the Chinese seers about how dams had been giving way in areas outside the city, adding water to the already overtaxed waterways around Beijing itself. Most of those waterways had been expanded in the past forty or fifty years, from what Jem told me, and often more for aesthetic than purely practical purposes when it came to the waterways around the city of Beijing itself. In a water-poor world, waterways had become a sign of prestige for the richest citizens of a lot of cities, not only Beijing.

It was strange to think how much the water situation had changed in just one short year. Now it seemed to rain all over, all the time.

Water was still a problem, just in a totally different way.

Jem said the seers had even been an influence on the building of those canals to a degree, in that many were modeled after the canals, waterfalls and other waterways inside the Forbidden City. Those same canals had been expanded significantly under the Lao Hu, again mainly for aesthetic reasons. It was an image that the Communist Party leaders had been eager to emulate as they redesigned Beijing––not only because it projected success and status to the outside world, but because it served as an obvious, inescapable reminder of the close ties they had with their warrior caste of seers who protected the ancient City.

I remembered that from when I’d lived with the Lao Hu, too.

The relationship between the seers and humans of China had long contained a quasi-mythological element in terms of how it was seen by both parties. That perception and relationship had been cultivated strongly on both ends…that of the holy warrior seers who loyally protected their benevolent human masters.

When I lived there, I grew to realize that the symbolism surrounding that symbiotic relationship had elements of religious fervor around it.

That mythology got cynically wielded at times too, of course, by both sides of the racial divide. They even used it against one another when it was politically expedient, as a part of the negotiating strategy in terms of roles and responsibilities of the different races and castes.

But a hell of a lot of them seemed to buy into it too, both among seers and their human cousins. Voi Pai believed it; I was sure of it. I can’t say I ever fully understood all of the nuances there, in terms of how they’d blended the seer Myths and the original religions and cultural histories of the Han Chinese, but the relationship didn’t feel wholly fabricated to me.

It was even kind of beautiful, in its way. It certainly beat the models of seer-human relations that grew up in most parts of the world.

It hadn’t fully sunk in for me yet that all of that was gone.

So was most of Beijing.

At the time I’d jumped into the river, I hadn’t known any of that, of course.

I’d hit the water, hard, and immediately got slammed into by the trunk of a tree.

Parts of houses had been crashing into one another in that same bloated stretch of river, along with signs and store-fronts and metal poles.

For the first time, I’d been damned glad the electrical grid had already gone down.

Even so, as soon as I hit that water and got slammed between the ripped up wall of a food stand kiosk and that tree, I’d been pretty sure I’d just made a huge mistake.

Then bullets started whizzing by my head.

I’d been forced to duck down fast, taking a mouthful of air before using the debris to pull myself around the edges of the clapboard and metal kiosk and away from the river’s banks. I managed to crawl around the edges of another log before I got past the metal roof of the kiosk itself. Coming up for air with a gasp, I hid behind the thickest part of the trunk and a piece of corrugated metal from the kiosk roof, just in time to hear the ping and crack of more bullets embedding themselves into the wood and ricocheting off the corrugated metal next to my hands.

I’d barely had time to look up at where Ute and her Dreng soldiers fired down on me from above the water line.

I saw Ute there, briefly, holding a rifle to her shoulder, her eye on the sights, her face twisted in a hate-filled scowl.

I saw a few others get closer to the water.

A handful even made feinting runs right up to the very edge of the rushing current, as if on the verge of jumping in. I also saw at least one who appeared to be looking more strategically at the moving debris, as if trying to decide if she should jump on one of the larger pieces, go after me directly.

From what I could see, none of them did, though.

A few seconds later, I’d heard no gunshots at all.

But then, the water was moving really damned fast.

I hadn’t seen the bombs streaking across the sky for what seemed like a really long time later.