Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine (44 page)

Dalejem stared at me, then at Feigran. I could feel him frowning between the two of us in the dark and I sighed again, motioning with my gun for him to open the door.

“It’s done now,” I said.

I felt him trying to decide just how stupid this really was…then he reached out, grasping the metal wheel in the center of the door with both hands. After another bare pause he cranked it hard, counter-clockwise. I could almost feel the seal as it let go.

The Barrier field shifted around us…

I felt Dalejem jump, right before he looked back at me, panting.

“Did you feel that?” he said, his voice heavily accented. “Fuck.”

Fighting to keep my own mind level, I tried to place the accent…couldn’t. Something Asian. If Chinese, then not the accent I usually heard from seers born in China.

“What the fuck
was
that?” he said again, his accent worsening.

“Barrier containment field of some kind,” I said. Blowing a reassuring warmth over his light, I kept my own voice nonchalant. “It’s okay, brother. I already figured that much out. That’s what Feigran referred to before.”

Despite my words, I held my gun up again, two-handed.

I also focused only on the door as I spoke.

“Like the tanks,” I finished, gesturing vaguely with one hand, still gripping the gun with the other. “…You know.”

I felt his understanding, even as his light calmed slightly.

“We’re going ahead with this?” he said. His voice held skepticism again, yet his hand still rested on the L-shaped door handle below the wheel. His fingers looked strangely white through the virtual infrared image of my headset.

“Yes,” I said, nodding.

Too late now anyway…
my mind muttered unhelpfully.

Dalejem gave me a look, but he was already pressing down on the brushed metal door handle, balanced lightly on his toes in a semi-fighting stance. He gripped the rifle tightly in his other hand, balancing the stock on his shoulder and aiming it at the opening.

He opened the door so softly I barely heard the click.

The corridor was immediately flooded with light.

My infrareds switched off, adjusting to the change.

The scene flipped in the same set of seconds, negative to positive, and I blinked, fighting to make sense of the images in front of me.

It was like blacking out…then whiting out in the same millisecond.

The pause had to have been really short. Like, less than a second short. Even so, it felt long. Probably because this immediately felt like a combat situation.

A second meant something totally different in combat.

When my eyes refocused, no one was firing at me, though.

Dalejem and I faced a perfectly round room with high ceilings. Something about the circular shape immediately threw me. Or maybe it was the weird layout.

We stood on a meter-wide walkway elevated at least ten feet off the next highest level of the room. Our level––if you could call it that––circled the entire rim of the room, as did the other steps between us and the center circle on the bottom. Ladders on the far end appeared to be the only way down. It looked like a steep amphitheater, only with no seats. Or maybe one of those zoo cages for bears and lions I remembered from before they modernized that kind of thing.

The bottom level lived below a much steeper step than the one right below us, like a pit surrounded by a few rings of what might have been observation decks. I didn’t see a ladder on that one either, which made me wonder if it was something you needed a passcode or some other security measure to extend.

The steep drop both accentuated the circular shape and did something strange to my depth perception, making it hard to get my arms around the size of the room itself.

It was big though. And it did absolutely nothing to dispel that whole “rats in a cage” vibe.

For a few blinks I felt almost like I might lose my balance and fall.

Despite the weird layout, I saw more or less what I’d expected to see at the end of Feigran’s twisted scavenger hunt. Meaning, below me existed clear signs of a version of the creepy lab I’d seen in my head while we descended that stairwell.

Green mirrored organic walls shone from all of the levels, reminiscent of the original tank where we’d held Revik. I didn’t see metal cages with bars, but I
did
see walled compartments with transparent dividers and windows in my glimpses of those lower levels, kind of like human-sized display cases or really big pet store tanks. Each appeared just big enough to act as a prison cell for a single person, if a brutally small one. An average-sized adult human could maybe take two full strides in any direction before they’d smack into one of the walls, and the ceiling was just high enough that most could have stood upright.

I saw what might have been human or seer shapes inside a few of those, too, although it was hard to tell from the angle where we stood. All of those I saw appeared to be lying on the floor, not moving.

I found myself thinking they were dead.

As if to confirm my suspicion, I noticed blood on the floor outside several of those cells and on the transparent walls of the cells themselves.

Alarm bells kept ringing in the background of my light, impossible to ignore.

Something definitely wasn’t right here…well, something besides the obvious.

The place was too fucking quiet. I didn’t see or feel anyone here working in an official capacity. No guards. No creepy doctors. No tech-guys or “scientists” of any kind. I didn’t feel any real security features, either…none that triggered any level of my aleimi. The place felt like it had been broken in some way, stripped from its original purpose.

Only the inmates remained in the asylum now.

Did their keepers intend for them to die down here, like Feigran said? Just starve to death quietly and out of view? Or were they meant to be preserved at the basest level, like the trees in that frozen city? Just another form of biological machine maintained via timed irrigation and fertilizer and fake sunlight?

As I thought it, my gaze returned to the center of the room. A single raised platform stood there, like a stage set in the middle of that circular floor.

My eyes had glanced over it as I cased the room, a fraction of a second’s pause after we walked in. Now, when I finally went there for real, I realized the platform was covered in yellow-tinted spotlights. A man stood there.

He was staring at us.

Actually, he was staring at me.

My mind stuttered briefly when I met those clear eyes.

Colorless, like faintly tinted glass.

His face blurred to me, lost in shadow and indistinct boundaries, but those eyes glowed up at me, like twin points of living light.

Some part of me got lost there. The familiarity hit me like a punch to the gut. I doubted it even as I saw it…the way I got lost in details on other faces and bodies, sure I saw Revik in every one of them. The same thing happened to me in those months trapped in the Forbidden City, where a certain kind of deep-toned male laugh could get me to freeze, scanning faces and bodies until I’d determined the source and knew it wasn’t him.

Lately I saw pieces of Revik in everyone, in the way some of the mulei fighters moved, in gesturing hands and narrow mouths, black hair or light eyes or even just an infiltrator’s stance, a too-long stare…the way someone clicked at me or carried a gun.

But the instant I felt this other male’s light, I knew it wasn’t Revik, no matter how much I could see him in those eyes.

My eyes shifted down the rest of him then, really taking him in.

Even so, most of my attention remained on his light.

I felt the charge there, an intensity that ran through my aleimi like live current, sparking the higher structures in my light, nearly dragging me out of my body. I saw geometric shapes rotating silently above his head, multicolored like Revik’s…but unlike Revik’s or my own in ways I couldn’t even begin to catalogue.

He had structures I’d never seen before, yet enough base similarity lived there with Revik and I, with the telekinesis and whatever else, that again, the resonance caught my breath.

I fought to pull myself together, to control my light…

Dragon.

This had to be Feigran’s Dragon.

He hadn’t looked anywhere near so much like Revik in Feigran’s drawings, but as soon as I thought it, I knew I had to be right.

Instead of being covered in burnt and frayed combat clothes and boots like he had been in the drawings, this Dragon was entirely naked. His body looked disturbingly like Revik’s too, but also not. He was bigger, closer to the size Revik was when he worked for Salinse, without Revik’s tattoos or the scars I knew, without the same way of standing or holding himself at all. His skin was darker, but I suspected that was from dirt and sweat. He had a scar along one leg I’d never seen before; it looked almost like his leg had been split from his calf to his thigh.

So yeah, definitely not Revik.

Even so, the similarities were enough to throw me completely for those few breaths.

A bare handful of seconds had gone by since I’d first locked eyes with him.

Still lost in that frozen moment while he watched me look at him, I returned my gaze to his a second time. That time, I looked at his whole face.

I realized only then that the blurriness I’d caught around his features came from most of his face being covered…in that sense, he looked almost identical to Feigran’s depictions. A dark organic muzzle fitted around his mouth and most of his lower jaw, wrapping around the back of his head. It looked like something alive, but also like a helmet, leaving his eyes shining at me from beneath an uneven shag of black hair and only slightly less dark skin. I’d scarcely seen the mask, it blended in so well with his face…and the shadow where he stood.

His clear eyes continued to watch me, holding an intensity I knew, but so different in flavor than Revik’s I could scarcely make sense of it. His eyes blazed up at me with an inner light, but something in that light held chaos instead of stillness…a profusion so intense I couldn’t hold his gaze that time, either.

I had to look away.

It was only then that I noticed he wasn’t alone.

Another person lay on the raised platform in front of him.

When I looked down at her, I also realized he had an erection. My mind fought not to notice how similar he looked to Revik there, as well.

She stared up at me, gagged with a strap, her light blue eyes wide in her face. Emotion hit me as soon as I met her gaze, even before I saw the pleading, begging look in her eyes. Physically, she looked like a seer with Asian features, light-colored irises and long limbs…but her light was strange.

Looking at only her light, I couldn’t tell for sure what she was.

I supposed, under the circumstances, it didn’t matter.

Covered in blood that appeared to be hers, she’d been tied down with organic bindings that wound out of the platform itself. On one edge of that platform Dragon leaned a hand holding a long, curved knife that dripped blood from the blade to his hand. Sporting a nine-inch, glass-like blade, the knife itself looked ceremonial, an impression strengthened by the elaborately carved green handle that might have been organic. The green of that handle, unlike the green of the walls and floor, made me think of jade. Carrying a softer luster than the walls, it looked old, and I realized the design on it may have been a dragon as well.