Kirev's Door

KIREV’S DOOR

A Quentin Black Prequel

by

JC Andrijeski

Copyright © 2016 by JC Andrijeski

Cover Art & Design by Jennifer Munswami at

J.M. Rising Horse Creations

www.facebook.com/RisingHorseCreations

2015

Link with me at:
http://jcandrijeski.com
 

Ebook Edition, License Notes

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Synopsis of
Kirev’s Door
~
 

Kirev is a seer. Raised in an alternate version of our Earth, his people are enslaved under human owners. While he is still young, Kirev joins a resistance army of rebel seers after spending most of his youth in work camps and brothels.

He wants to help his people. However, during his first mission with the seer rebels, Kirev faces a strange twist of fate and a terrifying new future.  Just when they are about to destroy a human research facility, a voice from his past intervenes and sends his life into a whole different direction.

Kirev's Door is a prequel for the
Quentin Black Mystery series
, and crossover story with the
Allie’s War
world, an apocalyptic science fiction romance series featuring star-crossed lovers Alyson Taylor and Dehgoies Revik.

For Roy

1

CHOSEN

Mularang Rehabilitation Camp

South of Khao Luang, Thailand

March 1928

THE CHILDREN FELL silent, watching the guards as they walked past the front of the barbed-wire fence. Only the buzzing of flies and the distant echo of a tinny loudspeaker could be heard across the low-voiced discussions of the men walking the dirt path between fenced pens.
 

They had two hunters with them, Kirev noticed.

Both female, they wore military-style jackets, camouflage-colored pants and khaki shirts, incongruously thick and heavy-looking in the suffocating heat. They carried rifles and wore pistols on their belts, along with bandoliers of bullets. Even with the bandoliers they looked like soldiers––much different from the rag-wearing hunters who raided his village far away from here. Where Kirev was from, the air was cold and dry and snow covered the Asia peaks.

Here, the jungle surrounded the dirt of the camps on all sides.

Kirev fell silent with the rest of those inside the pens.

He watched the female hunters the most closely.

They were his own kind. He could tell that much from a dozen yards away, just by the way they walked. Their height tipped off his eyes first. He noticed other things as well, even wearing the heavy sight-restraint collar that itched and burned where it dug into the flesh and bone of his sweat- and dirt-caked neck.

As the small group walked closer, Kirev noted other things about the two athletic-looking females. They didn’t speak to one another aloud where they flanked the human men. Even so, he distinctly got the impression they communicated, and not only by the unfamiliar dialect of hand-signals they used.
 

Kirev found himself riveted by the dark red irises of the tallest of those two females. Those irises burned like hot coals in the shadow of her face, sharp against her dark skin, flashing briefly in the Southeast Asian sun when they caught glimmers of the light.

Kirev watched her, fascinated.

He never saw females like this back home. Not even among the pockets of rebels that grew more common in the hills near where his farming parents built their home.

He noted their muscular arms and shoulders, the jewel embedded in one belonging to the red-eyed seer, the ink tattoos on her fingers and forearms. She had shockingly high cheekbones…a dark mouth with a nearly perfect curve, another characteristic of those of his blood. Kirev felt himself reacting to her in strange ways, just the mere fact of her being within visual range. She moved gracefully, like a hunting animal…nothing like the clunky, childlike steps of the men walking a dozen steps in front of her.

Humans walked like they’d just been shoved to their feet by an impatient parent and told to figure it out on their own. From what his friend, Coreq said, that was more or less how it happened for humans. He had a cousin who could pass, and she told many stories of how the humans were with their children, and with one another.

Some of those stories, Kirev had difficulty believing.

Still, they did all walk like that, as if they’d never been instructed on how to walk at all.

By sharp contrast, the two female seer’s movements were even more practiced than those of most seers Kirev knew. He watched how they placed each step and moved each segment of leg and body, fascinated by that precision. It reminded him of the jungle cat the human guards had brought into the camp one day, one they’d caught in a nearby river while it swam. The animal had growled and snarled its anger at them as they tried to coax and then bodily force it into a metal barred cage, using ropes and sharp sticks.

The guards had been laughing, Kirev remembered. They laughed about the downed cat, which had been a present for one of their higher-ups, some joke between their bosses.

Frowning, Kirev pushed the image of the screaming cat with the black and orange stripes out of his mind.

The humans had reached their part of the fence.

Kirev held his breath when the small group came to a stop. He saw the human eyes shift, turn, staring at all of them, looking them over like dogs in a pen.

Next to him, his friend, Coreq, gripped Kirev’s hand.

Kirev wound his fingers into those of the other seer, glancing down at him with a small frown.

He hadn’t seen Coreq approach, but now he wished he had been paying more attention. He would have told his friend to stay indoors, to hide inside the shadow-darkened shelter at the back end of the pen. They’d all been ordered to come out, of course…every one of them…so it would have been risky had the guards chosen to do a real head-count and gone to look for any stragglers. The guards were lazy though, so they didn’t usually bother. Not unless they were looking for one seer in particular.

Coreq was small. He was small, and the guards liked to torment him too much.

For the same reason, he had learned ways to hide. Kirev helped him with this.

Kirev knew there were some who––for reasons not always readily apparent to the minds of the children in the pen––drew the guard’s eyes more than others.

Coreq was one of those.

Kirev did not know if it was due to some quality of his light, or some allure related to his delicate features and small body. Likely, it was a combination of those things.