Allie's War Episodes 1-4(107)

I and the other seer walked back through the crowded causeway, and all I could do was stare around me, lost in the complexity and beauty of every single thing I could see. Even those banal VR projections grew fascinating...I could see now, how they were made, the technology infused with nonphysical light, framing each message like the projection screen behind a movie’s shifting frames. The minds behind each concept, the way in which those concepts formed building blocks into more and more detailed messages...all of it grew visible to me.
A group of humans pass us, jerking my mind off the cleaner lines of the virtual program.
I hear their harsh laughter as if from far away. They feel like children, puppets caught in lit strands, surrounded by a complexity that dictates their every move, while remaining wholly invisible to them.
Yes, the blue-skinned woman sends. You feel it, don’t you? Even you. You feel how wrong they are. How...incomplete.
I watch atoms dance among the beams of the causeway ceiling, light shower down in golden rainbows as the lit strands cross and change overhead. I gaze into the eyes of the woman holding me...and she is beautiful.
More than that, her words feel right to me. True.
The humans really aren’t much above animals. As insentient as the fake jewels on the women’s necks, the dogs they drag around on leather leashes. I wonder how it is that I never saw it before, the gaping holes in the pictures that surrounded me, day after day, week after week...
It’s not only the humans, I realize as I look around.
It’s all of it. The world feels half-formed. Incomplete.
It is broken. Somehow, we let it be so. It struck me then...
Like any equation, it could be changed.
We will show you, the blue-skinned woman purrs. We will show you such wondrous things, Sister. You will understand so much of what has been hidden from you. The world will never be so small to you again as it is at this moment.
I close my eyes.
I can see what she offers me. It is clear. It is without pain, without ambiguity or aloneness. I would have a purpose. My life would mean something...something other than pain and death to those I loved.
It is such a relief to give in, to just let it all go. The sickness and pain I felt just minutes before is already gone.
The woman is right.
Nothing could ever be the same again. Nothing.



ALLIE! Revik screamed her name into the Barrier. ALLIE!
He shoved at the space where she’d been, trying to force his way through. He tried again, fighting a rising panic. He knew what had her, recognized the flavor of the metallic strands that forced him away from her light, taking her away from him. He didn’t understand how yet, or who, but that didn’t matter, either, not now.
He slammed against that wall, using all of his light.
The wall started to give.
Then something rose up. A sharp pain hit him over his right eye. He fought back, tightening his shields, when something bigger lashed at his light. The dark shape threw him sideways, knocking him out of the smaller construct, knocking him out of his body, too, enough that he lost himself...
When his vision cleared, he’d come to a stop in the corridor, fingers splayed on one of the wallpapered walls.
He wiped his nose, stared at the blood on his fingers.
He didn’t let himself think. He began to run.
Dread pooled in his stomach as he pushed his legs to move him faster down the hall, fighting to build momentum, to cross the distance between himself and her, even as he threw part of his mind ahead of himself, and back into the construct.
It would take him at least ten minutes to get to the atrium, even at top speed.
Too long.
He scanned options.
He tried their cabin. It was empty; he got the equivalent of Barrier static. No Chan. No Eliah. No guard. How the hell had she gotten out of the room, much less out the secured corridors on the seventh deck? Someone must have noticed she was gone by now. And who had her? A unit of the Rooks? Ship’s security? A lone infiltrator looking for the bounty on her...or worse, to sell her?
Had facial recognition software picked her up, or something else?
He tried a general channel, Guard security.
Nothing. He slid more of himself back into his body, where he ran towards the bow of the ship, fighting to think.
His head hurt. Something dark clung to it, and to his right arm. The hole over his eye was the most serious. He attended to that first, reweaving his light, but the something there fought to hold on, hiding in parts of him he didn’t access as often. He’d lost where she was. He continued to search, but his shields were up now, in hunting mode, which slowed him down. Still, if they broke too much of his structure, he’d be useless to her.
How in the gods’ names had she gotten to this side of the ship?
His adrenaline spiked as his mind put the pieces together.