Allie's War Episodes 1-4(126)

Chandre didn’t notice the change in me at first. She stopped when I stopped, still complaining to me about me as she glanced around at the wooden buildings. Another cow, this one a chocolate brown, wandered past, grinding its long jaw sideways. It lowed plaintively, twitching its tail.
“Welcome to Seertown of Himachal Pradesh, Bridge,” Chandre said after she’d finished her catalogue of my wrongdoings and ignorant, human ways. “...Sewer of the Himalayas.”
Seeing me leaning against the cane then, breathing unevenly, she snatched my fingers off my neck.
“Stop it. The humans are staring!”
I laughed, unable to help it when I realized it was a variation of the crap my mom’s status-obsessed sister would spew at me when she visited us in San Francisco. I saw a man in a doorway looking at me, holding a straw broom that looked handmade and wearing a sweat-stained fedora. His upper body was wrapped in a colorful shawl.
He shook his head at me ruefully, clucking his tongue.
“They think I’m high,” I said. “I’m a bad Buddhist...a decadent white woman. Who cares?”
Chandre’s mouth hardened. “I am sorry for your family, Bridge. But you cannot continue to dwell on the loss of them, or of your mate. You must focus on the task at hand.”
“Which is what, exactly?” I said. “Avoiding ringworm?”
But my words just filled space while my eyes rose to take in the mountains.#p#分页标题#e#
Even here, I felt it. The world was dying.
It might even be more pronounced here, where remnants of the old remained, where I could feel how things used to be, even if I’d never experienced them myself. I gazed down to the street below, where a nun in dark red robes herded a cluster of Asian kids in black and white uniforms across the cracked blacktop. I assumed they must be human, anyway, since I’d still not seen a single seer child, and had been told I wouldn’t, not here.
The numbers rotated over the woman’s shaved head like a disjointed countdown, floating in and out of the lights of the children.
6, 6, 120, 123, 2, 8, 88, 99, 40, 4, 2, 4, 6, 29, 29, 32, 4, 2...
I forced myself to speak, although I didn’t look away from the nun. “How far is it?”
“You tell me,” Chandre said. “Use your light for something useful for once.”
I frowned, glancing at her. “My light? The town is a construct?”
Chandre rolled her eyes. “No Rook comes here, Bridge. It is by treaty that they stay away. We are safe now...I told you that.”
I gave her a skeptical look, but kept quiet.
The Seven certainly put a lot of stock in treaties, for all the good it had done them.
Hearing voices raised nearby, I turned, saw a cluster of men dressed in Muslim garb talking excitedly to an Indian man on a bicycle who shook his head, making broad negative gestures with his hands. It took me a second to realize he was a seer, and owned. The metal collar around his neck was so filthy I almost hadn’t seen it under his stained shirt. While I watched, a man in a police uniform came up, waving what looked like a homemade nightstick. The seer cowered, holding up his hands. Watching him pedal away on his bicycle, I frowned.
“Well?” Chandre said. “Will you lead us, or not?”
I looked at her, startled, then realized what she meant and laughed.
Limping away from her stare, I maneuvered the cane up the hill.
The number of storefronts diminished as we climbed higher, and the mud-brick apartment buildings and houses grew piled one on top of another, colorful and strangely cave-like against the hills. Prayer flags waved beside shrines for gods with aura-like headdresses. I saw more pictures of me, even a graffiti drawing of my profile with words in Tibetan and the art-like, slanting characters from the seer language, Prexci.
Paths wound up into the forest and back into the town on either side of the road as we climbed higher into the Himalayan foothills. The street deteriorated from crumbling asphalt to packed dirt, and the trees hung closer to the buildings.
The flavor of the town began to change as well.
Seer religious graffiti grew more dominant, along with a greater number of plastic bottles, used condoms and broken glass. I saw groups of Asian-looking girls in clusters on wooden stoops, drinking beer and wearing torn silk dresses next to men with greasy hair and jeans stiff with dirt. Most of the men wore plaid, long-sleeved shirts and scarves around their heads. It took a few minutes of looking before I noticed the metal collars. They laughed, passing bottles as the occasional Indian or Tibetan tromped up the wooden steps, leading one of the females inside, or sometimes one of the males.
As we passed, those left on the stairs noticed me and Chandre and stared.
We were nearly all the way past the building when a handsome man who looked to be in his twenties spoke up.