...and now he is lost there, scanning their light...something he hasn’t been able to do since he got here. He studies every structure and segment in their aleimi. He works carefully, risks going deep, needing to be sure. He checks it twice, then rechecks it. After a few moments, he feels his shoulders begin to unclench for real.
He checks each of them again, just to be thorough. No threads are leaving them into the Barrier, no sign or flavor of the Pyramid, the Dreng, Terian. Nothing lives in their light but themselves, their ties to him and each other, their ties to Allie and their other friends and family...everything dampened by the overall fog of this place. He checks them again, going over every inch of their aleimi a last time.
Then, he lets himself smile.
Clicking out, he met Jon’s hazel eyes.
“It is you,” he said.
“Well, yeah. Who did you think it was?” Jon grinned at him, though, banging on the glass. “Come on, man! Get us out!”
Revik glanced at Cass. She clutched the transparent wall of her four-by-six box, staring up at him. Her splayed fingers reminded him of a tree frog in a glass aquarium, especially with her wide eyes in a too-thin face. A mixture of fear, hope and another emotion he couldn’t identify shone from her eyes.
Revik barely hesitated, then rose to his feet.
Crossing the room, he opened the weapons’ locker, where he found four custom Berettas M9s with organics, a Steyr TMP, and six SCAR-H fully automatic rifles. Stacks of magazines for all of the weapons filled metal shelves above and below the main locker, which had hooks on the back wall for the handguns and slots for the rifles.
Grabbing one of the Berettas off the wall, Revik loaded a full magazine of 9mm shells, chambered a bullet, and walked back to the cages. He motioned Cass back first.
“More,” he said, until her back was pressed to the wall. “Cover your face.”
The mixture of relief and fear and...gratitude, he realized...returned to her gaunt face.
“Did you kill him?” Her voice was muffled, but raw.
He nodded, barely meeting her gaze.
Raising his arm, he aimed the gun at the lock, and fired.
Less than an hour later, Revik sat at a desk chair over a flat computer console, chewing on a piece of canned meat with his back molars and thinking he’d never tasted anything so sharp, salty, tangy...and just so damned good in his entire life.
He exchanged grins with the two people sitting across from him, who were chewing with equal enthusiasm from separate containers.
While Jon and Revik hunted down the remainder of the bodies and deactivated their stasis chambers, Cass had found them food...and clothing. With the dozen or so different bodies, there had been more of both than they possibly could use.
Extending a filthy arm in a designer wool shirt, Revik pointed at a juice carton sitting on the table next to Jon, making an unintelligible noise. Jon threw him the carton, laughing when Revik missed and it went spinning to the floor. Scooping it up, he ripped the paper open with his teeth and drank deeply, washing down the meat and belching.#p#分页标题#e#
“What is it you said?” he gasped. “Holy fucking God...that’s good.”
Cass laughed, shaking her long, black hair with the dyed, bright red ends. It was still thick with sweat, blood, water...gods knew what else. Both Jon and Revik had beards. Jon’s red-blond hair fell past his shoulders, still streaked with black and green at the ends.
“So why are we still here, man?” Jon said. He propped up his bare feet, wearing pants from one of the Terian bodies. He was so thin they bunched up baggily around his waist, held there by an expensive-looking leather belt.
Revik took another long pull of the juice. He motioned at the console.
“We need to figure out where we are.” He belched again. “...Find a shower, maybe. But not here.”
Jon laughed, shaking his head. “What’s wrong with my plan?”
“What’s your plan?”
“Getting the hell out of here now...walking out. Now.”
Revik motioned towards the metal ladder built into one wall, and the round, submarine-looking hatch that stood at its top.
“Be my guest,” he said. “You might want a jacket, though.”
Hearing this last, Cass frowned.
Before Jon could move, she dragged herself to her feet, and crossed the room to the green metal ladder and its circular cage. She climbed up it with her bare feet, dwarfed in a dark sweatshirt and a pair of jeans left by one of the female bodies. Revik watched her carefully. She had barely spoken since he’d gotten her out of that cage, but she felt open to him still, strangely clear in her mind. Clicking out, he was still watching when she reached the top of the ladder and twisted the locking mechanism counter-clockwise to open it.