“Careful,” Revik warned. “Hold on to the rungs.”
She opened the door. Immediately, sound filled the metal chamber. Bits of white were blown in through the open portal. Wind echoed down, filling the small space, beating against the walls, penetrating Revik’s clothes.
“Jesus.” Jon stared up as Cass yanked the metal door shut, spinning the wheel to close it. “Where are we? The North Pole?”
“The North Pole is water, Jon,” Revik reminded him.
“That’s not what I—”
“My guess would be Russia,” Revik added, stretching his arms. “Maybe the mountains in Norway...or Asia. Could even be Greenland, but that’s a bit much, even for Terry.” He grunted. “I don’t think he’d risk the Himalayas...even in winter. But there are many places to hide on the southern border of China.”
Jon looked at him. “You could feel that out there? The snow, I mean? You knew what it was like?”
Revik shrugged. He stuffed another piece of meat into his mouth, chewing. Both humans were staring at him now.
“So what do we do?” Jon said.
Revik hesitated. He’d thought about that, too, but he doubted the humans were going to like what he’d come up with. “We have to walk, Jon. But we’ll need to gear up. And we might have to go the long way, in case Terry’s sent for reinforcements already. Cass found us heavy jackets...and boots. You’ll both need guns. At least two...and a rifle, if you can carry all that. We need to leave within the hour. Less, if you think the two of you can be ready.”
Cass nodded in agreement, returning from where she’d finished descending the ladder. She sat cross-legged on the floor and began to eat again, silent.
Revik checked her mind. He clicked out seconds later, exhaled.
“We’ll need water,” he added, turning to Jon. “As much as we can carry. And food, of course.”
Cass looked up at them suddenly. Her eyes widened, grew bright...as if a light had just gone off somewhere in her head. Revik didn’t read her, but both men watched as she got to her feet and crossed the small space. She opened one of the lockers she’d explored earlier, began rifling through the back of it. Revik took another drink of juice, still watching her warily.
She turned then, jingling something in her hand.
When they only stared, she jangled the metal harder. Revik’s eyes snapped into focus. In her hand dangled a set of keys, clearly fitted for some kind of vehicle.
“Shotgun,” Cass said, grinning.
It was the first time Revik had seen her smile since watching her and Allie together in that diner in San Francisco.
Meeting her gaze, Revik grinned back.
Candar was a poor city, even smaller than its sister city of Mestia in Upper Svanetia, the higher half of the Svaneti region in the country of Stalin’s birth.
Georgia is smaller than most people imagine, at the southernmost tip of what had been, once upon a time, the Soviet union , and closer to Tehran than Moscow. In the winter, like now, the Caucasus Mountains were buried in snow and ice, more so since the climate started changing and increased the average snowfall across most of Asia, at least in the past few centuries.
Historically speaking, the town of Candor was also new, grown up from the slave trade between Asia and Europe that erupted after the second world war.
Trade in young seers remained the town’s only real industry.
Sight slavery was, of course, legal in Georgia.
Ironically, the dearth of visiting free seers made it easy to slip past racial checkpoints unnoticed, even in the heightened paranoia caused by rumors of a telekinetic seer terrorist.
No one expected a free seer to walk into Candor willingly.
At present, Allie was supposedly training seers in India, readying her nascent army to wage war on the United States and China. While no one in Candar was overly fond of the governments of either place, purges had occurred there as elsewhere, in reaction to the news of a telekinetic seer in their midst. Bids on her blood and any genetic “samples” were whispered on the sidelines, too, of course, but Sark settlements in places like this were work camps, or else holding pens...and recruiting grounds for the Rooks.
They wouldn’t get any real bounty hunters sniffing here.
Revik was able to think through this much just from his own knowledge of the area combined with what they heard on the live news feeds. The snowmobile was fitted with organics like their prison had been, in this case to give it satellite capability. Even so, the weather interfered at times, and he avoided any feeds with two-way capability, which meant most of the majors as they tended to cull demographics for ads.
Jon and Cass didn’t look like seers, so that would help. Revik’s blood type would help them fly under the radar, as well.