Allie's War Episodes 1-4(23)

As he speaks, I watch his reconstructed veins pulse and plume more light.
There are several...oddities...in your make up, he tells me next. Your blood is undetectable as Sark...Sarhacienne, that is...seer. It is an extremely rare condition. Only one in several hundred thousand seers have this. I have it, too. It is why they made me an infiltrator.
I am back to staring at myself inside that car, trying to convince myself that the rest of this isn’t real, that the sleeping girl is the only part of me that matters.
He reaches out, catching hold of my light arm.
This is the Barrier, Esteemed Bridge. Do you recognize it?
I am forced to nod, which isn’t a nod of course, but a silent conveyance that feels like one.
Yes, he sends, and I feel his approval. Good.
I’m not a seer, I say. I can’t be. It’s impossible.
It sounds hollow to me now, but I fight to hold on to that one thing.
I’ve read about your kind, I tell him. You play with people’s minds. You can convince them of anything.
As usual, this does not faze him.
You are right, he sends equably. But why would I do this with you?
I don’t have a good answer, and it irritates me.
His opens himself somehow, and I feel more of him.
It is disconcertingly intimate.
You have known that you are different, he tells me. You consciously chose to hide those differences...to suppress them where you could. His mind turns more pointed. Having a preference about what species one is, is irrational, Esteemed Bridge.
I don’t like this much, either.
His light begins to change, sparking in different-colored eddies that dance across his intricately woven skin. I cannot help but watch. His veins pulse, changing from white-gold to orange and red rivers with flecks of black and indigo blue. The transformation is liquid, fire-like. The fire starts from a particular structure over his head, leaks down his light skull like thinned, living paint. It bleeds into his throat, shoulders, arms, hands.
What are you doing? I ask.
Inside the Barrier, he sends. There is only one rule...
The fire spreads to me, touching my light forearm first, where he holds me.
Before the color has finished traveling to his waist, it is spreading into my transparent skin. Once it soaks my arm, it sears like ice, absorbed by my light bones.
Wait. I am fighting panic...again. Something’s wrong! Dehgo, whatever your name is—
Revik, he cuts in neutrally. Dehgoies Revik. I am slowing it down so you can feel the process accurately—
No, really, Dehgo! Wait—
Revik, he repeats. Dehgoies is my family name.
The fire spreads up my shoulder. I am struggling against his hold now, panicking, but I can’t extract myself from his fingers, nor from that fire-like light.
He remains calm, indifferent-seeming.
...The rule is this, he continues, as if I hadn’t interrupted. To go anywhere you wish to go, to find anyone or anything inside the Barrier, you must become what you seek. Distance can impact this, and time. But ultimately, even these can be overcome.
Orange fire spreads to my stomach.
His body is all bright orange now, with the exception of one hand, which stubbornly remains a sparking gold-white, lighter than the rest. The denser orange sinks into my thighs, moving swiftly to my knees, then my calves...
Wait! I shriek in the dark. Revik!
...Whatever you become, you are drawn to. This is called resonance. It is what you and I were born to do...
My left foot fills with liquid fire.
Right as the last spot changes, his hand flushes orange, too, and it occurs to me in the millisecond before I’m ripped apart that he used that last piece of himself as an anchor, waiting for me to change, but the thought barely penetrates before...
My whole being ceases to exist.
When I can feel again, I am shooting across black clouds, moving so fast I can’t perceive anything but streaming light. I don’t realize I am screaming inside that space for a little while—if screaming is the right word, since I have no lips, no larynx, no tongue—but I feel Revik recoil as a part of me shrieks outward anyway.
A tornado of light opens before us...
...and then we are inside, moving fast, so fast that all I can do is survive it, holding onto him with my mind even if I can no longer feel my body. There is no sound. Light flashes by us in long, rotating, starbursts of fire. Orange and red and yellow twist in detailed spirals that light up the dark behind my eyes, making me nauseous.
Then, just as quickly, it is over.
Everything stops.
I come out the other end into the deepest silence I have ever felt.
We float.
Stars flicker in an expanse without clouds, so still and silent that a catch happens somewhere in my internal rhythms. My light body is back, still made of orange fire, but it is no longer uncomfortable here. Here, that orange light pulses with the sky, with his orange body suspended beside mine, with the slow-moving light I see up ahead. Gaseous clouds swirl in inexorable silence, a spiral with a fire-orange cloud at its center.