Allie's War Episodes 1-4(97)

“We’re not always like this,” he said, watching her look at him. “It won’t be as good.”
She studied his eyes. “It’ll be good enough.”
“Now,” he said, to be clear. “Are you ready?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Okay.” She balanced her martini glass on the edge of the bar, following the insistent tug of his fingers. He unhooked the clip from his collar, shoving it in his pocket as he led her out of the room.



I threw my jacket on the floor of the cabin, unwinding cotton wraps from my hands with shaking fingers. A few choice swear words left my lips, loud in the empty room.
Sparring hadn’t helped my mood at all. I’m not sure why I thought getting my ass kicked for the hundredth time by Eliah would help under the circumstances, but maybe I hoped it would distract me at least.
I could already feel Revik hadn’t been back.
Still, a tendril of my light flickered out, examining the room to be sure. Realizing that no amount of scanning was going to change reality, I slumped cross-legged to the floor. Fingering my hair out of my eyes, I fought a sudden tightness in my chest and closed my eyes.
Barrier clouds appeared.
A wolf runs across the tundra, tongue flicking over black lips in a blood-stained grin, body elongating...
But I don’t want to see that again, either.
Clouds hang bright and sharp, still against liquid black.
The Barrier enfolds me in dark and light waves. I can see it now, easily, whenever I close my eyes and resonate with its vastness. More importantly, I can feel when I am inside it, not just looking at it from without, or glimpsing the places where the physical world and the Barrier world overlap.
I’m not supposed to be here.
Even without Revik’s warnings, my gut tells me so.
The construct should keep me safe. I’m in a big fishbowl of protected space, cut off from the Barrier proper...but even I know that what I’m doing isn’t strictly covered by the construct’s shield. It’s not enough to stop me, though.
Not now, and not the countless times I’ve done it before, when Revik wandered out of the room at night or in the early morning, or whenever he thought I was asleep for more than an hour. He thought I didn’t know he roamed the halls while I slept, but I did.
I’d wait for him to leave, and then I’d sit like this. I even snuck in a few jumps after he’d passed out on the bed.
Those were riskier though...he was a light sleeper.
I no longer need to pause at the edge of the sharp clouds. I’ve eliminated a lot of the preliminaries, and even the intermediary steps. I’ve learned to make my jumps economical, due to the time constraints.
Even though I have time now, I do the same.
I don’t screw around, or look at the scenery. I don’t bother to play in any of the currents that flow in the waves above or below where I float in the clouds. I don’t visit nebulae, or stare up at the multicolored stars like I did the first few times I came here on my own. I don’t bother with vortices, either.
I aim directly at the gray wall around the spot at the top of the Pyramid.
Images hit me at once.
Most center on the keys I turned to get this far. The faceless man hides behind door after door, but it always starts in the same place, with a bearded man on a scaffold in a dying city that has a main square covered in broken shards of black volcanic glass. Before the Barrier jump with Revik, the image held no storyline, no meaning to me. Now I know, somehow, that the bearded man on the scaffold is the faceless man.
They are both Haldren, both Galaith.
Somehow.
I don’t understand, but I also don’t care.
Haldren whispers over an old man’s battered body.
Liego...Liego Kardek...why did you do it?
I know now that Kardek is the old man’s name.
Revik blames Kardek for the war that killed the Elaerian...the First Race...but I know better. I know Liego better by now, too. Liego and Haldren go way back, sharing a timeline I don’t understand, but that I am forced to accept on some level, at least enough to find him. I see Liego with Haldren when he is a child in that other world. A squalling, sickly child wearing rags, alone and abandoned. Liego rocks him to sleep, sings songs when the orphanage comes late to pick Haldren up from the school where Liego teaches.
Liego pities the boy. Eventually, that compassion becomes a deeper love.
The boy moves in with him and a man named Massani after no one claims him from the first set of wars. I watch Liego feed the four-year-old. I see him talk to an angry, confused adolescent, hold him as he cries at some disappointment or rejection.
I see Liego teach him in his private laboratory, ready him for exams, introduce him to a society that accepts him because of who Liego is.