Trickster Read online

  But Terian knew what that thing was. That thing was him.

  Terian could almost see Galaith, the Org Leader, a handsome, middle-aged seer who looked almost human. He saw the man’s well-formed mouth pursed in a frown, saw him holding up his hands in a peace gesture as he tried to reason with Deghoies’ objections to whatever they were discussing.

  They were discussing him.

  Somehow, Terian couldn’t quite get past that detail.

  Then he didn’t have to imagine it.

  He walked in far enough and saw them, in almost the identical poses in which he’d seen them in his mind, his accuracy likely aided by the room’s well-built, permanent construct. Terian saw a glint of sunlight touch the ring Galaith wore through the window of the room, which faced west, into the sunset.

  The two of them fell silent the instant Terian entered, silent enough that Terian knew they had felt him enter the apartment’s secondary construct.

  Smiling faintly at what caught little boys they now appeared to be, Terian walked the rest of the way into the penthouse’s living room, unbuttoning his overcoat as he went.

  Taking the time to hang up his coat on the coatrack in the hallway foyer, he removed his hat next, setting it atop the same rack, then walked fully into the carpeted living room. The whole apartment was done in Art Deco style, just like the new building itself.

  “Should I ask?” he said, smiling at the two of them as he loosened his rust-colored tie. “Or should I just assume this little spat is about me, given how mouse-like you both became when you felt me at the door?”

  Dehgoies took his eyes off Galaith first.

  He turned towards Terian, his jaw visibly hard, his black hair cut short in the current human style. He wore a near-black suit that accentuated his long form, making his eyes stand out below the black hair and visibly darker skin left over from the summer sun.

  He looked Terian over in a flickering glance, and that frown at his lips grew, right before he looked between Terian and Galaith.

  Galaith lowered both of his hands slowly to his sides, from where he’d held them up in a peace gesture to Dehgoies, just like Terian imagined he had.

  “Ahhh.” Terian smiled. “More silence. This is ominous––”

  “Did you really agree to this, Terry?” Dehgoies blurted, his deep voice hard. “You’ve really given them the go-ahead on this crazy plan of theirs?”

  Terian’s smile grew.

  Now, he understood.

  He glanced at Galaith.

  “Ah,” he said, smiling at the Org leader before letting his eyes return to Dehgoies. “I understand now.”

  At Dehgoies’ scowl, Terian returned his gaze to Galaith.

  The handsome, human-like face hadn’t turned from his, and now Galaith’s eyes held a barely-visible warning. Terian couldn’t feel his boss’s precise thoughts––Galaith was the most heavily shielded seer in the network––but it felt almost like he could.

  Whatever he felt or didn’t feel, Terian found he understood.

  Galaith was hoping Terian wouldn’t say or do anything overly crazy.

  He was hoping Terian wouldn’t pick now to act unstable in front of Dehgoies, to make a joke of this thing, or do anything to anger or frustrate or scare Dehgoies more.

  Galaith wanted his help to talk the other infiltrator down.

  Galaith was hoping Terian would see the need to take this seriously, that he would help Galaith convince Dehgoies that they were approaching this thing rationally.

  More than anything, Galaith wanted Terian to convince Dehgoies that he, Terian, had made this decision from a position of sound mind and body––not out of reckless, eccentric abandon, or self-destructive boredom. Galaith wanted Terian to make it clear he was not blind to the possible dangers and side-effects that could occur as part of the process––that he had weighed these things, and decided to do it anyway.

  For the good of the race.

  The thought made Terian smile, somewhere in the back of his mind.

  In another, deeper and more distant part of his mind, it angered him.

  Neither thing made it to his face.

  Instead, Terian made his light immediately calm.

  “Of course,” he said brusquely to his friend, unbuttoning the top button of his tailored shirt. Opening that shirt at the neck, he studied Dehgoies’ gaze. “Why would I not do this, brother? Given the military and political advantages it will bring us?”

  “Gee, Terry,” Dehgoies growled. “I don’t know. Maybe because it’s fucking insane?”

  Terian pursed his lips. Quirking an eyebrow, he said calmly, “You’re aware this has been done with my light before, na? With little or no deleterious effects?”

  “Little or no deleterious effects?” Dehgoies’ face grew still as stone, despite the open incredulity of his voice. “Gaos, Terry. What about that fucking killing spree in Prague?”

  When Galaith held up a hand, as if to quiet him, Dehgoies only glared at him, then back at Terian.

  “…or the one in the United States?” he retorted, his voice harder as he followed Terian with his eyes as he strolled deeper into the room. “The one who killed… what? Forty women? Or was it fifty?”

  Terian shrugged easily, holding out a hand in a seer’s gesture of dismissal.

  “Anomalies,” he said. “It was known there would likely be some mistakes. It is only natural in such an experimental procedure––”

  “Jurekil’a mak rik’ali dugra––”

  Terian cut him off, holding up a hand. “You are overreacting, brother.”

  “Am I?” Dehgoies growled. “Overreacting? Really?”

  Dehgoies glared between them, like he was certain he was the only sane person in the room, or at least the only one seeing this clearly.

  “They want to carve up your light, brother,” Dehgoies growled. “Like some kind of monster from the old books! They want to turn you into some kind of…” He gestured sharply with a hand, his mouth curling in frustration. “…one-man army. Pieces of you in this body, pieces of you in that body…”

  “Yes,” Terian said, his voice calm. “That’s precisely what they intend. Are you really going to tell me you don’t see the advantages of this?”

  “Advantages? Like what?”

  “Like I cannot be killed,” Terian responded calmly.

  At the other’s silence, he exhaled, unknotting the rest of his tie as he approached the sunlight coming in through the glass from the setting sun.

  “They would do it to more of us,” Terian added. “If their light could handle it. They would likely want to do it to you, brother––”

  “Over my dead body,” Dehgoies growled.

  Terian shrugged, finishing with the tie and exhaling again. He walked to the drink cart next, fixing himself a scotch and soda.

  “I tell you again, you are overreacting, brother,” he said, calm as he made his drink. “You are like an old man in some ways, despite your youth.”

  Galaith grunted at that, a pulse of amusement leaving his light, and Dehgoies glared at him, then back at Terian. Seeing the fury growing in those crystal eyes, Terian raised a hand towards him again, speaking before the other could.

  “We knew there might be accidents of this kind,” Terian said, his voice warning just before he took a sip of the drink. “…at least until we perfected the process. No one has ever done this before. But if we succeed, think of the benefits––”

  “Fifty. Women,” Deghoies said, hammering the words.

  Terian shrugged. “They were only human.”

  Dehgoies just stared at him.

  Terian returned his gaze calmly.

  When neither he nor Galaith broke the silence after a few beats more, Dehgoies let out a disbelieving snort. He stepped back from the two of them, as if unconsciously wanting more distance between his light and theirs.

  Stepping closer to the opposite side of the window from where Terian stood, Dehgoies unbuttoned the front of his own suit jacket, the
n fished in the inside pocket, likely for hiri, Terian assumed.

  His assumption was proven correct seconds later, when Dehgoies extracted one of the dark, leaf-wrapped sticks, and put it to his lips, lighting it with the familiar silver lighter he pulled from his pocket.

  “Gaos,” he muttered, exhaling smoke as he clicked the lighter shut.

  Taking a deep drag off the stick, he stared out the window at the setting sun, his long jaw hard, his mirror-like eyes reflecting the orange and red light.

  “Brother,” Terian said, his voice faintly exasperated. “We will work out the kinks of this process. You worry yourself needlessly––”

  But Dehgoies clicked under his breath, the sound bitter.

  “Why the hell didn’t you tell me?” he said, blunt. “About her?”

  Galaith turned, staring at the tall, black-haired seer.

  “Revik,” he said, warning.

  Dehgoies ignored him.

  “Your sister,” Dehgoies said, still speaking to Terian. “Why the hell didn’t you tell me you had a twin sister, Terry?”

  Terian blinked.

  His mind dipped, shifting into static.

  For a long moment, he only stood there, staring at the profile of his friend’s angry face.

  “What?”

  His voice came out distant, unfamiliar.

  He saw Dehgoies frown, right before he turned, staring at Terian. As soon as those crystal-cut eyes took in his face, they visibly flinched.

  After another beat, something in them changed.

  “Gaos di'lalente.” Dehgoies continued to stare at him. “You don’t know.” He looked at Galaith, his eyes accusatory, then back at Terian. “You don’t fucking know. You don’t even remember her, do you? You think you were born this way? That you were born––”

  Galaith raised his voice.

  “Dehgoies. Enough.” That time, the warning was explicit. “This isn’t the time. We are not having this conversation here. We are not having it now.”

  Dehgoies looked over at the other male, his long jaw hardening.

  Those crystal-like eyes gauged Galaith’s face, but the heat in them didn’t dim.

  Galaith returned his stare, his own eyes unmoving.

  After a meaning-laden silence, the Org leader made his voice quiet.

  “Iltere ak selen’te dur Hulen-ta––” he said.

  “Don’t quote that shit at me!” Revik growled, raising his voice. “I know the goddamned scriptures… and the holy books. Likely better than you.”

  Galaith pursed his lips.

  For an instant, a hotter charge rose to the Org leader’s light.

  Then, just as swiftly, he seemed to change his mind.

  That sparking, lightning-like cloud of aleimi reconfigured, backing down and dissipating, then withdrawing from the other male.

  “Of that, I have little doubt,” Galaith murmured, his voice neutral. “Yet I would still caution you to think on those words right now, Revik. Take a few breaths. Remember yourself, and think upon what I have said.”

  When Galaith next spoke, Terian heard the metallic edge.

  “…Perhaps you could find it in yourself to trust me, despite your worry for your friend. Perhaps you could find it in yourself to trust your brother, Terian, as well. Rather than distress yourself needlessly over issues that do… not… concern… you…”

  Galaith hammered the last four words, unambiguous.

  Terian looked between them.

  Even for Dehgoies, that was bold, to speak to the Org leader that way.

  That was bold, he thought.

  Dangerous, even… to defy him, right to his face.

  It was rare to see Galaith show anger––rarer still that he would aim it at Dehgoies, who Galaith loved like a son, who he would openly be affectionate with, even in public.

  Rare. Dangerous. Bold. Unusual.

  Love.

  Somehow, those were the only things that penetrated Terian’s light.

  He barely noticed when the world around him began to gray.

  He barely noticed when that world began to recede from him.

  And when it disappeared entirely…

  He did not notice at all.

  Eleven

  The Sin Of Weakness

  30 clicks east of Rio Negro

  283 clicks northwest of Manaus

  The Amazonian Basin, Brazil

  November 30, 1978

  I smacked my neck, grimacing at the blood on my fingers from the enormous mosquito that had been feeding on me while I trudged through the black mud.

  We were in wetter terrain again, passing by a river tributary, and my boots stuck in the black mud, making a sucking sound as I separated them.

  The temperature regulator in my suit told me it was over a hundred degrees.

  That didn’t fully take into account the humidity, which seemed to affect the ability of my lungs to even function properly. I struggled with the endless clouds of insects, the spider webs, the dense undergrowth, the snakes that periodically hung from trees, leeches that somehow found their way inside my boots when we waded into the swampy shallows near to the river.

  I hated all of it.

  Well, most of it.

  Monkeys also chattered at us from jungle trees, drawing my eyes. Birds called back and forth from the canopy overhead. I found my eyes tilting up to catch glimpses of their bright plumage, without ever stopping the tracking work I conducted from behind the Barrier.

  It wasn’t really any hotter or more humid than places I’d worked with similar climates in Asia, but everything about it still managed to feel different. Everything about it felt foreign, and somehow more likely to kill me, or give me some rare form of disease.

  According to Terian, we were still behind the group protecting the extraction targets.

  Whoever these unreg’d assholes were, they’d been dumb enough to stay on the ground.

  I flat-out couldn’t figure that out.

  I thought for sure we’d be chasing them overseas by the time oh-four-hundred rolled around. I figured we’d be re-routed back to North America, to one of the coastal cities like New York or Los Angeles, if not all the way to Hong Kong or one of the big cities in India or China, or even Nepal, where untagged seers liked to hide.

  It made no sense at all for them to stay in South America.

  It made even less sense for them to stay in Brazil, which was positively crawling with Black Arrow operatives. The corporate headquarters for the multinational defense contractor lived in São Paulo, which meant they had more resources here than anywhere not currently a warzone.

  Moreover, Black Arrow was controlled in large part by us, meaning the Org.

  Really, these rogues… or terrorists… or Adhipan… or whatever the hell they were… should have left the continent at the earliest damned opportunity. They should have had someone ready to airlift them out the minute they got free of the security perimeter.

  Instead, they’d chosen to split their team in the middle of the Amazon basin jungle, hiding their numbers behind multiple constructs and evading us more by sowing confusion than by what appeared to be a well-thought-out exit strategy.

  I could only guess they had no operatives or connections at all in South America. If so, that was a whole level of stupid I didn’t even know how to unravel.

  The problem was, they didn’t feel stupid.

  Given their current course on the map, and the imprints Terian’s infiltrators pulled off the primary team, they appeared to be heading straight for Venezuela… or possibly for one of the neighboring states of Suriname or Guyana, or even Columbia to the west.

  Whatever the precise destination, they’d left a huge opening for a strike team to cut them off before they could cross any one of those borders.

  I would have thought the whole thing was a diversion, but Terian seemed sure we were still behind their primary team. We had to trust that his instincts were correct in this, that they hadn’t evaded us and left the continent thr
ough some surreptitious means, perhaps via the river to a private airstrip.

  I did trust him, in truth.

  His sight was uncanny.

  Anyway, he wasn’t arrogant enough or stupid enough to rely on his sight alone.

  He had his infiltrators back at the work camp monitoring his hunch as best they could. Terian led us on an active track as well, using markers he’d pulled from the intel collected by his Sweeper spooks on the ground.

  Of course, those markers had all kinds of misdirection woven into them as well.

  Still, the longer we’d been on this tracking line, the more sure I was of Terian’s gut and vision regarding our quarry and their tactics. The seers he had us following all appeared to be the ones with the strongest Adhipan imprints in their light.

  Perhaps more significantly, the one glimpse I got of Dehgoies––or, more precisely, the imprints I’d been given for Dehgoies’ aleimic light––placed him with the same team.

  As we trudged through the mud and undergrowth and swarms of mosquitos and flies, I heard many in my pod discussing Dehgoies, sharing intel and impressions now that we appeared to definitely be tracking him.

  Honestly, I’d never given much thought to him before all this.

  Now I found myself listening in the Barrier as theories were bandied back and forth among those of my pod. They wondered what he might be doing out here, why he’d truly left the Org, whether the pregnant female seer was connected to him in some way, why the Adhipan would have brought him into this, given who and what he was.

  They wondered if he was still in the thrall of the mystery female who had pulled him out of the Org. They wondered if the Seven and the Adhipan still used her to control him.

  They wondered if the pregnant female was that mystery seer.

  Seers loved a good sex story, especially anything involving a sexual liaison that drove a seer off the deep end, turning them into a jurekil’a mak rik’ali… a seer’s way of saying “crazy fucker,” and not in a nice way.

  That didn’t make the story untrue, of course, but I was skeptical.

  The sheer drama of the narrative made it a little too convenient.

  I still suspected it was more true that Dehgoies had been an operational target of the Seven, and that the female had been a plant sent to neutralize him.