Trickster Page 4

  They had to have.

  Varlan smiled, patting my knee in reassurance.

  “I am sure it is nothing, brother,” he said.

  I nodded, forcing my light back to neutral.

  His words unnerved me, though.

  In the end, when he spoke of it no more, I was forced to let it go.

  Like most things that only make sense in retrospect, I blew it off.

  Four

  Meetings With Remarkable Men

  Guorum Work Camp

  Nearest city: Manaus, Brazil

  November 27, 1978

  Are you all right, my brother? Varlan asked, as we walked towards the compound.

  My superior officer spoke directly in my mind.

  Shaking off a cloying misgiving, what had surrounded my light since we’d first landed in this jungle shithole on the ass-end of the world, I wiped sweat from my brow, clicking softly under my breath.

  I’m fine, sir, I sent back.

  It is understandable, you know, Varlan sent.

  The elder seer moved silently across the rough ground, even with two big guns, no temperature-controlled sense-suit, and a vest full of ammunition.

  We all react this way to the camps, he added. Even knowing their necessity, brother.

  I wasn’t thinking about the camps, though.

  I certainly wasn’t thinking about the dirtbloods cringing on the ground from behind the electrified fences, staring up at us like frightened sheep.

  Looking away from the razor wire at the top of the enclosure fences, I had already started to brush off the seer’s words, but Varlan wasn’t finished.

  All of us feel misgiving for allowing such a thing. For being complicit. He followed my eyes to the line of razor wire. For whatever story we tell ourselves, whatever rationale we favor, we are responsible for the systematic imprisonment of our own kind, brother Quay.

  I scowled faintly, even as I tried to keep my reaction from his mind and light.

  If Varlan noticed––and knowing his sight rank, he likely did––that awareness did not touch his facial expression.

  He went on in the same patient tone.

  Whatever the case for these temporary measures in ensuring the long-term survival of our race, that does not change the raw fact of what we have done. You would be wise not to forget it, little brother. We must keep our eyes open… not only in relation to the evils the humans inflict, but what we do ourselves. That is our burden.

  I suppressed my internal eyeroll with an effort.

  On the surface I nodded, giving Varlan a bare look.

  I understand, sir, I sent. Thank you, sir.

  My respect for him was real.

  But the dude had to be five hundred years old, if not older.

  He was from a different generation.

  I didn’t need lectures about necessity, or hardship.

  I knew all about necessity. I knew all about hardship.

  The Org rescued me from a place far worse than this.

  These sad-sack, low-ranked motherfuckers just couldn’t help us much, in terms of liberating our people from the human scum. Moreover, there was no point in telling them the truth. Race protection, sacrifice for the greater good––these concepts were just too big for most civilians, seer or human, and not only because of their insane naiveté about the ability of two such different species to live side by side in peace.

  For now, this more unforgiving world was necessary.

  Hard in some ways, sure.

  But necessary.

  We were approaching the main bunker of the work camp now, the largest of such camps in South America, about a hundred clicks north-west of Manaus in Brazil.

  As we passed through the corridor between two chain link fences, I could feel the lights of the camp seers on either side of me, well enough to have a rough feel for the numbers housed in this part of the facility. I felt enough to know they were divided by age, with older seers to my right, younger ones in the pen to my left. I felt they were mostly male, with only a handful of females sprinkled in on either side.

  I had no desire to look at them beyond that.

  Really, what would be the point?

  I knew what they were.

  Varlan’s thoughts once more rose inside mine.

  Imprisoning our brothers and sisters is a karmic sin, he sent, soft. It creates a kind of sickness in us, no matter what we tell ourselves. No matter how many words we use to construct our reasons, it breaks us… quietly. We can only hope this collective wound will heal, once our faith is justified… once we triumph over the human oppressors.

  A denser pulse darkened his thoughts.

  If that healing does not come, it will kill us, brother Quay. If we do not fix this world, it will kill us… and all of this will have been for naught.

  I bit my lip, suppressing the impulse to tell him to shut up.

  I knew he was trying to reach me.

  I knew as my pod commander, he felt it was his job, his responsibility, to teach us more than simply military strategy.

  Still, I struggled not to feel resentment towards him, and towards his lectures, which seemed to be aimed at me more frequently as of late.

  If I was broken, as he said, I could not afford to think of such things.

  Not yet.

  I understand, my young brother, Varlan murmured in my mind.

  The older seer fell silent then, turning to stare at something in the distance.

  After a pause, a wry amusement touched his light.

  We all cope with our life’s path in different ways, Varlan thought next, that amusement growing more pronounced. And perhaps you are right. Perhaps, in your case, my lectures are misguided. After all, not all of us mind being broken. From my observation, some of us revel in that brokenness, turning it into a kind of strength.

  Pausing, he added,

  …Or a weapon.

  My eyes followed Varlan’s.

  I followed his gaze all the way to the entrance of a crumbling, moss-covered building, the first of four cement-block barracks that made a curved line into the jungle, a dozen or so yards from the end of the chain link paddocks filled with seers.

  None of the structures looked particularly old, but the jungle had already taken its toll, such that the nearest one hunched like a mangy animal at the edge of a grove of high palms. The walls and roofs had obviously suffered under the frequent and violent rains, and although the structures remained more or less intact, time was not these buildings’ friend.

  Already, the jungle grew over and around the stained walls and red-tile roofs, awaiting its chance to consume the remains.

  Being the largest of the four structures I saw, the compound directly in front of us would probably outlast the rest, but not by much. The color of its red tile roof could only just be discerned under a thick layer of green and black moss. With its austere walls and complete lack of visible windows, I wondered if it was another cell block, perhaps for the more valuable or more dangerous merchandise.

  Whatever its purpose, the building was ugly.

  Apart from the roof, the whole thing was built of the same brownish-yellow cement blocks mixed with mud.

  The slave pens stretched to our left, running along the row of buildings. I glanced up at the high-beam security lamps on poles that circled the clearing and the main yards. Unlike the barracks, those looked brand new, and relatively modern in terms of the tech.

  I let my aleimi slide cautiously over the grounds of the camp.

  Once I had, I realized the building in front of me was much larger than I’d initially thought, in part because seers had built it, not humans. Like most seer-designed structures, a good portion of the actual, usable space lived underground.

  I’d barely had time to notice this, when I felt the presence of another light.

  Alien. Unknown to me.

  My eyes searched for the source of that vibration.

  Seconds later, I found it.

  Once I had, I realized Varlan ha
dn’t been looking at the buildings at all.

  He’d been looking at a seer.

  The strange male stood there even now, watching us approach. His lean body balanced at an angle in the darkened doorway, his long auburn hair brushing his shoulders, his pale eyes glowing faintly from the shadows.

  He was what Varlan had been staring at.

  He was the source of Varlan’s wry amusement.

  I scanned my seer’s photographic memories, wondering why his features looked familiar to me, even though I knew I had never met him in the flesh. I wondered if I had perhaps caught glimpses of that face inside the Org’s nonphysical network, or even on the human news feeds from the physical world.

  I could not recall any specific memory, though.

  I could not pinpoint the source of my familiarity.

  As I continued to stare at the youngish seer, I began to wonder if it was his light I truly recognized, not so much his face.

  Still, I could have sworn I knew that face.

  I just could not, for the life of me, discern how I knew it, despite how memorable those features were, or how striking they appeared to me, the longer I stared.

  He had most of the classic features of an Asian-born seer, and all the best qualities of those features. High cheekbones. Light-colored, almond-shaped eyes. Sculpted, dark-lipped mouth. Darkish skin, but more golden in tone than red or olive. Hair that had been black (if the roots were any indication) before he dyed it that vibrant, dark red.

  Well-defined jaw. Lean but muscular body.

  The seer was handsome.

  Unusually handsome, even for one from that region of the world.

  Despite that obvious fact, his light fascinated me far more than his face, or even his body.

  His aleimi had a quality to it, some unusual element I found myself reacting to within seconds of letting myself examine it. Sparks of heat rose from my own living light, as soon as I’d tasted the other male’s.

  Whatever that reaction was, it felt entirely outside my control.

  I just stood there, letting the effects wash over me as a fire ignited somewhere in my chest, exciting parts of my light I could barely feel, some of them at the high end of my upper aleimic structures. That heat rolled down through the rest of me––subsuming skin, flesh, muscle, and bone––causing my heart to beat harder, my lungs and breath to tighten, my throat to close, my skin to flush.

  Once I’d fully tasted that light, I found it difficult to even look at the other male.

  As a general rule, I prefer males as sexual partners.

  Most seers are “sexually open,” or “bisexual,” in the human parlance, but many of us have preferences of various kinds, in which we tend to lean or adhere more naturally. My own preferences may have been confusing my take on the strange male’s light, it’s true––but I don’t think that was all of it.

  That said, this brother seer was definitely my type.

  I could feel that in the other male, in his light even more than his physicality.

  That unique and tantalizing flavor drew me like a drug.

  Despite the fact that I generally adopted a hands-off policy with any seer in the Org who had the power to hurt me politically––a power this seer, above all others, had in razor-sharp spades, at least if he was who my light told me he was––I found myself surreptitiously checking the male out, well before I’d admitted to myself that I was doing it.

  Moreover, I could feel through the networked minds of my pod that I wasn’t the only one whose light’s interest was piqued. Male and female, they all found this new male intriguing, albeit in slightly different ways.

  I had the first stirrings of jealousy at the realization.

  I could feel also from the light of my pod that none of them had met Terian in the flesh before now, either, apart from Varlan himself.

  For I had to be looking at Terian.

  I was surprised at his youth, truthfully.

  He looked to be roughly my own age.

  At that age, he’d already achieved heights within the Org I could only dream about. As high commander over more than three-fourths of the military pods in all enforcement branches infiltrated by the Org, he practically ran the entirety of ground operations.

  Of course, his genius and skill were famous within the Org network. I had heard awed words spoken of him since the early wars.

  Brilliant strategist. Savant with the organic machines. Favorite of Galaith. Single-minded in pursuit of his targets. Creative in the field.

  Ruthless.

  He was said to be unpredictable. Highly unpredictable, even.

  Even more unpredictable than Dehgoies, who he supposedly supplanted within the hierarchy upon the other’s defection.

  He had long been notorious in his own right––almost as notorious as the male he had replaced as Galaith’s favorite son, a male who, it was said, had been Terian’s closest friend. The two of them were said to be so close, in fact, some even blamed Terian when Dehgoies left.

  Some of that, again, was simply grasping for explanations.

  No one left the Org.

  It was beyond unusual that any seer would defect––much less one residing in the very highest circles of power. Dehgoies’ abrupt departure sent reverberations through the whole network, not to mention rampant speculation, rumors and attempts to comprehend what had occurred. Some of those reverberations continued to this day. The truest of true believers, Dehgoies was rumored to have been one of the main architects of the early years. Up until the day he left, his loyalty had been beyond reproach.

  He had been beyond reproach.

  Until he wasn’t.

  He gave no reason. There was no note left behind detailing a rational excuse.

  Some said he had been tricked into leaving. They said he’d been targeted by enemy agents, recruited and manipulated by seers who were simply better than he was.

  Some said he had gone insane, or suffered some kind of nervous breakdown.

  Whatever the truth of it, he had not come back.

  Looking at Terian, I felt a sudden, strange immediacy in the mystery of this, in a way I never had before now. I could not help but be intrigued, imagining the two of them as friends prior to all this––really more like blood brothers, if rumors were correct.

  Supposedly, they had been nearly inseparable, right up to the end.

  Terian might be the only seer alive who knew what had truly occurred.

  Staring at the auburn-haired seer, I found that excitement in my light intensifying.

  He had to be Terian.

  Nothing else could explain what I felt in that male’s light.

  Even as I thought this, Varlan’s mind rose quietly in mine.

  Have a care, brother Quay, the older seer cautioned.

  I glanced at him, as casually as I could.

  Brother Terian is brilliant, Varlan murmured softly. His light is highly unique, as you’ve already surmised. He is charming, well-read, witty, shockingly talented in multiple areas, including military strategy, genetics, chemistry, non-dimensional and semi-dimensional construct manipulation, organic machinery, weapons design, infiltration, hand-to-hand combat… even fine art, I am told, particularly music and painting.

  Varlan looked at me, his violet eyes unblinking.

  His sight is almost unparalleled within the Org, he added. And it is said he has the light markers of a true prescient, despite how rare a thing that is.

  I gaped at that, I admit.

  I had never heard such a thing before––about anyone.

  But Varlan had not finished.

  His thoughts grew openly warning.

  I am not immune to the pull there, brother. For like you, I am only seer, and the light wants what the light wants.

  I blinked. Then I felt my skin warm, my jaw harden.

  Varlan’s implication was clear.

  Also, I was now waiting for the punchline, I realized.

  I could feel that punchline hanging in the air between
us. Moreover, I already felt how little good it would do, as far as my own light was concerned. I felt the annoyed reaction of my aleimi already, for having to hear what it knew it would ignore.

  I didn’t want a lecture from an old man… even if he was right.

  Varlan might have sensed some of this.

  His light changed.

  Gradually, it turned mesh-like, impenetrably dense. That cloak fell entirely over my mind, my body, my light. It created privacy in a network that was rarely private.

  By the time the old seer had finished, it was as if he whispered his words directly into my ear, shared only between the two of us.

  He is a psychopath, Varlan sent.

  I flinched.

  …An incredibly talented one, Varlan added. One who is invaluable and utterly irreplaceable within the Org. One who may even lead us one day. But he is a psychopath, brother Quay… so have a care.

  I stared at Varlan’s pale, violet-tinged irises.

  Jerking my eyes off the older seer, I felt my chest clench.

  I didn’t speak, however.

  I didn’t say a word.

  Five

  Do Not Be Afraid Of Me

  The Plaza Hotel

  New York City

  May 8, 1954

  “You’re an asshole,” Terian said, clicking his tongue at the other male, seer-fashion, speaking lightly as he pretended more amusement than anger. “A complete and utter asshole… and an unapologetic one at that.”

  The taller, black-haired male with the glass-like eyes only grunted, adjusting his weight in the opposite chair. For a long-feeling pause, he didn’t move apart from that, not even to take his eyes off the ass of the female he’d been staring at––really, fucking with his eyes––from across the crowded bar.

  Terian watched his friend, fighting annoyance for real.

  “Do you mind?” he said mildly, letting his anger be audible that time. “Or should I simply go? Find my own amusements for the evening?”

  The other snorted for real at that, looking back at Terian with a wry smile.