The Defector Read online

  “What?”

  “I have been given a message. From her husband. To you.” As if seeing something in Revik’s face, Balidor hesitated, then made another of those nearly-apologetic hand waves. “We managed to communicate with him briefly, on the inside. We told him we were pulling you, on his wife’s request. We felt obligated to inform him of this development, if not necessarily to ask his permission. He had a right to know.”

  Revik nodded.

  “I agree,” he said simply.

  He did, too. He didn’t really want the details of that conversation, however.

  Balidor sighed, clicking under his breath.

  “Yet I must give them to you,” he said, again apologetic. “Uye said to tell you that your role constituted one word… and one word alone. He said if you deviated from that role, if you tried to surpass or expand it in any way, with either his daughter or his wife, he would hunt you, brother.”

  Balidor hesitated, his eyes still holding that apology.

  “…He said he would kill you, brother Dehgoies,” he said, the apology audible. “Even if his family was unharmed.”

  Revik only nodded.

  He couldn’t say the words surprised him, but some part of his light retracted anyway, feeling the threat more deeply than he would have from most seers.

  Kali would have told her husband about him.

  Of course she would have. She would have told him everything.

  Revik nodded to himself, feeling his chest tighten.

  “What was the word?” he said, realizing Balidor wouldn’t speak until he did.

  He turned his head, looking at the Adhipan leader directly, and that time, sympathy shone from those pale gray eyes. Balidor laid a hand on his arm, in reassurance maybe, or maybe simply because he thought Revik needed the contact.

  Hell, maybe he even did.

  “Bodyguard,” Balidor said. “The word he used was ‘bodyguard,’ brother. In point of fact, he said, Hul-tare, as in the ancient guardian of the light.”

  Thinking about this, Revik nodded again.

  He knew the myth of Hul-tare.

  The part about that particular mythic guardian being celibate, asexual and willing to die for his charges could not have been unintended.

  “I understand,” is all he said.

  Clasping his hands between his knees in an unconscious imitation of Balidor’s own pose, he stared out through the window at the passing scenery. In some part of his mind, he catalogued pine trees, the distant flash of blue sky, white clouds intervening along with sunlight, contrasting the sharper edges of the Pamir range as they descended down the steep slopes.

  He noted in that same part of his mind that they were heading south, so probably towards Kabul in Afghanistan, rather than Dushanbe in Tajikistan.

  Ticking, ticking in the background.

  The tactical part of his mind endlessly clicked on its own tracks, regardless of whatever emotions tugged at him on the surface.

  Some days, it bothered Revik.

  It made him feel like some kind of machine.

  Other days, it was a relief.

  When Balidor said nothing else, Revik only nodded again.

  “If you talk to him again,” he said. “Tell Uye I understand. I agree to this role.”

  Balidor nodded, squeezing him arm.

  “I will,” the Adhipan leader said.

  Revik believed him.

  When he glanced back towards the window, he paused on the green-eyed male sitting next to him, the same one who had been in his room in the monastery, the one Balidor called Dalejem. Revik realized only then that the other male was staring at him again, a thin veneer of puzzlement coloring those jade-green and violet eyes.

  The puzzlement was different on this seer than it had been on the giant one sitting across from him on the opposite bench.

  Dalejem seemed almost frustrated with what he did not understand.

  Something new lived in the male’s expression now, as well.

  Revik discarded it as soon as it flickered past his awareness, if only because he didn’t quite know what to do with it.

  Even so, some part of his mind catalogued it anyway.

  It looked almost like jealousy.

  Five

  Returning To Civilization

  They would be landing in São Paulo in approximately thirty seconds.

  They would enter the São Paulo airport approximately twelve minutes after that.

  The reality of both things had Revik in a state bordering on what he suspected might be an anxiety attack.

  He had already reacted badly to Kabul.

  Luckily, after Kabul, he’d had a chance to calm down.

  Over the course of a very long plane ride, seated with a group of infiltrators whose light exuded more silence than noise, even when they spoke, he’d managed to calm down quite a lot. He’d even managed to meditate for part of the trip, sitting at the back of the plane.

  He’d needed that calm, desperately.

  He needed it even more.

  Given how he’d reacted to being in a human city for the first time in five years, he wasn’t feeling all that confident of his coping skills. He knew São Paulo would be even more crowded, even more intense, and would involve even more humans ignoring his personal boundaries than what he had experienced in Kabul.

  He also knew he had a better chance of being recognized here.

  Under the Org, with only a few exceptions, Galaith kept Revik stationed in the West.

  That meant primarily North, South and Latin America, with some time spent in Europe and even less time spent in Russia and the Ukraine.

  Revik’s time in Russia had been not long after the end of the second world war, so near the beginning of his time with the Org. It had more to do with operational priorities at the time, and the stint in Moscow only lasted about a year.

  Without coming out and saying it explicitly, Galaith wanted Revik out of Asia.

  From casual things his boss had said, Revik assumed Galaith had been trying to put some distance between Revik and his family.

  It was an idea Revik himself found quite funny. There was no love lost between Revik and his adoptive family. He wouldn’t have sought them out for regular visits, even if he lived next door… even if he worked every tour of his career under the Org there. He’d tried arguing that same point with Galaith a few times, but the Org leader was immovable for some reason. He wanted Revik in the west. Other than those initial jobs in Moscow, and his tours in Vietnam, Revik never set foot in Asia, not once in almost thirty years.

  Revik didn’t try to voice any of his concerns about São Paulo to his new companions.

  He followed along with them without speaking much at all, really.

  He did notice that Balidor rarely left his side.

  He didn’t know if that was for his protection, or to ensure he didn’t split at the earliest opportunity, but Revik found he appreciated the proximity of the other seer. He noticed the inhumanly handsome, green-eyed seer with the streaked brown and black hair didn’t stray very far from him, either, which Revik also found strangely comforting.

  Dalejem, or “Jem,” as the other Adhipan seers seemed to uniformly call him, seemed to have made Revik his pet project of sorts.

  He didn’t talk to Revik much. He’d cut out the worst of his staring, too. He didn’t call himself out as any kind of bodyguard, not specifically––he merely attached himself to Revik’s side, and seemed to be shielding him almost constantly with his light.

  He even shielded him from the other seers in their Adhipan group.

  Normally, that might have irritated Revik.

  Right now, however, given everything, Revik mostly found it a relief. Something in the way the other seer’s aleimi enveloped and held his would have made it difficult for him to mind anyway, he suspected. He felt the protectiveness there, and couldn’t help but appreciate it, even if Dalejem was a stranger to him.

  Maybe he’d just been absent from that kind
of warmth for too long.

  Maybe that absence was making him stupid.

  In either case, he let himself be escorted, even if it blinded him somewhat.

  He didn’t speak much. He spoke even less to Dalejem than Dalejem did to him, and mostly just listened to brother Balidor. Even so, he followed the two of them wherever they led. By the time they boarded that first plane, he’d already begun to follow them even when they didn’t prompt him to do so specifically with their lights.

  In the airport at Kabul, he felt like he’d been thrown into some kind of alternate reality.

  He couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt so alien, or so totally out of his depth.

  The instant he stepped out of that Jeep––sounds battered him.

  His light felt the wash of presences like an assault, as if he’d stepped out in the midst of a riot. It was only an ordinary human city, on an ordinary human day, but it felt like a war zone. Something about the clash of lights, sounds, presences, and other physical stimuli felt violent to him. He got completely lost in that chaos, overwhelmed by it.

  The volume of everything shocked him.

  The hardness of light, the intensity of emotions.

  The loudness of their thoughts.

  It was as if someone had, without warning, cranked the dial on a radio, shattering a silence Revik only noticed in its absence.

  Revik stood in the middle of the street like some kind of time traveler from another world. He flinched from the horns, the shouts of pedestrians in markets, on the sidewalk and in front of the taxi stands of the airport. He ducked and flinched at dogs barking, music from open-air shops, feed stations running outside the larger stores, images and text flashing at him.

  He felt like he might have a heart attack.

  He felt like at any minute, he might be shot.

  The contact with so many minds overloaded his seer’s sight, blinding him.

  He struggled to filter, to screen and control the speed and volume of inputs.

  He felt and heard them all around him, though… not only in his light, murmuring at the edge of his awareness, but so tangibly when they were physically close to him, it was as if he could see their thoughts with his physical eyes, coming at him like an attack.

  Once he got close enough that some of those people actually began talking to him, wanting things from him, trying to sell him things, Revik basically hid behind the other seers, feeling some embarrassment for doing it, but unable to help himself.

  To their credit, the seers closed ranks around him.

  For the first time, he felt real understanding from most of them, and more compassion (and surprise, in some cases) than he did ridicule, which was a relief.

  Even so, it was hard to take.

  Hawkers and touts descended on them pretty much as soon as they hit the cold air.

  Revik found himself staring up and down the dusty streets, lost in the sheer number of bodies, faces and minds, animals and stimulus.

  Truthfully, it felt like being on LSD.

  For the first time since he left the Rooks, he felt high as fuck.

  If it hadn’t been for the lights enveloping him, particularly those of Dalejem and Balidor, he was pretty sure he would have had a full-blown panic attack. They probably would have had to tackle him in the street, shoot him up with some kind of animal tranquilizer.

  Smells hit him particularly strongly for some reason, some of them extremely unpleasant, some mildly so, the rest just overwhelming in their frequency and intensity.

  Petrol, exhaust fumes, spiced foods, sweaty bodies, dirty clothes, raw sewage, the chemical taste of perfume, animal urine, rotting vegetation from the stands, meat cooking, burning plastic from a trash fire, rotting animal meat, sulfur…

  He picked out each smell individually, but could get away from none of them.

  His eyes couldn’t track all the faces that pulled him, any better than his light. Some things stopped him harder than others, especially bright colors. He found himself staring at a group of women wearing full burqas of a sharp, lapis lazuli color.

  He still barely comprehended what he was looking at when Dalejem pinged a warning at him with his light. When Revik’s eyes swiveled to the other male, then followed the direction of his warning’s meaning, Revik saw a group of male, Afghani humans watching him stare at the females in burqas, their faces openly hostile.

  The connection between those male Afghanis, the warning in Dalejem’s light, and the women fell into place, enough to get Revik to look away.

  When he glanced at Dalejem, embarrassed, the other seer only smiled.

  Don’t stare at the women here, brother, Dalejem cautioned gently. Not the human ones. No matter how hungry you are.

  Revik blinked at that, startled, but not offended.

  Dalejem added, It’s less a morality issue than bad politics here, in this part of the world. We don’t have time for a confrontation with the locals.

  His thoughts grew even more gentle, but still held a faint rebuke.

  We can push them, of course, brother Revik… but we are only supposed to do so in cases of necessity, in areas that can rightfully be termed self-defense. We are not supposed to initiate or spark confrontations that might require us to unnecessarily impinge on their free will. It is part of the Adhipan code.

  Thinking about that, Revik nodded slowly.

  It made sense.

  The Adhipan would have a strict code about such things.

  As he stood there, he continued to turn over the other’s words, wondering if he’d been staring at more than the color of the burqas after all, consciously or not.

  He couldn’t make up his mind.

  Truthfully, he hadn’t been aware of thinking about sex at all, not here. He hadn’t even been fully aware those humans in burqas were female until Dalejem pointed it out.

  Now, Revik found himself overly-focused on the fact that there were female humans and seers around him, in addition to the rest.

  Dalejem grunted, rolling his eyes.

  Figures, he sent, nudging Revik’s arm.

  His light held humor, though.

  Revik flushed. Still, he did make a point of not looking overtly at the Afghani humans after that, especially the females, no matter how they were dressed. He also noticed that the female seers with them, Mara included, had covered their hair and in some cases their faces before they’d left the truck traveling behind theirs.

  Revik knew that might be partly to obscure the truth of their race as much as adhere to local custom. Even so, he noted that things might be more tense in this part of the world than he remembered.

  Your intuition is correct, Dalejem sent, apparently feeling enough of Revik’s thoughts to feel compelled to answer. Things are… heated… in this part of the world. Many social customs have become more rigid as a result. There is a resurgence of human religious fundamentalism everywhere right now, brother, among humans and seers.

  When Revik looked over, Dalejem added,

  There are a number of radical sects following the seer myths, as well. Terrorism is on the rise. We have been trying to stabilize the situation, but most of it is symptomatic. Far deeper problems are beginning to manifest, brother, both within the seer and human communities. The system Galaith set up to calm the humans following the wars is not really working. Where it does “work,” it does so mostly through oppression.

  Dalejem flipped one hand eloquently, a seer’s shrug.

  Revik thought the other might say more.

  He didn’t.

  Revik also wondered if Dalejem’s words might be an accusation, in part––but if they were, he could not feel it.

  Then again, Dalejem was Adhipan. There was a good chance Revik wouldn’t feel it, not unless Dalejem wanted him to.

  There is no accusation, brother, Dalejem sent, softer.

  He squeezed Revik’s arm briefly, then let him go.

  Revik fought the flush that rose in his light, but only nodded.

  He
didn’t ask for more information.

  He would have plenty of time to learn about the current state of the world later. For now, he got the gist of what Dalejem was warning him about.

  Mythers. Religious wars.

  The scriptures were rife with predictions around this.

  He let Dalejem and Balidor lead him towards the glass doors of the airport, keeping his light and his eyes within the group of infiltrators.

  He still caught stares.

  He found himself strangely self-conscious of his clothes, touching his face to remind himself if he’d shaved, how long his hair was, what he even looked like.

  It hit him, really hit him, that he hadn’t left those caves in over five years.

  At the thought, Dalejem and Balidor’s lights wrapped more tightly into his.

  It was strange to be protected by these two men, given who he was.

  It was strange, but not unwelcome.

  Six

  The Adhipan

  Revik knew of the Adhipan before this, of course.

  He didn’t know much about them in terms of details.

  Then again, apart from Vash and a handful of seers high up in the Seer Council, most seers knew nothing of the Adhipan.

  No one was really supposed to know much about the Adhipan––not unless they were of the Adhipan.

  Everything Revik knew, everything most seers knew, came in the form of rumors and quasi-myths. Most of what Revik had been told about the elite squad of infiltrators, he’d frankly questioned the accuracy of, if only because so many seemed to try and use sightings or encounters as bragging rights of one kind of another.

  They joked about such things when Revik was with the Org.

  They joked about every two-bit, wannabe seer having a lame “Adhipan” story.

  Everyone assumed these stories to be lies.

  Historically, the Adhipan had always worked in secret.

  They trained in secret. They recruited in secret.

  It had been that way for thousands of years.

  All seers had heard of the Adhipan, whether they believed in them or not. Revik had been hearing stories of the Adhipan since he was a boy, growing up in the Himalayas.