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Of course, she had some idea of his mental state.

  That smile slid upwards into a grin when she remembered the last time she’d encountered Revik in the Barrier. The big guy was hurting, yeah. She’d felt pain on him, confusion, a kind of sad puppy vibe, frustration, determination… anger.

  A fuck of a lot of anger.

  Those stronger emotions were pretty easy to pull off him, and not particularly illuminating.

  But fun, yeah… they were fun.

  Cass couldn’t help finding the combination a bit of a turn-on, too.

  Menlim described Revik’s reactions more from a psychological perspective. According to him, Revik never really grew out of an almost adolescent grasp of his emotions, especially when it came to close attachments.

  None of that answered the real question, though.

  What would Revik do?

  It remained the question they all theorized about, discussed, argued about and spun around––all except Shadow himself, who seemed to think he knew Revik well enough not to have to guess at much of anything when it came to him.

  Cass was less sure.

  Granted, she hadn’t known Revik as long, but maybe she’d known him more recently.

  In any case, she couldn’t help but be curious what he must be thinking right now, given everything. Yes, indeedy––some not-small part of her was very intrigued with the possibilities around what the infamous Sword might do, or try to do.

  Five months had passed since Cass left Allie in San Francisco.

  So far, they hadn’t heard a peep out of him.

  Not so much as a ripple, despite his unquiet sleep.

  Cass knew there was no way in hell that would be the end of it. That understanding didn’t bother her; it intrigued her. She would very much like to know what Revik might be capable of, if push really came to shove.

  The thought sent a small shiver through Cass’s light, and a grin back to her lips.

  It was all pretty exciting, truthfully. Even Shadow seemed to think so.

  Still grinning, she bounced on her heels for warmth, wrapping her arms around her jacketed torso and staring out over the horizon, focusing on a bank of low-hanging clouds and the gold light highlighting contours under a black and gray sky.

  Revik would definitely move on them, and probably soon.

  Cass still had something he wanted.

  At the thought, she turned her head, gazing back over her shoulder.

  Her eyes ran down the length of the seventy-five-foot ship, noting the organic sails as they moved languorously in a strong wind, jerking in sharp snaps and pulsing outwards like living membranes. Their interiors shone different colors, like oil-slicked water as they hit the sunlight from different angles. Eventually, though, they snapped back into full tension when the crew finished realigning both masts.

  The deck shone like pale green glass, despite the grips for her feet as she walked along its surface. The above-deck cabin had an unearthly quality to it, partly because one-way, dark green organic panes made up the majority of the domed shape, like an Emerald City floating along the top of the water.

  Feigran jokingly called it, “The Ark of All Elements.”

  The vessel could be submerged all the way under the waves, so that was part of Feigran’s––or Terian’s, as he’d started calling himself again––smirking reference.

  The vessel wasn’t quite a submarine, nor was it simply an ordinary ship.

  It couldn’t fly exactly, but it could hover, high enough for short hops over blocked passages. It could climb up on shore, crawling across earth as a land vessel. The high masts could be retracted, turning it into a low-sitting (if very long) speed boat. The vessel’s hull stretched into a narrow wedge, which meant the ship could really move when called upon.

  The other seers, meaning everyone but Terian, called it ulintek, which Cass thought for a long time was merely the ship’s name, like what a human would paint in white letters across the stern. She didn’t realize for months that ulintek meant “sea bird” in Prexci.

  Even that wasn’t the full meaning, however; ulintek was also a seer expression, one that roughly translated as “neither fish nor fowl,” so something that was neither all one thing nor the other, that belonged in more than one place at a time.

  Cass still missed a lot of seer references.

  She would have to learn them, if she was going to pass those cultural meanings on to her daughter. Shadow and Feigran could fill in any gaps, of course, but that didn’t weaken her resolve to know those things herself. She certainly didn’t intend to sit on the sidelines while everyone but her contributed to her child’s education on her own race.

  Shaking her hair out of her face once more in the wind, Cass leaned her full weight on the metal railing, resting her chin on her hands as she looked out over the gray and blue waves.

  She was still standing there about twenty minutes later, when a female seer approached her from behind.

  Cass turned, feeling the seer before she heard or saw her.

  She wore a robe of dense, starless black, her form seeming to disappear where the fabric coiled liquidly around her legs and torso in the wind, leaving her bare feet visible. Even before she spoke, Cass knew why the seer had come.

  Cass could feel it, trembling just outside the conscious areas of her light.

  She could feel her.

  The seer touched Cass’s arm carefully, reverently.

  It is time to return to your duties, most precious and Formidable War, she sent gently. Your presence has been greatly missed.

  Cass felt a now-familiar jolt of tenderness and wonder in her light.

  She had been missed.

  The realization still caught her off guard, each and every time.

  She still felt the same flush of awe, the same bursting wave of love, happiness and bewilderment. Her light flared out, a smile came involuntarily to her lips. That confusion of feelings and excitement rendered everything else in her life insignificant. It made the rest of what she felt and thought irrelevant. The feelings were so intense, some part of her still wondered at the truth of them, even as they sent shimmers of heat and sparks through her light.

  Then she would see it.

  She would see that love reflected back at her in those pale, silent eyes.

  In those moments, she knew, irrefutably, how real it was.

  In those moments, it was the realest thing in her life––the realest thing she’d ever known, and likely would ever know again. That love made everything else in the world unimportant, and yet, maybe for the first time, it made it all meaningful in a way she never thought possible.

  Cass used to scoff at people who waxed on and on about how having a child changed their lives, how it was some great spiritual experience and whatever other self-congratulatory crap they gushed about while bouncing their chubby, weird-looking offspring in their laps. Most of all, she hated how whenever she didn’t respond with sufficient enthusiasm about their cult-of-motherhood crap, they’d give her pitying looks for not “getting” it.

  Cass used to laugh at people like that.

  She always thought them self-satisfied fools, elevating motherhood––one of the basest and most crudely biological of all human functions––into something quasi-mystical, just to feed their overblown and deluded egos.

  She didn’t feel that way anymore.

  Of course, she also recognized a good chunk of her previous contempt had probably been jealousy.

  She’d stopped believing she could be a mother, even before she left San Francisco. She’d wanted a child more than anything while she’d been one herself, but the older she got, the more she doubted she’d ever be capable of it. She tried with Jack––as if there wasn’t a worse person in the history of humankind to reproduce with––but they had no luck.

  She tried with another boyfriend, Christian.

  She even tried with a few one night stands, deliberately foregoing birth control and convincing them to do the same in her desperation to get p
regnant.

  She never did.

  Truthfully, she’d assumed she was sterile.

  It never occurred to her she was seer.

  Smiling at the memory now, she aimed that smile at the black-robed seer.

  Excitement mixed with warmth as she followed her through the hatch-like door leading below-deck. That precise, intense combination of emotions felt so new to her still, Cass shivered, each and every time they came over her.

  Love lived there.

  Love, gratitude, affection, awe, wonder… yes, even reverence.

  The feelings mixed with a heated protectiveness more intense than anything she’d ever felt in her life. At times, that desire to protect, to keep safe, unharmed and untouched, cocooned from all the horrors of the world and anyone who might harm her, superseded all the rest, turning her light and mind fierce, sharp, cold, borderline animalistic––deadly.

  She was a mother.

  She would kill anyone and anything that threatened her child.

  Climbing down the narrow, circular staircase to the lower levels of the sea bird, she bit her lip to hold back that part of herself that wanted to run the whole way, to skip down those stairs two at a time so she could be reunited with her sweet girl once again.

  When she slid through the low door to the pink and green painted room, her smile slid into a full grin. She’d already seen the eyes peering over the edge of the crib.

  She was growing so fast.

  They called her Kumari.

  It meant “daughter” in Thai, and while Cass knew some of the senior seers already assigned her baby girl some long, difficult-to-pronounce intermediary name befitting her rank and the age of her soul, Cass and Terian both called her Kumari or “Kami” when they cooed at her alone.

  Shadow’s scientists had accelerated little Kami’s growth, of course.

  They did it the first time after they placed her tiny embryo in that incubation chamber after they’d taken her out of Allie in San Francisco.

  They accelerated Kami’s growth a second time after she’d finally been “born” under the most careful of conditions in the high-tech lab next door to where Cass’s baby lived now, in her own cozy nursery whose walls Terian lovingly painted with his own hands.

  He added to the murals for weeks, surrounding little Kami with exotic jungles and snow-capped mountains and intermediary beings and painted sunlight, along with larger animals that smiled down at her where she lay inside her crib.

  Cass broke into a laugh at the eyes looking at her solemnly over that crib wall.

  The child’s lips lifted carefully to mirror her expression.

  Narrow lips, like her father’s. A bare fuzz of near-black hair. High cheekbones like Allie’s, although the exact shape of her face wouldn’t be known for some time, of course, not until after she grew into her features and started to shed some of the baby fat that now made her so adorably round and soft and squeezable.

  Her eyes shone like pale searchlights, nearly colorless, like Revik’s. Even so, they had a rim of brilliant green around that lighter center near the black pupil, almost as if her eyes had split her parents’ right down the center.

  She was tall for her age already, and curious.

  Cass looked down at her, beaming when one little hand carefully let go of the side of the crib to grasp the air insistently with her chubby fist.

  Her clear, green-rimmed eyes never left Cass’s face.

  The intensity in that stare brought a tightness to Cass’s throat.

  She was so beautiful, so smart. Little Kami already learned the universal sign for asking to be picked up. She still couldn’t stand up inside the crib without gripping the wooden edge with one hand, but she knew how to ask to be picked up.

  The motion of that one, pink fist nearly brought Cass to tears.

  Her darling girl.

  Even as she thought it, Kami sent her a flood of warmth, so much love Cass could barely stand it. The sheer amount of love, the complete unconditionality of it, the trust she felt behind that dense pulse of feeling, only made the tightness of her throat worse.

  Cass had never known she could love any person, any thing or being so much.

  It was beyond love.

  It was a force all its own, so densely tied to the core of who Cass was that she could already no longer imagine living without it. She would die before she lived without this feeling. She would die before she let anyone hurt her precious girl. It gave a meaning to her life and identity that she’d never before known. It made her want to be a better person.

  It made her want to save the world.

  Cass would do all of it. She would do anything for little Kami.

  Truthfully, she was grateful to Revik. She was even, at times, grateful to Allie.

  They’d given little Kami to her.

  At times, that gratitude overwhelmed her, turning into a heated love that felt more familial than anything she’d ever felt towards the two of them before, despite how often Shadow and Terian tried to hammer that family thing into her head.

  Cass suspected she would never stop being grateful to the two of them for being the biological parents to the one thing in life that finally made sense to her, the one thing that explained, after all these years, what her life actually meant.

  So yeah, Cass was grateful.

  At times, she also felt what might have been empathy––a sharper, denser compassion for all they had lost, together and separately. Sometimes Cass even wondered if that feeling was love, or some remnant of love perhaps––a love that transcended who they were down here.

  Whatever that feeling was, it made no difference to the protective part of her.

  No one would take Kami from her. No one.

  Not even Revik.

  She would die before she let anyone take her baby girl away.

  2

  FOREVER YOUNG

  I REMEMBER US in that field, in blooming wild grasses in a valley between Himalayan peaks, snow-capped crags which loom over us on either side. I remember what he says to me, when he thinks I can’t hear him.

  I can’t hear him, not then.

  I can hear him now.

  I remember you, his mind murmurs. Gods, I remember you. I remember you, Allie. Please remember me. Remember me, please…

  He wills the words at me.

  He feels them more than thinks them, not fully understanding them himself.

  He feels like a teenager, watching me, trying to read me without touching my mind.

  He wants to fuck, wants to wrap his arms around me, tell me romantic things, lie on me in the grass. He wants to stroke my hair, to play with it, wrap it in his fist, pull on it. He wants to whisper in my ear, against my mouth, to confide in me, to coax me into confiding in him.

  He can only watch me, though, unsure of himself, his confidence shaken from our conversation of the night before.

  But I haven’t left. I haven’t left him yet.

  I’m still there, with him. I’m watching him, too.

  He can feel it. He feels glimmers of my pain, glimmers of my eyes on his body, his chest, his face, his mouth. Glimmers of shyness, of my wishing I could feel more of him.

  Glimmers of wanting to move closer, to be in his light.

  There is love in those glances. He feels that, too. Lust, too, yes, but even that feels more like love––maybe love that doesn’t know how to express in any other way.

  I feel his light.

  It is distant to me back then, still broken somewhere over his head, but I feel it.

  I know that light now, better than I know myself. I can see the parts of us, whispering in that dark. I can see him saying romantic things, blushing in his light, even as he pours his heart out to me. I can feel the high, clear, blue-white light where he lives.

  I feel truth there. Truth, and so much beauty.

  He is innocent there.

  Innocent, and so open. Beauty in fragility. Yet so much strength lives in that light. More than I’ve ever seen in him
, even in his most warlike moments on the ground.

  We are children.

  Up here, we are forever children.

  3

  THE LEVEE BREAKS

  HE HOLDS HER hand, gripping her tightly, maybe too tightly.

  He can’t help but stare at her face… at her eyes, more than the rest.

  Disbelief floods him as she blinks a second time, bringing a shock of heat to his whole body. His mind fights to comprehend that she’s awake.

  Gods. She’s awake.

  She’s finally awake.

  Seeing her focus on him, looking directly at his face with those luminous, green irises, the heat worsens, turns primal, mixed with a love he can’t control, a longing that resides somewhere past him. Pain arcs through his chest, nearly debilitating, a joy he can’t hold with all of his light.

  He grips her fingers harder, fighting to stay with this moment as long as he can, unable to think as he hears the others react to her around him.

  They walk up to touch her, to touch her face––Jon, Balidor, Wreg, Tarsi, Chandre, Jax, Loki, Garensche, Jorag, Neela, Illeg, Raddi, Torek. He hears them joke with her, tease her. He feels their relief, their love. He sees a denser thread in Torek’s eyes as the other seer leans down to kiss his wife’s cheek.

  Jealousy arcs through him irrationally, so intense, he has to fight not to snarl at all of them, to drive them possessively from the room.

  He wants her to look at him. He wants her to look only at him.

  When he finally tears his eyes off her face, off her animated face and those intense green eyes, he sees Jon. He stares at the tears in the other man’s eyes.

  “Revik,” Jon says gently. His fingers grip his shoulder. “We gotta move, man. We’re running out of time.”

  Revik frowns, shaking his head. He pushes away the other man’s light.

  He brings his wife’s hand to his chest, cradling it against him, over his heart, wishing he could pull her inside him, body and light. When he looks at her again, she’s shaking her head at him, her perfect, full lips sliding up in a smile, a smile he knows so well, it gives him an erection so painful he nearly cries out.