War_Apocalypse Read online

  It wasn’t the first time I’d wanted to do something like that, but we’d been warned vehemently to stay off the street, and to leave the local skirmishes alone. We couldn’t afford to be ID’d by SCARB up here. Balidor didn’t have any real contacts in this part of the state, and all of the flyers had been militarized and armed.

  According to ‘Dori, we’d likely be stunned or killed on the spot if one of our IDs popped up in their networked databases. Even if the flyer didn’t manage to kill or maim any of us, if they sent the information back, troops would come shortly after. They’d have seers with them, and likely more than we could handle.

  The bounties on everyone in our team––even Jon––had gone from capture to kill since Revik and I were named as primary suspects in the dispersal of the human-killing virus.

  The anti-seer conspiracy feeds weren’t even the only ones blaming us anymore.

  The World Court more or less blamed us, by naming us as primary persons of interest and putting out an international call to all law enforcement for our capture or kill––with only a slight preference for us being brought in alive.

  The United States government blamed us, too.

  I winced as a shotgun blast went off below me, bringing my eyes back to the street.

  They’d shot down the flyer. I saw one of them kicking it, laughing as he stomped on its electric eye. They’d chased down the woman too, and now they tied her wrists behind her back using what looked like a power cord. Blood dripped down the side of her face, darkening her white business shirt. Her eyes were blank, stunned, but otherwise, she looked like someone who might have worked in the law offices in the building across from where I stood.

  I bit my tongue until I tasted blood, watching them drag her away.

  I knew things like this were happening all over the city.

  I knew that, but something about just standing here, doing nothing in this small corner of the world where we might have stopped it, made me feel sick.

  Revik rubbed my shoulders, pulsing warmth into my light.

  He’d stopped talking, maybe because he could feel my thoughts, or maybe because he didn’t know what to say.

  There was nothing to say, really.

  The apocalypse had started, the third and final Displacement.

  The end was here, and all I could do was watch.

  2

  UNDERWATER

  CASS WOKE.

  Something woke her. A gunshot, maybe. Whatever it was, it came from far away––so far, it sounded more like the echo of a gunshot than the gunshot itself.

  Or maybe a memory.

  Yes, a memory.

  It could be that.

  An image slid through her mind, clear as a photograph, only with surround-sound sensory details. She heard the whistle of a desert wind. A large, yellow-haired seer lay in the dirt, face-down in his own blood. A sick smell came off him, not just of shit, although that was there, too, but of something less tangible, something that clung to him in more subtle layers.

  Bags smelled of the disease, she realized.

  It made no sense; Bags was seer, he couldn’t have been sick from the human-killing virus, but she smelled it anyway. He smelled of death. His own death, all deaths… every death that would follow.

  They would all die, and soon.

  She could hear the screams, the shouts of anger and denial.

  She watched the fires burn, the guns, the knives and metal pipes, the smoke fill the sky, the blood. She saw them panic, run like stampeding cattle, screaming, turning on one another, clawing and fighting one another to stay alive. She saw them smash windows, shoot friends and neighbors for their cars, steal, hoard food, hijack boats.

  In the beginning, they did anything they could to get away. Then, when they couldn’t get away, they did anything they could just to survive.

  There was no where to go.

  More images pressed in on her, trying to force their way behind her eyes. Too many things lived there, even when she didn’t try. Memory mixed with intuition, past with future, present with what might have been, the minds of those near with the minds of those far.

  Some of those she connects to are hers––from her life, her memories. Others are simply significant in some way, small or large, visible or invisible. Some silently, unknowingly, pave the way to a different future, a fork in the road, a new direction.

  The lines connecting her to all of these things––to all of these people, places, moments in time––are too numerous to count.

  A bomb goes off somewhere over the Rocky Mountains.

  The image of smoke and fire mix with the sick shit smell still lingering in her nostrils. A dragon breathes fire in a starlit sky. A blue-white vortex opens to her eyes; it merges with a view from a cave of a capsule in space. She sees bodies bulldozed into a river that is already sluggish and thick with death. A hurricane rolls over a dark ocean while the earth trembles under her feet.

  Windows crack, water gushes from underground, filling the pipes as people run, climbing and fighting and clawing to get away––

  Something is coming.

  Whatever it is, it wants to twist her insides around.

  She fights to see through the images that bombard her, trying to sort them out like threads in a vast carpet that covers her eyes.

  She’d expected it to be different, somehow.

  The seer thing. The seeing.

  Being one of them.

  She’d expected it to be more like talking inside her mind, like listening to a world previously unrevealed. She’d expected to be able to control it. She’d expected to be able to turn it off and on at will, learning the secrets that lived behind silence.

  It was all so very very different than she thought.

  Much of the new information came at her unbidden, un-summoned, out of control. It woke her with vivid dreams. It made it hard for her to focus on the tangible events and people around her. Much of it had nothing to do with the physical world at all––at least not in any way she could comprehend.

  It clarified so much, but left her with so many new questions.

  You will learn to control it, he promised. We will help you.

  They did help her. They helped her so much.

  Everything came to you so fast, he said, smiling. So very, very fast, War Cassandra. You are brilliant, brave, beautiful and wise… and soon, the rest of the world will see you for what you are. But we must help you control this first. You must be ready, or they will try to destroy you before you can fully spread your wings.

  He was proud of her.

  That pride emanated off him, like a scent, even a kind of flame.

  He was so very very proud of her.

  No one had ever been proud of her before––not like that.

  He told her she was a first for him, too. None of his other students, none of the hundreds of seers he’d trained over the centuries, had ever learned so much so fast as her. None had ever been so willing to do what needed to be done. None used the pain as she did, the way it was meant to be used. None fought so hard to awaken themselves, to accelerate their abilities. None embraced sacrifice as she did, the willingness to smash herself to pieces for the greater good, the desire to do whatever it took to save her people and the world.

  She was a goddess, he said. She was better than all of them.

  She was better than Revik.

  Revik fought them, the old man confided in her. Revik fought them for years, sniveling and hiding, playing weak and lying, avoiding his duty at every turn, at every chance he was given. Revik was unwilling, frightened, weak. He was too afraid of his own power to do anything but resist his true self, for decades.

  Because of him, decades and decades of time had been wasted.

  Cass was afraid, too.

  She didn’t tell the old man that, but he seemed to know.

  He smiled at her, petting and stroking her, cooing his praise. He told her that bravery was being afraid and embracing the hard path anyway.
/>   She was his star. His beautiful, beautiful star.

  She was War, and her light would shine the brightest of all.

  For her light is needed, in the very darkest of times…

  Her feet padded on the cold tile in front of her, making soft slapping sounds in the quiet. The floor changed before her eyes, going from Italian tile to smooth, green-blue metal.

  Metal bars, metal water, metal floors that breathed and warmed her feet. They spoke to her. The machines embedded in tables and walls spoke to her, the floors spoke to her, the walls themselves. They spoke to her when she listened, they listened when she spoke.

  She felt other beings outside those thick, transparent walls, swimming and paddling and floating in the ocean beyond.

  They spoke to her, too.

  Some sang to her. Long flippers moved silently through darkness; they called to her and sang. Sometimes she longed to go to them, to swim alongside them.

  Swimming. They were all swimming here––

  She couldn’t remember when they first brought her to this place. She couldn’t remember when any of it started anymore, or when it changed from that time when things used to be different. The pain even felt distant now. She couldn’t remember where that happened, or when. She didn’t know if that happened here, or somewhere else.

  She didn’t know where they were going now.

  The images tilted, shuffled, changed…

  Allie laughs from the grass in Golden Gate Park, in the middle of telling her and Jon a story, propped on her elbows as sun lightens her jade-green eyes. Jon sprawls beside her, one arm over his face to block those same rays. He rolls his eyes as Cass watches, snorting involuntarily at something Allie says.

  Cass can’t remember the exact day, or any of the details of the story Allie painstakingly unfolds. She can’t remember the significance of the story itself, or if any exists.

  She only remembers the look in her friend’s eyes, the exact quirk of her full mouth as she withholds the funnier bits for later. She remembers the way Allie glances between them as if to gauge if she’s lost them, if she needs to make the words more colorful, cleverer, funnier…

  The memory sours as Cass finds she understands.

  It’s all so calculated.

  Allie wasn’t hanging out with her friends. She was learning how to control spaces, how to move people, how to push them, how to manipulate them, how to get them to dance like puppets on her brightly-colored strings. She manipulated how she appeared, how they reacted, whether they laughed, what they thought of her.

  Even back then, Allie knew how to hold court.

  More memories swim forward, a cascade of memories, so many times she fell for Allie’s schtick, believed in the mirages she unfolded…

  Christmas.

  The three of them hunkered around a fireplace, not far from a living tree covered in glass ornaments and white lights. From the tree alone, Cass knows that Allie’s father is still alive. It’s not the bent, plastic tree Mrs. Taylor dug up to decorate every year after his death, usually drunk and crying over ornaments she remembered from Christmases like this one.

  This tree is alive.

  It smells good, like life itself…

  …then Cass sees him, sitting on the couch, watching Allie joke around with her and Jon, watching her with adoration in his eyes. Cass looks at Allie’s dad, Carl Taylor, who she always harbored a secret crush on, but not an icky, gross, pining-after-an-old-man kind of crush, more of a dad-crush, in that she wished he’d been her father, instead of the one she’d had, who’d been drunk or high most of the time when he bothered to be around at all, and who had––

  Her mind stuttered, rewound, erased.

  Allie got everything.

  Where it mattered, Allie always got everything.

  Even in her losses, Allie got just enough taken away to make her life sympathetic, without it being full-blown depressing. She lost the great father, but she’d had him, too. He’d adored her, thought she walked on water, the whole time he’d been alive. Allie had him through the worst parts of growing up, the times when Cass most needed a father who could be counted on to say and do the right things, at least most of the time.

  Allie had the perfect life, until she turned seventeen.

  She had the great brother, the cool, funny mom, the adoring father. She didn’t date really, but that was her choice, not because she never got offers. Allie was smart. Way smarter than Cass realized until now, but it was more than that, too.

  People liked her.

  Men liked her, even though Cass was prettier.

  Well, had been prettier. Allie changed a lot in the past few years, and Cass’s face got carved up. Cass didn’t even have the unquestionably better figure anymore––Allie’s body had changed, too, so now they were a lot closer in that area, as well.

  Back then, it wasn’t Allie’s tits or her ass, though… men just liked her.

  It was almost worse that Cass couldn’t pin down the exact reasons the real guys always liked Allie more than her, or why guys would sleep with Cass once and keep coming back to Allie again and again.

  She joked about it, pretended she didn’t care. She called it Allie’s “magic pussy,” and tried to pretend it made Allie weird, instead of simply better in some indefinable way.

  She still didn’t understand.

  After it came out Allie was seer, Cass thought, well, that must be it; those guys were picking up on eau d’seer, even back in high school. But now Cass might be the same, so that didn’t explain it either, much less explain why Allie got everything and she got nothing, why the Council sent Revik to watch over Allie and left her to rot.

  It had to be something else, something Cass would probably only recognize or understand if she had more of it herself.

  Then, after everything else, Allie got Revik himself.

  Only Allie would end up married to a guy like Revik. Only Allie would have the most infamous seer alive in her bed, or hell, doting on her to the point of mental instability––

  Her mind broke, stuttered, shattered into jagged shards.

  …a faraway shot echoed.

  Bridge. Intermediary. Elaerian. First of the Four. Fabled lover of the Sword. Leader of her people. Darling of the Seven, the Adhipan, and now the ex-Rebels.

  Cass’s head started to pound, hurting her in waves through a thin layer of skin.

  She’d been happy before.

  She tried to remember, to remind herself what that was like.

  Even recently, she’d been in a happy place… a stupid, childish happy place.

  Behind her eyes, she saw red rocks in the desert, Bags’s dark eyes and wide-lipped smile as she told him about a trip she’d taken to Sonoma with Allie and Jon when they’d all still been in high school. She told him about cave drawings and cactus, vortexes and New Age stores, hikes they went on, and the weird fortune teller they met. She’d asked his opinion on whether she should get another tattoo, and which design.

  She told him how she planned to find a hotel with a pool, seduce him into screwing her brains out before they went for a swim, then end their day on the patio of an adobe restaurant, eating kick-ass Mexican food and drinking salt-rimmed margaritas as the sun went down over the red-rock cliffs.

  All those images, sounds and smells were gone in a single flash of metal and smoke, only brighter for the harsh glare of the Arizona sun…

  In the end, Bags chose Allie over her, too.

  They gave him a choice, and he chose the Bridge.

  At the time, she’d been dumb enough to be proud of the big lug for his defiance.

  The echo of that shot came back to her now. It came back in dreams, in waking thoughts while she navigated the flood of images, whispers, sounds, smells that came at her from her newly awakened sight. The shot was burnt into her mind, like a scratch in an old record.

  But that was Cass’s problem really. Her mom always thought so, anyway.

  She couldn’t just let things go.

 
I like the way you are, a tentative voice whispered. It pulled on her, sending her warmth, love. I think the way you are is very good, just as it is, my most Formidable darling. You are beautiful, you are fearless, you are fire…

  Cass smiled, clicking softly.

  Did I wake you? she asked him. Leaving? Thinking too loud?

  He sent another pulse of warmth, pulling on her. Will you come back to bed? he whispered. …After you speak to him?

  Cass halted on the metal floor, looking around. The bare feet were now stationary below her, and for the first time, Cass realized she was entirely naked.

  The realization would have bothered her before, but somehow, now it didn’t.

  You are beautiful, War Cassandra, the voice murmured, quieter. So beautiful. I hurt for you, my love. I hurt for you, all the time. You are a goddess…

  Cass felt a flicker of his heat, the denser desire that underlay it.

  “You are, indeed,” another voice agreed.

  3

  BEING SEEN

  THE SECOND VOICE came from outside her mind.

  It also held a faint note of humor.

  Cass felt him before she turned, lifting her eyes from her pale feet with the chipped nail polish to look around a green and blue-tinted room, strangely egg-like in shape. When her eyes found him standing by the view port, smiling at her, something in her relaxed.

  He saw her.

  He truly saw her. He was the very first.

  Her parents didn’t see her. None of them did––not Allie, Jon, Chandre, Balidor, none of those cunts in school who treated her like shit, not Jack, not Baguen, not Terian, none of the other men and boys… not even Revik.

  But he saw her, the old man.

  She would not forget that.

  She would never forget that.

  And now, she saw him as well. As she did, the voices in the background dimmed. The memories that bombarded her dimmed, the onslaught of images slowed, the whispers receded. Her mind gradually cleared, like water as the silt drifts back to the depths.

  She remembered where she was.

  She remembered who she was.

  He stood there, a stately apparition cutting a shadow over a view port on the side of the underwater ship that had become her home.