Revolution: Book Three of the Secret World Chronicle - eARC Read online

  Both, if he was to be honest, attracted by the same qualities in Bulwark. Qualities he was noticeably lacking in.

  “I am sorry for your loss.” These were more than words. They were backed by what the Seraphym was. She did understand. How could she not? She felt what he felt, and shook with the power of it. His heart wailed with the injustice of it, of losing not just one, but two women to this man, and she wept with him.

  “Show me,” the Djinni said.

  “What do you wish to see?”

  “Show me,” Red snarled. “What happens to me, without her?” He didn’t have to specify who he meant.

  “Much of that future is hidden from me,” she said, and uncharacteristically knelt to him for a moment in humility. “I am truly sorry. This is the source of my own uncertainty. I…think…it is not so much hidden, but so in flux that even I would go mad, trying to sort through it all. I will show you what I can, and I beg you, believe that I would show you more, if I could. I will show you all I am permitted—in fact, all that I am permitted to know. Will that…be enough?”

  “I’ll let you know,” he replied. “Do it.”

  And so, she did. Fragments, mostly, as much as she could snatch from the branches that were changing so quickly that they were blurring even to her. Mostly, he was in pain. Mostly, he was achingly alone. But too much was unknown, too much was obscured and within such a short period of time. Past a year, at most, the Seraphym’s vision revealed nothing for this man.

  But around him, the world was slowly improving. They won victories, small ones at first, then greater—then the Great Blank. But on the other side of that…on the other side of that, instead of virtually every branch of the future ending in hellfire and Thulian conquest, something else flared into existence. A few tenuous strands of fate began to burn with hope, began to pulse with renewed vigor, with the promise that all was not lost. And there were glimpses in those futures of the people he had come to care about, despite himself, battered, worn, almost broken, but triumphant.

  “It’s what needs to happen,” he said, finally. “It starts here, doesn’t it? With a choice.”

  The Seraphym nodded, reached out for him, and gave him what compassion she could.

  “With a sacrifice,” she said. “But the choice is yours. It always has been.”

  “No, it’s not much of a choice at all.” Red replied. “But you’re going to make me say it, aren’t you?”

  She nodded, and Red turned to meet her unearthly gaze.

  “She is not for me,” he said.

  The little pocket of unreality rang like a bell.

  It is permitted, Seraphym. The Red Djinni is ready.

  Of course! It had not been Bulwark who was not ready! It had been the Djinni!

  With pure joy, the Seraphym leapt from the “gate” like a racehorse released, and poured herself into Bulwark. She gave him glimpses of his future; she gave him glimpses of his past, the things that would galvanize him rather than sinking him. She showed him how very much he meant to those around him.

  But most of all, she gave him hope. That, too, was another thing she knew, and knew well. The bits of the future, she knew he would forget as soon as he awoke. But he would remember the hope. She was like a radiant torrent refilling a dry, parched lake. No matter how profound his grief, it could not prevail against her. And she found, and ruthlessly slew, the little worm of despair the evil thing called “Harmony” had left to gnaw at his soul, a thing that Vickie and Bella had both missed. This, too, was permitted.

  She filled him with her fire, and pulled him back from the abyss. And then, she used words to trigger that fire.

  “I had not thought that Bulwark was a coward,” she said, scathingly, lashing him with contempt.

  That got his attention. Gairdner Ward may have been called many things in his lifetime, but “coward” wasn’t one of them.

  “Nor did I believe that he was lazy,” she continued, “Yet, there you stand, taking the coward’s, the lazy man’s way out. ‘I will do my duty,’ you say, knowing very well that merely doing your duty is not enough, is never enough. Knowing that everyone who steps back into life must be invested in life, and determined to fight through whatever life flings in his path. But no, you will walk in, and walk out, not even so much as an extra on the stage because you are too much coward and too lazy to step up and actually live.”

  She sensed his anger slowly igniting. But that was not what she wanted. Anger alone would not bring him through this.

  “Yes, coward, I say again. You knew Victoria was no longer living long before I told you. And yet, you fought. You lived. You even loved. You connected with and cared for those around you. But now, you use this fact of her death as the excuse to give up. Death is nothing. Even if you had not the evidence of your own experience, of my presence, to prove that, you know that death is nothing. But no. Now you will give up, let loose of those connections you have made, deny the ones you might make in the future if you were not such a coward, if you dared to have the courage to care, to have the hunger to feed mankind, if you dared to reach out. You are angry? Prove that I am wrong!”

  Again he would have said something, but she cut him off. “Yes, you are in pain. So is everyone around you. And you know that! And you are lonely. All mortals are lonely! That is the condition of mortality, that you can only, briefly, touch one another, and only if you have the great courage to reach out, to risk more pain, to risk rejection, to bet all against the chance of that connection! You had that, Bulwark! You could have it again! But no, you are afraid.” Terrible contempt colored her words. “And you think you are all alone in that. Fear. You know nothing of fear.” And she showed him. Vickie, fighting back panic from the moment she woke to the moment she slept, wrestling with more fear in her very dreams. Acrobat, battling constantly with his own insecurity. Scope, certain that she was never, ever going to come up to the mark she had set herself, no matter how well she did. She even gave him brief glimpses of Red’s pain—though not the cause, never the cause, and not his thoughts.

  And Bella, struggling every moment of every day beneath the burden of being the de facto leader of a rebellion with few resources and no assurances whatsoever, a role in which she felt crushingly inadequate, and a role which she knew was one that could (and probably would) kill her friends. Friends who trusted her and her decisions, that she would knowingly send straight into the jaws of death.

  “Are you finished?” Bull asked.

  “Are you?” she countered.

  “No,” he said, and she felt his resolve, the fires she had lit within him die down to bright, self-sustaining coals. And that was all, he was Bulwark after all. She had restored his connection—his willingness to connect—with those he held dear. Before, he felt a duty to return, now there was impatience. There was work to do, and he was Bulwark. He was ready.

  She softened, and surrounded him with compassion. “No, you are not finished. You have not yet begun. Let us go home.” She held out her hand to him. “Now it is time.”

  He didn’t hesitate, and took her hand in his.

  * * *

  This time, the world didn’t fade to black. Red felt his hand fly to his eyes as a crescendo of light flared up around them. When it subsided, he found himself standing next to the Seraphym at Bull’s bedside. Bella was there, sitting next to Bull and sprawled across his chest. She wiped the tears from her face and looked up at them, astonished. And then, without fanfare, Bull opened his eyes and sat up. He gave Bella a soft pat on her arm, and turned to the Seraphym. He nodded.

  She smiled. There was still compassion in that smile, and sadness, even grief. There was understanding, and shared pain. She knew this was no “happy ending,” that the odds were terribly against them, and that she had asked them all to step forward, unflinching, to accept that world of anguish. She said nothing. Her look said it all.

  Bella gave a low cry and threw herself around Bulwark. He patted her back gently. “I’ve been told you might need my he
lp in the next little while,” he said. Red chuckled and shook his head. Bull was back, definitely back.

  “Did you take a graduate course in ‘Understatement’?” Bella asked, around what sounded like a few tears. “Don’t you ever, ever do this to me again, you hear me?”

  “Yes ma’am,” Bull said. “I apologize for the delay in returning. You’ll have a full report on the matter on your desk in the morning.”

  “Moron,” she replied.

  Red chuckled again, but the laugh died in his throat. Bella’s joy and Bull’s palpable if somewhat veiled relief at being back felt like a dagger twisting in his gut. He tried not to think about what had just happened here, what his choice had cost him. He made another choice then, one to leave, when he felt the Seraphym stop him with a touch. He turned back, and met her gaze with his own.

  “Red Djinni,” she said, touching his face with shaking hands.

  “Yeah?”

  “I can See you.” Her eyes held him, full of grief and remorse, compassion—and maybe, just maybe, a touch of pride, pride in him.

  “That’s great, darlin’,” he said. He turned away, walked purposefully to the door, and left.

  Bedlam Ballroom

  Mercedes Lackey and Cody Martin

  Of course, while some of us were fighting the internal ECHO revolution, others were concentrating on the real enemy: the Thulians. After KC, they’d been quiet. Consolidating the forces, we figured. Trying to work out how we had found their staging depot. More than that, maybe, trying to figure out what impossible weapon we had that took out their entire staging depot in a few minutes.

  Some people were not content with waiting for the Thulians to make the first move. Some people wanted to take the fight to them.

  If you guess those people were Red Saviour and the CCCP…well, you win the Kewpie Doll.

  Red Saviour drummed her fingers impatiently on the desk, staring at the mountains of paperwork. Moscow always wanted paperwork. Which made no sense, since this was no longer the old days of the USSR where paperwork provided the jobs for thousands of low level clerks. She privately suspected her father of demanding it just to keep her off the street and out of the headlines.

  “Bah!” she said aloud. “Am nyet being out to pasture put.” Truly, there was no reason for the Commissar to be doing the daily street patrols, but surely there was something she could do. Some action! That was what she needed.

  Untermensch poked his head in through the open door. “What was that, Commissar? Did you call for me?” He had been on desk duty right outside of her office, organizing a file cabinet.

  “Are there no current targets that we can be making hits on?” she asked. “My behind is growing fat with chair sitting. Soon I will look like Desperate Housewife.”

  Georgi thought for a moment. “Nyet. We have assets assigned to all known targets, at the moment. Until we have better intel, we are currently doing all that can be done, Commissar.”

  She snorted with disgust, then thought a moment more. “Nechevo. I will find target.” Georgi cocked an eyebrow at that, then went back to working on the file cabinet.

  She stalked out of the office, goal firmly in mind. Unter scrambled to follow her a moment later…perhaps a bit desperately, she thought. He was a soldier at heart, and craved action as much as she did; Natalya imagined that he was going insane as she was after being cooped up in the HQ doing busywork.

  She didn’t head for the armory, nor the garage, as she suspected Unter thought she would. Instead she went deep into the bowels of HQ, into what might have been an interrogation room if the Americans in general and the Blue Girl in particular hadn’t been so squeamish. But, ah well, at the moment it held something a lot more valuable.

  Fortunately, as Commissar, the techno-witch had set up all the locks to answer to her. As if she had had a choice; the Commissar wasn’t going to be locked out of her own base, in any fashion. A small price for their cabal of conspirators to pay in order to house their “secret weapon.” She opened the door, and faced the curious mechanism that its owners referred to as a “quantator.” Untermensch respectfully stood behind her and off to the side, waiting to see what his Commissar had in mind.

  “Dos vedanya!” she called to the odd contraption, which sat quietly on top of one of the ancient industrial desks that had been left behind when this building had been abandoned. “I am needink to speak to Tesla!”

  For a moment, nothing happened. She tapped her foot impatiently. Finally parts of the thing began to unfold; a couple of spindly antenna-like things deployed, and a bluish field sprang up between them. After a moment longer, the wire-frame image of a genial man’s face appeared in the field. “Bon giorno, Commissar. Tesla is occupied, will Marconi do?”

  “Tesla, Marconi, ghost of Marx, I do not care,” she replied. “Am needing target.”

  “A target?” The lines moved in a way that suggested an expression of puzzlement.

  “Da! You have havink all manner of uploadings from Kansas City after-action!” she exclaimed. “And I am needink to break heads!” Her fists glowed a little in reaction to her pent-up frustration.

  The expression of puzzlement turned to one of mild alarm. “Ah…I see. Let me see if we’ve managed to decode anything useful for you yet…” The wire-frame head went very still. Natalya folded her arms over her chest and tapped her foot. It took longer than she liked…though really, less time than it took one of her people to look something up on a computer…and the head was moving again. “Well, as it happens, since you indicate you are looking for something for a little personal attention, there does seem to be a very small Thulian intelligence-collecting cell located right in Atlanta. It’s probably no more than three or four technical personnel, perhaps a few armed troops to guard them, since it’s in the Hayes Street destruction corridor.” Helpfully, the face winked out and was replaced with a map. “If our translation is correct, they seem to be working with a local collaborator.”

  Natalya’s eyes lit up. “Shto?”

  “It’s not within your allotted area of operation as CCCP…” Marconi said, voice trailing off a little

  “It’s an area nominally controlled by ECHO, Commissar, though their presence is light.” Georgi leaned back, looking from the Commissar to the image of the map.

  “Technically, I suppose you ought to inform them and let them handle it, but…” Marconi’s face replaced the map.

  Normally, Saviour would have ignored all that—something told her to wait. “But?” she prompted.

  “Then you would have to inform them where the intelligence came from or they would not believe you. And that would…well…” Was there a look of mischief in those wire-frame eyes? “Given that we are supposed to be a secret, I can imagine that Signorina Parker, Signorina Vickie, and Signore Pride would have, how is it? A litter of cats?” There was an exaggerated electronic sigh. “In fact, all things considered, given the—how is it?—need to know, I fear you will be forced to deal with this yourself, with as few others involved as possible.”

  Nat managed to suppress a whoop of triumph as Georgi rolled his eyes. “I’ll be getting a van out of the motorpool, Commissar.” Georgi turned to leave.

  “Wait.” He turned back to face Natalya. “Rouse Chug as well. I am not wanting him to be eating HQ while we are gone.” With a nod, he left to do as ordered. Briefly, Saviour considered involving Overwatch, but then (a little to her relief) she realized that with everyone but Gamayun and Soviette out on patrols, there were no headsets left in HQ. Good! Executive decision. She sketched a salute to Marconi, who nodded and faded out and the apparatus folded back up again. She followed Untermensch out, and locked the door behind her. “Ha. We do this old school!”

  “I am not sure that city’s already strained insurance will cover the damages if we do it ‘old school,’ Commissar. Whatever that means.”

  “It means, is a good thing this cell is already in destruction corridor, comrade,” Nat said with poorly-repressed glee. “Cannot de
stroy what is already ruined, da?”

  “How much ammunition should I bring? Grenades?” Georgi gauged the look in her eyes for a moment before giving a sigh. “Many of both. I’ll suit up and prepare everything, Commissar.”