Free Allie's War Season Four by JC Andrijeski

across his throat.
    That last panel had a retraction belt on it, of course, in case he convulsed during the jump, or had a panic reaction and tried to free himself. The danger of choking would have made it more practical to use electrodes, like in the old-style chairs Jon had seen back in Seertown, but these new straps worked better, Balidor told him.
    Jon remembered seeing the old jump chairs when they’d all still been in New York. He’d seen images of the old set-ups on one of the research feeds he’d been trolling with Wreg, learning how infiltrators actually worked.
    He remembered how that particular lesson had ended, too. That had been after Revik and Allie’s wedding. He and Wreg had already been dating, although Jon hadn’t admitted it to himself yet. He told himself it was just sex, or maybe just comfort...anything that allowed him to not think about it very much, or at least not very deeply.
    In any case, they’d ended up on the floor of the media room that day, too.
    Most of their ‘practice’ sessions ended that way in those weeks, with Jon losing control of his light, pulling on the other man, or Wreg asking him outright for––
    Cutting off the thought, Jon shoved the memory out of his mind.
    He got it out, too, but not before it brought an unwelcome pulse of his own pain, separate from Revik’s for a change.
    Distracting himself, trying anyway, Jon glanced around the room, which contained the same mish-mash as the rest of the house. Rich, modern upholstery and drapes covered couches, chairs and windows, giving it a goth feel, but the truly expensive version, not like what a lot of his friends used to cultivate with their second-hand finds from the street or the odd sidewalk sale of thrift store Victoriana.
    Heavy, blood-red, velvet curtains blocked most of the daylight through the reinforced storm-windows, which, despite the cloud cover, could still reflect significant glare from the hidden sun. Wallpaper with burgundy and cream-colored stripes covered the walls, and the built-in, walnut bookshelves remained stocked with all of their original––and highly-expensive––library of paper books. Next to wall-to-wall and sometimes ceiling-to-floor monitors that probably cost a good twenty thousand dollars apiece, Jon could see what had to be genuine and probably ridiculously expensive antiques and original paintings.
    Now that the seers had taken over the space, their own high-tech gadgets, illegal organic-modified components and weapons had been added to the mix, left on decorative tables, book shelves and even resting on the carpet by one of the four, high-ceilinged walls with their elaborate baseboards and sconces. Because they’d only recently converted this particular room, there also remained a more sunk-in shabbiness that hadn’t yet been eradicated, that struck Jon as more likely a token of the squatters and looters who had been more recent tenants before they arrived. Jon could see more obvious evidence of the same in carpet holes and smoke damage, burns to one of the couch armrests, along with green spray paint of a sloppy, teenaged-looking tag over what looked like an original oil painting. Jon saw a spray-painted smiley face on one of the burnt umber walls, too, right next to the stone fireplace.
    Really, though, the damage was pretty minimal.
    The same hadn’t been true of all of the houses on the square, Jon knew.
    He’d personally toured a number of them, and helped move furniture and set up bedrooms and semi-apartments for group housing. Most of those had been to accommodate local seers who moved to the square when they found out Revik was in town. Jon didn’t know if they moved near the Sword for religious reasons, or in the hopes he might protect them from the seer purges occurring periodically in other parts of San Francisco. In any case, it began to feel like they’d created their own city within a city, a miniature seer Mecca on the West Coast.
    Jon had been warned already