Free Allie's War Season Four by JC Andrijeski Page A

by Jorag and Neela not to leave the confines of their ‘territory’ for security reasons. In particular, he was told never to go to the Mission District, but Chinatown was off-limits, too, along with most of Pacific Heights and North Beach, as well as the Marina.
    Revik was more blunt...and more specific.
    He laid a map out on the mahogany table, pointing out the limits of their staked territory. Indicating the various cross-streets, he told Jon not to cross Fillmore to the east, Geary to the north, Oak to the south or Stanyan to the west, even if he went heavily armed. According to Revik, he’d worked out deals with human gangs running each of those areas, and that they’d be well within their rights to shoot, if Jon or anyone else crossed those lines without obtaining explicit permission. According to Revik, permission meant payment.
    More or less.
    Revik also told Jon that he was well within his rights to shoot anyone who crossed into seer territory. Jon hadn’t asked Revik whether that was an implied order or not.
    He let his eyes drift to the wall closest to the two rows of leather recliners, where the in-built monitor had already been modified and an organic panel fed into the original dead-tech console. Glancing back down at his brother-in-law’s angular face, he watched absently as Garensche and Loki prepped Revik for the jump. He occasionally watched Revik’s hands, as well, as the Elaerian motioned in sign language for a secondary tech––Kandash, Jon believed it was––to record everything that happened, including any Barrier imprints that might be pulled once they began.
    Jon had noticed Revik using sign language a lot lately.
    They used to joke about Revik being reticent before, him and Allie and Wreg and anyone else who knew him well enough to give him crap about his expressive silences.
    Revik had taken that whole thing to new levels in the past months, though.
    Revik’s silences maybe weren’t as expressive these days, but they were infinitely more common. In fact, the silence around Revik grew painful at times, if only due to its complete and utter impenetrability. He rarely stayed in a room long enough past when they finished working for anyone to dig him out of that silence, either. Really, just getting him to make eye contact could be a chore, unless Revik wanted something in particular.
    Jon tried, of course.
    He knew he hadn’t been the only one to try.
    He’d seen Wreg try, and Balidor. He’d seen Jorag try, and even Garensche...and Chandre, while she’d still been here. He’d heard from others that Tarsi called from New York, attempting to corner her nephew...maybe the only times Revik stopped long enough to even pretend to listen. He still had that old-school respect thing, enough that he apparently couldn’t bring himself to blow Tarsi off outright. Even so, it was pretty clear from where Jon stood that Revik had no intention of opening up in a real way to any of them, Tarsi included.
    Jon had even seen Yumi hanging around him a few times, attempting to find an entry, although truthfully, she’d only managed to get near him on those few occasions when Revik had been visibly drunk.
    Jon strongly suspected Balidor had put Yumi up to it, in any case.
    The last time Jon witnessed one of those attempts had been at the downstairs bar at the black house on Hayes Street. The seers always seemed to find a bar, Jon noticed, no matter how dire or unlikely the circumstances. This time, it came in the form of a rec room they’d converted in the basement of one of the houses serving as a quasi-seer hotel.
    Jon remembered Allie liking the house, back when she lived on Fillmore.
    Maybe Revik even knew that, since he’d been the one to pick the place.
    However the location had been chosen, a handful of seers––mainly refugees from San Francisco that Wreg’s people and the other security teams had collected in the past few months––took it upon themselves to remake it into an off-hours