Free Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine by JC Andrijeski

for clarifying that, brother.”
    “Of course. Of course…happy to help, my beautiful sister. Always.”
    I might have wanted to laugh again, but I found myself turning over his words instead.
    It was easy to forget, truthfully…that Terian really was Feigran and Feigran was Terian. Not figuratively, but literally. Then again, I couldn’t be sure how much of “Terian” remained inside Feigran since we’d cut him off from the rest of his bodies by putting him in the tank.
    On the outside, meaning outside of the tank, it looked like all of those bodies died.
    The Terian body died right in front of me.
    Watching Feigran go back to drawing, I fought another wave of frustration.
    If Loki was telling me the truth, then by tomorrow at the latest, I’d have people in the field again, hunting Menlim’s Network. Chandre would follow shortly.
    Neither thing reassured me, though.
    I knew Revik and Wreg were right. None of this was happening fast enough. It wouldn’t be fast enough, even if Loki and Chandre managed to find and acquire their targets right off, sans complications…which was unlikely in the extreme.
    I rarely spoke that thought aloud though, even to Revik.
    Anyway, I knew he agreed with me. What would have been the point?
    Thinking about Wreg’s comments earlier that day, I bit my lip.
    Tarsi, Wreg, Revik, Yumi and ‘Dori had been punting around possible network models for months now, in the hopes they might dismantle part of it remotely if we managed to destabilize a few pillars. The problem was, the damned thing seemed to look different depending on who studied it. It was like the elephant and the ten blind men. One person thought it was a rope, another a tree, another a wall, another a fan…they were all probably partly right but mostly wrong and none of it added up to a coherent picture.
    Revik being disconnected from that Network both helped and hurt us, I suspected.
    Worse than any of that, if Feigran was right…if he wasn’t just fucking with us or planting information for Shadow…we had a mole. A real one.
    Of course, we’d long suspected that. Balidor brought the possibility up within minutes of Dorje murdering Vash right in front of us. The problem was, whoever it was, it was probably someone I cared about. It was probably a friend of mine. Or a friend of Revik’s.
    Definitely someone we trusted.
    Maybe someone we loved.
    Which just…sucked.
    It flat-out sucked, even without knowing the specifics.
    For awhile, Revik and I told ourselves the mole might be him. Meaning, we speculated that Menlim might have found some way to pull intelligence off Revik’s own light…or even Wreg’s or Jorag’s or one of the other ex-rebel seers. Which also sucked, yes, but sucked significantly less than finding out one of our friends was deliberately betraying us.
    “He has checked the information I provided, yes? Your ex-lover?” Feigran managed to blink those amber eyes of his at me innocently. “He has seen that this information checks out? That the intelligence is good?”
    I winced at his reference to Balidor.
    I was positive Revik liked it even less than I did, from where he listened on the other side of that glass. Assuming he was even over there.
    I’m here, Revik sent.
    I clicked a little under my breath. Even so, a troubled jab rippled my light. Even if Revik was partly joking, his answer had been curt. Unnecessarily curt, given that this was Feigran and we all knew he was batshit crazy.
    Revik had been acting pretty weird lately, though. More than usual, that is.
    Of course, I knew why…more or less…but his mood swings still made me nervous. I knew things would get worse in the coming months, not better. Increasingly I was starting to wonder if the two of us would be able to handle it, either individually or together.
    But yeah, I didn’t want to think about that, either.
    As it was, lately I found myself fielding a lot of questions about Revik’s erratic behavior from other people when they