Allie's War Season Three Read Online Free PDF Page B

shield's not holding?"
    "It is. They haven't felt us. But they felt the cameras go..." He glanced at me. "They'll probably think it's an electrical problem at first. Still, they'll send someone down to look..."
    He glanced up the stairwell. I felt his light flicker over the next camera, right before it snuffed the mechanism out. He did it soundlessly, and when we reached that landing, I didn't even see a crack in the outside glass.
    "Show off," I muttered.
    He spared me a grin, but his eyes remained serious. Not quite worried, but definitely focused, and I could feel him in several different places now above our heads. I felt that charge in his aleimi, too...even through his fingers where he held me lightly with one hand.
    We were close now. I felt it. I'd been counting floors, too, but the feeling created a kind of tremor through my light.
    He stopped outside the correct door, and now he wanted me well behind him, and behind the wall, out of sight when he opened the door. He positioned me firmly on the stairs just above where he stood before his hand went to the locking mechanism to the right of the steel-plated panel. He glanced at me, his eyes sharp once more.
    "They'll feel this," he reminded me. "Stay behind me, Allie."
    "I will."
    "Don't follow until I say it's all right."
    "I won't."
    "Promise me."
    I'd been staring at the lock, ready to watch him open it, but his tone made me look up. That time, I saw a faint worry in his eyes. Before I could say anything, he leaned towards me, kissing me on the mouth. It was a brief kiss, but the first he'd given me in months...and a lot lay behind it. Enough that it stunned me temporarily, stopping my breath even as I clutched at him. He pulled away a heartbeat later, his hand still over the door lock, his body tense, his light sparking in strange arcs over his head.
    "Promise me, Allie," he said, his voice firm, still holding a faint worry. "Promise you'll let me handle this...please."
    I nodded, swallowing tautly at the look in his eyes. Woven into the worry was a love even I could feel.
    "I promise."
    "You'll do what I say?"
    "I will," I said, trying to reassure him. "We agreed. You're in charge."
    His face relaxed, but only a little. "We've agreed this before," he muttered.
    I knew he worried about that part of me that could be a bit of a loose cannon, the part that Vash included in his definition of my 'Bridge nature.' Even as far back as the ship, Revik had seen that part of me do things that were more than a little risky...at times, seemingly without my actually deciding to do them, at least in the usual sense.
    Whatever misgivings he had about me, however, he seemed to shove aside, even as I felt him make up his mind.
    He focused back on the door.
    It seemed like he only looked at it an instant before I felt his light shift.
    He didn't wait that time...nor conduct scans to make sure the alarms disengaged, like we'd done below. We both knew they'd be engaged up here. No way existed to turn the alarms off without alerting the whole building. Even so, time seemed to slow when I felt his light unfurl. I watched it filter through the mechanics of the lock, draw the combination out of the mechanism itself. Right before he finished, he looked at me a last time, his eyes the color of green glass.
    Stay here, he sent, his thoughts openly warning.
    His mind changed, emptied down to the bare minimum, business-only. It held nothing of what I'd felt in him seconds before. A sudden rush of fear hit my light. I pulled it back before he might feel it, but I could tell by looking at him that it wouldn't matter, not anymore. The cloak falling over him grew abruptly dense. Feeling the Revik I knew slip from my grasp, I felt a different thread of nerves as he disappeared behind it.
    He was Syrimne again.
    It occurred to me to wonder if maybe I was playing with fire, letting him come with me on this jaunt. It also occurred to me he'd nearly lost his soul using these same abilities, more than