Wreg didn't stop walking; if anything he slightly sped up his pace, but this time, he caught hold of Jon's arm again, pulling him along after him.
"Simple, brother," he said with a grin, glancing back at him. "...Once we get through the craziness of this week with his bride, I'm going to have to ask Nenz to take over your training personally. He's busy, but I think he'll make the time..."
Immediately, Jon's tension deflated.
He found himself rolling his eyes instead, irritated with himself for falling for Wreg's melodramatic b.s. He'd take Revik in a heartbeat over this monster. If nothing else, Jon could at least reason with Revik. Revik was also less likely to get pissed off at him for making a mistake, or start yelling at him for no reason. He would push him, sure, but Jon probably wasn't going to spend another full day hanging over a toilet.
Wreg laughed harder, giving Jon a look of open disbelief.
"You think I am messing with you," he said, grinning. "That is extremely funny, Jon...I will have to remind you of that in a few weeks, after brother Syrimne has gotten his foot lodged up your ass..." Still laughing, he added, "I will tell you right now, little brother...I will tell you the truth. If you think I'm bad, just wait until Syrimne starts giving you sight lessons..."
Jon snorted again. "Whatever, man. That boogeyman crap doesn't scare me. You're forgetting, Revik is my friend..."
"He made half the seers in our senior infiltration team break down, at one point or another. I saw a few of them crying, brother..."
"Yeah." Jon rolled his eyes, walking faster to keep up. "Sure he did."
Wreg didn't answer, other than to laugh again, knocking playfully into Jon's arm and nearly plowing him over sideways, since Jon hadn't seen it coming.
That time, something about the sheer happiness behind the infiltrator's laugh made Jon nervous, in spite of himself.
DANTE DIDN’T KNOW where she was.
She felt her heart beating harder in spite of herself when she saw the span of faces standing over her. She had no memory of getting here, she knew that. That fact alone was enough to freak her out...no way that could be good, no matter who these fuckwads were.
It meant they'd either drugged her, or they had icebloods on the payroll.
A shit-load of men, too. That never boded well...being stuck in a dark, windowless room with a bunch of guys you don't know. Especially when you didn't know how you'd gotten there. Especially when the one in front was a damned monster of a Chink, one who looked juiced on 'roids and wore enough tats to be an ex-con or Russian mafia or both.
As soon as she thought it, the same seer laughed, making an odd clicking sound with his tongue.
"Maybe get Yumi in here," another Asian one grunted.
He glanced at the guy who looked like some kind of surfing-instructor-slash-skateboard-rat from California. Only he had a shitload of tats, too, and his blond hair was streaked with black and brown dye...she might have thought the reverse, if it weren't for his blond roots. He also looked at least a decade too old to be either of those things...had to be early thirties at least. The rest of them looked younger...all but that monster in the middle. He could be as much as forty, maybe even older. The black braid hanging down his back didn't have any gray in it, but his face was hard, and had that kind of solid, knowing look. Between that and the tats and the muscular bod and his high cheekbones and those nearly-black eyes, he was definitely the most dangerous-looking one in the group.
He was pretty hot, actually. A sexy older guy, in that biker kind of way.
"That's not going to help," the blond one muttered. "You've seen Yumi, right?"
"But she's female..." the thinner Asian one said. "Wouldn't that reassure her?"
"What about the new one..." the blond one said after a pause. He seemed to be trying to remember her name. "...Oli?" he said. "That's her name, right? The new recruit?"
Recruit? Dante didn't like the sound of that.
Her whole body hurt, she realized. That vest thing that Mavis gave her to wear under her sweatshirt was gone, and she felt strangely naked without it. Her face hurt, and her head...something in her hip and back felt out of whack too, like she'd been hit with a baseball bat in one or the other and it dented her whole frame out of synch by an inch or two. Her leg on the same side hurt as well. When she raised her fingers to her face, she felt a swelling on her jaw, and realized her hair was wet, as if someone had dunked her face in a sink-full of cold water. She also smelt something that reminded her a lot of burnt hair.
The biker Chink with the high cheekbones glanced at another of the men standing there, who looked East Indian.
The Indian one nodded after the barest pause, touching his ear.
Headset. So they were wired in, whoever they were.
Then the Indian-looking one turned, staring directly at her, and Dante saw his dark violet eyes, shining in the floor lights. She also realized he stood over six feet tall, easy.
Jesus. He had to be a seer. No one would wear enhanced lenses of that color with his height...they'd be too afraid of being picked up, even if they had the ident tats, implant and blood to prove their race.
Looking around at the rest of them, it occurred to her that all of them were tall, even surfer boy. Most of them were Asian, too. She found herself staring at the tattoos on several of the exposed arms, the sword and sun insignia she'd seen on the news and spray-painted on half-pipes and in sewers and walls and wherever else...at least until some pig or Sweep had it scrubbed off with acid solution, or burnt off with a laser.
Dante fought to clear her throat, to speak. She was still trying to find words when the door opened to the outside cell, and in walked a face she recognized.
Dante stared at the woman at the door.
She saw that woman assessing her right back.
She was smaller than she looked on the feeds. While still taller than average, she appeared short compared to most of the seers in the room. Her hair hung halfway down her back, so dark it looked nearly black in the florescent lights, falling in soft rings past her shoulders. She didn't look human, though...or very much like the pictures of her in the news where she looked younger and more human-like. Of course, it was easy for Dante to think that, knowing who and what this chick really was, but she couldn't shake the feeling she would have known her race anyway, just by the way she moved.
The woman walked in like she owned the place. Even that tattooed monster moved out of her way when she came closer to get a look at Dante's face.
"Well," she said with a smile. "Nice to meet you."
The woman with the nearly black hair held out a hand, smiling in a friendly way, but Dante only stared at her fingers, sure she was caught in some bad VR-trip, pot and wires nightmare. Had someone dosed them on the street? Had SCARB decided to get creative in getting a confession out of her this time?
If the woman was offended by Dante's refusal to shake hands, it didn't show on her face. She merely withdrew her hand, her expression close to businesslike, but still friendly. As she spoke, she continued to assess Dante with those jade green eyes.
"...I'm Alyson Taylor," she added, after only a bare pause. "...But from your expression, I guess you knew that." A quirk touched her lips. "...And you must be Dante Vasquez? I know you probably think you just fell down the rabbit hole, Dante, but I promise you, it's really good to have you here. We're all very happy to meet you..."
Dante only stared up at her, trying to convince herself the woman was even real, that Mavis and Pip weren't screwing with her, performing some hack on her headset to make her imagine all this. If it was a hack, it was, like, seamless...down to the fact that Dante no longer even wore her headset, if she could trust her senses.
The chick terrorist continued to look at her, her eyes appraising.
If Dante hadn't seen the seer's face all over the feeds for the past however-many years, throwing humans alive out of forty-story buildings and blowing up cruise ships, she might have thought Alyson Taylor looked worried about
her. The seer continued to look at her for another long moment, her expression blank despite the intensity in those eyes. Then she glanced at the men around her, an amused quirk lifting one edge of her lips.
"What the hell did you do to this poor kid?" she said.
They all looked at one another, faintly guilty, like oversized schoolboys.
"Jon?" the woman said, raising an eyebrow at surfer boy.
"We haven't even talked to her yet, Al," the blond said, a touch defensively. "We just cleaned her up...put antiseptic on her cuts. They drugged her, so she just came out of it..."
The female terrorist looked back at Dante, still appraising her with those light eyes.
"Are you all right, Dante?"
Dante forced a nod, unable to tear her eyes off the woman's face.
"Can we get you anything?" Alyson Taylor said politely. "Juice? Coffee –– "
"...A beer?" the thinnest of the Asian-looking seers joked. When Dante looked over at him, he smiled at her. "...Maybe a shot of something?"
"Tequila," Dante blurted, pretty much without thinking.
There was a silence.
Then all of the seers laughed, even Alyson Taylor, who grinned at her afterwards with a gleam in her eyes and a disbelieving shake of her head.
Dante couldn't force herself to laugh with them, or even return the smile, although it seemed friendly enough, all things considered. It hit her that maybe some of those hackers who'd 'disappeared' hadn't all been recruited by SCARB or the Pentagon or even Black Arrow Industries. In fact, she was pretty sure she'd just been dropped somewhere in the middle of the worst kind of nightmare, a scenario she'd never imagined when she left for the hack that morning...
Instead of the rabbit hole in Alice in Wonderland, Dante was pretty sure she'd landed in the dark forest of Oz, the one with the witch and the evil, flying monkeys...and she kind of doubted she'd get handed her own pair of ruby fucking slippers.
15
SACRIFICE
I FOUND MYSELF pacing back and forth in front of the bar in the inner lobby and courtyard of the hotel, half-flooded with adrenaline, so much so that I couldn't force myself to stand still. Even when I managed to remain in a single place for more than a few minutes, I found myself shredding something with my fingers, like a bar napkin, or arranging empty glasses near the soda fountain, or color-coding the colored toothpicks...or whatever.
The bartender walked over to me a number of times, asking good-naturedly if I wanted anything. Each time, all I could think was, yeah, I want a shot of something...and then I wanted to laugh, remembering what that fifteen-year-old kid had said while they had her trapped in that cell in the basement, surrounding her like a bunch of thugs.
To the bartender, I just smiled and shook my head.
It wasn't until about thirty minutes of this had gone by that I even knew what had me so wound up. I'd been stuck in the penthouse on my own for days, waiting for them to okay me to talk to Raven or Surli. I spent most of it on the balcony, drawing and overlooking the park...occasionally leaving to go swimming in the rooftop pool on the other wing of the hotel or to attend strategy meetings regarding an approach to Shadow's base in Argentina.
The day before, I wandered downstairs only once, in the early evening, mostly to check if they'd gotten any new information off Surli or Raven...and to check the feeds about what was going on in San Francisco, which also increasingly stressed me out.
I got why they were cutting me out. I really did.
But I hated it, too.
Revik slept almost a day and a half that first morning we'd gone up to the penthouse together. We hadn't had sex in the past however-many days, either. He'd woken me up a few times, coming up late to bed, his hands on me, his mouth on me, but we hadn't done much, really. We made out a number of times, and spent a lot of time wrapped around each other. More than once, I'd been tempted to try to do more than that, especially after a few days of him waking me up and being stir crazy anyway...but something made me back off.
Part of it was how hard he was working. He still felt tired whenever I saw him. He came up every night, but often only for a few hours before he crawled out of bed again, disappearing hours before I got up. He came up late, usually after midnight. Neither one of us managed to stay awake for long once he came upstairs, not even to eat when I had food brought up for him and we had a kind of late supper together.
Also, Revik felt like he was waiting for something.
What, I had no idea...but I could feel it in his light, and in his restraint when he stopped us after a few kisses or whatever else he started with me in the early hours of the morning. Most of the time, I'd been tired too. Between the pain worsening again and wondering what the hell the rest of them...and especially Revik...were up to, I'd been pretty stressed, I guess. I ended up swimming for hours most days, just to burn off the more agitated parts of my mind with endorphins, which seemed to be the only thing that let me sleep at all.
But that time when I got up, I felt awake.
Really awake, and relatively normal.
Revik had been long gone by the time I got up, of course. I didn't even bother to dress but threw on my bathing suit, a robe and flip-flops and headed straight for the pool. When I came downstairs dressed and showered at around eleven-thirty or so in the morning, I immediately found myself heading for the basement. True, I wasn't allowed in the area containing Raven and Surli's cells, but I knew the other service elevator led to where they'd temporarily housed Jon's latest recruit, and I couldn't resist dropping by.
It's a good thing I did.
Jon, Wreg, Jax and Holo already managed to scare that poor kid, Dante-whatever, half to death. Even covered in bruises and cuts from the failed attempt on her life, she seemed to be a scrapper, though...at least from what I could tell from our short time together in that room.
But any human would find Wreg a bit much, at least on first sight.
That, coupled with the kid's age, meant she'd probably be a major pain in the ass unless they managed to convince her they were telling the truth. She clearly thought they were some kind of seer cult of fanatics...or just flat-out terrorists, ready to kill every human in sight.
Wreg seemed to think it was a toss-up at this point, whether they'd be able to convince her of much without pushing her mind forcibly...and possibly for weeks on end.
I sat in on most of the first two hours of their attempts to explain to Dante why they'd brought her back to the hotel. I saw the skeptical look cross her expression when they told her that her life was in danger. She didn't seem to remember the laser hit at all...all she knew was that she'd been hurt, and then she found herself here.
The whole thing might have been humorous if there wasn't so much at stake. The look on her face alone had been pretty rich––especially when Jon and Wreg tried to explain how her name showed up on a list created around eighty years before she was born. She clearly thought they were nuts...or liars...or both.
And who could blame her, really?
I was pretty sure Jon hadn't given up yet. Last I saw the two of them, he'd mentioned something about having lunch delivered to that same cell. His words shocked me at the time; it felt like I hadn't been up long enough for that, either.
It was now after one o'clock, although it was hard to tell from looking out the windows of the hotel. A late-autumn, early-winter thunderstorm blew in a bunch of heavy, gray clouds, covering the sun. It looked like twilight outside the front lobby windows, which I could only just see when my pacing brought me close enough to the double-glass doors that separated the inner lobby from the outer one.
Jon and his new teenage recruit weren't really on my mind, though.
Revik got up hours before me, like I said...at around four a.m., if my blurred memory served. He rarely managed to get out of the room without my knowing these days...it used to be I had no idea where or when he'd gotten off to when I woke, even as recently as when we lived together with Salinse and the rebels. He normally slept a
lot lighter than me.
I guess both of us had gotten pretty sensitive about one or the other of us leaving. Revik thought maybe it was worse since we opened our light a lot when we slept in the same bed. Still, that didn't explain why it would be worse now than it had been in the past, when we'd shared a bed together as well...and when we'd been having sex regularly on top of it.
It would take some getting used to, waking up like that.
I could feel that he was stressed when he woke me up that morning. I wondered if it had something to do with how things were going with Surli or the thing with Maygar being his son...or even our being together again...but I suspected none of those things were really all of it. Probably the thing with Vash had started to hit him, too. He had a tendency to work through stress until he couldn't, which meant until he collapsed.
Clearly, he hadn't quite managed that yet, either.
Still, it had been hard to see him go without me.
He'd gone to bed naked that morning, so he'd still been naked, sprawled out and only half-covered in the blanket when he first stirred awake...and let's face it, I was struggling with my own issues with him at that point, even when he wore clothes. I'd been pulling on him again, even while we slept...and I was having trouble leaving both his body and his light alone once I felt him conscious next to me.
He'd probably gone to the bathroom to get away from that, too.
I'd just have to chill out until I knew where he stood with us. He'd said he wanted to wait, but I still wasn't sure where that left things now, or how long the waiting thing was going to go on exactly, especially with us sleeping in the same bed together every night. He might just want to wait a week or so, until we had time to really be alone.
Or, he might want to wait another few months.
He'd barely waited to check in with me after lunch. I'd gotten an absent-minded kiss when he found me roughly in the same place I stood now, pacing like I paced now. He'd barely glanced at me, giving my dress a once-over, wearing that odd expression I saw on his face sometimes when he looked at my clothes. After that, he hadn't looked at me again, at least not directly. He'd offered me the latest intel from their interrogations, including all of the Barrier recordings and imprints, then he'd taken off.
Allie's War Season Three Page 38
