Anale grunted in agreement, favoring Dante with a thin-lipped smile of her own.
She barely paused from where she was going over Barrier transcripts of Varlan’s team’s last jump, her fingers moving skillfully over the keys as she marked every ID comparison and synched it between the aleimi grid and the one in the physical.
Dante didn’t know much about Barrier tracking work, but it looked pretty spiking. She’d dabbled in just enough of those transcripts to have her interest officially piqued. Deklan promised to give her the 101 on that stuff, just as soon as they had some breathing room.
She didn’t know much about Varlan, either...just that he was some super-seer with mondo psy skills who worked for the Sword. The Sword assigned him, along with Chandre, that Indian chick who looked like a bounty hunter from some tomb raiding video game, to tracking and spying on that Chinese seer, Ditrini.
So far, they’d been tracking him, but hadn’t managed to get much intel.
From what she’d heard, that guy, Ditrini, was a bona fide loony.
He’d also been the one responsible for all that shit that went down in the sewers right before the first big tsunami. A lot of seers blamed Ditrini for the death of their friends who got trapped down there as a result, and most were rooting pretty hard for Chandre to take that dickhead out, once and for all, when her current spying job finished.
Dante knew by now that despite their anger at Ditrini, and despite what media pundits said about them on the feeds back home, most of the seers working for Allie Taylor and the Sword were all more or less kind-hearted. They cared a lot about their friends and didn’t like it when people got hurt or died...human or seer.
All of their seer-terrorist-badassery, the endless shit-giving, jokes and sexual innuendo aside, they were a big bunch of goofers, really, from what Dante could tell.
Dante had given up trying to pretend she didn’t give a damn about them, or even that they weren’t starting to feel more like family than her own family had back home.
Well, except her mom.
And yeah, maybe it was all some kind of mondo head-trick. She’d read all about people getting confused and ID’d with captors. And yeah, they’d shared some heavy shit together, there was no denying that, even in just a few months.
Dante didn’t see that quite as the same thing, though...not like being brainwashed.
She didn’t think they were pushing her around mentally at all anymore, although she got Deks and the Vik to admit they had done some of that when Dante first got to the hotel. They claimed they did it mostly to keep her from being too afraid and to get her to sleep, which struck her as more or less true, too.
Dumb or not, she trusted them.
She fought it for a long time, pretended like she didn’t, but when push came to shove, she trusted them. She’d seen their actions line up with what they said, again and again. Moreover, they’d risked their lives for her. Not only when they dragged her out that bombing in the lobby, or kept her out of the flooded lower levels of the hotel. They also gave her food before they fed themselves. They watched the other humans and even the refugee seers around her like a hawk, making sure no one so much as touched her. They put a stop to anyone that got out of line, or even disrespectful towards her.
Really, it was weird to think she used to be afraid of these guys.
Most of the seers up here were a bunch of pussycats.
She even made Vikram cry once, and purely by accident, when she flipped out on him for criticizing her attempt to stomp on a bite into one of her own hacks. She’d been overtired...he’d been overtired. That had been during that awful period where they were still digging bodies out of the flooded basement, including some Adhipan seer named Sanjay that had been a friend of his, who’d gone to seer school with Vik in Asia or whatever. In the middle of her stomping around and calling him ‘iceblood’ and accusing him of mindtricking her, she’d looked over and seen tears running down his face.
Dante felt like a real bad shit-stick for that.
She’d gone to the funeral rites with him, trying to make it up to him, even though she didn’t really know what was going on. All of the seers seemed happy to see her there. She got a lot of hugs and kisses on the cheek...it was pretty overwhelming, even apart from all of the chanting, drums, bells, strange warbling and wailing horns and whatever else.
They painted pictures on the walls of one of the lower rooms. One for each of their fallen friends––Sanjay, Farador, Jalar, Krybol, Tan. They’d all been Adhipan, which was a kind of seer ninja, from what Dante could tell.
Tardek died, too. He’d been one of the rebels, but they painted his picture there, too.
Tardek had gone down into the sewers with a bunch of other seers, following the Sword and Jon in those tunnels. He helped his people get out first, pushing them up the ladder, but he and Krybol and Tan didn’t make it. Tardek had been a rebel in both wars, according to Raddi and Mila, two of the other ex-rebels, who got depressed and drunk after they found his body. So yeah, to them, Tardek was some kind of war hero.
Dante couldn’t help having mixed feelings about that one, since he’d mostly been helping the Sword exterminate humans during World War I...but she could appreciate that he saved his friends before trying to save himself.
Vikram stayed up with her all night during the second tsunami, too.
They all stayed up together for the third one, crouching in one of the giant conference rooms on the fiftieth floor, along with most of the humans from San Francisco and a bunch of seers whose names showed up on ‘the list.’ The power was down, so they all crouched around candles like tiny campfires, passing around hot drinks heated with one of the six, cell-powered, portable stoves they managed to dig out of storage.
Even the hotel’s owner, Naldaran, stayed up with them that night, sitting on a leather chair in his expensive-looking suit, his long hands clasped between his knees as he stared around at the candlelit walls. It was pretty eerie, hearing the steel and glass building creak and groan around them, even as the wind howled outside, pattering the panes with rain like light gunfire. They had the internal communications up on the speaker, so they could hear the teams fighting with the fields in both the basement and on the roof. Truthfully, although none of them voiced it aloud, they had no idea if all of them would survive the night.
So yeah, the seers were nothing like Dante thought.
That realization made her wonder just how much bullshit she’d been fed about their race over the years, in the news feeds and wherever else.
“Quite a bit, my beautiful cousin,” Vikram murmured, without taking his eyes off the screen. “Quite a bit, I’m afraid.”
He smiled at her, glancing up sheepishly, and Dante gave him a small grin back.
“Stay out of my head, Mr. Tom-Peepery,” she mock-scolded him.
He rolled his eyes. “If you didn’t shout all of your thoughts in my immediate vicinity, I might be able to, my beautiful cousin.”
She shook her head. “You don’t have to keep pretending you’re not in love with me, Vik...it’s written all over your face...”
Mika laughed at that, too.
Vikram himself rolled his eyes at her, but she managed to make him blush that time.
Yet another of their dumb, running jokes.
Glancing at Tina again, Dante found herself on the receiving end of another death stare. Tina really did have an issue with the whole planet, it seemed. She personally blamed each and every one of them, with the exception of her hottie boyfriend maybe, for every single thing that had happened to her in the past few months...even when it saved her butt.
Dante rolled her eyes, making sure that Tina saw it that time.
Then she sat down in her own swivel chair and used her sneakers to pivot herself back towards her monitor. Hers was only slightly less obsolete than the one Vikram rigged up after the Big One, as they still referred to the massive tsunami that originally knocked everything out.
Unfortunately, the breake
rs failed before they could shut everything down or unplug, so they blew out most of the modern equipment when the converters overloaded, setting fire to the entire tenth floor about six hours after the basement flooded and while they were all scrambling to move power to the fields before they lost more people.
Since then, they’d been in constant rebuild mode, it seemed.
Dante toyed with a longish piece of her uneven, chunky hair, sucking thoughtfully on the end of it as she continued to scan lines of code on her headset. At the same time, her peripheral vision periodically checked the anomaly sensor on the screen in front of her.
She’d lost even more weight in the past few weeks.
She’d started getting scolded for it, with some of the seers insisting she eat part of their portions at meals, since she ‘wasn’t full-grown,’ which Dante found pretty funny. Dante didn’t mind losing weight, though. Something about being scrawny kind of suited the whole ‘end of the world’ thing...and anyway, she was starting to look like her mom, who was always lean in that Joan Jett, retro-rockstar kind of way that Dante thought was pretty cool for an older woman.
At the thought of her mom, her eyes glanced briefly out the window, watching the rain slant past the glass in nearly horizontal lines.
She didn’t have to look down at the streets to know they’d be flooding again...the background chatter on the line told her that much. The streets pretty much always had at least a foot of water on them since the Big One. Hell, the hotel lobby was underwater a lot, too, although they managed to get it under control faster now, with the work Arc had been doing on the pumps.
Dante knew Long Island City would be even more underwater, given that they lacked the expensive and massive field and levee system of Manhattan. Where Dante’s mom lived in Queens was probably long gone...assuming anyone had been left there to kill, given that they were outside the quarantine zone and in one of the worst kill-paths of C2-77. Given the density of population in the boroughs, it spread like wildfire there.
Pulling her mind off her mom, Dante frowned, staring at the screen.
They had access to the feeds again...for whatever that was worth.
Most of the stations went to static in the last month, since the flood waters hit Manhattan after that monster quake. A few stations soldiered on, spreading their depressing news across satellite airwaves for all to hear. Most of those were underground, illegal or ‘black’ feeds, as they used to be called, and run by off-the-griders.
The fact that they stayed up longer than the old, official broadcasts of the main feed networks didn’t surprise Dante particularly, either.
Squinting at the readouts on her liquid monitor, Dante hit a few keys, her mind still mostly focused on the screens in her headset.
Well, until the perimeter breach bleeped at her, forcing her eyes front and center.
Muttering under her breath, she sent a command to the headset feed, freezing it mid-stream. She squinted at the blinking red square, confirming she’d heard the signal correctly.
Yep. Breach.
Irritated to be interrupted by what was probably yet another false alarm from the twitchy sensors, or at the very least, a false ID due to the distortion they got on the image collectors at the ports and outside the hotel from the rain...Dante hit through the requisite keys anyway, knowing there’d be hell to pay with Dek and the other security-minded seers if she didn’t.
They were like...Nazis...when it came to following protocols around breaches and checkpoints.
Which, yeah, okay. Dante could understand that, given everything.
Hitting through her pass code to reach the actual cameras, she found that the hit came from the docks, on the east side of Manhattan. Frowning as she remembered that camera was pretty well sheltered, she switched her monitor view to video once she verified the hit on the facial-rec software. She squinted at the image that came into focus, even as the software highlighted the points of comparison on the gait and facial features hit.
The details weren’t necessary though, not once Dante got a good look at the view through the image capture. Dante recognized the person standing there. Briefly stuck in a kind of limbo of disbelief, she blinked, rubbing her eyes before she glanced at Vik.
The East Indian seer seemed oblivious. He must not have his own screens up for the breach hits, which was weird. Usually they backed each other up.
“Hey.” she said, clicking her fingers at him. “Hey, man...hey!”
She chucked a broken antique keyboard key at him, and missed.
Glancing at Anale, she decided to keep it cool until she got a verify. Keeping her voice low, she threw another key at him, and that time tagged him in the shoulder.
“Psst. Vik-man. Hey...I need you.”
He was immersed in something, though, and still didn’t notice. Maybe that tracking project they had going, some top secret thing they’d mostly been keeping her out of. Otherwise he would have felt her chucking that thing at him.
“Hey. Vik...hey!”
Dante tossed a seer’s hair clip at him that time, one of those metal thingys male seers used to keep long hair out of their faces. It was a lot bigger than a broken letter key. The twisted piece of copper bounced sharply off Vikram’s shoulder, making him jump violently, then turn, jerking the old fashioned, noise-canceling headphones off of his head.
“What?” he said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
“Check out seven,” she said, keeping her voice casual. “We’ve got a hit.”
He gave her a puzzled look, and she motioned sharply at the screen.
“Seven,” she said, a little sharper. “Camera Seven.”
Seeming to hear something in her tone that time, or maybe see it in her light, he glanced back at his own screen. Two keystrokes later, and he had up the same security grid she’d been looking at, down to the blinking red square in the corner.
She didn’t wait for him to go through the same song and dance she had, but hit a few keys to pop the image on her screen over to his.
The second she had, Vikram’s eyes widened abruptly.
He jerked his feet off where they’d been resting on the terminal in front of him, nearly tipping himself over in his haste to get to the keyboard.
Dante watched as he typed in a number of keys. Within seconds, a different image of the same woman that Dante had been looking at solidified in front of him. Dante glanced back at her own screen, since they were linked, looking at a closer image of a woman who wore a swank, what looked like tailor-fit, red leather business suit and high-heeled black leather boots. Dante followed the woman’s smile as she tossed her head back in slow motion, grinning at a handsome man with auburn hair wound in a clip who had pale yellow eyes. The man wore a more traditional black suit and bright red tie. The woman’s hair hung long and loose, black and straight down to its scarlet tips, which shone an even brighter red than the leather pants.
Cassandra Jainkul.
War, to the Myther junkies out there, in case any were listening.
Dante knew from the chick’s bio she was only half Thai, and otherwise a bona fide American mutt, like Dante herself. In the images she looked like she could be one hundred percent Thai, though, with the exception of her body type. Her height and her breast size looked a lot more European or maybe African, at least from the Thais Dante knew from school.
“Fucking Zeus,” Vikram said, imitating one of Dante’s curses.
He swore again in a different language as he keyed through a few more screens, probably that seer language, Prexci, or Cantonese, which seemed to be his two defaults before English. Dante watched the aleimic imprint come up under the video feed showing the facial and gait markers, which provided a third verification to the ID.
Seeing the intensity rising to the East Indian seer’s violet eyes, even as he clicked his fingers at Anale and Deklan, transferring the images to their screens as well, Dante frowned again.
“The big boss’ll want to know, right?” she said.
; “Yes,” Vikram said, without looking up at her.
His eyes appeared less wide that time, but the anger overlaying the grim look there stood out more sharply than Dante ever remembered seeing in him before. She could almost feel the rage building in the room, and not only from Vikram. The five seers all had similar expressions on their faces now, making them look more warlike than she’d ever seen them, and bringing a buzzing intensity to her own body and even her mind. That intensity made her skin hot, her breath short as the heat caught somewhere in her throat.
It made her feel angry, too. Angry for her friends.
Angry for the Sword, even. Angry enough to grit her teeth.
“He’ll come here, won’t he?” she said. “The Sword?”
Anale looked up and over at that, her light, gold-rimmed eyes narrow in the overhead light as she stared at Dante’s face.
Again, Dante felt a shiver of heat warm her flesh at the female’s expression.
“Yes, he will, my beautiful cousin,” Vikram muttered in reply, still staring intensely into the old-fashioned screen. “...I imagine the Sword will be coming here very soon indeed, just as soon as we show him this.”
7
NOT-ALLIE
May 20, 1990
Golden Gate Park, San Francisco
I WRINKLE MY nose, pulling my own piece of pinkish-blue baloney off my mayonnaise-covered bread with delicate fingers. I lay it on the bark next to hers. Normally, the meat is my favorite part. But I want a puppy more. We need to save the meat for him.
My wrinkled nose isn’t for the baloney, anyway.
“You want a baby?” I say to Cassie, my best friend. “Eww. Why?”
“They’re cute!” she declares, flipping back her long, black hair. Hair I really, really wish was mine. Cassie is so pretty, just like someone in a storybook. “...And you can name them, and buy them clothes and dress them up,” she says. “You can push them in carriages...”
Allie's War Season Four Page 12
