Before Dante could figure out why, or even, like… breathe… he’d dragged her into the elevator, coughing as they climbed floors. He didn’t put her down until he got her into her assigned room, but he never yelled at her or hurt her or anything.
They told her later she’d pounded mondo-hard on the guy’s back, a big, mountain of a seer named Durel, trying to climb off him to go back to where the action was. Dante thought they figured she was trying to escape, and that’s why they’d tried to drag her back.
Pretty stupid, really.
Where would she even go? She was cut off from Queens, where her mom’s house was, and even if she wasn’t, she’d seen the feeds. Who would be dumb enough to run out into that, with a deadly disease and crazed zom-bots with their ears bleeding running around everywhere?
It’s not like she could get her mom out of there, anyway. According to Vik and the other icers, even if she tried to swim, she’d be cut in half by some super-deadly security grid the new mayor of New York put in place right after the disease hit.
Anyway, Dante had to face facts. Her mom was probably dead.
She tried not to think about that, though.
Anyway, in terms of the bomb and Dante running towards it and whatever other crazy thing she did that day––as it turned out, the seers knew she wasn’t trying to escape.
They’d just wanted her safe.
That pretty much blew Dante’s mind. Durel took her upstairs to get her out of harm’s way. They were worried she’d get shot or lit of fire by one of the crazies, and they told her she was too important to put herself at risk.
Again… Mind. Exploding.
The funny thing was, a bunch of the tougher, scarier icers seemed to like her better after that, thinking her badass or whatever for running towards the gunfire, instead of away, “like most humans,” they joked. “The sane ones, at least.”
When Durel brought her back downstairs, several hours later, she was greeted with cheers. Several bought her drinks. At that point, most of them hunched around the various bars of the hotel, downing hard alcohol, still covered in smoke and powder and blood and other nasty bits of crap from the three or so hours of firefight and getting hit with Molotov cocktails that happened after the initial blast.
They didn’t let her drink much.
In fact, a few of them seemed to remember her real age somewhere in the middle of that first beer, because they took it away from her.
Well, one of them did, anyway, a butch, black iceblood named Oli who cussed the others out in that weird clacking and clicking language of theirs, waving her hands like her mother.
Durel, who stayed with her for most of that, said they’d need to start her on combat training soon. When his words earned her another round of cheers, Dante smiled.
Combat training? She was cool with that.
Because, hell yeah. Why not?
If the whole world was going bust, she’d better learn how to mess some shit up.
Unlike most grown-ups, they hadn’t been blowing smoke, either. Two days later, Durel and that chick Oli showed up at her hotel room door, carrying armored clothes in her size and telling her she was going with them down to the target range.
And damn, it was kickin’ fantastico, shooting off all those guns. Boom! Boom! Boom! They were loud as fuck, knocked into her shoulders like hammers, made her body shake and her arms ache, especially at first, but she never got tired of it. Apart from the tech and seer hack classes she got every morning, combat training was now her favorite part of day.
Everything changed after that first attack.
The place lost its open-air, fancy hotel thing, for sure.
Dante now felt like she lived inside some kind of glass and steel castle. Only instead of a moat, they had these half-alive electrical fields that could cut a car in half on contact.
She felt relatively safe here, despite the insanity right outside their doors. After spending most of her life on those same streets she could now see only at a distance, she also felt trapped. It was unnerving to be cut off from pretty much everything she knew in New York.
She was goldfish girl now, seeing it all through glass.
And yeah, gaos d’ jurekil’a, as the icers would say.
Everything was deeply messed up outside those walls.
That feeling of quiet, the waiting in the air once martial-law kicked in, even as the streets grew increasingly overrun by well-armed street gangs and crime lords operating out of the shadows––it was unnerving, and scared her in a way the old New York never had. This new version of the streets she’d stomped and cruised her whole life made her feel like an alien in her home town, like there was no place for her here anymore.
The New York she knew was all about noise, dickheads with money, scammers and parasites, ad-zombies, robo-taxis and luxury cars, vurt billboards and people selling you shit you didn’t need. In that old world, cannibals didn’t try to eat you––unlike what she’d seen the night before on the dark feeds. In that old world, it was dangerous being a girl, but it wasn’t an instant ticket to slavery and being raped by any dude with a bigger gun.
People like Dante swam through the cracks of old New York like minnows in a stream.
Here, in this new version of New York, Dante felt more like a bunny than a minnow. Food for the wolves, who would be looking for bunnies like her. If she ventured outside, she’d be hunted down and eaten in a matter of days, in one form or another.
Her ice-blood pals definitely agreed with that assessment.
She’d been warned to stay inside the hotel so many times, she sometimes dreamed about being lectured by Vik or Oli on that very topic.
She couldn’t get away from their mothering even when she slept.
It didn’t bother her, really.
Maybe it even felt right, since her own mother wasn’t around to wag her finger and scream at her when she did something dumb or dangerous.
Dante paced the hotel room’s patterned carpet, chewing on her cuticles as she looked out the window compulsively, taking in big gulps of antiseptic air and downing ridiculous amounts of coffee and high-octane soda. She never went anywhere without the hand-held wrapped around her wrist. The link rarely left her ear, either.
She worked in virtual diagrams and straight code, abstractions that blacked out the view around her, specs of organic comp-beings and code representations of their energetic footprint. She kept a constant, running line to the seer hacks to ensure those outer lines stayed clean, balancing between them in a dance she knew better than breathing.
She never took her primary focus off her work, especially after her screw-up with the first kid they had her track.
In addition to the coding and virtual, she always kept a screen open to the real world, too.
Maybe it was habit, or a kind of dark fascination.
Maybe it was just a reminder of what she was doing––why she was doing it.
Dante was lucky. She knew she was lucky.
She was in here, surrounded by overprotective icers, whereas most people were out there, dealing with sick fucks, the diseased, and military whacks. She was in New York, inside this hotel-slash-fortress, not outside the clean zone of Manhattan, where people were dying in droves, the bodies piled so high they had to bulldoze them into mass graves.
Of course, that whole “lucky” thing only worked if she didn’t think about her mom. Or Pip. Or even that ass-munch, Mavis, who left her high and dry for a second time when their hack got snipped and she got walked.
She’d lost weight since she got here.
Eating was one of those things she forgot to think about in this new world, but she noticed it now as she hiked up her jeans, yanking on the tongue of a leather belt to try and tighten it over her hips. The studded belt felt like some kind of artifact already, a piece of history to a scene that no longer existed, an identity-marker that overnight got irrelevant.
What had once been a statement of some kind, a quiet piece of fuck-you to her mom and t
he cops and her teachers, now felt like nothing more than marginally-functional leather.
She’d cut her hair.
She chopped it herself, using a razor to get the edges rough, leaving longer pieces around her neck and over her eyes. She deliberately sculpted it into a spiky, contradictory mess, something she could live with and that wouldn’t get in the way. Something that reminded her she was still alive, maybe.
Anyway, being in a full-on war zone required changes, Dante figured. Since her hair tended to go more straight when it was short, for reasons neither she nor her mother ever understood, the look was decidedly retro punk rock.
But that didn’t really mean anything anymore, either.
The only thing it meant to Dante is that she looked more like her mom now.
Really, Dante could look however the shit she wanted.
She could shave her head, tattoo her face blue, get one of those illegal sword and sun tattoos, like all her new seer pals had, dye her feet and hands. No school principal was going to breathe down her neck. No SCARB agents were going to arrest her. She didn’t have to worry about keeping some legit job to cover the hacks after school, or to keep her mom from flipping out.
All that shit was just gone.
She focused back out the window, bouncing on her heels a little, if only to keep herself from either pacing or biting off even more of the skin of her cuticles. Meanwhile, with another part of her mind, she continued manipulating code on a separate screen.
Kid’s stuff, this hack.
Or, it would be, if she didn’t have to conduct these searches massively under the radar. And if she didn’t know someone might die if she got bit.
And yeah, she believed the icebloods about that now, too.
When Jon and that monster seer, Wreg, first told her people were trying to kill her, she’d thought they were screwing with her. She figured the whole “we just saved your life” mindfuck was just some line they spun to trick her into thinking they were the good guys.
She’d read about seers. She knew they could hack your head, make you believe things that weren’t true, make you remember things that didn’t happen.
Basically, she spent the first few days telling everyone here to fuck off.
She resisted believing them for weeks. Then they put her on a hack to find another kid on that same Displacement List where they got Dante’s name, pairing her with a bunch of seer hacks so she could learn the ropes.
A few days into that whole thing, Dante got bit.
Meaning, someone on the network saw her, some trawler on the same line, looking for someone on her side to be doing the very thing Dante and the iceblood hacks were trying to do. Dante noticed the bite, pretty much right off, but she didn’t say anything.
She figured, fuck them, if they’re so mondo scary with this shit, they could find their own damned bites. Chase their own creepster sharks.
They didn’t need some shit-for-brains kid to tell them anything, right?
Anyway, she figured it had to be SCARB or FEMA or the NYPD, given the sophistication of the bite. Human, in other words, and official. Someone who might actually help her, if they found her locked in this icer-infested hotel, made to hack for a bunch of terrorists for free.
So yeah, win-win.
She believed that, right up until the kid’s name showed up on the feeds.
He’d been shot, walking down the street on his way home from school.
No other targets nearby, no way it was just some drive-by, where the kid was in the way and they meant to kill someone else. The hit was professional. Clean, like the stuff the mafia still did in her neighborhood now and then, according to her mom.
The cops thought the kid was the target, although they had no motive. That happened before the quarantine, so a white kid getting killed for no apparent reason still made the news.
Then another kid got killed, later that same day.
That one also got gunned down by “assailants unknown,” while walking her little brother to the park. Dante had just started spidering that kid for the seer spooks, running out threads to get the basics on his location.
One of those happened in Boston. The other in Los Angeles.
The only connection Dante saw between them was, well––her.
Meaning, Dante and the icer spooks who’d worked the hack with her.
The seers showed her the bites not long after. They didn’t yell at her, threaten her, nothing. They showed her so she’d know to discontinue the spiders, and to mark down those two kids as “accounted for but not acquired,” which was just a polite way of saying that they got their asses killed before the Bridge’s spooks could pick them up.
It was her belly-up, whether they said so or not, and all of them knew it.
They probably even knew she’d done it on purpose.
Even with that, they were cool. Kind of intense about it, yeah… but cool.
They talked around it. They gave her this whole 101 tutorial on organics, on how the living comps could “recognize” users, and how once you got bit once, you had to erase your identity and start again, or you’d keep getting bit. They said those types of comps had a consciousness that allowed them to “see” her, then recognize her again later, if they saw her again. They showed Dante the things the machines could feel, then told her she had to learn to disguise those things to avoid getting bit, each and every time.
So yeah, the whole thing sucked.
Dead kids on her conscience, plus a bunch of seers who didn’t even kick her ass for letting those kids get snuffed. Worse, they obviously felt like shit about it, and blamed themselves. They had a wall in the main icer-hack cell, where they put the pictures of the dead ones.
The seers prayed to those photos, lit candles.
Vik told her they’d done some kind of “death ritual” over each one, too.
She saw those photos every day.
If the icebloods hadn’t cared, if they’d treated a few worm deaths like no big thing, Dante might not have felt so terrible. But they did care, or were damned good at pretending. Maybe they could even tell how bummed she was about the whole thing, because they never brought it up with her again.
They put up two more photos of the kids she killed, lit two more candles and chanted more words, never so much as aiming an accusing frown in her direction.
Dante started over after that.
She wiped every trace of her net fingerprint. She came up with a whole new kit and thread inside. She let the seers teach her about constructs, about how they altered her appearance online to the organic machines, like wearing a kind of living disguise.
Then, like a week after that, everything went to total shit.
The disease splashed over the feeds, popping up in new cities every hour. Sometimes a new outbreak got ID’d every few minutes.
Dante still felt dizzy at how fast the quarantine happened.
In less than twenty-four hours, the city turned into a floating prison, walls high enough that even the crazy and the rich couldn’t get through. It was like the fuckers had everything sewn up for months before they made the announcement to lock it all down, and then, the whole thing shifted into critical before anyone knew enough to protest.
The fear got totally out of control, and fast.
Most cities around the globe were already pretty much cratered, from what Dante could tell. She’d watched the feeds along with the rest of them, huddled around monitors for hours those first few days, until she felt like she needed to wash her eyes out with bleach, or maybe go catatonia with a wire headset and a few bottles of whatever crap the seers were drinking.
New York stayed clean, though––of C2-77, that is.
Well, Manhattan did.
She didn’t want to think about what the boroughs must be like right now, especially in those areas that were dangerous even before.
The people in Manhattan didn’t get sick, though, even after a good chunk of the rest of the world did. No one knew why New York wasn’t ta
rgeted. It wasn’t the only city to get a free pass, but it was probably the most famous one.
Most everyone thought it was because that Allie chick lived here.
Dante honestly didn’t know, but truthfully, she doubted it. She did know one thing for certain: Allie wasn’t here now.
Which meant she was out in that mess somewhere, beyond the quarantine walls.
So yeah, if Allie was the mastermind behind all this, she hadn’t planned it well. Being seer would only help so much out in that mess, especially after the world descended into homegrown militias, private-sec forces, military thugs, armed gangs, deadly fliers and people shooting one another on the street over water, batteries and frozen burritos.
A lot of seer encampments got ripped apart by pissed off humans, so it was unlikely there were many places to hide, even with her own people.
So yeah, Dante doubted Allie was behind it.
Then again, Dante and “Allie the Bridge” weren’t exactly on a first name basis.
Everything Dante knew, she got from hearing the other seers talk.
They talked a lot about Allie and her guy––the tall, quiet dude with black hair and angular features everyone called “The Sword,” or sometimes “Dehgoies” or “the boss.”
Dante only met him in person once. He was polite. He shook her hand, asked how she was doing, whether she was “settling in” at the hotel. Dante couldn’t remember what she’d said to him, in terms of actual words, but she’d stammered something.
Whatever it was, he nodded to that politely, too.
Some part of him seemed to hover somewhere else the whole time she talked to him. A distance lingered in his weirdly colorless eyes, even as he seemed to take her measurements, mental and physical, in a single flickering glance.
But yeah, dude was polite. Like, old-school polite.
He looked like a fighter, too.
Dante hung around fighters her whole life, so she knew the look.
She didn’t doubt for a second that Mr. Sword had killed people, although she had no idea whether he was who the feeds claimed he was, meaning the same Syrimne d’Gaos she learned about in history class at school.
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