Bridge

by JC Andrijeski

  She’d even started getting the hang of hacks for organics.

  The translation program she’d built with Vikram between non-binary and binary helped a lot. She’d gotten better at feeling out gaps, too, even according to Garensche, that giant seer in San Francisco who still called now and then to help them out with the machines.

  Gar was the real organics guru, Vik said.

  Of course, they gave him shit about that, too, teasing him about his “machine girlfriends” and making what Dante suspected were even cruder jokes in their own language.

  As a result of all this––and, well, the fact that she hung with icers more often than not, just because they seemed less depressed than the vast majority of humans here, even cute, blue-eyed Jaden––Dante already knew a fair few of their little soap operas.

  She was learning more of their swear words, too.

  One thing was for sure, the Bridge had some hot men hanging around.

  Jaden was famous, too, so not just a pretty face. Not famous like the Sword famous, but Dante recognized his name from music feeds, as the lead singer of that San Francisco indie group, Eye of Morris. Jaden himself had been a minor heartthrob, before––

  Well, before all of this started.

  Since they only showed avatars of living humans on the feeds, not real faces, Dante didn’t know what Jaden looked like before now.

  Luckily, in addition to being a hot crooner type, Jaden was decent with comps, too. Apparently he’d worked in software and game development back in California.

  They pulled him during a skill set analysis of the Listers just a few weeks ago, mostly to help with minor coding, although the icers said he was qualified to do more. Blondie big boobs appeared to be pretty much useless with tech, but she came up here every day with him. Her sole purpose for making the trip seemed to be to keep an eye on Jaden, and make sure no one so much as breathed on him without getting a death stare from her.

  Next to her, she heard Vikram snort another involuntary laugh.

  He glanced up at her, a glint in his violet eyes. “The gods will smite you,” he told her. “Watch what you think, for they hear all.”

  “You,” she said, pointing at him. “You hear all, you mean. Anyway, aren’t you the one supposed to be hitting those security bots?”

  Vikram only smiled innocently, giving her a wink.

  “I have only concern for your soul, my beautiful cousin. I am willing to be late on my work, to prevent you from temptation and decadence.”

  Dante rolled her eyes, realizing only after she’d done it that she’d probably picked up that particular mannerism from her new seer pals, too.

  “Yeah, right,” she snorted. “My soul.”

  Vikram grinned, right before he turned back to the old-fashioned monitor. At no point during their exchange did he remove the ridiculously large, noise-muffling headphones he wore, which made him look like he had two enormous bread rolls taped to his ears.

  Vikram chuckled.

  “Quit that!” she barked in their usual ritual, motioning sharply to his monitor. “Back to work! I can’t keep carrying you, my cold-blooded friend.”

  He waved her off dismissively, but that was part of their ritual, too.

  Dante raised her fingers to her own headset. In the background, she kept screens shifting, slower than before the tsunami, but still multi-tasking.

  Leaning closer to the console despite his feet resting on the desk, Vikram turned up the music on his monitor, which happened to be the “1812 Overture,” another private joke of theirs. They’d gotten in the habit of playing that particular piece of music whenever they got a really good storm––as in, lightning and thunder crashing overhead, hurricane-force winds buffeting the windows of the hotel, vibrating the organic panes.

  Like now.

  At the very least, it distracted them from what was probably going on in the basement, with the pumps and fields and the seers manning them.

  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 aleimic 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 to have her interest officially piqued. Declan 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 the Chinese seer, Ditrini.

  So far, they hadn’t managed to get much new intel. They’d managed to track his movements, which was the bare minimum the Sword wanted, but that was about it.

  From what she’d heard, that guy, Ditrini, was a bona fide loony-toon.

  They’d been chasing him in the sewers when the tsunami hit, so a lot of seers blamed him for the deaths of their friends who got trapped down there. Most were rooting pretty hard for Chandre to take that dickhead out, with or without Varlan’s help.

  Dante knew by now that despite their anger at Ditrini, and despite the common wisdom on the news 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 their seer-terrorist-badassery aside, and despite the endless shit-giving, jokes and sexual innuendo, they were all a big bunch of goofers, really.

  She’d given up trying to pretend she didn’t give a damn about them. Truthfully, they were starting to feel more like family than her own people ever did.

  Well, except her mom.

  And yeah, maybe it was all just some big 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 as quite the same thing, though.

  She didn’t think they were pushing her around mentally at all anymore, although she got Dex and the Vik to admit they had done some of that when she first got to the hotel. They claimed they did it mostly to keep her from being too afraid. They’d also done it to get her to sleep a few times, Vikram said.

  Their confessions around that 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 of that bombing in the lobby of the hotel, or kept her out of the flooded lower levels. They 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 who got out of line, even if they just disrespected 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, 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. It happened during that awful period where they were still digging bodies out of the flooded basement, including some Adhipan seer named Sanjay who’d been a friend of Vik’s, who’d gone to seer school with him 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.

  She felt like a real 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 the chanting, drums, bells, strange warbling, 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.

  Jokko died, too. He’d been with the Rebels, but they painted his picture with the others.

  He’d gone down into the sewers with a bunch of other seers, following the Sword and Jon and the Sword’s son, Maygar. He helped his people get out first, pushing them up the ladder, but he, Krybol, Tan didn’t make it.

  Jokko was 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, Jokko 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 stuck 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 had been down, of course, 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 internal communications up on the speaker, so they could hear the teams fighting with the fields in both the basement and on the roof. Though no one voiced it aloud, they had no idea if all of them would survive the night.

  So yeah, the seers here 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, 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 let out a dramatic sigh. “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 rolled his eyes, but she managed to make him blush that time.

  Yet another of their dumb running jokes.

  Glancing at Tina, Dante found herself on the receiving end of yet 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 Tina saw it that time.

  Then she sat down in her own swivel chair and used her sneakers to pivot herself back toward 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 breakers 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 still scrambling to move power to the fields before they lost more people.

  Since then, they’d been in constant rebuild mode.

  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.

  Truthfully, she didn’t mind losing weight.

  Something about being scrawny suited the whole “end of the world” thing. 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, especially for an old lady.

  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 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 after the flood waters hit Manhattan after that monster quake. A few stations started back up about a month later, maybe half of what existed on the East Coast before. Most of those same feeds soldiered on now, spreading their depressing news across satellite airwaves for all to hear. Most were underground or “black” feeds, as they used to be called, 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.

  Rogues and rebels were running the world now.

  Squinting at the readouts on her liquid monitor, she hit a few keys, her mind still mostly focused on the screens in her headset.

  It stayed that way until she caught a light bleeping on her monitor.

  Her eyes shifted there, and she did a double-take.

  Breach alert.

  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 read 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 from the rain, Dante hit through the requisite keys anyway, knowing there’d be hell to pay with Declan and the other security-minded seers if she didn’t.

  They were like, Nazis when it came to following protocol around checkpoint and Barrier breaches.

  Which, yeah, okay… Dante could understand that, given everything.

  Hitting through her pass code to reach the actual cameras, she pursed her lips when she saw that the signal came from the East Dock, not far from their part of Manhattan. Frowning as she remembered that camera was pretty well sheltered, she sw
itched her monitor view to video once she verified the hit on the facial-rec software.

  Peering at the monitor from only an inch or two away, 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 looked oblivious, lost in his own little coding world. He must not have his screens up on 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 antique, noise-canceling headphones off his head.

  “What?” he said. “What is it?”

  “Check out seven,” she said, nodding toward her monitor. “We got a hit.”

  He gave her a puzzled look.

  She motioned sharply at the screen, frowning meaningfully.

  “Seven,” she said, a little sharper. “Camera Seven.”

  Seeming to hear something in her tone, 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.