Pain slid off his light. I closed my eyes once more, but he pulled on me again, drawing my gaze back up to his.
"Allie," he said. "Don't be afraid of me...please. I won't hurt you...I promise I won't. I have my reasons for wanting to wait, but they're not what you think...I swear they don't have anything to do with the Lao Hu. I adore you...you must know that."
I couldn't help wincing at his choice of words.
Moving closer to where I lay, he kissed my face, caressing my cheek with his as his voice dropped to a murmur. "No more separations...no more hidden personalities...no more talk about divorce. Please, Allie. Please, just try to trust me...just a little. I'll never leave you again, I promise...I swear to you I won't..."
Pain hit me as his words sank in.
It worsened as I realized that he was right, that he'd actually picked up on more in me than I'd even admitted to myself. I hadn't really been letting him in, not entirely. In fact, we hadn't fully made love since that time in the cabin...not if I was being particular about definitions. I'd always been hiding something from him, or him from me, or both of us from one another. Even the other morning had been as much about sex and our light as it had been about us. It was more like raw need from too much time apart...raging hormones and deprived light. That had been true even at the end, when he'd used that desperation to coax me open enough to play at trying to get me pregnant. We were still getting to know one another in some ways, so it was easy to get lost in the sex as somehow separate from the two of us.
I could see what he meant, about us jerking each other off.
Leaning over me where I lay on my stomach, he gripped my shoulder in one hand, pushing my hair aside from the middle of my back. I saw him looking down at the profile of my face before shifting his gaze to the tattoo of the sword and sun. Before I could say anything, he lowered his mouth to my skin, using his tongue, working his way down slowly from the back of my neck. I was fighting to control my light almost at once, especially when he started putting his own light into his lips and tongue, leaning his weight against my back until my breath started growing heavier again.
"Revik..." I protested. "Sleep. Remember? We were going to wait..."
He gave another low groan, gripping my hair more tightly in his hand.
"Gods," he murmured. "Maybe I could just get you off. It's driving me crazy...I can feel you doubting everything I'm saying to you..."
"No," I said, craning my neck to look at him. "I'm not doubting you. Not anymore. I was just realizing you were right." Still looking into his eyes, I pointed to his side of the bed, making my voice stern. "Go back to your corner, husband...now!"
He laughed a little, but moved back to lie facedown on the mattress. For a long moment, he just lay there, looking at me, caressing my face.
"I didn't tell you the truth about something, Allie," he said. "Not entirely."
I felt myself stiffen. "Which thing was that?"
"The imprints..."
I winced, averting my gaze. "Jesus, Revik."
Pain hit me though, hard enough that I couldn't look at him right away.
"Allie," He tugged on my arm, trying to get me to turn my head. "I didn't lie. Not like that. I didn't feel them during sex. But something happened while we were in hibernation..." Still looking at me, he went on more cautiously. "Whatever it was is probably why I didn't feel anything when we were actually together..."
"What was it?" I asked, forcing myself to turn. "What happened?"
When I met his gaze, I saw him studying mine, hesitant again.
"Just tell me, Revik," I said. "It's too late to stop now."
"I saw a lot of it," he admitted. Seeing me flinch, he added more carefully, "...At least I think I did. I remember a lot. It was pretty detailed, Allie. Some of it was detailed, anyway..."
Shaking my head again, I closed my eyes, probably to avoid looking at him. I felt my light starting to close and he must have felt that as well, because he shook me harder that time.
"Allie...don't. Dammit...please don't..."
When I looked up, his eyes were serious, even pained.
"Please," he said. "I really meant what I said about letting this stuff go. I don't want you to have to worry about me like that again." Hesitating, he added, "...It really feels like neither one of us should be worrying about that. We should be focusing on other things...and trying to trust one another, like we never got a chance to do after our time together at the cabin."
He waited, still watching me cautiously.
"Do you understand?" he said.
After a pause, I nodded. I forced myself to look at him again. When I did, his expression held so much worry I made myself relax.
"I think so," I said, caressing his arm. "You're saying we should get over it. That I should get over it, too...not live in that old place."
"...I don't mean that we won't fight," he added. "Or that we won't get jealous or that I won't be a possessive dick on occasion...or that I won't end up on the couch some nights for one of a million other reasons..." He hesitated, still watching my eyes. "I'm sad about what happened to you there, Allie. I'm sad that you were there at all. I won't lie...I'm really sad about it right now. I don't think that will go away overnight, which is why I asked for some time. But it feels like it's really over. To me, anyway. This is just...I don't know. Me processing, I guess..."
Still studying my expression, he made his voice more emphatic.
"But I'm not going to freak out, Allie...or ask for a divorce, or accuse you of wanting to be with someone else. I want to trust you...more than anything I want that. And I want you to trust me. I don't think we should be focusing on this stuff anymore...I really don't."
Hesitating again, he continued to watch my face.
"Do you know what I'm talking about?" he said. "Or is it just me who feels this way?"
Thinking about his words, I rearranged my weight on the mattress, watching his face. After another pause, I nodded, feeling my shoulders unclench a little more.
"No," I said. "It's not just you."
Relief touched his expression, even as he gripped my arm more tightly.
I smiled back, resting my chin on my folded hands. Closing my eyes then, I sighed, feeling my body start to unwind in more subtle increments against the bed. He rearranged his arm under his head, moving closer to me so that our legs were touching. That intensity shone briefly in his eyes once more, right before he kissed my cheek, sliding his fingers down to massage my neck and then my back.
He was tired though. I could feel it on him again, and I could feel that sadness he'd been talking about, too. Instead of pulling away from it that time, I opened my light, enveloping him as much as I could. I saw his eyes close briefly once I'd done it, then another pulse of relief left his light, even as he kissed my neck.
I waited for both of us to finish arranging our bodies on the mattress before I leaned my side against his. When I glanced up next, he was already closing his eyes. I barely heard his breath start to slip into that deeper, more rhythmic cadence of sleep, when I found my own quite effortlessly doing the same.
14
DANTE
DANIELLA ANITA VASQUEZ, or Dante, which was what all of her friends called her, as well as being her hacker name, laughed, nudging her best friend, Pip, in the shoulder.
Damn, it was early.
Like, early enough that she wished she'd drank at least another four high-octane sodas before coming down here. But they needed to do it before the heavy traffic started, which meant after the bar crowd was mostly asleep or in coffee shops fueling up, and before the more ambitious tourists and shoppers ventured out of doors.
She'd managed to capture the advert man...which told her the rest would probably work, too.
Still holding the portable monitor between her hands, Dante used the code she and Mavis had worked out in his basement the other day, trying to hijack the signal. Mavis was a friggin' genius with the code jumping. He'd managed to hack into info on the nets ab
out illegal seer tech, which as it turned out, formed the basis of most of the real security systems for anything bigger than a mom and pop...and there weren't a lot of mom and pops these days. Everything was owned by some huge company, which in some ways made things easier.
Mavis gave Dante all the info he found, and between them, they'd figured out that the reason they couldn't crack most of the security encryptions was, essentially, that they weren't actually encryptions at all. The organic machines acted more like guard dogs than code in the strictest sense. Some of the more sophisticated ones didn't even speak solely using binary. Which meant, fooling them required figuring out how to wave the best bones in front of their noses.
So to speak.
This was their trial run.
Well, not the first trial, really...she and Mavis had done some dry runs hacking signals of some of the smaller stores, those lame, stiff-talking avatars. The ones that didn't know how to scan barcodes of passing humans to run credit checks, for example...or how to access those accounts if the human sucker spoke the wrong key words.
Cheap, low-grade shadows, in other words...nothing like those run by the corporate pigs, the holographic think-beings that had access to pretty much anyone's bank account who happened to walk by in a short-sleeved shirt.
Dante had heard even that was starting to change with the new high-grade scanners. The big corps didn't advertise that fact, of course, but they'd figured out some way to get at the barcodes past clothes now. Pretty soon, someone would come up with clothing to fool the scans, but lately the corps seemed surprisingly ahead of the curve. There'd always been some lag between the security narcs and the hacks...but that lag seemed to be getting longer instead of shorter lately. They'd recruited too many of the good hackers into their ranks, dangling different kinds of bones in front of their noses...even if it was just that or jail.
Maybe Mavis was right. Maybe some of those scary, Big Brother Mutha's, as Mavis called them, had even talked the government into handing over the implant codes. Or maybe they were adding their own chips into the package by now...learning how to program better consumers, or at least monitor every aspect of their buying habits.
Dante happened to know for a fact that the whole barcode versus implants thing was a scam anyway. Everyone got implants...everyone. They never took them out when people turned eighteen like they claimed. They let those suckers line up like sheep, thinking they could walk away free, unmapped, private citizens...but all they did was knock them out, make an incision, and then laser that barcode right next to the scar. It was bullshit, all of it.
And hell, why would they take it out?
Even at fifteen, Dante knew the score. No one at that high-paying bigwig level gave up power when they didn't have to. Why give up any opportunity to control the mob...and that's all they saw when they looked at the drones and peons and no-names and kids below a certain level...just a rabble to be herded, intimidated, manipulated and monitored 24/7.
She knew the penalties were steadily getting worse for hacking, too.
She'd seen the warnings flash periodically as she tried to access some of the protected sites...saying how the fines were enough to bankrupt her whole family, that they could take her parents' houses, their jobs, even their passports. But she was still under eighteen, so she knew it was more likely she was looking at a stint in juvie...or maybe she'd get offered some kind of deal, too, like the others. A bond contract to work for the Pentagon, some big multinational with government contracts...or maybe even SCARB. She'd heard a lot of hackers got shoved into those mind-fuck academies run by the World Court.
She also heard about the ones who took deals they weren't allowed to tell anyone about...the ones whose families supposedly thought they were being "detained" for terrorist activities. But the story always got out anyway. No way to hide that stuff entirely, not with all the black market feeds cluttering the skies. Some of those same black feeds claimed worse things happened than backroom deals with slave hackers sold to the highest bidder.
Some said a lot of hackers just disappeared...especially the adults.
But Dante wouldn't get caught. She was too smart for that. She'd picked her partners too carefully.
Anyway, she was a kid. A girl kid...and yeah, maybe not blond, but she knew how to widen her eyes if need be, and tremble that lower-lip. She knew how to play the kid card, for sure, if she did get caught again.
That first time was bad, though.
She'd been picked up for a short run when she was thirteen. They couldn't pin it on her, of course...not for sure. She'd erased everything in her data banks at home, keeping it all on a black box she hid in a locked room in an abandoned warehouse near the river park. Her and Mavis worked out a long time ago to never have anything sitting smack dab in either of their actual houses, much less their rooms. So they found themselves an unused squatter's hut, claimed a room for themselves and kept it locked and the machines hidden under the floorboards when they weren't there. A small satellite dish even lived in the remains of the chimney that once led to a laundry in the rusted crap hole where a bunch of poor people sewed clothes or worked some other shit job, way back in historical times.
Mavis' uncle owned a few of those buildings, so whenever some bum screwed with them, he'd just call the police and they'd clear the place out.
Dante thought it was funny as hell, having the police work for them. Keeping 'the office' clean, as she and Mavis jokingly called it.
Those SCARB assholes were a different story.
They weren't as dumb as cops.
Dante got stuck in a room with three of them for like four days. By the end of the first day, she already figured out they knew she did it. They couldn't pin it on her, but Dante could tell they knew. She didn't know how they knew, precisely, but she saw the quiet one in the corner with the weird, silver eyes...figured he had to be an iceblood, so he probably got most of the real shit out of her mind. The guy barely blinked for like two days, but she could feel him watching her, like a bug under glass he was thinking about dissecting later...or maybe having for dinner with his iceblood pals.
She still wasn't sure how she got out of that whole thing.
She knew the law, of course...iceblood testimony wasn't admissible in court, even if they got their information the normal, non-seer way. Usually they used their sniffer dogs, as Mavis called the SCARB Sarks with a laugh, to get a location on any physical evidence or possible witnesses. But Mavis moved the machines as soon as he heard Dante got picked up. He'd stashed them somewhere...probably in some sewer tunnel, knowing him...so the SCARB fucks got pissed, started threatening her, asking her about her little brother, about her parents.
Mavis' dad was some kind of bigwig in Black Arrow, that big genetics company. He bragged to Dante later they would never pick up Evan Saunders' kid, even if he murdered someone. He said his dad would have those SCARB narcs in a welfare line by the end of the day if they tried it, if not in the ground.
Dante didn't know if that was true, or just a lot of dick-waving crap, but they never did pick up Mavis, like they did her. Since that iceblood prick must have gotten Mavis' name from her mind the same way he got the location of her black boxes, Dante figured Mavis must be telling the truth...that he was protected somehow. Untouchable.
Given that Dante's mom was a manicurist and a sign painter, she didn't figure she'd be getting that lucky, at least not anytime soon.
She suspected she didn't get out of it so much by having her machines stashed as she did by knowing when to turn on the waterworks. She even pissed her pants deliberately at one point, when they wouldn't let her use the restroom for like four hours. She did it partly to freak them out...try and convince those Nazi fuckers how scared she was. Like, how could she be any kind of threat, this little girl with the quivering lip who pissed her pants?
Mavis laughed his ass off when she told him about that.
But man, it really did work...at least at the time. The guy who'd been grilling her hard, trying
to scare her about taking away her mom's job, like, totally freaked out. He nearly fell over in his chair in his attempt to get away from her...and, well, yeah...probably the smell.
Of course, Dante got stuck in wet pants for the rest of that day, but she made the most of that too...sniveling, wiping her nose, shaking like she was cold and humiliated and scared. It was easy to pretend it was some modesty thing, but the truth was, she didn't care that much. The iceblood left the room...that, she cared about.
Since they couldn't use Mavis, and she pissed in their interrogation room, and they couldn't find her box, those creeps didn't know what to do with her. She was too young to be tried as a terrorist in the state of New York, so they had to follow the rules of the court system, which obviously pissed them off royally. One of them even turned off the recording devices and threatened to have her deported. No matter that her mother had been born here and Dante had never even been to Madrid, where she was supposedly from...they were going to send her back, let Spain have a budding terrorist on their hands.
Between her acting like some scared, freaked-out, little girl and the lack of physical evidence, they finally had to let her go.
Success, as far as Dante was concerned.
A second offense would be more complicated. They'd know they picked her up before, so they wouldn't be so easy to freak out and have it be convincing. She was also teetering pretty close to that cutoff line for trying terrorists as adults, which was sixteen. They might just stick her in a holding cell and wait for her birthday to roll around.
Still, Dante didn't think she'd get caught. Since that first bust, she and Mavis had gotten a lot more careful. Even her portable monitor was essentially a dummy terminal. Connected to the main boxes, it would erase all connections to the main the very second it got hit by a scanning probe...which they'd have to do before they picked her up.
Dante would get at least a three...maybe four minute window between the warning and when they found her on the ground. By then, the machine, and Dante herself, would be long gone. Mavis even hooked the two of them up with fake passports that would seem to go along with their implants. He'd already tampered with her implant some...a federal offense, but one mightily worth risking in Dante's opinion. Mavis seemed to think so, too, but he could be cool in that way, at least when it came to hooking her up with hardware that required serious bread.
Allie's War Season Three Page 35