Anyway, I couldn't help seeing the wound through Jon's eyes, which I knew would be a lot less blasé than Wreg’s.
Revik had been pretty pleased with my attempt at the healing thing for some reason.
He gave me a warm kiss before he finished re-bandaging Wreg's arm, ignoring additional ribbings from Wreg about 'public displays of horniness.'
I could tell Revik felt pretty off-balance from not being able to do much with his own light. He did a pretty good job of hiding it, but I still noticed the difference. He was jumpier than usual, for one thing. Even before Wreg got shot, he kept insisting I stand behind him, even though I was in a better position to defend him than the reverse.
Luckily, that same paranoia had him on those seers the instant they fired at Wreg...but, of course, it also made it weirder that he hadn’t seen them coming in the first place. The fact that I hadn’t seen past that cloak bothered me, too. Usually I was pretty sensitive about that kind of thing. Meaning people wanting to kill me, Revik, or my friends.
All in all, I felt pretty wound up, and not only from the crime.
I don’t know if it was one of those warning bell things I get sometimes, or if I was feeling something in the F.O.B. construct more generally, but my aleimi felt jagged with extra current by the time we finished loading the last of our new ‘acquisitions.’
Whatever that thing I was picking up on was, it remained faint enough, vague enough and elusive enough for my denial to kick it, so that I found myself pushing it aside, at least until we were back with the others.
It turned out, we needn’t have worried about Jon, at least in the short term.
Someone had already locked Jon up in the quarantine crate down below. Some security measure or other demanded it, I guess, since his blood still technically showed up human. So Revik, Jorag, Neela and I finished unloading crates from the jeep’s cargo bed by the crane next to the larger of the two hatches, while Wreg got escorted off by a few other ex-rebels to visit the infirmary down below.
Everyone had been waiting for us, so they'd already lowered both quarantine cells into the hold. Really, that ended up being a a good thing for us, too, in that we were able to determine how best to use the free space, mostly by jamming all of our booty into every crack and crevice that remained.
By the time we were done, only a thin trail led to each of the crates’ doors.
Minutes later, and now sweaty and hot despite the cold air, driving rain and whipping winds, Revik and I struggled our way through that upper hatch and into the relative silence and stillness of the lower hold. By then, I was exhausted, worried about Wreg, worried about Jon, worried about Revik, wondering about the storm and FEMA protocols in the city and whatever else. On the plus side, I also felt strangely purged of the worst of the death and chaos we'd witnessed on the way from the airport. I had that lingering anxiety thing going on, but I still couldn’t quite get a thread on where it came from, so I blew it off for the moment.
Climbing down the ladder after Revik, I hadn't even turned around yet when a familiar voice brought me up short.
“You both look almost as bad as Wreg,” the voice observed.
When I turned, Balidor was watching us, his gray eyes unreadable.
“Was this meant to add suspense to our trip?” he queried next, raising an eyebrow at me. “Or are you just testing my emotional responses? Making sure they are as unshakable as what must always be expected of the leader of the Adhipan?”
I felt a small smile teasing my lips, almost before I could hold it back. “Do you ever just come out and say things, ‘Dori?”
“I don’t want to be around when your brother sees Wreg,” Balidor returned easily, smiling back at me more genuinely that time. “...How is that for ‘saying’ something?”
"Yeah,” I sighed in agreement. “You and me both.”
“You made a liar out of me, too,” Balidor added. “I had just spent more than a small amount of my time reassuring brother Jon that you would let no harm come to that monster...”
Revik chuckled, caressing my back as I stepped closer to him.
“How did it happen?” Balidor asked next, glancing up at Revik, watching as his fingers tugged me to stand closer to him still. His eyes held a flicker of worry, there and gone almost before I caught it. “Wreg said they got past you. Some kind of new shield technology? Of course he was more colorful about it...”
Revik grunted, but he gave Balidor a less dismissive look than he’d given me.
“Yeah,” he said, combing the fingers of his free hand through his black hair. “Neither one of us had seen it before. Tied to something mechanical, Wreg thought...in the armor, maybe. Semi-organic. But there was definitely a closer source. Non-dimensional, I mean...”
I blinked, glancing at Revik, half in surprise, half in irritation. He’d clearly noticed a few more things about that armor than I had, and more than he’d deigned to share with me.
Revik raised his eyebrow at me in return, then looked back at Balidor.
“I would ask Wreg, see what he says,” Revik added, his voice more subdued. “He’s the one that gave me the intel I’m sharing. And it seems I’m not quite as reliable as usual in that area...” he added ruefully, glancing again at me, again a near question in his eyes.
Balidor only nodded, but I saw his eyes studying both of our faces again.
I wondered if he was reading one or both of us. With him, it was pretty much impossible to know for sure.
"What else happened?" he said finally. "Do I even want to know?"
"Karma," Revik said, slinging his arm around my shoulder. He pulled me against him, holding me flush with his body that time. It surprised me, but it took me a few seconds to realize why. Then it hit me...he almost never touched me overtly in front of Balidor. He was cautious with affection in front of most of the military seers, really, but he particularly didn’t do it in front of Balidor. Before I could puzzle through that more, Revik added to the Adhipan seer, “...And I have a feeling I have more coming my way.” At Balidor’s humorless grunt, Revik’s smile widened. “...Or do you mean ‘what else’ in general?”
Balidor smiled faintly, but that shrewder look never left his eyes.
“I mean, whatever is causing you to hover over your wife like a hyper-protective dog,” he said. “...Along with whatever she is frowning about with her eyes, even when she is smiling. Both of you look so tightly wound that you might explode at any minute...” He stared a bit harder at Revik. “...And truthfully, I’m not even entirely sure if it’s for the same reasons...”
I gave a tense laugh, glancing up at Revik. “What does he mean? Nervous? Who’s nervous?” Even so, I hesitated a little at the expression I saw on Revik’s face. He was giving Balidor a hard look, one that contained an overt warning. “...No really,” I said, frowning a bit more genuinely that time, looking between them. “What’s going on?”
“I believe I was asking you that,” Balidor said mildly.
Despite his words, I could tell somehow, that he’d taken Revik’s warning to heart.
His light backed off in the same set of seconds.
Frowning as I continued to study the immovable look on Revik’s face, I said, “Well, I just figured it was something I was picking up on in the F.O.B. construct,” I said finally. “Nothing’s wrong here? Nothing happened while we were gone?”
“Not that I’m aware of, no,” Balidor said, but again I saw him exchanging a barely perceptible look with Revik.
I fought back and forth on whether to try and pin the two of them down right then and there, then decided it would be pointless, with either of them, at least right now. Whatever was eating Revik right now, it was obviously heightening his paranoia more than a little already. I figured I’d have better luck trying to get it out of him when we were alone.
At my thought, Balidor’s smile grew less subtle.
Of that, I have little doubt, he sent humorously.
Funny, I sent back, letting him feel my annoy
ance. Of course, you could save me the trouble just this once and tell me. Not cater to my husband’s paranoia around me actually knowing something, for a change...but just tell me what’s going on...
Balidor shook his head inside my mind, though, clicking softly. No, no, my friend. I am sorry, but this is one topic I absolutely do not want to get in the middle of...not for any amount of good will, favors, food or money...
Frowning harder at the seer figure of speech, I looked away from Balidor’s unreadable face, only to find myself staring up at Revik’s even more unreadable one.
“Jerks,” I muttered, for the second time that day.
Revik squeezed my shoulder with his fingers and arm, but I sensed him closing his light up even tighter than before. Sighing in defeat, at least for right then, I motioned with my head towards the oval door leading out of the foyer below the main hatch.
“Shall we?” I prompted, giving Revik a meaningful look before I glanced back at Balidor. “I’d like to check on Wreg, if that’s possible,” I added. “...And meet this new friend of Chandre’s. Preferably before she gets us all killed in the underwater OBEs, screaming ‘Viva la Displacement!’ when it turns out she’s a plant of Shadow...”
“Funny,” Revik muttered, bumping up against me. His voice made it sound less so.
“Yeah, I’m a comedian all right,” I agreed. “Ask anyone.”
Balidor chuckled at that last, but I noticed the sharper look never left his light gray eyes, not when he looked at either one of us. That look, if nothing else, convinced me I needed to have a little talk with my husband, and really, at the earliest possible opportunity.
3
SIEGE
FIFTEEN-YEAR-OLD Daniella Alexis Alvarez, hacker name, Dante, looked out the window of the 47th floor hotel room that had gradually become her home in the past however-many weeks.
A freakish kind of quiet lay over the city.
Fires burned in the background, but even those seemed to happen in silence.
Dante saw figures moving, shadowy forms, what looked like people in uniforms. She heard gunfire when she stood on the balcony earlier, but now that had stopped, too. It was more like a vid than real life. She had to remind herself those were people...actual people...down there.
Not billboards, or even icers. People.
Dante had been downstairs when someone with a grudge went after the hotel itself.
A fucking bomb. Like something out of the movies. Like a news feed about seer terrorists, or some kind of disturbance in the Middle East or India.
It was also loud as hell...like a ‘viced A-bomb went off, right inside her head.
Glass exploded inward. Another explosion shattered the next panel down...right before a large pane of the window facing Fifth Avenue crashed down in a single line, like a sheet of water that broke over the pavement in a deafening wave.
Dante had been thrown back by the blast, even as seers already rushed directly towards the source. More out of habit than real thinking, Dante followed them towards the noise and the smoke, until one seer seemed to notice her suddenly, and literally picked her up. He held her like a sack of garbage, walking her out of the smoke and eruption of gunfire...fast...and before Dante could figure out why, or even, like...breathe.
They told her later that she’d been pounding 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 at first...pretty stupid, really.
Who would be dumb enough to run out into that bullshit for no good reason?
But they knew she wasn’t, it turned out...trying to escape, that is.
They just wanted her safe, which kind of blew Dante’s mind, too. Even so, the seers all seemed to like her more after that, thinking her badass or whatever for running towards the gunfire, instead of away, ‘like most humans,’ they said. Several bought her drinks after that, even, when 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 shit from the three or so hours of firefight that happened after the initial blast, and the explosions themselves.
They didn’t let her drink much, though, she noticed.
In fact, they 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 she had to get combat training.
Dante went along with that, too. Because, yeah...why not? If the whole world was going bust, as Dante had no doubt it surely was, she had to learn how to mess some shit up, along with the rest of them...right? And yeah, it was cool. Cooler than she expected. Apart from the tech and seer hack classes she got every morning, it was now the best part of her day.
Everything changed after that first attack.
The place lost all of its open-air, fancy hotel thing, for sure.
Now, Dante felt like she lived inside some kind of glass, iron and electric-fenced castle. After spending most of her life on those streets she could now only see at a distance, she also felt trapped. It felt really weird to be cut off from pretty much everything she knew about New York. She was goldfish girl now, seeing it all through glass.
And yeah...fuck.
Everything was a mess outside those walls.
That feeling of quiet, the waiting she felt on the martial-law and anarchy-ruled streets she’d stomped and cruised her whole life, felt so different from anything she remembered about New York City. New York was all about noise, dickheads with money, scammers and parasites, ad-zombies and cars, vurt billboards and people selling you shit you didn’t need. People like Dante swam through the cracks like minnows in a stream.
So Dante paced the hotel room now instead, 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 as well as 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.
Even so, 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.
Dante was lucky, really. She was in here, whereas most people were out there. She was in New York, inside this hotel-slash-fortress, not outside the clean zone of Manhattan, where people were reportedly dying in droves. Moreover, she hadn’t owned much in that earlier version of New York to begin with. It was a lot easier to watch it burn, knowing none of it ever would have been hers, anyway, not unless she stole it.
Of course, that 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.
Dante had lost weight since she got here. Eating was one of those things she forgot to think about most of the time, 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 the cops and her teachers, now felt like nothing more than marginally-functional leather.
&nb
sp; She’d cut her hair, too.
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.
Really, Dante could look however the fuck she wanted now. No school principal was going to breathe down her neck. 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.
Dante focused back out the window, folding her arms and feeling her shoulders tense. She stood there, 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 have been, if she didn’t have to conduct these searches massively under the radar. If she didn’t think someone might die if she got bit.
And yeah, she believed the icebloods about that now, too.
When Wreg and Jon pulled Dante off the Avenue of the Americas in the middle of her fishing hack with Pip and Mavis, she’d thought they were screwing with her when they told her someone tried to kill her. She figured the whole thing was a ‘we just saved your life’ mindfuck to confuse 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.
Allie's War Season Three Page 84