“Did I mention that I’m not alone?” he said.
“You did mention that,” I grumbled.
“Any requests for breakfast?” he said, after another pause. His voice had that maddeningly innocent tone again.
“No.” I said, still grumbling at him. After a pause, I changed my mind. “Wait,” I amended. “Fruit. If there is any. Blueberries, preferably. Bananas.”
“Coffee?”
I rolled my eyes, letting my weight collapse back on the bed.
“Do you even need to ask?” I grunted.
“I fixed the wall monitor,” he said, after another pause. “I’ll be back soon.”
Before I could protest, he switched off. I tried to raise him again, but hit dead air. I tried a few more times, but only got the same thing.
He must have switched the damned thing off.
That, or he was blatantly ignoring me.
Rearranging my shoulders as best as I could, with one hand still locked to the wall over my head, I shoved a pillow under my upper back before taking off the earpiece and tossing it back on the night stand. I looked to the featureless wall on my left, which also happened to be the one that stood over Revik’s desk.
A few paper books sat there, along with a wristband comp he wore some days, particularly if he happened to be coordinating a lot with Vikram. I also saw his urele sitting there, probably from training sessions he’d been conducting with Maygar. Blinking at the urele, I finally noticed he’d put away the toolset he’d been working with yesterday on the monitor.
So yeah, maybe he really had fixed it.
I couldn’t help marveling a little at just how little sleep he managed to get away with, as well as his overall stealthiness in not waking me up.
The sleep thing made me frown a moment later, though.
He really hadn’t been sleeping much.
He also hadn’t told me much about that whole Dalejem thing the night before, either, despite what he’d said on the link before I came down. Instead, he’d managed to distract me pretty quickly, and while I couldn’t say I minded exactly, I found myself wondering if that had been more calculated than I realized, too.
He really had been more evasive than usual.
I couldn’t exactly say he’d been closed...or even distant.
I didn’t get the sense he didn’t trust me, either, or that he was keeping things from me for some more sinister reason...but yeah, something was definitely going on there. With both of us, maybe. I’d been telling myself that it was just the two of us getting our equilibrium back after everything that happened while I’d been out of commission for the past six or so months, and with being parents now, and with getting to know one another through all of the changes we’d been through. And yeah, I still thought that was mostly true, but I couldn’t help wondering if that was all of it.
The truth was, both of us were different.
We were circling one another through that difference still, maybe me as much as him. Even so, at times it made me nervous...if only because I could tell he was still suppressing at least a percentage of his feelings from the last year or so.
Just from glimpses, I could also tell that those less-overt feelings were significantly more intense than a lot of those he actually let me feel.
Using a voice command in Prexci, I tried turning the wall monitor on.
Immediately, the greenish, glass-like surface morphed.
Flickering images rose.
He really had fixed it. We’d been getting crappy reception in here for weeks, some glitch with the security re-routing. He must have worked with Vikram and Dante to source the problem.
The black market feeds came up first.
Instead of the several thousand...or even tens of thousands...of stations that filled the airwaves prior to the outbreak of C2-77, we’d only identified a dozen or so human stations that remained in the months since we left New York. All of them covered news in some fashion, even the black market feeds, which had news headlines that could be pulled up beneath auction and fixed-price merchandise lists. Even the World Court channel that focused primarily on energy, food and water supplies, weather and seismic activity, had more “political” and world event type news scrolling in the background, too.
A fair bit of what came out of several of those stations had a lot of crazy rhetoric attached, along with a lot of ideological and religious chatter and––from what we could tell––distortions to real-life events that made that information questionable, to say the least.
One of those channels had a primarily Third Myth cast to it.
Another seemed to belong to an extremist Christian camp, one that advocated the murder of any found seers openly.
According to Loki, one of the Middle Eastern stations also had a radical Islamic bent to it, one that advocated a lot of the same things as the extreme Christians.
I could remember everything now, since that whole dead-not-dead thing happened to me, which meant I remembered being kidnapped by that Myther group in New York, even though Revik erased it at the time. The rhetoric from the current Myther feeds reminded me of those guys a little.
Another station we’d found with an iffy political slant came out of China, but it wasn’t endorsed by the Chinese government of any of the mainstream Chinese news sources. From what Balidor could tell us, another fringe group ran that one, and they tended to broadcast a lot of warlike, conspiracy-theory stuff––not only against most seers but also against every surviving human civilization apart from those originating from China itself.
They harbored an especial hatred of the World Court, but also of the United States and Japan. They really hated Japan for some reason.
I couldn’t imagine why.
Japan had plenty of its own problems, and not only from C2-77. The increasing intensity of storms and earthquakes in the Pacific Rim hit them hard, especially coupled with energy shortages due to how they ran their power grids and the drain from their failing containment fields. A lot of other news feeds had already predicted mass evacuations from Japan as their last defenses from the rising ocean waters continued to crumble.
In addition to the feeds, our ship had a decent stock of recorded material, as well.
Balidor told me that even more existed in storage that hadn’t yet been added to the ship’s networks. I’d overheard Vikram talking about how they’d put a handful of seer and human volunteers to work cataloguing everything prior to feeding it into the archives, where things could get lost if they had the wrong category coding in their metadata.
Those seers and humans who featured prominently on one of the Displacement lists were being given more operation-critical jobs, at least where possible.
They’d even put Jaden, my ex-boyfriend, to work on the tech side, since he’d worked as a game programmer for a number of years in Silicon Valley––and, probably more to the point, he had the “tech” designation by his name on the actual Displacement list. I didn’t ask what they had him working on, mostly because I didn’t care, but apparently, he reported to Dante, which I couldn’t help finding a little funny.
I mean, she was a genius, sure, but she was still only sixteen.
When I gave Vikram a semi-serious warning to make sure Jaden and the others kept their hands off Dante herself, the East Indian’s expression turned fierce. Fierce enough that I knew something had come up around that already. I hadn’t probed him for details, so I had no idea if it had anything to do with Jaden himself, but I doubted it.
No way Jaden would be that sleazy...or that stupid.
For one thing, if Jaden did pull something shitty, even if it wasn’t that exactly, I didn’t fully trust Revik not to overreact. I’d already been warned to keep Jaden and Revik apart. Apparently, something had gone down between those two while I’d been out of it. Something more, that is...beyond the usual animosity that hovered between them.
I knew that Jaden and Tina had broken up, too.
I don’t know why Jon felt the need to tell me that, but he did. I
nstead of making me feel validated, given how Jaden initially got together with her by cheating on me...truthfully, the thought of my ex- being single made me uncomfortable.
It seemed to bug Jon, too, which is probably why he told me.
Anyway, I knew Vikram and the others would keep an eye on her.
Dante, that is.
If Jaden was stupid enough to go after jailbait...if any of those guys were that stupid...they’d likely have to answer to more than just Vikram, or even Revik. Dante had been more or less adopted by every comp-nerd on the seer tech team, in addition to a good number of the more dangerous among the ex-rebels, meaning those who stayed behind in New York while Revik worked out of San Francisco.
Not only that, a hell of a lot of seers got sexually abused when they were underage, and mostly by male humans. Some of that happened in work camps. Some happened at the hands of human owners. Some got abused by soldiers during wartime, or smugglers, or even scientists who claimed to be “studying” them.
It was a sensitive point for a lot of them, is all I’m saying.
And yeah, Dante was family.
Vikram and some of the others even approached me and Revik about sending a team to Queens in New York to look for Dante’s biological mom. I hadn’t heard the results of that trip yet, but I knew they should be back with us soon.
Apparently Vikram had felt Dante missing her mother often enough that he wanted to at least try to find her, even if the odds were seriously stacked against her having survived. He had a whole rationale around looking for others on the Lists while Loki was there, but we all knew that was mostly bullshit, too. Jon and the others had already pulled as many as they could find while we were still running a base out of Manhattan.
Of course, no one told Dante about the real target in that mission.
She’d been kept away from that op entirely, in fact, which hadn’t been all that difficult since we already had more tech work going than we could handle. Vikram strongly agreed with us, given how slim the odds were of finding Dante’s mother alive, that Dante shouldn’t be told anything until we knew for certain.
Thinking about all of this, I only half-watched the feeds in front of me.
The most-watched of the remaining feeds, at least by us, consisted of the remnants of an old Russian news station that reported on news that the human feeds wouldn’t cover.
Most of that––prior to the C2-77 outbreak, anyway––involved reports on illegal violations of the seer-human treaties, as well as abuses by governments, covert ops, etc. So things like work camps being run by Black Arrow Enterprises with the illegal sanction of SCARB, for example. Or refugee camps being used as breeding pens for specialized seer orders in the private sector, or worse, as chop-shop factories for organic machines.
That same feed, called Drahk, now provided the only reliable source of news left in the world. At least for those who wanted to hear it.
Reliable from our perspective, anyway...meaning, the news didn’t come straight from one of Shadow’s mouthpieces, nor did they seem to suffer from the same issues in terms of propaganda and population control as those feeds being broadcast by the remaining elite and their militaries. The news came through as more or less objective, if still flavored with more than a little conspiracy taint.
At this point, none of us could really argue against the whole ”conspiracy” angle anyway.
Since all of Drahk’s reporters were seers, most of them survived the outbreak, too, which facilitated their ability to provide accurate and timely news. Moreover, they seemed to be the only remaining feed with contacts in all or most of the established quarantine cities, including a good chunk of those set up by Shadow, as well as the independents that had sprung up in the time since. They even had someone in New York, despite flooding and other problems that had only accelerated there, following our departure.
Drahk meant “truth” in Old Prexci, I was told.
If I understood Wreg correctly––which, truthfully, wasn’t always the case––it meant more like “higher truth,” as in the truth that transcends the base level of fact.
Then again, since he’d been slotted as my cultural, historical and even sometimes sight teacher, I was finding that Wreg could be surprisingly academic at times, so I might have missed some nuance there he was trying to impart.
Supposedly, the infamous black market feed, the Rynak, still existed out there somewhere, too, but could only be accessed via private channels. Balidor said they hadn’t managed to hack that yet, but Dante had recently turned it into a pet project-slash-personal challenge, for reasons Balidor didn’t even attempt to explain. Regardless, he and Vik seemed confident we’d have access to it soon.
They were probably right. I definitely got the sense Dante didn’t like to lose.
Right now, all I could see on the feeds was China.
The situation in China had worsened again over the last few months. The images on the feeds mostly consisted of large buildings in Beijing burning, along with people starving to death and being thrown into mass graves. Nuclear attacks were still being threatened from various parts of the globe, which made all of us nervous, not only the Legion of Fire in Macau.
Personally, I didn’t get it. I had no idea what the other human militaries thought that would accomplish exactly, to drop a bomb on a city full of people already being decimated by a deadly disease and running out of food...but maybe I’d feel differently if I thought those people were responsible for killing everyone I’d loved. Either way, in the human world, most countries that weren’t China seemed to blame China for C2-77.
Some blamed China wholesale, meaning the human government.
Some blamed China more as a proxy for blaming seers.
At the top of that list––meaning the seer list, not the broader, more overarching “China wants us all dead” list––Revik and I remained the reigning king and queen of evil ice-bloods. Of course, it didn’t help that Drahk covered what Revik did in New York, meaning his telekinesis rampage when he went there looking for Cass and Shadow.
Either way, things could definitely get worse...considerably worse, if they went nuclear.
So far, no one had pulled the trigger, though.
I could only hope that at least they watched the news in other parts of the world, and knew that the Chinese were already dying in droves. I figured at some point, it might cross someone’s mind that maybe the Chinese weren’t the evil masterminds everyone accused them of being. Of course, that still left the possibility of me and Revik being those evil masterminds, but for now, I preferred that to a bunch of nuclear weapons being lobbed at the entire Asian continent, all because Shadow wanted to scrub out his competition in the Forbidden City.
I had to hope the remaining human powers would come to their senses.
Of course, in thinking that, I had to remind myself that they were likely being manipulated by Shadow, too. Shadow undoubtedly had people in most of the remaining human governments, as well as in the governments of every safe city across the globe.
Beijing finally managed to create its own version of a quarantine zone out of the remnants of the walled Forbidden City. Since they’d built theirs after the fact, we had no idea who made it inside, or whether they’d managed to keep the disease from breaching the City’s walls.
Luckily for them, the Lao Hu enclave already had a lot of features of a quarantine zone, in terms of self-sustaining resources and whatnot, but we had no idea if their water supply had been contaminated, like it was for the rest of Beijing.
So far, I hadn’t seen any images at all from inside the walls of the Forbidden City itself.
Because so many seers came from and lived in Asia, China featured a lot more prominently on Drahk than it would have on most Western human feeds. Even the European countries got a lot less coverage on the seer feeds, compared to Asia. For the same reason, due to their relatively small number of seers, Australia and Africa were lucky to get any coverage at all.
Since I’d gr
own up mostly accessing Western media and feeds, it was kind of a trip to be in a part of the world that fell outside of the news coverage priority.
It made sense, but yeah, it was strange.
I was still watching Drahk, trying to think through what I wanted to say at the meeting that afternoon on Dubai, when the wall monitor suddenly went dark.
I LAY THERE, unmoving at first. I felt strangely disconnected as I stared around the small space. With the power out, the organic walls went dead, too.
I felt truly alone in here.
That wasn’t where my mind went first, however. Instead, I found myself wondering about the tank itself. If we’d lost power, did that mean that the constructs would fail, too?
Lily.
I sat up sharply, breathing harder.
I yanked on my wrist on the chain in the wall, but it didn’t budge. My heart hammered in my chest, but I forced myself to think. Revik. Revik was outside. Presumably where he could actually do something. He could unlock me, at least.
Turning towards the nightstand table I could no longer see, I lunged for it, feeling over the top carefully to find the headset.
My fingers had just closed around it...
When a bright light jerked my eyes to the center of the room.
I sucked in a breath at the shape solidifying there. I doubted my eyes, but when I blinked, it looked the same as before. If anything, it looked clearer.
Terian stood in the middle of the tank cell.
He wore the same body I remembered from when I first met him in San Francisco. Long auburn hair, handsome, high-cheekboned face, full lips, yellow-tinged amber eyes...
I blinked again, but the image didn’t waver.
He smiled at me, using one of his more enigmatic looks, his full lips quirking higher on one side. The expression struck me as absurd under the circumstances...borderline comical, and affected enough that I might have found it funny under different circumstances.
“Hello, Alyson,” he said.
I don’t know what kind of look had come to my face, but he held up his hands in a peace gesture, his light exuding reassurance.
Allie's War Season Four Page 81