Walking next to her, I felt really young, suddenly, and not in a good way.
She didn’t talk until we’d been walking for awhile, either.
When I finally glanced at her, I saw tears in her eyes again. Something about that made me want to leave her there. I felt suddenly burdened by this, by having to fucking hold all of their emotions, too, when I couldn’t even hold my own.
“I’m sorry,” she said, touching my arm.
She removed her hand when I flinched, but I felt pain on her again, and looked away.
“...I thought we should talk,” she said. “Away from everyone else. We don’t have much time today, and unfortunately there is business we must address.” Her voice caught a little again, and while I didn’t look at her that time, I felt her looking at me. “...I am sorry, Alyson. I hadn’t meant to shock you like this. And it really is not your mate’s fault...I hope you know that.”
But that brought a flush of anger from me.
Anger I still couldn’t fully catalogue for some reason.
Or maybe I just didn’t want to.
“Please stay out of things between me and Revik,” I said, hearing a colder edge creep into my voice. “I get that you know each other. I get that you like him, too, so you want to protect him. But I don’t really want to know anything about that, to be honest.”
I felt her flinch a little at my words.
Even so, after the barest pause, I felt her acquiesce to them, too.
“Of course,” she said. “My apologies, sister.”
Grimacing a little at her phrasing, I realized suddenly I was having to fight not to yell at her. I wasn’t even sure what I wanted to yell at her about. Maybe I was just confused. Overwhelmed. Or maybe something else was going on with me, something a lot less conscious.
In either case, I mostly just wanted to get the fuck out of there.
“What do you want from me?” I said then, looking out over the water. “Your ‘Children of the Bridge’...what is it you want from your Bridge, exactly?”
Sarcasm leaked into my voice, without my really meaning it to.
Fighting to make my tone more polite, I ended up stripping it of emotion instead.
“Balidor said you have some people who know Dubai.” I cleared my throat, making a vague motion with one hand as I continued to look out over the water. I focused on the curl of white and dark blue waves that crashed lower down on the beach. “...Infiltrators, specifically. Balidor said you thought they might be able to help us out.”
“Yes,” Kali said at once, giving a seer’s single nod. “Dalejem was just there recently. Also, one of our other infiltrators, who is––”
But I let out a humorless laugh. I couldn’t help it.
Stopping dead on the sand, I stared out at the water, shaking my head in a disbelief that held more than a little anger. The look I gave her that time was openly hostile.
“Dalejem,” I said. “Of course.”
Kali frowned, stopping on the sand when I did.
I saw her studying my face cautiously, but I didn’t bother to hide my anger that time.
“And what is it that I can do for you...sister?” I said, my voice holding a harder edge. “I’m assuming you want something from me, in return? What is it?”
“You are hurt,” she said. Tears filled her eyes again. “I understand, Alyson...I do.”
“I really doubt that,” I said.
My words were openly bitter that time.
Even so, I think I said it more to shut her up, to get her to stop talking than to hit out at her, per se. Realizing I was crying too, I wiped my face with a hand, looking back out at the water. Shaking my head, I gave her a harder look.
“Don’t sweat it,” I told her. “Just tell me what you want from me. Like you said, we don’t have a lot of time.”
I felt her fighting with my words, maybe even with my light, off in some place where I couldn’t see it. Eventually, she only nodded again.
I could feel she hadn’t given up exactly, but maybe she’d given up for now.
“That is more complicated,” she said finally. “And it is not so much that we want something from you,” she added more carefully. “It is more that we would like to offer you our help, now that we can.”
She paused, as if waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, she went on again, only speaking loud enough to be heard over the wind that still blew sand down the beach, and rippled her long, dark hair.
“You probably don’t know this about me,” she said then. “But I am a prescient, Alyson. A true one.”
I looked up at that, in spite of myself.
I’d already put a few things together in my mind, of course. I’d memorized a good chunk of the names on the Displacement Lists, particularly on the Sarhacienne one, but even on the human Lists by then. I’d memorized the nine intermediary names pretty much as soon as I’d looked at them. So I’d already put two and two together and figured out my mother, Kali, was probably the same “Kali” that showed up on that list.
The exact listing for her read:
Ireleten Kali. Female. Born: August 30, 1532. Birthplace: Cajamarca, Peru. Rank: 2 (Elephant). Position: First wave - Second. Race: Elaerian.
Since she was a seer, I had to assume that her family name preceded her given one, which meant her first name, from a Western perspective, would be Kali.
So her being a prescient made sense, I supposed.
I didn’t ask her if she was telekinetic, too, but I found myself doubting that. I couldn’t have said why, exactly, but something about her light made me think it didn’t have that component, any more than Feigran’s did, the only other true prescient I’d ever met. Kali didn’t even feel like an infiltrator, really, like I said. Her light felt entirely absent of that whole warrior stamp I’d grown accustomed to, given that most of the seers I knew had it...even, increasingly, my adopted brother, Jon...especially since he and Wreg had bonded for real.
Something about remembering Jon, while looking at this woman, made me frown again.
Why was I letting this confuse me?
I knew who my family was.
This woman might be someone to me, but she wasn’t my family. Not yet.
Trying to apply that same sentiment to the male seer, Uye, who’d looked at me with such love in his eyes, was harder, though. Maybe it was just easier to push away someone who looked so much like me. Who seemed to feel free to touch Revik right in front of me, even though it obviously bugged her mate.
“Allie.” She caught hold of my arm again, and held it even after I stiffened, even though I had to fight not to jerk it away from her fingers. “Alyson...” she said, her voice blurring once more. Her eyes filled with tears. “I love you more than my life itself,” she said in a whisper. “Everything we have done. Everything, all of it...it has been for you, my dearest.”
But I knew that quote. I’d heard it come from my husband’s lips, and I knew who had taught it to him. Wiping my face angrily with a hand, I stepped back from her.
“What do you want from me?” I said again.
She sighed, clicking softer, the sound carried away from both of us by the wind.
I felt another pulse of that grief off her light, but it felt further away that time.
“Allie,” she said, exhaling. “I not only left the Displacement Lists there, I wrote them. Or, I should say...I transcribed them. About a hundred years ago. They came to me non-stop. For months. It was agony. I wrote them down...everything. I made only two copies...”
I stared at her, even as her voice trailed.
My mind fought to make sense of this information, even as she gave a powerless kind of shrug, shifting her head so that the wind would blow her hair out of her face once more, pulling and tugging it in lengths behind her back.
She was beautiful. No wonder Revik looked at her.
I saw her flinch, even as her green eyes shifted back to mine.
“I want to offer to take your people somewhere safe,”
she said, quieter. “Somewhere that we could begin to rebuild...away from Shadow and his quarantine cities. This is something I can do for you now...something you cannot do yourself. Not yet.”
When I looked at her, fighting the anger that wanted to course back through my light, I saw her mouth firm, even as those green eyes fixed on me, holding a harder steel.
“Allie,” she said, her voice more gentle that time, despite her expression. “The ship’s not safe for you anymore.”
Hesitating, she once more gauged my expression carefully. Even so, when she spoke next, her voice was firm. Uncompromising.
“Alyson...it’s not safe for Lily,” she said, meeting my gaze directly again. “It will be even less so, once you do what you intend to do.”
At the time, I thought she meant Dubai.
Whatever she meant exactly, in looking up at her face, at those clear, light-filled eyes, I believed her. I also knew, with more than a little anger, that she’d found the one thing that I wouldn’t argue with her about...that I couldn’t argue with her about.
For a long-feeling few seconds, I almost hated her for that, too.
DANIELLA ANITA (“DANTE”) Vasquez stared down at the copy of the human version of the Displacement List in front of her, frowning.
She’d never made it this far down the list of names before.
Now she stared at the names written in orange across the virtual landscape where she worked...a landscape she’d designed herself and that consisted of a lot of physics-impossible buildings so tall they nearly met in the sky, as well as flying dinosaurs, pink snow falling from purple clouds, sunsets pretty much any time of day...talking robots...
Dante looked through all of that to the three-dimensional, bright-orange text (since orange was currently her favorite color, she’d decided) and focused on a single name.
Dante stared at the name. As she did, her lips pursed more.
Vikram must have been watching her face.
“What is it, cousin?” he asked her gently.
Dante shifted her focus.
Immediately, the virtual landscape receded to the background, revealing the much more drab and uninteresting tech room that surrounded her in reality. The room had been modified a lot since Dante first came on board. According to Vik and the other seers, it had been organized and cleaned up a fair bit even before that.
Still, Dante mostly saw a long, twenty-by-ten room decorated with a lot of rust...and filled to all four walls with bolted-down, semi-organic tables equipped with built-in screens surrounded by even more crates of crap. Dead metal chairs sat in front of most of those tables, the majority of those with swivel and lock capability and bolted to the deck, as well.
The rest of it was just, well...stuff.
Tech stuff of various kinds, mostly. Semi-organic machines, dead-metal wires, tubs of jellies or “squids” as the seers generally called the full-organic circuits. They even had a cabinet of guns and ammunition shoved in one corner of the room, even though it stuck out awkwardly and got in everyone’s way half the time. Dante knew that was in case the ship got boarded and they got cut off from the other storerooms in the lower levels of the hull.
Armor-piercing vests, life vests and rafts of the more floatable variety stood on top of that same cabinet in an off-kilter stack.
There was also stuff that was a lot less practical...well, depending on your definitions.
Ping pong sets for when the seer and human techs got bored and played across the length of tables. A small refrigerator in the corner filled with snacks (junk food, mostly, and things with a lot of caffeine). Plastic dinosaurs. Miniature race cars that they’d built tracks for out of old tubing. A plastic beach ball that one of them found during one of their shore excursions and brought in here to be annoying. A rack of long trays under grow lights where the Vik-man and some of the others had been experimenting with trying to grow squids by splicing clones from high-functioning organic clones with those culled from dead animals.
Because of that last thing, it kind of stank in there, too, Dante knew.
She was used to the smell by now, from spending most of her days and nights here, but whenever she left for any amount of time and came back, she always got a shock when that first cloud of squid stink hit her nose as she walked through the door.
Most of the non-techs complained about it whenever they had to come in here for some reason, too. Dante was used to techs being viewed with various combinations of disdain, annoyance, incomprehension, fear and awe, however. The same was pretty much true in the human world, too.
Thinking about the squids fermenting in that tank now, though, Dante wrinkled her nose, glancing up at the ventilation fans.
“Do not dodge me, cousin,” Vikram scolded. “Something is bothering you. I would prefer not to read it out of your light...”
Dante folded her arms, giving him a direct look.
“You didn’t tell me my mom was on the List,” she said, jutting her jaw a little. “Is that why you sent Jax and Loki and all of those guys to go look for her in Queens?”
Vikram’s eyes went blank.
Blank enough that Dante realized he had no idea what she was talking about. He really hadn’t been reading her.
“What?” Dante said, unfolding her arms, and losing some of the defensiveness in her stance. “You didn’t know about her being on the list? Really?”
Vikram shook his head, slowly, his expression looking pinched now.
He rose to his feet, walking over to her, even as she activated the link again, transferring the data she’d been looking at––essentially a scanned version of the human Displacement List––to the monitor on the short table below where she stood.
She often stood when she worked, a nervous habit that they all seemed to have gotten used to by now. She liked to pace and think, not sit still so that her brain fuzzed out and went numb, along with her ass.
“Are you sure about this?” Vikram said, his voice reflecting that worry. “We looked for her name, cousin...we checked, months ago.”
Dante felt her shoulders relax for real.
“Marriage, Holmes,” she said, a little impatient.
“What?” He looked up at her, his violet eyes showing bewilderment.
“You didn’t look under her maiden name, did you?” Dante pointed at one of the names glowing in orange type on the desk monitor. “She took my dad’s name when she got married, Vik. Her name wasn’t ‘Gina Vasquez’ when she was born. She was Gina Justicia Black...that was my grandfather’s name. He was Cherokee Indian or something.”
“Not Indian,” Vikram said, shaking a finger at her. “Native American. Or indigenes...there are better words for this, cousin.”
Dante rolled her eyes. “Don’t get tetchy with me...you’re not ‘Indian’ either, cuz, no matter where you were born.”
Vikram glanced up at her at that, then smiled, as if in spite of himself. “Fair enough,” he said. “But this...” He shook his finger at her sideways, waggling his head, and suddenly looking much more like an East Indian human than a seer. “...This is still inaccurate, cousin.”
She grinned back, rolling her own eyes. “Yeah. Got it.”
He returned to where he’d been staring down at the monitor.
“She’s dead, right?” Dante said then, into the silence. “That’s why you guys haven’t said anything to me. You found her, and she’s dead.”
Vikram looked up, his eyes widening abruptly.
“No, no, cousin!” he said hurriedly, his voice holding some shock. “Quite the contrary! She is very much alive...has no one told you this? They are coming back today...” He checked the time piece in the corner of the screen. “...Any minute, in fact. The boat they took to pick them up left before the Bridge and Sword did...”
Dante unfolded her arms, staring at him.
“What?” she said.
Before she could make up her mind how to even react, Vikram’s voice and expression grew extremely contrite. “I am so very s
orry, my cousin...I really thought they had informed you...”
Behind him, Jaden let out an irritated and incredulous snort, shaking his head. Dante and Vikram both turned, and the blue-eyed human gave Vikram an openly annoyed look, too.
“Nice job, asshole,” he said, his voice hard. “It was supposed to be a surprise, man.”
“What?” Vikram said, his voice sounding very East Indian again. “What does that mean?”
“A surprise. Get it? A surprise. They were supposed to call me when they got here, and I was supposed to come up with some excuse to bring Dante up on deck and surprise her. That’s why they didn’t tell her...jackass.”
Looking between the two of them, as if sensing suddenly that the idea wasn’t as cool as he might have initially thought, Jaden sat up straighter, folding his arms. Then next time he spoke, his voice came out more defensive.
“Don’t look at me!” he said to Dante. “It wasn’t my idea. It was Chinja and Neela’s. They were going to record both of your reactions and everything. I think they were kind of blown away to have found her alive...and kind of psyched to see the reunion.”
Dante and Vikram both continued to frown in his direction.
Then Dante looked at Vikram.
“What kind of stupid shit is this?” she said. “They didn’t tell me my mom was alive, because they wanted to record me having a heart attack after they brought her out on the deck with me thinking she was dead?” Her frown deepened. “What the fuck did they tell my mom? Because if they told her I was dead or something, she’s going to kick the living shit out of all of you...”
There was a silence where Jaden just stared at her blankly.
Then, exhaling in frustration, Dante stomped out of the room, her arms folded tighter in front of her chest.
As she passed his work station, Jaden held up a hand, his voice apologetic.
“Hey, Dante...I’m sorry. It really wasn’t my idea...”
She ignored him.
Reaching out, she jerked open the metal door with one hand, her other arm still wrapped around her chest. She was already fighting tears, but she managed to keep them off her face until she got into the head, what everyone called the toilets on the ship, after squeezing through an oval door a few down from the tech room.
Allie's War Season Four Page 99