Sitting on the downed toilet seat in her jeans, she locked the door and folded her arms over legs before she let herself cry.
“Assholes,” she muttered, resting her forehead on her arms.
DANTE DIDN’T GO up on deck when the proximity alarm went off.
She didn’t want to be up there to get her stupid picture taken like some kind of fucked up afternoon feed special where everyone is supposed to boo-hoo and hug and everything else that was corny and stupid and so not Dante or her mom. She didn’t want the others to ooh and ahh over them, either, or to see her mom looking fucked up from whatever had happened to her, or all of the seers treating her weird.
Dante didn’t know how they’d treat her mom, though.
They were cool to Dante herself because she knew tech stuff. She knew they liked her, too...or she thought they did, but she also knew she was useful.
What if they didn’t see her mom as particularly “useful?”
She didn’t know if she believed they cared enough about her––meaning Dante herself––to treat her mom decently, too. But really, it didn’t fucking matter if she believed it...she didn’t want to see it, if it turned out she was wrong. She knew she’d been slamming pissed if any of them acted crappy to her. She knew she’d be belching smoke and mad-eye...like it said in those comics Jaden liked.
She didn’t want her new friends seeing her old life like it was nothing.
She didn’t want to end up hating them.
Dante pictured her mom coming out of there, too, screaming, yelling about stuff, thinking they were icers fucking with her head. Or worse, broken somehow. Her mom would have been reading feeds and looking at images for months now, on all the crazy shit going down on the island. She’d have seen razor-wire castles run by wired-up overlords selling kids younger than Dante and Pip for tracers and water and weed and whatever else.
Kids were currency over there...but so were women and girls, too.
Dante wasn’t stupid. Her mom might be old, but Dante knew she was hot-old, not fat and frumpy old, and anyway, that might not even matter anymore, either.
If her mom had survived, she would have seen some seriously bad shit once the quarantine went into place in Manhattan.
It hit Dante again that they’d gone back there, looking for her mom. Knowing she was probably dead. Like Jaden said, they’d been surprised to find her...much less to find her alive...but they went anyway. They hadn’t even known her mom’s name was on the List.
They’d done it for her.
Vikram had been behind that. Dante knew it had to be the Vik-man.
He got Loki and Illeg and Anale and the others on board and they didn’t even tell Dante about it at first, because they didn’t want her to worry. But she had worried, of course. Dante got it out of them eventually where Loki had gone and why, and they all told her not to count on shit, but she couldn’t help worrying, and counting on shit, and whatever else.
She knew they’d done it for her.
She knew that, or her mind did, anyway, but some part of her stayed suspicious and pissed off and mad at them anyway.
She didn’t want to think about the last time she’d seen her mom, either, or what they’d said to each other. They got in a big, drag-down fight in that dingy, yellow-painted, crap kitchen with the smoke-stained, lacy curtains and the dented, white-painted cabinets where they’d had most of their dumb arguments in Queens. Dante said a lot of shit that morning, she remembered that. Her mom heard her getting up at like six a.m. and crawled out of bed to confront her. Her mom knew she was up to no good with Pip and Mavis and tried to stop her from leaving.
She’d brought up that Dante had already been picked up by the Feds once, for her “computer crap,” as her mom called it. Her mom brought up that icer who interrogated her back then, the fact that she’d nearly destroyed her future and any chance of getting a job.
Dante derailed everything her mom threw at her, though.
She’d called her a “middle-aged, has-been hootch” who thought she was kidding someone, sneaking in at 2am from her “dates” with losers from that crap bar down the street.
Thinking about that now, Dante felt her stomach wrench in smaller and tighter knots, until she could barely breathe.
Of course, she couldn’t hide from those icers forever.
They could feel her, of course, and they could find her whenever the hell they wanted, no matter where Dante hid. So she got hit with a bucketload of shitty “concern” when she wouldn’t come upstairs, and later, when she wouldn’t come out of the head or answer any of them when they stood outside. They tried sweet-talking her, then tough-talking her, then sending her light things that screwed with her head and her mood.
They tried guilting her about how bad her mom wanted to see her.
But her mom never came.
Tenzi came. Neela came, too...and even Anale and Illeg came. Jax came later, when Dante could tell it was getting dark out and her stomach started to hurt.
Now she just wanted them all to go away. She was embarrassed and pissed off and just wanted them all to leave her alone.
Not long after she thought that loudly enough, they did.
Then the hallway outside the head got really quiet.
Another hour or so after that, Dante couldn’t stand it anymore.
She was hungry, and it was slowly sinking in that she couldn’t stay in there forever, and that her mother really wasn’t coming for her. She wished she was an icer and could yell at her mom in her head. Anale told her that her mom wanted to see her, but that started to feel like bullshit, too. So Dante left the head, and when she saw no one in the hall, she shoved her hands in her pockets and thought loudly at the Vik-man, knowing somehow that he was probably still around, somewhere, since he was the only one who didn’t come knock on the head door.
Where is she, Vik? she thought loudly.
Hooking her link around her ear, she opened the channel when no one answered, and pinged him that way.
He sounded strange when he picked up, almost like, stern.
Very unlike the Vik-man, even apart from the colorless avatar he showed her, nearly a stick figure drawn with white light over a black background. Still, Dante knew they were kind of weird about family and respect to elders so maybe it was something like that. Maybe she’d actually managed to get the Vik-man pissed off at her.
“What is it you need from me, cousin?” Vikram asked.
“Where’s my mom?”
There was a silence. Then she saw his virtual avatar shrug.
“I can take you, cousin,” he said. “Or I can tell you. Which do you prefer?”
“Has she been asking about me?”
“You know full well she has been asking about you!” he shouted, his voice openly angry that time. “What are you doing, cousin? You know you hurt her very much! And all of the seers who brought her back here for you! You hurt all of them!”
Dante fell silent at that.
She tasted blood and only then realized she’d bitten her lip hard enough for that coppery taste to leak over her tongue.
“Look,” she said, gritting her teeth. “Are you going to tell me or not?”
There was another silence.
In it, Dante saw his avatar standing there, in its black, empty space. Then she saw that avatar sigh, right before it ran a stick-figure hand through its white, sticking up, stick-figure hair.
“I forget, you know, how young you are,” he said, his voice still openly grouchy. “You were a real brat today...a stereotype of a human teenager. I am not used to that from you!”
“What?” she snorted. “You my dad now, Vik?”
“I am close enough!” he snapped, surprising her with his emotion as much as his words. “You embarrassed me today, beloved cousin! You embarrassed me, just as if you were my own! More than that, I am very disappointed in you...and very sad for your mother, who cried when we told her you would not come up! I did not think you would treat one of your loved ones in
such a callous way...with so much selfish disregard!”
Some part of her wanted to snap back at him.
She could feel it building somewhere in her throat, rants about how he sure as hell wasn’t her father and he could just piss off with his unearned “embarrassment” and disappointment in her and just piss off in general. She didn’t say those things, though.
The truth was, his words stung. They stung a lot. They hit her in a way that almost surprised her, if only because it hurt. It hurt more than maybe anything anyone had said to her since she’d gotten here. After a few more seconds, she realized the feeling was shame.
She also realized she did see him almost like her dad.
Close enough, as he’d said.
She could feel all that and even imagine the Vik-man could feel her feeling all of that, too, but she couldn’t make herself say she was sorry.
Even so, she sniffed a little, wiping her nose. “Are you going to tell me?” she said, hating how young she sounded suddenly. “Or should I ask one of the others?”
He let out another sigh, clicking at her. She felt some part of his anger lifting though, even before he spoke to her in a gruffer voice.
“I will come find you.”
“No, Vik...you don’t have to––”
“I will come find you,” he said, firm. “I can see you right now, cousin.”
“Peeping tom,” she muttered.
“...On the surveillance, cousin,” he said, exasperated again. “I left your mind alone! But I am coming with you for this. I will not have you shocking your mother a second time. She is still adjusting to the realities of her new situation.”
Dante rolled her eyes at that, but didn’t argue.
She figured she knew what he meant, anyway. Her mom was probably freaking out at being surrounded by a bunch of hyper-tall, weird-eyed, high-cheekboned people who stared a lot and made off-color jokes and looked Asian but not-Asian and looked human but not human, and who walked in that weird, fluid way that made them look more like animals than people, especially when they were getting ready to fight.
Dante didn’t voice any of that, either, though, but just waited for Vik in the narrow, green and gray metal hallway with the oval, raised doors, her arms folded across her chest.
Vik emerged from around the corner, only a few minutes later.
He gave her a seer’s eye roll when he drew level with her, then motioned with his hand and head towards the hallway Dante had just left. Turning on her heel, Dante followed him once he’d walked past her, moving fast but still in that arm-folded slouch, and neither of them talking until they’d gone another hundred or so paces.
Then, just after they went through the fourth of those oval portals, Vikram bumped her with his shoulder.
When she burst out in a surprised laugh, he smiled, too.
IT TOOK THEM another six of those oval portals...or maybe seven, Dante sort of lost count when she got nervous again about seeing her mom...then another four of those super-steep metal staircases that passed through an open area of the hold that stretched up and down between floors...then another three or four hundred steps down those long residential corridors...before they got to the section of the ship where they’d put Dante’s mom.
Dante was openly nervous now. She noticed suddenly that she was actually wringing her hands in front of her chest as she walked, maybe because having her arms folded got in the way of using the stairs and whatever else.
She was also weirdly glad now, that Vik had insisted on coming with her.
It was stupid, really, to be like this.
Really stupid.
It was her mom. Even if Dante really did hurt her feelings a little, refusing to come up to the flight deck, it was still her mom. The thought of her mom crying because Dante wouldn’t come out before only made her feel worse, though, so she shoved that idea right out of her head.
When they finally got to the correct door, she was kind of tweaked out again, though.
Her chest felt tight, like something got stuck there. She found herself staring around at the walls of the low-ceilinged residency area corridor, looking at exposed pipes and electrical cables painted white and gray and even blue for water and red for live wires housed in some segments of the ceiling and walls. Truthfully, she felt kind of sick to her stomach.
Like she might actually hurl.
When Vik looked back at her, his hand on the door handle, she only nodded to him, though.
Before he could turn that handle, she changed her mind and grabbed his arm.
“Hey,” she said. “Did anyone tell her? About being on the List?”
Vikram frowned, then shook his head. “No, cousin. I have not told any of the other seers yet, either. I thought it better to wait...until your mother is perhaps more acclimated.”
Dante nodded. Reluctantly, she released his arm, realizing only then that at least part of her asking had been a stall tactic.
Even as she thought it, Vikram was already turning the handle and opening the door.
Once he had, Dante found herself looking at a very plain-looking room.
Truthfully, it looked pretty much identical to how her room looked when she first came onboard the ship. Since then, Dante had personalized hers a lot, and most of the seers she knew in similar rooms had personalized theirs, too, so it had been awhile since she’d seen one stripped down to its bare-bones basics.
Dante had printouts on her walls of the Lists, at least the portions she was working on at any given moment. She’d mark out the ones they found, using a color code she worked out with Vik and Jaden. “Red for dead,” as Jaden joked while they sat down with the markers over lunch that morning. Green for alive and on the ship. Blue for alive and not on the ship. Black for alive and unreachable because they were in a Shadow city.
Purple for unknown.
Something about having that physical version mapped out on her wall felt more real to her...and maybe made the people behind those Lists seem more real, too, especially after she tracked them down and could put pictures to the names, usually pictures of how they looked now, or fairly recently.
Vik had the Lists on his walls, too. She didn’t know about Jaden, since she’d never been to his room. A lot of the other seers had that sword and sun symbol on their wall in some form, or pictures of other seer deities. Vikram had some Hindu symbols up, too. In particular, he seemed to be fond of that god with the elephant head.
So yeah, at first, Dante didn’t see much but the bareness of this room.
Metal table, pretty much blank of anything. A mirrored panel that had been programmed into the wall, a monitor over the single bed...
Doing a double take, Dante stared openly at the bed.
Two people were on it.
Not one, two.
And Dante recognized both of them.
“What is the name of fucking shit-bleed storms of the gods is this?” she shouted, speaking before she’d managed to wrap her mind around any of what she was seeing.
She didn’t really notice that when she swore, she’d done that part in Prexci.
When she yelled it, though, her mom started violently, her cheeks blooming red even as her eyes widened comically in her face. Well, it might have been comical, if it hadn’t been for the rest of it, including Vikram’s shocked face as he stared at Dante, too.
But Dante barely noticed that part.
Instead, she stared at her mom, still fuming.
Her mother looked back at her, still surprised, but her dark eyes held additional things now, too: annoyance, a barely suppressed joy at seeing her...what might have been guilt.
Loki, the guy her mom had been tongue-wrestling with, like...five seconds earlier...looked one hundred percent mortified, even as he hastily acquiesced to Dante’s mother’s attempts to extricate her body from his. Given that he’d been lying on her, half-wrapped around her with various limbs and other parts of their two bodies, that took a few seconds.
Somehow, it was him, Loki, w
ho got the burnt of Dante’s next words.
“You goddamned iceblood!” she exploded.
Next to her, Vikram jumped a foot.
Dante didn’t so much as glance at him that time, but continued to glare furiously at Loki. Losing the power of speech briefly, she gestured at him again, not noticing that time, either, that she did it in seer sign-language.
“What, in the lowest realms of the coldest hells are you doing to my mother?” she snapped. She balled her hands into fists, her whole body shaking. “Are you going to explain yourself? Or am I going to have to get Deklan to kick the living shit out of you?”
Once again, she barely noticed when she switched from English to Prexci to swear at the now guilty-faced male seer with the Middle Eastern features.
Loki blinked at her, then glanced at Dante’s mother with a frown.
“Well?” Dante demanded. She stamped her foot at him.
Clearing his throat, Loki held up a hand in a peace gesture, his face reddening more.
“Cousin. Please. Control yourself. I apologize. I––”
“Control myself?” Dante burst out. “You’re seriously telling me to control myself? When I just saw you with your hands all over my mom?”
There was a silence.
Next to her, Vikram didn’t make a sound.
Neither did Loki, although he seemed more bewildered than anything now.
Then Dante’s mother burst out in an involuntary laugh.
As soon as she had, she clamped a hand over her mouth, as if horrified, but she couldn’t seem to stop laughing, either. All Dante could see was Loki’s shirt hanging open and his long, dark brown hair out of its usual clip for the first time in the eight or so months she’d known him. That, along with the unfastened top buttons of her mom’s black jeans was enough to have Dante livid, to the point where she really did consider calling Deklan.
When her mom started laughing harder, still looking at Dante’s face, her hazel eyes holding more guilt now, despite her seeming inability to stop, Vikram, who had apparently been suppressing the same, chuckled, too.
Allie's War Season Four Page 100