The idea was difficult for Dante to wrap her head around, even though she knew seers lived a lot longer than humans. This guy looked to be maybe in his early thirties, so yeah, the idea of him taking out half of Europe during World War I struck Dante as bizarre.
He definitely had a “look” about him, though. Even compared to that monster, Wreg, the one who looked like a biker on steroids, the Sword looked dangerous.
But he was gone now, too, somewhere outside that quarantine wall with Allie and the rest of them.
Although relatively safe compared to the rest of the world, things got pretty crazy in New York, too, especially in the beginning. They heard gunshots, pretty much all the time. Black-clad troops moved through the streets, and once Dante saw a freakin’ tank rolling down Fifth Avenue, heading for Central Park.
After the last big purge of “high-risk contaminants” got herded to ferries and trucks and sent outside the city to prevent the spread of the disease, things got a lot quieter.
Too quiet.
Well, apart from the storms. And the fires, which never seemed to end.
Dante heard a lot of bizarre weather warnings on the feeds, even just that morning. The warnings struck her as surreal––everything from tsunamis in Europe to earthquakes in places like Iran, South Africa, Brazil and Sweden. The whole world was going to shit, and pretty much all at once. So yeah, compared to people out in that, Dante was lucky.
She’d found her place to ride out the apocalypse.
She’d known for weeks now, she was pretty much stuck with these icebloods for the duration of whatever this was.
More and more, she didn’t even mind.
10
LOST IN TRANSLATION
DANTE PACED THE light blue carpet of the main hack-room now.
It was uncharacteristically quiet.
No one told her much directly, but she’d overheard enough chatter on her headset to know the big bosses were coming back today. Well, they were hopefully coming back today.
They were expected, although Dante never got the full scoop on why, or how.
She just knew a lot of seers downstairs and in other parts of the hotel were busy getting ready for them. They were getting all the survivalist-type stuff ready downstairs. They were prepping inventories to give reports, reinforcing security, installing new protocols for the higher floors. They were cleaning rooms, consolidating rooms, moving around current residents and setting up new rooms for humans and seers who would be coming to the hotel for the first time.
Apparently, Allie the Bridge and her entourage weren’t coming back alone.
Dante wished Vik was around. Vik would tell her what was really going on.
Vik was the first real seer hack she’d ever met. Not just here––anywhere.
Her first week at the hotel, she’d tried a few of her less-well-known hack tricks to try and break their high-grade security system, see if she could contact someone on the outside, like her mother or Mavis. Her attempts got more urgent when news of the Sweeps and FEMA hitting her old neighborhood showed up on the black feeds.
That damned mind-reading thing was a bitch, though.
Not only did the icers see her hacks coming a mile away, but the pricks added humiliation to failure afterwards, giving her tips on how she could have hacked their system better.
Vik was the one who sat down to talk to her.
Despite her annoyance, when the Vik-man got into talking about the living machines, what the seers called “organics” and how their comp-system-minds worked, Dante found herself listening, ears up.
Most of the Vik’s original advice that day centered around how she should have isolated the organics of the terminal she broke into, maybe by setting up a separate firewall from the hotel’s public network, or better yet, by cutting that part of the organism off the system altogether, then setting up an illegal tap to one of the outside feeds by using non-binary communication.
Vik called that last part, “walking the dog.”
For seers, he explained, hacks often started with befriending one or more of the actual organics running the targeted system.
They’d then hack backwards by walking the dog right past the security systems.
According to Vikram, who she later found out headed up their hack security, her initial attempts “lacked foresightedness” and “refinements.”
Vikram was one of the foreign seers.
He spoke a weird mish-mash of heavily-accented English and that super-fast, machine-gun seer language, often getting words and even whole phrases wrong without seeming to notice that he did it.
Still, Vik was all right, for an iceblood.
Even that first day, she couldn’t help liking the Indian seer.
Truthfully, Dante liked most of the seer hacks by now. They were like all hacks Dante knew, and sort of “her people,” even if they played with a whole different bag of tricks.
Vikram himself spent hours with her that first day, explaining how a seer would have gone about her attempts to break through the system.
According to him, seers used the virtual interface primarily as a means of targeting, conducting most of the actual work with their minds. They did the latter through things they called “taps,” “pushes,” “pulls,” “whips,” “cracks,” and a bunch of other slang seer terms Dante didn’t really understand.
Vikram told her that Dante, herself, could potentially do the same types of things, even as a human, albeit in a modified fashion. She’d just need to learn how to translate some of those mental impulses directly into code––ideally into non-binary code, if she could teach the machines a language other humans didn’t understand.
According to Vik, the principle should work the same, providing Dante figured out how to talk to the viced thing so she could win it over. He said the latter mostly took experience, and knowing what mattered to the organic machines.
Despite her initial skepticism, Dante was slowly getting the hang of it.
She’d been working on a non-binary language now for weeks with Vik and a few of the other hacks, adding new concepts and “words” after every new op she ran.
She’d heard of that whole mind-fuck thing the icebloods did with comps, of course; it was a part of the hack mythos, seers and their pet machines.
Still, Dante never expected to have it confirmed by a team of actual iceblood hacks.
If someone told her she’d be getting lessons from a group of mind-benders, she would have laughed her ass off. Vik even hooked her to a machine that allowed her to see the organic comp’s mind and how it thought, which was just beyond out-there––but, again, incredibly useful when she did her next hack run.
When Dante stepped back to think about this, she could only laugh.
Still, she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun.
Even at her most down about her mom and the world dying and everything else, Dante couldn’t help seeing this whole kidnapping deal as the rarest of hacker tutorials, a kind of mondo-kill zone for organics 101.
Even Mavis hadn’t known any of the stuff Vik was teaching her, and she’d actually believed him when he said he had inside intel on the whole iceblood angle, given his dad worked at Black Arrow in their bio-genetics division.
Frowning, she stared out the window, watching a group of gang-bangers walk by carrying metal poles. They wore a lot of gold and designer backpacks, but they were practically begging for a flier to go after them, walking openly on the street like that. A few even carried guns, which was just beyond stupid.
She wondered if Allie really was coming back to the hotel that day.
If so, Dante hoped Tenzi was right, and she wouldn’t be alone.
It hadn’t only been Allie and her pet Sword who left all those weeks ago. A whole bunch of her new bunkmates cleared out, including the one, semi-normal guy in the group, that surfer dude from the West Coast, Jon whatever-his-name was.
It kind of pissed her off, really, that Jon hadn’t even warn
ed her he’d be leaving. Guy wasn't a hack, but he’d been trying with her. He was also more or less warm-blooded.
But yeah, blondie went poof, just like that shit-weed, Mavis. Just like her mom and Pip and everyone else she’d ever known. Surfer Jon took off on some super-secret mission with his sister and the rest of the icebloods, not long after Dante began cooperating with all of them.
After Jon left, she had no one.
She woke up to new faces every day.
More than half couldn’t speak English.
They understood her just fine, probably from the whole mind-reading thing, but Dante understanding them was a different story. Most days, she had to rely on the comps. Not only were computers a language she and the iceblood hacks shared, but a built-in translator did a decent job converting their verbal speech into an audio translation, straight into her headset.
Now, Dante hardly noticed the delay.
“So what’s on downstairs?” she asked Tenzi, probably for the fourth time in the last two hours. “The big bosses back yet?”
Unlike most seers, Tenzi seemed to be trying to learn English.
He’d also spent a fair bit of time trying to teach her Prexci, the seer language.
Now he usually managed to mix his weird, clicking and gestures thing with some actual words in Dante’s native tongue.
“Boss and Bridge not come back yet. Later. Soon,” he added, not looking up from his own monitor. “They coming. Bring more people…” (there was a slight pause after he added words in his own language, then his headset sent her),
“…refugees, along with infiltrators from several work camps brother Wreg freed in South America.” Tenzi paused, then added, “San Francisco, Argentina, Brazil. These places… understand? They are all coming. No worry. Many new faces tonight.”
Dante’d heard that word “infiltrator” before, but she still had only a vague idea of what it meant. The Argentina thing made her frown. She’d seen something on the black feeds about an attack in Manaus, and Tenzi and Vik both mentioned Wreg being in Brazil.
Tenzi was watching her, so she shook her head.
“You got Argentina from my head, right?” she said.
“Yes,” the Asian-looking seer said. “I am saying this wrong? Incorrect?”
“No, not wrong.” Dante frowned. “You’re saying it like my dad would… so yeah, Spanish. But stay out of my head, okay? I don’t need you poking around in there just to get your English screwed up with my Spanglish.” At his confused look, she shrugged. “Anyway, you’re in the U.S. of A., Holmes. You should say it like a gringo would… Ar-GEN-tina. Got it?”
Tenzi continued to look puzzled, but smiled faintly as he nodded.
“Got it,” he said, enunciating each word.
Shaking her head, Dante picked at the cuticle of one thumb. “Right.”
The seer only spared her a glance, his expression distracted as he did something in the hack-line they shared.
“I understand some,” he told her.
Dante grunted, seeing the faintly guilty and agitated look in his eyes. He understood all right. Ice-for-brains just read her mind. Right after she told him not to.
“It is easier,” he said apologetically. “I am sorry.”
Dante blew a longish string of dark bangs out of her face. “Whatever.”
She glanced down at the monitor he was adjusting, watching the signals configure.
She knew he did a lot with his mind as well as the headset, so she was only seeing the surface stuff. She knew this in part because she’d memorized every sequence the first time he let her watch him open a hack terminal, and then tried to replicate it on her own, in one of her failed attempts to unlock the machines after they all left.
All she’d managed to do was set off an alarm.
Declan hadn’t even been mad.
He seemed to be their head of security, at least when Wreg, that monster with all the tats, wasn’t around. Of course Vikram was the head of the type of security she cared about, since he was their big cyber-heavy around here.
Dante supposed the Vik-man knew the weaknesses of his system well enough not to bother being seriously vexed. Still, his complete and utter indifference to her hack got Dante where it hurt. Ice-dick actually praised her, for having “so many excellencies of memories.” He asked her to repeat the whole sequence so he could watch it again, smiling in delight when she knocked through it without a single keystroke out of place.
“Marvelouses,” he told her, once again making up a new English word. “Very many marvelousnesses of memory, my cousin. We can use this mind of yours. It is most excellent… I am much much pleased.”
Dante hadn’t known what to say to that, either.
It was hard to get pissed when he was praising her like she was his favorite pet chihuahua, but yeah, she was, a little. Pissed, that is.
That same day, Vikram informed her they were going to intensify her training by putting her on an actual job, which turned out to be the tracking people thing. Vikram said they would’ve given her a taste of real work sooner, but most of the “militarily-deployed infiltration units,” (that one went through the translator), were away on assignment.
Dante had to assume he meant Jon and big sis and the Sword, along with that tattooed monster and whoever else.
She had to admit, she wanted them to come back.
The feelings around that were mixed, sure, but overall, she wanted them to return in one piece, too. In particular, she was looking forward to seeing Jon again, and his cut, tattooed bodyguard with the super-black eyes, Wreg.
Dante thought Wreg was pretty hot.
She’d distinctly gotten the impression that he and Jon were an item of some kind, but she doubted that mattered. From what Mavis told her, seers would put their dicks in pretty much anything, so being with another guy didn’t even make Wreg gay, really.
If anything, her estimation of Jon went up once she scoped that.
Jon himself was a pretty weird bunch of contradictions, anyway.
Sometimes he came off like white-bread too-nice California dude.
Other times, he seemed as tough and foreign as the rest of them. Even when Jon was trying to pal around with her or whatever, his casual-seeming words were peppered with bouts of intensity and a sharper intelligence. A thinker type. Maybe a lot smarter than he pretended, which made Dante careful around him, since maybe he was there to get her to lower her guard around the icers.
He’d gone badass on her once or twice, too, talking to her about how they would be training her, and the importance of protecting her mind from hostile seers.
That time, he’d seemed as gung-ho-military as Wreg.
The more she’d talked to him over those couple of weeks, the more her impressions of Jon blurred and seemed to conflict.
Thinking about it now, Dante found herself thinking Jon was pretty hot, too. She wasn’t into white-bread usually, but Jon had something, and not only because he hung around all these icebloods. Anyway, growing up with the Bridge had to be a trip.
Glancing at Tenzi, she said, “Has anyone heard from them? Today, I mean.”
Tenzi nodded. “Yes.”
“They’re okay?” she said, casual. “Jon? That guy, Wreg? They’re together, right?”
Tenzi gave her a half-smile, one that held a degree of knowing.
“Where Jon is, there is Wreg, too,” he said. “Both are fine.”
“How long?” Dante said, keeping her voice casual. “The two of them, I mean. How long have they been a thing?”
“Not long,” Tenzi said, making that clicking noise with his tongue. “Weeks… maybe this many.” He held up five fingers.
Seeing something in Dante’s expression, or maybe her mind, Tenzi firmed his mouth.
“Wreg is not okay for you, cousin.” He pronounced the words carefully. “Not Jon, too, my lovely friend. I would not thinks about this. Dangerous. He and Jon… is much light. No other peoples.”
Tenzi frowned, as if trying
to think of some other way to phrase it. Shaking his head and clicking again, he essentially repeated himself.
“No good,” he said, looking back at his liquid monitor. “Dangerous.”
He made what almost looked like the universal hand gesture for crazy by his head.
“Mind and light,” he repeated. “Understand?”
Dante shook her head, frowning. “Not even a little. You’ve got to give me more than that, Holmes. You’re saying one of them is crazy? Both of them? What?”
“Yes,” Tenzi said, nodding emphatically.
Dante laughed, refolding her arms. “Really? He didn’t seem crazy. Jon.”
Looking at her blankly for another few seconds, Tenzi shook his head as soon as his eyes clicked back into focus.
“No. Okay.” He took a deep breath. “I explain bad. Seer thing. Not broken. Not crazy like that. Seer is okay. Crazy for human. But only short time.”
Likely seeing Dante’s puzzled look deepen, Tenzi sighed, making that expressive clicking noise all of them made, right before he seemed to concede defeat, switching from his stilted English to his normal, clicking and purring tongue.
Dante listened to him speak, waiting out the pause.
When the translation kicked in with her headset, Tenzi was still speaking, punctuating his words with hand gestures, pauses, and more of that clicking sound.
“…Jon and Wreg aren’t just having sex,” the program translated. “They are together. In the seer sense of together. Seers have a lot of casual sex, it is true. But mated pairs are exclusive. When this kind of coupling is at its beginning, the affected seers tend to go a little crazy. This can manifest as paranoia, hyper-possessiveness, violence. When I said ‘crazy’ I meant only this. There is nothing wrong with them. They are not sick. But we seers know to be cautious around new pairs of this kind.”
There was a pause as the translation program caught up.
“…It’s not really good for you to have crushes on either of them, cousin. It could be dangerous for you, even with how young you are. They know you are a cub so will likely not take offense, but it is better to rid this idea from your mind. Understand?”
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