Allie's War Season Four (124 page)

Hell, maybe she
wanted
to be alone.

Maybe she didn’t want a bunch of seers watching her every move, 24/7, like she was some precious artifact.

Maybe she just wanted to be a little girl.

When Revik didn’t go on after a few seconds, I forced my mind back to the present, again glancing at my wrist cuffed to the wall. I debated whether I wanted to get into it with him on the link, especially since there was a good chance I might be overheard by security. Pretty much everything went through security these days, I knew...although usually, yeah, they tried to give the personal conversations a bit more space.

“What were you dreaming about last night?” Revik said, pulling me out of my own head again. “You were restless.”

I paused in my thought processes, staring without seeing at the foot of the bed. “Dubai,” I said, half-surprised at my own answer. “I was dreaming about Dubai.”

I heard him smile. “I know,” he said.

I rolled my eyes. “Was I talking in my sleep again?”

The smile returned. “Yes.”

“But you’re not going to tell me what I said?”

Briefly, his voice turned more serious. “Not right now.”

There was another silence between us. That one felt more loaded.

“Was there anything else, wife?” Revik said innocently.

Shaking my head, I clicked at him softly. I let my voice get softer, too.

“We’re going to have words, you know. When you get back,” I said. “Unless you planned to just leave me here for the day while you wandered around the ship without me...teasing me long distance about dreams I may or may not have had...”

He chuckled openly at that.

Listening to him, I bit my lip, frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t feel his light, knowing at least part of my anger now stemmed from pain around that, too.

“Are you alone?” I asked finally.

“No.”

“Do they know you chained your wife to a wall?”

He clicked at me softly, but I could hear something in it that time, something I almost recognized, even though I couldn’t feel his light.

“I wanted to know where you were,” he said finally.

“You wanted to know where I...” I trailed, again fighting between competing impulses for laughter and outrage. “You could have brought me
with
you, you freakin’ weirdo...!”

“I didn’t want to disturb you,” he said, his voice still innocent. “You were tired. You haven’t been sleeping enough.”

“What if the ship got attacked?”

“I can unlock you from here.”

That stumped me a little. “You can?”

He clicked at me, and I could almost hear him rolling his eyes.

And yeah, he was right. Of course he could. He was contingency guy. He would never have left me in here if he couldn’t.

“What if you got knocked out?” I said, still fighting annoyance.

“I have a check-in switch timed. It would unlock you automatically if I didn’t respond.”

“What if you
died?”
I retorted.

“Then you’re dead anyway, wife,” he said, smiling.

I bit my lip at that, fighting a curse. He seemed to pick up on that, too.

“I told you I wouldn’t be reasonable about this, Allie,” he reminded me.

“Reasonable?” I snorted. “Since when have you ever been
reasonable
about anything, Revik? Do you plan to come back here anytime soon, at least?”

“Of course.” I heard him smile again.

Feeling anger win out briefly over amusement, I let my voice grow sharper. “Are you seriously punishing me?” I said. “For what? The mission going south? Or more generally for being abducted and nearly killed last year?”

There was a silence.

“Nearly
killed?” he queried innocently. “Did you just say
nearly,
wife?”

I bit my lip. Then, snorting a little, I exhaled, clicking at him. Before I could answer him directly, though, he continued in a more serious voice.

“...And no, wife. Not punishing,” he said. He seemed to think about my words for a few seconds more, then surprise touched his voice. “Punishing...no.”

“Then, what?” I said, exasperated. “Or is this just getting you off?”

He chuckled again, not answering at first. I almost felt him glancing around the room that time, even before he spoke.

“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.