Allie's War Season Four (125 page)

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. Instead 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 grown 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.

“I would simply like to talk to you, Esteemed Bridge,” he said. “...I won’t harm you. I promise you I won’t. I could not, in any case...I am not even really here.”

I stared at him, lost in those amber-colored eyes.

“Would that be all right?” he said, his voice strangely young-sounding. “For us to talk?”

“Why in the hell would that be
all right
, Terry?” I said, my voice hard.

“Peace,” he said, holding his hands higher. “Nothing up my sleeve.” He tugged back the cuffs of a bright green shirt, one by one, to demonstrate. The same shirt, a near metallic, highlighter green, contrasted sharply with the dark red of his hair, and his pale skin next to those sharp, amber-yellow eyes, the rust-colored but expensive-looking tie. He really looked like he had the day I first met him, only his hair was down, instead of in a clip.

And he looked less...hard, somehow.

“Promise.” Terian smiled coyly. “Peace, sister. I wish you no harm. Nor am I here to represent Shadow in any capacity. Only myself. He does not even know I am here...”

I let out a disbelieving snort.