Allie's War Season Four (153 page)

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 sorry, 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.

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.