Allie's War Season Four (18 page)

Dante grinned wider before she turned back towards the cluster of humans on the other side of the partition. She aimed her grin at blue-eyes, too, not wanting to make him paranoid. Truthfully, she mostly felt sorry for him and the others. Maybe because Dante got here earlier, or maybe because she was used to living a high-wire act even before the shit with C2-77, but mostly the other humans seemed to be struggling––with the no power, the crazy outside the city and the crazy inside the city and everything else––a lot.

Well, more than Dante, anyway.

Right now, blue eyes looked too tired to even acknowledge her smile, although he tried. Nodding to her, his lips twitched in a friendly way before he looked back at the monitor in front of him. Dante’s smile earned her a scowl from blondie big-boobs, though...what Dante dubbed blue-eyes’ skanky, always-pissed-off girlfriend.

Their real names were Jaden and Tina, she knew. It was just more fun to call them the other things, and anyway...they weren’t seers, so for once, Dante could think whatever she wanted. She only had to worry about eavesdropping seers cracking up if they happened to hear her.

Even as she thought it, Mika grinned at her, rolling her eyes.

“Give it up,” she mouthed at Dante, motioning with her head towards Jaden.

You can do better...
Anale agreed drily, without looking up from her own monitor.

Dante made an elaborate face, making it clear to both female seers that she had no intention of touching baby blue eyes. Anyway, the guy probably had serious diseases, considering where he’d been putting his dick for the past few years.

Anale choked on a laugh at that, covering her mouth with one tattooed hand as she looked up from the screen for the first time all morning. Vikram chuckled, too, along with Raddi, who sat at the terminal on Anale’s other side, and of course Mika, who laughed aloud. Dante glanced again at Tina and Jaden, both of whom looked warier now.

Sheesh,
Dante thought in general at the seers.
Obvious much?

Vikram grinned, clicking at her.

Dante gave up, grinning back. Shit, what else were they going to do in this submerged steel and glass ark but gossip? That and dick around with machines and try to salvage food from the flooded basement and fight information out of broken security systems and figure out ways to keep the water out...those five things seemed to be all they did anymore.

Well, some of the seers were having sex, she was pretty sure.

Some of the seers were having a
lot
of sex, from what she’d heard, maybe just to keep their minds off of everything else.

She’d tried teasing out info on the Vik-man’s sex life during one of the longer blackout days, and he’d turned scarlet, so she knew he probably wasn’t getting any. He’d also informed her in no uncertain terms that he didn’t sleep with ‘children,’ and that she would do better to find a human partner of ‘appropriate age.’

He’d said it kindly, but the sheer embarrassment on the seer’s face made her grin.

Just how much of a snowflake did he think she was?

If she hadn’t liked him so much, she might have taken it as a challenge. As it was, she assured him she would attempt to control herself, which made all of them bust up...not just the Vik-man himself, but Deklan, who happened to be eavesdropping but pretending he wasn’t, and Anale and Mika, who’d both been eavesdropping openly.

The very next night, while they’d been passing around a bottle in the upper floors, Deklan offered her some, joking that he’d only give her a drink if she would promise to ‘control herself’ around Vikram. That was another thing Dante learned––seers loved giving one another shit, even in the middle of an apocalypse.

They all seemed to have taken to her, too, treating her more like ‘one of them’ than they did most of the other humans, presumably because she spoke comp-nerd better than the rest.

She’d even started getting the hang of hacks for organics. The translation program she’d built with Vikram between non-binary and binary helped a lot...and she’d gotten good at feeling out gaps, as Garensche put it, that giant seer in San Francisco who still called now and then to help them out with the machines. Garensche was the
real
organics guru, Vik said. Of course, they gave him shit about that, too, teasing him about his ‘machine girlfriends’ and making what Dante suspected were even cruder jokes in their own language.

As a result of all this...and, well, the fact that she hung with the icers more just because they seemed less
depressed
than the vast majority of the humans she saw here, even cute, blue-eyed Jaden...Dante already knew a fair few of their little soap operas.

She was learning more and more of their swear words, too.

One thing was for sure, the Bridge had some hot men hanging around. Jaden was famous, too, so not just a pretty face. Not famous like the Sword famous, but Dante recognized his name from music feeds, as the lead singer of that San Francisco indie group, Eye of Morris. Jaden himself had been a minor heartthrob before...

...well, before all of
this
started.

Of course, since they mostly only showed avatars on the feeds, not real faces, Dante didn’t know what Jaden looked like before.

Luckily, in addition to being a hot crooner type, Jaden was decent with comps, too. They’d pulled him just a few days ago, mostly to help with minor coding. Blondie big boobs appeared to be pretty much useless with tech, but she came up here every day with him. Her sole purpose for making the trip seemed to be to keep an eye on Jaden, and make sure no one so much as breathed on him without getting a death stare from her.

Next to her, she heard Vikram snort an involuntary laugh.

He glanced up at her, a glint in his violet eyes. “The gods will smite you,” he told her. “...Watch what you think, for they hear all.”

“You,” she said, pointing at him. “Aren’t you the one hitting those security bots?”

Vikram only smiled innocently, giving her a wink. “I have only concern for your soul, my beautiful cousin,” he told her. “I am willing to be late on my work, to prevent you from temptation and decadence.”

Dante rolled her eyes, realizing only after she’d done it that she’d probably picked up
that
particular mannerism from her new seer pals, too.

“Yeah, right,” she snorted. “My soul.”

Vikram grinned again, right before he turned back to the old-fashioned monitor. At no point during their exchange did he remove the ridiculously large, noise-muffling headphones he wore, which made him look like he had two enormous bread rolls taped to his ears.

Vikram grinned at her again.

“Quit that!” she barked in their usual ritual, motioning sharply to his monitor. “Back to work! I can’t keep carrying you, my cold-blooded friend.”

He waved her off dismissively, but that was part of their ritual, too.

Dante raised her fingers to her own headset. In the background, she kept screens shifting, slower than before the tsunami, but still multi-tasking.

Leaning closer to the console despite his feet resting on the desk, Vikram turned up the music on his monitor, which happened to be the 1812 Overture, another private joke of theirs. They’d gotten in the habit of playing that particular piece of music whenever hurricane-force winds started buffeting the windows of the hotel, vibrating the organic panes, like now. At the very least, it distracted them from what was probably going on in the basement, with the pumps and fields and the seers manning them.

Anale grunted in agreement, favoring Dante with a thin-lipped smile of her own.

She barely paused from where she was going over Barrier transcripts of Varlan’s team’s last jump, her fingers moving skillfully over the keys as she marked every ID comparison and synched it between the aleimi grid and the one in the physical.

Dante didn’t know much about Barrier tracking work, but it looked pretty spiking. She’d dabbled in just enough of those transcripts to have her interest officially piqued. Deklan promised to give her the 101 on that stuff, just as soon as they had some breathing room.

She didn’t know much about Varlan, either...just that he was some super-seer with mondo psy skills who worked for the Sword. The Sword assigned him, along with Chandre, that Indian chick who looked like a bounty hunter from some tomb raiding video game, to tracking and spying on that Chinese seer, Ditrini.

So far, they’d been tracking him, but hadn’t managed to get much intel.

From what she’d heard, that guy, Ditrini, was a bona fide loony.

He’d also been the one responsible for all that shit that went down in the sewers right before the first big tsunami. A lot of seers blamed Ditrini for the death of their friends who got trapped down there as a result, and most were rooting pretty hard for Chandre to take that dickhead out, once and for all, when her current spying job finished.

Dante knew by now that despite their anger at Ditrini, and despite what media pundits said about them on the feeds back home, most of the seers working for Allie Taylor and the Sword were all more or less kind-hearted. They cared a lot about their friends and didn’t like it when people got hurt or died...human or seer.

All of their seer-terrorist-badassery, the endless shit-giving, jokes and sexual innuendo aside, they were a big bunch of goofers, really, from what Dante could tell.

Dante had given up trying to pretend she didn’t give a damn about them, or even that they weren’t starting to feel more like family than her own family had back home.

Well, except her mom.

And yeah, maybe it was all some kind of mondo head-trick. She’d read all about people getting confused and ID’d with captors. And yeah, they’d shared some heavy shit together, there was no denying that, even in just a few months.

Dante didn’t see that quite as the same thing, though...not like being
brainwashed
.

She didn’t think they were pushing her around mentally at all anymore, although she got Deks and the Vik to admit they
had
done some of that when Dante first got to the hotel. They claimed they did it mostly to keep her from being too afraid and to get her to sleep, which struck her as more or less true, too.

Dumb or not, she trusted them.

She fought it for a long time, pretended like she didn’t, but when push came to shove, she trusted them. She’d seen their actions line up with what they said, again and again. Moreover, they’d risked their lives for her. Not only when they dragged her out that bombing in the lobby, or kept her out of the flooded lower levels of the hotel. They also gave her food before they fed themselves. They watched the other humans and even the refugee seers around her like a hawk, making sure no one so much as touched her. They put a stop to anyone that got out of line, or even disrespectful towards her.

Really, it was weird to think she used to be afraid of these guys.

Most of the seers up here were a bunch of pussycats.

She even made Vikram cry once, and purely by accident, when she flipped out on him for criticizing her attempt to stomp on a bite into one of her own hacks. She’d been overtired...he’d been overtired. That had been during that awful period where they were still digging bodies out of the flooded basement, including some Adhipan seer named Sanjay that had been a friend of his, who’d gone to seer school with Vik in Asia or whatever. In the middle of her stomping around and calling him ‘iceblood’ and accusing him of mindtricking her, she’d looked over and seen tears running down his face.

Dante felt like a real bad shit-stick for that.

She’d gone to the funeral rites with him, trying to make it up to him, even though she didn’t really know what was going on. All of the seers seemed happy to see her there. She got a lot of hugs and kisses on the cheek...it was pretty overwhelming, even apart from all of the chanting, drums, bells, strange warbling and wailing horns and whatever else.

They painted pictures on the walls of one of the lower rooms. One for each of their fallen friends––Sanjay, Farador, Jalar, Krybol, Tan. They’d all been Adhipan, which was a kind of seer ninja, from what Dante could tell.

Tardek died, too. He’d been one of the rebels, but they painted his picture there, too.

Tardek had gone down into the sewers with a bunch of other seers, following the Sword and Jon in those tunnels. He helped his people get out first, pushing them up the ladder, but he and Krybol and Tan didn’t make it. Tardek had been a rebel in both wars, according to Raddi and Mila, two of the other ex-rebels, who got depressed and drunk after they found his body. So yeah, to them, Tardek was some kind of war hero.