Allie's War Season Three (129 page)

But that didn’t really mean anything anymore, either.

Really, Dante could look however the fuck she wanted now. No school principal was going to breathe down her neck. She didn’t have to worry about keeping some legit job to cover the hacks after school, or to keep her mom from flipping out.

All that shit was just gone.

Dante focused back out the window, folding her arms and feeling her shoulders tense. She stood there, bouncing on her heels a little, if only to keep herself from either pacing or biting off even more of the skin of her cuticles. Meanwhile, with another part of her mind, she continued manipulating code on a separate screen.

Kid’s stuff, this hack. Or, it would have been, if she didn’t have to conduct these searches massively under the radar. If she didn’t think someone might
die
if she got bit.

And yeah, she believed the icebloods about that now, too.

When Wreg and Jon pulled Dante off the Avenue of the Americas in the middle of her fishing hack with Pip and Mavis, she’d thought they were screwing with her when they told her someone tried to kill her. She figured the whole thing was a ‘we just saved your life’ mindfuck to confuse her into thinking they were the good guys. She’d read about seers. She knew they could hack your head, make you believe things that weren’t true.

Basically, she spent the first few days they spun that shit telling them to fuck off.

She resisted believing them for a few weeks at least. Then they put her on a hack to find another kid on that same Displacement list where they got Dante’s name, pairing her with a bunch of seer hacks so she could learn the ropes.

A few days into that whole thing, Dante got bit.

Meaning, someone on the network saw her, some trawler on the same line, looking for just the kind of thing Dante and the iceblood hacks were trying to do. Dante noticed the bite, pretty much right off, but she didn’t say anything. She figured, fuck them, if they’re so mondo scary with this shit, they could find their own bites. They could chase their own sharks.

They didn’t need some shit-for-brains
kid
to tell them anything, right?

Anyway, she figured it had to be SCARB or FEMA or the NYPD. Human, anyway, and official. Someone who might actually
help
her, in other words, if they found her locked in this infested hotel, made to hack for a bunch of iceblood terrorists for free.

So yeah, win-win.

She believed that, right up until the kid’s name showed up on the feeds.

He’d been shot, walking down the street on his way home from school. From what they could tell, he’d been the intended target, too. The hit was professional. Clean, like the stuff the mafia did in her neighborhood now and then still, according to her mom. That happened before the quarantine, too, so a white kid getting killed for no apparent reason still made the news.

Then another kid got killed, later that same day.

That one also got gunned down by ‘assailants unknown,’ while walking her little brother to the park. Dante had just started spidering that kid for the seer spooks, running out threads to get the basics on his location.

One of those happened in Boston. The other in Los Angeles.

The seers showed them to her, but they didn’t threaten her or nothing. They showed her so she’d know to discontinue the spiders, and to mark them down as ‘accounted for but not acquired,’ which was just a polite way of saying that they got their asses killed before the Bridge’s spooks could pick them up.

It was totally her fuck-up, whether they said so or not, and all of them knew it. They probably even know she’d done it on purpose, but they were cool.

Kind of intense about it, yeah...but cool.

They talked around it, sure. They gave her this whole 101 on organics, on how the living comps could ‘recognize’ users. They said those types of comps had a kind of consciousness that allowed them to ‘see’ her, then recognize her again later, if they saw her again. They showed Dante the things the machines could feel, then told her she had to learn to disguise those things to avoid getting bit, each and every time.

So yeah, the whole thing sucked.

Dead kids on her conscience, plus a bunch of seers who didn’t even kick her ass for letting those kids get snuffed...even as they obviously felt like shit about it. If they hadn’t cared, if they treated it like no big thing, Dante might not have felt so crappy. But they did care, or seemed to. Maybe the icebloods could even tell how bummed she was about those kids, too, because they never brought it up with her again.

Dante started all over after that. She wiped every trace of her net fingerprint...got a whole new kit and thread into the network, everything.

Then, like a week after that, everything else went to total shit.

Dante still felt dizzy at how fast the quarantine happened.

In less than twenty-four hours, the city turned into a floating prison, walls high enough that even the crazy and the rich couldn’t get through. It was like the fuckers had everything sewn up for months before they made the announcement to lock it all down, and then, the whole thing shifted into critical before anyone knew enough to protest.

The fear got totally out of control, and fast.

Even so, the people who managed to dodge FEMA and SCARB and whoever else, well enough to stay, at least, knew how lucky they were.

Most places around the globe were already totally fucked, from what Dante could tell. She’d watched the feeds along with the rest of them, huddled around the monitors for hours those first few days...until she felt like she needed to wash her eyes out with bleach, or maybe go catatonia with a wire headset and a few bottles of whatever crap the seers were drinking.

New York stayed clean, though...of C2-77, that is. The people there didn’t get sick when a good chunk of the rest of the world did, for reasons no one knew for sure. Most everyone thought it was because that Allie chick lived here, though.

Dante honestly didn’t know if that part was true or not, but truthfully, she kind of doubted it. Dante did know one thing for certain: Allie wasn’t here now, meaning at the hotel. Which meant she was out in that mess somewhere, beyond the quarantine walls.

So yeah, she sure as hell hadn’t planned this thing well, if she was behind it and left herself on the wrong side of the quarantine fence, in the riots and people shooting one another on the street and fighting over water and food and whatever else.

A lot of seer encampments and neighborhoods got ripped apart by pissed off humans, too, so it was unlikely there were many places to hide, even with her own people.

So yeah, Dante doubted Allie was behind it.

Then again, Dante and ‘Allie the Bridge’ weren’t exactly on a first name basis.

Everything Dante knew, she got from hearing the other seers talk. They talked a lot about Allie and her guy, the tall, quiet dude with the black hair and angular features who everyone called ‘The Sword.’ Dante only met the Sword in person once. He was polite. He shook her hand, asked her how she was doing, whether she was ‘settling in’ okay at the hotel. Dante couldn’t remember what she’d said to him, in terms of actual words, but she’d stammered something.

Whatever it was, he’d nodded to that politely, too.

Something about him seemed to hover somewhere else the whole time she talked to him, though. A distance lingered in his colorless eyes, even as he seemed to take her measurements, mental and physical, in a single flickering glance.

But yeah, dude was polite. Like,
old-school
polite.

He looked like a fighter, too.

Dante hung around fighters her whole life, so she knew the look...and she didn’t doubt for a second that Mr. Sword had killed people, although she had no idea whether he was who the feeds claimed, meaning the same ‘Syrimne’ she’d learned about in history class at school. 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, even knowing what she knew about icebloods and their aging quirks.

He definitely had a ‘look’ about him, though, that guy. Even compared to that monster, Wreg, the one that looked like a biker on steroids, the Sword looked dangerous.

But he was gone now, too...somewhere outside that quarantine wall with the rest of them.

After that last group of 'high-risk contaminants' got herded to ferries to prevent the spread of the disease, things got quiet.

Real quiet.

Well, apart from the storms, that is...and the fires. Dante heard a lot of bizarre weather warnings on the feeds, too, everything from tsunamis in Europe to earthquakes in places like Iran, South Africa and Sweden. The whole world was going to shit, it seemed, and pretty much all at once.

Dante had resigned herself, weeks ago now, that she was pretty much stuck with these icebloods for the duration.

The first week she got here, 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 hit the black feeds.

But that damned mind-reading thing was a bitch.

Not only did the Sarks 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.

Still, Dante found herself listening, ears up. Especially about the living machines, what the seers called ‘organics.’ Most of their advice 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 main 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.

They called that last part, 'walking the dog.’

For seers, hacks often started with befriending one of the actual organics running the targeted system. They’d then hack backwards by ‘walking the dog’ right past security.

According to Vikram, their current head of hack security, her initial attempts 'lacked foresightedness' and 'refinements.'

Vikram was one of the foreign seers. He spoke a weird mix 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, Vikram was all right, for an iceblood. 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, 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,’ along with 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...if she learned how to translate some of those mental impulses directly into code. According to Vikram, the principle should work the same, providing Dante figured out how to talk to the damned thing in the first place, and then to win it over. He said the latter mostly took experience, and knowing what mattered to the organic machines, i.e., how to wave the right bones in front of their electronic noses to get them to jump.

Despite her initial skepticism, Dante was slowly getting the gist.

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. That hack seer, Vikram, even hooked her to a machine that allowed her to
see
the organic comp's mind and how it thought, so she could figure out how to talk to it.

When Dante actually stepped back to think about this, it kind of blew her mind.

Still, she’d be lying if she said it wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun. Even at her most down about the current situation, Dante couldn’t help seeing the 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 this shit, and she'd actually believed him when he said he had inside info on the whole ice blood angle, given that his dad worked at that defense contractor giant, Black Arrow.