Page 182 of Seer Prophet

“Assholes,” she muttered, resting her forehead on her arms.

* * *

Dante didn’t go upon deck when the proximity alarm went off.

She didn’t want to go up there and get her stupid picture taken like some kind of afternoon feed special where everyone is supposed to boo-hoo and hug. Everything about that was corny and stupid and sonotDante or her mom. She didn’t want the others tooohandahh,or see her mom looking fucked up from whatever bad things had happened to her.

She didn’t want to see all the seers treat her mom weird.

She was worried they might not be nice to her mom.

They were cool to Dante herself because she knew tech stuff. What if they didn’t see her mom as particularly “useful?”

But really, it didn’t fucking matter how they saw her mom.

She didn’t want to see it, is all.

If it turned out she was wrong about her seer friends––if it turned out they weren’t the people she thought they were––she wasn’t sure if she could take it. She knew she’d beslammingpissed if any of them acted crappy to her mom, especially after all of them, Dante included, left her behind in that nightmare in Queens.

She’d bebelching smokeandmad-eye,just like 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 the ‘copter scared, yelling about stuff, thinking they were all just icers fucking with her head. Her mom would’ve been reading feeds and looking at images for months now, seeing all the crazy shit going down all over the world. 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.

Worse, what if the same thing happened to her mom?

What if bad things happened to her? What if her mom was broken somehow?

Kids were currency, but so were women.

Dante wasn’t stupid. Her mom might be old, but she was hot-old, not gray and frumpy old. All her comp-nerd guy pals got stupid and stutter-y around Dante’s mom, like, theinstantthey hit puberty.

Anyway, old or ugly might not even matter anymore.

If her mom survived, she would have seen some seriously bad shit.

Once the quarantine went into place around Manhattan, Queens turned into a war zone.

Those icers went back there anyway.

They’d gone back to look for her mom, knowing they’d probably never find her. Knowing she was probably dead. They hadn’t even known her name was on the List, but they’d gone anyway. They’d done it for her––Dante.

Vikram must have been behind that.

It had to be the Vik-man, although she knew he’d never admit it.

Vik must have asked the Bridge for approval, and she must have said yes, or the op wouldn’t have happened. Dante knew that; she knew how things worked around here. Some part of her stayed suspicious and pissed off anyway, looking for a trick.

She didn’t want to think about the last time she’d seen her mom.

They got in a big, stupid, drag-down fight. Dante remembered all of it, every word. She’d yelled at her mom by the sink, in that tiny, puke-yellow kitchen with the smoke-stained curtains and dented, white-painted cabinets.

She said a lot of shit that morning.

A lot of really bad shit.

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