Page 236 of Seer Prophet

When I asked if he’d slept with any of the male seers on the ship, he’d gotten more cagey, but he told me the truth there, too.

“Yes,” he said, blunt. “Do you want a list of names?”

I did, actually.

Another part of me absolutely didn’t, though.

In the end, I didn’t ask. Probably for the same reason I didn’t ask for any more specifics about my biological mother, Kali.

Truthfully, I was pretty tired of the endless-seeming rabbit hole that was Revik’s sexual past. As soon as I thought I was more or less at peace with it, something else appeared to smack me across the head and unbalance me all over again.

I fought to think past everything we’d said even now, through the heartbeat of the ship, as I lay curled up against Revik’s side, my head cushioned on his bare shoulder. We hadn’t stayed angry at each other––we almost never did these days, not after we’d apologized––but I still felt annoyingly insecure with him.

Weirdly, I could tell he did with me, too.

He still wasn’t happy I’d spent those three days in a residence with Jaden.

I knew both of us were really tired of feeling threatened.

My being awake and staring at the ceiling wasn’t all about Revik, though.

It wasn’t even about the dreams I’d been having… although those definitely didn’t help. I still dreamt of bombs falling and Beijing, but most of my dreams were more nebulous lately, like watching my friends get eaten by wormholes in space, watching myself give birth to dragons made of light, seeing featureless underground bunkers explode. I started to wonder if maybe the sun was just going to blot out the Earth.

Maybe the Displacement wouldn’t be about us at all… or the Dreng.

Maybe the gods or ancestors would just throw in the towel at some point, send an extinction level event our way.

I hated how little I actually knew. I hated thatTerianwas beginning to feel like one of my better sources of intel.

I hated that my dreams got one of our people killed in D.C.

Loki’s team pulled everything they could from that wall safe under the White House. Holo, Rex, and Mika dumped a pile of data drives on the tech lab workbench, along with organic machines unlike any we’d ever seen, and reams of actual, dead-tree paper.

Vik’s team was still going through all of it, but we’d gotten a preliminary report.

Apart from some stuff on emergency weather planning, sentient O.B.E. fields, underground crop development, and shelters in different parts of the southwestern United States, most of it pertained to genetic experimentation.

A lot of the intel involved attempts to build “living machinery” out of the genetic building blocks of seers. These weren’t the usual organics, where biotech was used to enhance dead circuits and metals. They weren’t even the more advanced models by Black Arrow, what they called “sentient machines.”

The plans I saw pertained to actual, living organisms, more like genetically pre-programmed cybernetics.

They could arguably be classified as whole new species.

From what Revik said, that kind of thing had been going on for years, even though it was deeply illegal under the now-defunct World Court. Galaith had labs all over Asia working on similar projects, including the one where we’d found the original Barrier containment tank.

Unsurprisingly, initial funding for the projects outlined in the White House safe started under President Caine, a.k.a., Galaith.

Vik also found a series of maps.

Rather than depicting specific places in the human world, those maps showed coordinates somehow related to the Earth’s magnetic field. Vik didn’t know what they meant, but informed us that he and his team was “working on it.” He said they would also look for any potential connection with the genetic materials. They’d already determined most of the places marked on those maps were located near one of the Shadow Cities.

We’d lost Ontari in that op.

We nearly lost Loki and Jax.

I had to hope togaossomething useful would come of it.

I closed my eyes in the dark cabin. I tried to push back the sick feeling in my stomach as I stared into the dark.

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