The toolset he’d had out most of the week to fix the monitor was gone.
Frowning at the blank wall, I remembered our aborted conversation of the night before?specifically, about that seer we’d run into on Macau.
Dalejem.
Revik hadn’t said much.
I didn’t get the sense he was keeping things from me for some sinister reason; he more seemed uninterested in anything but sex by the time I got down here. Now that it was a new day, and neither of us were dealing with post-op sexual frustration, or subsequent adrenaline crashes, I’d have to reassess my tactics.
Realistically, though, I knew the sex thing would probably be a distraction for a while.
We both seemed to be having… adjustment issues… after everything that happened the year before. It was easy to blame that on Revik, but I knew it wasn’t all him.
Sighing, I leaned into the pillow, using a voice command in Prexci to turn on the wall monitor. Immediately, the greenish, glass-like surface morphed.
Flickering images rose, sharpened.
We’d been getting crappy reception in here for weeks?some glitch with the security re-routing. Revik must have worked out with Vikram and Dante what the problem was.
The black market feeds came up first.
Instead of the hundreds of thousands, possibly millions of stations that used to fill the airwaves prior to the C2-77 outbreak, only a little over two dozen remained. Each covered news in some fashion, even the black market feeds, which streamed headlines beneath auction and fixed-price merchandise lists. A lot of them had pretty blatant agendas and spouted a lot of crazy shit, both ideological and religious.
One channel had a primarily Third Myth cast.
Another belonged to an extremist Christian faction. That one advocated the open murder of seers by all “true believers” and “non-race traitor” humans.
According to Loki, one of the Middle Eastern stations had a radical Islamic bent and advocated most of the same things as the extremist Christians.
Another with an iffy political slant came out of China, but wasn’t endorsed by the Chinese government or any of the mainstream Chinese news sources. They, too, broadcasted a lot of violent, conspiracy-theory stuff aimed at other humans.
In addition to live feeds, our ship had a decent stock of recorded material. Balidor told me even more existed in storage that hadn’t yet been added to the ship’s library.
The regular comp-ops didn’t have time to spend on that kind of work. Their plates were full to overflowing these days, and likely to get worse.
They’d even put my ex-boyfriend, Jaden, to work. He’d been a game programmer in Silicon Valley and had the “tech” designation by his name on the human Displacement List, so it made sense. I didn’t ask what they had him working on, mostly because I didn’t care, but apparently, he reported to Dante, which I couldn’t help but find funny.
I mean, she was a genius.
She was also sixteen years old.
When I gave Vikram a semi-serious warning to make sure Jaden and the others kept their mitts off Dante, the East Indian’s expression turned fierce. Fierce enough that I knewsomethingmust have happened already. I didn’t probe him for details, so I had no idea if that something had anything to do with Jaden, but I doubted it.
No way Jaden would be that sleazy.
Or that stupid.
If he pulled something shitty aroundanyof the seers or humans, even if it wasn’t something gross like messing with an underage kid, Revik would definitely overreact. I’d already been warned to keep Jaden and Revik apart. Something apparently went down between the two of them while I’d been out of it in New York.
Somethingnew,that is.
I mean, I’d already known they hated each other.
I knew Jaden and Tina broke up, too, and almost wished I didn’t know.
Jon felt the need to tell me, maybe to gloat a little, given how Jaden hooked up with Tina by cheating on me. But knowing that didn’t make me feel super smug. Truthfully, the thought of my ex- being single made me uncomfortable.
It seemed to bug Jon, too, which is probably the real reason he told me.