Allie's War Episodes 1-4(105)

Even then, it was easy to get turned around.
After the near-silence of the past few weeks, both here and in Seattle, the voices echoing up and down the five stories of glass and metal were both comforting and a kind of psychic attack. A feeling of almost paralyzing aloneness tried to creep back around me, as well. The groups of laughing, shopping and even bickering humans somehow reminded me just how completely isolated from everyone around me I really was.
That aloneness shed some light on something else, too.
It was no wonder, really, that the thing with Revik screwed me up so badly. In the past month or so, I’d let him become my whole world.
I needed to be around other people, even if I couldn’t talk to any of them. Even if it was reckless. Even if all I could do was watch them from a distance. I needed to know I wasn’t the only person on the planet, and that every human being in the world hadn’t been replaced by angry, one-hundred-year-old, mind-reading seers with sexual and emotional issues.
Anyone could potentially recognize me, I knew, at least in theory.
But it struck me as pretty damned unlikely that anyone actually would.
I had my doubts that most of the humans on board would be on the lookout for a renegade seer terrorist in their midst, even if they weren’t on vacation. I suspected they’d be a lot less likely to be looking for me while taking a scenic cruise up the Canadian coastline on a city-sized boat that boasted a midnight buffet table. Half the people around me were drunk, or focused solely on free food and gambling in the ship’s casino, anyway.
And anyway, I looked different from the photos plastered all over the feeds. My hair had changed color and length. My face had thinned. My eyes were a different color. Then there was the other thing: weird as it was, I could swear I had grown taller. Not much, maybe only a quarter or half-inch, but to call it strange was hardly an understatement. I didn’t know many humans who had a massive growth spurt as they approached their thirties.
The truth was, I didn’t completely look like the same person I had when I left San Francisco, except for maybe my eyes, thus the contacts and the shades. The rest of me, I figured wouldn’t stand out as specifically mine to anyone but my mother, and maybe Jon.
From wall maps I got the basic layout of the boat.
I located the main casino, two dining areas and five bars on the lobby floor alone, along with access to a theater and a swimming pool. Thinking about the last of these, I seriously contemplated going for a swim, although it meant going in wearing underwear, which might call a little too much attention to me, even here.
I didn’t have any credits to buy a suit, or even a room key. I wondered if I could push a clerk well enough to get one anyway. Thinking about this, though, I figured I should probably save the pushes for if I really needed them.
Photography stands flashed virtual backdrops of Alaskan coastlines next to people dressed in VR-paneled costumes that used computer-generated images to make the wearers look like everything from bald eagles to caribou to penguins to moose. I even saw a few polar bears standing on that virtual landscape, which as far as I knew had been extinct for years outside of zoos.
Next to the long lines of people waiting to be seated in the dining area for a five course, sit-down dinner, stood a piano bar flanked by two gilded waterfall balconies. Lining the guard rail above the sunken bar stood kiosks that sold everything from jewelry to shore excursions, pedicures and massages, dance classes and raffle tickets, tax-free wires, hiri and tobacco cigarettes, perfume, alcohol and handbags.
I saw a woman holding a brochure on seer services that could be purchased in Anchorage, too, including a trip to what Revik referred to as an “unwilling” bar, and what every human I knew called a whorehouse.
Another surge of sickness hit, that time bad enough to make me stop.
I took a breath, leaning a palm against the corridor wall in a shadowed observation area outside the piano bar. Only a few tables stood there, populated by couples sipping drinks and looking through large windows to the ocean.
Jesus. Whatever was wrong with me, I had to get it under control. I was sweating too much, and I could see in the reflective glass that I was deathly pale. That, combined with the hollow cheeks, made me look like a drug addict.
I couldn’t risk that someone here might care. Security maybe, or one of the cameras. I had to get out of here, away from these people, away from—
Allie?
I stopped in mid-exhale. Scanning faces to my left, I paused on the bay windows overlooking the ocean.
Allie? Will you answer me?
I swallowed, keeping my eyes on the rolling waves. The sky was dark, but a rim of reddish-purple remained by the water. My eyes returned to the dim lounge with its few tables. I didn’t recognize anyone, didn’t feel him nearby.