It was a fortress now. Really, its own country.
If you could call the new powers rising in the world “countries” at all.
They were more like kingdoms, really. Fiefdoms.
Conquered territories, perhaps.
Empires run by despotic warlords.
Revik squeezed my hand tighter, warning me about my thoughts.
I could barely feel his light at all now, despite how close we stood, and the bond we shared through our aleimi. I knew they must be scanning us to verify the ID, yet again. I couldn’t feel the light of the human standing in front of me, either, so I knew seers must be shielding him from behind the one-way windows of that small guard station, too.
Either way, there was no doubt about it.
Despite our party costumes, we were in full-fledged military op territory now.
These days, we rarely ever left it.
2
LEGION OF FIRE
REVIK TOOK MY hand again, as we finally walked out of the security checkpoint, some twenty minutes later. He held me even closer that time, bringing me nearly flush against his side as we walked down a long, open-air corridor on the inside of the east wing of the hotel.
I noticed that he also kept me on the building side, too, so that he walked between me and the open area of the pool and the distant balconies.
Somehow, I doubted that was an accident, either.
We continued to walk more or less leisurely, but we’d been given instructions on where our hosts would be waiting for us inside. From the way the guards behaved, and how we received our instructions on that secondary location, I doubted they would be okay with us giving ourselves a tour before we made it to that initial meeting. Revik must have gotten the same impression, because he walked us more or less in a straight line for the casino, which was where the guards told us we’d be collected.
I could feel flickers of light impressions from that casino already, albeit faintly through the confusing maze of a Barrier construct we now inhabited.
The casino was only a detour, too, I knew.
I pushed all of that out of my mind, however.
I wanted to look at the scenery, regardless of why we were here.
They’d done a good job showcasing and emphasizing almost otherworldly amounts of wealth. Gauzy cloths hung down beside pillars that separated our walkway from the largest swimming pool I’d ever seen in my life. Fire pits had been strategically placed alongside that same pool at intervals, as well as the more numerous tiki torches and the occasional standing bar, which I admit looked tempting, if only for the holiday-like appeal.
I wasn’t alone in feeling that way, either, apparently.
What must be other “guests” and friends of the Legion of Fire sat around and inside that pool, either floating naked or in expensive-looking swimwear inside the water, or perched on pristine, modern-looking furniture with silk cushions next to small glass tables. On the tables themselves, I saw food plates mixed with expensive-looking cocktail glasses filled with colorful drinks, fruit and little paper umbrellas. Servants brought new ones of each and cleared away dirty ones while I watched, all of them wearing those anachronistic white gloves and spotless white belhop uniforms.
I also noticed that most of the servants themselves were not Chinese.
The women and men I saw lounging on that deck––with its colorful, butterfly-shaped lights and white-uniformed bellhops and umbrellas and palm trees and flaming stone-basin torches––looked incongruously wealthy, considering what I knew to be going on outside the city gates. In fact, they maybe looked wealthier than any group of people I’d ever seen. The whole scene threw me, making me feel like I was caught in some kind of bizarre time loop.
In any case, these people seemed to have zero qualms about reaping the spoils of a disease that basically wiped out the vast majority of their previous civilization.
The women I saw all wore easily thousands of dollars in jewels, even when dressed only in g-string bikinis. Given that a lot of those bathing suits fell firmly into the “why bother?” category of body covering, the jewelry looked even more out of place, like they had so much of it they’d forgotten what it was even supposed to be used for.
Designer, high-heeled sandals criss-crossed over feet and ankles next to men’s designer suits and loafers and gold cufflinks and Swiss watches. Expensive-looking sunglasses sat atop many of their heads, pulling back their hair artistically even though the sun had dropped behind the horizon hours before we left the ship for this little rendezvous.
The air was warm here, humid even in the night, and the soothing bubble of hot tubs mixed with gentle laughter as they drank wine from thin-stemmed glasses and smoked dark-colored cigarettes with jewel-encrusted holders.
The whole scene just looked surreal to me.
Surreal, and kind of gauche, in a rich-person’s sort of way...like we were walking through some modern version of Rome while everything outside the gates burned.
When Revik prodded my light, turning my eyes to the upper balconies over the lake-like pool with its colored lights and waterfalls and floating bars, I saw more of those guards wearing all black. Gold and red lion and flaming sun symbol wrapped around the biceps of their black uniform shirts, too, and they looked incongruously brutal somehow, both in terms of the light they exuded and their facial expressions.
These weren’t rent-a-cops, like you might have seen at a ritzy mall back home before the plague. These guys looked like the real deal, like mercenaries who wouldn’t tolerate bullshit from anyone, no matter how much jewelry they wore, or how many expensive watches or Italian loafers they’d stuffed in their suitcases...or how good they looked in a gold, g-string bikini.
It was a good reminder that the opulence here came at a pretty steep cost.
Macau wasn’t one of Shadow’s cities, though. Not directly, anyway, like I said.
The Legion of Fire performed their own lockdown, after the fact.
Since they hadn’t been one of those cities whose water supply got directly targeted, they had a wider window than most...enough that their lockdown managed to be more or less effective. That, combined with a fair bit of geographical privilege––including proximity to Hong Kong, which happened to be one of the Shadow quarantine cities––allowed them to survive.
I’d been told that the Legion of Fire performed their own purges, of course.
Truthfully, that kind of thing didn’t even shock me any more. I understood it...even agreed with it, in principle...despite the heartlessness of how it usually got done. People did a lot of heartless things when their lives were on the line.
More than that, if they hadn’t, there might not be much of a human race left.
For the same reasons, I understood why the place was fortified like a military base now, too. Given that Macau was completely owned and operated by a single organized crime family, and more or less had been even before C2-77, I knew they likely had a large number of security measures in place even before the human-killing disease. I didn’t doubt that those measures were a large part of how they’d survived, and why they continued to do so.
Now, every person inside the fortified enclave was a potential threat to all of them.
To most people here, I imagine, these criminals had become their saviors.
A number of enclave cities like this had popped up around the globe in the past few months, in addition to the quarantine cities designed by Shadow himself.
Revik had been one of the first to note that a large number of the same grew out of locations where organized crime already had a strong presence, as well as both the money and mindset to institute a lockdown of sufficient severity to actually make it effective.
Other locations that managed to pull this off often succeeded due to a combination of geographic privilege and a tightly-knit local population. Those types of locations, like Reykjavik, Bhutan and Helsinki used the natural environment to keep a lot of would-be disease carriers out, and reinforced those boundar
ies by instituting more military-style lockdowns, as well.
Some enclave cities arose for different reasons, however, including because they were blessed with a large enough loyal seer population that they could utilize those seers to assist in the lockdown itself.
Examples of the latter included London and the Forbidden City in Beijing.
In any case, a strong leader seemed to be a requirement. Each of the successful enclaves we’d encountered so far seemed to center around the work of a particular person able to rally the population to do what needed to be done. Usually that entailed some degree of being willing to sacrifice the sick for the benefit of the healthy.
That meant family members, friends, relatives.
Even apart from that, most of those cities we’d encountered operated on survivalist rations, with a scarcity mentality reinforced by some kind of plea for self-sacrifice among the remaining citizens.
But Macau.
The fact that places like this still existed kind of blew my mind, honestly.
Despite the warning pulses I occasionally felt from Revik, I found my light returning to the construct again and again, trying to puzzle it out, if only for its foreignness. It didn’t feel anything like what I remembered of the construct in the Forbidden City in Beijing, or anything like the ones I knew from the Adhipan or Seven, either.
It didn’t feel like one of Shadow’s hall of mirrors constructs, either.
Revik had warned me that the seers involved in organized crime families had their own way of doing things. He said I was better off pretending I didn’t see the man behind the curtain, too, even if that curtain twitched right in front of me. This wasn’t the kind of group that would appreciate a seer able to penetrate the bubble of illusion they created around their world.
Even so, I didn’t seem to be able to leave it alone. It was like a cut inside my mouth I couldn’t stop examining with my tongue.
“Allie, cut it out,” he muttered, squeezing my hand tighter.
I tried to do as he said, if only because I could feel worry on him again, rippling the light around his hands and fingers.
He hated this plan.
I knew he hated it, but neither he nor anyone else had been able to think of a better one. I’d promised him I would go along with anything he came up with that was better, but in the end, partly due to pressures around time and partly because of the limited options we had on approach to a place like this, he’d reluctantly agreed to go along with mine.
“I hate this,” he muttered.
Again, I wondered if he’d read me.
I supposed it didn’t matter.
Not answering him verbally, I only squeezed his fingers in response. Even as I did it, we passed by the last set of columns.
I found myself blinking at two more security guards in black uniforms, standing on either side of twelve-foot-tall, gold-colored, double doors.
Bowing to us unsmilingly, the two guards grasped handles on either side and opened those same doors in tandem, causing me to flinch slightly against Revik’s side at the explosion of sound that briefly shattered the quiet of the outside pool and marble-white deck area.
It went from some oddly-serene, wealthy cocktail party flashback to full-fledged casino chaos in two seconds flat.
Revik didn’t slow his steps.
We walked into the lobby and past a twenty-foot-tall lucky cat statue surrounded by live, pink and white orchids and a coin-filled reflecting pool.
I found myself staring around again, fighting to get my equilibrium as I adjusted to the new sights and sounds. I never let go of Revik’s hand, but leaned into him slightly as I tilted my face up, taking in the dramatic height of the glass atrium and its curved dome that stretched easily a hundred feet above where we walked. Palm trees lined the promenade inside here, too, on either side of plush red carpets.
I saw birds winging through the indoor area, more fake waterfalls and rock gardens, both the Chinese variety and a few that looked more Japanese. Those high, steeply curved bridges I always associated with the Japanese tea garden in San Francisco looped decoratively over a number of indoor streams, too. Those same streams appeared to be filled with koi and were bordered in several spots by pagoda-type buildings housing bars and low-light tables.
All of it had been carefully and artistically arranged, but overall reminded me more of an amusement park than the actual places being evoked. The bushes and trees looked as though they were tended and trimmed by gardeners daily, and I didn’t see a single light bulb that had burned out, anywhere in the entire room.
On one of the stepped, upper levels, black and gray stones stood on white sands next to red-leafed maples, clearly evoking a more zen-type rock garden than what I saw on the ground level. More humans and seers in expensive clothes sat at stone tables up there, incongruously drinking alcohol, listening to piped music and lounging on leather seats while they occasionally looked out over the expanse of the wider casino.
Storefronts ringed the inside of the larger structure, too, reminding me of movie props mixed with the one and only cruise ship I’d ever been on, the one Revik and I took to Alaska. This floor area had to be about fifty times the size of the ship I remembered, though, from what I could tell from our brief stroll so far.
My eyes kept scaling those dizzying walls, pausing on forty-foot screens showing streaming feeds flickering between images of live tigers jumping through flaming hoops, jungle scenes and tsunami waves followed by images of a starry sky...only to melt back into faster-moving light shows and people bungie jumping off the same high tower I’d seen from the boat as we rode into the harbor earlier that afternoon.
I didn’t have long to look around, though.
I could feel the clock ticking again.
Revik walked me right past all the shops and gaming tables, barely looking at the people throwing dice and hunkered down over face-down cards.
It was difficult to see the fun in it, honestly. Most of the gamblers I saw looked either drunk or stressed, frowning at black-suited dealers with flat eyes. Those same dealers watched their customers back emotionlessly, humoring them here and there with insincere smiles, but mostly looking vaguely predatory as they assessed their faces.
A few of the men looked me over.
I saw a few of the women pause on Revik, too.
Mostly, though, they seemed lost in their own little worlds.
Pushing that from my mind with a frown, I continued to stare around until Revik pulled me sideways, guiding me to walk in front of him. He pushed me gently into a small recessed corridor about a dozen steps later, which stood behind a black curtain on a thick island in the middle of the atrium floor. The corridor, I soon realized, was the same one the guard at the dock had described. Unlike Revik, I’d been too distracted by everything else to notice it, although, in fairness, it clearly had been designed not to be noticed, so it wasn’t all me.
Once we pushed past the curtain, the space looked identical to the snapshot the guard provided us with for reference, though. The carpeted, high-ceilinged corridor housed two long rows of elevator doors, and not much else.
Remembering the much more prominent set of elevators we’d passed not long after entering the casino, I looked around carefully, marking the locations of security cameras and what were probably audio recorders, too.
This definitely appeared to be the private, executive version of the elevator lobby, rather than the one leading to the larger cattle cars we’d seen outside. Which probably meant they would take us directly to the suite where we would be received...although maybe with a few more security stops along the way.
I distinctly got the impression we weren’t finished jumping security hoops for the Legion of Fire crowd yet, given who we were.
Even as I thought it, four guards appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, although I quickly surmised that they’d emerged from a sliding panel door on the other side of the furthest elevator. Two females and two males, they approached us without preamble, and
after a few polite smiles and gestures that still managed to come off as mildly threatening, the two males frisked Revik and the two females frisked me.
They were thorough.
While they patted me down, I noticed we were being watched by two more men wearing expensive suits, who stood on the far end of the corridor. Both large enough to be professional, heavyweight boxers, they stood next to a second set of curtains, parted just enough for me to see past them. Noting the headsets they wore, I figured they constituted yet another layer of security. Maybe they would be the ones to accompany us upstairs.
Letting my gaze shift to the space behind where they stood, I saw more gaming tables, only a higher-end-looking variety. Blackjack, roulette and craps tables stood in that sliver of a view, but no slot machines. In the distance I glimpsed a high-end restaurant. Colorful mood lighting illuminated stone statues that bookended a giant metal gong outside its doors. A lot of women stood there, I noticed, most of them wearing dresses even shorter than mine.
It was pretty clear they belonged to the house, too.
Awesome, I couldn’t help thinking.
The two female security guards stepped back from me, right as my gaze returned to their faces. That time, they both bowed politely.
One of them started to make the respectful sign of the Bridge, but the other stopped her, slapping her fingers down before she could complete the motion. The woman who got slapped looked horror-struck, and looked at me in abject apology, maybe even terror, as she pressed her hand down to her side, bowing even more deeply.
Only then did I realize they were seers.
Both wore contact lenses, I realized, probably to keep from alarming the human guests.
The one who stopped her companion from saluting me gave me an apologetic look, too, along with a seer eye-roll.
Allie's War Season Four Page 63