Smiling, I waved it off, indicating that I understood.
I did, too. But yeah, it was a fuck-up. I was just glad they hadn’t done it on the main floor of the casino, or anywhere where it might have been noticed by someone who mattered. They really weren’t supposed to ID us in here. It was one of Revik’s stipulations when he made the call.
Of course, I knew there was still a good chance our cover would get blown. That would be true no matter whether they acknowledged us publicly or not. Our faces had been plastered all over the feeds for months now. Years really, and that didn’t even include our fan clubs and whatever else. Because we were terrorists, officially, and had been even before the whole mess with C2-77, the feed stations could bypass the ban on real-time imagery and show our real faces. So yeah, we would look familiar to a lot of people, presumably.
Revik seemed to think it unlikely anyone would be looking for us in a place like this, but yeah, all it would take is one gushing fan, or one paranoid, conspiracy-theory type, and our cover was blown.
Even as I thought it, the female guard who appeared to be in charge made another apologetic gesture, still watching my face warily, as if trying to gauge my mood. I just looked at her, puzzled, until she indicated with another set of hand-gestures that I was to hold out my arm.
Unthinkingly, I obeyed.
Once I stretched out my hand and arm, she carefully snapped a green-tinted metal bracelet on my left wrist. The ends immediately grew into one another. So yeah...clearly organic. It did something weird to my light, too, but I couldn’t pinpoint exactly what.
I could still feel Revik. I could feel the construct, too, so it hadn’t blinded me.
I could even feel traces of our mobile construct, although that had been faint all along, and I couldn’t be sure anyone on our team could feel much of anything from us at this juncture.
I retracted my arm to look at the organic band, frowning slightly, still trying to figure it out. The bracelet shimmered like a living thing in the golden mood lights of the recessed corridor.
I glanced at Revik then, right as they were snapping an identical bracelet on his wrist.
Then all four guards backed away, bowing to us.
I smiled at the four of them, returning the bow subtlely, even as I fought a sudden attack of nerves. I was just straightening to my full height when one of the suited figures from the other end of the corridor walked up and pressed a button to summon an elevator for us.
He continued to stand there once he’d done it, watching us with no expression on his wide face as he waited for the car to descend. His muscular hands clasped together at roughly his waist in front of a tailor-made suit. Despite how expensive the suit looked, the guy still had professional fighter written all over him, and I could see at least one bulge in his jacket that had to be a gun. The bulk didn’t look much like a beer gut, either.
It occurred to me suddenly that in all of that time, no one had actually spoken to us.
Even the humans on the pier relied on hand-gestures.
“They are being polite,” Revik murmured to me. Leaning closer to my ear, he added in an even lower voice, “...The humans assume we don’t know Mandarin. The seers don’t speak to us due to our rank.” He smiled at me faintly, kissing my cheek. “They can’t acknowledge the specific forms of rank for us, so they treat us like higher-ranked seers within their own hierarchy.” He lifted an eyebrow, glancing down at the dress again as he spoke in another low murmur. “...I thought Wreg was teaching you this stuff?”
I clicked softly, but didn’t answer.
Even so, I could tell the sideways look I gave him brought on another shiver of pain.
Once the elevator doors opened, the security guy in the suit motioned for us to enter in front of him. I thought he was going to accompany us up, but once we walked inside, he merely hit the correct button for us, and walked out. He turned to look at us, his hands clasped as he waited for the doors to close.
Our view of him and corridor disappeared in the next set of seconds, and then the car was moving, traveling up at what felt like a good clip.
Exhaling, I turned to Revik, holding up my braceleted wrist.
“Blocking device?” I asked him.
He held up a finger, indicating that the elevators would be bugged.
And they’d have imaging devices in here, too. Of course.
It didn’t take me long to figure out what the bracelet did, anyway. As soon as I placed even the faintest whisper of my awareness on the structures I used for telekinesis, I winced at the hard shock that vibrated my light.
When my vision cleared, Revik smiled at me, quirking an eyebrow.
I saw the taut look in his eyes and only nodded.
We’d expected that, too. Not many people were comfortable with having two telekinetic seers wandering around, leashless, so yeah, it made sense.
Revik still hated this idea. I could feel it on him. He hated that I was here at all; he just didn’t want to say so in here. Anyway, he was trying not to think about it right now...at least not in a way that was going to get him even more wound up.
He was up first. He knew that, too.
Reaching for him, I clasped his hand. Moving closer to him again, I leaned my body against his, melting into his side. I felt him trying to relax, but mostly failing.
I felt him reacting to me in the dress again, too.
When the doors finally pinged to indicate they’d be opening, I realized neither of us had said a word since I’d asked him about the blocking device.
By then, we’d traveled up thirty-three floors.
When the doors slowly opened, I gazed up, and found myself looking at the sky that hung like a giant bowl over the South China Sea.
We were on that same terrace I had been looking at from the dock.
I paused briefly on the stars, although they looked strangely muted up here.
I’d been looking at the stars for weeks from the deck of the ship. Revik and I would sit up there some nights and talk, dangling our feet over the sides as we watched the wake of the ship churn below us. Revik had taken up smoking again, while I’d been gone that half-year before everything went down in New York, so it was our compromise to go out there, and talk in the air where that hiri smell didn’t get in all of my clothes and our bedsheets.
Clicking my mind back to the present, I followed as Revik pulled me forward by the hand, feeling the nerves in his fingers as we walked out onto the carpeted foyer. The elevator doors more or less faced a dark stone wall that was at least half-sculpture. It only blocked the portion of the room nearest to the main building at our right, which is how I’d seen the stars and the steaming pool and hot tubs to our left.
Now that I stood in front of that dark stone sculpture, however, I couldn’t help staring at it, feeling the carving there as some sort of message. A trickling sheen of water ran down the lion, sun and flames etched into a marbled, blood-red stone. Gold eyes and white teeth stood out sharply from the dark rock, and it struck me that the teeth didn’t look like stone at all, that they might have come from a real lion.
Staring at that image, I felt the warning in it, and hesitated.
Revik and I had taken on a lot of people over the past few years. But this was our first stint with organized crime. Even as I thought it, the elevator doors closed silently behind us.
“Come on, wife,” Revik said, his voice a murmur. “Tick-tock.”
I nodded, giving him another brief smile.
Then we were walking around that decorative wall and onto the terrace itself, which opened up like a garden once we’d passed the lion’s head. The whole area was dark, probably intentionally so, since it made it difficult to discern faces, with colored lights hidden discretely among leaves and artistically-placed stones on the outdoor terrace itself. The outdoor segment stretched across what I imagined were the fronts of several different lounges and/or suites, covering a distance my mind estimated at close to fifty yards.
I glanced
down the length of a full-sized outdoor pool, several steaming hot tubs, tall ferns, palms and glowing-glass boulders of different colors that provided a muted pastel light around the pool itself. More than one artificial waterfall cascaded into the pool, too, and below them, I saw beautiful women standing naked in chest-high water, their make-up untouched and martini glasses in their hands as they smiled and talked to much older men.
From the eye colors I saw glinting under those lights, I suspected the females were seers.
More trinkets of the Legion of Fire, I guessed.
To my right, on the part of the terrace protected by a high-ceilinged roof, stretched a long, dark-wood bar and an even darker seating area filled with couches, leather booths and several open fireplaces in the center of glass-like reflecting pools.
I could see more people in there, but it was even harder to make out faces. Most of the illumination came from muted fireplaces with blue flames, as well as a small stream in a white, stone basin that served as a kind of miniature reflecting pool around the edges of the room. That same white basin ran like a maze through that whole area of the terrace, all sharp corners and strange angles as it skirted the raised fireplaces and strategically placed glass tables nestled between white leather couches.
Again, I couldn’t tell on first glance how many of the people sitting in there were human and how many seer. I didn’t try to use my light to find out, either.
I felt Revik bounce slightly on his feet next to me, and glanced over at him.
I could tell from his face that he was scoping the layout even more closely than I was.
As I thought it, he touched my light, nudging my eyes and aleimi towards the cameras in several corners of the room. I didn’t nod, but sent a faint pulse that I understood. When I glanced at him next, he was looking at me again, and I realized I’d been trying not to obsess on the fact that there were a bunch of naked women in a pool less than ten feet away from where we stood. He must have felt some part of that, because when I met his gaze next, he gave me the first real smile I’d gotten since we got on that boat.
Then he clicked at me, squeezing my fingers.
I rolled my eyes, but bit my lip anyway.
What if they were men? I asked softly.
He sent me a thread of pain intense enough that I jumped.
When I looked over, though, that taut look was back in his eyes, firming his mouth.
He’s going to try and separate us, he sent, softer still. I can feel it already.
I nodded, barely.
He might succeed, Revik added. If we’re going to do this for real.
Not for long, I reminded him. It’ll be okay.
If we knew that, we wouldn’t need to do it this way at all, he sent, his mind sharper. Allie. If they do, I’m not going to wait long. I mean it.
That time, I only nodded.
Shifting my eyes and light from his, I continued to check out the room, noting the security grid I could feel just behind the white plaster walls. There were definitely some surprises in here. I wondered how many more of them Revik had noticed already, given that he’d had a lot more experience looking for that kind of thing. He’d even worked with this kind of outfit before, he told me. He said it was pretty common for the Rooks to use groups like this as suppliers back in the day, especially when they were going for bulk orders.
He also said that this kind of exchange––meaning the one they’d proposed to us––wasn’t all that uncommon either. Seers working for organized crime had grown into their own kind of tribe over the years.
Reaching over, Revik fingered my necklace again.
Do we get a drink? I asked him softly.
No. Don’t accept anything they offer you here, Allie. Food or drink.
A little surprised, I glanced up.
What about you? I sent, teasing him a little, trying to lighten that look in his eyes. I thought you said you might have to get drunk with them?
That’s different. He hit me with a harder pulse of his light. I mean it, Allie. Be careful. He was a little too interested when the subject of you came up. I don’t trust them to hold to their end of the deal, not when it comes to...
His thoughts trailed when three men approached us directly.
Again, they wore dark, expensive-looking suits.
These looked even more expensive, though, and had an embroidered image of the flaming red and gold sun, along with the roaring lion on the right side of each of their chests. I found myself staring at the darker image of the lion, focusing on the gold eye and wondering if it was sewn with real gold thread, considering where we were. The colors were muted to a mere imprint, subtle compared to what I’d seen on the armbands of the foot soldiers downstairs, but clearly, they were designed to send a message, too.
The Legion of Fire were a tight-knit little crime family, for sure.
The smallest of the three males stepped ahead of the other two when they got within a few yards. Folding his fingers elegantly at the center of his chest, he positioned himself as the apex of their little group, making the whole presentation and posture appear posed. That same male seer wore a version of the embroidered lion and sun only with a mandarin collar and additional gold thread around the sleeves and in part of the lion design itself.
Again, I wondered if it was real gold, and decided it probably was.
Either way, this guy definitely looked and felt like their leader.
His light sparked with unusual waves, but something about it felt familiar almost, and I realized I’d tasted flavors of his aleimi in the construct itself. The structures there fascinated me, but I didn’t get too close, only letting myself feel the bare edges before Revik tugged me away, wrapping me more carefully in his own light.
That’s when I noticed the male seer’s eyes.
His irises glowed a sharp gold, so deep in color they appeared almost opaque and nothing like the light-filled gold of Chinja’s eyes...or Hondo’s. I got lost briefly, looking at those eyes, seeing the ribbons of black coloring that emphasized and darkened the gold, making them look even more cat-like, and even less human.
They were the same eyes as those of the marbled lion in that wall mural, I realized.
I was still staring at them when the shorter seer spoke.
It had been so quiet up until then, borderline silent even with the casino and the ambient noises of running water and birds and glasses clinking and soft laughter and footsteps and now splashing naked people...that it felt like Revik and I operated from within our own private bubble. Since we’d stepped off that boat, I’d felt mostly disconnected from everything around us, borderline invisible, really, like we operated at a different frequency than the other people here. The fact that someone spoke to us directly, and in such a normal tone of voice, made me jump...almost like some part of me believed we really were invisible.
“Esteemed friends,” the small seer said, smiling at us in a friendly way. “I am Dulgar, oldest son of the Legion of Fire. We are so very honored to have you here with us.”
Those gold eyes settled directly on me.
I just stood there, unflinching, as his gaze flickered over my dress, pausing on my legs a few times on the way back up, then resting for a longer beat on my chest.
He was still staring at roughly the area of my neckline when he smiled again.
“...Very honored,” he murmured.
I heard the undercurrent even more clearly that time.
Next to me, Revik didn’t move.
Truthfully, I wasn’t worried about Revik the fighter. I never really worried about him. It was Revik my husband I worried about...meaning Revik-Revik, the man. I was wondering how he would handle this, given that I was the bait.
I needn’t have worried, though.
When I looked up, his face had smoothed to glass.
His expression, even his normally-expressive eyes, wore an overt armor that I didn’t see on him very often, not even back when I first met him and couldn’t read him at all. It wasn
’t just his infiltrator mask, it was...something else. His military face, maybe.
In any case, I could tell he wasn’t operating down here much at all anymore. I strongly suspected that all of us had been converted into game pieces already...to be moved around within some wider battlefield he constructed in the less-visible areas of his mind.
Looking up at him, and seeing the faint glow that whispered around his irises, likely visible only to me, both relaxed me and charged my own light up in a subtle way.
In any case, one thing was abundantly clear.
We were on.
Yeah. This thing was definitely on.
3
MUTUAL INTEREST
I SAT CAREFULLY, conscious of the shortness of my dress as I lowered my weight to what looked like expensive, white leather. Once there, I didn’t cower, however.
There would have been no point, and anyway, I had my role to play, too.
Most of that consisted of using to full advantage the light tricks and physical machinations I’d learned as a consort of the Lao Hu.
Therefore, even as I rested my weight, I crossed my legs deliberately, wrapping my light in the remnants of my consort cloak. Subtly highlighting specific structures in my light, as well as the more vulnerable areas of my aleimi more generally, I settled deeper into the white leather and stretched out my legs. I didn’t open my light so much as tantalize with it, inviting speculation around what it might feel like if I did open it.
Next to me, Revik shifted his weight on the leather couch.
I couldn’t tell how much of that was pretense, either, until I glanced down, and saw that he was having a physical reaction, too. He didn’t look over at my glance, but I felt him fighting briefly to control his light, even as he kept his eyes firmly on our host.
I couldn’t think about his reactions either, though.
Turning to smile at our host, I opened my light slightly more, particularly around the area of my heart and chest. I gave a light toss of my head when Dulgar returned my smile. Then I leaned back, arranging my hair so that it fell over my shoulder and slightly down my front on one side. Re-crossing my legs, I placed my hands deliberately on the white leather, stroking it softly with my hands as I resettled in my seat.
Allie's War Season Four Page 64