Whoever this mystery guy was who bought me, he lived in the Burj Khalifa, probably the most iconic building in the whole city, even if it was no longer the tallest in the world.
It was iconic for a reason, I discovered.
I found my eyes returning there, again and again, looking up at it through the transparent dome of the covered walkway as we approached its glass-doored lobby. The high glass spire looked like an elongated pyramid, foreign and strangely timeless in the simplicity of its design, yet also evoking something high-tech and futuristic with all of that glass and steel and the carefully designed gardens that wrapped around its base.
Even beyond the Burj Kalifa itself, the landscape surrounding us proved difficult to ignore. I also couldn’t help finding it all weirdly impressive, despite the cloying heaviness of the construct and the fact that I knew slave-labor built and maintained most of what I could see.
Buildings appeared to float on a man-made body of water to our left, connected to the shore by small walkways surrounded by elaborate fountains. Some had white, ionic columns like something out of ancient Greece, while others I saw were almost hyper-modern, with egg-like, etched-glass domes that shone white and lapis-lazuli blue in the sun, glinting with crystals that might have been worked into the material purely to reflect sunlight.
The people appeared to be a mixture of local and cosmopolitan, too.
I saw what might be human or seer males walking around in more of those sheik outfits, most either blindingly white or pitch black. I also saw their female counterparts in burqas or some other variation of coverings made of elaborate veils. The people in that style of dress walked right alongside people of both sexes in modern, Western-style clothes, some of which were pretty danged revealing.
Palm trees lined the covered walkway where we strolled, along with more stone and metal sculptures, rows of fountains, and a moving sidewalk that cruised past us going both directions. The walkways carried yet more people, all of whom looked pretty relaxed.
But maybe having a limitless pool of slave labor and daily manicures did a lot to really chill a person out, even in the midst of a deadly pandemic and global apocalypse.
I was glad we were walking, not taking the moving sidewalks, even with the ridiculous clothes and even more ridiculous shoes I’d been forced to wear. I strode down that pristine sidewalk in what had to be six-inch heels that coiled around my ankles and up my calf, wearing a beaded dress that showed off more of my body than it hid.
Oh, and the collar, of course... can’t forget that. I’d really been jonesing for a few more hours in one of those fucking things.
On the plus side, it didn’t seem to touch to the parts of me I used for telekinesis, so I was pretty sure I still had options. I couldn’t test that assessment, not here or anywhere inside the construct... not until I absolutely needed it, anyway... but it was comforting to know they hadn’t planned for telekinetic seers. It also meant they likely had no idea who I was.
The beaded thing I wore, the fuck-me shoes and a different collar had been put on me in that underground room below the main auction hall.
At the time, I’d stood close enough to the open staircase that led up to the main auction area that I could hear bids being called out from the stage. I could tell we were in a basement below the main basement, but I definitely got the sense there were a lot of people up there, so the space must have been a lot bigger than where they held me.
I couldn’t help wondering if Revik was up there.
I pictured him standing in that audience, looking for me with a stressed out expression on his face and his arms folded as he glared at everyone else. I obviously couldn’t check with my light, but the image was disconcertingly clear.
I guessed I wouldn’t be allowed up there long enough to check for him with my eyes.
Unfortunately, I was right about that, too.
We should have expected there might be something like this... a presale, I mean. Hell, Revik told me about this kind of thing before, from back when work camps doubled as wholesale retailers to high-end customers. The richest of those customers often got first pick of the merchandise before it was offered to mid-range customers and below. Back then, that mainly meant major corporations, with a few excessively wealthy individuals thrown in, along with organized crime, oil and water barons and whoever else.
Come to think of it, these were probably a lot of the same people.
It struck me as both sad and funny that the “mid-range” clients tended to be things like, oh, say... human governments. The World Court. Big but not insanely big corporations. The low end of the scale consisted of everyone else. Wealthy law enforcement departments, prostitution rings, low-level corporate espionage. Run of the mill billionnaires.
No one else made it to the table at all.
But there would always be preferred buyers, apparently.
The uber-rich never liked mingling with the rest of the cattle... even if those cattle were people only slightly less uber-rich. It made sense to me that they would still stratify themselves, even when there was only a slave class beneath all of them.
My own snarky assessments notwithstanding, I got thrown in with the novelty buys, presumably because of the Lao Hu structures in my light. That meant the current crop of preferred buyers got to look me over first. I assumed any of us who didn’t move in the presale would be marched up to the main auction block to be bid on up there.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have that particular problem.
Meaning, I got bought pretty much right off.
I had to guess the Lao Hu thing was still a pretty big draw.
A tall male seer with bright orange eyes walked right up to me after skimming his hand-held for a list of product attributes. I watched him read another set of details off the wall display as he stood in front of me. He verified the Lao Hu structures with his light, talked to someone else over his headset, presumably whoever he worked for, then he took my picture with an illegal imaging device and sent that to the same person.
After another short conversation in Arabic, he made a bid.
He got hit out of the gate with a counter-bid by a Chinese human. After I got prodded and scanned a second time, this time by a seer who was also clearly hired help, another human who looked and sounded European, maybe Swiss or Austrian, bid on me, too.
An Arabic-looking seer chimed in at the next round.
The orange-eyed seer went back and forth with each of them, along with a female seer who looked Japanese. Finally, the group settled on a price.
That price was put forth, again, by the orange-eyed seer.
Even with the collar on, I could tell the orange-eyed seer wasn’t too worried about being out-bid. I suspect the others thought he would win, too. Maybe they only bid against him to see how high he’d go, or to find out how serious he was. Or maybe they just wanted to make sure he didn’t get me too cheap. Either way, no one seemed to question his right to me if he wanted me. I assumed that meant his boss was even richer than the rest of them.
Or maybe there was some other reason people didn’t deny him what he wanted, my mind whispered unhelpfully. Something besides his obscene amounts of money.
I didn’t dwell on the thought for very long. No one in that cellar seemed short of money. People that wealthy tend to go a bit funny in the head anyway, from what I observed, maybe simply because they didn’t hear “no” often enough.
In any case, they didn’t waste any time once the credits changed accounts.
I was the sheik trader’s. Then I wasn’t.
The collar the sheik put on me was removed and a new one put in its place.
The orange-eyed seer activated that one personally.
Less than a minute later, I was being led off to the side by two other seers, what looked like body guards or hired thugs. Neither of them made any bones about looking me over, and even touching me. Once I stood in the shadowed alcove of the room with them, they seemed to think I was fair game. Grinning at me when I elbowed off the
ir hands, they only cut it out when the orange-eyed seer gave them a warning stare.
“Children,” he said, his odd-colored eyes shining cold.
The one who had been holding my ass in one hand released me at once.
Even so, I got stuck standing there in that ridiculous beaded outfit, forced to watch while the orange-eyed buyer looked over the rest of the “exotics.”
Most of those, he scarcely looked at before declining, dismissing his right to bid with a few flicks of his long fingers. A few seers later, however, they brought out a blond female that made my heart slam sideways in my chest... right before I got angry enough to nearly blow my cover right there.
Holy fucking gods, what was she doing here?
She noticed my stare while she was still under the spotlight.
It seemed to irritate her, but from her eyes, she didn’t seem to recognize me. Her expression remained blank, if somewhat aggressive, which was kind of her normal expression anyway, as far as I could tell. She looked more like she was trying to figure out what the hell my problem was. Then it hit me.
The prosthetics. She really did have absolutely no idea who I was.
I felt that heat in my chest loosen.
As long as I didn’t do anything stupid, she probably wouldn’t realize who I was. Remembering the long, red-tinted and straight black hair on my head, the redrawn cheekbones and chin on my face, not to mention the highly-expensive contact lenses, I fought to make my expression indifferent, if somewhat catty, right before I looked away.
I hoped she would take my weird staring as female rivalry.
Of course, apart from issues around specific mates and boyfriends (or girlfriends) that type of high school, catty, female thing tended to be a lot rarer among seers. I didn’t much care if she thought I was an immature weirdo, though––as long as she didn’t blow my cover.
From what Revik told me, the disguise I was wearing should be convincing.
He seemed to think my eyes, in particular, were so different that it was unlikely anyone would recognize me. They’d gone way darker with my irises this time, making my eye color nearly black, so that they nearly matched the color of Wreg’s.
According to Revik, that changed my face more than the prosthetics did, in terms of making me look like someone else.
The prosthetics were more for the facial-rec software, anyway. The added organics should screw up any mapping or analysis of my bone structure... even my teeth... so there shouldn’t be any hits when it cross-mapped to security databases.
When the orange-eyed seer started bidding on the blond, I felt my disbelief worsen.
He bought her, of course, a few minutes later.
The other bidders scarcely put up a fight that time, even for show.
By the time I snapped out of my stare the second time, orange-eyes was already putting the new collar on her. The same pervy seers who’d escorted me went to retrieve her, and the next thing I knew I was standing directly beside her, bare arm to bare arm where we leaned against the same segment of darkened wall.
She wore an outfit that wasn’t all that different from mine, although hers was red while mine was mostly black with pale blue highlights.
“What’s your fucking problem... sister?” she muttered to me in Prexci, once we stood next to one another and no one was looking. “Do I know you?”
The bidding had started again, this time on a male seer with a high sight rank. Rather than answer her, I pretended I hadn’t heard, reading the projection on one wall, as if I was interested in the details of the seer’s stats.
“What is your name?” she said, trying again.
“Ralla,” I said.
“I am Kat,” she said, almost as she had when I first met her, in the basement of that Seattle brothel. “Where are you from, sister?”
I didn’t answer her that time, either, figuring I’d go with the whole weird and immature thing, since that’s where I started. Even so, I found I had to bite my lip to keep from snapping at her. I’m sure the issues with my light and Revik’s weren’t exactly helping with that.
“...I am from Russia originally,” she said, prodding me again, her accent more prominent that time. “But I am American now. Where are you from, sister? Did they take you from America, too? I did not see you on the ship with the rest of us.”
I turned and stared at her that time, letting my hostility leak openly out into my voice.
“Why don’t you shut the fuck up... sister?” I said, cold.
The male seer next to me grunted a laugh. Still smiling, he nudged his pal, who was looking over Kat’s body in obvious interest, especially her breasts.
Kat didn’t answer. When I glanced over at her next, however, she was staring at me, her mouth pursed into a frown.
Shit. I should have kept my mouth shut.
What if she recognized my voice?
We’d both been speaking Prexci, not English, but seers had photographic memories. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, much less given her a reason to pay attention to me. If she did recognize me, however, she didn’t let any sign of that show on her face.
“Fine,” she muttered. Folding her thin arms, she blew up her bangs, exuding annoyance. “Be a cunt. I suppose there is no point in reminding you ‘we are in this together’... is there, sister? Clearly you are going to let these worms drive wedges between us.”
Her words came out bitter at the end.
I flinched when she said them. Worse, she managed to remind me that she was in a pretty crappy situation here too, given where we both were, and where we would probably be going after this. Really, her situation was significantly worse.
I was here of my own volition...more or less. I also had people looking for me somewhere in the city, even if they didn’t currently know where I was. Kat, on the other hand, had likely been kidnapped off the street in the United States, probably for her sight rank, which I happened to know wasn’t inconsiderable, since she’d worked as an infiltrator for Revik in the past.
She’d also probably endured a lot of crap on the ride over, more than I wanted to know about, truthfully.
Even so, I didn’t answer her.
It was going to take a lot more than shared ownership to make me get over my issues with Kat, whatever fleeting sympathy I might feel for her. Especially since it had already occurred to me that I couldn’t just leave her here, no matter how much I hated her personally.
Which meant I had to bring her with me.
The thought did not please me.
Thinking about that now, walking more or less outdoors under the shaded dome, I frowned again. The thought still did not please me. It hadn’t pleased me the first time it crossed my mind, or in any of the times since. Truthfully, it probably annoyed me more now... if only because I’d had longer to imagine having to deal with her around Revik, and the kind of bullshit that would probably come out of her mouth whenever she thought she could get away with it.
I hadn’t talked to her since her first attempts to communicate with me in that sellers’ room, however, partly because I still didn’t want her figuring out who I was.
Not until I was ready to get out of here, anyway.
We continued to walk leisurely under the lightly-misted, virtually-enhanced walkway as it circumnavigated a flower-petal shaped pool surrounded by deck chairs on our right, and a sprawling lake on our left of crystal-blue water. The lake had to be equally man-made of course, but I found myself staring at the blue waters anyway, following its course where it wound around nearby buildings and more walkways in glass-like pools. Our particular walkway led in a curved line to the Burj Khalifa, and probably directly into its main lobby, which I could just glimpse between two of the giant flower petals that made up its base.
Or I assumed it was the main lobby, given the number of glass doors.
The orange-eyed seer walked right beside me now.
One of his guards walked on my other side, the same one who had been grabbing my ass in the dark by t
hat wall. Kat and the male seer with the high sight rank walked directly behind us, led by two more guards, one of whom drove the car on the ride over.
I continued to study the view of that winding, crystal-blue lake that now filled most of the space to either side of the walkway.
Like in Macau, I couldn’t entirely suppress the wave of unreality as I watched human women in bikinis turn over so that servants could rub tanning oil on their mostly-naked bodies. Men in bathing suits and business suits walked around the same area of the deck, smiling at those same women, holding drinks with umbrellas in their hands or briefcases, or beers, depending on why they were there.
“Can you dance?” a voice asked from next to me.
I looked over, surprised.
He’d spoken in English that time.
Up until then, every seer in the group alternated between Arabic and Prexci, even Kat, who appeared to be fluent in both. My crash-course in Arabic as a lead-up to this op left my fluency spotty but serviceable. I could understand it, at least, which had been my primary goal, and while my accent was definitely iffy, I could more or less speak it, too.
I found the orange-eyed seer watching me closely as these thoughts flickered through the back of my mind, curiosity reflecting from his nearly opaque irises.
“Depends on what you mean,” I said, answering in the same.
He smiled. “You are American.”
“I learned English there, yes,” I said, realizing my mistake.
I knew I likely wouldn’t have been able to hide the American accent in Prexci, either, but I still had to force my eyes to remain forward, to not glance at Kat to see if she’d recognized my voice when I spoke the only language she’d ever heard me use as myself.
I’d been teased by Maygar and others that my Prexci had a mish-mash of accents, anyway, given that I’d mostly learned it from Revik. Since Revik alternated between German, Russian, American and British accents in his own Prexci, in addition to the formal variants he knew, I’d adopted a lot of his quirks.
I hadn’t been trained to mimic accents yet, and now I was regretting that, too.
Either way, I doubted I could have pulled off pretending I didn’t know English.
Allie's War Season Four Page 124