Allie's War Season Four (199 page)

I couldn’t help but be thankful we’d left some of those people outside the city walls, including Wreg. Wreg’s light had changed so dramatically in the last few years, especially since he and Jon got together, that it was easy to forget he had once been Menlim’s most senior and most loyal lieutenant. I was glad we’d decided not to take any chances with him.

As I thought it, I looked up at Revik again, frowning.

Terian’s people were opening doors to the back of the limousine then, politely offering us hands, which all of us ignored with the exception of Terian himself. He caught hold of one of those white gloves offered and bounded out gleefully ahead of us.

I knew we couldn’t trust Terian, no matter what we thought we felt on his light.

I’d felt real sincerity there. Revik had, too. But Terry was such an enigma that he might think he was helping us by handing us over to Menlim to be reprogrammed, so there was no way to assume his idea of helping us would end well.

Moreover, Terian was also so hooked into Shadow’s light by now that he might not even know if he was being manipulated. If he’d been anyone else living in this city, so closely under the watchful eye of Menlim, we would have assumed he was corrupt. We would have assumed he’d lead us right to Menlim, even if he thought he was helping us escape. But the unique properties of Terian’s aleimi made everything with him a lot more ambiguous.

In both directions, really.

To say what we were doing right now was risky... well, that was nothing short of a laughable understatement.

And it was my fault.

Revik squeezed my hand, still walking tight by my side as we made our way down a floating walkway. The walkway itself was lined with bronze Art Nouveau lamps, making it look vaguely elf-like, even beyond the glass sculptures placed at strategic points, lit from within so they looked like otherworldly animals.

“No, wife,” Revik chided me softly. “I felt it, too. Crazy or not, we need the bastard. And we can’t leave all of the Listers he’s collected here. There are too many of them.”

“Which is exactly what Shadow would want us to think,” I muttered.

Revik didn’t answer.

I saw Dalejem turn his head, though, staring at me.

Chinja gave me a glance, too, and a grim nod, enough that I could tell she’d not only heard me, but agreed with me. I saw her touch her side in the area of her ribcage, and remembered that even though I was unarmed at the moment apart from the telekinesis, not all of them were.

Revik would have a weapon, too.

The thought didn’t reassure me as much as I thought it would.

We continued to make our way down the deserted walkway, stopping only a few times to go through security checkpoints. Each of those more or less waved us through when they saw Terian leading us, although I saw a few harder stares at the obvious infiltrators in our group, including Revik himself, and in spite of his measured, civilian-style gait.

Whoever these seers were, they weren’t low-level goons, like we’d seen in Macau.

I didn’t get close enough to confirm my impressions, but I noted the multiple weapons strapped to their persons, including grenades and what looked like high-voltage stunners. Seeing one muscular, male seer with multiple tattoos and a semi-automatic weapon strapped to his back, along with handguns at both hips and another sticking out of a shoulder holster, I found myself reminded of Wreg, and by extension, Jon.

As we walked away from that set of guards, I wrapped my fingers tighter into Revik’s, drawing closer to him as I walked.

“Where’re the newlyweds?” I said, my voice a murmur.

“Not far.”

“Not inside the line?” I pressed.

Revik checked the old-fashioned watch he wore. I didn’t take my eyes off his face as he did it, but didn’t see any change in his expression as we continued to walk.

“Not yet.” He glanced at me, tugging me closer by the hand.

“Do we have a line out, still?”

He nodded, slowly. “No easy access right now, love.”

I grimaced at that, but I knew what he meant.

If we tried contacting Balidor through the shield, chances were, the signal would be picked up and traced. I could tell Revik thought that possibility was even stronger down here, meaning at The Waterfront itself, given the added security. I also got a fleeting glimpse through my proximity to his light of geometries in the air, almost like floating equations under the higher protective dome.

I realized he was showing me the construct down here. It was different.

I didn’t fully understand the differences, but clearly a few extra layers lived here, compared to what hovered over downtown Dubai. I found myself annoyed that I hadn’t noticed it on my own, but then, Revik always had a firmer grasp of the semi-dimensional stuff.

Or at the very least, he had a lot more practice looking for it.

Anyway, I got the gist.

The Barrier triggers I glimpsed through Revik operated at much more sensitive frequencies than anything I’d felt downtown, even in the Burj Khalifa. I knew they would engage security protocols silently too, and long before we ever felt them.

The thought worsened my nerves, enough that I had to struggle to control my light.

But Revik was right. We knew what we were getting into, coming here.

We’d come anyway.

My eyes rose to the building at the end of the walkway, which grew more and more visible after a few more curves that wound us around other structures. I scanned the building with my eyes as I walked––noting its incongruity here, as well as the sheer size of the warehouse-like structure where it loomed like a shadow over the waters of the Gulf.

I began to hear sounds other than those made by our small group.

Distant still, those sounds made me think of cocktail parties. I heard gentle laughter, faint music, clinking glasses and plates––and what might have been splashing, as if someone or several someones had just jumped into a swimming pool.

My eyes left the rectangular building at the end of the crescent as those sounds grew more distinguishable, looking for their source.

Another house stood there, to our left as we made our way down the walkway.

It looked like an old plantation building, like one might find in the deep South in the United States. Or maybe like some kind of pre-war, colonial-style mansion one might have unearthed from the British stint in India. It was a house that evoked servants, in any case, and wealth that had a lot of free time. To add to the faint air of unreality, the five-story building, as well as its sprawling grounds, looked as if they rested directly on the water itself.

Looking at it from where I now walked actually created a borderline-seasick sensation in me as I watched the surrounding gardens and manicured lawns undulate above the waves.

It would have been strange enough for a much smaller house and grounds, but the gardens, filled with palm trees and what looked like flower-covered bushes and lush lawns, filled my vision to the left of the walkway. Those lawns, trees and gardens appeared to stretch off into the distance, too, far enough away that I couldn’t see their end.

My eyes returned to the warehouse-sized boathouse.

I already knew that we’d be going there, not to the plantation-style house.

My intuition was confirmed when Terian motioned for us to leave the walkway to approach the boathouse from the right side. Once we’d crossed a segment of that man-made field, he led us onto a second path I only saw once he ignited the lamps on either side. It appeared out of the dark, making me flinch a little. I frowned more when it occurred to me how conspicuous this must be from the outside, surrounded by the darkness of those trees and lawns.

Revik must have been thinking the same thing.

“Kill the lights, Terry,” he muttered.

“No, this is better,” Terian said, grinning at us. “They know we’re here. We come in the dark, they think we are hiding... best not to hide.”

Still grinning, he motioned us forward, then began to walk, briskly, along that same lit path. It curved past an archway made of two trees grown together and into a second garden, lit all over in those fairy-like lights. The path opened, turning into a thick, winding white line covered in sparkling stone tiles. I listened to the sound of my heels on that stone as we followed, our group silent, passing by the house which now stood slightly behind us but still to our left.

Clutching Revik’s arm with both of my hands, I peered past him at a lit pool that stood behind that colonial-style house, steaming in the night air. The pool was decorated with multi-colored spotlights and surrounded by tall palm trees and stone fountains. I glimpsed shadowy figures out there, sitting at outdoor tables with umbrellas, drinking drinks as piped-in music played on the stone patio.

Some of them glanced at us as we passed by the house on that white-stone path, but most seemed utterly uninterested in our presence there.

Heads and torsos bobbed in the mist-covered water of the pool, and I watched a woman in a bikini slide down a man-made waterfall, laughing like she was drunk before she splashed into the deep end of the pool on the other side.

It was pretty close to the same splashing sound I’d heard before.

“The rich really are different,” Revik said dryly, smiling faintly when I glanced up at him. He met my gaze then, and I saw another flicker of worry cross his face.

It was too quiet out here.

Something about the landscape seemed to strike both of us––or maybe just me––as being a little too artificial to trust, and not only for the obvious reasons. As if Revik followed my same train of thought, both of us faced forward once more, looking at Terian at almost the exact same instant. I would have given a lot to know if this was his illusion, or someone else’s.

We were halfway to the boathouse by then.

By then, I could feel it, too.

I couldn’t have put into words exactly what I felt, or its exact purpose or relevance to our mission here. Maybe Revik could have done that, or Wreg, or Tarsi... maybe they could have explained to me the exact name for whatever that odd fluctuation of energy was that lived at the end of the dock. All I knew was how I experienced it.

It was as if I felt myself walking towards a giant mirrored piece of liquid glass.

I could see the boathouse, right in front of us... and then I could see the boathouse behind the boathouse. It was as if I’d gotten close enough to a pool of still water to not only see my face reflected back at me, but also the fish living inside the water itself.

I saw the boathouse... and then I didn’t...

And then I saw it again.

I nearly stumbled in those half-second gaps between each, like those moments where you step off a curb in your dream and find nothing but an abyss below. I didn’t feel myself pass through anything... but I saw it. I saw the flicker of there to not-there to there again, even as it happened.

And once I was inside, I felt the difference between the image that stood before me and the one I’d left behind.

I knew it was a Barrier trick of some kind, but I couldn’t make up my mind as to what kind.

All I knew was, the real illuminated the fake.

It was like believing in a lie until you have the truth to compare to that lie... and in seeing that truth, you realize only then that you’d been fooled. I’d had that happen to me before in the Barrier. In fact, Wreg had been hammering me on different aspects of discernment for months, and while I still didn’t catch the fakes a lot of the time, once I saw the real thing through Wreg’s light, the falseness of the replica always became obvious.

Revik told me long ago that this was the oldest game of psychic warfare, to impersonate the resonances that a target loves and trusts, to fool them into lowering their guard, or even inviting them in. Both Wreg and Revik had taught me, however, that no matter how good the illusion, if one gets a good look at the real thing, the illusion always falls apart.

The trick was making sure one always had a line to the real.

Which was a lot easier to do than it sounded.

Even as I thought it, I found myself acutely aware that we might not have such a line to the real in here. Menlim’s constructs always had an illusion-stacked-on-illusion feel to them. I’d noticed the Dreng in general liked to pull people from the truth bit by bit, in a way that made it difficult to spot until you were too far away to notice.