Allie's War Season Four (96 page)

Shadow just killed the Listers when he found them.

Or when we found them, really, since he didn’t have a copy of the Lists himself.

This other guy, our mysterious buyer, didn’t seem to be doing that, though. Whoever he or she was, they appeared to be ordering seers alive, mainly from smugglers working out of various ports in Asia. Of course, we still had no idea if they were targeting
List
seers, in particular...or if they were simply buying up large quantities of seers in general, perhaps going after those with high sight ranks, which most of the List seers seemed to have.

If they were targeting List seers
specifically
, that meant someone besides us had a copy of the Displacement Lists...a possibility I didn’t even want to contemplate, frankly.

If that was the case, we might be truly fucked.

On the plus side, we’d been told by the infiltration team that, whoever this buyer was, he didn’t seem to be killing his acquisitions, unlike what Shadow had been doing with the Listers. Balidor said his team could still ID their aleimi down here, so they had to be alive...somewhere. Tarsi and the rest of the Council agreed with him.

We traced the last big shipment from Taiwan to here, meaning Macau.

A few days later, Revik wrangled an invite, on the pretext of being a buyer, too.

Which hadn’t been easy.

It also required Revik to promise these jerkoffs a number of things he was still, interestingly, pissed off at
me
about. As if
I
was the one making outrageous demands.

The pirates of Macau may not be Shadow’s people (not directly, anyway), but our hosts weren’t exactly “friends” in the strictest sense, either, so coming here, regardless of pretext, might still be deeply stupid.

We couldn’t afford to lose any more of the seers or humans named on the Displacement Lists, though. We’d lost far too many to Shadow and his death-squads already.

The numbers related to this new player were frankly too big to ignore.

Looking up at the high, L-shaped towers of the lit building in front of us, I frowned at the sheer opulence of the buildings themselves, and the colored lights being shown onto each tower from the lawns dotted with palm trees and swimming pools below. The height of both main wings of the hotel and casino pulled at my eyes, if only due to the contrast of the endless stretches of ocean it felt like I’d been staring at for weeks and weeks on end.

My eyes drifted back to the skyline of the city itself even as I thought it, before locking dead-center on the walkway in front of us.

By then, I could feel us being checked out by the seers working this end of the construct, too. They’d already done a positive ID, looking at the different markers that lived in our aleimi, or living light, but I could feel them trying for more of that.

Maybe it was a bit of a prestige thing, too, I guessed.

After all, for the first time in a very long time, we were here as ourselves.

As a result, I could feel the interest there, the curiosity, but also the arrogance. They were used to being the smartest guys in the room, for sure. Out here, I had my doubts they were often challenged, even by the Lao Hu.

And, well, we were celebrities, I guess...in the seer world, at least. I could only imagine that cracking our construct would win them macho points with their infiltrator pals. Bragging rights for having hacked the Bridge and Sword.

Grunting a little, Revik glanced at me, a thin smile on his lips.

“You aren’t wrong,” he murmured.

His fingers tightened on mine again. I heard the warning behind his humor, but only smiled, squeezing his hand in return before I sent him a pulse of light. Anyway, there wasn’t much I could say. We knew we were being recorded.

Definitely visually, but probably our audio by now, as well.

On either side of the pier ahead, I could see shadowy figures carrying automatic rifles. Six humans, four seers, from my light’s darting probe.

They all dressed in identical black uniforms.

As we walked closer, a walk that began to feel strangely lost in time, I found myself staring at the red and yellow cloth bands each of the black-clad soldiers wore around their upper arms. The symbol looked like a flaming sun inside a lion’s mouth, almost a perversion of the sword and sun symbol, only their sun was the color of blood. The flames didn’t glow so much as consume the sun’s center, and overall, it had a threatening kind of vibe, which made sense, I guess, given what it was meant to represent.

The bands sat in roughly the same place around the sleeves of their uniformed shirts that the sword and sun tattoos of the rebel seers were generally situated, too.

Basically, the placement of your run-of-the-mill Nazi swastika armband.

“Be nice, wife,” Revik murmured to me.

“I’m
always
nice,” I muttered back.

He snorted a soft laugh.

I glanced up, watching as he smoothed down the front of his white shirt and the dark gray suit jacket with one hand. He straightened the edge of his collar out from under the jacket as he walked, without letting go of my fingers with his other hand, or taking his eyes off the security guards watching us approach.

I saw his clear eyes dart to metal poles on either side of the pier as well, marking the placement of image collection and probably gait and facial-rec as well. He did it casually, but I felt the heat in his light, the barely suppressed tension that flickered around his aleimi as he collected data, and not only with his eyes.

I saw him look at the flickering neon skyline of the city of Macau itself, right before his gaze returned to the pier and the complex beyond it. The first and largest of those wings faced us directly now, leading into the back end of that massive, upscale hotel and resort.

We had nearly reached the tiki torches on either side of the stone path that started where the pier ended. I saw the virtual landscape shift as we got close enough to see the edges of it, and realized that some kind of semi-electronic shield lived here, too, either an OBE or something similar. Whatever it was, it had been programmed to blend seamlessly into the background, likely using virtual reality and some other pyrotechnics to confuse our perspective on where we stood in relation to the hotel and grounds themselves.

I was still staring up at that shimmering mirage when a guard stepped deliberately into our path, holding up a hand with a flat-eyed smile to indicate for us to halt.

“We’re guests here, remember,” Revik added under his breath to me, his words a bare exhale. “Act like it.”

“Okay, boss,” I murmured just as softly.

“Right. Then stop looking like you’re scouting for a military patrol,” he muttered.

“I will if you will,” I said, even quieter.

He nudged me with his shoulder, smiling again.

Even so, his aleimi didn’t relax at all.

By then, we were too close to the black-uniformed guards to talk anymore, not even under our breaths. Definitely not from our aleimi.

Even though we only stood there quietly, the Chinese-featured human in the black uniform frowned a little, looking from one of our faces to the other. I found myself focusing once more on the red and yellow armband he wore as he gradually lowered that same arm and hand back to his side, as if finally making up his mind that we weren’t going to attack him.

His expression appeared totally empty. He gestured for us to hand over our invitation cards, which Revik did, pulling them out of an inside pocket of his suit jacket.

We’d received them on the ferry boat, after they conducted the first direct verification of our light, and ID’d us, probably using something they had on file from SCARB or one of the other previous law enforcement agencies.

From what Revik told me, places like this thrived on bribes and shared intel with corrupt law enforcement, long before C2-77 hit anywhere near this part of the world.

I knew that these “cards”––or chips, really, since they were more like GPS trackers inside small, semi-organic cases––were now the only way inside this private enclave.

This place might look like it did before the human-killing disease, C2-77, came and wiped out a good chunk of the planet’s human beings, but I’d been told it wasn’t much at all like it had been, back when this used to be nothing more than a tiny, semi-autonomous corner of the country called the People’s Republic of China.

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.