Allie's War Season Four (98 page)

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.

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.