Page 286 of Seer Prophet

“Are you flirting with me, brother?” I said scornfully. “Really?”

“Most certainly, I am.”

I clicked in open disbelief, but my contempt didn’t seem to faze him at all.

I wished he didn’t have to be cute about the name of my new owner. Given that I supposedly just got here on a slaver’s ship, I couldn’t ask about Dontan outright, but I needed to find out the guy’s name as soon as possible. If this jokerwasn’tDontan, I was just wasting time here.

If it was Dontan, I needed to focus on finding some way to get a signal out to the others, so they could track me.

I still hadn’t looked over my shoulder at Kat, or at the three seers walking with her, two of them there presumably keeping her and the other male from jumping head-first into one of those pools and trying to swim away.

There was a good chance I’d just fucked up, though.

If she recognized my voice, Kat might not keep that information to herself. She wasn’t all that fond of me, either, in addition to wanting to fuck my husband pretty much whenever she saw him. Moreover, she had her own reasons for needing leverage right now.

She might try to use the information to barter her way to freedom. Or, at the very least, to receive some kind of special accommodation.

Or, they might just read it off her.

I kept those thoughts a lot further back, in the deepest cracks of my mind, where I still managed to partition off at least a tiny portion of my light.

It was too late to do anything about it now, anyway.

Chapter52

Doppelgänger

We didn’t so much as pause in the lobby.

The orange-eyed seer led us straight through those glass doors and directly across the high-ceilinged space to the nearest elevator bank.

I barely had time to take in the basic layout.

I focused on the relevant details first: surveillance cameras over the doors, another inside focused on the lobby, a third set over the elevator bank. Some kind of secondary scanner in the lobby itself?could be a high-res MRI to check for seers masquerading as humans, or just facial/gait-rec on a separate scanner than the image capture. I felt myself pass through a tangible secondary construct that started just outside the lobby doors.

I wondered how much of that was private-sec versus standard for buildings of this kind.

Most of this segment of lobby was taken up by a giant waterfall, which gave me a brief pang as it reminded me of the House on the Hill in New York.

Of course, this place felt nothing like the hotel where we’d lived all of those months, and not only because of the vast differences between the two constructs. Instead of the man-made island of boulders and plants living among koi ponds in the atrium of the hotel in New York, the lobby of the Burj Kalifa contained a sterile modern-art sculpture, what looked like big metal buttons falling down on glittery gold tile.

The effect came across more like expensive but soulless corporate art.

Alrick led us to a bank of elevators with gold and white doors.

The instant the orange-eyed seer positioned himself in front of the first of these, the elevator pinged and the doors opened smoothly.

I frowned at the understated security. Either the mechanism had a secondary facial-rec trigger, or the orange-eyed seer accessed it via a code through his headset?or both.

Either way, these clearly weren’t public elevators.

When we got inside, I saw that the number panel contained only six buttons: the lobby, what must be the parking structure under the building, the gym, the pool, the restaurant (or maybe a floor of restaurants?) and a button displaying a symbol I’d never seen before.

The orange-eyed seer smiled at me as he pressed the button with the strange symbol, like he’d tasted some element of my thoughts. Clearly, he enjoyed withholding information as part of his little power game. The wealth-porn surrounding us played a part in that game, too.

As the elevator rose, I glanced at Kat, trying to assess her mood.

I caught her looking me over, her eyes rising in increments from the wraparound shoes on my feet up my bare legs to my butt. Her eyes held a harder scrutiny, which I ignored, even as I avoided returning her gaze when it lifted back to my eyes.

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