Page 5 of Seer Prophet

None of it was particularly surprising.

Moreover, trying to hack our light was a bit of a prestige thing, I guessed.

Macho points among their infiltrator cells.

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

“You aren’t wrong,” he murmured.

His fingers tightened on mine. I heard and felt the warning woven into his humor and squeezed his hand in return.

Truthfully, I didn’t need the reminder. Warnings flickered all over my light.

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, I noted the red cloth bands with gold symbols on each of the black-clad soldiers’ upper arms. The symbol depicted a flaming sun inside a lion’s mouth. Something about it struck me as a perversion of the sword and sun symbol. The bands even circled the left bicep?the same bicep where religious seers wore the sword and sun tattoo.

Also, my mind noted, roughly the placement of your standard Nazi armband.

“Be nice, wife,” Revik murmured.

“I’malwaysnice,” I murmured back.

He snorted a soft laugh.

Smoothing the front of his white shirt and dark gray suit jacket with one hand, he straightened his collar as he walked, without letting go of my fingers with his other hand, or taking his eyes off the armband guards.

I saw his clear eyes dart to metal poles to either side of the pier, marking the placement of image collection, gait and facial-rec, listening devices, flyers. He did it casually, but I felt the barely suppressed tension there.

A row of tiki torches began at the end of the pier.

Right as we passed the first of these, I saw the virtual landscape shift.

A shield appeared out of the dark, vibrating with rose and gold lines, shot through with blue and green. It rose up into the sky, encasing the massive towers and disappearing as it wrapped over the skyline of Macau. On the bottom end, it bisected the end of the pier, running along the water to either side, protecting the visible line of shore.

From the way it made the hairs on my arms and the back of my neck stand on end, I knew it wasn’t a Barrier shield only. A physical gate must be generating an organic binary electric (O.B.E.), or something similar.

As I studied that shimmering bubble of gold, rose, and green light, a guard stepped deliberately into our path. He held up a hand with a flat-eyed smile.

“We’re guests here, remember.” Revik murmured the words at me, a bare exhale. “Act like it.”

“Yes, boss.”

He exhaled even softer. “Right. Then stop looking like you’re running scout for a military assassin squad.”

“I will if you will,” I murmured just as quietly.

He nudged me with his shoulder, but his eyes didn’t reflect the smile that touched his lips. By then, we were too close to the black-uniformed guards to talk, even under our breaths.

We definitely couldn’t speak to one another in our minds.

A human with Chinese-looking features frowned as we halted. He looked from one of our faces to the other, then looked over our bodies. Grunting at us in Cantonese, which I don’t speak or understand but Revik does, he gestured for us to hand over our invitation cards.

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 scans of our light.

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