Page 78 of Seer Prophet

He could feel they were all essentially pulling for him, since Loki had only recently been assigned to lead teams on the ground. The thought struck him, how strange this would have seemed to all of them even a few years earlier, with Kalgi, an ex-Adhipan lifer, taking orders from him, Loki, who fought as a Rebel in two wars.

Loki found the symmetry there pleasing.

Something in it felt more like a circle than otherwise.

Giving Kalgi and Anale a last glance and a smile, he raised his rifle, following the others towards the ground entrance into the oval hallway.

* * *

The Sword gaveLoki only the bare bones of where to look.

Truthfully, from the encrypted recording Oli sent, Loki could not be certain whether the Sword knew if there was anything to find at all, much less exactly where it might be. Still, Loki understood the logic of looking. They were all unlikely to be in this part of the world again, at least any time soon.

They had found as many from the Lists as could be found here.

Loki wasn’t entirely clearwhatthe Sword hoped to find, even apart from where, or whether that thing existed. When Loki asked Oli to probe the Sword for additional information, purely for operational purposes, she said the boss told her he’d given her everything he had already. The Sword apparently received all his information from his wife on this, and Allie wasn’t currently available for questioning.

Loki found this odd, for several reasons.

Oli did, too, and proceeded to tell Loki so.

He knew better than to rise to such bait, or to speculate aloud as to the private life of his intermediaries?but he could not stop himself from hearing it, or agreeing with Oli that itwasodd, given that rarely were the two of them seen apart these days.

The Sword’s encrypted message had been precise in two critical areas.

One: he was able to tell Loki the rough area where this thingmightbe located, even if he’d been uncertain of the specifics. Two: he was able to tell Loki how toaccessthat thing, assuming he and the others managed to find the specific place the thing was located.

So nebulous, yes.

Yet still enough to go on, Loki felt confident they might succeed in retrieving this thing, particularly if one of the Bridge’s visions was involved. He might be more superstitious than many of the seers on this mission, but they wouldallagree the Bridge had an impressive track record when it came to her prescience.

They entered the portico with no problems.

They found the elevator shortly after.

Riding it down to the sub-basement levels, Loki could not help but feel some emotion around where they were. He had railed against, fought wars against, and cursed the denizens of this building off and on over the years, but his primary feeling now was one of sorrow.

Even nostalgia.

Good and evil seemed so much simpler even fifty years ago.

He glanced at Anale, who crouched on the floor of the elevator by the open control panel. A thick, sticky bundle of glowing, jelly-like wires spilled out of the opening and into the hands of her and Ontari, who worked beside her, fingering through components, or “squids,” as the techs called organic wiring.

Between them sat a portable power source pulsing an eerie orange light.

That same power source got the elevator car moving; unfortunately, it also triggered a good number of the attendant security protocols. The car already screeched to a halt in the shaft twice. Loki and Jax were forced to access a secondary organics panel through the back wall to override and fool the ID scans into thinking they all belonged here.

Luckily, the gas contingency had been disabled.

If it hadn’t been, they might have spent a lot longer in that elevator car?waking to splitting hangovers, their comms going crazy from having diverted from mission parameters by six to ten hours, assuming the gas didn’t kill just them outright.

The less dramatic scenario would have left them trapped between floors until they figured out a different means of traveling the shaft, likely by cutting through the elevator car.

Loki suspected any course they took would ignite security measures.

The boss warned him the building might still have back-up power sources and surveillance. If nothing else, they’d potentially trigger alarms for secret service agents no longer located on site, but who might be monitoring from bunkers housed elsewhere.

Something about having those remnants of security systems continuing on in their tasks, oblivious to the absence of their masters, struck Loki as eerie.

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