Page 75 of Midnight Coven

Nick didn’t answer. He’d already figured that much out.

That hard pain returned to his stomach as Morley pulled into a segment of driveway that lived off the main road. The images flashed behind his eyes. He couldn’t push them away. He kept seeing them there again, a cooing baby in the arms of a man all dressed in black, a man wearing a dirty, wide-brimmed hat, and bandages over parts of his face.

He saw the beautiful woman on the floor, sobbing, make-up running down her unlined face, lipstick smeared over one cheek.

Morley pulled up to a heavy, traditional-style gate, maybe thirty feet off the walled road.

That driveway gate was even more imposing than the one bordering the road into the private settlement.

This one was unmanned, though.

It was also done in an old Japanese style, what had been modeled after old war helmets. Nick had mostly seen them done in wood and tile back in San Francisco and in Japan the one time he went, but this one looked like organic metal. It shimmered as they approached, and he suspected it had a number of security measures built into the A.I.

Nick felt another shiver of odd déjà vu as he glanced at the stone walls on either side of the metal gate, covered in Japanese writing in what looked like real gold letters.

All of it looked familiar to him.

He hoped it was some distant, buried memory from his past, and not something he was remembering from one of his more recent dreams.

His parents, especially his mother, had relatively strong ties to Japan back when he’d been a kid. The traditional styles she kept around the house and in some of their cultural outings could be causing this feeling of familiarity, but Nick had his doubts.

Whatever this memory was, it felt more recent.

Even when Nick was a kid, he and his sisters were always a lot more American than Japanese, despite the holidays and traditions they still adhered to as a family. His mother’s favorite holiday had been Christmas, even when Nick was a kid… and even though she wasn’t Christian in the slightest. She just liked all the decorations. She liked the trees, the food, all the lights downtown, the shopping, the presents.

She liked the fun of it all, and the big family party at the end.

Most of all, Nick suspected, she liked feeling American.

The gates didn’t open immediately when Morley pulled up in front of them.

A red light shone directly overhead, with lit holographic words explaining that the car would be scanned and their identity cleared.

Unlike all of the hoops at the gate into the private zone, however, this security check was pretty quick and painless.

A green and then a blue and then a red light ran over the whole car.

Nick suspected it grabbed their implant IDs, too.

Then the red light turned to green, and Morley started up the engine again.

“They put a tracker on the windshield,” Morley explained. “The guards at the booth. Those grant us access to this property.”

“And only this property,” Nick muttered.

“That’s about the size of it, yes,” Morley said agreeably.

They exchanged looks.

“I wonder if that’s something you could fake,” Nick said. “With tech, I mean. It seems like a pretty easy way to bypass a lot of security.”

“Anything can be,” Morley said. “Faked, that is. Tampered with. Stolen.” The old man stepped on the gas as they left the last of the gate area. “Seems to me a settlement like this creates as many temptations as it does protections.”

Nick frowned. He knew Morley pretty well by then, so he could read between the lines of what he was saying. Knowing Morley, he thought these paranoid rich people were idiots for isolating themselves out here. Moreover, he probably thought they werearrogantidiots, who believed they could barricade themselves up with private security and no one would ever be able to think their way past it.

They still thought money was the answer to everything.

They likely also thought they were smarter than anyone who might try to break in.

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