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More than anything, I wanted to keep this short.

I felt envious of Jon.

Jon, Wreg, and a few others had taken a second boat, heading north up the coastline to find Loki and his team. They were supposed to signal them when it was safe to fly the Chinook back to the carrier. They weren’t bringing Dante, Jon told me.

Some of the tech geeks, and even Wreg and Jon, wanted to surprise her by bringing her mom to her. I knew that wasn’t all of it, though.

They didn’t want to risk bringing Dante to a potentially unfriendly shore.

Sixteen or not, she was increasingly becoming the real tech chief, even if Vikram still held that role in name, mostly due to his age and his long tenure with the Adhipan. After losing Garensche, they were all feeling especially protective of their teenaged whiz kid.

Some of that was personal, of course.

Hell, most of it was personal.

Even so, they increasingly had valid grounds to justify their protectiveness with military reasoning.

On the down side, I’d miss the reunion, which was a bummer, since Loki’s team should be back on the carrier long before we returned. It had been my decision to do both things at the same time instead of sequentially, however, to minimize our time and exposure out here.

That said, Wreg offered to stay on the water to back us up.

He would patrol the waters offshore in the boat after they saw Loki and the others off, just in case anything went wrong on our side.

Not that we expected anything to go wrong.

I fought to keep my light and focus off Revik, but it was hard when I felt his nerves worsening, hitting my light with enough charge that I looked at him again. He didn’t return my gaze exactly, but I felt him react to my stare.

Eventually, I looked away.

When I felt a group ofaleimiclights approaching us along the beach, my own nerves worsened.

Throwing up a harder, more leadership-type cloak, I folded my arms.

I didn’t know what to expect when the Children of the Bridge finally emerged from the trees, but the sheer number of them took me aback.

I counted at least forty seers with my eyes, all of them well-shielded.

Infiltrators.

Well, not all of them, my mind amended.

But most definitely had that stamp.

I picked Dalejem out of the line first, and frowned. I couldn’t help it.

That frown deepened when I saw him looking at Revik, his green and violet eyes reflecting sunlight.

Jerking my eyes off his dark hair and high-cheekboned face, I forced my gaze over the rest of the group, noting they covered a pretty broad age-range, but the majority were probably somewhere in the two-hundred to three-hundred-year range.

In the middle I saw a woman.

She might have been older.

She was also one of those who didn’t feel like an infiltrator.

Despite my thoughts on her age, I had no real reason to think she was older than anyone else. She looked young, like most seers tended to look young.

I would have pegged her at early forties if she’d been human, maybe even younger. She had an Asian cast to her features, like a lot of seers, and bright green eyes a few shades darker than mine. Close to Dalejem’s in color, they lacked the violet ring that made his stand out so intensely.