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I suppose that made sense in Lily’s world, since Revik tended to switch up languages a lot more than I did, often without noticing he did it.

Even so, I had to laugh a little.

Regardless of the relative merits of Lily’s blaming Revik for her perceived skill gaps, she’d demanded that he teach her Mandarin, Russian and Spanish at once. I’m not entirely sure why she picked those three languages, but they were pretty solid choices and Revik was fluent in all three, so we didn’t argue.

Revik split his teaching time with tutors, however, instead of doing it all himself, since we were often in planning sessions these days, even when she wasn’t in school.

Lily went along with that, if grudgingly.

She also wanted to learn Vietnamese, she announced a few days later.

I assumed that had to do with her grandmother, which annoyed me. Kali offered to teach her after we left for Dubai, and I thanked her for that?but not very nicely, I’m afraid.

Even apart from Lily leaving, the aircraft carrier was slowly disbanding.

We’d already decided we would continue to use it operationally for Dubai, but we would limit the crew to military. Even then, I’d ordered them to keep it at a skeleton crew once they got the tanks and other large items moved. They’d already started transferring nonessentials to smaller ships; all of that accelerated once we got to the staging area.

Now that we were ready to go live, that clock was running down for real.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that.

But, like giving Lily to her grandparents, there wasn’t much I could do to stop it.

* * *

I bobbed in the water,gripping the side of a thick, inflatable boat that held Wreg, Jon, Chandre and Neela.

I couldn’t help thinking,It’s a good thing I’m a decent swimmer.

We’d gone over about a million different ways to enter Dubai.

As with most of our operations lately, the tricky part was me and Revik.

We’d been practicing different types of Barrier cloaks and shields for weeks. We’d also worked at hiding specific trauma markers, as well as other imprints and structures particular to ourselves and ouraleimi?especially Revik, whose light had been mapped more extensively by the Dreng than likely anyone on our team.

That didn’t even get into things like changing the way we walked, talked, sat and otherwise moved our bodies to keep from being picked up by electronic surveillance.

Our lack of information was still more worrying than those things we knew to expect.

We had absolutely no idea how many bodies Terian might be operating, what they might look like, what race they might be, or how they might be connected. Even if we found one of those bodies in Dubai, taking it captive might be a total waste of time. We had no way to “hide” him in any conventional sense, given what he was. Putting a secondary body in the tank and cutting it off from his primary body?meaning Feigran?would likely only kill it.

Given how Terian’s bodies worked together in the past, Revik warned that no amount of shielding would cut Terian off from the rest of his bodies if we left him in some kind of military construct outside the tank. That meant he’d be a walking GPS signal for Shadow unless we locked him up?which again, would probably just kill him.

Really, we needed the primary body, Feigran.

In the past, the Dreng had gone to pretty drastic lengths to make Terian’s original body inaccessible. Given our current timetable, we were doubtful we’d have much hope of finding it, but Revik was determined to at least find out where it was being held, and to find and question the Terian who’d been messing with our light.

The whole topic of Terian and Feigran spawned an interminable number of discussions and arguments, however, including how long we could afford to stay there, inside a Shadow city, to look for someone who would probably be under armed guard and in close proximity to Menlim. Many of the infiltrators questioned whether we should even betryingto bring in Feigran, given the risks and uncertain benefits.

More than one person thought we should find him primarily to kill him.

A smaller set of us, including me and eventually Revik, thought we should at leasttryto bring Feigran in alive, in the hopes that having the Four together might help Lily.

Of course, those discussions also brought on a set of extrapolations around what might happen if we managed to get ahold of the original Feigran body, and, more to the point, if we could find some way to throw a kill-switch on the rest, in effect, killing “Terian” once more, and integrating all of his requisite pieces back into a unified Feigran.

Again, most of those theories involved utilizing the tank to cut Feigran off from his satellite versions, which in theory couldn’t survive without the original body. We had no idea what that might do to the “fragments” of Terian left floating out there, though, if they would be reunited with the Feigran body when he emerged from the tank, or?

Well, or not.