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She would figure it out, eventually.

Revik struggled to make the thought real in his head, pushing away the far more paranoid scenarios that involved her being gang-raped by a bunch of sick fucks in a high-rise hotel. More than that, he tried to decide if he had any real alternatives.

Alternatives that wouldn’t get her, him and Lily killed.

Revik looked back towards the stage.

Scanning faces, he paused on a man emerging from a dark doorway to the right of the stage. The man came to a stop just below the stage, still mostly in shadow, but his face falling within the glow of the harsh spotlights. At that distance, Revik couldn’t be absolutely certain it was him, not without using his sight, but it definitely looked like him.

Enough that it was worth getting closer.

“Come with me,” he said, looking at Dalejem. “Now. The rest of you stay here.”

Without waiting, he began to walk, aiming his feet for the front of the auction hall.

Dalejem followed, his light still sliding around Revik’s in occasionally distracting waves, but operating as an infiltrator’s again, which was all Revik really cared about.

Their window was closing. He could feel it.

He grew conscious of the gun he wore inside his shirt, tucked into a side holster that melded against his flesh. Luckily, that hadn’t been picked up in security scans?no one but the military and private security teams were allowed to carry firearms in Dubai. Vik and his team designed both guns and holsters to pass weapons’ scans unnoticed. They were full organics, and threw off a cloak that blended with the wearer’s bio-matter.

So far, that cloak had worked.

It took him a few minutes to get to the front of the room, even with the wide aisles between seats. By then, most of the bidding centered on a dark-haired male seer, maybe halfway through his second century, who looked like he might have come from Europe, from his expensive haircut, his weight and the tattoo on the side of his neck. He could be from anywhere though, really. He was stark naked, which didn’t help with identification.

This one looked like he’d never been a slave before, though.

He looked lost, eyes haunted, like his whole reality had been crushed recently?as it likely had. He’d probably been passing. He had the kind of coloring and facial features where he could have pulled it off pretty easily in the West, if he could keep himself in expensive and highly illegal colored contact lenses and high-grade blood patches.

And yeah, if he could afford to pay infiltrators who would keep his secret for him.

From his weight and the lack of clan tats on his body, he probably had that kind of cash. A fair number of young seers managed to pull that off before C2-77. Most were ambitious. Most used their sight conservatively, mainly in professions at the fringes of the stock market.

The stock market itself had been heavily regulated against tampering by seers, of course, and had its own army of seers whose job it was to prevent (or minimize, realistically) insider trading and high-stakes corporate espionage using seers. Plenty of the big players had their own cadre of seers, though, so there was a lot of bullshit that went on, as well as a sort of ongoing psychic battle between seers working for the various sides.

This guy didn’t have the rank to be a player at that level, however.

He probably advised suburban housewives on how they should invest their mutual funds, or maybe worked as a tax accountant for a mid-sized corporation.

Revik noted all that, even as he felt a flush of sympathy for his brother, as the seers and humans in the audience bid for him.

His mind didn’t dwell on that for long, however.

The only way they’d free seers like this was to take down Shadow.

For that, he needed his wife.

He aimed his feet towards the same corner of the stage where he’d seen the seer from the docks. The male still wore a pristine white robe, an organic earpiece wrapping the lower part of his skull below a black headband.

Revik walked right up to him. He saw security about to intervene, and held up a hand in a peace gesture, right as the trader looked over at him.

The dark blue eyes with their moon-white flecks shifted from Revik to Dalejem, right before his eyebrows lifted in surprise.

“Brothers!” he said, holding out his hands. “What is it you are doing here?”

Revik made a respectful gesture with one hand, bowing slightly, both to the man in the white robe and to his guard.

The bow wasn’t subservient. It was polite?a preliminary establishment of hierarchy, with himself firmly on the dominant end.