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I felt him thinking, turning over what I’d said. I felt a glimmer of his actual thoughts then, even beyond the issues he and I were having with our light.

We could bolt, now, cut our losses, he was thinking.

With Terian knowing exactly where we were, any chance of a clean exit had already passed, but we’d likely losefewerpeople?meaning, if we just broke cover and ran?than we would if we followed Terian and it turned out to be a trap.

We’d also less likely end up imprisoned. Or as slaves.

“We’d be abandoning them,” I reminded, quieter. “All of them. And we’d be giving up on the chance of using Feigran to fix Lily’s light.”

His narrow mouth firmed.

I felt him weighing his own knowledge of Terian, of what he felt was likely to happen if we went with him. I felt him using his military mind, as well as his family mind?meaning his father’s mind toward Maygar and Lily. I felt him think about the bank job in New York and all the other times my impulses had paid off.

I felt something else there, too.

A part of himwantedto go forward with this, even more than I did?and for reasons he hadn’t shared with me. That was the part I felt him wrestling with. It felt almost like he was using my intuition to rationalize what he wanted to do anyway. I couldn’t get a sense of what that was about?if it was about Feigran, the Listers, Lily, me.

Whatever it was, something about it made me nervous

I was still watching his face, trying to decide what I was seeing, when Revik let out a held breath. Taking my hand, he lifted it to his lips and kissed my palm, sending a denser, more deliberate thread of love through my light?coupled with a heated relief that I was okay.

Both things came through strong enough to cut my breath.

“Okay,” he said, loosening his hold on me. “Okay, wife.”

He kissed me, and I felt another shiver of his pain.

“Okay,” he repeated, smiling at me.

Funnily enough, that time, I think he was trying to reassure me.

I followed as he turned, walking us both to the club’s door. He never once let go of me as we made our way outside, and then I was looking at a gold and red sunset, shimmering on the glass buildings, and on the windshield of the black limousine that waited for us on the curb.

Gazing into the warm light of the fading sun, I knew, somehow, that things were about to change for us again?and not only for me and Revik.

Chapter55

The Waterfront

Terian didn’t take us back to the Burj Khalifa.

I saw the glass and steel spire through the window in the distance, but we drove past it, directly towards the Gulf. His driver aimed the limousine for the densest part of the walled shields that surrounded the city.

My mind recalled the maps we’d gotten from Vik and Dante’s satellite hacks. I knew the O.B.E. fields that lived on this part of the water were new, deadly, and highly complex. Given how well the organic generators were protected on shore, I wasn’t sure we’d get out that way even if Revik went full-bore with the telekinesis.

In other words, we were about as far from a true exit as we could possibly be right now.

I tried to keep the worry out of myaleimi, even as the physical lights of ships and smaller recreational boats grew closer and more numerous.

We ended up at The Waterfront, an exclusive stretch of man-made land, connected by an elaborate series of canals that wound around a curved jetty shaped as a crescent moon.

I remembered that from our planning sessions, too.

While we pored over maps during strategy meetings on the carrier, Revik showed me how this segment of the city could be seen as the crescent moon and star, visible all the way from space. Loki showed me the same symbol on the inside of his arm in black seer’s ink?the same arm where he wore the sword and sun symbol on the outside.

Not knowing Loki very well, I didn’t ask.

Wreg volunteered later that the Rebels first recruited Loki in Afghanistan, where he’d been fighting in wars for decades, alongside both humans and seers. That wasafterLoki apparently spent a few decades meditating in caves out in the Afghani desert.