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I watched the surrounding gardens and lawns undulate gently with the waves.

It would have been strange for a much smaller house and grounds, but these gardens were huge, filled with palm trees, flower-covered bushes and lush lawns. To the left of the walkway, the grounds stretched off into the distance, so that I couldn’t see their end.

My eyes returned to the stretch of dark in front of us, where there were no lights at all.

I already knew we’d be going there.

My intuition was confirmed when Terian motioned us to leave the walkway to follow a smaller path heading towards that dark. Once we’d crossed a segment of that man-made field, he led us onto a second walkway I saw only after he ignited the lamps. The path appeared out of the dark, leading into the distance. I frowned when it occurred to me how conspicuous this made us, surrounded by nothing but trees and lawns on either side.

Revik must have been thinking the same thing.

“Kill the lights, Terry,” he said.

“No, this is better,” Terian said, grinning over his shoulder at him. “They know we’re here. We come in the dark, they think we are hiding. Best not to hide.”

He motioned us forward, walking briskly along the lit path.

The lights only turned on one segment at a time. The first was lined by incongruous and very non-desert trees whose branches grew together overhead, forming a lush green arch. A few minutes later, we passed through a second garden, lit all over by more of those fairy-like statues and glowing rocks. Past the garden, the path transformed into a winding white line covered in sparkling stone tiles. I listened to the click of my heels on the stone as we followed, our group otherwise silent as we passed to the right of a second plantation-style house.

Clutching Revik’s arm with both of my hands, I peered past him at a lit pool that stood behind that colonial-style house, steaming in the night air. The pool was decorated with multi-colored spotlights and surrounded by tall palm trees and stone fountains. I glimpsed shadowy figures out there, sitting at outdoor tables with umbrellas, drinking drinks as piped-in music played on the stone patio.

Heads and torsos bobbed in the mist-covered water of the pool, and I watched a woman in a bikini slide down a man-made waterfall, laughing like she was drunk before she splashed into the deep end of the pool on the other side.

It was pretty close to the same splashing sound I’d heard before.

“The rich really are different,” Revik said dryly, when I glanced up at him.

He met my gaze, and I saw a flicker of worry cross his face.

I felt it, too. I just had no idea what it meant.

Something hummed up ahead, both too quiet and deafening in the relative silence of the water and surrounding fields. The darkness was too dense compared to the horizon on either side, and I saw only trees and water behind it, and no stars.

We were halfway across the field by then.

I was about to ask Revik if he could hear that humming too, when?

I walked through something.

It didn’t feel like an ordinary construct breach. It didn’t feel like anything I’d ever experienced before. Something about it was almost physical.

It was as if I’d walked through a giant mirror of liquid glass.

I could see the edge of the water, right in front of us, the darkness of the sky, the shadow of the field and a few scattered trees?

And then I could see a massive boathouse standing by the water, next to a synthetic dock.

I nearly stumbled in those half-second gaps between each flicker of reality, like those moments where you step off a curb in your dream and find nothing but an abyss.

Revik and I briefly came to a stop. So did the rest of our party.

We stared up at that warehouse-sized boathouse as a group, taking it in.

That kind of thing had happened to me in the Barrier before, of course. Wreg had been hammering me on different aspects of discernment for months, on how to spot Barrier illusions and delusions projected by individuals and constructs. While I still didn’t catch the fakes a lot of the time, once I saw the real through Wreg’s light, the falseness of the replica always became obvious. The trick was to always keep a line to the real?which isn’t as easy as it sounds.

I’d never seen anything at this scale before, though.

The quasi-physical quality made me wonder if a virtual component was involved.