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I wondered if the building itself was responsible for projecting the illusion we’d seen before we crossed the threshold into this secondary construct.

I stood there with Revik, silent, along with the rest of our group.

We just watched as Terian and his guards approached the front of the building. The main doors were padlocked together with a winding series of cables. I watched, transfixed, as those cables uncoiled themselves like snakes after Terian used retinal scanners and Barrier codes to disconnect the joining ends.

Then the guards were forcing open the heavy metal doors.

I winced at the screech of metal tracks as they finally slid open. Still, the sound told me at least part of the mechanism consisted of dead metal, not organics. Organics?even semi-organics and other high-grade composites?didn’t rust.

The twin doors opened excruciatingly slow, even under the combined weight and strength of Terian’s guards. I gazed into the widening chasm of dark with the rest of them, shifting my weight on the high-heeled shoes.

Revik gripped my hand tighter where I clasped his arm. We exchanged another look after Terian motioned for us to follow him inside.

Then Revik lowered his mouth to my ear.

“I love you,” he murmured, kissing me. “It’ll be all right, Allie.”

I nodded, but something about the way he said it made my throat close.

We were already doing as Terian indicated, though, walking nearly in formation, although no words were exchanged by our small contingent of infiltrators. Glancing around at faces, I found myself wondering where Loki’s team was, where Revik had sent him and the others when he’d pulled them aside?

?but Revik blew the question from my mind.

He did it softly, but perceptibly enough that I killed the thought on my own before it could go anywhere specific.

Our footsteps echoed in the high-ceilinged space.

It was dark inside. Not quite pitch dark?the upper-story windows reflected some light onto the warehouse floor, presumably from the ambient light of the city as well as the stars, the nearby houses and the path lights. I’d noticed only a small sliver of moon in the sky as we drove out here, and it had only just been rising.

The feeling of others being inside this building strengthened as we walked.

Whatever awaited us on the other side, we definitely weren’t alone in here.

Revik squeezed my hand. He felt it, too.

Terian didn’t lead us in a straight line through the cavernous space, primarily because he couldn’t. The further we walked, the more I found it difficult to see much with my physical eyes. Storage crates broke our pathway into multiple lines, some of them stacked almost to the ceiling despite its great height. The deeper we descended into those rows, the harder it was to see, since they often cut off even the small amount of light from the windows.

It created an odd, off-kilter progression through what felt more and more like a maze. I used my light to track every twist and turn, in the event we needed to backtrack the same way out without a guide, but I still found it disorienting.

Terian seemed to know where he was going, however.

Around the time I could feel we’d passed the halfway point of the boathouse’s length, I could hear them.

Most of it sounded like shuffling, like animals in cages.

I heard them through the echoes, thinking at first it must be rats. Gradually, it felt and sounded more like the movement of bare feet on a dusty floor.

My heart started to beat faster in my chest. I had to fight not to walk faster, even as I kept at least half of my attention on Terian, and on what I could feel of him as he passed through the dark in front of us. He continued to wind his way through the high stacks of crates, occasionally disappearing through curtain-like cloths hanging down over more crates, only to reveal more narrow, twisting passageways.

He clearly hadn’t wanted anyone stumbling on his “guests” by accident.

We’d all dropped the civilian gaits by then, even me in the high heels.

I couldn’t hear Revik at all anymore as he fell back into his normal fight-walk. Even under day-to-day conditions, his regular walk was close to silent.

Now, he moved like a ghost.

His light stilled into silence, too, making him an absence more than a presence even though he walked right beside me. Apart from his hand, which still held onto me tightly, he might not have been there at all.