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That hadn’t always been the case, however.

We’d had a few good surprises along with the bad ones.

Still, regardless of the flavor of the encampments we’d encountered, not a single one had anywhere near the infrastructure or energy capacity to pull off something like this. We’d been in and out of maybe thirty population zones since we’d left New York, and not one of them even came close.

In every place we visited, we spent most of our time on the ground tracking people already ID’d by our tech and infiltration teams as being on one of the Displacement Lists. The goal in every case was live extraction.

For a while, that strategy seemed to work well.

We tracked List seers and humans, or “Listers” as we’d started to call them, via the Barrier, then sent out a team to conduct the physical extraction, either by helicopter or boat, depending on the terrain and the level of hostility on the ground.

Wherever we could, we brought them back to the ship.

Rescuing seers and humans whose names appeared on those Lists had become a full-time job.

Then, all of a sudden, those excursions started coming up empty.

For months, we had no idea why.

Then, four weeks ago, Vikram, the head of our comp-hack team, discovered someone was offering money for Listers on the black market feeds. TheRynak,in particular?the black market feed most frequented by bounty hunters and traffickers?had several entries requesting live capture and trade for seers and humans whose names showed up on a highly classified “List” circulating via black market channels, and accessible only for a fee.

It didn’t take our team long to figure out that list was the Displacement List.

Which, yeah… was bad.

The only silver lining: whoever was buying them didn’t appear to be killing them. Not outright, anyway. Our infiltration team found evidence indicating the seers still appeared to be alive, likely the humans, too. Since Shadow generally just murdered any Listers he found, human or seer, a number of infiltrators speculated it wasn’t him doing the buying.

Of course, it was equally possible he only kept them alive to lure us to him.

Either way, someone besides us definitely had a copy of the Displacement Lists. I didn’t want to contemplate the implications of that, frankly. It meant we might already be too late to save whoever we hadn’t managed to extract in those months after Manhattan.

We were still trying, though.

That’s why Revik and I were here.

We traced the last big shipment of Lister seers from Taiwan to Macau.

A few days later, Revik wrangled an invite to the facility here, using his own name.

That had been a lot harder than it sounds.

It also required Revik to make promises to these jerkoffs he was still, interestingly, pissed off atmeabout.

Even before Revik fought his way through those preliminary negotiations, we were under no illusions these people were our friends. The pirates of Macau may not be Shadow’s people, but that definitely didn’t make them ours.

Coming here was deeply dangerous, for both of us.

But we couldn’t afford to lose any more seers or humans off the Lists. We’d lost far too many to Shadow and his death-squads already.

We had to at least try. We had to at leasttryto save them.

Looking up at the L-shaped towers, I frowned.

Colored spotlights aimed at white walls. The monkey and phoenix holograms continued to do battle through the skies overhead. I saw a new one up there now, an orange and black tiger stalking across the sky, its eyes bright gold.

By now, I could feel us being checked out by seers working this end of the construct.

They’d already done a positive ID on me and Revik, using various markers that lived in ouraleimi, or living light. Now I could feel them trying for more, trying to gain access to deeper levels of our light to glean actual intelligence. So far, their interests were about what we expected: what we really wanted, who we worked for or with, where our mysterious base lived, if we had ambitions to take over their territory, if we intended to kill them.