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The air was warm here, humid even in the night, and the soothing bubble of hot tubs mixed with gentle laughter as they drank wine from thin-stemmed glasses and smoked dark-colored cigarettes with jewel-encrusted holders.

If the whole scene wasn’t so over-the-top gauche, it might have felt like being at a high-end resort, or maybe an exclusive spa.

Revik prodded my light, shifting my eyes to the upper balconies over the pool with its waterfalls and floating bars. Once I’d focused there, I saw more guards wearing red armbands over black uniform shirts. Compared to the gentle and lazy-seeming opulence of the people by the pool, they looked incongruously brutal.

Macau wasn’t one of Shadow’s “quarantine” cities.

There was no pretense of maintaining the previous human authorities or laws here.

The Legion of Fire performed their own lockdown, after the fact.

Their house, their rules,as Revik noted wryly during one of our planning sessions.

Since Macau hadn’t been one of the cities whose water supply got directly targeted, they had a wider window than most to lock down their territory. That, combined with a fair bit of geographical privilege, allowed them to survive.

The Legion of Fire performed their own purges, of course.

That kind of thing didn’t even shock me anymore.

Frankly, I understood it?even agreed with it, in principle?despite the heartlessness of how it was often done. The sad fact was, there might not be much of a human race left if those purges hadn’t occurred.

Every human metropolitan area in the world would have been obliterated by C2-77.

Macau was owned by a single organized crime family now. To most people here, the Legion of Fire might be criminals, but they also looked a lot like saviors.

Enclaves like this had begun popping up all around the globe over the past six months, in addition to the quarantine cities designed by Shadow.

Revik was one of the first to note that a large percentage of the newer enclaves grew out of locations where organized crime already had a strong presence. Other places, like Reykjavik, Bhutan, and Helsinki, survived due to a certain amount of geographic privilege that made it easier to keep would-be disease carriers out.

Some enclaves arose for different reasons, including a large and loyal seer population that helped keep the peace and lock out infected humans. Examples of the latter included London and the Forbidden City in Beijing.

In every case, strong cooperation and leadership seemed to be a requirement.

“I hate this,” Revik muttered from beside me, squeezing my hand tighter.

I sent him a pulse of reassurance.

“I really hate it.” He ignored my attempt to calm him. “It’s a fucked up plan, Allie. And it won’t work. They’d be stupid to think I’d ever go along with it.”

I didn’t answer.

I knew he hated the plan.

He’d been extremely vocal about hating the plan, pretty much from the instant he hung up with the Legion of Fire leadership. The problem was, neither he nor anyone else had been able to think of a better plan.

I promised him I would go along with anything he came up with that worked equally well, but in the end, partly due to time pressures and partly because of limited options in approaching a place like this, he reluctantly agreed to go along.

“It wasn’t my idea,” I reminded him.“Theyproposed this.”

“You’re going along with it,” he muttered. “You orderedmeto go along with it.”

“You didn’t come up with anything better. Neither did Wreg. Or ‘Dori. Or Chan. Or even Tarsi. We ran out of time. We’re stuck with this. It’s something we know they want.”

His jaw firmed, jutting out his cheek.

“I hate this,” he repeated after a few more steps.

I only squeezed his fingers.