Prophet: Bridge & Sword

by JC Andrijeski

  “He is a very wealthy client, as well, of course,” the sheik trader mused aloud, as if considering Revik’s words very carefully. “…and he, too, prides himself as a collector.” The man tapped his lips with a forefinger. “Still, he is not a man of sentiment. And he, like all of our race, can be quite sympathetic to rational and well-funded appeals.”

  He smiled at Revik, wide enough to show teeth.

  Revik didn’t return it, or change expression.

  Unable to get a response from him, the sheik shrugged with one hand, seer-style.

  “For a small commission, I could perhaps facilitate such a thing,” he said carefully. “The buyer in question owns a club in Deira that is quite popular. He even mentioned to me during the sale that he thought your Lao Hu friend would fit in quite nicely there.” He gave Revik another smile, that one more predatory. “No promises that he will be willing to part with her, of course, but I can, perhaps, provide an introduction there this evening, if you so desire…?”

  Revik glanced at Dalejem, giving him a stare that made the other male flinch.

  Revik didn’t linger on it.

  He looked back at the seer in the pristine white robe.

  “I do desire it,” he said, inclining his head. “Set it up.”

  51

  OWNED AGAIN

  SOMETHING ABOUT THIS whole situation felt irritatingly familiar.

  Of course, it would help if I wasn’t worried about my spouse going homicidal any minute and blowing all of our cover, and likely getting himself shot down in the street for his trouble. Or the fact that an op that took us six weeks to plan got thrown completely off-playbook before we’d even breached the city limits.

  Dubai itself was interesting.

  I didn’t do a lot of traveling on my waitressing salary back when I lived in San Francisco, so a small part of me could appreciate my surroundings on that level, at least.

  Whoever this mystery guy was who bought me, he lived in the Burj Khalifa, probably the most iconic building in the city, even if it was no longer the tallest in the world.

  My eyes returned to the length of its glass and steel spire, looking up through the transparent dome of the covered walkway. The building looked like an elongated pyramid, timeless in its simplicity, yet somehow foreign-looking and high-tech at the same time. Compared to the other skyscrapers I’d seen, it stood relatively alone, surrounded by a flat expanse of parkland, man-made lakes, snaking walkways and shockingly bright lawns and fountains.

  I couldn’t help finding it all weirdly beautiful, despite the cloying heaviness of the construct and knowing slave-labor built and maintained most of what I could see.

  Buildings appeared to float on a man-made body of water to our left, connected to the shore by small walkways surrounded by more elaborate fountains. Some had white, ionic columns like something out of ancient Greece. Others I saw looked hyper-modern, with egg-like, etched-glass domes––white and lapis-lazuli in the sun, glinting with crystals designed to reflect light.

  The people I saw were a mixture of traditional and cosmopolitan.

  Human and seer males walked around in more of those sheik outfits, the majority either blindingly white or pitch black. Their female counterparts trailed behind in dark burqas, or sometimes wrapped in more complex coverings of elaborate veils.

  Right next to them, people of both sexes walked around in modern, Western-style clothes.

  Some of those clothes were pretty danged revealing.

  Palm trees lined the covered walkway where we strolled, along with stone and metal sculptures, rows of fountains, and a moving sidewalk that cruised past us going both directions. All the people I saw looked pretty relaxed––but maybe having a limitless pool of slave labor and daily manicures did a lot to really chill a person out, even in the midst of a global pandemic.

  I was glad we were walking, not taking the moving sidewalks, even with the ridiculous clothes and even more ridiculous shoes I’d been forced to wear. I strode down the pristine white marble in what had to be six-inch heels that coiled around my ankles and up my calf, wearing a beaded dress that showed off more of my body than it hid.

  Oh, and the collar, of course… can’t forget that.

  I’d really been jonesing for a few more hours in one of those fucking things.

  On the plus side, the collar’s organics didn’t touch any of the structures I used for telekinesis, so I was pretty sure I still had options. I couldn’t test that––not until I absolutely needed it, anyway––but knowing that kept me relatively calm, in part because it also meant they likely had no idea who I was.

  The beaded thing I wore, my hairstyle, the fuck-me shoes, and my makeup were all given to me prior to my sale, in that underground room below the main auction hall.

  I’d also been fitted with a collar––a different one than what I wore now.

  Following my dressing and clean-up, I got lined up with all the other “higher-bid” merchandise for inspection by potential buyers. From where I stood, I could hear bids called out from the stage above for other, primarily mid-ranked seers, most of them male. I got the sense there were a lot of people up there, so the space had to be pretty big.

  I wondered if Revik was up there.

  I pictured him standing in that audience, looking for me, arms folded as he glared at everyone else on our team. I obviously couldn’t check with my light, but the image was disconcertingly clear.

  We should have expected there might be something like this––a pre-sale, I mean. We didn’t discuss the possibility in a single one of our planning sessions, and all along we’d planned to look for Dontan at the slave auctions.

  It was a fuck-up, but hopefully not an irreparable one.

  I had to assume my team figured out what happened by now, and were in the process of tracing the buyer. That sheik trader would definitely remember me––not only because of the thing at the docks, but because I ended up being the first one sold.

  I had to guess the Lao Hu thing was still a pretty big draw.

  A tall male seer with bright orange eyes walked right up to me after skimming his hand-held for a list of product attributes. I watched him read another set of details off the wall display as he stood in front of me. He verified the Lao Hu structures with his light, talked to someone else over his headset, presumably whoever he worked for, then he took my picture with an illegal imaging device and sent that to the same person.

  After another short conversation in Arabic, he made a bid.

  He got hit out of the gate with a counter-bid by a Chinese human. After I got prodded and scanned a second time, this time by a different seer who was also clearly hired help, another human who looked and sounded European, maybe Swiss or Austrian, bid on me, too.

  An Arabic-looking seer chimed in at the next round.

  The orange-eyed seer went back and forth with each of them, along with a female seer who looked Japanese. Finally, the group settled on a price.

  That price was put forth, again, by the orange-eyed seer.

  Even with the collar on, I could tell the orange-eyed seer wasn’t too worried about being out-bid. I suspect the others thought he would win, too. Maybe they only bid against him to see how high he’d go, or to find out how serious he was. Or maybe they just wanted to make sure he didn’t get me too cheap.

  Either way, no one seemed to question his right to me if he wanted me.

  I assumed that meant his boss was wealthier than anyone else bidding.

  Or maybe there was some other reason people didn’t deny him what he wanted, my mind whispered unhelpfully. Something besides money.

  Either way, credits changed accounts, and the transaction ended.

  I was the sheik trader’s. Then I wasn’t.

  The collar the sheik put on me was removed and a new one put in its place.

  The orange-eyed seer activated that one personally.

  Less than a minute later, I was being led off to the side by two other seers. Both looked like priv
ate security. Once I stood in the shadowed alcove of the room with them, they seemed to think I was fair game. Grinning when I hit, blocked, and elbowed off their hands, they only cut it out when the orange-eyed seer gave them a warning stare.

  “Children,” he said, his odd-colored eyes shining colder.

  The one gripping my ass in one hand while I fought off the other, released me at once.

  Even so, I got stuck standing there in that ridiculous beaded outfit, forced to watch while the orange-eyed buyer looked over the rest of the “exotics.”

  Most of those, he scarcely glanced at before declining, dismissing his right to bid with a few flicks of his long fingers. A few seers later, however, they brought out a blond female seer who caught his interest.

  Looking at the blond’s face, I felt my heart slam sideways in my chest––right before I got angry enough to nearly blow my cover right there.

  Holy fucking gods, what was she doing here?

  She noticed my stare while she was still under the spotlight.

  It seemed to irritate her, but from her eyes, she didn’t recognize me. Her expression remained blank, if somewhat aggressive, which was kind of her normal expression anyway, if my previous experiences with her were any indication. She looked more like she was trying to figure out what the hell my problem was.

  That blankness confused me at first. Then it hit me.

  My prosthetics. She really had absolutely no idea who I was.

  The rising heat in my chest began to cool.

  As long as I didn’t do anything stupid, she probably wouldn’t realize who I was. Remembering the long, straight, red-tinted and black hair on my head, the redrawn cheekbones, nose and chin, not to mention the highly-expensive contact lenses, I fought to make my expression indifferent, if somewhat catty, right before I looked away.

  I hoped she would take my weird staring as female rivalry.

  Of course, apart from issues around specific mates or boyfriends/girlfriends, that type of high school, catty, female thing tended to be rare among seers. I didn’t much care if she thought I was an immature weirdo, though––as long as she didn’t blow my cover.

  From what Revik told me, the disguise I was wearing should be convincing.

  He seemed to think my eyes, in particular, were so different, it was unlikely anyone would recognize me. They’d gone way darker with my irises this time––so dark, they nearly blended with the color of my pupils. According to Jon, they came closest to mimicking Wreg’s obsidian irises, except my green still peeked through enough to give them an iridescent shimmer.

  Revik claimed they changed my face more than the prosthetics did, in terms of making me look like someone else.

  The prosthetics were more for facial-rec software, anyway. The added organics should screw up any mapping or analysis of my bone structure––even my teeth––so there shouldn’t be any hits when my information got cross-mapped to security databases.

  When the orange-eyed seer started bidding on the blond, I felt my disbelief worsen.

  He bought her, a few minutes later.

  The other bidders scarcely put up a fight that time, even for show.

  By the time I snapped out of my stare a second time, orange-eyes was already putting the new collar on her. The same pervy seers who’d escorted me went to retrieve her, and the next thing I knew I was standing directly beside her, bare arm to bare arm where we leaned against the same segment of black-painted wall.

  She wore an outfit that wasn’t all that different from mine, although hers was red while mine was mostly black with pale blue highlights.

  “What’s your fucking problem… sister?” she muttered to me in Prexci, once we stood next to one another. “Do I know you?”

  The bidding had started again, this time on a male seer with a high sight rank. Rather than answer, I read the projection on the wall of the male seer’s stats, as if I hadn’t heard her.

  “What is your name?” she said, trying again.

  “Ralla,” I said.

  “I am Kat,” she said, almost like she had when I first met her, in the basement of a Seattle brothel. “Where are you from, sister?”

  I didn’t answer that time, either, figuring I’d go with the weird and immature thing, since that’s where I started. Even so, I had to bite my lip to keep from snapping at her. I’m sure the issues with my light and Revik’s weren’t exactly helping with that.

  “…I am from Russia originally,” she said, prodding me again, her accent stronger. “I have lived and worked in America for the past few decades. Where are you from, sister? Did they take you from America, too? I did not see you on the ship with the rest of us.”

  I turned and stared at her, letting my hostility leak openly into my voice.

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up… sister?” I said, cold.

  The male seer next to me grunted a laugh. Still smiling, he nudged his pal, who was looking over Kat’s body in obvious interest, especially her breasts.

  Kat didn’t answer. When I glanced at her next, she was staring at me, her mouth pursed in a frown.

  Shit. I should have kept my mouth shut. What if she recognized my voice?

  We’d both been speaking Prexci, not English, but seers had photographic memories. I shouldn’t have said anything at all, much less given her a reason to pay attention to me.

  If she did recognize me, though, no sign of it showed on her face.

  “Fine,” she muttered. Folding her thin arms, she blew up her bangs, exuding annoyance. “Be a cunt. I suppose there’s no point reminding you ‘we are in this together?’ Clearly you are one of those who lets the worms drive wedges between us.”

  Her words came out bitter at the end.

  I frowned after she said them. Then I thought about them, unable to dismiss her meaning entirely. Worse, she managed to remind me she was in a pretty crappy situation here, given where we were, and where we could expect to be going after this. Really, her situation was significantly worse than mine, subjectively at least.

  I was here of my own volition––more or less.

  I had people looking for me somewhere in the city, even if they didn’t currently know where I was. Kat, on the other hand, was kidnapped off the street in the United States and shipped here, from what she’d said––likely for her sight rank, which I happened to know was more than decent. She’d worked as an infiltrator for Revik in the past.

  She’d also probably endured a lot of crap on the ride over. More than I wanted to know about, truthfully.

  Even so, I didn’t answer her.

  It was going to take more than shared ownership to get me over my issues with Kat, whatever fleeting empathy I might feel for her. Especially since it had already occurred to me I couldn’t just leave her here.

  Which meant I had to bring her with me.

  Thinking about that now, walking under the shaded glass dome, I frowned.

  The thought still didn’t please me. It hadn’t pleased me the first time it crossed my mind, or in any of the times since. Truthfully, it probably annoyed me more now, if only because I’d had longer to imagine it. I wasn’t looking forward to having to deal with her around Revik, or the b.s. that would come out of her mouth whenever she thought she could get away with it.

  I hadn’t talked to her since her first attempts to communicate with me in the sellers’ room, partly because I didn’t want her figuring out who I was.

  I didn’t want her knowing anything about me, not until I was ready to get us out of there.

  We walked leisurely under the lightly-misted, virtually-enhanced walkway as it circumnavigated a lotus-shaped pool surrounded by deck chairs on one side, and a sprawling lake of crystal-blue water on the other. I couldn’t tear my eyes off the shocking turquoise hue of the lake; my eyes followed its course as it wound around nearby glass buildings, outdoor pagodas, and more snaking walkways.

  The orange-eyed seer walked beside me.

  One of his guards walked on my other side, the s
ame one who’d been grabbing my ass earlier. Kat and the male seer with the high sight rank walked directly behind us, led by two more guards, one of whom drove the car on the ride over.

  I continued to look around, basically ignoring the rest of them.

  Like in Macau, I couldn’t entirely suppress the wave of unreality as I watched human women in bikinis turn over so that servants could rub tanning oil on their mostly-naked bodies. Men in bathing and business suits walked around the same area of deck, smiling at those same women, holding drinks with umbrellas in their hands––or briefcases, or beers, depending on why they were there.

  “Can you dance?” a voice asked from next to me.

  I looked over.

  He’d spoken English that time.

  Up until then, every seer in the group alternated between Arabic and Prexci, even Kat, who appeared to be fluent in both. My crash-course in Arabic as a lead-up to this op left my fluency spotty but serviceable. I could understand it, which had been my primary goal. I could also speak it––reasonably well, according to Revik––just with a thick accent.

  Since I’d had no illusions I’d learn it well enough to pass as a native under our time constraints, both things more or less met my goals.

  I found the orange-eyed seer watching me closely as those thoughts flickered through my mind, curiosity reflected in his nearly opaque irises.

  “Depends on what you mean,” I said, answering in the same.

  He smiled. “You are American.”

  “I learned English there, yes,” I said, realizing my mistake.

  I likely wouldn’t have been able to hide the American accent in Prexci, so maybe it didn’t matter, but I still had to force my eyes forward, to not glance at Kat to see if she’d recognized my voice when I spoke the only language she’d ever heard me speak.

  I’d been teased by Maygar and others that my Prexci had a mish-mash of accents, anyway, given that I’d originally learned it from Revik. Since Revik alternated between German, Russian, American and British accents in his own Prexci, in addition to the formal variants he knew, I’d adopted a lot of his quirks.

  I hadn’t been trained to mimic accents yet, and now I was regretting that, too.