hadn't had time to talk about really. The Four were the four intermediaries tasked with the Displacement, the name seers used to describe the end of a particular historical period...a seer apocalypse, if you will. This would be the Third Displacement, according to seer myth, and centered around human beings...preparing them as a race for evolution to some new, higher form.
That was the pretty version.
The less-pretty version was that humanity could simply be wiped out...or enslaved. Their life wave might not make it to the next level at all, or so few might make it that they wouldn't be able to sustain themselves as a species. They could end up dark, under the control of the Dreng. They could end up parasites, lost spirits...or devolve back into an animalistic state.
The Four were supposed to help them make it to the other side. We were supposed to find some way to shift the Displacement in the right direction.
The problem was, I had no idea what that meant.
Neither did Revik, as far as I could tell.
So Revik and I were two of the Four. Feigran, who used to be called Terian, was the third, and to call him a loose cannon would be generous in the extreme.
Truthfully, he was still pretty much a full-fledged lunatic.
A brilliant, prescient lunatic who happened to know a lot of things that he couldn't explain how he knew, and who could draw both the past and the future...but a lunatic regardless. I honestly couldn't see him bringing a lot of clarity to the situation, at least in the actual planning and working end. Sure, he'd helped me with my dreams...and he was a bit less dangerous than he had been as Terian, but only because a lot less focused in his crazy.
My adoptive brother, Jon, kept trying to reach him, though.
He even seemed to develop an odd sort of rapport with him over the past year. It was ironic, really, that Jon of all people would end up being Terian's lifeline to sanity, given that Terian had tortured and nearly killed Jon before he'd turned back into Feigran. I knew Jon's boyfriend, Dorje, wasn't too thrilled with the arrangement, but since no one else could reach Feigran, I kept my mouth shut. I was pretty sure we needed some kind of line into the scrambled brain of Feigran/Terian, and right now Jon was it.
Jon seemed to know that too, because no matter how pissed off Dorje got, Jon continued to visit the psychotic seer whenever he had the time. I could tell Balidor didn't really like it either, but, like me, he didn't try to intervene.
Balidor did confide in me that Terian's interest in Jon didn't seem to be as innocent as Jon claimed. Balidor said he'd seen the seer masturbating after Jon left his room...more than once. Although it pretty much raised the ick factor to a +10 or +11, I didn't tell Jon that part, either. Needless to say, I also didn't tell Dorje.
Revik and I still had no idea who the fourth of our little quartet might be.
I felt his light charge up again once we'd descended to a few floors above the lobby. That stripped-down, business-like feel encased his light in a narrow wall. He glanced at me, handing me back one of the guns, then put his hand up to indicate he wanted me by the wall, once more out of sight of the doors when they opened.
"Anything?" he said.
He meant the upper floors. I'd been shielding from him too, I realized.
"What you expected," I said. "They've got the stairs covered. They found the cameras. They know we're seers...one of them even mentioned you. But they can't figure out a motive..."
"How many?"
"Ten humans...four seers. Two are contract employees. Two are regular, owned by the bank." I glanced up at him. "But we'll be seeing a lot more soon. They've called for backup. They still don't know for sure if we're here for the vaults or the corporate offices...they've split their people, looking for us upstairs. So the spook thing must have worked..."
I didn't know much about the program I'd fed into their network, in terms of how Wreg and Revik actually