Chapter 33

“What for?”

“It’s so terribly romantic—a privacy bubble.”

“You mean a close-range cloaking module? That’s military tech. Where

did you—”

Leon shook his head and pulled out a palm-sized device from his jacket

pocket. A seam ran around the perimeter of the metal rectangular object,

adorned with a wheel and three buttons on one side. A tiny logo was on the

underside.

“You forget that all military tech makes its way onto the civilian market

in dumbed-down form,” he said. “This one is used by ecotourists to get close

to wildlife without scaring them off—it records a visual of the surroundings

and plays that back along with noise-cancelling waves around a holographic

static field bubble on a loop, so you can talk within it and from the outside

it’ll just look like you’re sitting there. The loop won’t hold up to close

examination, but anyone glancing at a video feed shouldn’t get immediately

suspicious.”