Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
She touched her finger to the teardrop, took the finger to her mouth as if to taste her own pain.
He gripped her jaw. “I can’t forgive you.” The betrayal was too huge, the anguish too enormous. “I needed you to choose me that day! I needed you to fight for us!” That it had been an irrational expectation didn’t matter, not between them. Not when it was her.
“I know.” Her hand on his heart again, and he had the sense she was listening to his heartbeat. “There can never be anything that will balance those scales.”
He wanted to shake her all over again. “How can you be like this?” he asked in a snarl before finally releasing her and striding away, the falcon inside him beating its wings.
“Js feel too much,” she said. “That’s why the Council kept reconditioning us. Reconditioning me. Making me perfect over and over again, until there’s not much of my original personality left…and nothing but a gray wall in its place.”
It wasn’t, he realized, an excuse. She’d never once tried to obfuscate things from him since the moment they met again.
The true horror of what she was saying seeped into him drop by cold drop.
Chapter 18
Further to our previous discussions on the lack of satisfactory Silence in a percentage of our younger adults, I would like to present to you an option my team has termed “reconditioning.”
It is a less rigorous process than Councilor Adelaja’s brilliant suggestion of “rehabilitation” but could be utilized for more minor cases of deviation from the protocol.
—Councilor Vey Gunasekara to fellow members of the Psy Council (circa 2013)
“What do you mean not much of your original personality left?” he demanded.
“Have you heard of rehabilitation?” She continued before he could answer. “It wipes out the person, leaves a shell behind. Reconditioning, on the other hand, just sands away the edges, smooths over any cracks, erases any hint of a breach in Silence…or it did, before the fall of the protocol.”
She shook her head. “With Js, there are always breaches. You saw that when you met me—I felt and felt deeply. Js walk in the minds of the worst of the worst—there’s no protocol that can hold strong against such a barrage from inside our shields.”
Adam knew his eyes had gone falcon long ago. Now he forced his talons back in before he began to use them on the room. “How many times?”
She stared into nothingness for a moment. “Seven, I think. Though it could be more. I stopped keeping track as much after the fourth time—I didn’t feel I had many edges left by then. There wasn’t much to protect or to mourn.”
“Sophia’s older than you. She’s not like you,” he said, wanting her to tell him this could be reversed—because the two of them? They weren’t fucking done. “I met her, saw her smile and laugh.”
“I think Sophie’s cleverer than I am, hid her edges better,” Eleri said. “But she also told me she had an experience in childhood that altered her in profound ways, anchoring her to the PsyNet. Perhaps that helped her retain more pieces of herself.”
Adam could hear neither admiration nor grief nor hope in Eleri’s voice. It was as if she was a statue frozen in time. “Can you reverse it?” he asked even when he knew there was no point.
What hope could there be for a mating born in betrayal and coated with heartbroken anger?
Eleri shook her head. “It’s why reconditioning wasn’t used more generally. It works but it eventually destroys the mind and the personality. With working Js, that’s not a bad trade-off, since before Silence, we just went insane anyway after a certain period.”
Adam’s face was hot, his falcon wanting to tear out of his skin. They’d taken everything from that sweet, pretty girl who’d wanted to give him a bandage. Even her ability to be angry at what they’d done to her. And in so doing…they’d taken everything from him. Because only now, standing here in this room where Eleri told him there could be no hope, did he realize he’d never quite given up on her.
Some desperate part of him had hoped that she would find her way to him…and find a way to make up for what she’d done.
He’d been waiting for her all this time.
Adam suddenly couldn’t think about that any longer, the weight of it too huge. Shifting on his heel, he paced mindlessly to the table where she’d obviously been working. His eye fell on a number of printouts sealed inside what appeared to be clear evidence envelopes. “What are these? You keeping a scrapbook about the Sandman?”
A pause that went on long enough that the hairs on his nape stirred. He turned, looked at her. “Eleri?”
“They were slipped under my door.” She strode over to group them together, then put them into a folder. “I’ll be handing them over to the task force—”