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)
Adam frowned. “How late?”
“After dark but just. Mi-ja was in the administration building—I could see the lights.” She pulled out a miniature organizer from her pocket, tapped at it, and small clear screens flipped out on all four corners to seamlessly create a much larger visual field.
Adam whistled. “Expensive tech.”
“Js are well compensated due to the short terms we’re able to work during our lives,” Eleri said, her eyes on her screen.
Adam’s hands squeezed the steering wheel. “Why,” he said, asking the question he’d avoided since the day she’d walked back into his life, “are there no old Js?” It was a fact of which he’d become consciously aware two years after he’d met her—because he hadn’t been able to stop reading news articles about J-Psy despite himself.
Eleri didn’t reply, her silence a heavy weight in the air.
“Tell me,” he demanded, stripped down to the bone from what she’d already shared about her reconditioning and what it meant.
No flinch from his passenger, but she looked up from her organizer. “The only old Js are the ones who managed to stop active work at an early age and stay under the radar.
“Active Js tend to self-terminate more often than any other Psy specialty. Sensitivity can lead to Exposure. Gloves, shields, nothing works at that point. We become a living and wide-open psychic nerve. We prefer to exit the world prior to that—because we can’t once Exposed. We’re no longer functional.”
Adam’s talons thrust out of his fingers, his falcon’s feathers a shadow under the skin. “Why aren’t you angry? Why aren’t you furious at the injustice of having given your life to a system that just throws you away?”
Her apathy enraged him.
Eleri’s response was to change the subject. “I had a friend in Enforcement check if Dae had a record.”
Adam wasn’t one to let things go, but this wasn’t just about the two of them—because that conversation, they would be having. “He didn’t last time the clan ran a check.”
“Two hits while he was still a juvenile, both for breaking and entering. Wiped from his adult record, but my contact has ways to see below the wipe.”
Adam thought past his instinctive reaction to Dae. “Lot of the human kids in Raintree do petty shit like that, though I wouldn’t have guessed Dae to be one of them.” The falcon fledglings knew not to even think about it, because the clan’s punishment would be far worse than anything Enforcement meted out.
WindHaven kids also had the whole sky to burn off their energy, could travel long distances on a whim if they wanted to go to a club or meet up with distant friends. And they were changeling, they didn’t hanker for big-city living beyond taking flights over new regions. Flying to a private grotto to go swimming and just hang out was “peak vacation,” per his niece.
“Agreed,” Eleri said now. “It’s not anything probative.” Closing up her organizer, she slid it away into a pocket of her suit coat. “Do you know about the recent spate of strange break-ins?”
“Yeah. Deputies blamed it on ‘punk kids’ and so did the chief back at the beginning, but he was starting to change his mind.”
“The escalation. Near-contact.”
Adam nodded. “Last we talked, he was considering calling in a favor, getting a profile done. He also told people to lock their doors, but place like Raintree? No one really worries.”
He turned onto the road up to the Canyon. “As for Dae, we’ve put a tracker on his van.” Adam had asked Pascal to handle it, the senior wing commander one of the clan’s best at computronics.
“Good.” Eleri’s voice was calm. “If nothing else, it’ll eliminate him from our list. The chance my serial is non-Psy is minuscule, but Dae could be developing into another kind of predator.”
Silence again, the unspoken words between them daggers in the dark.
You were meant to be the one person I could trust without question all my life. You betrayed me.
The angry denunciation of the youth he’d been.
The man he’d grown into knew it wasn’t that simple, that Eleri had had other masters to please…and still, he couldn’t forgive her. Had it been any other day, any other event…maybe. But for her to choose not to speak when it was about justice for the cold-blooded murder of his parents?
Adam’s entire being rejected the idea of forgiveness.
Chapter 19
We failed to enter WindHaven’s home base. We don’t know why, but we tried multiple times. There is something very strange about that canyon.
—Fragment of handwritten text discovered after a fire gutted the library of Clan IceHorizon (circa 1763)
“Anger,” Eleri said into the quiet heavy with all the words she could never speak. “It’s an emotion with which I had more than a passing acquaintance in my younger years.” She could still remember the fury that had unfurled in her after her first major memory reads and recalls.