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)
“No amount of scrubbing could remove the filth that clung to me after I walked through the minds of people who are warped in ways most of the world will never understand.” She’d stood in the shower attempting to get clean until her skin was raw and thick with welts. “I couldn’t sleep with the rage inside me. I paced all night, ended up so wired that my mind buzzed with a thousand angry bees.”
Adam shot her a glance before returning his eyes to the dark road into the Canyon. “It led to your first reconditioning?” His entire frame was a lesson in anger silent and deadly.
“No, it led to my first execution,” she said, and was aware of his head jerking toward her before he looked back to the road. “It’s an unspoken rule in the system that Js are never to be left alone with certain types of criminals. We…break. No amount of reconditioning can fix that tendency.”
She spoke on because this time in the dark might be all they’d ever have and she wanted him to remember her…because he might.
Reagan was gone.
Saffron, Yúzé, and Bram would follow her into the abyss all too soon.
Her family of record had long erased her from their minds.
Adam Garrett was the only one who might one day want to remember her…and she wanted him to know her. Not who she’d been in that long-ago hallway, but who she’d become over the years in between. Even if what she was about to say might repulse him.
“During my time, we had to undergo mandatory and intensive counseling sessions with specialist M-Psy—it was an attempt to program us not to kill.” The M-Psy hadn’t been empaths, of course, and thus had stood no chance against the steel-trap minds of Js who had long ago learned to pretend to be Silent when theirs was a designation that could never be perfect under the protocol.
“We might even have been the only designation under Silence to receive counseling as part of our training. To their credit, the Ms linked to the J Corps did their best. They were as traumatized as their Js in the end—losing client after client to suicide turns out to have a catastrophic effect on all the healing fields.” M-Psy linked to Js had higher rates of suicide and madness than any other.
“The Council kept trying nonetheless because Js were important to their hold on power. They were willing to sacrifice a few Ms in the pursuit of that power.” It wasn’t, after all, one of the rare designations.
“If you’re talking about the kind of criminals I think you are,” Adam said, his voice no longer wholly human, “then I won’t be crying any tears over their executions.”
“It’s considered vigilante justice.” Eleri didn’t disagree with that take; she also didn’t believe all vigilante justice was bad. “I got very good at releasing my anger by entering certain minds and turning them off.” There was no other way to explain the mechanism of what she did.
“Others cause the targets to mutilate themselves, or to suffer nightmares, but I like to go into their minds without warning—so the targets know they’re not in control mere seconds before they collapse of ‘natural causes.’ ”
Eleri had never questioned her actions. She’d walked in those minds, knew exactly the horrors they’d committed. “The problem with my anger was that it kept growing. Until there were three deaths in my vicinity within the space of three days.
“Multiple senior Js pulled me aside and warned me I was at risk of total rehabilitation unless I reined it in—the authorities turned a blind eye to this ‘minor problem’ with active Js, but they had their limits.”
She could still remember Reagan telling her that if she got herself rehabilitated, she’d leave the world with one less very effective soldier against evil. “Our version of final justice is a temporary release,” he’d pointed out. “You have more than a decade of active service left in you—so many more monsters yet to stop—but you won’t get the chance if you don’t get a grip.”
He’d been wrong about how many years she had left, but right otherwise.
“I didn’t want to rein it in,” Eleri said. “I was a being of rage by then. But Reagan had saved me in so many ways—first by telling me never to let my ability to bend memories come to the attention of the authorities, and second, by covering up some of my executions by calling in favors he’d collected over a lifetime. He asked me to make it out.”
Eleri’s spine felt as stiff as a rod of steel. “To do that, I had to put my rage in a place where I could control it.” It had caused her physical pain at the start, this version of Silence she’d chosen for herself. “I might not have managed to hold on to it, but two months after I began to try, Reagan chose death…and it was the last promise he asked of me.”