It was the hand attached to the arm on which the gauntlet was grafted. A gauntlet that could function on many levels. One of which was to control weapons that could annihilate hundreds in a single strike. The hands he wanted to put on Ivy were of a killer.
Ice doused the glowing embers. "I need to check the compound."
Ivy grabbed a thick orange cardigan she must've forgotten on a chair when she went to bed, and shrugged into it. "I'll come with you."
"You should remain safe in the cabin."
She stepped up to him, jaw set. "If there's a threat outside, you can 'port me out before I so much as see the threat. I don't want to be alone." A glance down at Rabbit. "Not that you're not wonderful," she reassured her pet.
He saw the quiver of her lip before she bit down on it and realized the level to which she'd sublimated her own fear to check on the others. "It's a cold night. You should wear this." Bringing in a heavy jacket he used when he had to go into bitterly cold environments and didn't want to waste energy maintaining his body temperature, he helped her into it. It swallowed her up, the zipped-up collar coming past her mouth and the sleeves swamping her arms until he folded them up.
That done, he nudged her to the kitchen counter. "Make your favorite tea." He knew the taste gave her comfort. "I can wait."
When they stepped out into the starry night five minutes later, Ivy with her hands cupped around the mug of tea and her feet in snow boots, Rabbit scampered out after them. Giving Vasic her tea to hold, Ivy petted and cuddled the dog before carrying him back to his little bed. "Stay here, Rabbit. It's too cold outside for you," he heard her murmur gently, the sound carrying in the stillness of the night.
She was with him again soon afterward. Tugging the hood of the jacket up over her head, he stepped out to begin patrolling the compound. Nerida, get some rest, he said to one of the sentries. I'll take over.
The other Tk sent back a quick confirmation.
"How do you measure harm to your Arrows?" Ivy's voice was familiar in the darkness a quarter of an hour later. "Is it a breakdown in their Silence or something else?"
"It's different for each member of the squad."
She paused with him in the night shadow of the trees. "Some of them," she said, tone solemn, "they'll never break Silence, will they?"
They. As if he wasn't on that list.
"A few are physiologically incapable of doing so." He thought about how much to reveal, not because he didn't trust Ivy, but because certain knowledge would put her at risk. "Part of our training used to involve a drug that can reset neural pathways if used too long. It intensifies natural psychic ability but eventually leaves the Arrow with no sense of self."
"That's so sad." Stark pain in her expression, her empty mug hanging from one finger; she didn't seem to notice when he teleported it away. "Are the victims conscious of what's been done to them?"
"No." That, Vasic thought, was the only mercy. "They remain members of the squad, and we'll make certain they live out their lives at the optimal level possible." It wouldn't be anything those in the outside world would consider a good life, but it would be a hundred times better than anything Ming LeBon would've permitted.
Their former leader would've simply used up those men and women, then ordered their executions at the hands of medics who had promised to heal. Patton, the only other Tk-V Vasic had ever met, had been put down like a dog when he became so dependent on instruction that he was useless in the field.
An unfortunate error in his Jax regime, had been the note on the medical file Vasic had hacked into when he was old enough. The regime is being modified to ensure this type of extreme compliance does not reoccur. Vasic should be useful far beyond the usual age of termination of Arrows.
"And you?" Ivy asked, touching her hand to his gauntlet as she'd already done once before. "Did they use the drug on you?"
Vasic considered the delicate fingers on the machinery that encased him. "Aren't you repelled by the gauntlet?"
"What?" She glanced down, frowned. "No, and stop avoiding the question."
He thought he should tell her everything he'd done, so she'd understand who it was she touched, but then she'd be afraid of him . . . and he didn't want Ivy afraid. "When I was younger, yes," he said in answer to her question about Jax. "Later, thanks to a subterfuge by Judd, all Arrows were taken off it."
"And you were fine?"
"I'm much, much better at delicate 'ports than anyone realizes." They should have, after watching him deal with blood until not even a single fine droplet of it remained in carpet, but no one had ever made the connection.
Ivy's eyes widened. "You 'ported out the drug while it was still in the delivery system." A whisper that held a passionate emotion he couldn't pinpoint. "That's incredible."
"Unfortunately, it took me time to learn the trick." He'd been forced to work under the influence of the drug for dozens of missions and whenever Ming LeBon required his teleportation skills. As a result of the latter, he'd had more Jax in his system as a teenager than most experienced members of the squad.
He'd escaped a permanent reset by three injections at most.
"I couldn't do the same for the others, except on random occasions when I was in the room while they were being injected." He'd tried, but he couldn't risk giving away the fact that the squad wasn't as under Ming LeBon's control as the former Councilor had believed.
He hadn't needed Aden to tell him that those they lost to the drug, if given the choice, would've chosen that fate rather than jeopardize their brothers-in-arms. That made the losses weigh no less heavily on Vasic's heart, adding to the other bodies that lay on it, until the organ had gone permanently numb.
Ivy's hand tightened on the gauntlet. He could feel the pressure of her touch through the sensors that linked every single square millimeter of the hard black surface that protected the delicate computronics beneath to living nerve tissue. But he couldn't feel her. And for the first time, he began to question his choice to allow himself to be used as the guinea pig for the experimental fusion.
That was when he became aware of the sheen of wetness in her eyes. "Ivy? You're in distress."
"You carry so much guilt, Vasic." Raw, her voice sounded as if it hurt. "A crushing weight of it."
Vasic thought of the deaths he'd meted out in darkness, the lives he'd erased, and shook his head. "No, Ivy. I can never carry enough." Never do anything to balance the scales.
*
IVY wanted to pound against the armor that insulated Vasic, smash apart the gauntlet on his arm, though she knew her anger was misdirected. It wasn't the outer shell that mattered. She could batter it to pieces and still never breach the ice that encased him.
He held me today.
Her body ached at the memory of his strength against her, his hand so tender and gentle on the back of her head. It was nothing he would've done at the start of this operation. And . . . and he'd caressed her with his gaze, the silver of his eyes molten. Melting at the memory, she counseled herself to be patient.
"Did you and Aden ever play together?" she asked, cuddling into the coat that smelled comfortingly of him. Clean soap and a warm male scent that was distinctly his. Last time Sascha had visited, Ivy had seen the cardinal empath nuzzle her mate's throat as they walked away. Ivy wanted to do that with Vasic, draw in his scent directly from his throat.
He gave me his coat.
She smiled. Expert teleporter that he was, he could've no doubt called in something that was a better fit. He hadn't.
"Not ordinary games," he said into the hush of the night. "We didn't have the time, or the freedom."
"I'm sorry." And angry, so angry. No one had the right to steal a childhood.
"We did, however," he added, "find ways to keep ourselves busy during the rare instances we somehow escaped supervision. Once we managed to paint zebra stripes on every wall of a training room."
Delight cut through her anger. "How did you manage that?"
"Aden and I stole t
he paint from work elsewhere in the facility. Then," he said, "he created a distraction while I painted as fast as I could. Afterward, I hauled myself into the ceiling with the paint and the brushes, and crawled my way out. No one ever discovered it was the two of us that did it, since we left no clues and the head of the training center vetoed large-scale telepathic scans."
"Why didn't you teleport out for your escape?" Ivy asked with a laugh.
Vasic took so long to reply that her smile faded, dread growing in her abdomen. "I had a psychic leash on my personal 'porting ability as a child," he said at last. "It was the only way anyone could keep me where they wanted me."
Ignoring everything else he'd said, she focused only on the most important, most terrible part. "They created a lock on you like I had on my mind?" Except where she'd been unaware of what she was losing, he'd been fully conscious of it. It must've felt like having a limb hacked off.
"That doesn't work for subdesignation V. Our ability is too deeply integrated into our minds."
"Like breathing," she said, her horror growing.
"Yes. Not fully autonomous, but close enough. The only way to control me was to use another Tk-V to do it." He stilled as a wolf's haunting howl rose on the air in the distance, followed by another a moment later, then another, until it was a wild symphony.
Hairs rising on the back of her neck and breath frosting the air, she turned toward the sound. "I wish we were allowed to go farther, to interact with the changelings."
"They're protecting their vulnerable."
"Yes." The fact this compound existed at all was a huge trust on the part of DarkRiver and SnowDancer, the biggest step in the relationship between the Psy and the changeling races for over a century. "The other Tk-V," she said when the wolf song died down, leaving only a lingering sensory echo of its primal beauty. "He was an Arrow, too?"
Vasic nodded.
She waited for him to say something, but he'd answered her question, and as she'd already learned, he wasn't a man who talked more than he had to. The snow crunched under her boots as they walked on, the sky a deep midnight dotted with stars. She didn't interrupt his silence this time, her thoughts of a boy who'd grown up in a cage, taught to become a tool his captors could use . . . of the man who'd survived that with the will to protect a flame inside his heart.
Chapter 22
Kaleb Krychek may have mandated the fall of Silence, but he gives us no answers for who we are without the Protocol. He leaves us to drown.
Anonymous PsyNet posting
COMFORTABLY ENSCONCED IN the sun-drenched breakfast nook, Sahara completed the lesson she'd downloaded and considered the question asked by the lecturer. "What is the meaning of good governance?"
Kaleb looked up from the counter where he'd just finished preparing two nutrient drinks. Drinking from the glass he passed her, she blew him a kiss. "I love you."
"You only say that because of my cherry flavoring."
She almost splurted the drink out of her nose. "And to think people say you have no sense of humor."
Having finished his drink, Kaleb did up a cuff link. Sahara's stomach heated as it always did when she watched him dress or undress.
"Why are you studying politics when you're living it?"
She walked over to finish buttoning his shirt and do up his tie, the strip of deep blue, almost black silk lying around his neck in readiness for her touch. "Because," she said, delighting in this small ritual that had quietly become a part of their lives, "people who think they know everything end up becoming despots."
Kaleb's hands on her hips, his thumbs brushing over her skin after he nudged up her knit top as he had a way of doing. "Good governance," he said, "is acting for your people rather than for your own gain."
Her fingers stilled on his tie. "Yes," she whispered to the man she adored, a man who'd been brutally scarred by "leaders" acting for their own selfish interest.
"That is your definition." His fingers squeezed her hips. "Mine is to do nothing that would make you ashamed to be mine."
Sometimes, he broke her heart. "Never will I be ashamed to be yours."
Kaleb bent his head toward her, his eyes a moonless night. "Don't say things like that, Sahara. What will I become if I don't fear losing you through my actions?"
"You'll always be mine." She cupped his face, his jaw smooth. "And I won't let you cross those lines."
He said he had no conscience, but he loved her with a wild devotion that made her feel safe, feel whole, feel cherished. In that love she saw hope for who they'd become together.
His kiss was raw, sexual, his hands lifting to place her on the counter. Standing between her spread thighs, his shoulders beautifully muscled under the fine fabric of his black shirt, he kissed her as if she was his air. She thrust one hand in the damp strands of his hair, cupped his nape with the other, and kissed him back with the same hunger. They'd both been deprived of touch for so long, and now they denied themselves nothing.
When he tugged up her top, she lifted her arms to allow him to pull it off. Wrapping those arms around his neck afterward, she luxuriated in the feel of his hands on her skin. "I thought you had a meeting," she said, kissing his jaw, the line of his throat, the masculine scent of him overlaid by the clean bite of his aftershave.
"I've told Silver to postpone it."
Leaning back, she simply looked at him, her dangerous lover who always put her first. "We'll beat it," she said, conscious the infection was a problem about which he never quite stopped thinking. "With the empaths and the Arrows and our race's will to survive."
Kissing the upper curve of her breast, Kaleb bracketed her rib cage with his hands. "The Arrows and the empaths--perhaps. But you have more faith in our race than I do. Right now most are burying their heads in the sand, hoping I'll tell them who to be, what to become. They're sheep."
She tugged up his head with a hand fisted in his hair. "If they are, it's because they've been trained to be that way for a century. A good leader will lead them to true independence. You'll lead them to freedom."
Kaleb might not be a white knight, but he was the knight the Psy race needed. Strong, fearless, and willing to make the hard decisions. And he was hers. Wrapping her thighs around him, she sank into the kiss, into him.
Chapter 23
There have always been unsubstantiated rumors of a hidden designation in the PsyNet. Sascha Duncan's defection brought those rumors to the surface, only for them to be thoroughly quashed by the Council at the time. Now, however, new whispers are coming to the fore--and the Ruling Coalition has yet to make a statement to either confirm or deny their veracity.
PsyNet Beacon
ADEN MET WITH Vasic close to dawn the next morning, the two of them standing near the trees looking out over the mist-licked peace of the compound.
"Nightmares," the other man said, referencing the telepathic conversation they'd had the previous night.
"Ivy was unable to give me any specifics." Vasic had asked toward the end of their walk, when she'd seemed more centered, no longer afraid. "She described it as a feeling of suffocating darkness."
"Was she discouraged by the incident?"
"No."
The single word answer was characteristic of Vasic, yet the depth of confidence in it intrigued Aden. Vasic had stopped getting to know people in tandem with his increasing remoteness when it came to the world. Even with new members of the squad, he made no effort beyond what was necessary for him to function as part of the team. And still, he was one of the first ports of call for any Arrow in trouble. Not because he was a Tk-V, but because he inspired trust on a visceral level.
Vasic simply did not let people down.
"The other empaths?" Aden asked, remembering how he'd felt that same trust as a boy. It had never altered.
"I haven't had a chance to assess them, or to speak in depth with their Arrows, but it's possible we may lose one or two."
Empaths, Aden had learned from Vasic, weren't all the same. Rationally
, Aden had already known that, but the mystery of the E designation was such that he'd lumped them into a single mental category.
"The recent episodes of violence in the Net"--Vasic put his arms behind his back--"seem erratic and small scale."
"The agitators tend to be individuals who are finding it difficult to adapt to the fall of Silence, but in one case at least, it was a surviving Pure Psy sublieutenant." Aden looked down at the small white dog that had appeared out of the mist to sit at his feet, its shining black eyes trained on him.
The canine belonged to Ivy Jane, he remembered. "We were able to eliminate the sublieutenant and his attendant cell," he told Vasic. "The cell was planning a larger-scale event that had no chance of success, though they were too wrapped up in their fanatical ideology to see that." Pure Psy didn't have the necessary independence of thought to function efficiently without their leader. And that leader was dead.
"Krychek?"
"He's left the Pure Psy cleanup to us and is concentrating on ensuring the Net remains stable." The latter couldn't be done by brute force alone, but Krychek was far more than that, the former Councilor's intelligence a blade, his connections labyrinthine.
"We don't need you on the team handling the cleanup," he said, to head off any offer Vasic might've made. "Your skills are better served here."
Vasic's gray eyes were penetrating when they met Aden's. "I can't leave the Es, not given the security leak we had with Lianne and the proximity of the infection." A glance at his gauntlet to check incoming data before he turned back to Aden. "That doesn't mean I'm not cognizant of your attempts to shield me from overt violence."
"I've never done anything behind your back." Aden had only ever had one true friend, someone he knew would fight for him and with him regardless of whether he held any power or not. The others in the squad he trusted, but Vasic occupied an entirely different place in his life, until it was as if their blood was the same. Aden would do whatever was necessary to make sure the other man made it, though he knew it might well be an impossible task.