Shards of Hope

  Getting Amin's nod, he turned to Vasic and Judd. "I need you two to speak to the other teleporters, make sure we have the capacity for the transfer."

  "It will have to be done in pieces," Vasic said. "But we should be able to put the pieces together as long as DarkRiver is willing to give us instructions."

  Judd turned to Vasic. "I can't see them saying no. It's not like the squad's planning to go into construction."

  "No." Arrows had other skills, skills that had a multitude of uses--and they didn't all have to do with death, not under Aden's watch.

  "There's also Kaleb," Cris said, her next words as pragmatic as the neat little ponytail in which she usually wore her dark brown hair--and the lack of flash with which she handled a sniper rifle. "No point keeping him out since we all know he can go anywhere he wants."

  Aden still wasn't sure about trusting the cardinal Tk, but Cris was right. They might as well use his abilities should he agree to assist. "Vasic--you or Judd touch base with Kaleb. Amin and I will speak to the DarkRiver alpha about the construction."

  The rest of the meeting was taken up with the finer details of what would be a seismic shift in Arrow lives. Zaira, he said when she would've left with the others, I need to speak to you.

  I've been away from Venice too long. Alejandro is unstable. Shifting her attention to Vasic, she asked the teleporter if he could give her a lift, was gone a second later.

  Aden didn't stop her. If Zaira didn't want to do something, she wouldn't do it. She had to choose to come to him.

  *

  ZAIRA arrived in Venice knowing she was running away. "Thank you," she said to Vasic. "I believe Marjorie wanted to speak to you. Do you have a few minutes?"

  At Vasic's nod, she directed him to Marjorie's location, then headed out to check on Alejandro. He wasn't in the compound, but, aware he didn't like to wander far, she did a sweep and found him standing beside a nearby canal. He wasn't alone.

  A large man was gesticulating and poking Alejandro. That could've been lethal for the man in question if Zaira hadn't given Alejandro an order not to attack civilians who weren't a deadly threat. Because though his brain was damaged in certain ways, Alejandro retained all his offensive and defensive skills. He could kill most untrained individuals in a matter of seconds. As she came closer, she heard what the man was saying.

  "I've seen you lumbering around. You're a big dumb lunk, aren't you?" Spittle flew out of the stranger's mouth, cruel laughter on his face. "You got any fucking brains at all?" The man continued to poke at Alejandro. "I told you this area is ours. No Psy scum allowed. Get lost or I'll show you the sharp end of my favorite knife."

  Zaira could've ignored the insult to Psy, but never to one of her people. Especially not to someone who was deeply vulnerable on a level this bully of a man couldn't understand. Normally, she'd have threatened the man into retreat. Today, so soon after her disconnection from the Net, the rage not yet trapped in the abyss where it lived, the switch in her brain, the one that had been thrown when she was a child, it flipped again.

  She saw her hand punch out, hit the male in the nose. That took considerable control--she could've killed him with a single hit. Instead, she just punched him again and swept his legs out from under him. Blood flew and he was on the ground, his bulk no defense against a fully trained Arrow.

  No defense at all against Zaira in a rage.

  At some point, her arm began to hurt and she was aware the man wasn't moving, but she couldn't stop. He'd belittled Alejandro, threatened to harm him in the future. Zaira had to put a stop to it right now. No one could be permitted to see her or her people as weak, because the weak got hurt and no one was ever again going to hurt her.

  Zaira.

  When Aden's voice sliced through her mind like a hot blade, she shrugged it off. He couldn't be here. She'd left him, left the man she wanted more than anything. But his strong hands were pulling her off her target, his hold not painful but resolute. She went to snap his wrist, couldn't make herself harm him. Changing direction, she twisted and kicked out in an effort to escape, get back to the man with a face smeared in red.

  Arms clamping around her, Aden turned her forcefully away from the body. She caught a fleeting glimpse of another man. A tall one with winter gray eyes and dark hair. Some part of her said she knew who he was, but she couldn't process the thought right then, her mind hot red.

  When the world shimmered around her, she screamed in untrammeled rage, conscious she was being teleported away. Then Aden was releasing her, the other man was gone, and they were alone in a moonlit desert, rolling sand dunes as far as the eye could see. Turning on Aden, she slammed herself into his body, taking him to the ground with her momentum. "He was mine!" she yelled, lifting her arm with the intent of plowing her bloodied and scraped fist into his face.

  Instead of bringing up his forearm to block the blow, he placed his hands on her hips and just looked her in the eye, the quiet, intense power of him a hum in the air. She couldn't bring down her fist, couldn't complete the hit. Muscles straining as she held the position, she said, "I had him."

  "Yes," Aden said, no horror in his tone. "Vasic tells me he's barely alive. He'll be in surgery for hours to reconstruct his face."

  It felt as if her arm would break if she didn't bring it down.

  Getting off this man she couldn't hurt, she rose to her feet, spun around to find something to fight, but everywhere she looked, there was only sand. It dissolved to nothing when she picked it up to throw, wasn't solid enough to pummel. Dropping to her knees, she screamed and screamed but the rage continued to boil in her until it consumed her, became her, became everything.

  The arms that came around her were strong but didn't cage. Still she broke away, her hands gripping fistfuls of sand. The screams kept coming. They made her throat raw, stole the air in her lungs until there was no more sound and every muscle in her body ached, but the tension, it wouldn't leave her. She felt as if she'd shatter with a single wrong move, break apart from the fury inside her.

  The madness had come.

  *

  ADEN tugged Zaira back against him when she went silent, a rigid figure on her knees in the sand. She didn't resist this time, but neither did she cooperate, her body stiff and her hands fisted. His own pulse was a drum, his fury for her a roar in his blood. "You're safe," he said, not sure what made him choose those words. "You're safe. I'm here."

  Knowing the horrors of the mental landscape in which she might be trapped, he spoke to the nightmare. "You aren't locked in that cell anymore." Never again would anyone imprison her and he wouldn't allow the past to, either. "You live in the light."

  She didn't respond, didn't say a word. It was as if she wasn't there anymore, as if she'd gone far away from this world where she'd been tortured and hurt and made to see herself as a monster.

  No. "I won't let you go." He had no compunction in ripping his own shields wide open for her. "I need you."

  Again, no verbal response, but when he eased her to the sand with him, she stretched out her legs. Keeping one arm under her neck and curving it around the front of her body, he put his other arm around her waist and held her tight against his own body so she'd remember this world, remember him. She was so still. Zaira was never still. There was too much fire inside her small form--and too much pain she'd never acknowledged.

  It was pure chance he'd been there to stop her from killing the man who'd triggered her rage. Courtesy of Aden's mother making a request to speak to Aden, Vasic had just brought him in from Central Command when Alejandro had run into the compound. Aden had known immediately that something was seriously wrong even before Alejandro said, "Zaira isn't Zaira!"

  The other man's words circled in Aden's skull now. Would the Zaira he knew come back to him? The Zaira who burned so bright even behind the strictures of Arrow discipline. The Zaira who saw parts of him no one else ever had. The Zaira who had always been his unspoken dream.

  Or was she lost in a nightmare world formed
of old horrors and older pain?

  "Zaira," he said again, his breath making a curl at her ear waft gently before lying back down against her skin. "Stay here. Stay with me."

  No answer.

  Chapter 35

  ADEN REFUSED TO give up. He couldn't, wouldn't take her back like this. Never would he put Zaira in a position where others might see her as weak or helpless.

  He may as well carve out her heart.

  "The first time Vasic teleported me to this desert," he said into the heartbreaking silence, "I didn't understand why he came to such places. All I saw was endless nothing." He slid one hand up and down her arm, wishing she wasn't in uniform, that he could touch her skin. "I think that was what Vasic saw at first, too. But by the time he brought me to it, he'd started to see how much existed here in the nothingness."

  He pointed. "Look over there. See the grasses. I can't understand how they survive, much less the small insects you sometimes see. But there's life in this barren landscape and there's beauty." Taking a handful of sand, he allowed it to fall slowly through his fingers in front of her. "Even now, the moonlight hits the silica and the minerals within. In sunlight, it can be blinding, but I prefer it in the moonlight."

  "I told you, you were never Silent." The words were a rasp of sound from a ravaged throat.

  The hand crushing his own throat eased its grip. "That means I must be very, very good at shielding."

  "Why won't you just admit I'm right? We both know it."

  "Because then what would we argue about?" He closed both arms around her again, wanting to hold on forever--but Zaira couldn't be held. She'd have to come to him, have to choose him even after the horror and the nightmare and despite the very real fear that haunted her. He was selfish when it came to her, would ask it, but he'd never turn his back on her if she said no.

  Zaira's name would always be written on his heart.

  They lay there for a long time, watching the moon rise to its highest point over the sands, bathe them in silver. "Let me see your hands."

  She lifted one, allowed him to cup it, examine the damage.

  "You're badly bruised and cut up."

  "I'll live." Dropping her hand back down, with his curled around it, she stared out at the moon, but her next words had nothing to do with the landscape. "They gave it names--antisocial personality disorder was one. I can't remember the others, but in the family, we always just referred to it as the madness. Like it was a sentient being out to hunt us."

  "You're not mad."

  "You can't make that true by saying it, Aden." Her head remained turned toward the moon, her profile fine and haunted by echoes of nightmare. "My family is one of those that was meant to be helped by Silence."

  "Silence was flawed from the beginning."

  "Yes." A deeper breath before she fell back into the quiet, shallow rhythm that barely seemed enough to keep her alive. "It clearly didn't restrain my parents, though it gave them the appearance of sanity. But it helped me."

  "If I've never been Silent, then neither have you." Zaira's emotionless discipline wasn't something external that had been forced on her. It was an internal winter of the soul, one she'd chosen in childhood in order to survive.

  Her hand moved under his as she flexed her fingers, fingers that had to be stiffening up. "I took pieces of Silence, used those pieces to build a cage to keep the rage and the insanity inside. The cage shattered in the RainFire aerie and I've been trying to rebuild it since. I'm failing."

  Aden took the first clear breath he'd taken since leaving RainFire. "You say you have the madness, but what I saw today was anger." He didn't know why she'd attacked the male but her raw fury had been unmistakable.

  "I was totally out of control." Stark words. "If you hadn't pulled me off that man, I would've killed him."

  "And if you didn't have anger inside you, you'd be inhuman." He thought of the classified recordings he'd seen, recordings made by her family during her punishments for purposes of "monitoring the progress of the education program." It had been sadism, pure and simple. It was her father who was a Neve, but he'd clearly found his perfect partner in Zaira's mother. The two had enjoyed watching Zaira suffer. And she had suffered.

  A small girl, fine boned and with dark eyes, dark hair, trying futilely to protect herself against belts and canes and whips.

  In the later recordings, she'd simply curled into herself like a turtle inside its shell, taking the blows on her back and arms and legs. Until they'd forced her hands up above her head and beaten and beaten her as she spun suspended from a hook in the ceiling. Her blood had soaked her shift, splattered the walls.

  And Aden, for the first time in his life, had understood rage. Even then, believing himself Silent, he'd understood rage. He'd been glad her parents were dead, that she'd beaten them to a pulp. If she hadn't, he would've gone out that day and done it himself. As it was, he had gone out and made sure no other Neve child was in the same situation. The warning he'd left for those who might attempt such horror in the future had stained the air with sick fear.

  "Your anger is honest. It's real." He had to make her understand that it wasn't her fury at fault; it was her refusal to accept it. "Ivy says that the things we hold inside, the nightmares we stifle, have far more power than the things we expose to the light of day." He hadn't betrayed Zaira's trust by asking specifically about her, the question a general one, but he thought Ivy knew. She was an empath--she saw into hearts, even ones stunted from years of deprivation. "Accept your anger, Zaira, and you'll strip it of its power."

  Zaira was quiet for a long time. "I don't believe you."

  Aden realized at that instant that Zaira would believe his words only when he proved them true, and the only way he could prove them true was if she didn't retreat, as he could already feel her doing. "Don't go."

  "I can't leave this desert until Vasic returns--though I will try to walk out eventually."

  "Will you face me?"

  Not an immediate response, but she did eventually turn.

  "Don't go," he said again, bringing his hand up to lie against her face. "Don't step back from the world again. Don't leave me alone."

  Dark eyes that hid so much. "I'll give my life for you." Fingers pressing to his lips when he would've spoken. "This is my peace." Her breath brushed his skin, so warm and alive even when she was shutting down in front of his eyes. "Let me live it. Let me be as normal as I can be."

  Aden had spent his life fighting. For his Arrows, for the Net, for a better future . . . and for Zaira. He could've done so forever, but right then, he realized he couldn't when his battle would be at the expense of her sanity and her peace. He would not make her feel hounded, would not make her feel as if she wasn't good enough, as if she was too broken for him.

  He would take her exactly as she was, because one thing was true, would always be true: "I'm yours." It was his turn to stop her words. "Just stay with me," he said. "In any way you want."

  "You deserve better." Rough, broken words.

  "There's no one better than you."

  "I'll be the best soldier you ever have," she repeated in a shattered whisper.

  "I know." It would have to be enough.

  Chapter 36

  BLAKE HAD BEGUN to "court" Beatrice. He'd started quietly by calling her into his office and commending her on her performance during a weapons drill. The truth was that she'd been average--not good, not bad. Acceptable. He'd praised her nevertheless and he thought he might have been the first person ever to do so.

  The following day, he'd attended her hand-to-hand combat session, and spent time with her afterward, offering her personal tutelage. They'd spent two hours alone in an outdoor training area, and he'd been careful to encourage her, mimicking things he so often heard Cris saying to her students. The need for such approval was a weakness, but he'd chosen Beatrice because she was weak.

  First he had to build her up, make her look to him for approval . . . then he had to break her down so she stopped th
inking for herself and became his creature. That was why he'd berated her for a mistake toward the end of a session, after making sure he'd been nothing but encouraging and complimentary to that point. She'd all but crumpled inward. When he'd told her it was all right, that she could learn to correct her error, she'd agreed to another hour of instruction.

  It wouldn't take long to break her to his will; she was already isolated and submissive, and he'd quickly become her "friend." He'd kill her without hesitation if she proved a mistake, but he didn't think it would come to that. Beatrice was hungry for approval, for attention. If she hadn't been such a well-behaved Arrow trainee, the trainers would've realized that she was fundamentally unsuited to the squad.

  Then again, perhaps not. Beatrice needed to cling to something and the squad had given her the chance. He'd simply give her a far more individual opportunity. Once she was his, once she'd made the first cut, there'd be no going back. Satisfied with her progress to date, he was in the right frame of mind to receive a call from the individual who'd been so encouraging of his tendencies.

  "Anyone in particular you'd like me to kill?" He knew the support he was receiving had to have a political motive, but it was working in his favor so he had no argument. "An intransigent business associate, perhaps."

  "No. We can't be connected on any level." The speaker's voice was made unrecognizable by what had to be a simple scrambling program on their end. "I reached out to you because I don't agree with the direction the Net and, it appears, the Arrows are taking."

  "Out of the goodness of your heart?" he said, pointedly using a human expression. "I'm touched. I was under the impression it had to do with undermining the fall of Silence." It had taken him time, but he was positive he knew the identity of his supporter--it had been a slipup during their last conversation that had given him the first clue and he'd taken that and dug.

  He might be a psychopath but he was also a damn good Arrow.

  "If that is my motive?"

  "Silence or not, I have the same playground." The only difference was that now, his psychopathy would be considered an aberration; under Silence, his lack of empathy had been a coveted state of being.