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Our ancestors made the decision to embrace Silence after a ten-year debate. It was no quick decision, no desperate grab at any offered solution. It was, they came to believe, the only viable solution.

What I find problematic is that no one in those ten years of debate brought up the possibility of such a regime fostering psychopathy in the populace. To be clear, I believe it must have been raised as a concern—nothing else makes sense in the context of such a huge and wide-ranging discussion.

Yet no official records of such concerns survive. Which leads me to the conclusion that those records were wiped by Councils past. Our history is a patchwork quilt with countless missing pieces.

—Excerpted from draft of upcoming PsyNet Beacon editorial (pending review for accuracy)

It took everything Adam had to fight the roar of need, to not attempt to initiate skin privileges with this woman who had always, always called to his wild changeling soul. “Can a Psy cause a heart attack in an otherwise healthy person?” he asked, his tone rough.

“Yes, but it’s not an ability so much as a side effect in most cases.

It’s said that Tk-Cells can do so by exerting physical pressure on the organ, but that subdesignation is so rare that it might as well be a myth.

Telepaths can do so accidentally when pushing at a mind in order to nudge their target into doing something—the strain can lead to myocardial infarction.

“But in most cases of attempted telepathic interference, it’s a stroke that leads to death, not heart issues.

Actually creating a heart attack that passes all the medical tests?

Very, very difficult and not something I’d expect from the kind of Psy who live in this town. It’d require Arrow-level training.”

Adam knew about the Arrows due to the Trinity Accord, of which WindHaven was a member. They were the Psy race’s most deadly soldiers, black ops pushed to the nth degree. “Yeah, we definitely don’t have an undercover Arrow in town, I can promise you that.”

Adam knew exactly who lived in Raintree, and had run background checks on all the Psy who’d moved in after the fall of Silence.

“As for passing medical scrutiny—we’ll have to wait on the chief’s medical reports.

On the off chance I’m wrong about the Psy in Raintree, you pick up anything problematic? ”

Eleri shook her head, her cheekbones too sharp against her skin. “No alarm bells so far. They seem to be people who didn’t like their lives and took the chance offered by the fall of Silence to build a new one. Most were more scared of me than otherwise until I mentioned my cover story.”

“They thought you were what, an operative sent to haul them back?” Adam guessed.

“The scars of the past will take a long time to fade.” She stared off into the parking lot with that calm statement that offered no insight into what she thought about the decision her Psy ancestors had made to condition emotion out of their young.

A decision that had, from what Adam had learned, begun in a desperate attempt to keep those children safe—but ended up with psychopaths at the top of their hierarchy.

“The assault on your clanmate,” Eleri said, “the chief’s heart attack…I was the first domino.”

“Maybe. Timing doesn’t quite fit for me—you’d barely spoken to anyone when Jacques was shot.” It would’ve been easy to blame her, but if it was related to the Sandman case, then the serial murderer had always been hiding in Raintree. All Eleri had done was bring the problem into the light.

“I’m recognizable to the Sandman,” Eleri said. “His letters indicate he stalked me for years before the first letter. I wouldn’t have had to talk to him—it could be as simple as him glimpsing me when I first drove down Main Street.”

Adam’s entire body was a knot of muscle.

“Jacques would stand in front of a hundred guns if it would help expose a murderer of innocents. I do, however, think, Sandman or another bastard, the shooting was a mistake, an act of impulse—impetus as yet unknown. We need to use that mistake to pin him down.”

Eleri continued to stare out at the dawn, but her next words weren’t to do with blame, her brain clearly having shifted track with Adam’s words.

“There’s a chance he’s decompensating—some serial killers are stable for a long time, while others disintegrate into chaos with unexpected rapidity.

The pathologist on the case has reported signs of increasing violence on the brains of our victims, as if he’s losing control rather than refining his skill.

I’ve seen that kind of rapid decline before. ”

Even as Adam wondered what it had done to the girl he’d met to walk into minds vicious and twisted day after day, what it had stolen from her, how it had altered her, Eleri continued to speak.

“The assault on your clanmate could,” she said, “as easily be a thing of proximity and chance. Let’s say it’s our killer, and he is aware I’m in town. I think he’d be excited, hyped, not scared. The letters show that he wants my attention in a way that’s disturbing.”

Adam’s talons pricked at the inside of his skin. “Yet you work alone.”

“He won’t murder me. Not yet. I’m his audience.” Eleri still didn’t look at him, her gaze fathomless as she stared past him. “Let’s say seeing me arouses him on the emotional level, leading him to want to go sit in his vehicle, relive his crimes.”

“Only Jacques beat him to the site, and took flight right as the killer parked and got out,” Adam said, seeing where she was going. “It had to be someone Jacques knew, could identify.” Which meant it was also someone Adam would know, perhaps even a person he called a friend.

“It wouldn’t have mattered if the killer had kept a cool head, pretended he was out for a drive and spotted Jacques so stopped,” Eleri said. “But he couldn’t take the risk, especially not when his mind was full of what he’d done, the excitement of his crimes.”

Her eyes met his again, the hazel more green today and devoid of any hint of personality. “It can’t be about the car alone. Anyone who’s spent even a day in Raintree would know your people would react with speed to the assault on Jacques—the car was forfeit the instant the shooter took aim.”

“Not if Jacques died before calling for help.” Adam would’ve been left to search the desert for his fallen clanmate, the blood bond severed. “The shooter—possibly your killer—made a mistake, yes, but we can’t be sure which mistake.”

“You’re right.” She released the doorjamb and flexed her hand…then stared, as if suddenly aware of her exposed skin.

“Why the gloves?” Adam asked at that moment. “None of the Psy in town wear them, but I’ve seen a few others over the years.”

···

Eleri considered whether to lie or otherwise obfuscate, because to tell him the truth would be to make herself vulnerable.

But he already hated her for a lie; she wouldn’t add to that.

Not because she expected him to feel any differently about her and not because any part of her was still that young girl who’d run into him in the hallway outside the courtroom, but because she’d made a promise to herself to never again betray Adam Garrett.

She didn’t know why it mattered so much when they’d interacted only once, spoken only once.

But it did.

It always had.

Always would.

“Working as a J,” she began, “eventually wears away the shielding that means Psy don’t pick up thoughts through touch.

” It was a natural barrier, that shielding, because babies, who’d had no training in creating shields, didn’t scream from an influx of thoughts while being cradled by their nurses.

“I’m a Sensitive on the far end of the spectrum.

I could die if I touch the wrong person with my bare hands. ”

Adam’s pupils expanded, the unusual pale brown of his eyes gaining a fine edge of intense yellow. “What about if a person touched you on another exposed section of skin, like your face?”

“Same result,” she said, “but it’d take longer. For whatever reason, the hands seem to be the strongest conduit—perhaps because we’re wired to use them to connect with people? I can’t explain. No one’s ever studied it.” Because no one cared; Js lived, did their work, then they died.

The end.

A flush across the top of Adam’s cheekbones. “So if this serial killer assaults you and manages to touch your bare skin, he could kill you?”

A small fragment of her wanted to believe it mattered to him if she lived or died.

She’d been wrong after all…the girl she’d once been wasn’t wholly dead.

“I think if I’m that close to him, then my death is already on the table.

” A simple fact. “That’s why I need to hunt him down, rather than the opposite. ”

Adam shifted to put himself in her line of sight, bracing his arms above the doorjamb; his muscular biceps were rigid against the soft gray of his T-shirt, his wide shoulders taut. “Putting yourself in the line of fire isn’t an act of penance that’ll wipe out the past.”

The blow got through the wall of numbness enough to reverberate throughout her psyche. “No,” she said, shockingly aware of the heat and power of him in this fleeting instant when the wall had fractured, “but it might save a number of futures.”

What, she thought in the wake of the psychic shock wave, would she feel if she touched Adam Garrett without gloves? “It’s a fair enough trade.”

Their eyes locked, held, that unspoken thing a living, breathing creature between them.

A muscle ticced in Adam’s jaw, and for an instant she thought he’d break the impasse, speak about the topic they were both willfully avoiding—and she couldn’t bear to face it, even in her numbness—but then Mi-ja’s voice rang out across the parking lot.

“Yoo-hoo! Adam! I heard about Jacques! Such a terrible thing.”