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This is a common misconception—and understandable, given the relatively recent “return” of Designation E to the PsyNet—but no, empaths do not all function much the same.

The E designation carries multiple subdesignations, some of which we may not discover for years, or even longer. We have almost no historical resources to mine, for the Councils of Silence took great care to wipe empaths from the world.

As the first empath to wake to her nature in this generation, Sascha had known that she wasn’t the right E for the job the instant the WindHaven healer contacted her. Jacques needed a specialist E, one with the ability to reach a comatose mind.

“I’ll find you the best person,” she’d promised Naia, then immediately got to work.

Her first choice, Jaya, proved to be in a mandated recovery period after almost burning herself out, but the other woman recommended another E—a young male named Hanz.

When Sascha met the empath at the nearest airport to falcon territory, having been led to him by her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter—who was holding a print of the ID photo Jaya had sent them—the youth turned out to have a German accent that went perfectly with his name, skin a darker hue of brown than her own, floppy dark hair, and hazel eyes that looked unseeing out at the world.

Sensors ringed his fingers.

She assumed he’d lost his vision in an accident as a teenager, for the Psy hadn’t been forgiving of any kind of obvious physical difference when Hanz would’ve been born.

“Hi, Hanz! We’re here!” Naya piped up and touched her fingers very, very lightly to the back of one of his hands before withdrawing.

Sascha’s daughter knew not to touch Psy without permission, but she seemed to have made a rapid calculation in that terrifyingly smart little brain that Hanz might need a physical reference to her presence. He didn’t, of course; he could have sensed them with his empathic ability.

“ Hallo , ‘we,’?” Hanz said before Sascha could introduce herself, his lips curved in a smile and his head directed unerringly down at Naya’s diminutive height. “That’s quite an unusual name, ja ?”

Naya laughed, a huge and delighted thing. Sascha had moments when she worried her daughter—half-changeling, half-Psy—would feel constrained by living outside the sprawling vastness of the PsyNet, but then she’d hear Naya laugh and it’d all melt away.

It helped that her own mother, who never sugarcoated anything, had bluntly said, “The child is hitting all her psychic markers ahead of schedule. The DarkRiver network is, quite frankly, far stronger and safer for her right now than any corner of the PsyNet.”

“No, I’m Naya!” her daughter clarified. “This is Mama.”

“Otherwise known as Sascha.” Sascha smiled.

“Thank you for flying out on such short notice.” DarkRiver had attempted to arrange a teleport, but everyone in the Net was running on fumes, and the only ’porter outside the Net they knew had just flamed out doing an emergency medical teleport for a SnowDancer juvenile who’d been badly injured in the mountains.

The juvenile would be okay, but Judd was out for the count.

Sascha and Naya themselves had flown in on a jet-chopper piloted by their escort, DarkRiver sentinel Dorian Christensen; they’d landed just ahead of Hanz’s commercial flight.

“It is an honor to meet you.” Hanz inclined his head, his face aglow. “Without you, we would all yet be locked in amber.”

Sascha had come to terms with her status as the first E to embrace who she was, but she didn’t know quite how to process the adoration of young Es like Hanz.

“I think it was just time,” she said. “One of us would’ve broken through—if not me, then Ivy or Memory or Jaya… so many of us were on the precipice.”

Naya tugged at her hand.

When she glanced down, her baby pointed to where Dorian stood a short distance away—from where he could watch everything and everyone.

While the pack had picked up no indications of any active threats against either one of them, Sascha was the mate of the DarkRiver alpha…

and the daughter of Nikita Duncan. Which made her a valuable target, and her and Lucas’s precious cub an even bigger one.

But Naya was on this trip because she loved seeing her falcon friends and adored that she shared a name with Naia, the falcon healer, even if the spelling wasn’t identical. She called the healer “big Naia” and herself “little Naya.”

It didn’t seem to occur to her that she could use her given name of Nadiya—likely because the only person who ever used it was her Psy grandmother. Who Naya got along with far better than Sascha could’ve once imagined; Nikita as a grandmother wasn’t the same woman who’d raised Sascha.

As for any risk—the one thing Sascha would never do was stop her child from living in order to keep her safe. Nikita’s choices had been different; to save her child, she’d had to lock up Sascha’s mind and conceal the truth of her very nature, but that didn’t mean that choice hadn’t left deep scars.

Now the baby Sascha was raising in freedom had pointed out that Dorian was nudging a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m sorry to rush you, Hanz,” she said. “But we only have a short-term spot on the landing pad. If you could follow us.”

“I can hold your hand!” Naya volunteered, smart but young enough that she didn’t understand Hanz didn’t need the assist.

“Oh, my cublet, you’re very kind to offer that,” Sascha said, “but see the sensors on Hanz’s fingers? They’re connected to his brain, so he can see the world around him.”

Her daughter’s face lit up. “Whiskers! Like me!”

Hanz’s smile was as bright as Naya’s. “Yes, I suppose they do act like whiskers, just like your leopard’s.”

“I a panther,” Naya piped up. “Like Papa.”

“I think your panther must be strong and smart.” Hanz held out his right hand, leaving his left free for navigation. “How about we walk each other?”

A happy Naya tucked her hand into his, and the three of them made their way to the sentinel with hair of a brilliant white blond and surfer blue eyes who was one of the most dangerous people in DarkRiver.

The resulting flight was much shorter than their trip to the airport, and Naya was as glued to the window as she’d been on their first flight.

Sascha and Lucas’s cub had already asked Dorian if he could teach her to fly the big machine—giving her mother palpitations.

Raising a fearless panther cub was going to turn her gray by the time Naya was eighteen, of that she was certain, but Sascha planned to white-knuckle her way through.

Never would she permit her own fears to stifle her baby’s primal heart.

“Dori, Dori!” that wild cub said now. “The big X!”

“Good spotting,” Dorian responded without taking his attention off the flight controls. “Now, sit back while I take us down.”

That landing—directly on the marked spot on the Canyon plateau—was as soft as a feather. Adam was waiting for them, ready to lead Sascha and Hanz inside. “Hello, little Naya,” he said, crouching down to close his arms around Naya when she ran over for a hug.

“Big Naia?”

“She’s busy right now, but you can say hi to her later.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Someone else has been waiting all day for you.”

Naya made a happy sound at seeing her small friend but didn’t run off; she might be a panther, but she was also a DarkRiver cub raised with the boundaries a strong changeling child needed to feel safe—and to grow into a trustworthy and disciplined member of the pack. “Mama, I go play with Jina?”

“I’ve got her,” Dorian said when Sascha glanced at him.

To trust the sentinel with this living piece of her heart wasn’t even a question. “Yes, go play. And mind your manners if you go to Jina’s house.”

Leaving her daughter to play, safe in the knowledge that she’d be watched over in this landscape that wasn’t theirs and held dangers Naya might not understand, she followed Adam inside the Canyon, Hanz at her side.

The youth paused outside the infirmary. “I need baselines,” he said. “I’ve never had reason to interact with or read falcon changelings before. I don’t have any idea of your emotional normal.”

When Adam glanced at Sascha, she gave a nod.

He extended his hand. “Please go ahead.”

Hanz frowned after he made contact. “I held your daughter’s hand,” he said, his head angled toward Sascha.

“I made no attempt to read her, of course, but her surface self felt primal in a way I’ve never experienced.

However, you, Adam, are closer to the husband of my trainer, Jaya. Wildness contained.”

Jaya’s husband was an Arrow, a lethal soldier. And so, Sascha thought, was Adam. Alphas—and wing leaders—tended to be that way. She should know.

“Adult versus child,” Adam said as “big Naia” came to join them, his voice gruff. “Jacques is my right hand. He should feel similar to me.”

After Hanz nodded and broke contact, he said, “Jaya said she called you. She did explain that I might not be able to get through? Changeling shields are formidable.”

It was Naia who answered, her fingers touching Sascha’s in a silent hello. “Yes. She also said the shield might be more permeable due to the serious nature of his injuries, but that there were no guarantees.”

“Just do your best,” Adam said, his tone the encouraging one of an alpha to a young packmate.

He reminded Sascha of Lucas in many ways. Both of them leaders with huge hearts. As Naia reminded her of Tamsyn, another healer who’d give her blood itself if it would help her packmates.

“Thank you for coming,” Adam said to Sascha in a low tone as Naia led Hanz to Jacques’s room. “We have no way to monitor the E, see what he might be doing to Jacques.”

“I understand.” The Es had a strict code of ethics, but to expect a changeling pack to blindly trust a being from a race that had so often been their enemy was to ask the impossible.