Page 28

Further to our previous discussions on the lack of satisfactory Silence in a percentage of our younger adults, I would like to present to you an option my team has termed “reconditioning.”

It is a less rigorous process than Councilor Adelaja’s brilliant suggestion of “rehabilitation” but could be utilized for more minor cases of deviation from the protocol.

“What do you mean not much of your original personality left?” he demanded.

“Have you heard of rehabilitation?” She continued before he could answer. “It wipes out the person, leaves a shell behind. Reconditioning, on the other hand, just sands away the edges, smooths over any cracks, erases any hint of a breach in Silence…or it did, before the fall of the protocol.”

She shook her head. “With Js, there are always breaches. You saw that when you met me—I felt and felt deeply. Js walk in the minds of the worst of the worst—there’s no protocol that can hold strong against such a barrage from inside our shields.”

Adam knew his eyes had gone falcon long ago. Now he forced his talons back in before he began to use them on the room. “How many times?”

She stared into nothingness for a moment. “Seven, I think. Though it could be more. I stopped keeping track as much after the fourth time—I didn’t feel I had many edges left by then. There wasn’t much to protect or to mourn.”

“Sophia’s older than you. She’s not like you,” he said, wanting her to tell him this could be reversed—because the two of them? They weren’t fucking done. “I met her, saw her smile and laugh.”

“I think Sophie’s cleverer than I am, hid her edges better,” Eleri said. “But she also told me she had an experience in childhood that altered her in profound ways, anchoring her to the PsyNet. Perhaps that helped her retain more pieces of herself.”

Adam could hear neither admiration nor grief nor hope in Eleri’s voice. It was as if she was a statue frozen in time. “Can you reverse it?” he asked even when he knew there was no point.

What hope could there be for a mating born in betrayal and coated with heartbroken anger?

Eleri shook her head. “It’s why reconditioning wasn’t used more generally. It works but it eventually destroys the mind and the personality. With working Js, that’s not a bad trade-off, since before Silence, we just went insane anyway after a certain period.”

Adam’s face was hot, his falcon wanting to tear out of his skin.

They’d taken everything from that sweet, pretty girl who’d wanted to give him a bandage.

Even her ability to be angry at what they’d done to her.

And in so doing…they’d taken everything from him.

Because only now, standing here in this room where Eleri told him there could be no hope, did he realize he’d never quite given up on her.

Some desperate part of him had hoped that she would find her way to him…and find a way to make up for what she’d done.

He’d been waiting for her all this time.

Adam suddenly couldn’t think about that any longer, the weight of it too huge.

Shifting on his heel, he paced mindlessly to the table where she’d obviously been working.

His eye fell on a number of printouts sealed inside what appeared to be clear evidence envelopes.

“What are these? You keeping a scrapbook about the Sandman?”

A pause that went on long enough that the hairs on his nape stirred. He turned, looked at her. “Eleri?”

“They were slipped under my door.” She strode over to group them together, then put them into a folder. “I’ll be handing them over to the task force—”

He gripped her chin, fear a surge in his blood. “He knows you’re here.”

“It might not be him.” She didn’t move. “It could be anyone who recognized me.”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“If anything,” she said, “it’s good news. Now I don’t suspect I’m on the right track. I know it.”

Even as ice crawled up his spine, she pulled out of his hold to store the evidence in the case she’d shown him, the one that held the letters.

She locked it as he watched. “I can’t let them out of my sight until they’re en route, but I don’t expect the forensic team to find anything.

He’s too smart to have left prints. Someone authorized to transport them should arrive in Raintree before lunch. ”

Shifting on her heel before he could snap at her for her utter lack of response to the danger she was in, she said, “How is Jacques?” and the pinpoint accuracy of her question was a bullet through the heart.

Because a mate would act that way, would just know what was wrong with him.

“I have to let him go.” The words came out grating, broken. “No one can reach him, and his brain readings are so faint as to not exist.”

“I’m sorry. I’ve lost friends. Each loss takes a piece of you.” Unadorned, flat, and piercing in their bluntness, her words helped in ways he’d never expected.

She was a woman he’d told himself to hate over and over again, and yet it felt as if they’d never stopped their conversation in the hallway. She was still offering him bandages, this time for his soul.

And on this morning, dark and cold and crushing, he was too hurt and lost to push her away.

He collapsed onto the sofa, his hands in his hair as he stared down at the old-fashioned carpet.

“We were crèche-mates. We grew up together.” Adam could still see the wild and brash eighteen-year-old Jacques had been.

“He’s been part of every important moment of my entire life. ”

A thousand memories overflowed his mind. “He was right there beside me on our first solo flights as fledglings, and he was there the day my grandmother told me my parents had been murdered. The same man celebrated wildly with me when I was made a wing-second two months before his own promotion.”

Happiness or grief, Jacques had stood beside Adam for all of it. “He was meant to grow into a disreputable old man with me. I was meant to babysit his fledglings so he could go on date-night flights with his mate—he always wanted a huge brood. He promised me that he’d be there to the very end.”

Eleri’s legs in front of him, her body so close he could’ve grabbed her, pressed his face to her stomach as he allowed his emotions to roar through him. If she’d been his mate, he wouldn’t have hesitated, would’ve let her comfort him, love him, make this terrible thing somehow bearable.

Hands fisted, he dropped them to his thighs and looked up.

“There’s no hope at all?” She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, her bones far too visible beneath her skin for all her obvious strength.

Following the movement because watching her when she was close was a compulsion, he suddenly jerked to his feet, his heart thundering. “ How sensitive are your hands with an unshielded being?”

“On the extreme end. If I deteriorate any further, the gloves won’t work.” Eleri looked at his face, then down at her hands. “You want me to see if I can pick up anything from your injured clanmate?”

Again, she followed his thoughts so quickly, as if she’d known him a lifetime. “Can you?” he asked past the torment of knowing what they could’ve been.

“Js read memories,” Eleri said, but her brain was connecting the dots Adam already had. “But we are telepaths, and Sensitivity ramps up that ability to deadly levels. So yes, it’s possible I could sense something, but if he’s unconscious, it’s an E you need. They—”

“Two empaths who specialize in comatose patients have already attempted to reach him—they can’t.”

His pain was writ large in the grooves carved into his face, his emotions open to the world.

Adam Garrett would never hide who he was and who he loved.

A part of her, perhaps the same part that could still cry even if she couldn’t feel the sorrow that engendered the tear, wondered what it would be like to mean that much to her beautiful boy grown into a powerful man.

I have missed you all my life without ever knowing you.

Words she could never speak aloud. Words she’d barely dared to think in the depths of Silence. Words she would take with her to her grave.

“If the empaths haven’t been able to reach him…” She didn’t want to say it, didn’t want to tell him the blunt truth. Because even numbed by repeated reconditionings, she never again wanted to hurt Adam Garrett. “Why do you think I might succeed where they haven’t?”

“Jacques is caught between his two selves. His mind isn’t like any the Es would’ve encountered before, his brain pathways neither falcon nor human.” Adam paced the room. “Since your sensitivity is instinctive, you might react to him on a primal level.”

He paused, turned to hold her gaze with that of a falcon, the ring of yellow vivid in the low light inside the room. “I need to know if my friend is in there. I have to be sure before I let him go.”

Eleri nodded. “I’m willing to make the attempt.

” The truth was that she’d have given Adam anything he wanted.

The imprint he’d left on her was far beyond anything she understood, and it predated the repeated reconditionings and the piece-by-piece fragmentation of her personality—and that imprint said that she was his in any way he’d permit.

But then Adam’s expression turned dark. “What’s the risk to you?” he asked, striding back to stand toe-to-toe with her, the silk of his hair tumbled around his face. “Could it cause an overload?”

“The risk is negligible, given what you said about the Es. I’ve heard the ones who work with coma patients can sense even the most subtle emotional response.” Not that it would’ve stopped her regardless. Because despite everything, she was still that girl who wanted to give Adam something.

Adam didn’t move, his eyes once more on her hands. “What happens if Jacques rises to consciousness without warning and you get the full blast of his emotions?”

“That’s so unlikely as to not matter,” she said with as much care as she could, but knew it came out robotic. “If there was a chance of that, the Es wouldn’t have given up. He’s down too deep to rise to the surface at speed.”