Page 52

Js with weak shields are at catastrophic risk of a memory seizure, where the memories of another overwrite all of their own. There is no remedy for this because no J has ever survived a total overwrite.

Eleri was inside a nightmare, her world shattered pieces of color painful and jagged. Everything hurt, but she couldn’t pinpoint any of the pain. It was everywhere and nowhere.

Nausea churned in her gut.

Twisting instinctively to the side, she pressed her hands to a floor coated in straw and dust and retched.

Nothing came out, her body refusing to release its pain.

And all the while, the insanity inside her head wouldn’t stop—erratic flashes of memory, a throat being slit, a falcon in flight, a glass shattering.

It cut her.

Except it couldn’t. It was inside her head.

Then the falcon’s talons clamped on her arm. She shoved it aside, but her fingers were weak, and oddly, the talons didn’t feel like talons at all. They felt like fingers even though her…Her eyes jittered, snagged. She wasn’t wearing her gloves. Why wasn’t she wearing her gloves?

Because this was a nightmare.

And that hand that wasn’t a talon had taken hers and soon she’d be awash in another person’s memories and nightmares. She braced herself as much as she could, even as her mind spun and spun and spun.

The hand was solid. The mind was solid. Nothing to see.

Relief kicked her in the gut. Whoever this person was, they had an impenetrable shield. She tried to look at them, take them in, but her brain was so scrambled that her visual cortex couldn’t process the information.

Her hand clenched on the straw on the hard floor.

Lifting it up, she stared and tried to see.

She couldn’t, but some small part of her brain wondered why she’d imagined straw.

She’d never been in a farm-like environment in her life, and that was what her brain associated with straw.

Yet the tactile sensations she was experiencing told her that she was holding straw.

The hand that wasn’t a talon shifted back to her arm, shook her hard. She couldn’t tell if it was causing her pain, but she felt the desperation in the other person, and that, she understood.

Turning again, she tried to focus on the person to whom the hand belonged, because surely it must belong to someone…unless this was a nightmare and she was lost in her own broken brain.

Exposure. Had she hit Exposure?

An echoey sound, as if someone was talking to her through a long tunnel.

Again and again.

A sob.

It was the sob that reached her in a pristine ball of clarity.

A child was crying.

She didn’t know why, but she reached out her hand into the chaos of color and sharp edges that cut and made her bleed, telling that crying person to grab on to her. The fingers released her arm to grip her hand.

Solid, strong, shielded.

Feathers in her mind, against her hair.

“—please, please!”

The echoey words had taken shape, become a plea. She still couldn’t make out the shape of the person who held her hand, and while her mind stretched and tried to reach the PsyNet, it couldn’t.

It was too shredded, too twisted.

But this being was pleading with her, and the part of Eleri that had assisted survivors of abuse escape murder charges reacted out of primal instinct, hearing in the plea the cry of a being who was trapped with no way out.

Their leg in irons.

Their freedom shackled.

She squeezed the hand.

It squeezed back, and the echoes continued, as did the nausea and the lack of clarity.

“—drugs! He said—your gloves—removed—”

It took a very long time for Eleri to process those scattered words, to even begin to gain some comprehension of the shape of them.

It was the part of her that she’d designed to flick the shutoff valve to her life that got it; she’d separated the valve controller from all the normal pathways of her mind so it could flip the off switch even if the rest of her was compromised.

It was small and restricted and had only one real goal, but right now, it was also the only part of her that had retained even basic function.

Cut off as it was from all other pathways, it had been accidentally protected from both the drug that had sown chaos in her brain and the impact of any direct contact she might’ve had with the person who’d peeled off her gloves.

All these thoughts happened in that same secretive part. The rest of her was a puppet with its strings cut.

Whoever did this knows Psy react badly to most narcotics , murmured the tiny hidden part of her. They overdosed you with something that ensures you can’t reach for help on the PsyNet. I can’t. I’m your secret. I’m not designed for communication, my only function to flip the switch.

Something dripped from Eleri’s nose. It smelled of iron.

That hand left hers and a soft sensation was dabbing at her lip…and that was when Eleri realized she was starting to regain a hint of clarity. Though the PsyNet remained out of reach, she’d been able to connect the sensation with the act, could now see the blurred outline of the person with her.

Young, so young. And such beautiful hair.

Malia.

Malia’s head jerked, her hand dropping as her breath caught.

When she grabbed Eleri’s hand again, the connection cleared up the chaos enough for her to comprehend the words the girl was speaking. “He’s coming. He’ll drug you again so you can’t telepath for help.”

Eleri wanted to tell the child that she couldn’t telepath anyway.

The drugs had broken something in her already wounded brain.

Things were never going to sit quite right again; she felt that in the deepest fiber of her being.

That same part keened with a sense of loss and grief, but uppermost was her determination to save this child who was Adam’s.

Adam.

She couldn’t speak, couldn’t say anything, but she made her hands move and took the child’s face in her hands, then jerked her head to the side, even as she pushed the child that way.

Malia’s eyes were panicked, huge.

This time, Eleri pushed at her shoulder, shoving her toward the darkness in the corner.

“You want me to hide in the shadow? He’ll still see.”

Eleri shoved again, and this time, Malia, this child who was scared but trusted Eleri to help her, went where Eleri had thrust her.

A sound in the chaos, a creak. A door opening.

Eleri had already dropped her head to her chest as she slumped against the beam behind her. Drops of red in her vision as her nose bled onto the white of her shirt.

That was good. The more blood, the more…She couldn’t follow that thread, but an instinctive part of her knew not to worry about the blood, that it was something that could help Malia.

Only one chance , whispered the fragment of her she’d saved so it could kill her, but that she would now use to save this child so loved and protected. A second drug overdose and no part of you will come back.

Eleri felt footsteps, felt thuds, the man’s voice so loud it was shards inside her brain. But none of that mattered, because she really only had one final card to play.

“Fuck! The fuckers are on the horizon! What the hell did you do?”

As the ranting man came down on his knees next to her, she set that one functioning part of her free and let it take full control of whatever remained of her mind.

Her vision cleared, she saw the pressure syringe, saw the distorted mask he wore to hide his face, and punched him hard in the throat with all her strength.

He flew back, gurgling and clutching at his throat.

Turning to Malia, Eleri waved her arm, telling the girl to run. But the man was scrabbling back at her, and the ounce of clarity she’d gained by sacrificing that one functional piece of her was already fading.

He slammed the pressure injector into her palm instead of her neck…and worse, grabbed hold of the bare skin of her wrist.

Evil poured into her brain in an unstoppable wave of filth and despair and horror, shattering things inside her as they pushed and shoved and violated. His memories. His fantasies. His…sadness.

He had been a sad little boy once, after all.

Screams, so many screams. Not his.

Vivian’s.

Kriti’s.

Sarah’s.

Laughter. That was his.

He was spreading through her brain like a virus, an infection of cruelty and torture.

He would kill her long before the drug reached her brain, but in this moment, she somehow had enough of herself left to kick him hard in the same spot she’d punched. Blood flew out of his mouth to splatter on her as his head lolled onto the ground, and this time, the girl was moving.

But instead of running out, Malia came to Eleri, tried to get her upright. Eleri pushed her away. “Go.” A garbled simulacrum of a word. “ Go! ” Her legs were paralyzed as her brain began to go haywire, her chest jerking.

Malia was sobbing, pleading with her.

Eleri found one last ounce of strength and shoved at her back. “ Run, Malia! Find Adam! ” At least that was what she thought she said.

Racing heart, skin so hot it burned, a blankness that wasn’t peace.

She had just enough left in her to attempt to write the Sandman’s name on the wooden floor in the blood that dripped down her wrist to her palm and her fingers.

Then it ended.