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“Saoirse, will you build me a rocket ship?”

“Sure, Bear. I just have to collect a bit more money. Rocket ships are expensive to construct. But here, let’s plan it out, get the schematics ready for when we have the cash.”

Something flashed on the large wall screen to the left of Eleri’s room, with Dr. Czajka’s name at the top of it. “I have to go look in on another patient,” she said after glancing at it. “I’ll be back to check hourly on Eleri, however.”

Adam pressed his hand to the glass, as beyond, the three nurses in Eleri’s room seemed to be going through a checklist to ensure they’d finished their tasks. Not interrupting them lest he break their concentration, he grabbed his phone and called Saoirse. “Malia?”

“She’s doing so good,” his sister said, her voice rough. “Hendricks drugged her before he broke her arm. She didn’t see or feel him break it, was in pain and scared when she woke with him looming over her in that hideous mask, but then she got angry.”

A sniffing laugh. “God, my baby is a tough cookie. She was planning how to semi-shift and use her talons on him, but then Eleri was there and—Adam, she saved our girl by letting Hendricks take her. We might not have found Malia in time without her. Please tell me she’ll be all right.”

“I need you to build her a shield, Saoirse.”

“What?”

“Eleri’s telepathic shields are gone. They were already failing before Hendricks attacked her and now she has nothing to protect her mind—she can’t heal without a shield.”

“Bear”—a careful, tender tone—“I’m a shield engineer, yes, but I engineer heat and radiation shields for jetcraft . I have zero idea about psychic shields.”

“You’re the smartest person I know, Chirp.” He swallowed hard. “And I figure psychic powers are a kind of energy, a kind of signal. Sound is a signal, and you build internal sound shields, too. And heat is energy. If you can block heat, you should be able to block telepathy.”

He talked over her when she tried to interrupt; he didn’t know if he was getting the science right, but his desperate mind was seeing the blurred whisper of a truth he needed his sister’s virtuoso engineering intellect to turn into reality.

“Teleporters need a physical image lock—if anything changes in that image, they can’t arrive at their destination.

That means psychic abilities aren’t divorced from the physical.

“And something in the Canyon stops them dead regardless. That means psychic energy can be stopped on a physical level. You just have to find the right element or the right frequency.”

Saoirse no longer sounded distressed or gently careful when she responded. “You say the craziest shit, Bear, and why am I always letting my little brother talk me into bad ideas?”

But despite her big-sister muttering, he could tell she was already sketching something on one of the pads she always had at hand.

“Let me work on it. I’ll get Malia on it, too—it’ll keep her mind off things, and she’s always been one to come up with off-the-wall concepts. Gets that from her uncle.”

When she hung up without saying good-bye, he knew she was caught up in the undertaking. He also knew it was a near-impossible task he’d given her, a request from the little boy he’d once been who’d believed his big sister could build him a rocket ship.

Lifting his phone again, he called one of the few people who might know the effect of the blood bond on Eleri’s current status.

“Adam,” Lucas Hunter said when he answered. “How’s Jacques?”

“Naia says he’s rising through the levels of a coma and is close to the point where he might regain consciousness on his own.

” The update he’d discovered on his phone after he came out of Eleri’s surgery had been the one bright spark in this hellish day.

“Luc, I need to ask you about your blood-bonded network.”

The alpha of DarkRiver didn’t react as an alpha might once have—as Adam probably would have even recently.

Prior to the request to blood-bond Psy children into changeling clans and packs, Adam hadn’t given any thought to the fact that he created a psychic network when he blood-bonded his seconds to him.

As a changeling, he couldn’t see that network, just sense the bonds.

“Ask.” Lucas’s tone held the weight of experience. He’d been alpha of DarkRiver for close to fifteen years at this point, and mated to Sascha for over four years.

He understood both what it was to lead, and what it was to fall in love with a Psy.

Adam told him about Eleri’s disintegrating shield, about how he’d blood-bonded her in a last-ditch attempt to keep her alive, and how Dr. Czajka had told him she’d probably not be able to successfully come to consciousness without a shield. “Is it possible the blood bond could protect her?”

A long pause. “That’s one hell of a question, Adam,” the DarkRiver alpha said at last. “I don’t know anyone who’s come into a pack with absolutely no shields.

I didn’t even know that was survivable. But we have a strong group of Psy between DarkRiver and SnowDancer.

You okay for me to pull them in to answer the question? ”

“Yes.” They were allies, the trust between them a thing of unbreakable stone. Which is why he said, “She’s my mate, Luc. But her mind refuses to permit the mating bond.”

A hiss of air, the understanding silent. “I’ll call you back the instant I have anything.”

“Thank you.” Hanging up, Adam slid away the phone as beyond the glass, Eleri lay motionless.

The minutes ticked by.

Turned into hours.

Until three hours had passed and he was seated in Eleri’s room going through his messages and making short comm calls while talking to his mate—because a wing leader couldn’t simply vanish from his people’s lives.

“The fledglings especially,” he told her, “and at this time—the older ones know what happened to Malia, while the younger ones have picked up on the tension in the clan. That call I just made to the littlest birds? It’ll mean they sleep easy tonight.

” Adam had smiled and even chuckled in that call because the littles needed to see him as a pillar that would never fall, never break, their safe place to land.

A new message arrived just then.

He shoved a fisted hand against his mouth as he read the name of the sender: Eleri Dias .

He didn’t want to open it, didn’t even want to believe it existed, but at the same time, he was desperate to hear from his mate, even if it was through a message that could have no good tidings. She had to have sent it this morning—that was the last time she would’ve had a chance.

Right before she’d told him she was driving out to meet a colleague. Right before she’d planned to leave Raintree…perhaps leave him.

Adam touched the screen…and the pillar cracked, bled.

…but don’t mourn me, Adam. I’m free now. Your wild bird in flight, my mind whole and my spirit no longer locked in a cage of reconditioning.

At last, I’m Eleri again.

···

Eleri screamed.

She knew she was locked inside her own mind.

She also knew she was exhausted. Her personality, what remained of it, lay shredded in fine threads around her feet.

At least it was hers , her thoughts still those of Eleri Dias thanks to the self-termination switch that she’d thrown at the end when she’d felt the virus of Hendricks’s memories and thoughts attempt to take hold in her mind.

Had it succeeded, she’d have been either insane…or an extension of him for however long it lasted before her mind collapsed.

Kill the virus. Die as Eleri. Adam. Child, the child—

The last garbled thoughts she remembered having.

It hadn’t worked. She wasn’t dead.

And through the shredded memories of her ran a line of vivid yellow.

It reminded her of Adam’s eyes.

She focused on that because it was beautiful and it made her happy. A dazzling happiness far beyond the numb gray in which she’d existed for years. A gray that wasn’t a product of Silence, but of being a J.

A nothingness where she should be.

But she existed now inside her mind and she felt . Oh, how she felt.

Something had happened to her, that much she knew, but what it was, she didn’t remember. There’d been pain, bright edges, talons on her arm that had become a soft female hand, but they were nothing but flashes that soon faded.

Only the bright falcon line remained.

It was a barrier, she realized in slow fractures of knowledge. One that stopped her from stepping over into the quiet dark that beckoned. A place without pain, without loss, without grief. A place…without Adam.

She stepped back even as the happiness faded.

Because emotion was a multifaceted jewel, and that jewel had just spun…but even as it did, her tired mind shut down again.

The falcon yellow blazed, the wildness of it the last thing she saw.

Adam.