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We’ve implemented your suggested solution and slowed the degradation—but we can’t stop it.

Ashaya had lived with a quiet guilt ever since the chip she’d helped develop in an effort to create shields for the human mind had failed.

Bowen Knight, the security chief and effective leader of the Human Alliance, had told her it wasn’t her fault, that they’d rushed the implantation—but tests afterward had proved the chip would’ve failed regardless.

Now, as she walked into the cool depths of the cave network underneath the home of the falcons, her mate an edgy presence behind her and Saoirse Garrett in front, she clung to hope. What Saoirse had told her thus far had blown all her previous ideas out of the water.

A solution from the outside ?

Neither Ashaya nor her twin had ever considered that.

She was an M, a DNA specialist. Of course her mind had jumped to an internal solution.

That the falcons had thought to go outside was a spectacular case of unconventional thinking—in truth, she wasn’t even sure she could assist them, but she was going to do everything in her power to try.

“Here,” Saoirse said. “Only the four of them inside right now.”

No matter her assurance, Dorian slipped around Ashaya and Saoirse to enter the cave first before poking his head out to nod that it was safe. “Bats hanging off the ceiling,” he muttered, the luminescence from the walls turning his white-blond hair a pale green. “Great.”

Her leopard mate was not doing well being confined underground, but she hadn’t even questioned that he’d come with her. Dorian would never allow her to walk into what might be a dangerous situation alone.

“You’re my Shaya,” he’d murmured late the previous night, then nipped at her ear in feline affection as he grinned. “My dangerous, intelligent, hot scientist. I’d let you experiment on me anytime.”

Buoyed by the memory of his laughter and her own, she entered the cave to find Adam and Dahlia, whom she’d met previously, standing in the center of the room talking quietly, while two tents sat on opposite sides of the huge cavern.

“Eleri and Bram fell back asleep,” Adam said when she reached them. “Their minds are still recovering.”

“I can’t even imagine what they’ve been through.” The idea of lowering her shields to test the cave’s protective nature went against her instincts—and those two had been stripped of the choice.

She exhaled. “First, the test.”

Dorian’s presence against her back, his hand on her hip in a silent reminder that she was his mate, part of a pack that had her back. And there, in the corner of her mind, burned Amara’s star.

Her twin. A genius intellect. Total lack of a moral compass.

Not quite so broken these days, but still…damaged enough that she would never be safe to walk the world alone.

It was just as well that she had no wish to be apart from Ashaya.

Clutching at the mate bond for comfort today, Ashaya dropped her telepathic shields in a way she couldn’t ever remember doing consciously. Her body tensed as she waited for the expected noise of the world to hit her.

Nothing. Quiet. No, wait, there, the vague awareness of two unshielded Psy minds…but no onrush of thoughts, no overwhelm.

Ashaya opened her eyes, her mouth dry and heart thudding. “An outside shield,” she said in wonder, hope alive in her heart.