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Saffron: I feel good about this.

Yúzé: Me, too.

Bram: We can’t get too carried away. It’s early days yet.

Eleri: I’m with them, Bram. Team Hope.

Bram: They’re bad influences. But fine. Team Hope.

—Conversation between the Quatro Cartel (undertaken on a notepad left in a tent and added to by each of them, one by one, in lieu of any phones or organizers with a signal) (today)

Ashaya and Saoirse, working together from that point on, came up with a prototype three days after the aborted bat transfer.

The El-Shield team had already done less intensive tests using mockups, and it had quickly become clear that it wasn’t simply the bats’ ultrasonic communication that was the key, but the sound in concert with the overall mineral composition of Mirage.

This was to be the first serious test, and though Eleri knew it had a high likelihood of failure, none of them could stop themselves from hoping.

“It’s not pretty,” Saoirse said from the other side of the entrance into Mirage, “but we can make it prettier if it works.” A glance at Bram. “At least it’s not a tinfoil hat, right?”

Bram’s face cracked into a slight smile. “Progress.”

Saoirse laughed and turned to Eleri, who’d volunteered to be the test subject as she appeared the most sensitive to psychic noise.

Inside Mirage, Eleri leaned into Adam for a second. “Wouldn’t it be incredible if we were saved by bats?” She couldn’t keep from grinning, her face having learned the shape of happiness with such rapidity it was as if she’d been born for it. “I might found a bat religion, become the first convert.”

“I can’t believe you’re joking at a time like this,” he said in a stern tone, but spoiled the effect by leaning down to kiss her. “Let’s do this, bat lady.”

Laughing, she took a step beyond the entrance…and almost crumpled under the noise of the world. It took everything she had not to step back, and she could feel Adam fighting his urge to shield her even the fraction he could.

They’d decided to do it this way rather than putting the prototype on her in the cave because it’d be more difficult to calibrate it inside a space that echoed with the bats’ ultrasonic chatter.

It was noticeably less apparent in the passageway outside, and Eleri’s brain had healed enough to handle the seconds-long exposure.

Saoirse rushed forward with a device that was nothing more than a glittery headband with a circular metal piece on one side and other metallic filaments curving out from the circle.

“Had to borrow Malia’s headband,” she said, and slipped it on over Eleri’s head, pushing back her hair as Ashaya came around to situate the circular bit against the bone behind Eleri’s ear.

“Nothing,” Eleri ground out, disappointment heavy in her gut. “I’ll step back.”

But Ashaya Aleine’s blue-gray eyes, so striking against the rich brown of her skin, were focused on the piece behind her ear. “It’s not switched on yet.” She turned to Saoirse. “Position?”

Saoirse looked at her scanner. “Yes, I think so. Go.”

A tap on the circle.

The pressure of the psychic noise grew heavier and heavier…and was just…gone right before Eleri’s legs would’ve crumpled, Adam already preparing to catch her.

She snapped upright, touched the side of her head where the circle buzzed very, very quietly. Around her, everyone was holding their breath—everyone but Adam. Who gave a huge “Whoop!” and picked her up to spin her around.

He was her mate. He felt her pain. And he felt her lack of pain.

Ashaya and Saoirse stood side by side, both literally biting their lips as they read things on their organizer and frantically checked two different scanners.

Bayani, who’d been standing around the corner with the rest of the El-Shield team so as not to crowd the area, now ran into view. “We heard the whoop!”

“It works,” Eleri whispered to him, before turning to Bram and the others. “It works!”

“Holy fuck.” Saffron’s eyes were huge. “Are you serious?”

“Saoirse, can Saffy try this?”

“Wait. We have to calibrate.” An absent statement. “How’s that?”

The buzzing went quiet, became more a faint vibration against her skull. “Not irritating,” she said. “It’s almost comforting being able to sense it.”

Neither engineer nor M-Psy smiled.

Not then.

It took testing the device on Saffy, then Bram, and finally a Yúzé who was amazed enough that his cool exterior actually cracked, for the two women to turn to each other in an enormous hug as they said things that were incomprehensible because both were also crying.

So was Eleri.

Adam’s own tears were ashine in his eyes as he bent so their foreheads touched. “Do you have a fear of heights, mate?”

When she shook her head, he said, “I bought you a glider. So we can go flying together.”

Bursting into sobs, Eleri threw her arms around his neck. “I’ll fly with you into every sky.”

He picked her up, held her tight, and it was perfect.

It was life.

And it was happiness.

···

Eleri asked the shield team to name the shield the Ultrasonic in honor of its chiropteran cocreators, to the team’s enthusiastic agreement. Its final design involved no sparkly headbands—unless requested—to Bram’s great relief.

The circle piece that tucked behind the ear, against the bone there, became sleeker while retaining its comforting hum that told the wearer it was active, while the arcs of metal across the skull were fine enough that they could be merged into the hair if desired.

Methods of retaining it on the head went from the initial sparkly headband—which Saffy had chosen—to a much finer band for Eleri, which she integrated into her hair. Yúzé had gone for the same with a playfulness that was startling but made Eleri happy to see.

“I can rock it,” he’d said.

She knew better than to think he was all better, but it was a start. Because WindHaven had embraced all three other members of the Cartel as family, because they were her family. Yesterday, she’d found Yúzé in the children’s play area, coloring with them with a patience unexpected.

She’d stepped in to join them, only to find herself drawn to a child-sized acrylic paint set—where little Ollie had also joined her.

They’d painted together for an hour, and at the end of it, Ollie had put one tiny paint-covered hand on her shoulder as he stood beside her seated form and said, “Wow, Eri, you paint.”

To the littles in the clan, she was just Eri, and it brought her infinite joy.

Feeling shy, she’d nonetheless shown the piece to Adam, who’d whistled. “Baby, you can paint . This is the Canyon looking up from Raintree.” A glance up. “You have a talent.”

It was a strange feeling to know that she could become a painter if she so wished, or a plumber, or a teacher, or anything else that she wanted.

Yúzé could follow his passion for tech and lose himself in code, Saffy could design clothes, and Bram…

Bram could discover who he wanted to be beyond the protector of their small family.

“I can sleep now, think now,” he’d said, it having become clear while they were still in the cave that his issues with sleep could be ameliorated by a shield—no longer fighting to just survive, his brain was able to reroute the necessary messages through undamaged neurons.

Eleri, for her part, had realized that she wasn’t in danger of drowning in the same kind of anger that had haunted her as a young J. The ugliness that had fueled her rage was no longer a part of her life. Instead, she was fueled by joy, wonder, and surprise at the kindness of those around her.

Saoirse had given her a box of clothes the other day. “I figured you never had a chance to find your style, so Malia and I ordered you a bunch of stuff to get you started. Keep what you like, and we’ll stick the rest in one of the caches.”

Eleri hadn’t ever considered clothing as part of her identity…

but that day, she’d been drawn to a floaty summer dress of white with little green leaves on it.

It was air around her body, and she had the feeling that she might like airy, floaty dresses that were nothing at all like the suits she’d worn all her adult life.

As for Bram and the Ultrasonic, he’d scowled at the idea of a headband of any kind, so the team had created a version that involved him having two small magnets embedded into the very surface of his skull, with the device locking onto them.

Dahlia was not happy with him over his choice. “I can’t believe you had brain surgery rather than wear a headband!” Eleri had heard her say while glaring.

“It wasn’t brain surgery. The magnets are literally sitting on top of my skull, just under my scalp.” Bram had been unmoved, but he’d also been holding Dahlia close at the time while looking at her in a way that said she was wonderful.

Eleri wondered if he had any idea what that did to Dahlia.

She didn’t think so; Bram wasn’t manipulative that way, never had been. He just thought Dahlia was wonderful.

As Eleri thought the same of Adam.

“I got a call from Tim just before,” she told this man she loved with every cell in her body, as the two of them sat on the edge of his aerie exit.

“He wanted to say thank you. It helped the families a great deal when Hendricks’s remains were found and identified.

They feel as if his slow death—in the desert as they see it—was wild justice. ”

“Do you think we made the right call?” her mate asked. “He needed to be stopped, but did his untrained telepathy make him insane? It’s not our way to execute those who are sick in the mind, but we were so angry at the time.”

“No, he was sane. I spoke to Bram about it—and Tim looked into his personnel files all the way back to his start in Enforcement. He passed all the psych tests with flying colors. If he was sick in the mind, it was the same kind of sickness as other serial killers—he knew that what he was doing was evil, but he continued to do it because it excited him.”