Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Auden stared at her mother. “Fragmented thoughts. Telling me that we’re linked, that it’s too late to separate.” A pause. “I think she’s right. She’s the other Auden. I didn’t splinter. I didn’t fragment. She stamped herself onto part of me.”
“But in the end, you won.” He hugged her roughly to his body, his voice shaking. “Your love for Liberty won.”
Auden let him hold her for a long second before she drew back. “Remi, my Remi.” A single tear streaking down her face before she turned toward the bed.
Remi growled, his cat wanting to rend that shriveled body to a hundred pieces, his rage an ineffective shield against his pain.
“Good-bye, Mother.” Auden pulled the plug on the machine that powered her mother’s heart, then unhooked the breathing tube…just as all hell broke loose.
Pounding feet in the tunnel, yells, every alarm on the machines around Shoshanna going off. But Remi didn’t give a shit about that.
Because Auden was convulsing, the sclera of her eyes streaked red when she looked at him. Grabbing her before she could collapse, he was only peripherally aware of the scream of the machines as Shoshanna’s heart flatlined.
Charisma Wai entered the chamber with a weapon a heartbeat later, the doctor at her heels. Remi figured the nurse had called them even before she yelled that they’d disconnected the “lifelines.” The doctor was bleeding from claw marks to his cheek, while Wai’s loose sleep pants were torn at the knee.
Rina and the others. Fighting against that strike team Wai must’ve activated early. Now, his people were keeping the same team busy because Rina knew that Remi could easily take care of one slender Psy woman and an out-of-shape doctor who was huffing from his run.
Wai couldn’t shoot or hit him with a psychic assault before he could separate her head from her body.
But that wouldn’t save Auden. “Councilor Scott completed the transfer,” he said in a growl of a voice.
Charisma’s eyes widened. “What?”
“Her body was about to fail. She made the executive decision, but there’s been a physiological issue,” he said, as Auden’s body went rigid in his arms. “Deal with it!”
The weapon trembled in Charisma’s hand. “How do you—?”
“Did you think it was a coincidence that Auden found me?” he yelled. “The Councilor and I have an agreement. She comes back, and we get a payment big enough to take my pack into the future. Now move!”
Wai shook her head. “No, why would she do that?” But her hand wavered. “Your people attacked us.”
He snarled. “Some don’t agree with my decision. I’ll handle them—that’s my job. You can do your job now or you can let the Councilor die!”
Dropping the weapon, Wai urged the doctor forward. “Go!”
“That body is dead,” Remi snapped when the doctor would’ve gone to the emaciated frame on the bed. “If it worked, she’s inside this body.” And if that was so, then he’d keep his promise to Auden and end her.
The action would haunt him all his life, but to take any other course would be to spit on her courage and love for her daughter.
He stood, Auden’s now limp body in his arms, and headed for the second bed.
Two beds. One for Shoshanna. And one for the baby meant to be hooked up to her by methods unimaginable so she could rape that tiny and vulnerable mind.
“Right, right.” Dr. Verhoeven followed him.
Though Auden was limp, her eyes moved rapidly under her eyelids. The echo of Shoshanna’s dying body sent ice through his veins, but her scent…it was still Auden.
Until it wasn’t.
Back again.
Lost.
Back.
Fighting, he realized, she was fighting a battle to hold on to her own mind, her own sense of self. “You can make it,” he said, not caring if the doctor heard—the other man would no doubt believe he was talking to Shoshanna Scott. “Think of the future.” Think of Liberty.
Removing the tiny knit cap from his pocket while everyone else was distracted, he placed it in her flexed open hand.
It clenched instinctively around it.
* * *
• • •
AUDEN was no combat telepath. She wasn’t a powerful telepath at all. She didn’t have the weapons to battle the psychic tendrils her mother had shot and somehow hooked into her mind in her dying agonies. She had no blades to cut her off, no acid to burn them aside. And fuck if she’d ever reach for her baby’s nascent powers.
Never would anyone use her little girl.
She leaned on what she did have—a ferocious love and a vicious anger—and the awareness that they made her stronger than her weakened mother. Instead of fighting Shoshanna’s blows, she blanketed Shoshanna in her rage, a rage with a near-viscous quality that was a thick net stifling Shoshanna’s strikes.
Auden hadn’t known her mind could do that, but she was a psychometric. She touched emotion every time she felt an imprint. It made sense that the same emotions could come out of her in this strange and almost tactile way.