Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Ivan’s mother had still been able to telepath when she died, but barely. Her voice had gone from a firm, clear sound in his head to a rasping whisper he could barely hear. He’d have wondered if she’d called out to him at the end, panicked and helpless, but he knew she wouldn’t have; she’d died lost in the petals of the crystalline flower, her son far from her thoughts.
Jax wasn’t needed now, of course. Silence had fallen, emotion no longer a crime. Most of the users here would’ve begun to inject or inhale it before the fall, perhaps in a hopeless quest for freedom—or perhaps just because they’d wanted to run from their lives. There were, however, a startling number of fresh young faces.
He’d spoken to some of them.
“Too hard, too hard, too hard.”
A refrain he’d heard from more than one mouth. They’d turned to Jax because they were scared of who they were outside the Protocol.
“I’m nothing and no one, a null value,” one youth had whispered to him, as if imparting a great truth. “Just a drone. No personality. No self.”
Caged mice who no longer knew how to live in the wild, she and others like her sought only to numb the world, forget their pain—because there were plenty of psychic scars beneath the drugged-out stares, plenty of stories of traumatized children and crushed souls.
“The sadness here,” Arwen said, his eyes pools of silvery darkness, “it hangs like a cloud.”
Though Ivan had never been a toucher, he’d made an exception for Arwen after realizing how much physical contact meant to his cousin. Arwen was too generous, too much the empath, to ask for anything that would make another person uncomfortable, but Ivan had eyes and a brain, had figured it out.
It turned out that he didn’t mind touch if it was about taking care of another person. Except for Soleil. With her, for her, he’d been a different man—for a fragment of a moment in time.
I don’t need my memories to tell me that I would’ve never just walked away from you. You’re too important to me, Ivan Mercant.
It didn’t matter how much he wanted to believe Soleil’s statement, didn’t even matter if her words were the purest truth. He’d been another Ivan then, had touched the shooting star of her and believed he had a chance at some kind of normality.
He’d been wrong.
Chapter 30
I’m getting reports from hospital empaths that they haven’t been able to successfully communicate with the still-conscious Psy who appear to be on the island. All attempts—including by my most senior people—have failed.
Of significant concern is that a number have slid from incoherence to catatonia, while those who fell into comas during the incident remain in that state, their brain waves erratic.
My Es are picking up constant pulses of panic and terror, and the medical teams are worried about the patients’ hearts. They’re beating at a rate that’s not sustainable.
—Message from Ivy Jane Zen, president of the Empathic Collective,
to fellow members of the Ruling Coalition
THE COLD REALITY of his future a vise around his mind, Ivan put his hand on Arwen’s shoulder, squeezed.
Reaching up, Arwen touched his fingers to Ivan’s in a silent thank-you. Then he took a quiet breath and went to take a seat next to a young woman with a vacant stare. Sophisticated haircut, cashmere sweater, and shoes handmade by an Italian cobbler—yet Arwen didn’t hesitate so much as a second before he came down on the dirty lawn chair.
Because Arwen was an E first. The rest was pretty window dressing.
Soleil would like him. And Arwen would like her.
He wanted to tell Arwen about her, even though he had no right to her. If she’d marked him as the cats and Arwen both claimed, then he had to convince her to remove that mark. He would not drag her into the cage with him.
And though the spider was the ugliest of his scars, the rest of him wasn’t exactly pretty. There was a reason he walked to the halfway house almost every night. As a reminder—of what he could’ve been, what he could still become.
Even now, a hidden part of him understood why these people took the drug. He’d experienced the lying beauty of it far too young, his mind opening up like a flower in bloom. A crystalline flower with a thousand petals, a thousand possibilities of life and existence.
He hadn’t known what was happening. He’d been a child, a toddler really. He shouldn’t even have those memories, but perhaps it was a side effect of the drug, the impossibility of forgetting. He’d wandered the crystalline pathways for hours, perhaps days. All he knew was that he’d woken on the floor of their grungy motel, thirsty and hungry and with the dirty carpet’s rough weave an imprint on his cheek.