Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

“I heard it circling maybe an hour after you went down, and just before the rain got this bad and the wind turned into a gale.”

So they were safe enough for now. Their pursuers would be idiotic to try to track them in this terrain in the dark in such inclement weather. On the flip side—“They have to know we’ll have holed up.”

Aden nodded. “We’ll have to be ready to move as soon as the weather clears up enough that the chopper can take off again.” Lifting an index finger, he made her follow it from left to right, then took her through a battery of other tests to check for any lingering impairment. “You’re physically fine.”

“No PsyNet link,” she said, answering his unasked question. “I instinctively did a telepathic scan when I woke and the pain was severe enough that I think a second attempt could cause me to black out again.”

The aloneness was a huge thing inside her, stretching and growing and swallowing her up until soon all that remained would be the rage that had burned in her as a child. “We should do your surgery now.” Not only was her mental state unstable, her abdomen didn’t feel right. “I think I might still be bleeding internally.”

Expression grim, Aden got her to pull up her blood-matted top and palpated her abdomen. “Yes,” he said afterward. “I clearly didn’t find all the damage.”

“It’s not your fault.” She put the top—plus the sweater—back down and zipped up his leather jacket, then the waterproof one she wore over it. “The fact you’ve kept me alive this long is a credit to your skill.” He was only meant to be a field surgeon and medic, but Aden had never been “only” anything. “Let me pay back the favor. This weather makes it likely they’ll press the kill switch the next time they can get up in the air. No point leaving you alive if they have doubts about being able to get to you.”

“There’s just enough charge left in the last laser that you should be able to unseal the bone following the lines of the original surgery. You’ll have to do the rest using a scalpel.”

She stared at him. “Aden I’m a combat telepath trained in hand-to-hand fighting and various weapons. I know how to slit a throat using any knife at hand, but I don’t know how to do complex surgery.” It would’ve been difficult enough with the laser. “I’ll butcher you.” End up with hands drenched in blood again.

Her mind flickered with frozen snapshots of her palms stained a rust red that had an orange tinge, her arms splattered with flecks of brain matter. Each mental photograph was from the point of view of the child she’d been, the ground below far closer and her bare feet wet with the blood in which she’d walked as she brought down the pipe over and over again.

Small, smeared footprints surrounded the bodies.

Gritting her teeth, she slammed shut a mental door that hadn’t opened since the day she perfected her shields. That screaming, bloodied girl was gone. Dead. “I can’t do it.”

“You have to.” Aden dragged the daypack closer and pulled out the medkit.

“Aden,” she began, fingers still curled tightly into his thigh.

His eyes locked with hers in the darkness inside the cocoon he’d created for them. “I’m dead otherwise.” An inescapable truth. “As you said, I’d make the same choice.”

To die attempting to fight their captors rather than allow them to blow up his brain from a distance.

Breathing in and out, she tried not to hear the scrabbling nails of the murderous ghost she’d put back in her cell, and said, “Tell me how.”

•   •   •

HUNDREDS of miles away, another meeting was taking place, the attendees hooked in via comm screens set to audio only, except for the one that showed the man in charge of the operation to retrieve Aden Kai.

“A much bigger storm is scheduled to hit within the next hour.” His jaw moved as he chewed. “We’ll have a roughly five-minute window in about ten minutes—the current front is moving away from us and the real storm’s not yet arrived.”

“Chances of retrieval?”

“Low. I’ve got people on the ground but they’re trapped on either side of swollen rivers and streams, or hampered by low visibility.” A foul dark brown stream coming out of his mouth, his spit aimed at the ground. “We can take the chopper up in the window between the smaller storm and the bigger one. What do you want me to do? Search or eliminate?”

“Please wait.” Muting their side of the feed so he wouldn’t be able to hear the discussion, the attendees spoke among themselves, their voices distorted by technology. The decision was unanimous: Aden Kai could have been a serious asset, one that would’ve significantly accelerated their long-term plans, but they couldn’t risk him getting out alive.

“Eliminate,” they told the search leader. “Take the chopper up as soon as it clears and sweep the area while emitting the destruct signal.”

That signal had a range of two miles. The leader of the Arrows would be dead long before the second storm hit.

•   •   •

BLOCKING out the noise of the howling wind and the pounding rain, her heavy rainproof jacket off so she could move more easily, Zaira knelt behind Aden. He was taller than her but he’d taken a cross-legged position and bent forward so she could work on him.

She gripped the penlight in her teeth, shining the beam onto the crudely sealed incision on the back of his head, and after cleaning it as he’d told her, picked up the laser and cut along the lines of the previous surgery. Aden had instructed her to do it three times, going a fraction deeper each time. The laser died midway through her third set of cuts.