Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

“Quiet,” the boy said, the command in his voice so strong that she stopped speaking.

“I’m going to undo your restraints,” he told her. “If you start struggling or screaming or fighting with me, it’ll alert the trainers and they’ll come strap you down again.”

Zaira just stared at him. The instant he released her, she’d do everything in her power to take him down. He was bigger than her, but she’d killed her parents. She could kill him. Once she’d done that, she’d escape this place where they tortured her by making her alone just as her parents had done.

The boy with the dark eyes and the silent feet held her gaze. “Don’t,” he said, and it was another order, though one given in a soft, solemn tone. “Do you know where this facility is? Have you looked outside?”

“Mountains,” she said, remembering what she’d seen from the vehicle that had brought her here. “Some green things. No trees.” She’d been born in Jordan and though she’d rarely been permitted out of her cage and never beyond the walls of the family compound, she’d glimpsed enough of the landscape through the bars of the gates to know she was no longer anywhere near the region where she’d been born.

But the air outside had felt as dry, the sun as warm, so maybe she was just in another part of Jordan?

“That’s all there is for miles and miles and miles,” the boy said. “Even if you somehow manage to outwit all the security protocols and escape, you’ll die of thirst and heat exhaustion within hours.”

“So?” Dying was preferable to being trapped.

“So we can’t win if we all die.”

She didn’t understand him, didn’t want to understand him. He was a stranger and even if he was a boy, that didn’t mean he wasn’t allied with the adults. None of her siblings or cousins had ever helped her. Instead, they’d reported on her when she went out of bounds and tried to squeeze through the bars of the main gate. “Okay,” she said, just so the boy would do what she wanted.

He moved to the ankle manacles and used something she couldn’t see to unlock them. When he paused at the second one and glanced at the door, she froze. Was there someone there, someone who would stop him before he set her free? But he returned to his task a second later.

Fighting the rage inside her that made her want to scream and kick, she forced herself to pretend to be following his order to behave, even once her ankles were no longer bound. Except the boy didn’t free her wrists. He just stood beside her and watched her.

“What?” she asked, so angry that she just wanted to beat him until he had no face.

“I know you’ll run,” he said. “If you do, the trainers will realize Vasic and I can get into these rooms, and they’ll punish us. That means we won’t be able to help anyone else until the punishment is over.”

What did Zaira care about anyone else? No one cared about her. All she wanted to do was get out of here. “I won’t run.”

“Yes, you will,” the boy said, and then he put his tool to her wrist manacles.

Zaira wanted to stay silent, but he was confusing her. “Why are you letting me go, then?”

“Because,” he said in that quiet voice that made her listen, “I won’t be like them. I won’t use threats or pain to keep you from doing what you want.”

Zaira didn’t understand him again. So she just waited. And as soon as he freed her, she jumped off the table, ignored the throbbing pain all over her body, and bolted.

The boy and the taller one who’d been waiting outside for him went in the opposite direction from her, and then she was through a heavy door on the other end and the alarms shrieked. Her heart in her throat, she kept running, her bare feet slapping the cold surface of the floor.

She didn’t know what made her glance back. When she did, she saw the boy had come back and was now by the doors that had set off the alarms. Their eyes met, and at that instant she knew he was going to pretend it had been him who’d set off the alarm.

He was giving her time to hide.

•   •   •

ALL of them had been caught, of course. Zaira didn’t have Aden’s stealth and she didn’t know the facility. Aden and Vasic had been punished far more brutally than Zaira, a fact she didn’t learn until over ten years later, when she’d become skilled enough to hack into secure records databases.

All she knew then was that the boy with the dark eyes and the quiet feet had come back for her. When he unlocked her shackles a second time, she didn’t beat him with her fists . . . and she didn’t run despite the need inside her. Because another need was stronger.

“Why do you do this?” Zaira asked him as she lay curled up on the examination table, under a heat blanket he’d smuggled in for her. He’d told her he couldn’t treat her wounds except in subtle ways no one would notice, but he could make her more comfortable. “Why do you help me?”

“So you’ll be strong enough that they won’t break you when I’m transferred,” he said, continuing to work on a crushed bone so it wouldn’t hurt as much when they came back and forcefully switched off her psychic pain controls. Her parents had taught her those controls so she wouldn’t pass out before they were done with her.

“Where are you going?” she demanded, infuriated. “When?”

“I’m being sent to another facility in ten months,” he told her. “Does the bone hurt less now?”

“Pain doesn’t matter,” she said, trying not to think about the fact that the only person who had ever treated her as something better than garbage would soon be gone, leaving her once more alone in the darkness. “I can think past pain.”