Shards of Hope (Psy-Changeling 14)

The guards had just been the brawn. Someone else was behind this.

Aden stepped onto the first stone, his muscles flexing against her as he maintained his precarious balance. A second step. A third.

Water frothed around the rocks, the river’s passage rushing thunder around them.

Aden’s body dipped and she held on though her training told her to let go so he’d have a better chance of survival. She knew Aden. He’d come for her again. He’d dive into that dangerous water in a stupid, irrational, un-Silent decision and he’d come for her. So she’d stay with him as long as possible, until there was no other option and even he would agree with her.

Only she wasn’t sure he ever would.

He really was a very bad leader in that respect—and it was why his Arrows gave him their unswerving dedication. All of them rejects from the world, from their families. No one else had ever come for them, ever would. Silence or not, it mattered that Aden would. Perhaps that exposed a flaw in the heart of the Protocol and perhaps it was simply a sign that even Arrows had a soul.

Halfway across the river and she could hear shouts that indicated their pursuers were heading to the ridge she and Aden had slid down. “I estimate they’ll see us in another two minutes.”

Aden didn’t answer, but she knew he’d heard.

Four more stones, the other side starting to appear closer, but then Aden’s foot slipped. Zaira would’ve released him and chanced the water except that he locked one hand around her ankle. A silent statement that if they went, they’d go together. Irrational, she thought again as they both almost fell in before he righted himself.

Two more stones.

The sounds so close now, flickers of light flashing on the ridge when she glanced over her shoulder.

Aden slipped and slammed down to his knees . . . but it was on the bank. He made sure his body tumbled sideways so she fell on the bank beside him rather than backward into the water. Pushing up on her hands, she looked up toward the ridge. “We need to get into the trees.”

They made it barely in time; the chopper was in the air now and sweeping the area with a spotlight. Pressing themselves to the ground and covering their bodies in enough forest floor debris that they no longer looked people-shaped, Aden and Zaira waited.

Zaira breathed into her hands, the gloves she’d found in the coat’s pockets too large but warm. She couldn’t hear Aden breathing and for a second, her heart stopped. Alone, whispered the stunted, murderous child hidden in the darkest corner of her psyche, alone. A second later, she shook it off. He was being silent, that was all. Aden could be more silent than any other Arrow she knew, even the most capable assassin. She’d asked him once how he’d learned to do that. His answer was one she’d never forget.

When I was a child, my parents told me to be invisible, so invisible that no one would ever consider me a threat, so invisible that I would be forgotten.

Zaira didn’t understand how anyone could have failed to see the relentless strength and raw power that lived in Aden, but they had. Ming LeBon had barely paid Aden any attention, until one day, their former leader suddenly realized someone else was holding the reins and that he’d been deposed. No more would Ming treat the Arrows as his personal death squad, using them up then putting them down as if they were lame dogs.

They belonged to Aden now. And they would follow him into hell itself.

She felt the spotlight sweep over her at that moment, the light seeping through her damp tomb with its smell of the earth and the musty wet of decomposing forest debris. The light didn’t linger. The sound of the chopper grew more distant heartbeat by heartbeat as the search went downriver, the voices of the searchers on foot also heading in that direction.

“I think they’re gone,” she said at last.

“Slowly.” Coming up from his prone position with painstaking care as she did the same, Aden picked up the pack she’d thrust under a tangle of undergrowth, then looked up at the smattering of stars exposed by a small gap in the cloud cover. “We’re in the northern hemisphere.”

Since it was spring in that hemisphere, they had to be either at a high elevation or in one of the generally colder areas such as Alaska. “Can you narrow it down further?”

“No, but this might.” He retrieved a small device from the pack, stilled before turning it on. “It could have a tracker that could lead the search straight to us.”

“Don’t use it,” Zaira said. “The risk outweighs the gain. In fact, leave all the tech behind. They may not have thought of it yet, but if there are trackers, they could activate them remotely.”

Aden took out every piece of technology they’d carried this far, venturing to the river’s edge to throw them in the water before returning. “How good is your knowledge of astronomy?”

“Bad. I’ve always had access to the PsyNet for reference.” The psychic network overflowed with data. “And after my defection, I could telepathically contact others if I needed location data.” Zaira had played dead for five years and eight months in order to provide a safe haven for “broken” or used-up Arrows for whom Ming had signed execution orders, but now the Net needed her alive and part of it. A large number of the Venice contingent had returned to the PsyNet with her, none of them any longer at risk from Ming’s assassins and pet medics.

It had been a strange homecoming, the formerly stark night sky landscape of the Net now webbed with delicate golden threads created by the empaths whose presence protected the Psy race from a deadly psychic contagion, but it had been a homecoming all the same. In a heartbeat, her world had gone from a small, contained network she’d had to constantly remind herself wasn’t a cage, to a vastness without boundaries.