Chapter 17

Chapter 17

There is a point of terminal velocity, a moment beyond which the psychometric no longer has control of the inputs into their system. I didn't understand that prior to that day at the Johanssen farm, when I fell into the vortex of an evil so profound that the imprints have become a permanent part of my own memories.

I was institutionalized in the direct aftermath. Not because I was psychotic, but because I believed with every cell in my body that I had committed the atrocities for which I had such vivid memories both visual and emotional. I remembered not just the act of brutalization, but pleasure so violent it was obscene, and I was convinced that warped pleasure was mine.

—Excerpt from Terminal Velocity: A Psychometric's Journey into Oblivion by Crispin Nicholas (1973)

"I'M SORRY." AUDEN wiped her face on the sleeves of her loose sweater dress, an action which would've horrified her mother.

But Shoshanna Scott had been displeased by Auden from a young age. Why she'd made Auden her successor, even in name only, especially given Auden's injury, no one would ever know.

Auden did , however, know why Shoshanna had carried her in the womb, rather than using a surrogate. The vast majority of Psy believed that contact with the maternal carrier's mind influenced the child's mind—and psychic integrity was as important to the bloodline as genetic.

Her journey to birth had never bothered Auden. She hadn't even been wounded by her mother's disdain. To her, Shoshanna had just been her maternal donor, Henry the person who was her actual parent .

A good parent.

A good man.

A good liar .

"I'm sorry," she repeated through a throat that rasped, the need inside her an aching hurting thing that wanted to hide her face in his arms and pretend this was her life, her world. Safe. Warm. Full of the wild. "I don't know what happened."

"Pregnancy hormones?" Remi suggested, ducking his head in an effort to meet her gaze. "It's not a big deal," he said when she refused to cooperate. "I've held more than one crying pregnant woman in my time."

Auden tried to make sense of that, couldn't. "You have?"

"One of the lesser-known duties of an alpha. My chest is well used to being a landing pad for tears."

He was trying to ease her embarrassment, she thought, and wanted so much to take him at face value. To believe in someone enough to lower her guard even this much, it would be more than she'd known since the day her father sacrificed her to the altar of his ambition. "Thank you."

"Auden"—Remi's voice wasn't all human—"I don't want to push you after what you just experienced, but we have to talk."

Her muscles threatened to spasm, they'd gone so tight. "Yes." It came out a whisper as she thought frantically about how to explain what had happened without coming across as brain damaged. Her baby couldn't afford for Auden to be seen as weak, as prey. "I need to wash my face."

"I'll stay out here. Unless…how sensitive are you? To what you pick up, I mean? Will my presence inside leave strong impressions?"

"Imprints," she found herself saying—because no one in her life had ever been interested in her ability. "We call them imprints."

"Right, imprints." He nodded at the cooler. "You seemed to go into something like a seizure when you touched the handle. Rigid body, eyes shifting to black."

"It's better if you stay here," Auden said, rather than thinking about the image he'd sketched for her. It did sound like a seizure, a bad one. Maybe that was why she had no memory of their conversation, or even of accepting the cooler from him—the seizure had disrupted her neurons, wiped them clean.

Once inside her cabin, she made quick work of washing up. The eyes that looked back at her from the mirror remained that pale Shoshanna blue, so unexpected and striking against the rich dark of Auden's skin tone.

Shoshanna blue.

That was how she'd always thought of them, these eyes her mother's enduring stamp on Auden. She shouldn't have them—the genetic calculations done before her birth had put the probability of her inheriting her father's brown eyes at ninety-nine point eight percent.

Shoshanna, however, had never liked to lose.

So now when Auden looked at herself, she saw the same eyes that had always been cold and disinterested when deigning to look in Auden's direction, and icily calculating the rest of the time.

One last laugh on Shoshanna's part.

The rest of Auden's face was hollow, her skin pallid. Only her hair remained undisturbed and pristine in its tight bun at the back of her head, the strands sleeked over her head with a precision that she'd taught herself as a teenager.

As a preteen—when she'd finally been permitted to choose her own style—she'd worn a short, curly crop pushed back with combs. At least in her father's house. Outside and at Shoshanna's, she'd been expected to go to the hairdresser and get her hair put into a contained style that would be considered "professional" among the Psy.

Auden had never understood what her curls had to do with professionalism.

Pushing away from the sink, she dried off, then went to her small kitchen area and mixed up a nutrient drink. The last thing she felt like doing was eating, but her stomach was rumbling, which meant that her child had to be hungry, too. At least the liquid was a cold balm against the abused tissues of her throat.

She emerged to an empty clearing.

Disappointment was a lead weight in her gut, her abrupt loneliness hurting parts of her she hadn't known could hurt. But meshed with the hurt was a shaking sense of relief. Now, she wouldn't have to deal with his questions, wouldn't have to think of more lies.

It was hard to lie to someone who had held you while you cried, his big body a protective embrace.

Fingers trembling, she drank more of the nutrients, but was only halfway through the glass when the trees rustled and Remi emerged holding two slender metallic cases.

Her lungs expanded, the world back in Technicolor. "What are those?"

"We usually throw a couple of these folding chairs in the back of our vehicles." Opening one case, he quickly assembled it into a comfortable-appearing seat. "I'm likely to be the only one who's touched it for a while," he told her. "They don't get much use—it's pretty much only if we go down to the town to watch a game. A few of the juveniles have joined local leagues."

Auden went to the chair and reached out a single careful finger. One brush and—

—excitement, Remi's excitement—

—fur, small hands, tiny paws, and a waving tail—

—sweet things, liquid spilled—

—family—

—worry, directed at Auden —

The ache inside her spread, so deep that it threatened all she thought she knew of the world. "Yes," she whispered. "I can sit in this."

Sit in it and pretend that she was part of that happy family where children felt safe enough to clamber into an adult's lap, their trust a sweet thread that resonated with her maternal heart…and where this leopard alpha meant it when he seemed to care about her, his protectiveness embracing her as fiercely as it embraced his pack.

His imprint whispered that he did mean it, but that was a fleeting kiss, a momentary burst of concern that might be directed at any pregnant woman alone in the forest.

It wasn't about Auden herself.

But for a few minutes, seated in this chair that he'd brought for her, she could pretend.

The second chair ready, Remi rose to grab the cooler and put it in front of them before he took a seat. "How are you feeling?"

Tears threatened again, a thick knot of them in her throat.

"Better," she said when she could speak, then felt compelled to add, "You don't have to babysit me. I'm sure you're a busy man."

"Not too busy for this." He stretched out his legs, his gaze on the trees beyond. "You mind if I ask what it feels like when you pick up an imprint? I've never met a psychometric before."

Auden's first urge was to tell him everything. He sounded genuinely interested. But aware of her current muddled state, she considered his words, thought of how information could be used to cause harm not just to her but to others like her, and hesitated.

"I know you sense emotion." Remi's eyes glinted at her. "Cat's out of the bag there."

She exhaled, the decision easier now. "It's why Ps-Psy kept their heads down during Silence," she said. "And why there are so few of us. We were rare anyway, but while the Council didn't bother to crush us as they did designation E—likely because we were too few in number to make a ripple in the Net—the quiet pressure to select for less ‘emotional' abilities had an effect."

"I did a bit of research after we first met," Remi said, "and saw some pretty high salaries offered by universities and museums for psychometrics."

"We're prized in certain quarters now, but during the initial few decades of Silence we were considered one of the least desired of abilities. That generation took enough psychometric genes out of the pool that our numbers now are even smaller than they were prior to Silence. Small enough to command a premium at those facilities that need us."

Remi stayed silent, a big jungle cat who looked outwardly lazy but who she was certain could move at lethal speed without warning.

"Our low numbers," she added, "meant that even if we did breach Silence on a bad read, we didn't have a big enough presence to contaminate the Net with emotion." It had been a formless black back then, dotted with the cold and icy stars that were the minds of the Psy.

No empathic color, no desperate honeycomb to connect them to each other in an effort to stop the psychic network from crumbling. The latter terrified Auden, not for herself, but for her innocent baby, who would be born into a world with a PsyNet that was thick with holes and ragged with lost and broken pieces.

She felt sick when she stepped onto it these days, the thinness of the psychic fabric a stark warning.

"Makes sense," Remi said in that easy way of speaking, as if he had all the time in the world. "Why waste energy on such a small percentage of the population, especially when I'm guessing most of you tried to stay away from emotional reads?"

Auden nodded, feeling an odd expansion in her chest. This was the first time she'd spoken openly about her ability to anyone in real life. To someone who knew her as Auden Scott and not just anonymous user A9.

It felt so good that she broke her private rules, told him more. "Back in the old world, before Silence, psychometrics worked regularly with search and rescue and even Enforcement. They used to help catch serial killers.

"In one famous case, the Ps-Psy found a live victim because the victim had thrown her driver's license out the window of the car as it was traveling the highway, but she'd been reciting her abductor's registration number in her head at the time. Over and over again. Until it imprinted on the license."

Remi whistled. "Wow, that's seriously good tracking."

"It was also agonizing," she whispered. "I've read a copy of the book the psychometric published." It was passed around the forum like a holy relic, a forbidden thing from the time before Silence.

"The license was a clean item as imprints go, but Crispin Nicholas—the psychometric—later read the basement on the killer's farm, the place where he tortured and murdered his victims. Crispin wrote that it felt like fingers shoving into his skull while other fingers forced his eyes open and made him watch, made him see everything that had gone on in that place.

"He couldn't look away, couldn't make the images stop, was frozen in place until a human colleague figured out something had gone horrifically wrong and punched him unconscious before physically carrying him out—with no access to a strong telepath who could go in and disrupt the read, it was the only way to break him out of the loop."

Remi's agreement was quiet, his voice deep and low. "Be like picking up the scents at a murder scene a couple of days old. The fetid scent of decay."

"Yes, only a hundred times worse. Because scents fade after a short time when compared to imprints. And layered imprints, where the same action has occurred over and over and over, can be relentless."

—warmth, happiness, pride—

She realized she was stroking the arm of her chair, bathing in an imprint that didn't hurt but healed. How utterly lovely.

"The bad reads…they're chaos, nightmare pieces." Auden wanted so much for him to understand that she tried to think of a way to give better shape to the experience. "Like walking into a library to find all the books pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor, only a few spines visible and all the pages ripped out and scattered out of order."

She found herself tracing Remi's profile with her gaze as he took the time to think over her words.

"That's why you only pick up snatches, images, or pieces."

It made her wonder all over again what she'd read on his comm device. "Yes." But then she told him more, because her defenses were down and any other motivations aside, he did care in at least an impersonal way.

"We can pick up more coherent things—that's what the academic psychometrics do, but it requires intense focus and energy. It's too difficult with emotion-touched objects. The resonance is too strong, starts to overwhelm the psychometric.

"Crispin called it terminal velocity in his book, the point at which the psychometric isn't able to turn back, get themselves out of the nightmare."

Remi's eyebrows drew together over his eyes. "Have you—"

"Only once—and I was so scared that I broke away before terminal velocity." It had left her a trembling, sweat-soaked wreck regardless. "A mistake in childhood. An object picked up off the ground at my small private school that had been dropped by a teacher who should never have been in charge of children."

Remi's growl made her nape prickle.

"My father was…not a good man," she said, speaking the words aloud for the first time. "But he did a good thing then. He believed me. And that teacher vanished." Swallowing, she met his gaze. "Do you judge me for not caring about what happened to him?"

"No. I'm changeling. If you're implying what I think you're implying about the teacher, then our sentence is death at the claws of the alpha. No mercy. No forgiveness. Not for violating the trust of the smallest and most vulnerable of us all."

Auden's shoulders softened.

His jaw yet a brutal line, Remi's eyes went to her empty glass. "How about it?" He nodded at the cooler. "You want to try the food I brought?"

Her stomach rumbled right on cue.

"I think your cub is saying yes." His grin creased his cheeks, eased up the grim line of his jaw.

Her stomach flipped.

She was still struggling with the reaction when he opened the lid to show her the goods within, his eyes bright with a feline wildness.

Right then, she understood what humans and changelings meant when they said a person's smile reached their eyes. It was a warmth that couldn't be faked, a sense that this being was glowing from the inside out.

"Auden?"

Flushing, she jerked her gaze away from his face and to the cooler.

Remi didn't rush her as she stared down at two items she recognized as muffins from seeing them on the comm, a swirling pastry that might've been a cinnamon roll, and what looked like a croissant. Then there was a sealed packet of cookies, a clear container of mixed berries, and a block of chocolate.

"I wasn't sure how into food you were, so I kept it simple. The cinnamon roll is probably the one with the strongest flavor."

Hungry in a way she hadn't ever been before her pregnancy, Auden felt as if she could devour it all, but limited herself to trying the croissant for now. It was still warm. What she'd assumed was a cooler, she realized, was actually a carrier designed to keep food at the temperature it was when put inside.

Having placed her empty glass on the ground, she now took a large bite of the croissant…and made a startled sound as flakes of pastry drifted down around her. It was no doubt all over her face, too.

But she didn't care.

"This is delicious ." Forgetting every bit of manners she'd ever been taught, she took several more bites in quick succession…then looked sadly at her empty hand.

Instead of laughing at her, Remi creased his cheeks again with a smile she could almost believe held affection. "I'll bring more croissants next time."

Next time.

A galloping horse inside her chest, she decided to try the cinnamon roll despite his warning that it was the strongest tasting. A single bite and she moaned before licking up the frosting around her mouth.

"You should have some water to wash that down," Remi said, his voice sounding strangled.

She waved him toward her cabin.

He hesitated. "I'll have to touch your things."

"Glass is on the sink. Keep your shoes on. Tap is motion activated." Then she took another bite of the most delicious item she'd ever tasted. "And I like your imprint. It's like an enormous comforting purr that wraps around me." The words spilled out in a haze of sugar and cinnamon.