Chapter 3

Chapter 3

Given the previously noted circumstances, as certified by qualified counsel, I hereby remove Auden Jackson as my legal heir. She no longer has any claim on my estate beyond any specific bequests in this amended document.

To clarify, no penalty is to be paid by Shoshanna Scott for her family's adoption of Auden into their bloodline. The matter has been negotiated satisfactorily between Shoshanna and I, and no debts remain.

—Amendment to the Last Will and Testament of Henry Ignatius Scott (9 March 2076)

AUDEN'S HEAD FELT heavy, her vision foggy, but she couldn't stop staring at the trees. At the man who wore a comm thick with memories that hadn't hurt her. The person who'd worn that watch before him…had been a good person. Auden had few parameters for what words like "good" meant, but she thought the lack of pain associated with her read of the device must be a link to goodness.

Her thoughts splintered without warning, the edges fraying until she couldn't remember why she was looking at the soaring trees with their dark green limbs and thick trunks marked by natural patterns and textures she could almost sense against her palm. Just like she couldn't remember why she'd woken with bruises on her hip and thigh today.

They ached.

"Auden." Charisma's crisp voice.

It took a second or two to penetrate, but once it did, Auden forced herself to look away from the trees and to the older woman who had been her mother's right hand for so long that she was present in Auden's earliest memories.

Charisma Wai was intelligent, rigid in her views on Psy perfection and the importance of bloodlines, and excellent at her job. She'd also been long enough in Auden's life that Auden never forgot Charisma, even when the rest of her memories fractured.

"That was unexpected," the other woman said while Auden fought the compulsion to stare once more into the shadowy green of this place so different from the pristine lawns and precise hedges of her childhood.

"Yes," she said at last, because Charisma was waiting for her to reply. The truth was that Auden didn't know what she was replying to, had already lost track of the conversation.

"The male was a changeling." Curt words from Charisma, whose eyes were on her organizer. "He made an offer on this land."

Auden stayed silent.

"Normally," Charisma continued, "I'd advise against a sale. It can be useful to have a hidden location that can be utilized for more covert matters."

Auden had retained the thread of the conversation this time around. "But?" she said, trying to read the face of this woman who had been a peripheral part of her existence since the day she was born. It hadn't mattered that Auden had spent most of her time in her father's household, among his people. She'd nonetheless always understood Charisma's importance to her mother.

"I wasn't aware until now that this parcel was so close to a pack." Charisma's lips tightened. "Many of the packs are intensely insular and keep to themselves, but given that the male approached us, I don't think we can rely on that—whatever his animal is, it isn't the kind to mind its own business."

Auden's brain fired, a fragment of memory crashing inside her temporal lobe: a man with eyes like the topaz stone she'd seen once, so clear and striated with light. His hair had been cut messily, countless shades of brown within it, his skin a gold that seemed warm and touchable.

No, his eyes had been yellow-green, argued another part of her mind.

"Both," she whispered under her breath. "They were both." Because he was changeling.

A cat of some kind.

It confused her that Charisma, with a mind that was undamaged and whole, hadn't worked that out. It had been obvious in the slow prowl of his walk, the languid fluidity of his muscles.

"I think…" she said loud enough for Charisma to hear. "I think I'd like a house here. A quiet place. Like…Father used to have."

I go to my quiet places to think, Auden. That's why you can't come. When I'm with you, I think only about you because you are my daughter and my heir.

Charisma's gaze sharpened. "Can you solve this equation?" She flipped the organizer toward Auden.

The numbers blurred and swirled, but Auden found her hand lifting, found herself inputting numbers that formed in her head in a soft glow. Ghosts created by her fully functional visual cortex.

Charisma sucked in a quick breath.

"I do believe," the older woman murmured, "it's time we go back to Dr.Verhoeven. As for the land, I see your point. But think it over. I'm not fully aware of your father's more private residences but your mother's were in locations with no watchful neighbors. Furthermore, there is no road to this godforsaken place. You'd be reliant on air vehicles or teleports."

Auden's eyelids came down, rose up again. The streamers of her thoughts attempted to fly away. But, for the first time in…an endless nothingness of being, when she extended her psychic hand and gripped at the streamers, she managed to keep hold of them.

The transport issue: that could be a good thing.

Before the fogged brain and the broken thoughts, she'd done something. What had she done?

Congratulations on your graduation from flight school. To have passed the testing at fourteen, that brings great honor to the family.

Controls under her hands, the sensation of lifting off the earth.

Fly. She could fly things. Small things. A private jet-chopper. Her father had given her one, she was sure of it. A sleek black machine, a present on her graduation. Shoshanna hadn't been pleased, she remembered, had said Auden was too young.

"As for the changeling pack," Charisma said, her gaze once more on the organizer that was an extension of her body, "they have next to no footprint on the Internet. Some packs work hard to achieve that, so we can't assume they're small or weak.

"I believe I have the name at least—RainFire. I was able to find it in a search of property records. The pack purchased the block of land against our border outright just over three and a half years ago now; they also have changeling rights to land in public ownership. But the main chunk of their private territory comes out of the Peace Accord Land Trust."

Auden stared at the older woman, her brain struggling to comprehend the shape of Charisma's words. "What?"

"I don't know what that is, either." Charisma's rounded eyes had a tilt at the very corners, and now it seemed as if those corners twitched in frustration.

Auden knew that was her own imagination—or a glitch in her mental processing of the image. Charisma's Silence was without flaw.

"I'll run a quick search on the PsyNet," Charisma said.

Auden knew she should be able to run her own identical search but she couldn't figure out how to enter the PsyNet, her brain refusing to give up that knowledge. It was right there , just beyond her grasp, a thing so basic that it should've been second nature. It was like forgetting how to walk.

"Ah," Charisma said, "the trust was set up in the aftermath of the Territorial Wars in the eighteenth century. It holds the lands of dead packs in trust until they can be passed on to a living pack that meets the criteria."

None of that meant anything to Auden, the streamers of her thoughts sliding out of her suddenly slack grip. She swayed back and forth.

Gripping her shoulder, Charisma spoke to someone other than Auden, her tone clipped. "Teleport us to the medical facility."

Auden didn't feel the teleport, but she was soon standing in a crisp white room that held a white examination chair covered in leather-synth, along with countless monitors hooked up to computronic machinery.

The air smelled sterile, no damp green, no ozone in every breath.

She'd been here before. Many times. When Charisma nudged her into the chair with wide arms and a clear top part that came down over her face and head while the body of the chair reclined so that she lay supine on it, she didn't resist.

"Charisma." A male voice, movement at the door. "Show me the equation you had her solve."

Dr.Verhoeven, Auden's brain supplied, putting a face to the name, the voice. Pink-tinged skin with scars from childhood acne outbreaks that had either been left untreated or not treated well, brownish-red hair he kept short and combed in neat lines, and a compact body on a frame shorter and stockier than Charisma's.

"Yes," he murmured. "An encouraging sign."

Screens lit up around Auden as the doctor started the…scan. Yes, that's what this was, a scan.

She faded into her mind, her thoughts filled with the most fascinating thing she'd seen today: the changeling who moved like a cat. But what kind of cat? Not a house cat. She didn't think any changelings shifted into house cats.

A jungle cat then.

Leopard. Tiger. Jaguar. Lynx. Puma.

Were there others?

The lights flickered around her, bringing her back to the present day.

"…working." The doctor's voice was higher than usual. "Intensification of neural activity to levels we haven't seen since the initial failure."

"I wonder why today. I've been taking her on various site inspections and other low-risk private business matters for the past two months, ever since you advised that she was beginning to show signs of neural regeneration. Shoshanna is intrigued by the change and wants to see if the external stimulation will progress it further."

"It's possible it's just time. Despite what we like to think, there's still a lot we don't know about how Psy brains work."

"How will this impact the other medical situation?"

"I can't predict it. Is she even aware that she's pregnant?"

Auden's mind faded out again, her thoughts filled with images of large jungle cats…and flashes of things she'd done for which she had only snapshots, no context to the memories. Was that her? Sitting at a meeting table? Being hooked up to a machine that scanned her belly? Lying on a table while…while…

Almost all her thoughts slipped out of her grasp.

Only one remained.

A large, shimmering fragment that rippled with a single word: pregnant .

Then the word vanished, forgotten, while another memory floated to the surface: a comm call with a business associate. She'd attended it. Not today, or yesterday, or even two weeks ago. But at some point.

She hadn't had to do much, mostly just show her face while Charisma undertook the negotiations. Her job, she'd understood, was to ensure the cutthroat businessman believed that the family had a powerful heir waiting in the wings.

Not her father's family. Her mother's.

Scott was her mother's last name. Henry had used it publicly to foster the image of unity he and Shoshanna had agreed to portray as part of their agreement to work together. He'd been a Jackson by birth: Henry Ignatius Jackson.

"A Scott must lead these negotiations," Charisma had told her. "A direct line descendant. Not a secondary branch as applies to your uncle and cousin. You are from the first bloodline, and it's important that you start to become visible now that you're in your twenties. It will assure a smooth transfer of power in the future."

Auden didn't know why any of that mattered when Shoshanna ran everything, but her brain hadn't been working well enough for her to ask Charisma to explain. So she'd played her part, spoken the words that Charisma telepathed her to speak during the introduction phase, and then she'd sat back.

No one had trusted her to actually undertake the negotiations.

"Won't he be insulted I'm not interacting with him?" Auden had asked Charisma in a rare moment of clarity.

The other woman had stared straight at her. "Astonishing. Your mind truly is returning to its previous acuity." Then she'd answered Auden's question. "No. It is understood that you are a young woman who is learning the ropes.

"Your presence, however, makes it clear that you do intend to take over when your mother is ready to retire—and they are used to dealing with me as her proxy, so there is nothing unusual in that. Everyone understands that the former Councilor is a very busy woman."

Auden's mind had begun to fade in and out toward the end of the meeting, and she'd had to fight to hold on to reality with a grip as sharp and hard as the claws of the man to whom she'd spoken in the forest today.

Topaz. Feral yellow-green. Glints of gold in that tumbled hair.

Big frame…but fluid movements. Feline.

Was this a memory? How could it be a memory? What reason would she have to stand face-to-face with a changeling in a forest? Her upper arm pulsed, an echo of fingers hot and strong holding on to her.

Threads unraveling, the memory being eaten away at the edges.

A faint growl, those yellow-green eyes following her into nothingness.