“Why leave her on your doorstep?” Ashaya said, voice shaken. “A warning?”
“A taunt, more like it.” Dev had made it his business to study the enemy. “Psychological warfare.”
Dorian nodded. “Could be Ming wants to spook you into doing something rash.”
“All the Shine kids are safe and accounted for,” Dev said, having spent the past few hours verifying that. “Unfortunately, we’ve still got the gray area where we’ve tracked them down, but they haven’t yet agreed to accept our help.” The last Council mole had taken advantage of that gray area, fingering children for experimentation after they came into the field offices but before they’d been brought safely under the Shine umbrella.
Every single death haunted Dev. Because Shine was about safety, about locating those Forgotten who’d been lost, cut off from the group when the Council first began hunting their ancestors. But instead of safe harbor, it was only death the children had found . . . while the old Shine board sat by, their heads in the sand.
Dev had been ready to kill them for their blindness, their refusal to see that the culling had begun again—and according to some, he’d almost succeeded. One board member had had a heart attack after Dev threw pictures of the children’s broken bodies in front of him. Several others had come close to nervous breakdowns.
But no one had stopped him when he took over, when he went after the mole with single-minded focus. “This way,” he said, leading them down a silent corridor.
“Tally said you shut down the recruitment process last time.” Dorian looked over, his eyes a brilliant blue even more vivid against his distinctive white-blond hair. “You going to do that this time, too?”
“They need a mole to find those kids,” Dev said, his tone flat. “And the mole is dead.”
Ashaya blinked, glancing from him to Dorian, but didn’t say a word. Her mate nodded. “Good.”
Dev used his palm print to scan them in through a security door. “I can’t justify shutting down the program again so soon without solid proof of trouble—we spend so much time and effort on finding descendants of the original rebels for a reason. There are kids out there going insane because they think they’re human.”
After a hundred years of Silence, of the Psy remaining locked within their own culture, no one bothered to test for psychic abilities. No one realized that some of those crazy kids actually were hearing voices in their heads. Some were latent telepaths whose gifts had broken through during puberty. Some were weak empaths, overwhelmed by the emotions of others. And some . . . some were secret treasures, gifts rising up out of a century of genetic drift.
Seeing Glen exiting a room, he waved the doctor down. The other man hurried over, dark circles under his eyes.
Dev took in his friend’s wrinkled clothes, the way his ginger hair stuck up in untidy tufts. “I thought you were off shift.”
Glen thrust a hand through his hair, further electrifying the strands. “I wanted to be here in case our guest woke. Caught some sleep in the break room.”
Introductions took only a couple of seconds, and then they were walking into Ekaterina’s room. To Dev’s surprise, she was awake and sitting up, sipping something out of a small cup. He glanced at Glen.
“Just ten minutes ago,” the doctor murmured.
Ekaterina looked straight at Dev, her eyes skating off Ashaya as if her former colleague didn’t exist. “The cobwebs are starting to part.” Her voice was husky, as if it hadn’t been used for a long time . . . or as if it had been broken in the most brutal way.
Walking to her side, Dev took the cup she held out, caught by the shadows that swirled in the green-gold depths of her eyes. “How much do you remember?”
She swallowed but didn’t break eye contact. “I don’t know who I am.” It was a plea, though her voice didn’t shake, her eyes didn’t glisten. Yet Dev heard the scream—a thin, piercing cry that stabbed him right in the heart.
Part of him, a small, barely salvageable part, wanted to offer comfort, but this woman, simply by existing, was a danger to his people. She was Psy. And Psy connected to the Net could not be trusted. No matter that she acted more human than her brethren, he had to treat her as a weapon, carrying within her the seeds of Shine’s destruction. And if she proved to be that, he’d have to make the most lethal of decisions . . . even if it killed the last bit of humanity left in him.
“Ekaterina.” Ashaya’s voice, gentle, coaxing.
The woman on the bed blinked, shook her head. “No.”
“That’s your name,” Dev said, refusing to let her look away.
Those changeable hazel eyes flickered and went out, a flame dying. “Ekaterina’s dead,” she said with absolute calm. “Everything is dead. There’s nothing lef—” Her teeth snapped together as her body convulsed with vicious strength.
“Glen!” Catching her before she twisted off the bed, Dev tried to keep her from hurting herself, her bones startlingly fragile under his hands.