BONDS OF JUSTICE

Ten minutes later and far too soon, Max walked to the door, with her behind him. “I’ll be on the phone to the manhunt team throughout the day, too, so leave a message if you can’t get through and I’ll call back.” Reaching out, he tucked a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Building security has Bonner’s image—they know not to let him up to you under any circumstances.

“Enforcement’s on alert, and Clay’s also put the word out among DarkRiver’s network of informants.” A squeeze of her hip. “If you go out—and I’d rather you didn’t—don’t forget to take one of the security guys with you. Or better yet, call me, and if I can’t get away, I’ll call DarkRiver, organize a leopard escort for you.”

Remembering the warped arousal she’d read in Bonner during the Gwyn Hayley scan, Sophia hugged her arms around herself, the tiny hairs on her body rising in primitive warning. “I plan to stay in.” Being outside in the general population was becoming more and more unbearable. “And I won’t be entering the PsyNet, so don’t worry about that either.”

He touched his lips to her temple. “How are you?” A rough question that held a thousand unsaid things.

She placed her hand over his heart, soaked in the incredible gift of his presence. “Still here.” But her telepathic shields were so thin that any touch by an unstable personality could perforate them.

A hard kiss. “I’ll check up on you every hour. Don’t even try to stop me.”

He was gone an instant later.

Knowing she should have protested, but reassured by his protectiveness, she fed Morpheus—who graciously permitted her to stroke him once—then took a quick shower. Afterward, refreshed, she changed into a pair of soft velour pants—they were like nothing she’d ever before worn. She’d bought them on impulse several months ago, in a decision so non-Psy she hadn’t required a medic to tell her she needed to go in for reconditioning. But she hadn’t worn them until now.

The dark blue material was velvety soft, delicate, and beautiful against her skin. Enjoying the tactile pleasure, she put on a stretchy T-shirt, zipping herself into a hooded gray sweatshirt several sizes too large for her to complete the outfit. It wasn’t cold in her apartment, but the sweatshirt was Max’s, carried his scent.

Her cop, she thought, would never understand the depth of what he meant to her, what he’d given her. It was at once a wild, earthy thing and an incandescent joy. The only shadow came from the knowledge that their time had almost run out, that one day soon, her mind would fill with noise and she’d lose Max, lose the tearing power of the emotion that had made her whole, every broken part of her accepted and cherished.

Her fingers clenched.

She forced them to open. It was no use being angry, no use railing at fate. Fact was fact—she’d gone through every manual, spoken to every one of her colleagues, all to no avail. Telepathic shields could not be rebuilt once they began to degrade from the core out.

“They use then discard us like garbage,” a fellow J had said to her.

“Why did you accept the position?” As an eight-year-old girl strapped to a hospital bed, Sophia had had no choice, but other Js did.

“It was the only available job.”

Sophia had understood. “Is it always the only available job when a J attempts to find work?”

“Yes.”

Fury had made her gut twist. “In the past, before Silence,” she’d dared ask, knowing the J opposite her would’ve been a historian if given the choice, “was it like this?”

“No. Js were only ever used in capital cases. Or if there was a hung jury where the crime fit certain parameters.”

The load, Sophia had realized, would’ve been spread, placing far less pressure on each individual.

“Js still went mad, still broke,” her colleague had continued, “but no more than the rest of our race.”

But now the Council used them up in order to consolidate its power. In light of that brutal truth, Sophia wasn’t sure she wanted to save Nikita, but Max was a good cop. He believed in justice, made her want to believe in it, too.

Her mind took that thought, connected it to a rumor tangled up in the information cache she’d begun to process while she got out the ingredients to prepare a breakfast drink of the hot chocolate Max had bought for her. Interesting. Leaving the milk unopened on the counter, she found a piece of paper and, taking a seat on the sofa, began to note down the relevant facts as she smoothed out the “lumps” of raw data.

The click of her door being opened was quiet, but it shattered her concentration. “Ma—” But it wasn’t her cop.

Her eyes took in the security override key in the woman’s hand, the Center badge on her lapel. No. She went to lower her PsyNet shields, send out a psychic mayday, but the woman’s male companion was already gripping her arm, slapping a pressure injector against the vulnerable skin of her neck, his naked hand mere centimeters away. Her concentration fractured—and they shot something into her bloodstream that turned her mind dull, sluggish.

“Useful that Js have such solid PsyNet shields,” the woman said, supporting Sophia under one arm while her partner took the other.