That wasn’t the scary part.
It was that there were no distinctive structures or natural formations in the part of the orchard to which he’d teleported. Which meant he’d done so by using her face as a lock . . . but he’d come in a little distance from her. So either he could ’port to within a certain radius of the target, or there was something in the orchard he’d been able to use as a focus. How then would he have obtained the image of the specific area in the first place?
She rubbed her forehead. Not that it mattered. If an Arrow wanted to find her, she’d be found. The fact Vasic was most probably a teleporter who could lock onto people only hammered home that inescapable truth.
“Ivy!”
Almost to the cabin, she saw her mother running toward her. Having thrown on a jacket over the simple khaki cargo pants and old sweatshirt that was her usual work wear when she wasn’t handling her honeybees, Gwen Jane had longer legs than her daughter and made it to her side in seconds.
“I’m fine,” Ivy said at once, kicking herself for not having telepathed that the instant it became clear Vasic didn’t intend to do her harm. Her only excuse was stunned shock. “He only came to deliver a message.” Her fingers pressed into the thick paper of the envelope he’d given her before he left.
“The settlement went into lockdown the instant we received your telepathic alarm.” Gwen’s chest rose and fell as she caught her breath, her pale skin flushed. “I couldn’t stop your father from heading out to cover you with a weapon, however.”
“I know.” She’d felt her father’s telepathic touch. And while she couldn’t prove it, her gut told her Vasic, too, had been aware of her father the entire time.
Gwen’s eyes shifted over Ivy’s left shoulder just as Rabbit “woofed” and ran to greet Ivy’s father. Turning her attention back to Ivy, her mother said, “I assume we need to talk?”
Ivy wasn’t the least disconcerted by her mother’s lack of an emotive response. Gwen wasn’t maternal in any obvious way, but that said nothing; Ivy’s mother had changed her entire life so that her child could heal, and she’d done it without ever making that child feel at fault.
As had her father.
Where Gwen was taller than many men, her hair the soft black she’d bequeathed Ivy, Carter Hirsch was a stocky man of medium height, his eyes a clear copper ringed with gold. Ivy had always loved the fact she was so clearly an amalgam of the two most important people in her life. Though the genetics had worked out to leave her the shortest in the family, she had not only Gwen’s hair, but the fineness of her mother’s bones, while her golden skin tone echoed her father’s part-Algerian heritage.
Right this instant, Carter held his weapon at his side, his elbows and the front of his clothing wet, dirty. He must’ve been flat on the ground with a bead on Vasic the entire time, this man who had always been there for her, though she’d been meant to be nothing more than the completion of a simple fertilization contract.
The love and respect she felt for her parents was a hugeness in her heart she could never properly explain. “The settlement can come out of lockdown,” she said, voice husky, and led them toward the cabin that had become her own the day she took responsibility for the fruit orchard that supplied the families who lived here, the majority of their crops far more prosaic grains.
Rabbit padded along in front, and it was such a familiar sight that the knots in her stomach began to unravel a fraction. “The Arrow—Vasic—came specifically for me.”
“They don’t send Arrows after fractured Psy,” her father said, always the more phlegmatic of her parents, despite the fact her mother appeared the more practical at first glance. “Especially Gradient 3.2 telepaths.”
“No.” Ivy pushed through the door to her home. “I’ll get you a blanket, Father. You really shouldn’t stay in those wet clothes.”
“I’m fine.” He took off his jacket to reveal that his heavy work shirt was dry.
Seeing that he’d made up his mind, but aware his pants remained wet, she turned up the heat, then handed him the letter wrinkled from her grip. “According to Vasic”—she tugged off her gloves to put them on the counter, shrugged off her jacket—“I’m not a telepath. Or rather, that’s not my main designation.”
Her parents sat down at her small kitchen table and read the letter together.
It was her mother who broke the silence. “Well, it makes sense.” Gwen stared down at the floor, her eyes crinkled at the corners and her arms wrapped around herself. “When you were a fetus,” she murmured, “I had a serious problem maintaining Silence. The obstetrician sent me to a specialized M-Psy who did a complete workup, then told me it was simply an unusually severe but known side effect of pregnancy.” Her shoulders grew stiff. “He must’ve known, kept me in the dark.”
“I’ve never heard of an E designation. How can we be certain it’s as the Arrow says?” her father said with his usual practicality.
Ivy had asked the same question. “Vasic told me to contact Sascha Duncan for confirmation.” Former Councilor Nikita Duncan’s daughter was famous for her defection to a changeling leopard pack . . . and for being a cardinal derided as weak and flawed for most of her lifetime.
The parallel was a difficult one to avoid. As was the dangerous hope that came with it. “I don’t think she’d have any reason to lie, do you?”
Gwen nodded, but it was Carter who spoke, his words unexpected. “When your mother and I made the decision to take you in for reconditioning, we thought we were helping you.”
“Father, I know,” Ivy began, distressed he’d think otherwise.
“Ivy, let me speak.” When she nodded, biting back her words, he said, “I don’t judge us for making that decision. It was all we knew to do to help our child. You were in excruciating pain, and had we done nothing, you would’ve been forcibly rehabilitated.”
Ivy couldn’t keep quiet any longer. “I know,” she whispered again. “I know.”
But her father hadn’t finished. “It wasn’t until afterward that we realized we’d made a terrible error and that the price might well be our Ivy.”
Ivy’s eyes burned at the love embodied in those uninflected words.
“You were a ghost.” Gwen stared off into the distance.
Rabbit immediately scampered over to stand with his paws on the tops of Gwen’s scuffed boots, whining in his throat until she bent to pet him.
“The Ivy we’d nurtured from birth seemed erased”—Gwen’s hand clenched on Rabbit’s coat—“and while Carter might not judge us for the decision we made, I’ll never forgive myself for handing my child over to be violated.”
Ivy knelt in front of her mother. “I wanted to go,” she reminded them both. “I thought it would help, too, and it did in one way. I don’t think I’d be alive now without the reconditioning, no matter how bad it turned out to be.” Her mind had literally been crushing itself.
“Our daughter is correct.” Carter shifted to face Gwen, holding her gaze with his own until Gwen gave a slight nod.
Ivy glanced away, feeling as if she’d intruded on a private moment. She didn’t know what her parents’ relationship was beyond a joint commitment to her, but Carter was the only one who had the ability to get Gwen to change her mind. It made Ivy hope that they’d discovered a fragment of joy in the darkness.
“The reason I brought up that day,” her father said into the silence, his skin pulled taut over solid bones, “is that whatever was done to you during the reconditioning brutally harmed an integral part of you.” He pushed back sandy hair glinting with more strands of silver than there should be on a man his age.
Ivy’s reconditioning had marked them all.
“This may be your opportunity to undo that harm,” he said, “to find out who you’re capable of being without the cage of Silence.”