Atonement Sky, page 13
part #9 of Psy-Changeling Trinity Series
“We’ll have to ask Beaufort,” Whitten said. “Only he or the chief can authorize that.”
Eleri nodded, leaving it at that. It didn’t really matter; she had ways to get the files without authorization. Because it turned out that a woman who hunted serial killers with great success had a hell of a lot of contacts who owed her favors.
She glanced at the gloved hand she had on the table.
Not long left for her to collect on the favors. Might as well cash in one now.
Don’t forget your gloves.
She polished the memory of their morning interaction, made sure it was in high definition before she stored it carefully away. Because while her memories were only eidetic when it came to the traces she took, she’d never forgotten a single detail of her interactions with him.
Never wanted to forget.
• • •
It was three hours later when she returned to the inn. She’d spent the time working her imaginary cold case while making contact with the Psy residents of the town. Still no red flags, but the Sandman had been flying under the radar because he was good at hiding his true face. She planned to dig into each and every person to whom she’d spoken.
Having already used her mobile comm to check her security system, she pushed open the door…and felt her boot press down on something that crackled softly. Lifting her foot at once, she looked down to see what looked to be printouts of online articles. She crouched down so she was close enough to read the headlines without having to touch the paper.
The Sandman Strikes Again!
Missing woman identified as Kriti Kumar, an engineering student from ASU.
Breaking News: Body discovered!
Vivian Chang’s Parents on Why They Still Have Hope
Rumors of a Serial Killer in Arizona!
They were all like that, every single printout that she could see. Someone had gone to great lengths to find articles on the Sandman going back all the way to the beginning. That interview with Vivian’s parents, for one, had been right back at the start, when she’d been a missing person.
But that wasn’t what held her attention: it was the printout in the center of the haphazard mass—of an article that included a black-and-white image of the location where Eleri had discovered Sarah Wells’s body.
She was standing next to Tim, the two of them in conversation.
The person who’d slipped the printouts under her door had drawn a smiley face next to Eleri’s image.
Chapter 15
This is a common misconception—and understandable, given the relatively recent “return” of Designation E to the PsyNet—but no, empaths do not all function much the same.
The E designation carries multiple subdesignations, some of which we may not discover for years, or even longer. We have almost no historical resources to mine, for the Councils of Silence took great care to wipe empaths from the world.
—PsyNet Beacon: Response to reader question by Jaya Laila Storm (medical empath and Social Interaction columnist) (7 June 2083)
As the first empath to wake to her nature in this generation, Sascha had known that she wasn’t the right E for the job the instant the WindHaven healer contacted her. Jacques needed a specialist E, one with the ability to reach a comatose mind.
“I’ll find you the best person,” she’d promised Naia, then immediately got to work.
Her first choice, Jaya, proved to be in a mandated recovery period after almost burning herself out, but the other woman recommended another E—a young male named Hanz.
When Sascha met the empath at the nearest airport to falcon territory, having been led to him by her two-and-a-half-year-old daughter—who was holding a print of the ID photo Jaya had sent them—the youth turned out to have a German accent that went perfectly with his name, skin a darker hue of brown than her own, floppy dark hair, and hazel eyes that looked unseeing out at the world.
Sensors ringed his fingers.
She assumed he’d lost his vision in an accident as a teenager, for the Psy hadn’t been forgiving of any kind of obvious physical difference when Hanz would’ve been born.
“Hi, Hanz! We’re here!” Naya piped up and touched her fingers very, very lightly to the back of one of his hands before withdrawing.
Sascha’s daughter knew not to touch Psy without permission, but she seemed to have made a rapid calculation in that terrifyingly smart little brain that Hanz might need a physical reference to her presence. He didn’t, of course; he could have sensed them with his empathic ability.
“Hallo, ‘we,’ ” Hanz said before Sascha could introduce herself, his lips curved in a smile and his head directed unerringly down at Naya’s diminutive height. “That’s quite an unusual name, ja?”
Naya laughed, a huge and delighted thing. Sascha had moments when she worried her daughter—half-changeling, half-Psy—would feel constrained by living outside the sprawling vastness of the PsyNet, but then she’d hear Naya laugh and it’d all melt away.
It helped that her own mother, who never sugarcoated anything, had bluntly said, “The child is hitting all her psychic markers ahead of schedule. The DarkRiver network is, quite frankly, far stronger and safer for her right now than any corner of the PsyNet.”
“No, I’m Naya!” her daughter clarified. “This is Mama.”
“Otherwise known as Sascha.” Sascha smiled. “Thank you for flying out on such short notice.” DarkRiver had attempted to arrange a teleport, but everyone in the Net was running on fumes, and the only ’porter outside the Net they knew had just flamed out doing an emergency medical teleport for a SnowDancer juvenile who’d been badly injured in the mountains.
The juvenile would be okay, but Judd was out for the count.
Sascha and Naya themselves had flown in on a jet-chopper piloted by their escort, DarkRiver sentinel Dorian Christensen; they’d landed just ahead of Hanz’s commercial flight.
“It is an honor to meet you.” Hanz inclined his head, his face aglow. “Without you, we would all yet be locked in amber.”
Sascha had come to terms with her status as the first E to embrace who she was, but she didn’t know quite how to process the adoration of young Es like Hanz. “I think it was just time,” she said. “One of us would’ve broken through—if not me, then Ivy or Memory or Jaya…so many of us were on the precipice.”
Naya tugged at her hand.
When she glanced down, her baby pointed to where Dorian stood a short distance away—from where he could watch everything and everyone. While the pack had picked up no indications of any active threats against either one of them, Sascha was the mate of the DarkRiver alpha…and the daughter of Nikita Duncan. Which made her a valuable target, and her and Lucas’s precious cub an even bigger one.
But Naya was on this trip because she loved seeing her falcon friends and adored that she shared a name with Naia, the falcon healer, even if the spelling wasn’t identical. She called the healer “big Naia” and herself “little Naya.”
It didn’t seem to occur to her that she could use her given name of Nadiya—likely because the only person who ever used it was her Psy grandmother. Who Naya got along with far better than Sascha could’ve once imagined; Nikita as a grandmother wasn’t the same woman who’d raised Sascha.
As for any risk—the one thing Sascha would never do was stop her child from living in order to keep her safe. Nikita’s choices had been different; to save her child, she’d had to lock up Sascha’s mind and conceal the truth of her very nature, but that didn’t mean that choice hadn’t left deep scars.
Now the baby Sascha was raising in freedom had pointed out that Dorian was nudging a thumb over his shoulder. “I’m sorry to rush you, Hanz,” she said. “But we only have a short-term spot on the landing pad. If you could follow us.”
“I can hold your hand!” Naya volunteered, smart but young enough that she didn’t understand Hanz didn’t need the assist.
“Oh, my cublet, you’re very kind to offer that,” Sascha said, “but see the sensors on Hanz’s fingers? They’re connected to his brain, so he can see the world around him.”
Her daughter’s face lit up. “Whiskers! Like me!”
Hanz’s smile was as bright as Naya’s. “Yes, I suppose they do act like whiskers, just like your leopard’s.”
“I a panther,” Naya piped up. “Like Papa.”
“I think your panther must be strong and smart.” Hanz held out his right hand, leaving his left free for navigation. “How about we walk each other?”
A happy Naya tucked her hand into his, and the three of them made their way to the sentinel with hair of a brilliant white blond and surfer blue eyes who was one of the most dangerous people in DarkRiver.
The resulting flight was much shorter than their trip to the airport, and Naya was as glued to the window as she’d been on their first flight. Sascha and Lucas’s cub had already asked Dorian if he could teach her to fly the big machine—giving her mother palpitations. Raising a fearless panther cub was going to turn her gray by the time Naya was eighteen, of that she was certain, but Sascha planned to white-knuckle her way through.
Never would she permit her own fears to stifle her baby’s primal heart.
“Dori, Dori!” that wild cub said now. “The big X!”
“Good spotting,” Dorian responded without taking his attention off the flight controls. “Now, sit back while I take us down.”
That landing—directly on the marked spot on the Canyon plateau—was as soft as a feather. Adam was waiting for them, ready to lead Sascha and Hanz inside. “Hello, little Naya,” he said, crouching down to close his arms around Naya when she ran over for a hug.
“Big Naia?”
“She’s busy right now, but you can say hi to her later.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Someone else has been waiting all day for you.”
Naya made a happy sound at seeing her small friend but didn’t run off; she might be a panther, but she was also a DarkRiver cub raised with the boundaries a strong changeling child needed to feel safe—and to grow into a trustworthy and disciplined member of the pack. “Mama, I go play with Jina?”
“I’ve got her,” Dorian said when Sascha glanced at him.
To trust the sentinel with this living piece of her heart wasn’t even a question. “Yes, go play. And mind your manners if you go to Jina’s house.”
Leaving her daughter to play, safe in the knowledge that she’d be watched over in this landscape that wasn’t theirs and held dangers Naya might not understand, she followed Adam inside the Canyon, Hanz at her side.
The youth paused outside the infirmary. “I need baselines,” he said. “I’ve never had reason to interact with or read falcon changelings before. I don’t have any idea of your emotional normal.”
When Adam glanced at Sascha, she gave a nod.
He extended his hand. “Please go ahead.”
Hanz frowned after he made contact. “I held your daughter’s hand,” he said, his head angled toward Sascha. “I made no attempt to read her, of course, but her surface self felt primal in a way I’ve never experienced. However, you, Adam, are closer to the husband of my trainer, Jaya. Wildness contained.”
Jaya’s husband was an Arrow, a lethal soldier. And so, Sascha thought, was Adam. Alphas—and wing leaders—tended to be that way. She should know.
“Adult versus child,” Adam said as “big Naia” came to join them, his voice gruff. “Jacques is my right hand. He should feel similar to me.”
After Hanz nodded and broke contact, he said, “Jaya said she called you. She did explain that I might not be able to get through? Changeling shields are formidable.”
It was Naia who answered, her fingers touching Sascha’s in a silent hello. “Yes. She also said the shield might be more permeable due to the serious nature of his injuries, but that there were no guarantees.”
“Just do your best,” Adam said, his tone the encouraging one of an alpha to a young packmate.
He reminded Sascha of Lucas in many ways. Both of them leaders with huge hearts. As Naia reminded her of Tamsyn, another healer who’d give her blood itself if it would help her packmates.
“Thank you for coming,” Adam said to Sascha in a low tone as Naia led Hanz to Jacques’s room. “We have no way to monitor the E, see what he might be doing to Jacques.”
“I understand.” The Es had a strict code of ethics, but to expect a changeling pack to blindly trust a being from a race that had so often been their enemy was to ask the impossible.
“I spoke to him on the flight from the airport, and he’s relieved to have me shadow him in a telepathic sense. He wants the oversight, is scared he’ll screw something up.”
“Kid’s young.” A frown between Adam’s eyebrows. “You sure this won’t hurt him?”
There it was, that protective heart. “There aren’t many Es with Jaya’s—and Hanz’s—specialty, so he’s been pulled into active service earlier than might be optimal, but Jaya told me he’s passed every single test to check his psychological and psychic readiness, and that to hold him back would be detrimental to his development. He also knows he can walk away at any point.”
“Good. Last thing Jacques would want is to scar an E.”
A sucked-in gulp of air, distressed telepathic contact. Sascha, he’s so hurt. My sensors are picking up amputations and other variations they can’t process.
Leaving Adam’s side at once, Sascha went straight to Hanz’s. And though Naia had described the extent of Jacques’s injuries, Sascha’s own stomach twisted at the sight. The last time she’d seen the falcon male, he’d been scowling down at her cub, saying no to playing a game of swords and dragons, but in the way of a man who knew he was going to do it but had to make a show of resisting first.
Right then, she’d known that her cub would be as safe with Jacques as she was with Dorian. If her heart hurt at seeing him so wounded, how much worse must it be for his clan?
Do you want me to telepath you a visual? she asked Hanz, forcing herself to keep her tone calm because if she wavered, the younger E might crumple. Will your receptors be able to process it?
No, I was born blind. I have no visual parameters beyond how I perceive the world with my sensors. Please describe him to me.
Hiding her surprise at his revelation of his congenital blindness—and hoping the story behind it was of a loving family that refused to buckle to societal and Council pressure—she spoke aloud to keep the others in the loop. “Hanz needs a description of Jacques’s physical state. His sensors are having trouble processing it. I’ll—”
“No,” Adam interrupted. “I’ll do it.” Then, as Naia’s face trembled before she schooled it into professional calm, he gave a crisp, clear description of the man Sascha knew was his closest friend. “We don’t know about the internal semi-shift beyond what we can scan. His brain…that’s why you’re here, Hanz.”
Hanz’s throat moved as he swallowed. “Thank you. I’m sorry for causing you pain.”
Adam shook his head and touched Hanz on the shoulder, a changeling who understood when another being needed physical contact to feel safe. “It’s fine. You ask for whatever you need.”
“Sascha?” Hanz held out his hand.
Taking it, she said, “Ready?”
A nod, but inside her mind came a scared question. What if he’s trapped in there?
If he is and we can find him, that means he can come back once he heals, can finish the shift either way. She didn’t actually know that, and neither did any healers Naia had contacted, but it was their best hope. It would mean he’s just stuck, not gone.
Hanz’s eyes met hers, the sightless orbs swimming with distress and determination both. You’ll watch? I don’t want to make a mistake, make him worse.
You won’t. Jaya wouldn’t have sent you if she didn’t trust you could handle it. Sascha squeezed his hand before requesting a telepathic connection through his shields that would permit her to shadow him.
Hanz opened on his end at once, and she could immediately see everything he was doing as he did it. While she’d worked with Jaya on previous occasions, it was once again a revelation to see how their E abilities worked when compared to her own.
She saw Hanz take an initial broad emotional read of the room before he filtered out the “noise” and began to drill down through the layers of what appeared to his mind to be a heavy black blanket that stifled Jacques’s. It was obvious that he was being methodical in not skipping a single step as he built not a bridge but a tunnel.
I can get in, he said on a psychic exhale. It’s as if his natural shield suffered a quake. It’s here but in pieces with large gaps in between.
He was caught mid-shift, Sascha replied, perhaps right as the shield was resetting from one form to the next. Because when changelings shifted, they did so on every level.
Hanz didn’t reply, his attention on his work.
I’m trying to find him, the E said to Sascha. When people are lost in their minds, or when they’ve retreated to a protected bit of the brain, we have to drill. It sounds harsh, but it’s not, I promise.
I know. Jaya showed me once.
She’s so good at it, can do multiple tunnels at once, but I can only do one at a time.
Trust yourself, Hanz. Jaya does.
A long and deep breath before Hanz settled in, having already indicated he preferred to work standing up.
He went through three nutrient drinks and an equal number of hours of work before collapsing in the chair Adam had earlier dragged over for him—before the falcon wing leader had to leave to take a meeting that was urgent for the clan’s bottom line.
The heads of clans and packs didn’t have the luxury of giving in to their emotions, and their sentinels and seconds were cut from the same cloth. Sascha knew Jacques would’ve been the first person to remind Adam of his responsibilities had he shown any signs of forgetting. That was a sentinel’s—or second’s—job.
“I can’t find him,” Hanz said aloud to Sascha and Naia, his lower lip trembling and one of his hands clutching Sascha’s.
