Storm echo, p.19
Storm Echo, page 19
Empaths. Just couldn’t help taking care of their people.
Same as healers.
Chest tight with all the emotions he had no right to feel, he turned left, leading Arwen to the halfway house. The large residence was a place where users could choose to get clean at no financial cost—but someone with a more pragmatic mindset had also arranged for a significant open area right up against the home.
Because sometimes, junkies didn’t want to be inside, screamed at the walls, thinking that they’d lost themselves in the phantasmagoric world that existed for some long-term users.
Ivan’s mother hadn’t lived long enough to reach that stage.
It was to this open “backyard” protected by regular DarkRiver patrols that he took Arwen. A user had lit a fire in the large metal barrel that sat in one corner, and several people stood or sat around it, their faces shrunken and sallow and their eyes bright. Others sat wrapped up in blankets that looked relatively new and rocked back and forth. Still others slept under the stars, uncaring of the cold night wind.
None of them bore open wounds, or had broken bones, or showed any other signs of ill treatment or a rough life—other than, that is, the marks left by long-term drug abuse. Somebody was looking after these people.
His investigations told him that it was DarkRiver’s charitable arm in conjunction with the Psy Empathic Collective. Because none of these junkies were changeling or human. They were all Psy, Jax a drug designed for them. It collapsed Silence and opened up the mind, at least for short bursts of time. In the end, however, it not only burned out the users’ ability to speak and think, it stole the very thing that made them Psy, but by then, the junkies were too far gone to care.
Ivan’s mother had still been able to telepath when she died, but barely. Her voice had gone from a firm, clear sound in his head to a rasping whisper he could barely hear. He’d have wondered if she’d called out to him at the end, panicked and helpless, but he knew she wouldn’t have; she’d died lost in the petals of the crystalline flower, her son far from her thoughts.
Jax wasn’t needed now, of course. Silence had fallen, emotion no longer a crime. Most of the users here would’ve begun to inject or inhale it before the fall, perhaps in a hopeless quest for freedom—or perhaps just because they’d wanted to run from their lives. There were, however, a startling number of fresh young faces.
He’d spoken to some of them.
“Too hard, too hard, too hard.”
A refrain he’d heard from more than one mouth. They’d turned to Jax because they were scared of who they were outside the Protocol.
“I’m nothing and no one, a null value,” one youth had whispered to him, as if imparting a great truth. “Just a drone. No personality. No self.”
Caged mice who no longer knew how to live in the wild, she and others like her sought only to numb the world, forget their pain—because there were plenty of psychic scars beneath the drugged-out stares, plenty of stories of traumatized children and crushed souls.
“The sadness here,” Arwen said, his eyes pools of silvery darkness, “it hangs like a cloud.”
Though Ivan had never been a toucher, he’d made an exception for Arwen after realizing how much physical contact meant to his cousin. Arwen was too generous, too much the empath, to ask for anything that would make another person uncomfortable, but Ivan had eyes and a brain, had figured it out.
It turned out that he didn’t mind touch if it was about taking care of another person. Except for Soleil. With her, for her, he’d been a different man—for a fragment of a moment in time.
I don’t need my memories to tell me that I would’ve never just walked away from you. You’re too important to me, Ivan Mercant.
It didn’t matter how much he wanted to believe Soleil’s statement, didn’t even matter if her words were the purest truth. He’d been another Ivan then, had touched the shooting star of her and believed he had a chance at some kind of normality.
He’d been wrong.
Chapter 30
I’m getting reports from hospital empaths that they haven’t been able to successfully communicate with the still-conscious Psy who appear to be on the island. All attempts—including by my most senior people—have failed.
Of significant concern is that a number have slid from incoherence to catatonia, while those who fell into comas during the incident remain in that state, their brain waves erratic.
My Es are picking up constant pulses of panic and terror, and the medical teams are worried about the patients’ hearts. They’re beating at a rate that’s not sustainable.
—Message from Ivy Jane Zen, president of the Empathic Collective,
to fellow members of the Ruling Coalition
THE COLD REALITY of his future a vise around his mind, Ivan put his hand on Arwen’s shoulder, squeezed.
Reaching up, Arwen touched his fingers to Ivan’s in a silent thank-you. Then he took a quiet breath and went to take a seat next to a young woman with a vacant stare. Sophisticated haircut, cashmere sweater, and shoes handmade by an Italian cobbler—yet Arwen didn’t hesitate so much as a second before he came down on the dirty lawn chair.
Because Arwen was an E first. The rest was pretty window dressing.
Soleil would like him. And Arwen would like her.
He wanted to tell Arwen about her, even though he had no right to her. If she’d marked him as the cats and Arwen both claimed, then he had to convince her to remove that mark. He would not drag her into the cage with him.
And though the spider was the ugliest of his scars, the rest of him wasn’t exactly pretty. There was a reason he walked to the halfway house almost every night. As a reminder—of what he could’ve been, what he could still become.
Even now, a hidden part of him understood why these people took the drug. He’d experienced the lying beauty of it far too young, his mind opening up like a flower in bloom. A crystalline flower with a thousand petals, a thousand possibilities of life and existence.
He hadn’t known what was happening. He’d been a child, a toddler really. He shouldn’t even have those memories, but perhaps it was a side effect of the drug, the impossibility of forgetting. He’d wandered the crystalline pathways for hours, perhaps days. All he knew was that he’d woken on the floor of their grungy motel, thirsty and hungry and with the dirty carpet’s rough weave an imprint on his cheek.
He hadn’t cried. He’d already learned not to cry. His mother wouldn’t hear him, and if one of her friends was in the room and conscious, it might result in a slap to the face and an order for him to shut up.
Not all his mother’s friends took the “special medicine” she’d given him after he asked her for food. The medicine ones weren’t so bad—they mostly just sat there with strange smiles on their faces, their eyes holes with nothing behind them. He didn’t like the dead eyes, but those friends were better than the ones who were wide awake and full of meanness.
That day, however, he’d seen he was alone with his mother—but he still hadn’t cried. Instead, he’d hungered for the crystalline flower, for the pretty and warm place without boundaries—unlike his real world, in which he was either trapped inside small filthy rooms or huddled under a blanket on a street corner, with a woman who had eyes of dazzling blue and hair of black.
“My baby boy,” she’d say as they shivered under the blanket. “Tomorrow will be different, just you wait. I have a line on a great job.” Red veins in her eyes, trembling hands. “We’ll buy you all the eats you want, get you a nice fluffy bed. It’ll be like a dream.”
Swallowing hard, he thrust his hands into his pockets and told himself to call Arwen back, turn around. But he didn’t. Because that was part of the test. To stand here in a place where he knew he could buy the drug with a single nod, a single moment of eye contact, and not do it.
The doctor who’d watched over him since Grandmother brought him home had told him to stop baiting himself this way, but Ivan had no intention of doing that. He understood what Dr. Raul didn’t—Jax seduced with counterfeit beauty, forged happiness. Each time he stood in a place like this, with hollow-eyed people stripped of pride and sense of self, he understood the truth: that Jax was a leash, same as Silence.
There was no freedom or beauty in the crystalline flower.
A junkie was a junkie, regardless of whether their drug of choice was heroin or Jax. Once hooked, they’d do anything to feed their hunger … even sell their “precious baby boy.” It had happened only once, that cold calculation on his mother’s face, and though she hadn’t gone through with it, Ivan would never forget.
Jax stole everything.
“Back again?” croaked a man of about five feet whose face had shriveled inward, his once-pale skin now mottled and discolored by dark marks—the remnants of old scabs he’d picked at until they bled. He hugged a plush blanket around his shoulders, a battered paperback in one hand.
Ivan had bought him that blanket, after seeing him on the street one day looking into the window of a shop that sold them. It wasn’t that Clarence didn’t have access to a blanket, but he’d wanted that particular green one.
A small enough thing, but it had made him light up from within.
Ivan had the feeling the other man was actually much taller than five feet. But he’d been walking hunched over for so long that he’d forgotten how to straighten up. Regardless of his physical state, however, his small brown eyes were sharp, his mind present; Clarence had taken up the assistance of the halfway house, given up walking the crystalline flower.
“You better be careful,” the older Psy man said, “or cats will start to think you’re here jonesing for a fix.” A hacking cough, followed by a jerk of his head. “And bringing soft creatures like that one around. What were you thinking? You throw deer to wolves, too?”
“He’ll be fine.” Arwen might be soft of heart, but he could be paradoxically tough when it came to helping wounded birds; the girl with the previously blank gaze was already whispering to him. “You’re well.”
Another rattling cough, but Clarence nodded. “Body is fucked up from all the poison I shoveled into it, but I do have better days—gives me hope.” His eyes shone. “She still calls to me, that crystalline bitch. Still tells me of all the splendor I could experience, all the pathways I could dance.”
Clarence had once been a scholar of mathematics, but literature had been his “one true love.” A love he’d been forbidden from pursuing under Silence. Too much emotion in stories, too much passion, too much empathy.
These days, Clarence read story after story, novel after novel. The halfway house had given him a computronic reader, but he treasured paperbacks, hoarded any he was able to trade for or buy.
Tonight, Clarence looked Ivan in the face, a sense of weight to him. “You’ll never understand, young man. You can’t. You’ve never seen the searing wonder that exists when Jax lights up the neural pathways.”
Ivan didn’t correct him. The only people who knew the reality of his childhood and what it meant for him were Grandmother, Dr. Raul, Silver, and Canto. Canto because he’d been fourteen when Ivan came into the family—plenty old enough to know that something was wrong with his newest cousin. And Silver because she was Ena’s successor.
Grandmother had asked Ivan’s permission regardless before informing Silver. “I won’t take the choice from you.”
“Tell her,” Ivan had said at once. “She needs to know of all possible weaknesses in the system.”
“When it comes to sheer willpower, Ivan, you are the strongest of my grandchildren,” Ena had said. “I have stubborn grandchildren as a rule, but you push it to the nth degree. I have every faith you’d rather cut your own throat than ever again taste Jax.”
Silver had brought up the topic with Ivan only once—after Ena first told her of Ivan’s history. “Ivan, Grandmother says you consider yourself a weakness in the Mercant armor. That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—you and Canto built our current security armor.
“As for mental strength? It’s not even a question. You stood up to Grandmother even as a child—if that’s not a sign of implacable will, I don’t know what is.”
That was it. The end of the discussion as far as his cousin was concerned. Even when someone had tried to hurt Silver, no one had looked at Ivan with a jaundiced eye. He’d been investigated and cleared per the same checklist he’d have used himself against anyone else in the same position. Soon as he was cleared, he’d been fully briefed on the investigation with the—correct—assumption that he’d want to do everything in his power to eliminate the threat.
Silver didn’t, however, know about Ivan’s habit of eliminating hostile Mercant enemies who didn’t play by the accepted rules—or his tendency to take out Jax dealers. He only targeted the utterly evil for the former, was far broader in his approach when it came to the latter.
“Plausible deniability,” Grandmother had said, then given him a penetrating look. “I don’t suppose you intend to stop anytime soon?”
“They’re vermin.” Ivan felt no guilt whatsoever for his actions. “I’ll make sure it never touches Silver.”
An arch look. “Dear boy, Silver would fillet us both if she knew we dared keep this from her.”
“But we protect her,” Ivan had murmured. “Her, and Arwen, and even Canto. They all have a shot in this new world. I’m not going to bring them down with me.”
White lines around Ena’s mouth, a rare sign of tension. “You are my grandchild. I did not raise you to be a shadow in bloody service, and none of your cousins would want that for you if they knew of it.”
“I know.” She’d given him every advantage, tried to channel him toward paths far less dark, but Ivan had never wavered. He knew who and what he was.
A prowling cat in his mind, the memory of fingers against his cheek.
What would Soleil think of his murderous little hobby?
“Is it worth it?” he said, asking Clarence the question he’d never been able to ask his mother. “All the destruction the drug’s done to your body, and to your relationships with others?”
“What relationships?” Clarence snorted. “I have deeper relationships with the leopards and humans who run the halfway house than I ever did with my own family. Cold as ice they were, took Silence real seriously.”
A sudden heaviness to his features, the folds of his face drooping. “If only I’d been born a few decades later …” Looking up, he pinned Ivan with a gaze far too powerful for a man this emaciated and tired. “Don’t waste this chance, young man. You have what I could’ve only imagined—the freedom to build bonds, to be more than a lone star in the dark.”
With that, the old man—who wasn’t so old after all—shuffled away, going to sit in a lounger next to someone who was clearly still addicted. With her layers of clothing and her treasured cart of belongings next to her, the woman looked like any of the homeless. What gave her away as Psy was the obsidian of her eyes.
Most Psy eyes only did that in the throes of a huge use of power—or under great emotion. But with the Jax-addicted, it could become a permanent state. It wasn’t common, and it didn’t appear to affect their vision, but it was a strange and eerie thing even for a man who’d seen his own eyes do that while looking into a mirror.
No light would ever again fill the addict’s eyes, not even if the therapists managed to wean her off the drug. From what he’d learned since he’d found out about this place, that was unlikely to happen. Another resident had told him that ten people in the local population had eyes of permanent black. Only one had been open to rehabilitation—and though he’d gone through the full program and was holding on to his sobriety, his eyes remained obsidian.
Another shuffle, this one more stealthy, one of the users sidling up to him. “You looking for a hit?” It was a low murmur, the eyes that flicked up at him rimmed in red. “I got extra.” Then he named a price that was double the street price.
Ivan could’ve ended this man then and there, but all that would’ve done was eliminate a user. This man was just trying to make a quick buck so he could then go and buy more of his poison of choice. Ivan’s targets were those who produced the poison and spread it out.
“No,” he murmured. “I’m looking for a lot more than that. Finder’s fee involved.”
The user’s eyes grew bright. “I knew it,” he hissed. “I knew that you shiny ones must be using. Life is nothing without the light it gives.” A shudder of purest pleasure, an awful, terrible thing to witness. “You just have the money to look better. Look like you’re not inside the flower.”
Ivan let the man have his delusions; it was all some of these people would ever have. “Do you know anyone who can hook me up or shall I talk to someone more connected?”
As expected, the junkie bristled. “Hey, I found you. This is my score.” He leaned closer in a waft of odor—unwashed flesh and the miasma of the streets—that threatened to send Ivan back to his childhood. “What’s the finder’s fee?”
“Whatever I pay the dealer, I pay you ten percent of it.”
He could see the man attempting to do the math, fail, his pathways too degraded. So he gave him an exorbitant number. When the time came—if the time came—he wouldn’t give this junkie that money. Because to give him money would be as bad as feeding the poison into the junkie’s veins himself. Instead, he’d transfer the money into the accounts of the halfway house, as he’d always intended.
The junkie’s eyes were hot little spotlights in his shrunken face. “Deal,” he said. “Deal.” He scratched at his arms. “I’ll speak to the one who can provide. I’ll find out how much he can get you.”
“Remember, you never saw me,” Ivan ordered. “You don’t know who I am. Just one of the shiny ones trying to get a big score for his friends.”
A gleam of a feral kind of intelligence, that of an animal starving for food. “How much is that worth to you?”
This time, the stare Ivan gave him was the flat, dead one that so worried his grandmother. The junkie shriveled away. “Okay, okay.” He threw up his hands, the palms pockmarked with scabs where he’d dug at his own skin. “Was just asking. Where do I find you?”
