“I voted to leave you stranded,” Clay muttered.

Talin linked her arm with Max’s. “Don’t mind him. Secretly, he loves you.”

“Very secretly.” Max’s heart went tight in a good way at seeing Talin so happy. They’d become close during the investigation into several missing kids a while back, but he’d known her on and off for years, their beats colliding in New York. She’d worked with troubled kids—and Enforcement was always picking up those kids.

But it wasn’t just that. He and Talin had a connection, one they’d never really articulated but which was simply understood. They’d both been children caught in the foster-care system, understood the scars that could leave. It wasn’t the kind of thing you could really explain to anyone who hadn’t lived through it.

But Clay got it. Max didn’t know the big man’s history, but the connection Max shared with Talin was slowly being formed with her mate as well. Max had taken them to dinner the last time they’d come up to Manhattan, had ended up getting well and truly drunk with the leopard. Talin had herded them home from the bar, promising to tear the hides off them the entire time, but she’d tucked them both in that night—pushing Max down onto their hotel couch and telling him to stay put.

Grinning at the memory of the pulsating rock music she’d played the next morning as punishment, he looked down at the wild mane of her hair. “Did you check out the apartment?” He’d e-mailed them the details of the place where he’d been put up for the duration.

“It’s near Fisherman’s Wharf,” Talin said, “not that far from the Duncan building. Nice area—close to the shops.”

Clay glanced up as he stowed Max’s bag in the trunk of the car. “You sure you don’t want to tell us what you’re doing for Sascha’s mother?” His eyes were human again—and full of a keen intelligence, as befitted one of Dark-River’s top men.

“Sorry, can’t say anything. Not yet.” Max put Morpheus in the backseat. “I might be able to share more once I know what’s going on.” Getting into the seat beside the still silent cat, he strapped up and waited for Clay and Talin to get in. Except . . . “What the—” Reaching beneath his thigh, he found himself holding some sort of a weird pink-haired doll with joints in impossible places.

“That’s a Metamorph,” Talin told him, turning to look over her shoulder. “They change into animals.”

“Huh.” He played with the little toy, managed to figure out the mechanism, and voila, he had an improbably pink wolf on his hands. “Like a changeling.”

“Yep. Clay keeps buying them for Noor even though she already has at least a dozen.” Talin was twining her fingers with her mate’s free hand even as she teased him. “One look from those big brown eyes and he folds.”

Clay lifted up her hand and pressed a kiss to her knuckles. “You don’t complain when I melt for your big gray eyes.”

“Clay.” Blushing, Talin nonetheless blew her mate a kiss.

Relaxed by the byplay, Max leaned back in his seat—after checking to ensure a still silent Morpheus was okay—and thought about the e-mail he’d received while waiting to board the airjet. It had come via the commander’s office.

Sophia Russo will meet you in San Francisco.

Anticipation thrummed through him—his body didn’t seem to want to accept the fact that the woman was more likely to freeze his balls off in the night than consent to tangle with him in the male/female sense.

But Max had stopped being ruled by his hormones around the age of sixteen, no matter that this J with her night-violet eyes full of secrets tugged at him in the most visceral of ways. Using the time he had before his flight boarded, he’d made a few phone calls, including one to Bart Reuben to get an update on Bonner. The prosecutor had had nothing new to report on that front, but when Max mentioned he was going to be working with Sophia, he’d said, “I got curious about her, did some digging.”

Max had been startled by a sudden—and forceful—surge of possessiveness. “Why?”

“Those gloves,” Bart had replied. “I realized I’d seen them before, on a J I worked with a long time ago. I know they mean something, but I haven’t figured out what yet. However, I did find out something else very interesting.”

Fighting off his unexpectedly strong response to the idea of Bart investigating Sophia, Max had forced his tone to lighten. “You going to make me beat it out of you?”

“No, a bottle of single malt whiskey will do.” He’d been able to hear the laugh in his friend’s voice. “Seems like over the past year, our Ms. Russo has developed a curious little habit of being in close proximity to some very nasty people who decided to mutilate themselves in creative ways.”

“That’s not surprising, given how long she’s been a J.” A cop would have to be willfully blind to miss that occasionally homicidal “quirk” of J psychology. It was always impossible to prove anything, of course, even if a cop felt so inclined given the nature of the individuals the Js invariably targeted, but the Corps policed itself very effectively—it wasn’t good for their image to have their people start going nuts in public.

Even as the thought passed through his head, Max had found himself disturbed by the idea that Sophia Russo might be going slowly insane. “Why hasn’t she been yanked from active duty?” It had come out harsher than it should have.

Bart, thankfully, hadn’t noticed. “She’s very, very good at her job,” he’d replied. “But she’s reaching her use-by-date. One of these days, she’s going to disappear just like every other J I’ve worked with over the years.”

Now, as the car entered the hilly streets of San Francisco proper, Max thought of the last words Sophia had spoken to him, and he felt a low burn of anger in his gut at the idea of her having a “use-by-date.”

Sophia took a seat across from the exotic-looking woman who might well sign the order for her rehabilitation once she was deemed obsolete. It should have concerned her, if only on an intellectual level, but Sophia wasn’t affected by much at present.

So soon after a reconditioning, with her mind piercing in its clarity, the facts were undeniable: her shields against the PsyNet were rock solid—for the simple reason that all Js were drilled remorselessly until they mastered that skill—but the shields that protected her on a day-to-day basis, her telepathic protections, were paper-thin. Any number of occurrences could incite a devastating mental wave.

Results could range from shock and psychic disintegration to death.

Councilor Nikita Duncan raised her head from the file on her desk as Sophia was thinking she’d prefer a sudden and total death over a psychic collapse. Far better that it all end in a sudden, bright burst of agony, than to find herself weakened and at the mercy of those who had none. She’d been helpless once in her life—never again would she allow herself to be in that position.

“Ms. Russo”—Councilor Duncan’s voice was precise—“I believe you had a court appearance this morning?”

“It was at nine,” Sophia said without pause. “I was finished and on my way here by ten thirty.”

“So you’ve had a chance to read the file I e-mailed to you?”

“Yes, I went through it on the airjet.” What she didn’t add was that she’d spent the majority of the time looking at the small digital image of the man she’d be working with, a man she’d never expected to see again in the course of what remained of her lifetime.

The photo had been taken earlier this year, and there’d been something in it that said he’d been laughing just before the photographer pressed the shutter, those uptilted eyes lit from within. She’d found herself fascinated by the difference between that image and the grim-faced man she’d met outside the interrogation room in Wyoming.

“Do you have any questions?” Nikita asked.

“Not at this stage—the assignment appears straightforward.” Other than the fact that she’d been paired with a human who made her think thoughts that weren’t only impossible, but so outrageously impossible that she wondered if she was already walking the cracked and twisted road to irrevocable insanity.

Nikita’s eyes turned into pieces of jet, hard, cutting. “Before we continue, I want to make one thing explicit—I don’t want any ‘incidents’ while you’re in my employ.”

“I don’t know what you’re referring to, Councilor.” Sophia kept her face expressionless—it was a fiction, but it was a fiction that would keep her alive a little longer. Long enough to speak to Max Shannon again, to find out what it was about him that made the last forgotten slivers of her soul, her personality, shimmer with unexpected fragments of light. At the same time, the otherness whispered that he was smart, that he’d discover everything about her and turn away once he knew. It would hurt. And the broken girl inside of her, the secret hidden beyond Silence, was tired, so tired of hurting.

“I’ve said what I have to say,” Nikita said after a small pause. “Break the rules and you’ll pay the price.”

Sophia knew enough of Nikita to understand that that was no idle threat. The Councilor was rumored to be a viral transmitter, able to infect minds with the most fatal—and if she chose, viciously painful—of psychic weapons. “Understood.” Rising to her feet, she picked up her organizer. “I do have one question that doesn’t relate directly to the case.”

Nikita waited.

“According to my immediate supervisor, you specifically requested me.” Sophia hadn’t been aware that Nikita even knew her name. “Was there a reason for that?”

“It made more sense to use you than to take a fully functioning J out of the system.” Cool, pragmatic words.

Except for one thing.

Sophia knew Nikita was lying.