Memory wanted to haul his hand back to her nape and tell him not to move it until she gave him permission. Clenching her abdomen against the urge, she told herself to get the tactile need under control before she became as much a junkie as Renault. “I’m a special case,” she said, staring out the windshield as the tiny stabbing pains began to return limb by limb.

“Yeah?” A glance she felt. “Why?”

“I don’t want to talk about that anymore.” The memories of how Renault had violated her, how he’d dragged her down into the abyss, made her so angry she could barely think. To her surprise, Alexei let her be. For a growly wolf, he could be very quiet when he wanted. “Empaths don’t want to kill, don’t want to murder,” she blurted out, her gaze on the rain-drenched landscape. “They don’t fantasize about torturing annoying people with tiny insects.”

A shrug of those muscled shoulders that she caught with her peripheral vision. “I dunno. Sascha scrambled the brains of the idiots who tried to come after her cub.”

Memory sat up straight in her seat, angling her body so she could see his profile. “Did she truly?” Her heart raced, her lungs aching with withheld air.

A nod. “Fuckers wanted to abduct her baby. She threw them into a nightmare. Served them right.”

Memory’s mother had fought for her and Diana Aven-Rose had been an inmate of Silence. Sascha had rejected Silence on her defection. Of course she would fight relentlessly for her child. “I never heard about this on the comm.”

“Not sure it was covered widely. Cats and the locals took care of the aftermath pretty fast. Couple of SnowDancers responded, too, along with several other allies.” He shoved away a strand of hair that was threatening to fall into his eye. “I need a damn haircut.”

“Don’t.” The word spilled out of her lips before she could stop herself.

A quick glance, both eyebrows raised.

Cheeks heating, Memory muttered, “It’s beautiful, even if you are a bad-tempered growler.”

His lips curved, the openly smug smile unexpected and devastating. “Tell you what,” he said, “you let me play with your curls and I’ll let you pet any part of me you like. Exchange of skin privileges. Fair and square.”

Skin privileges.

Memory shaped the term inside her head, tried to understand its meaning. But she kept getting caught on one indigestible fact. “My hair is a matted nest.” Renault had used his hold on her mind to force her to straighten it each time they went out, ostensibly so that she’d have the appropriate “look” as his aide, but Memory knew it’d had more to do with control and humiliation. She’d been aware and conscious while he forced her to erase a part of herself, her body a marionette and her mind caged.

“You know what hair goop you need?” As he spoke, Alexei pushed something on the dash that changed the vehicle from hoverdrive to wheels.

The SUV touched the rutted track that had appeared in the trees, the jolt that rocked up her body a pleasant reminder that she was no longer in a cage. “Yes,” she said, though she’d never actually used any of the conditioners or creams; Renault had refused to supply them for her after she saw ads on the comm and asked.

In the only rebellion left to her, she’d deliberately allowed her hair to go wild the instant he was no longer forcing his mind on her own. She’d done zero maintenance on it. It had always taken hours to straighten it when he wanted her to perform, and she’d resisted him every inch of the way. It hadn’t stopped him—he’d had her since she was eight years old, the pathways he’d laid inside her mind permanent tracks he could access with only minor physical contact.

But it had mattered to her that she fight.

“Here.” Alexei pulled out his phone, brought up a note-taking program. “Make a list of what you need. I’ll make sure you get it. Clothes and shoes, too.”

Memory’s hand clenched around the phone, her throat threatening to go tight. Lowering her head to hide her response, she began to make the list. It didn’t take long. She’d learned to live with the bare minimum—Renault had only given her enough that she remained useful, nothing else.

“Done already?” Alexei frowned as he took a quick look at her list before returning his attention to the track. “You need to add a coat, thermal socks, and boots, for starters. It gets cold here.” A rumble in his chest. “What happened to the suits you wore in the photos? I didn’t see them in your wardrobe.”

Memory allowed herself a small, satisfied smile. “Renault kept them in a special closet in his home after coming to get me once and finding I’d shredded every one of the suits to pieces.” Her captor hadn’t ever allowed her access to sharp knives or scissors, but she’d found ways to destroy the clothing. Jitterbug had assisted with glee. “I imagined it was him I was tearing into pieces.”

“Bloodthirsty.” Alexei smiled, and it was more than a little feral. “I like it.”

Of course he did; he was a wolf.

Wondering if he looked like Lucy when he shifted, she added the coat, socks, and boots to her list. Otherwise, she’d asked for a particular hair product she’d seen advertised, a pair of jeans, underwear, and a shirt. “Should I request more clothing?”

“I’ll get you a datapad so you can look at catalogs online and choose stuff you like. Phone, too, so you always have access to help.”

A crushing pressure in her chest. “I’ll be in too much debt.” Even the small amount incurred by the clothing and the hair product edged her into breathlessness.

Alexei brought the vehicle to a stop and gave her a long, penetrating look. “You don’t like the idea of debt?”

“A debt gives a person power over you.”

Piercing gray eyes held hers. “In that case, SnowDancer or I won’t pay for anything. It’ll come out of the fund set up by the Empathic Collective, with backing by the Ruling Coalition of the Psy.”

He tapped a finger on the steering wheel. “Fund was created to aid Es who come out of Silence without a supportive family network. Hawke’s already told Ivy Jane Zen about you, and she’ll make sure you’re assigned the stipend.”

Ivy Jane Zen was the president of the Empathic Collective.

Stomach lurching, Memory parted her lips to interrupt, but Alexei hadn’t finished.

“It’s a generous amount,” he said, “but that’s because the Coalition’s going to try to press you into service as soon as you have the necessary training. PsyNet’s coming apart at the seams and that Honeycomb thing the Es have created is apparently the only thing holding it together.”

Memory’s mind glowed with images of the golden threads she’d seen weaving across the blackness of the PsyNet. “If I don’t want to serve?” She’d be exposed as a fraud the instant she was assessed by a senior E, but she could live the dream a moment longer—dreams didn’t ever come true for her, so what was the harm?

“Empaths heal the PsyNet simply by existing, so they’ll get their pound of flesh.” Alexei opened his door. “We walk the rest of the way. Rain’s stopped, so you won’t get wet again.”

The air was cold and crisp in her lungs, the ground beneath her feet wonderfully uneven, and the green, so much green. The snow had faded the lower they came down the mountain, and though it was still apparent in patches at this elevation, spring had also begun to whisper its oncoming arrival here. She could imagine Jitterbug pouncing after an out-of-reach butterfly, or prowling through the underbrush like a tiny leopard.

Sadness enclosed her in heavy wings, her heart aching; she wondered for the millionth time if she’d done the right thing in taking another living being into her cage. Her only excuse was excruciating loneliness—and oh, how she’d loved him. She’d even cooperated with Renault at times so he’d take Jitterbug into the world, too.

Her captor had agreed because it meant he didn’t have to waste psychic energy on forcing her actions. Not that she’d ever been free—he’d always had fingers in her mind, ready to clamp down if she stepped out of line.

Four times during those outings, she’d tried to set her pet free.

Jitterbug had always come back to her. Once, while he’d been exploring a large public square outside the meeting location, Renault had teleported Memory home. She’d cried in the chill emptiness of the bunker, but it had helped her to know that Jitterbug was free. Then Renault had taken her back to the same general area two days later, and her pet had found her. Jitterbug had remonstrated with her volubly and audibly and she’d never again tried to leave him behind.

The reminder of her pet’s loyalty leavened some of her guilt, but it could do nothing for her grief.

A rough-skinned hand brushed her own.

Not taking. Asking.

Breath a knot in her lungs, she didn’t look at Alexei as she slid her fingers into his, let his bigger hand engulf hers. Skin privileges. Hers for a short while longer . . . before the true Es discovered that she was an abomination.

Chapter 17

All historical records retrieved1 to date support the Ruling Coalition’s hypothesis that the PsyNet was never meant to contain only Psy minds. In the pre-Silence period, humans—via relationships with Psy—made up at least twenty-five percent2 of the Net population. As all indications are that human minds cannot access the PsyNet and Psy cannot access Net-connected human minds, the humans were a passive element of the pre-Silence PsyNet.

1 Majority of retrieved documents are partials, resurrected then organized into coherent order.

2 Conservative estimate.

—Research Group Alpha-Z, PsyNet Health

NIGHT CLOAKED MOSCOW. Kaleb stood on the edge of the terrace, his body clad only in the lightweight black pants he wore while exercising and his mind on the new damage in the PsyNet. The disintegration was increasing at multiple critical junctures, the Honeycomb strained.

“There are a lot of us Es,” Ivy Jane Zen had told the other members of the Ruling Coalition an hour earlier, “but it’s clear we were never meant to hold the entire PsyNet together on our own.”