Memory froze, black horror curdling her stomach. “What happened?”

“The Correlation Concept. Psy began to lose their minds. Violence erupted. Chaos threatened.” Words that cut, Sascha’s anger a refined blade. “So the Council stopped its extermination program in favor of permitting Es to exist—while erasing all knowledge of the designation from the world. They told us we were nothing, failures.”

Right then, Memory saw that Sascha had lived and survived her own prison, rising to spit in the faces of those who would crush her. “You think that passive aspect worked in reverse to nurture me?”

“It explains your high emotional intelligence and innate sense of good and evil. You were raised by a psychopath and yet you’re a good, whole person.”

“Add spite to the list of reasons,” Memory muttered. “I stayed myself to spite him.”

Sascha’s lips kicked up. “Poor Lexie. I think I need to look out for him, not you. He has no idea who he’s messing with.”

“That stubborn grouchy wolf can go jump in a lava lake for all I care.”

Eyes filled with stars again, Sascha chuckled. “I spoke to Alice Eldridge, as we discussed before lunch, and she suggested that you might be one of the E-sigma.”

Sascha had told Memory that Alice was the closest thing the world had to an expert on Designation E. Put into forcible cryonic suspension over a hundred years ago, the researcher had awakened to a world that had altered beyond comprehension. All her friends and family dead, her research on empaths all but erased from the world.

Memory’s heart ached for the woman she’d never met.

“But even Alice only knows bits and pieces,” Sascha added.

Pushing her braid behind her shoulder, the cardinal put both forearms on the table. “Apparently Es of subdesignation sigma never actually used their abilities. It was considered too dangerous.”

Memory had finished her sandwich without realizing it. She took an absent sip of what she’d assumed was coffee. It wasn’t. It was sweet and creamy and melted her bones. “What is this?”

“Hot chocolate. Food for the soul. I also brought cookies.”

“I understand why Es like me wouldn’t want to use their abilities,” Memory said after inhaling three oatmeal raisin cookies. “I’m only alive because Renault realized my long-term utility. Most psychopaths would drain the E to death at first contact.”

“It means previous sigmas didn’t have the ability to cut off the transfer from their end.” Sascha put down her half-eaten cookie, her brow furrowing. “Or, more likely, since the Es blocked their own abilities because of bad historical precedent, the question never came up.”

“Is it doable?”

“My mother can seed mental viruses and even she agrees I’m the best shield builder in or out of the Net.” A fleeting emotion on Sascha’s face, too complicated to label. “We’re going to build you a shield so formidable that you can slam it down mid-transfer, slicing the feed in two.”

“Then I’m ready.” Alexei would keep. Next time the two of them met, Memory was going to metaphorically singe off his fur.

Chapter 28

Dear Aunt Rita,

My wolf friend has suddenly begun to bring me random gifts of food. It started off innocently enough—a piece of candy here, a sandwich there when I forgot my lunch at home. But two days ago, he left a box of out-of-season white peaches at my door. Then yesterday, he turned up with an entire trifle along with a can of whipped cream. What does this mean?

Sincerely,

Confused Human

Dear Confused Human,

Sit down, dear. I have some news for you.

—From the October 2078 issue of Wild Woman magazine: “Skin Privileges, Style & Primal Sophistication”

MEMORY’S PLAN TO sear off Alexei’s fur hit a snag out of the gate: the damn wolf was suddenly never around when she had free hours in her intensive training schedule. Oh, she knew he kept an eye on the compound, could taste him in the air, but he was avoiding her.

It didn’t take much work for her to find his comm code. Three days after their last encounter, she was standing in front of the comm, about to call him, when she thought about what she was doing. Was Sascha right? Had she imprinted on Alexei because he’d pulled her to freedom?

Every cell in her body rebelled against that idea.

“But that’s not enough,” she said aloud. “You have to prove it to yourself and to him.” Otherwise, she might cause her wounded wolf even more pain, and that was unacceptable.

Clenching her jaw, she deleted his comm code from her system, then strode outside, off into the trees. When a black-clad form appeared a short distance from her without warning, a phantom she hadn’t detected with her empathic senses, she froze.

Her mouth went dry.

Yuri, that was his name. A man with rough-hewn features and strands of silver in his chestnut hair, his jaw always clean-shaven in the morning but dark with shadow by the end of his shift. A tiny detail that had made him seem more approachable to her, but she’d never actually spoken to him. And now, alone in the trees with him, she saw only the deadly assassin who was part of the Arrow squad.

“You’re aware of the perimeter limits?” His voice was ice—not because of the nothingness, but because of Silence. In his late forties, Yuri was the oldest Arrow in the security team, had spent too long under the Protocol to emerge unscathed.

“Yes.” She rubbed her hands down her sweatshirt-covered arms.

“I apologize. I am causing you discomfort.” He began to fade into the trees.

“No,” Memory blurted out, infuriated by her reaction to this man who had done nothing to hurt her. “I’m just not used to many people yet.” All the myriad personalities, all the different levels of lingering Silence.

“I felt the same,” Yuri said unexpectedly, his hands behind his back. “But now I have a family, and it is good.” A moment of eye contact, his irises a dark hazel against weathered skin that didn’t hold a tan but was marked by tiny lines at the corners of his eyes—and what appeared to be a knife scar on his left cheekbone. “Do not allow the past to shape your future.”

It was another version of what Ashaya had said to her. If the universe was sending her a message, it wasn’t being subtle about it. “I won’t,” she promised him, and when the next day dawned, she made a deliberate effort to talk to him again.

As the days passed, they began to walk together. Yuri’s energy was as calm and patient as Alexei’s was wild and turbulent. Her reaction to Yuri was different, too. She felt no urge to antagonize the quiet, contained male who had lived so long in the shadows that sunlight had once seemed an enemy.

“Now, I sit in the light with the youngest and most innocent of us all,” he told her one day as sunset drenched the compound in myriad hues of orange and gold. “They ask me to tell them stories, so I’ve had to learn human and changeling tales for children. I hope they’ll never have to know the blood and pain that is the history of every adult Arrow.”

Caught by the touch of melancholy he permitted to escape, she said, “Why are you worried? Arrows are free now, too.” He’d told her why the squad had first been formed and what it had become, how good men and women had been used by power-hungry Councilors for their own ends.

“Arrows are Arrows for a reason,” he said to her. “The children . . . they have deadly abilities. All we can do is care for them, teach them to use their strength in the pursuit of good.”

“I think they’re lucky to have you,” Memory said honestly, and though Yuri didn’t smile—she hadn’t ever seen his lips curve—she thought he was pleased. She liked him so much, was glad he seemed to consider her a friend, too, but never did she feel any compulsion to know him as a woman knows her man.

But this relationship, their friendship, she treasured it in its own right.

She made herself get to know the other Arrows, too, as well as her fellow empaths—and even the leopard and wolf soldiers who swung by the compound every so often on their patrol routes. She had to understand her own heart, had to know if the fact she dreamed of Alexei night after night was more than a thing of happenstance.

In those dreams, she felt the hard muscle of his body against her, shivered at the rasp of his stubble, gasped when he bit her. Each morning she woke frustrated and alone, she glared another hole in her mental photograph of a certain golden wolf. Then one day, she opened her door and found a small sealed box outside.

Eyes narrowed, she scanned the dawn-quiet compound, but found no grouchy wolf hanging around. She took the box inside before opening it . . . to find it full of granola bars. Dark cherry with white chocolate. Salted caramel and almonds. Apricot and mango. Walnuts with nougat.

Memory emptied out the box, but there was no note. Not that she needed one.

Scowling, she put all the bars back in the box. Then, at mid-morning, she took the box around the entire compound, offering the bars to the other Es, the Arrows, and especially a couple of SnowDancers who’d dropped by. The dark-haired one, who’d introduced himself as Riaz, accepted a bar with a gleam in his eye, and she knew he’d scented Alexei all over the box.

Good.

This was war.

* * *

• • •

THE obstinate, crabby wolf who’d rescued Memory then rejected her left her a full-size apple pie the next morning. In a warmer.

Memory fed it to an ecstatic bunch of empaths.

Two days later, she woke to a basket of exotic fruit.

Those she gave to Yuri, to share with the children at the Arrow squad’s own compound.

Then came the single-serving-size blueberry cake with her name written on it in white icing that glittered with sparkles. It hurt her heart, it was so pretty. She wanted desperately to keep it.

She set her jaw: Alexei didn’t get to look after her when he’d walked away from her and stayed away.

Picking up the small cake box, she headed outside.

No one would take it off her hands. Her fellow trainees fought not to laugh as they waved it off with cobbled-together apologies about expanding waistlines and newborn allergies to blueberries, while Jaya bit down hard on her lower lip and pressed a hand to her heart. “Oh, Memory. That’s so sweet.”