Vasic would start to connect with the youngest children, the ones who were least in control of their abilities but far more in touch with their emotions. His task was to be their point of contact, the one person they could go to without hesitation.
I’m not sure about this, Aden, the other man said.
I am. Vasic was one of the gentlest Arrows Aden knew, and he understood the vulnerable. He’d know how to calm their fears. Bring Rabbit. Your pet is a better icebreaker than any words you could say.
As for Walker, he and Cris would work together to assign compatible children and Arrows to one another, while Judd picked up most of Walker’s duties back in SnowDancer. Zaira was to provide assistance where needed, including liaising with “damaged” or recently retired Arrows in Venice and elsewhere around the world who might want to relocate to the valley as teachers or to build families. While a number were dangerous and unstable, many were just worn out, might well thrive in this new environment where they weren’t expected to be perfect soldiers.
The final member of the team, Amin, was placed in charge of organizing the new living spaces.
“The construction of the family units should be done by Arrows,” Nerida pointed out. “It’s the only way we can maintain security.”
Amin shook his head, the dark, dark brown of his skin gleaming in the light. “We don’t have the expertise.”
“Amin’s right,” Aden said, fully aware of his people and their capabilities. “We were only able to build the extension to Vasic and Ivy’s home because her father and several other community members oversaw the project.”
“DarkRiver is in construction.” Judd’s voice. “I know you won’t want an entire team in the valley, but they can construct the buildings elsewhere and Vasic, I, and the other teleporters can bring them in. Only the foundations would have to be laid.”
“We should agree on the most efficient parameters for the houses,” Amin began.
“They shouldn’t all be identical and starkly functional,” Walker interrupted. “Neither should you set them out in military-precise rows.”
Nerida was the one who voiced the critical question. “Why?”
“Because you don’t want the valley to look institutional.” Walker’s pale green eyes held each of theirs in turn. “You’re creating a permanent home.”
And a home, Aden thought, didn’t need to be only efficient. He glanced at Amin. “We can ask DarkRiver’s architects to personalize the homes in different ways.” They were much better qualified for the task. “Focus on making sure we’ll have the flexibility to accommodate diverse types of family groups—including those families that want to live together with others.”
Getting Amin’s nod, he turned to Vasic and Judd. “I need you two to speak to the other teleporters, make sure we have the capacity for the transfer.”
“It will have to be done in pieces,” Vasic said. “But we should be able to put the pieces together as long as DarkRiver is willing to give us instructions.”
Judd turned to Vasic. “I can’t see them saying no. It’s not like the squad’s planning to go into construction.”
“No.” Arrows had other skills, skills that had a multitude of uses—and they didn’t all have to do with death, not under Aden’s watch.
“There’s also Kaleb,” Cris said, her next words as pragmatic as the neat little ponytail in which she usually wore her dark brown hair—and the lack of flash with which she handled a sniper rifle. “No point keeping him out since we all know he can go anywhere he wants.”
Aden still wasn’t sure about trusting the cardinal Tk, but Cris was right. They might as well use his abilities should he agree to assist. “Vasic—you or Judd touch base with Kaleb. Amin and I will speak to the DarkRiver alpha about the construction.”
The rest of the meeting was taken up with the finer details of what would be a seismic shift in Arrow lives. Zaira, he said when she would’ve left with the others, I need to speak to you.
I’ve been away from Venice too long. Alejandro is unstable. Shifting her attention to Vasic, she asked the teleporter if he could give her a lift, was gone a second later.
Aden didn’t stop her. If Zaira didn’t want to do something, she wouldn’t do it. She had to choose to come to him.
• • •
ZAIRA arrived in Venice knowing she was running away. “Thank you,” she said to Vasic. “I believe Marjorie wanted to speak to you. Do you have a few minutes?”
At Vasic’s nod, she directed him to Marjorie’s location, then headed out to check on Alejandro. He wasn’t in the compound, but, aware he didn’t like to wander far, she did a sweep and found him standing beside a nearby canal. He wasn’t alone.
A large man was gesticulating and poking Alejandro. That could’ve been lethal for the man in question if Zaira hadn’t given Alejandro an order not to attack civilians who weren’t a deadly threat. Because though his brain was damaged in certain ways, Alejandro retained all his offensive and defensive skills. He could kill most untrained individuals in a matter of seconds. As she came closer, she heard what the man was saying.
“I’ve seen you lumbering around. You’re a big dumb lunk, aren’t you?” Spittle flew out of the stranger’s mouth, cruel laughter on his face. “You got any fucking brains at all?” The man continued to poke at Alejandro. “I told you this area is ours. No Psy scum allowed. Get lost or I’ll show you the sharp end of my favorite knife.”
Zaira could’ve ignored the insult to Psy, but never to one of her people. Especially not to someone who was deeply vulnerable on a level this bully of a man couldn’t understand. Normally, she’d have threatened the man into retreat. Today, so soon after her disconnection from the Net, the rage not yet trapped in the abyss where it lived, the switch in her brain, the one that had been thrown when she was a child, it flipped again.
She saw her hand punch out, hit the male in the nose. That took considerable control—she could’ve killed him with a single hit. Instead, she just punched him again and swept his legs out from under him. Blood flew and he was on the ground, his bulk no defense against a fully trained Arrow.
No defense at all against Zaira in a rage.
At some point, her arm began to hurt and she was aware the man wasn’t moving, but she couldn’t stop. He’d belittled Alejandro, threatened to harm him in the future. Zaira had to put a stop to it right now. No one could be permitted to see her or her people as weak, because the weak got hurt and no one was ever again going to hurt her.
Zaira.
When Aden’s voice sliced through her mind like a hot blade, she shrugged it off. He couldn’t be here. She’d left him, left the man she wanted more than anything. But his strong hands were pulling her off her target, his hold not painful but resolute. She went to snap his wrist, couldn’t make herself harm him. Changing direction, she twisted and kicked out in an effort to escape, get back to the man with a face smeared in red.
Arms clamping around her, Aden turned her forcefully away from the body. She caught a fleeting glimpse of another man. A tall one with winter gray eyes and dark hair. Some part of her said she knew who he was, but she couldn’t process the thought right then, her mind hot red.
When the world shimmered around her, she screamed in untrammeled rage, conscious she was being teleported away. Then Aden was releasing her, the other man was gone, and they were alone in a moonlit desert, rolling sand dunes as far as the eye could see. Turning on Aden, she slammed herself into his body, taking him to the ground with her momentum. “He was mine!” she yelled, lifting her arm with the intent of plowing her bloodied and scraped fist into his face.
Instead of bringing up his forearm to block the blow, he placed his hands on her hips and just looked her in the eye, the quiet, intense power of him a hum in the air. She couldn’t bring down her fist, couldn’t complete the hit. Muscles straining as she held the position, she said, “
I had him.”
“Yes,” Aden said, no horror in his tone. “Vasic tells me he’s barely alive. He’ll be in surgery for hours to reconstruct his face.”
It felt as if her arm would break if she didn’t bring it down.
Getting off this man she couldn’t hurt, she rose to her feet, spun around to find something to fight, but everywhere she looked, there was only sand. It dissolved to nothing when she picked it up to throw, wasn’t solid enough to pummel. Dropping to her knees, she screamed and screamed but the rage continued to boil in her until it consumed her, became her, became everything.
The arms that came around her were strong but didn’t cage. Still she broke away, her hands gripping fistfuls of sand. The screams kept coming. They made her throat raw, stole the air in her lungs until there was no more sound and every muscle in her body ached, but the tension, it wouldn’t leave her. She felt as if she’d shatter with a single wrong move, break apart from the fury inside her.
The madness had come.
• • •
ADEN tugged Zaira back against him when she went silent, a rigid figure on her knees in the sand. She didn’t resist this time, but neither did she cooperate, her body stiff and her hands fisted. His own pulse was a drum, his fury for her a roar in his blood. “You’re safe,” he said, not sure what made him choose those words. “You’re safe. I’m here.”
Knowing the horrors of the mental landscape in which she might be trapped, he spoke to the nightmare. “You aren’t locked in that cell anymore.” Never again would anyone imprison her and he wouldn’t allow the past to, either. “You live in the light.”
She didn’t respond, didn’t say a word. It was as if she wasn’t there anymore, as if she’d gone far away from this world where she’d been tortured and hurt and made to see herself as a monster.
No. “I won’t let you go.” He had no compunction in ripping his own shields wide open for her. “I need you.”
Again, no verbal response, but when he eased her to the sand with him, she stretched out her legs. Keeping one arm under her neck and curving it around the front of her body, he put his other arm around her waist and held her tight against his own body so she’d remember this world, remember him. She was so still. Zaira was never still. There was too much fire inside her small form—and too much pain she’d never acknowledged.
It was pure chance he’d been there to stop her from killing the man who’d triggered her rage. Courtesy of Aden’s mother making a request to speak to Aden, Vasic had just brought him in from Central Command when Alejandro had run into the compound. Aden had known immediately that something was seriously wrong even before Alejandro said, “Zaira isn’t Zaira!”
The other man’s words circled in Aden’s skull now. Would the Zaira he knew come back to him? The Zaira who burned so bright even behind the strictures of Arrow discipline. The Zaira who saw parts of him no one else ever had. The Zaira who had always been his unspoken dream.
Or was she lost in a nightmare world formed of old horrors and older pain?
“Zaira,” he said again, his breath making a curl at her ear waft gently before lying back down against her skin. “Stay here. Stay with me.”
No answer.
Chapter 35
ADEN REFUSED TO give up. He couldn’t, wouldn’t take her back like this. Never would he put Zaira in a position where others might see her as weak or helpless.
He may as well carve out her heart.
“The first time Vasic teleported me to this desert,” he said into the heartbreaking silence, “I didn’t understand why he came to such places. All I saw was endless nothing.” He slid one hand up and down her arm, wishing she wasn’t in uniform, that he could touch her skin. “I think that was what Vasic saw at first, too. But by the time he brought me to it, he’d started to see how much existed here in the nothingness.”
He pointed. “Look over there. See the grasses. I can’t understand how they survive, much less the small insects you sometimes see. But there’s life in this barren landscape and there’s beauty.” Taking a handful of sand, he allowed it to fall slowly through his fingers in front of her. “Even now, the moonlight hits the silica and the minerals within. In sunlight, it can be blinding, but I prefer it in the moonlight.”
“I told you, you were never Silent.” The words were a rasp of sound from a ravaged throat.
The hand crushing his own throat eased its grip. “That means I must be very, very good at shielding.”
“Why won’t you just admit I’m right? We both know it.”
“Because then what would we argue about?” He closed both arms around her again, wanting to hold on forever—but Zaira couldn’t be held. She’d have to come to him, have to choose him even after the horror and the nightmare and despite the very real fear that haunted her. He was selfish when it came to her, would ask it, but he’d never turn his back on her if she said no.
Zaira’s name would always be written on his heart.
They lay there for a long time, watching the moon rise to its highest point over the sands, bathe them in silver. “Let me see your hands.”
She lifted one, allowed him to cup it, examine the damage.
“You’re badly bruised and cut up.”
“I’ll live.” Dropping her hand back down, with his curled around it, she stared out at the moon, but her next words had nothing to do with the landscape. “They gave it names—antisocial personality disorder was one. I can’t remember the others, but in the family, we always just referred to it as the madness. Like it was a sentient being out to hunt us.”
“You’re not mad.”
“You can’t make that true by saying it, Aden.” Her head remained turned toward the moon, her profile fine and haunted by echoes of nightmare. “My family is one of those that was meant to be helped by Silence.”
“Silence was flawed from the beginning.”
“Yes.” A deeper breath before she fell back into the quiet, shallow rhythm that barely seemed enough to keep her alive. “It clearly didn’t restrain my parents, though it gave them the appearance of sanity. But it helped me.”
“If I’ve never been Silent, then neither have you.” Zaira’s emotionless discipline wasn’t something external that had been forced on her. It was an internal winter of the soul, one she’d chosen in childhood in order to survive.
Her hand moved under his as she flexed her fingers, fingers that had to be stiffening up. “I took pieces of Silence, used those pieces to build a cage to keep the rage and the insanity inside. The cage shattered in the RainFire aerie and I’ve been trying to rebuild it since. I’m failing.”
Aden took the first clear breath he’d taken since leaving RainFire. “You say you have the madness, but what I saw today was anger.” He didn’t know why she’d attacked the male but her raw fury had been unmistakable.
“I was totally out of control.” Stark words. “If you hadn’t pulled me off that man, I would’ve killed him.”
“And if you didn’t have anger inside you, you’d be inhuman.” He thought of the classified recordings he’d seen, recordings made by her family during her punishments for purposes of “monitoring the progress of the education program.” It had been sadism, pure and simple. It was her father who was a Neve, but he’d clearly found his perfect partner in Zaira’s mother. The two had enjoyed watching Zaira suffer. And she had suffered.
A small girl, fine boned and with dark eyes, dark hair, trying futilely to protect herself against belts and canes and whips.
In the later recordings, she’d simply curled into herself like a turtle inside its shell, taking the blows on her back and arms and legs. Until they’d forced her hands up above her head and beaten and beaten her as she spun suspended from a hook in the ceiling. Her blood had soaked her shift, splattered the walls.
And Aden, for the first time in his life, had understood rage. Even then,
believing himself Silent, he’d understood rage. He’d been glad her parents were dead, that she’d beaten them to a pulp. If she hadn’t, he would’ve gone out that day and done it himself. As it was, he had gone out and made sure no other Neve child was in the same situation. The warning he’d left for those who might attempt such horror in the future had stained the air with sick fear.
“Your anger is honest. It’s real.” He had to make her understand that it wasn’t her fury at fault; it was her refusal to accept it. “Ivy says that the things we hold inside, the nightmares we stifle, have far more power than the things we expose to the light of day.” He hadn’t betrayed Zaira’s trust by asking specifically about her, the question a general one, but he thought Ivy knew. She was an empath—she saw into hearts, even ones stunted from years of deprivation. “Accept your anger, Zaira, and you’ll strip it of its power.”
Zaira was quiet for a long time. “I don’t believe you.”
Aden realized at that instant that Zaira would believe his words only when he proved them true, and the only way he could prove them true was if she didn’t retreat, as he could already feel her doing. “Don’t go.”
“I can’t leave this desert until Vasic returns—though I will try to walk out eventually.”
“Will you face me?”
Not an immediate response, but she did eventually turn.
“Don’t go,” he said again, bringing his hand up to lie against her face. “Don’t step back from the world again. Don’t leave me alone.”
Dark eyes that hid so much. “I’ll give my life for you.” Fingers pressing to his lips when he would’ve spoken. “This is my peace.” Her breath brushed his skin, so warm and alive even when she was shutting down in front of his eyes. “Let me live it. Let me be as normal as I can be.”
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