Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
"Some
of us didn't make it, Sophie. We've accepted that. Our final goal is to
create a better world for the next generation of the children we once
were."
"No, I won't let you do this."
"You have no
choice-to be a good leader, you have to implement triage, focus your
energy on the ones who are salvageable. Leave the rest of us to do what
we do best. We've bathed in evil . . . there's no washing that off, so
we might as well use it to lure monstrous prey."
-Heated discussion between Eleri Dias (J Corps) and Sophia Russo
(director of the J Corps) (5 January 2084)
The
road to Raintree, Arizona, was composed of sprawling desert and
rippling walls of red-orange rock. Eleri was no geologist, had no idea
whether the rock was shale or limestone or something else altogether.
All she saw were natural formations that looked as if they'd been
created by an expert sculptor, each ripple and gradation of color put
delicately in place.
Where the rocks fell away, the desert
glinted, the only signs of life in any direction scraggly bushes of a
sandy green hue and the majestic forms of saguaro cactus plants, their
arms akimbo at ninety-degree angles.
The sky was a searing blue,
the landscape as arid and dry as Eleri's heart and mind. It seemed
fitting that it would all end here, in this place devoid of the lush
greenery so prevalent in the place where she'd taken her first breath
too many shadow memories ago.
LIAR!!
That echo was as
vicious today as the day it had been born, his voice having haunted her
through all the years in between. And the further she drove into
Raintree, the higher the likelihood that she'd come face-to-face with
him . . . with the one person to whom she could never atone. There was
no way to bring back the dead, and he'd taken care of the justice at
which she'd failed.
Eleri. That's pretty. My name is Adam.
Her
fingers flexed on the steering wheel, the wall of numbness in her mind a
gift against the past. How much worse would it be if she could truly
experience it, instead of looking at it from beyond a vast gulf of
nothingness?
She hadn't shared her latest PsyMed test results
with Sophia. They would have distressed her, and she was already in a
physically vulnerable state, her pregnancy now at seven and a half
months.
Poor Sophie.
Trying so hard to save all of them
when that was an impossibility. And a terrible irony, because it had
been Sophia's refusal to give up on her fellow Js that had led to her
forcible elevation to Director of the J Corps.
Sophia was Ruling
Coalition member Nikita Duncan's senior aide, and had no time to head a
group of damaged telepaths who had once been overseen by the J Corps
Management Board. But when the Ruling Coalition wiped out that
board-after Sophia brought its mismanagement of the Corps to the
Coalition's attention-and asked all working Js in the world to get
together to nominate their new leadership, they'd come back with a
single name: Sophia "Sophie" Russo.
They'd dropped the mess of
the J Corps into Sophia's lap and trusted her to build a better
long-term structure for them. She could've said no, but of course she
hadn't. Because Sophie wanted not just life for all of them, but a life
filled with joy and hope.
"Sophia's as tough as fucking nails, except when it comes to Js."
It
was Bram who'd said that in the conversation group of four he'd set up
almost eighteen years ago: the Quatro Cartel. Bram's little joke because
the biggest case in the news at the time-when the four of them had been
between nine and ten-had involved a ruthless drug cartel that liked to
remove organs from people who owed them money, for no reason except that
it was horrific torture.
"Perhaps we should follow that cartel's
example, Bram," Saffron had said two months ago in her whisper of a
voice, her throat still healing from her altercation with a murderer on a
rampage. "Remove organs one by one, make our targets suffer."
No
one had told her that would take her into sociopath territory. Fact
was, none of them had the patience for such games of torture, especially
not Saffron, with her violent rages and extreme temper. Regardless,
they agreed with her in principle-after what they'd seen in the minds
they'd wandered, Eleri and the rest of the cartel of four had no doubts
about evil and what it deserved.
Quatro had begun as a secret
because they'd been children at a strict boarding school who'd wanted a
private way to talk. It was Yúzé who'd taken Bram's initial idea and
used his tech skills to move the chat into a secure online room-Eleri
didn't understand how he'd done it, but then tech had always been Yúzé's
specialty. As a J, he'd been pulled near exclusively into cases that
involved high-tech elements of murder.
Quatro remained secret for
a far darker reason. All four of them had begun to work as active Js at
the same time, give or take a month or two. And all four of them had
crossed a final dividing line within weeks of each other, whether by
chance or because of the cases they'd been assigned over the years-Bram,
Eleri, Saffron, and Yúzé ranged from 8.9 to 9.5 on the Gradient; they'd
never been given any nonviolent cases after they completed their
apprenticeships.
Theirs had been the realm of serial and spree murderers.
The four of them weren't going to make it on either the psychic or psychological level.
"No
point hiding from it," Bram had written four months ago after Yúzé
turned Sensitive, the last one of the Cartel to do so. "All four of us
now have shields so thin that we pick up thoughts through even minor
touch-staving off Exposure is going to take a mammoth effort, if it's
even possible."
Exposure would mean the total loss of their
shields, the psychic noise of the world crushing them until they
screamed and tore at themselves in a futile effort to make it stop. No J
ever voluntarily reached Exposure-the members of the Corps knew to
choose their own exit route instead of being at the mercy of others
after they'd lost their ability to function.
Eleri could imagine
no worse death than being a mindless creature who could neither defend
herself nor understand the screaming voices inside her head that would
never, ever stop.
"This," Bram had added, "remains what it's
always been-our online home, but it's also now a place to share data
about our rates of disintegration. Whichever one of us falls last, your
task will be to compile that data and put it into Sophia's hands, in the
hope it'll assist her in saving more J lives. For now, it'll help the
four of us set our affairs in order-including ensuring any delayed
justice."
Delayed justice.
Bram had a way of couching
murder by Js in language that sounded almost harmless, but they all knew
what he'd meant. Because though none of them had reached thirty, with
Eleri and Yúzé just past twenty-seven and Bram and Saffron twenty-eight,
they were all senior Js who had completed their final assigned cases.
While
they technically remained Js in the system, with all the official
access to information, their badges yet valid, it was understood that
what time they had was their own; the four of them planned to use that
time to correct mistakes in that system for which they'd been
culpable-or which they hadn't been able to stop.
As part of their
pact to share everything they could to help each other plan their
unavoidable descent into the abyss, Eleri had posted her PsyMed results
an hour after she'd received them: Predicted status change from
Sensitive to Exposed now at six months.
"Fuck, Eleri." Saffron
was angry in a way Eleri simply couldn't become any longer, their brains
having reacted in diametrically opposing ways to repeated
reconditionings.
Where Saffron screamed her rage, Eleri drowned in nothingness.
"Six
months?" Saffron had picked up and thrown the object nearest to her-a
water glass that had shattered into bright shards of sound. "Fuck!"
Because
Eleri was the first of them to be given the Exposure diagnosis, she'd
added further context: I retain full cognitive and physical function.
However, I can't sleep for more than three hours at a stretch, and
memories from retrievals early in my career have begun to surface at
increasing speed.
Eleri was the canary in the coal mine now, hers
the descent the others would watch in order to prepare for their own.
The part of her that understood she'd once felt emotion on a deep level
was glad that she could offer this gift to the people who had been her
friends since the day she'd walked into class as a six-year-old child
who'd been told she'd never again be going home.
Later, that same information might help others born far after the end of her own childhood.
"If
the PsyMed specialists and empaths know what to watch for," Bram had
said when talking about compiling the information on their descent into
Sensitivity, then Exposure, to pass on to Sophia, "they might actually
be able to head it off at the pass."
It'd be their second
contribution to saving the J Corps. Their first had been to ensure
Sophie became their leader-between the four of them, their network was
labyrinthine and they'd put all their power behind the woman who was now
their director.
That Sophie had a direct link to the Ruling
Coalition was important, but they'd have disregarded that if she hadn't
also had their trust. Sophie might work for Nikita Duncan, but she
remained a J to her core, her determination to protect her fellow Js an
elemental part of her nature.
A sense of movement in Eleri's peripheral vision.
Glancing
out the window of her vehicle, she glimpsed a large bird wing lazily
over the desert landscape, its upper feathers a deep gray with a bluish
tone. On the underside were bands of white interspersed with black. Dark
eyes, with feathers of a much darker hue under those eyes.
A
peregrine falcon, an extraordinary aerial hunter with acute vision, and
the majority type of falcon that made up the WindHaven clan. She'd
researched them as much as she could before heading toward the town that
had been linked to the predatory clan throughout known history-but the
falcons were as reticent as most other changelings, and all she had was
scraps.
This falcon kept easy pace with her as she passed the
sign that marked the town boundary: Welcome to Raintree! Where the
Canyons Are Vast and the Skies Endless. The background image was of a
lush forested area nestled against a towering rock face painted in the
colors of sunset.
The changeling winged away at that point-and
she knew it had been a changeling from the size. Changeling birds were
much larger than their natural counterparts-though not as much as they
should have been given their size in human form. She'd found endless
online threads talking about the mass differential in certain changeling
species-many had theories, but none answers.
LIAR! It was no mistake!
Strokes
of green began to color the landscape as she drove deeper into Raintree
and into the echoes of the past. This far out, she saw only the odd
sign of habitation. From her research, the town had natural access to a
tributary of the Colorado River that caused it to be somewhat of an
oasis in this arid region. She saw that firsthand when she came around
the corner . . . and into a sudden explosion of dark green.
Raintree didn't quite fit in this landscape.
It
was too fertile, too abundant. As if it had been plucked out of the
Pacific Northwest and dropped into this landscape of desert browns and
rust reds, an intruder that had decided to settle in for the long haul.
Shaking
off the sense of wrongness but making note of it because it might be a
sign of mental degradation, she lowered her speed. This seemed like the
kind of place where children might run across roads while neighbors
gossiped on corners.
Turned out she'd been a little too early in
her caution; she didn't see any sign of true civilization until at least
five minutes later. The houses that began to pop up at that point were
small and neat, with well-maintained front yards, some of which had a
number of desert rocks in them.
Greenery crawled over the rock, life defying the desert Eleri had just traversed.
But
the green was no challenge to the soaring rock faces striated with
orange and yellow, red and pink, that rose on either side of the town.
They rippled like water, the rough surface appearing smooth as glass
from this distance.
Raintree, she realized, was based inside a
canyon that leaned in to shadow the town from both sides; the sunlight
that reached Raintree would mostly be on either end of the day rather
than in the blistering middle. Add in its proximity to water, and no
wonder the town had such an unexpected microclimate.
Almost at a
standstill on the road now, she looked up to the looming canyon wall to
the left of the town and frowned. Either she was having vision issues or
someone was standing high up on the side of the rock face.
A rock climber on a ledge?
Her
vision wasn't sharp enough to make out details from so far out, but
then she saw a pair of wings sweep out over the person on the ledge and
sucked in a breath.
Falcons.
She understood now. They were
linked to Raintree, but it wasn't their home. That sat high above the
town. She should've realized that; why would winged changelings want to
live on the ground when they could live in a nest in the sky?
Liar! You fucking liar!
Her
hands tightened on the steering wheel, the renewed roar of the memory a
thunderous force . . . as if it had gained strength from the sight of
the lone falcon who stood so high above Raintree, his confidence
apparent in his stance even from this distance.
Eleri. That's pretty. My name is Adam.
Chapter 2
Winged
changelings, especially the raptors, are interesting in the most
fascinating way. While their clans follow a similar internal structure
to those of earthbound predatory packs like the wolves and bears, they
have a unique culture built on the freedom extended by their wings
