Page 42 of Primal Mirror

“I know you sense emotion.” Remi’s eyes glinted at her. “Cat’s out of the bag there.”

She exhaled, the decision easier now. “It’s why Ps-Psy kept their heads down during Silence,” she said. “And why there are so few of us. We were rare anyway, but while the Council didn’t bother to crush us as they did designation E—likely because we were too few in number to make a ripple in the Net—the quiet pressure to select for less ‘emotional’ abilities had an effect.”

“I did a bit of research after we first met,” Remi said, “and saw some pretty high salaries offered by universities and museums for psychometrics.”

“We’re prized in certain quarters now, but during the initial few decades of Silence we were considered one of the least desired of abilities. That generation took enough psychometric genes out of the pool that our numbers now are even smaller than they were prior to Silence. Small enough to command a premium at those facilities that need us.”

Remi stayed silent, a big jungle cat who looked outwardly lazy but who she was certain could move at lethal speed without warning.

“Our low numbers,” she added, “meant that even if we did breach Silence on a bad read, we didn’t have a big enough presence to contaminate the Net with emotion.” It had been a formless black back then, dotted with the cold and icy stars that were the minds of the Psy.

No empathic color, no desperate honeycomb to connect them to each other in an effort to stop the psychic network from crumbling. The latter terrified Auden, not for herself, but for her innocent baby, who would be born into a world with a PsyNet that was thick with holes and ragged with lost and broken pieces.

She felt sick when she stepped onto it these days, the thinness of the psychic fabric a stark warning.

“Makes sense,” Remi said in that easy way of speaking, as if he had all the time in the world. “Why waste energy on such a small percentage of the population, especially when I’m guessing most of you tried to stay away from emotional reads?”

Auden nodded, feeling an odd expansion in her chest. This was the first time she’d spoken openly about her ability to anyone in real life. To someone who knew her as Auden Scott and not just anonymous user A9.

It felt so good that she broke her private rules, told him more. “Back in the old world, before Silence, psychometrics worked regularly with search and rescue and even Enforcement. They used to help catch serial killers.

“In one famous case, the Ps-Psy found a live victim because the victim had thrown her driver’s license out the window of the car as it was traveling the highway, but she’d been reciting her abductor’s registration number in her head at the time. Over and over again. Until it imprinted on the license.”

Remi whistled. “Wow, that’s seriously good tracking.”

“It was also agonizing,” she whispered. “I’ve read a copy of the book the psychometric published.” It was passed around the forum like a holy relic, a forbidden thing from the time before Silence.

“The license was a clean item as imprints go, but Crispin Nicholas—the psychometric—later read the basement on the killer’s farm, the place where he tortured and murdered his victims. Crispin wrote that it felt like fingers shoving into his skull while other fingers forced his eyes open and made him watch, made him see everything that had gone on in that place.

“He couldn’t look away, couldn’t make the images stop, was frozen in place until a human colleague figured out something had gone horrifically wrong and punched him unconscious before physically carrying him out—with no access to a strong telepath who could go in and disrupt the read, it was the only way to break him out of the loop.”

Remi’s agreement was quiet, his voice deep and low. “Be like picking up the scents at a murder scene a couple of days old. The fetid scent of decay.”

“Yes, only a hundred times worse. Because scents fade after a short time when compared to imprints. And layered imprints, where the same action has occurred over and over and over, can be relentless.”

—warmth, happiness, pride—

She realized she was stroking the arm of her chair, bathing in an imprint that didn’t hurt but healed. How utterly lovely.

“The bad reads…they’re chaos, nightmare pieces.” Auden wanted so much for him to understand that she tried to think of a way to give better shape to the experience. “Like walking into a library to find all the books pulled off the shelves and thrown on the floor, only a few spines visible and all the pages ripped out and scattered out of order.”

She found herself tracing Remi’s profile with her gaze as he took the time to think over her words.

“That’s why you only pick up snatches, images, or pieces.”

It made her wonder all over again what she’d read on his comm device. “Yes.” But then she told him more, because her defenses were down and any other motivations aside, he did care in at least an impersonal way.

“We can pick up more coherent things—that’s what the academic psychometrics do, but it requires intense focus and energy. It’s too difficult with emotion-touched objects. The resonance is too strong, starts to overwhelm the psychometric.

“Crispin called it terminal velocity in his book, the point at which the psychometric isn’t able to turn back, get themselves out of the nightmare.”

Remi’s eyebrows drew together over his eyes. “Have you—”

“Only once—and I was so scared that I broke away before terminal velocity.” It had left her a trembling, sweat-soaked wreck regardless. “A mistake in childhood. An object picked up off the ground at my small private school that had been dropped by a teacher who should never have been in charge of children.”

Remi’s growl made her nape prickle.

“My father was…not a good man,” she said, speaking the words aloud for the first time. “But he did a good thing then. He believed me. And that teacher vanished.” Swallowing, she met his gaze. “Do you judge me for not caring about what happened to him?”

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