Page 5 of Silver Elite

Hopefully.

There’s always the risk he’ll become so besotted, he’ll find a way to swap assignments with another soldier and get assigned to my ward. But I don’t think I’mthatgood in bed.

“What’s your ID?”

I reluctantly provide it, watching as he enters the digits into his comm. A moment later, the sleek device in my pocket chimes softly.

He flashes a dimpled smile. “That was me.”

I pull it out and save his ID. I detest this thing. We’re required to carry it at all times, but I only ever pay attention to my comm when a Company dispatch comes in. The rest of the time, I maintain obligatory correspondence with Uncle Jim or my friends. Nothing significant, of course; we have other means of communication for the real stuff. No Mod in their right mind would use a Company device to communicate, not when every word spoken or typed is recorded, a roomful of Intelligence agents monitoring every exchange. Same goes for the Nexus, our online network. We’d be fools to rely on either method to speak openly.

“I’ll walk you out,” he says.

I hear the din of voices beyond the inn doors. The fast tempo of the band, playing a song I don’t recognize. I assume it’s on the list of Company-approved melodies from the Communication Board. All media needs to be run by them before it’s released to the citizenry.

We step out into the courtyard, where the breeze is as balmy as it was before we ducked inside the inn. The aroma of grilled meat and buttered corn on the cob permeates the night air. The village square is all lit up tonight. Crowded and noisy, frequent bursts of laughter rising above the music.

Unease washes over me at the dozen soldiers milling about. Liberty Day is the one time of year when many of them are able to return to their wards and see family and friends. Most of them seem harmless, but there are too many blue uniforms here tonight for my comfort.

I wish they’d go back to the city and leave us the hellfuck alone. Nobody here enjoys faking smiles and playing nice. Even Primes detest the heavy-handedness of the General, the way he controls every aspect of our lives. Or at least most of them hate it. There are certainly die-hard loyalists willing to betray their own mothers for a brisk nod of approval from that man or his sycophants. Some Prime jerk in my own ward literally turned his mother in when hediscovered she was Modified. Nearly two decades of successfully hiding her gifts from him and thenoneslipup, one careless moment of mind reading without pulling her sleeves down, and her only son was reporting her. Last I heard, he’d been promoted to run his own unit in the Command.

Although I suppose that isn’t as bad as Mods who turn against their own, the sympathizers who serve Redden in Sanctum Point, our capital city. Those traitors live cushy lives out there. Loyalty to the General certainly pays.

The joyous shrieks of children capture my attention. I turn toward the noise and smile. Several hundred yards away in a grassy clearing, there’s a game of Chase happening. Village children scream and laugh as the chaser, a skinny girl with bright-red hair, races around trying to tag someone.

“Wren!” a happy voice calls out.

Tana Archer comes ambling over to us. Eyes bright, cheeks flushed. She’s clearly been sampling her own supply. Tana’s father, Griff, runs the only drinking establishment in the square.

“I was wondering where you’d disappeared to.” With a knowing look, she glances between me and the soldier. Even as she grins at the two of us, I feel her trying to link with me.

All telepaths have their own unique signature. When I was a kid, my uncle described it as your essence, a surge of energy exclusive to you. It’s almost impossible to explain unless you feel it yourself, but after an initial connection’s been formed, you automatically recognize the other person’s energy when they ask to link.

“Someone’s been busy,”Tana silently teases.

Her voice in my head always holds a lower pitch than her speaking tone. I asked my uncle about that once, why people’s telepathic voices sound so different from their audible ones. “Have you ever listened to yourself on a recording and thought,I don’t sound like that?” was his response. “That’s because to your own ears, you always sound different. When we speak telepathically, I hear your voice the wayyouhear it. When you speak out loud, I hear your voice the wayIhear it.” It made a strange sort of sense when he explained it like that.

“You’ve gotta stop screwing the soldiers, babe.”

“Hey, it’s the only thing they’re good for,”I tell Tana, and she turns her head to smother a laugh.

I know her veins are rippling beneath her long sleeves, hidden from nosy eyes. With her dark skin, those veins tend to look even brighter when they’re glowing compared with lighter-skinned Mods.

Me, I’m in a tank top and don’t need to worry. Just another thing I used to hassle my uncle about, because it was confusing to see the luminous surge of silver beneath the skin of his arms each time we used telepathy. Why didmyveins remain normal? I was an annoying child, always peppering him with questions. Back then, he didn’t have a good answer. He simply shrugged and said, “It’s been more than a century and there’s still so much nobody understands about people like us.”

That’s the tricky thing about the Modified—there’s no tried-and-true formula with us. Yes, the majority are the very definition of silverbloods, the veins in our arms glowing when we’re using our powers. A rare few, like me, don’t fit that mold. Whatever the reason for the anomaly, I can’t deny it makes me…well, not to be cocky, but…

Invaluable.

A Mod who can wield her powers without transmitting her actions to her enemies is a major asset for the Uprising.

When the network first tried to recruit me, however, my uncle said hell no. He was adamant.Wren doesn’t put her life at risk. Period.Once I was a teenager, it became harder for him to stop me. I’m stubborn. I love Uncle Jim to death, but I’m my own person.

We started running missions when I was sixteen. Small supply runs. Drop-offs. Using our ranch to hide Mods who were smuggled out of the city or the mines. It always boils my blood how many of us are still held prisoner in the labor camps scattered throughout the wards.

“You’re not leaving, are you?” Tana says. “I’ve barely seen you tonight. You can’t go!”

My soldier smiles. “That’s what I keep telling her.”

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