Page 29 of Storm Echo

Soleil’s fingers clenched on the cool red of the energy bar she hadn’t opened, her eyes on the vista in front of her. Defeat was a hammer coming down on her shoulders. There was no way she could sneak out of this street, far less sneak up on Lucas Hunter.

Paramedics swarmed the area, as did civilians … and many, many members of DarkRiver.

“Oh, Leilei,” Farah murmured from beside her. “You know you were never going to spill his blood. You heal. You don’t murder.”

It was my duty as the sole survivor, she wanted to say, wanted to argue.There’s no one else left to take vengeance, get answers.But she stayed silent—talking to invisible people was something she usually saved for the third date.

Farah laughed—because that was just her kind of humor.

Stifling a strangled laugh-cry, Soleil swallowed the anguish tearing her apart and forced herself to rip open the wrapper of the energy bar. Forced herself not to think about her best friend’s enormous laugh, or of how she’d never again look out from her aerie to see Farah, small and smart and fast, running over to share a piece of wicked gossip.

“Staring at it won’t get energy into your body,” Ivan said.

Soleil’s shoulders stiffened. “Neither will stuffing it someplace small and sunless in yours, but I’d sure feel good after.”

Ivan turned to look at her, his gaze unblinking.

Her cat, meanwhile, was cackling. The human side of Soleil was by turns astonished and aghast. She did not go around saying that kind of thing—though shehadalways had a quick-fire temper when someone pushed her buttons. But … that temper had gone into deep freeze the day her world fell.

Except, it appeared, for this stranger who’d saved her life.

She probably should have apologized. In no mood to do so, though she knew he’d said nothing that deserved such a scathing response, she took a giant bite of the energy bar, chewed.

Ivan returned to his own bar, his focus on getting it down methodical. She tried not to watch him out of the corner of her eye, but it was impossible. She was aware of his every slight move—from the way his eyes tracked their environment, to the way the strong muscles of his throat moved as he swallowed.

Flickers of stars in her mind, streamers of silver that made her cat pounce.

Whatever he’d done that day on the field, it had linked them in some way. He was difficult to read, but instinct—and common sense—told her he hadn’t done it on purpose. What reason would a powerful Psy have to attach himself to a broken changeling?

No matter how she looked at it, she couldn’t find a rational answer to that question.

And she realized she was staring at him again, as if he was her personal North Star. His cheekbones were knife blades against the cool white of his skin, his cheeks hollow. His eyes glittered. It would take more than a few nutrient bars to make up for the steep physical price he’d paid to do whatever it was that he’d done.

“How did you keep so many people alive?” she asked.

“Grabbed and threw them back into a stable part of the PsyNet, away from the part that was collapsing under us.”

A simple but precise explanation. A Psy on a news show had once described the PsyNet as an endless black sea filled with stars. Today, the stars had screamed as they fell into an abyss.

It was a horrifying image.

He turned to pin her with that icy gaze that made her insane cat want to lick him. “You never told me your name.”

“Soleil Bijoux Garcia,” she said, because the time for stealth tactics was well and truly over. “My friends call me Leilei.” She pointed at him. “You can call me Soleil.” Whatever this was, it wasn’t friendship.

“Soleil Bijoux,” Ivan said, as if testing out the name. “Treasure of the sun?”

A stab inside her, her mother’s accented voice singing her a lullaby.

“I’ll call you Lei,” he said.

Her mouth fell open. “You willnot. Nobody calls me Lei.” But she frowned, angled her head, almost able to hear the faint echo of a voice that had called her exactly that. It stayed frustratingly out of reach, a phantom memory she couldn’t capture, part of the monthlong black gap in her mind that she hadn’t been able to fill.

If Melati hadn’t told her that Soleil had been visiting just before the massacre, Soleil would’ve never known. But though her friend—a friend she’d made when she was nine and somehow managed to nurture to adulthood—had shown her photographs from that visit to Melati’s Texas town, Soleil’s brain stubbornly refused to remember.

At times, Soleil could swear that her mind didn’twantto remember, as if what had happened during that time would hurt her. Yet that made no sense. Melati had said they’d had a fun time together, though she hadn’t been able to fill in the hours they’d spent apart while Melati put in a little time on her small business.

Was it Soleil’s childhood friend who’d shortened her nickname?

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