Page 17 of Storm Echo

Those hands once more, now sheathed in black gloves.

They flexed again, this time to pull a thin wire taut in between.

This one, he wasn’t kind. He was dangerous. A predator.

She should’ve been afraid. She wasn’t.

Now the image in front of her was of a small room with walls of palest green, a plant in the corner, and a desk set up by the window. On it lay a datapad that held equations from a child’s textbook.

Everything collapsed, highways of crystalline flowers exploding in her brain, their colors infinite. Beautiful. So beautiful. Her mind began to fade at the edges again, the flowers blurring, but this time, she knew the fading wasn’t death. It couldn’t be. Because when the cat released its claws and pounced back into the mind that was her own, it brought with it a shimmering necklace of crystalline lightning awash with colors beyond colors.

Wrapping that lightning around itself, her cat curled up inside her, ready to heal.

The lightning crackled a pure silver as it created a shield around her brain. She sighed as she fell into the dark. She knew he’d protect her. The man with death in his hands. He’d keep her safe.

Chapter 9

I’ve met someone, Farah. Someone wonderful.

—Soleil Bijoux Garcia to Farah Khan (5 February 2082)

EXHAUSTION HIT IVAN with the force of a tidal wave ten minutes after he left the site. And it wasn’t the bodily exhaustion of hard work; if he didn’t know better, he’d have said he’d maxed out his psychic power, was on the verge of a dangerous mental flatline. Except that made no sense—even the jolt he’d given Lei had used only the most minor percentage of his psychic reserves.

His state got so bad that he had to pull off the night-cloaked highway and intake three nutrient bars before he could function again. Even then, he knew he was unsafe to drive. He was as likely to crash the vehicle and kill himself as make it to the hospital.

Ivan Mercantdid notnap.

He didn’t today, either. This sleep was demanding and too deep, left him feeling leaden and drugged when he finally clawed his way out of it some five hours later, the world yet dark. He was starving, hungrier than he could remember being since he was a child.

He ate and drank so many nutrients in the ensuing ten minutes that he cleaned out his entire stock and had to stop at an automated convenience store to pick up more. It was as if he were a bottomless void. The food just vanished into him and it wasn’t until a half hour later that he felt in any way stable.

He’d already called the hospital to check on Lei. They couldn’t locate her. Too many wounded coming in, he was told. Too much confusion. No matter. He’d find her when he got there.

He arrived twenty minutes later, walked straight into the patient area. It was amazing, the places you could get into if you simply acted like you belonged. No one asked him what he was doing there, and he was able to check every single room, put his eyes on every single patient.

He’d left his gift in the vehicle, knowing Lei couldn’t use it yet.

It was a dress he’d purchased after he spotted a clothing outlet in the small automated mall that housed the convenience store. Automations in that vein had never quite taken off as predicted—even in majority-Psy areas, which was interesting in itself—but they worked in lonely places like this, with passing motorists glad for a place to find essentials no matter the time of day or night.

The clothing store’s stock had been limited, but he’d managed to find an ankle-length dress in a bright lemon yellow that seemed as if it would speak to Lei’s sense of color and style. She was always bright, Lei. Sunshine in human form. He’d tried to replace her denim jacket, too, but the store didn’t have that in stock, nor anything else that might suffice, so he’d made a note to get that later.

As he went to check out, the automated service station had offered him a list of other suggested purchases, and he’d indicated yes to all of them. It had then presented him with a small box that was labeled as containing underwear, a toothbrush and toothpaste, a generic skin cream, and a small makeup palette for “midrange” skin tones. He’d figured she might be able to use the eye powder.

Lei liked putting sparkle on her eyelids.

Some might see his gift as a bribe, a way to nudge his way back into her life. It wasn’t. He’d do anything for her to choose him; to gain her attention by stealth, by taking advantage of her when she was hurt and defenseless … no, it would break him. He’d always know that it was all false.

Too soon. Too fast. But it had happened. He’d bonded to her with the same obsessive focus that had kept him functional and alive this long.

Now he had to learn to live without her.

As for the gift, Ivan simply valued the power of being clean and having clothes of your own. Those were the first things Grandmother had given him after she brought him home; he could still remember standing in front of the mirror after a bath, touching his hand carefully to the brand-new shirt that no one else had ever before worn—and that Grandmother had told him no one could take from him.

His, it was just his.

Even if Lei didn’t like the dress, it would give her some non-institutional clothing into which to change. But though he went through the entire multi-level hospital room by room, patient by patient, he couldn’t find her. There was no woman with her long limbs and specific pattern of injuries.

“We’ve been transferring a lot of patients,” a harried human nurse told him when he queried her, deep grooves marking the ebony skin of her face. The medical net she wore over the tight curls of her hair told him she must’ve just come out of a surgery. “Massive number of injured due to recent events.”

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