Page 61 of Storm Echo

A refrain he’d heard from more than one mouth. They’d turned to Jax because they were scared of who they were outside the Protocol.

“I’m nothing and no one, a null value,” one youth had whispered to him, as if imparting a great truth. “Just a drone. No personality. No self.”

Caged mice who no longer knew how to live in the wild, she and others like her sought only to numb the world, forget their pain—because there were plenty of psychic scars beneath the drugged-out stares, plenty of stories of traumatized children and crushed souls.

“The sadness here,” Arwen said, his eyes pools of silvery darkness, “it hangs like a cloud.”

Though Ivan had never been a toucher, he’d made an exception for Arwen after realizing how much physical contact meant to his cousin. Arwen was too generous, too much the empath, to ask for anything that would make another person uncomfortable, but Ivan had eyes and a brain, had figured it out.

It turned out that he didn’t mind touch if it was about taking care of another person. Except for Soleil. With her, for her, he’d been a different man—for a fragment of a moment in time.

I don’t need my memories to tell me that I would’ve never just walked away from you. You’re too important to me, Ivan Mercant.

It didn’t matter how much he wanted to believe Soleil’s statement, didn’t even matter if her words were the purest truth. He’d been another Ivan then, had touched the shooting star of her and believed he had a chance at some kind of normality.

He’d been wrong.

Chapter 30

I’m getting reports from hospital empaths that they haven’t been able to successfully communicate with the still-conscious Psy who appear to be on the island. All attempts—including by my most senior people—have failed.

Of significant concern is that a number have slid from incoherence to catatonia, while those who fell into comas during the incident remain in that state, their brain waves erratic.

My Es are picking up constant pulses of panic and terror, and the medical teams are worried about the patients’ hearts. They’re beating at a rate that’s not sustainable.

—Message from Ivy Jane Zen, president of the Empathic Collective,

to fellow members of the Ruling Coalition

THE COLD REALITY of his future a vise around his mind, Ivan put his hand on Arwen’s shoulder, squeezed.

Reaching up, Arwen touched his fingers to Ivan’s in a silent thank-you. Then he took a quiet breath and went to take a seat next to a young woman with a vacant stare. Sophisticated haircut, cashmere sweater, and shoes handmade by an Italian cobbler—yet Arwen didn’t hesitate so much as a second before he came down on the dirty lawn chair.

Because Arwen was an E first. The rest was pretty window dressing.

Soleil would like him. And Arwen would like her.

He wanted to tell Arwen about her, even though he had no right to her. If she’d marked him as the cats and Arwen both claimed, then he had to convince her to remove that mark. Hewould notdrag her into the cage with him.

And though the spider was the ugliest of his scars, the rest of him wasn’t exactly pretty. There was a reason he walked to the halfway house almost every night. As a reminder—of what he could’ve been, what he couldstillbecome.

Even now, a hidden part of him understood why these people took the drug. He’d experienced the lying beauty of it far too young, his mind opening up like a flower in bloom. A crystalline flower with a thousand petals, a thousand possibilities of life and existence.

He hadn’t known what was happening. He’d been a child, a toddler really. He shouldn’t even have those memories, but perhaps it was a side effect of the drug, the impossibility of forgetting. He’d wandered the crystalline pathways for hours, perhaps days. All he knew was that he’d woken on the floor of their grungy motel, thirsty and hungry and with the dirty carpet’s rough weave an imprint on his cheek.

He hadn’t cried. He’d already learned not to cry. His mother wouldn’t hear him, and if one of her friends was in the room and conscious, it might result in a slap to the face and an order for him to shut up.

Not all his mother’s friends took the “special medicine” she’d given him after he asked her for food. The medicine ones weren’t so bad—they mostly just sat there with strange smiles on their faces, their eyes holes with nothing behind them. He didn’t like the dead eyes, but those friends were better than the ones who were wide awake and full of meanness.

That day, however, he’d seen he was alone with his mother—but he still hadn’t cried. Instead, he’d hungered for the crystalline flower, for the pretty and warm place without boundaries—unlike his real world, in which he was either trapped inside small filthy rooms or huddled under a blanket on a street corner, with a woman who had eyes of dazzling blue and hair of black.

“My baby boy,” she’d say as they shivered under the blanket. “Tomorrow will be different, just you wait. I have a line on a great job.” Red veins in her eyes, trembling hands. “We’ll buy you all the eats you want, get you a nice fluffy bed. It’ll be like a dream.”

Swallowing hard, he thrust his hands into his pockets and told himself to call Arwen back, turn around. But he didn’t. Because that was part of the test. To stand here in a place where he knew he could buy the drug with a single nod, a single moment of eye contact, andnotdo it.

The doctor who’d watched over him since Grandmother brought him home had told him to stop baiting himself this way, but Ivan had no intention of doing that. He understood what Dr. Raul didn’t—Jax seduced with counterfeit beauty, forged happiness. Each time he stood in a place like this, with hollow-eyed people stripped of pride and sense of self, he understood the truth: that Jax was a leash, same as Silence.

There was no freedom or beauty in the crystalline flower.

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