A predictable response. This coward might wish to reinstate Silence, but his was a desire driven by a craven fear of the unknown.
“I’m capable of torturing you until you don’t have a single unbroken bone left from here”—he indicated the male’s breastbone—“to here.” He pointed to the man’s toes. “You’d resemble a piece of meat pounded with a mallet by the time I was done.”
The threat was the absolute truth. He’d taken responsibility for Ivy’s safety, and there was nothing he wouldn’t do in pursuit of that goal. “I’m a Tk, can make you feel each individual break without lifting a hand.”
He snapped the tiniest bone of the man’s smallest finger as an illustration. Waiting for the screams to die down to snuffling sobs, Vasic said, “I can use the same tiny breaks to dismantle your torso, breaking your ribs into splinters, then cracking open your breastplate.
“Fracturing your collarbone into inch-long segments would take considerable time and skill, but I have both.” He lowered his voice so the prisoner had to strain to hear. “I’m also patient. By the time I reach your toes, your fingers will have healed, and I can start the whole process all over again. You don’t want me to stay in this room.”
The man’s entire body began to shake.
“Answer my questions,” Vasic continued in the same even tone he’d used throughout, “and I’ll leave.”
Ten minutes later, the prisoner had given them everything he knew. It wasn’t much. His partner knew even less, but the pieces led to a single answer: the attack had been orchestrated by one of the few remaining Pure Psy lieutenants. Stupid. If Vasic had been in the lieutenant’s position, he’d have gone under and stayed there until he had the opportunity to strike at the heart of the new regime.
“I’ll update Krychek,” Aden told Vasic after they left the cells for the squad’s common area, “and undertake the hunt for the lieutenant.”
Vasic had no argument with that, the cleanup of Pure Psy far less important than protecting the Es. “What will you do with the two males?”
Aden was quiet for a long time, his eyes on the greenery beyond the glass, the ferns thick and curling on the lower part of the window. “Part of the problem with the Council was that everything was done in the shadows, ‘justice’ meted out on an arbitrary basis. We need to return to an open system, where men like this can be tried and punished according to our laws.”
“The Net’s not ready for that yet.”
“No.” Aden clasped his hands behind his back. “But it will be one day. Until then, I’ll dump them in a maximum security prison, complete with a paper trail that’ll guarantee they stay there for a long time.”
“Their abilities?”
“It’s not advertised, but any Psy who goes into the prison system has his or her abilities restrained by a self-sustaining leash. PsyNet access is restricted to a controlled area. I’ll organize it.”
Vasic thought of Aden’s words about justice as he returned to the snow-covered orchard and to Ivy. The other Arrow was right in one sense, but the violence of the abilities possessed by their race meant there would always be some monsters so horrific they needed to be hunted down and executed, terrors no justice system could handle. When that time came, it was an Arrow who’d do the hunting, darkness pitted against darkness.
Scanning the area around Ivy’s cabin in the muted morning light, he crossed over to the rucked-up snow beside it. Her small pet spotted him first, barking out a sharp warning from where he stood on guard in the back doorway. Ivy appeared a second later, a broom in hand and her curls held back by a purple and white scarf. “I knew it was you,” she said with a slight smile. “You’ve now been downgraded from ‘deadly threat’ to ‘irritation that won’t go away’ in Rabbit’s bark vocabulary.”
He thought perhaps there was a correct way to reply to that statement, to the wary softness of her, but he didn’t have that knowledge. “Why are you on your own?” He’d left only because he’d seen her parents and others on the way, armed and ready to protect.
“I’m not.” A quick glance over her shoulder before she lowered her voice to a whisper. “My mother, however, hasn’t yet realized you’re here. Do you want to meet her?”
“If you believe it’ll assist her in accepting the parameters of your proposed contract.”
“Probably not.” A slight wince, her expression so open he knew she wouldn’t have been able to fake Silence in the outside world. “She’ll probably take one look at you and pull out a gun.”
“If I’d meant to kill you,” he pointed out, “you’d be long dead, your body disposed of in a crematorium incinerator.”
Blinking, Ivy stared at him with those unusual eyes that made him feel stripped to the bone. “Maybe it’s better if you don’t meet my mother.”
“I disagree.” A taller woman, her body rangy, appeared in view a second after that pronouncement. “At least,” she added, “he’s honest.”
Handing her own broom to an Ivy who was looking increasingly doubtful about the situation, the woman Vasic identified as Gwen Jane from Ivy’s biographical data, said, “Your father’s about a minute away with the materials to repair the window and doors.” She stepped out to Vasic. “Let’s take a walk.”
The next ten minutes were . . . interesting. In the twenty-seven years since he’d been drafted into the squad, Vasic had experienced many things, but never had he found himself being interrogated by a mother concerned for her child. Gwen Jane might appear Silent on the surface, he thought, but in her ferocious protectiveness, he glimpsed the truth—and while he had no experience of maternal love, he understood it to be a formidable force.
“I’ll make certain she comes to no harm,” he told her. “Krychek’s priority might be the Net as a whole, but mine is the safety of the empaths, with Ivy my particular assignment.”
An intent look. “How can you promise that when you work for Krychek?”
“A common misapprehension.” One the squad permitted because it gave the Arrows freedom to stay below the radar. “We choose to side with him because his current stance benefits the PsyNet and the populace. Should that change, he knows not to expect our support.”
“Not tame dogs but wild wolves who’ve decided he’s an ally for the moment?”
“Except we aren’t wild.” To be an Arrow was to live a tightly regimented life. It wasn’t a choice but a necessity. Because there was always a reason an Arrow was an Arrow, and each and every one of those reasons was deadly.
“There are different kinds of wildness,” Gwen said as they came within sight of the cabin once again.
He could see supplies for the window repair laid out against the outside wall—wood for the new frame, the old one having been cracked by the barrage of bullets, as well as a sheet of glass designed to click in. From the sounds echoing over the sunlit snow, Ivy and her father were working on the front door. It only took him a short time to take care of the window, his telekinesis at 7.9 on the Gradient. He didn’t have to pound in nails, simply push with his mind; they went through the wood as if it was butter.
The skill required was of subtlety. Push too hard and the nail would exit out the other side. Working with a thick plank and hundreds of nails had been one of his easier and more fun exercises as a child—back when he’d lived with his “father.” The same man had later dropped him off at an Arrow training facility and never looked back.
Not even once.
Vasic knew because the scared four-year-old he’d been had stood in the entryway of the training facility and watched his father’s vehicle getting smaller and smaller and smaller. According to his memories, he’d cried, but he could no longer access the emotion that had led to the response.
“Well,” Gwen murmured, this woman who’d proven willing to go toe-to-toe with an Arrow to protect her child, “that’s useful.”
“Yes.” People had found Vasic useful his entire life, but it didn’t usually have to do with anything as harmless or as oddly satisfying as fixing a window. “I assume from your earlier questions that Ivy has decided to accept the contract.”