Shield of Winter Read online

  Right this instant, Carter held his weapon at his side, his elbows and the front of his clothing wet, dirty. He must've been flat on the ground with a bead on Vasic the entire time, this man who had always been there for her, though she'd been meant to be nothing more than the completion of a simple fertilization contract.

  The love and respect she felt for her parents was a hugeness in her heart she could never properly explain. "The settlement can come out of lockdown," she said, voice husky, and led them toward the cabin that had become her own the day she took responsibility for the fruit orchard that supplied the families who lived here, the majority of their crops far more prosaic grains.

  Rabbit padded along in front, and it was such a familiar sight that the knots in her stomach began to unravel a fraction. "The Arrow--Vasic--came specifically for me."

  "They don't send Arrows after fractured Psy," her father said, always the more phlegmatic of her parents, despite the fact her mother appeared the more practical at first glance. "Especially Gradient 3.2 telepaths."

  "No." Ivy pushed through the door to her home. "I'll get you a blanket, Father. You really shouldn't stay in those wet clothes."

  "I'm fine." He took off his jacket to reveal that his heavy work shirt was dry.

  Seeing that he'd made up his mind, but aware his pants remained wet, she turned up the heat, then handed him the letter wrinkled from her grip. "According to Vasic"--she tugged off her gloves to put them on the counter, shrugged off her jacket--"I'm not a telepath. Or rather, that's not my main designation."

  Her parents sat down at her small kitchen table and read the letter together.

  It was her mother who broke the silence. "Well, it makes sense." Gwen stared down at the floor, her eyes crinkled at the corners and her arms wrapped around herself. "When you were a fetus," she murmured, "I had a serious problem maintaining Silence. The obstetrician sent me to a specialized M-Psy who did a complete workup, then told me it was simply an unusually severe but known side effect of pregnancy." Her shoulders grew stiff. "He must've known, kept me in the dark."

  "I've never heard of an E designation. How can we be certain it's as the Arrow says?" her father said with his usual practicality.

  Ivy had asked the same question. "Vasic told me to contact Sascha Duncan for confirmation." Former Councilor Nikita Duncan's daughter was famous for her defection to a changeling leopard pack . . . and for being a cardinal derided as weak and flawed for most of her lifetime.

  The parallel was a difficult one to avoid. As was the dangerous hope that came with it. "I don't think she'd have any reason to lie, do you?"

  Gwen nodded, but it was Carter who spoke, his words unexpected. "When your mother and I made the decision to take you in for reconditioning, we thought we were helping you."

  "Father, I know," Ivy began, distressed he'd think otherwise.

  "Ivy, let me speak." When she nodded, biting back her words, he said, "I don't judge us for making that decision. It was all we knew to do to help our child. You were in excruciating pain, and had we done nothing, you would've been forcibly rehabilitated."

  Ivy couldn't keep quiet any longer. "I know," she whispered again. "I know."

  But her father hadn't finished. "It wasn't until afterward that we realized we'd made a terrible error and that the price might well be our Ivy."

  Ivy's eyes burned at the love embodied in those uninflected words.

  "You were a ghost." Gwen stared off into the distance.

  Rabbit immediately scampered over to stand with his paws on the tops of Gwen's scuffed boots, whining in his throat until she bent to pet him.

  "The Ivy we'd nurtured from birth seemed erased"--Gwen's hand clenched on Rabbit's coat--"and while Carter might not judge us for the decision we made, I'll never forgive myself for handing my child over to be violated."

  Ivy knelt in front of her mother. "I wanted to go," she reminded them both. "I thought it would help, too, and it did in one way. I don't think I'd be alive now without the reconditioning, no matter how bad it turned out to be." Her mind had literally been crushing itself.

  "Our daughter is correct." Carter shifted to face Gwen, holding her gaze with his own until Gwen gave a slight nod.

  Ivy glanced away, feeling as if she'd intruded on a private moment. She didn't know what her parents' relationship was beyond a joint commitment to her, but Carter was the only one who had the ability to get Gwen to change her mind. It made Ivy hope that they'd discovered a fragment of joy in the darkness.

  "The reason I brought up that day," her father said into the silence, his skin pulled taut over solid bones, "is that whatever was done to you during the reconditioning brutally harmed an integral part of you." He pushed back sandy hair glinting with more strands of silver than there should be on a man his age.

  Ivy's reconditioning had marked them all.

  "This may be your opportunity to undo that harm," he said, "to find out who you're capable of being without the cage of Silence."

  "But the decision must be yours." Gwen's voice was unflinching, her gaze steady. "If you need to run, get away from the Arrow, we're with you."

  Ivy had a feeling there was no way to run from Vasic. Dark and dangerous and with an ice to him that made her want to brush her fingertips over the sharp edges of his cheekbones, see if he was cold to the touch, he was a hunter no one could escape . . . but Ivy had had enough of being prey.

  "No more running," she said to her parents, her stomach tight and a strange exhilaration in her blood. "It's time I made my stand." Even if it meant going up against an Arrow with eyes of winter frost.

  *

  HAVING informed Aden of his decision to accept responsibility for the protection detail on the empaths, Vasic teleported that night to a man who had never been an Arrow but was a member of the squad in ways an outsider would never understand.

  Those like Vasic were taught how to snap necks or garrote in shadowy quiet, how to build covert bombs and effect subtle sabotage as needed. They weren't taught how to set up businesses or invest money. The irony was that while Arrows were paid commensurate to their lethal skills and the danger so often inherent in their ops, over the past century, most had died without spending any but a tiny fraction of it.

  Since Arrows were legally expunged from their family groups upon entry into the squad, that money had gone directly into an Arrow fund set up by Zaid Adelaja. The first Arrow had fought to make certain the Council would never have any right to a lost Arrow's assets. It was Aden who'd realized a decade ago that the processes were now so automated that everyone in power had forgotten about the fund in the interim.

  It meant the squad had millions upon millions to work with as they sought to save those of their own destined for cold, quiet executions because the Arrows in question were too broken to any longer be the perfect killing machines. But first, they'd needed someone who understood money, who could help them create a solid financial network of properties and investments that no one could trace back to the squad. Most of all, it had to be someone who could be trusted with the lives of men and women who had earned their peace.

  Now, the elderly man looked up from the book he had open on his blanket-covered lap as he sat on the partially glassed-in deck of his home beside Lake Tahoe. The small reading light he'd clipped to the arm of his chair bathed the pages in a warm yellow light, the world beyond draped in night. "Vasic," he said, and though there was no smile, no hint of emotion, the word held welcome.

  Going down on one knee on the wood of the deck, Vasic bowed his head. "Hello, Grandfather." Many people called Zie Zen "Grandfather," using it as an honorific, for in his lifetime, he'd helped an unknown number of people across the world. However, for Vasic it was a biological truth--one generation removed.

  Zie Zen was not his grandfather, but his great-grandfather.

  No one could've guessed at the relationship from their physical appearance, a fact the two of them had used to their advantage. Zie Zen's looks inclined strongly toward h
is Chinese father, his eyes dark brown and slanted, his bone structure sharp, elegant. By the time the genes reached Vasic, the genetic drift had come to full fruition.

  He had the gray eyes of his great-grandmother, his features echoing his own mother's half-Croatian heritage. His six-feet-four-inch height, muscular build, even the softer texture of his black hair, was courtesy of the Caucasian American male who had provided sperm for his conception. That was where the relationship began and ended.

  None of it mattered. Regardless of the fact his legal last name was Duvnjak rather than Zen, Vasic acknowledged only one being on the planet as family, and it was the man who now touched his hand to Vasic's shoulder in a silent request that he rise. Getting up, he took a seat on the edge of the deck that overlooked the vast quiet of the lake, his feet on the winter-hard and snowy ground, his forearms braced on his thighs, the rippling dark water his focus.

  Zie Zen understood the value of quiet, of peace, and he said nothing, turning a page in a rasping whisper of sound that merged seamlessly into the night. This land, Vasic thought, kissed the edge of DarkRiver territory. It was possible a leopard changeling, its lashes lowered to conceal the night-glow brilliance of its eyes, watched him from the edge of the lake even now. Vasic couldn't imagine what it must be like to be a being of two forms, to have such primal wildness within. The "half-feral child" he'd once been, as noted in his training log, was long gone.

  "We are to wake the empaths," he said to Zie Zen much later, the moon high over the lake, a spotlight on a world draped in pure white.

  "Ah." The sound of skin rustling against paper. "I had wondered if that might be the next step."

  Vasic told the older man everything he knew of the project. Aden would've done the same had he been here--Zie Zen had earned their loyalty long ago, while Kaleb Krychek remained an unknown. Then Vasic waited for his great-grandfather to speak, knowing the other man had far more knowledge inside him than most; at a sharp hundred and twenty, Zie Zen was one of the rare few individuals in the Net who had been old enough at the dawn of Silence to remember the past with adult clarity.

  "I was eight years old when the debate first began." It was a murmur as soft as the night. "A child, uncaring of the worries of my elders, happy in my play." Coughing into his hand, he cleared his throat. "We played then, as freely as the changelings and the humans."

  To Vasic, the idea was so wholly foreign that it took him several seconds to process it.

  "The decision was made to embrace the Protocol the day I turned eighteen. My parents' generation and those just a few years older than me . . . they were too old to adapt to Silence, though they tried. Most died at obscenely young ages."

  "I didn't know that." Vasic had, however, often wondered why the Net didn't have more elders like Zie Zen, the ones from before Silence.

  "Some say the men and women of this lost generation were murdered for being too disruptive to the new regime, but I think the truth is much more simple. They died because their hearts were broken." Zie Zen's breathing was harsh, choppy, but nothing to comment on, given his age.

  "Those long-ago Psy had to learn to live in a world where the children for whom they'd embraced an emotionless existence looked at mother and father both with cold eyes, and where their grandchildren were creatures they could not understand." Another cough, paper rustling again. "It was too alien an environment, one that stole the breath from the lungs of those who should've been my peers in this twilight."

  Vasic watched the water ripple in to shore, the moon whispering over each silken undulation, and he listened.

  "The empaths . . . the empaths died the fastest." A long silence pierced with the echoes of a past that to Vasic may as well have been a fever dream, and yet that Zie Zen had lived. "A small number did defect with those we now call the Forgotten, but the vast majority stayed, believing they could help their people. Instead, Silence eventually crushed the life out of the Es, until many simply didn't wake up one morning."

  Vasic didn't feel, but that didn't mean he couldn't comprehend the nuances in another's voice. That skill was part of what made him such a good assassin, such a good soldier. "You speak from experience, Grandfather?"

  Chapter 6

  Dear Z2,

  Yes I am mad at you, thank you very much. I can't believe you didn't wake me. I'm fine. Don't worry.

  xoxo,

  Sunny

  p.s. Love you (still mad though).

  p.p.s. I know we're not supposed to acknowledge emotions now, so burn this after you read it.

  HIS GREAT-GRANDFATHER DIDN'T immediately answer Vasic's question, the quiet broken only by the faraway echo of a wolf's howl, as if a SnowDancer ran tonight in the territory of its leopard allies. If Krychek managed to obtain the approval of the two packs, Vasic knew he'd hear wolf song at far closer range.

  "My growing up years," Zie Zen said long after the howl had faded, "were consumed with the discussion on Silence. You cannot imagine the world as it was then, the chaos and terror of it, our race on the brink of cannibalizing itself. We debated the Protocol at school, at the dinner table, in every corner of the PsyNet, on television, in newspapers . . .

  "Trillions of words were spoken, written, thought, until Silence was the defining memory of youth for many of my generation. But . . . it is not mine." A rasping breath. "My youth can be encompassed in a single word: Sunny." This quiet was deeper, heavier, not to be interrupted. "Her legal name was Samantha, but no one called her that. She was my neighbor, and my friend, and when we were sixteen, she became my lover."

  Vasic turned at last, bracing his back against one of the posts that bracketed the steps to his left. "A true lover?" he asked, looking into his grandfather's dark eyes. "Skin contact?" Rather than the financial and scientific dance that was the current mating ritual of his race, genetic and psychic profiles compared before an egg was fertilized at the point of a needle.

  Zie Zen's expression was distant, his mind clearly in that strange long-ago world. "Yes, skin to skin." He touched his fingers to his jaw in an action Vasic had never previously seen him make, before dropping that hand back on the open pages of his book.

  "I wanted to defect at the dawn of Silence," he said, and it was an unexpected admission, "but Sunny was an E, a powerful one. She wouldn't leave, said there was so much stress and panic in the Net that it would be the same as a doctor walking out of an ER bursting at the seams with trauma victims. So we stayed."

  Vasic didn't know too much about the beginnings of Silence, but he did know that established couples hadn't been forcibly separated--instead each couple had been directed to live a chaste, distant life in order to set the correct example for any offspring. That left only one reason why Zie Zen had not had a child with his Sunny, Vasic's genetic history including no one named Samantha. "When did she die?"

  "Five years after the inception of the Protocol," was the stark answer. "Only twenty-three and worn-out, worn-down. So many needed the help of an E after Silence, hundreds of thousands in agony because they had to sever ties of love and replace them with everything that was frigidly rational. Worse was the unrelenting pressure on the Es to stop being."

  A quiet shake of Zie Zen's head, but his hand clamped down so hard on the arm of his chair that Vasic could count his great-grandfather's bones. "It would be akin to my asking you to stop breathing, for empaths then weren't the smothered, broken shells of today. Sunny was joyous, vibrant in her ability, her heart open to the world . . . and that world kicked her until she bled in ways I couldn't stem, couldn't fix."

  The older man fell quiet for so long that Vasic was certain Zie Zen's time of talking was done for this night, but then he said, "Watch over your Sunny as I wasn't able to watch over mine."

  The Silent answer would've been to say that Ivy wasn't his, was just another task. However on this moonlit night when his great-grandfather had told him of a woman named Sunny who Vasic would never meet--but who he now realized had shaped Zie Zen's entire existence, there was only one
correct answer. "I will, Grandfather."

  Zie Zen closed his book, his hands steady and his jaw a firm line. "You must make certain the Es aren't sacrificed as they were then, aren't broken under the weight of the burden that is this new world." His gaze locked with Vasic's. "They will walk into any hell; with very few exceptions, it's how they're made. Of stubborn courage and little to no ability to be selfish. This new chaos will annihilate them unless there is a stronger force that will put the Es first."

  Vasic had made a vow to protect, and he would do it until his dying breath, but--"That is a task for a better man, a man like Aden." Strong and intelligent and without fractures in every corner of his being. Vasic's self was held together by countless jagged stitches that tore him bloody night and day.

  "I'm a brute weapon and an expendable shield," he said as the night wind cut across his exposed face, "my task to stand in the way of any violence directed toward the Es." He'd do so without flinching. "I'm not strong enough to last the time the empaths will need their protector to last." Into untold decades to come.

  Zie Zen shook his head again. "No, Vasic. This isn't your choice. It is a matter of honor--mine and yours." Another shaky breath. "You are the son of my heart, my truest descendent. You may have lost faith, but you will never give up, regardless of what you believe at this instant. You will do what must be done."

  Vasic said nothing. Zie Zen's word was law as far as he was concerned, but there was no doubt in his mind that he would disappoint his great-grandfather this one time. Zie Zen was right--Vasic would never give up, but there would come a time when he'd simply stop working, his body and mind shutting down as a malfunctioning machine might do.

  After all, that was what he was: a machine trained to mete out death.

  Standing after another half hour of silence, he gave a respectful bow of his head before walking to the water's edge, the snow soft and the pebbles small and smooth beneath the heavy tread of his combat boots. Zie Zen was growing frailer, the hand he'd placed on his cane as Vasic turned away trembling a little, but Vasic had known better than to offer his assistance. His great-grandfather would've considered that an insult of the highest magnitude.