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  To my father, Michael Ruiz, for everything. And my mother, Barbara Ruiz, for showing me what real strength is.

  [ACKNOWLEDGMENTS]

  It takes a lot of time and effort to bring a book to life. A good chunk of that effort belongs to other people. First and foremost, I want to thank my dad, who told me to go play outside as a kid, but never told me to stop writing. Thanks in a huge, huge part goes to my fabulously awesome agent, Jason Yarn, for loving this story as much as I do and taking a chance on me. Big shout-out and thanks to my editor, Brendan Deneen, for wanting this story and helping me to make it so much better.

  Thanks to Kelly Weingart for being so patient and supportive. I promised you this story for years and I finally got it right. Thanks to Trudy North for being the best first-reader one could ask for and a really awesome friend. All your help got me here and I couldn’t have made it without your lovely and brutal honesty throughout this entire process. Thanks to David Eccles and Tawnie Thiessen for humoring me and answering all my questions. Writing feels like its own different world and sometimes that really is the case. Thanks in large part to Cathy Yu, Demi Ruiz, Noël Sakievich, Melissa Taylor-Salvador, J. P. Salvador, and Daniel Martinez for putting up with my insane habits over the years. I love you guys! If there are any mistakes left in this book, they are (rightfully) my own.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: Contact

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: Retrieval

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three: Negotiation

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Four: Alliance

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Five: Sub Rosa

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Part Six: Convection

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Part Seven: Aperture

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Part Eight: Deliverance

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Part Nine: Prologue

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  CONTACT

  SESSION DATE: 2128.04.19

  LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research

  CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett

  SUBJECT: 2581

  FILE NUMBER: 346

  “Lucas wants to know if they’re worth it,” the girl says as she colors outside the lines. “If what’s left of humanity is worth the future I can see.”

  “And are they?” the woman who sits across the table from her asks, both of them centered in the camera. The room they are in is sterile and white, no color anywhere except on the yellow dress the child wears and the crayons she wields so carelessly.

  “He wants the truth, but I don’t even really know what that means anymore.” The girl looks up and smiles at the doctor, the charm in her tiny child’s face an almost alien expression beneath the faint exhaustion. “I’m not lying, Doctor.”

  The doctor marks something on her notes, shoulders tense. The girl, hooked to half a dozen machines by way of wires and electrodes attached to her skull, spine, arms, and hands, only hums. She is young, four years old, and seems content to stay where she is.

  “Who, exactly, is this Lucas you are talking about, Aisling?”

  “You don’t know him,” she says, discarding one crayon for another. “He’s not born yet.”

  The EEG and supporting machines spike almost off the grid, the readings nothing like the human baseline they are layered over. The doctor’s expression becomes strained.

  “Aisling, can you tell me when the war will end?”

  “If I tell you, it’ll only make things worse.” She bites her lip, brow furrowed in concentration as she turns her head, bleached-out violet eyes staring right into the camera. “We’re psions. You have to remember that, okay? We can’t survive a human lifetime when we die so young. I don’t really want to anyway.”

  [ONE]

  JULY 2379

  SLUMS OF THE ANGELS, USA

  “All passengers, please remain seated. For your safety, the protective shutters will be coming down as we pass through Las Vegas. Vidfeed will be available on the train’s public stream. All passengers, please remain seated.”

  The computer repeated its modulated tones over a static-filled comm system. Threnody Corwin cracked open one blue eye and watched as the thick protective shutters slid down the graffiti-covered windows on the outside of the maglev train, locking into place with the soft squeal of hydraulics. The heavy seal blocked out sunlight, her view of the dry, dead land beyond the windows, and the lingering radiation that still covered most of the country.

  “Don’t even think about opening that vidfeed,” her partner said from the seat beside her. “If you’ve seen one deadzone, you’ve seen them all, and I want to sleep.”

  “Then sleep,” Threnody said around a yawn. She stretched in the thinly padded seat and shoved straight black hair out of her eyes. In her mid to late twenties, she was built long-legged and lean, which made contorting herself to fit inside the limited travel space difficult. “We’ve got time before we reach California.”

  Quinton Martinez merely grunted, brown eyes narrowed down to slits as he scratched at the stubble on his chin. He wore the same type of outfit as Threnody, a black-on-black battle dress uniform, and boots that had walked across three continents. Taller than Threnody, with muscles corded thickly against his bones, Quinton’s skin was a deep brown, scarred lightly over the knuckles and the back of his hands from the fire he could control as a Class III pyrokinetic.

  Fire wasn’t something he could create, not without external help. That’s what the thin, malleable biotubes containing compressed natural gas were for. The biotubes were grafted along the metacarpal bones in his hands, radiating up his forearms where skin and muscle biomodifications held them in place. The skin at the tip of each middle finger and thumb had been replaced with razor-thin pieces of metal. Quinton had given up on keeping track of how many times he’d lost his hands and arms to fire. He’d seen the inside of a biotank for regeneration too many times over the years for it to matter anymore.

  “The Rockies, then down to the Slums of the Angels,” Quinton said, thinking of all that was really left of civilization on the West Coast since the bombs fell, a mirror for the rest of the world. “Chasing a blip on the grid into a goddamn warzone.”

  Threnody rubbed at her forehead with careful fingers, wishing her skin didn’t feel so new. “You didn’t have to come, Quin. You’re salvageable, according to the psi surgeons. They would have transferred you if you asked.”

  “And like a good dog I should have asked, right?” The smile Quinton gave her was thin and hard with anger. “You’re my partner, Thren. The only family I’ve got. I go where you go. End of story.”

  Two failed missions back-to-back: Madrid, and then later Johannesburg, where she ha
d opted to let unregistered humans and potential psions live instead of killing them in the face of threats from higher-Classed enemy psions. Their current mission was simply punishment for past failures.

  The Strykers Syndicate contracted out enslaved psion soldiers for high-risk jobs. Death was a known and accepted by-product of those contracts, and the dead needed to be replaced for the company to turn a profit. Those children with psion potential she let go were resources she had no right to touch or lose. Insubordination had only gotten them a stint in medical and a black mark on their records. Quinton could have argued his way out of it. She was the one in charge, after all; it had been her decision, not his. Except they were partners, now and always, and he’d opted to come with her once again. One last mission to prove her loyalty. One last mission to prove she deserved to live.

  The government owned her, as they owned every psion. Her independence, according to the ruling World Court, had become a problem.

  Never could learn to come to fucking heel, Threnody thought bitterly as she reached over and touched a sensor on the side panel of her seat.

  A hologrid snapped into existence before her, projected through the air from overhead, the logo for TransAmerica MagLev Inc. spinning slowly before blending seamlessly into the welcome menu. She dragged her finger over the public-stream option and was treated to a view of the stark, polluted ruins of a lost American city. Just a skeleton of a time abandoned generations ago, of a world no one even remembered. The ruins were similar to all the ones in the many deadzones they had been pushing through since departing from what was left of Buffalo, New York.

  She reached out to shift the feed to something different. Only this time, when her fingers touched the hologrid, the data flickered, wavered into colored lines, then sizzled into sparks that shocked her. Whatever pain or irritation Threnody experienced, it was drowned out by the frustration she felt at her lack of control. It wasn’t something she could afford.

  Quinton yanked her hand away before anyone noticed, reaching over to press the control screen on her seat’s arm panel that would shut down the hologrid.

  “Don’t,” he said, mouth pressed close to her ear. “You’re not ready. Johannesburg was a mistake and you’re still recovering. They shouldn’t have discharged you from medical.”

  Threnody rubbed her fingers against her knee, the shock of the charge nothing more than a tingle beneath her nails when it shouldn’t have been even that, not for a Class III electrokinetic. Her power, like that of all electrokinetics, was limited to conduits that she could touch and feed. An involuntary reaction to a machine simply meant Quinton was right. That didn’t change a damn thing.

  “Can’t fight orders, Quin.”

  “Then we do what we can to work around them. Why do you think I registered our route via train instead of an air shuttle?”

  She gave him a sharp look. “Did you even look at shuttles to get us out here?”

  “I looked. They didn’t interest me.” Quinton settled back in his seat, closing his eyes against the dim interior lights of the train. “Go to sleep, Thren. We won’t get much of it once we hit the West Coast.”

  She knew that. She knew the details of this mission better than he did. That didn’t make working through it any easier, not when they had to travel across radiation-tainted land to a state that was still being fought over by the government and drug cartels beneath the glitz of seedy glamour. The tension wasn’t over the gold California had once been known for—most of the Sierra Nevada had been strip-mined bare decades before the first bomb dropped—but over the government-owned and government-protected towers of SkyFarms Inc. that filled the southern part of the Central Valley. The farming and agricultural company that kept the world fed with its heavily shielded towers of limited produce and animal pens would always be worth dying for.

  The world was a different place ever since the first bomb fell in 2124 somewhere in the old Middle East, beginning the worldwide nuclear genocide known as the Border Wars. Five years of bombing hell across nearly all the continents had practically annihilated the human race. The fallout from that time still lingered in a toxic environment, still showed up too many generations later as genetic mutations that caused physical deformities and incurable disease. Since 2129 when the Border Wars finally ended, people hadn’t been living, they’d only been surviving.

  What cities had managed to survive the Border Wars and rebuild themselves into some semblance of society again were where most of the world’s population remained. Linked by way of maglev tracks built as a way to jump-start a broken global economy, or government-built air shuttles designated for the educated rich, countries remade their borders accordingly around deadzones. Travel wasn’t promoted or always permitted, but humanity would never give up the urge to explore.

  Two hours later the train finally pulled free of the Central Valley, wending its way toward their destination in Southern California. Sunlight burned into Threnody’s eyes, burned through sleep, as the protective seal finally lifted well beyond the old state line.

  Quinton was already awake, even if his eyes were closed. He felt different to her fine-tuned senses when he was conscious. She knew better than he did the electric song his nerves sang at any given hour. Every person gave off an individual charge. Like the mind, it was as unique as a person’s DNA, and DNA was the only thing they had to stand on out here in a place ruled more by street law than judicial opinion. Psion power would always have an edge over guns.

  “Time?” Threnody asked.

  “Thirty-five and counting.”

  She nodded, pushed herself up, and made sure her single bag was still stowed securely beneath her seat. They had a forward row in a middle car with enough space to breathe in, but that was about it. Anyone with enough credit to mean anything traveled by air shuttle, and they definitely didn’t travel to the West Coast of the United States of America. Elite society held stock and coveted living space in pockets down the East Coast of Canada and America or in Western Europe. The only things left in Australia were deserts and firestorms. What remained of South America was overrun by drug cartels, and most of Asia had turned into a toxic graveyard generations ago, its barrenness rivaled only by the desert Africa had become.

  Threnody could feel the maglev train begin to decrease its speed from 320 kilometers an hour to a full stop when they finally pulled into the only platform still servicing the outer edges of the Slums of the Angels. Ceiling lights blinked their arrival as the doors slid open with a crack that shook every car. Quinton helped Threnody to her feet and made a path for them through the Spanish-speaking crowds of people that were pitching themselves off the train, breathing smoggy air for the first time in days. The pollution stung the back of her throat, made her eyes water. What sky they could still see above through the ruins was pale gray from polluted clouds, the wind gritty, and the heat was like a weight against her skin.

  It didn’t compare to the presence that slid into her mind as they headed for the exit stairwell.

  Down on the street, a cautious mental voice with a heavy Scottish accent said. We’ve been waiting awhile already. Guess HQ wasn’t lying about you guys coming out here. You going to be able to handle this mission?

  Shouldn’t that be my question? Threnody asked as Kerr MacDougal pulled her and Quinton into a psi link with his telepathy.

  I’m not the one who spent half a month in medical getting their nervous system put back together.

  I’m not the one whose shields are slipping.

  Touché.

  I’m walking. That tell you anything?

  That you’re a stubborn bitch and your file doesn’t do you justice. Over here.

  They had reached the ground below the platform, and her gaze zeroed in on two men standing at the taxi zone with heavy-duty bags at their feet. Threnody schooled her expression into one of polite neutrality and swallowed her pride as they approached the team they were assigned to work with. From the top of the list to the very bottom. From being the best
to being a problem. It was a strange feeling to know that the standing she and Quinton had fought so hard to attain and keep in the Strykers Syndicate could so easily be wiped away. People only got assigned partnership with this team as punishment. No one liked working with dysfunctional psions, and that’s all these two would ever be.

  Kerr was a head taller than she was, whipcord thin, and not carrying the weight he should have with his height. The closer they got, the darker the circles beneath Kerr’s teal-colored eyes became. His partner, Jason Garret, stood silently beside him, chewing on the filter of a half-smoked cigarette.

  Kerr was the Strykers Syndicate’s only Class II telepath, with mental shields that never stayed up. Kerr should have been able to make his own, but even the best geneticists hadn’t been able to categorize all the quirks that showed up in the DNA and RNA of psions on the human accelerated regions of the human genome. His shields were unstable and his telepathy put him at risk of losing his mind in a maelstrom of the world’s thoughts. Riding along behind someone else’s shields was a stopgap procedure. It worked for now, but nobody back at headquarters was sure how many years he had left until it stopped.

  Jason was Kerr’s patch, his temporary fix, a Class V telekinetic that could teleport, making him a dual psion with average reach and strength. He was also the only Stryker in their entire ranks—their entire history—with intact natal shields that had never fallen. Psychically bonded at a young age by a psi surgeon telepath, Jason’s shields were Kerr’s only saving grace when Kerr’s own shields would fail him. The two weren’t lovers, despite the bond. They weren’t compatible that way. They considered each other family, and while Jason preferred men, Kerr didn’t like anyone.

  “Threnody,” Jason said with a sharp smile, hazel eyes cool in their assessment of her, but warmer when they focused on her partner. “Quinton. Never thought we’d ever get the pleasure of working with you two.”

  “Apparently you’re not doing as good a job as you should be and they sent us to sort you out,” Quinton replied with a steady look. “It’s amazing you haven’t been terminated after so many failures.”