take care of getting the vote out.” The leopard male’s eyes glittered a green so feral, Aden knew he was no longer looking at the human part of Lucas, no matter the skin he wore. “Your people pick up anything else about Naya?”
“No, but it’s possible some data I just received is related,” Aden said. “An unnamed party was searching for a mercenary team five weeks to a month ago. The action was or is supposed to be in San Francisco.”
Lucas snarled but managed to keep his voice civil as he said, “Thank you, Aden.”
“I’ll update you immediately if we discover who took up the offer.”
Clearly coldly furious at the implications of the information Aden’s people had discovered, the DarkRiver alpha signed off with a nod.
Alone in his office again, Aden considered Trinity. It had been his idea, and while he still believed deeply in the agreement, it was becoming obvious the divisions in the world ran far too deep for this to ever be a smooth journey.
You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Even if it’s dying of thirst. Not when it would rather fight the zebra on the other side.
Zaira had heard the human saying while she was posted in Venice, muttered it to Aden one night, and added her own pithy coda. Yet, despite her disdain for those who were causing problems, she remained his staunchest supporter. “You’ll do it, Aden,” she’d told him two nights earlier, the midnight dark of her eyes looking down into his as she rose up beside him on her elbow. “You always do what you put your mind to—even if it takes years.”
A sudden, narrow-eyed smile from his most lethal commander, the lamplight throwing a warm glow on smooth skin a shade somewhere between cream and sun-kissed brown, the color beautifully changeable; it all depended on the season and the strength of the sun. “Look at me. Took you decades, but now here I am, naked in your bed. Anyone who bets against Aden Kai is as big an idiot as those horses.”
His cheeks creasing at the memory of her acerbic words, Aden left his office and walked out into the sunlit landscape beyond. The Valley, as the squad had taken to calling this isolated piece of land cradled between the craggy peaks of two sets of mountains, was no longer as barren or as spartan as it had once been. Newly built cabins stood in small groupings, while pathways curved gently in and around those homes and across the Valley.
But though the newly planted gardens were blooming and the sun brilliant, he heard no childish voices, saw no young Arrows in the play area. A glance at his watch confirmed they were currently in afternoon classes.
Outsiders would see the Arrow teaching structure and declare it far too restrictive with too little room for innovation, but those outsiders didn’t understand that when a child could explode another’s mind with a simple passing tantrum, he or she needed walls, wanted safety and predictability.
Paradoxical as it was, such boundaries made the child feel more free.
The restrictions would be eased as each child became increasingly self-sufficient in terms of controlling his or her abilities. That step had already been authorized and implemented for the teenagers he saw studying in an outside green area when he walked around the corner. Because while structure was important, so was the ability to make independent decisions and the capacity to think creatively.
These children wouldn’t be forced into a path as Aden and his brethren had been, but many would end up working in the blood-soaked shadows nonetheless.
It was a dark truth for children born with violent psychic power.
Silence or not, so long as those of the Psy race were defined by their minds, the PsyNet would need the hunters, the ones who kept the innocents safe. Like all power, psychic power had a flip side. Changelings could turn feral. Psy could turn murderously insane.
What was no longer inevitable was being a lone hunter in the darkness. Every Arrow had a home here, had family. Even their most broken.
“Aden.”
Stopping to speak to the teens when they hesitantly called his name, Aden listened to their feedback on cooperative learning as the sun heated his back through the black of the T-shirt he wore in place of his Arrow uniform. “I’ll leave you to your work,” he said after ten minutes. “Don’t forget that your year group is supervising the under fives this afternoon.”
It had