cuts, the scars from her previous marks having faded away. She was too young to think in terms of metaphors, but she felt as if the scabs and cuts on her mind were fading, too.
The fuzzy edges had become sharp, the broken thoughts whole.
Putting her hands on the soft stretchy cotton of her black tights, she looked at the wall in front of her, and she made herself think. The doctor had said she could soon have her own proper room, where no one would lock her inside.
She wanted that—but she’d seen Lalit spying on her from around the corner. He was waiting for the doctors to stop watching her; he’d hurt her again if she let him. So she had to make sure he never caught her alone—and she had to make her mind stronger and stronger, so he couldn’t make her lose her thoughts again.
Don’t give the monsters the satisfaction of seeing you give up.
“I won’t,” she whispered to the memory of the boy who’d said such nice things to her, and who’d looked at her like she was strong and brave and not wrong in the head. “I won’t, 7J. I promise.”
Chapter 15
Project Sentinel is authorized to proceed.
—Unanimous decision of the Ruling Coalition
CANTO WAS USED to waiting. A man couldn’t work in surveillance and not build a tolerance for patience. He was also good at absorbing a lot of information and processing it down to the most critical factor.
But Payal screwed with his calm, turned his patience to dust.
His eyes went to the box that held the cake.
He’d done something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what and it was messing him up. He’d held on to her dreams for an eternity, waiting for the day when he would see her again; to be able to give her this small piece of what she’d wanted, it had made his fucking heart jump like an excited cub’s.
“Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Get it together, Canto.”
Checking on the time, he saw that several minutes remained until the others would begin to arrive. He moved out of the shelter and down to where Payal crouched by a bed of succulents, quietly rearranging the stones. Last night, after she’d left, he’d looked at what she’d done and hadn’t been able to see anything of substance.
Yet he’d known she hadn’t simply been moving stones around without reason, so he’d taken an image and had his computer analyze it. It had linked her design back to a precise mathematical model.
Patterns and grids were the baseline of Payal’s mind.
“I screwed up, didn’t I?” he asked roughly, because this mattered. She mattered.
Payal moved three stones before responding. “I can’t—” She broke off, started again. “I function in this world because I work inside a defined set of parameters, within a framework of rules that keep me from becoming erratic and without reason.”
Canto waited, unable to see where she was going.
“You …” A quick obsidian glance, the stars erased. “When we’re together, it speaks too much to the child I once was.” Another stone placed before she rose to her feet. “She wants to break out, wants to take control.”
Canto bit back his knee-jerk reaction and stared out at the water. He wanted to tell her that was bullshit, that she didn’t need all those rules and fences around her mind. She was dazzling in her brilliance, a bright star that had been constrained into an unnatural shape.
But Canto wasn’t only the boy who’d almost died because his father considered him a mistake. Canto was also the man who’d spent years harboring a child empath inside his shields. Arwen had altered the core of his nature, taught him things without ever once giving instruction. One thing Canto knew was how to listen.
Yesterday and today, what had Payal told him?
That she had a chemical imbalance in her brain that made her feel out of control, obsessive, and without reason. The medications she took helped equalize her brain chemistry to standard levels—and her focus and concentration, the rules she’d made for herself, took her the rest of the way to being the kind of person she wanted to be.
“I’m a risk to your stability,” he ground out, the words grating against his insides like sandpaper.
Payal released a shaky breath. “I thought I could handle it, that I could separate our time together from the rest of me … but I can’t. Being with you, it weakens the walls I keep between myself and the unstable