Page 45 of Primal Mirror
Auden gave a curt nod, her lips pursed.
“Do you want to know what you were like?”
No, Auden wanted to scream, no, she didn’t want to know. Because the more she knew, the more she had to confront the fact that her mind was broken in ways that couldn’t be fixed. She’d gotten lucky with what capacity she had now; this was never going to get any better.
But…She stroked her belly, a fist in her throat. This wasn’t just about her. She needed to know so she could make decisions about her baby. So she swallowed the lump of fear in her gut and said, “Yes.”
“Remote and cold enough to make me question if it was even you.” Remi’s words rumbled with the leopard’s growl. “Silence so perfect it was unbreakable.”
The hairs rose on the back of Auden’s neck, her tongue going dry. She’d never come close to perfect Silence. Being a psychometric made that impossible. Even the best of the best among Ps-Psy only passed the Silence tests at around seventy-five percent—which was considered an acceptable score but one with plenty of room for improvement.
She’d barely scraped through with sixty-two percent.
Her father had put her in remedial school for Silence, and she wasn’t sure he’d ever shared her results with her mother. As for the remedial school, their drills had pushed her scores up to seventy percent by the skin of her teeth, and that had been good enough for her to graduate to adulthood, leaving behind the lessons of Silence.
“Auden?”
Her hand clenched the chair arm. “I need to think about this.” Needed to figure out if she’d gone beyond neural damage and into instability so bad that her personality had split in two.
Bile burned her throat.
She couldn’t do that kind of life-altering thinking with Remi here, his presence so big and wild and dominant that it pushed against her senses in primal demand. “Please go. I need to be alone.”
“I’m going to send patrols this way to check on you.” His tone said she had no choice in the matter.
And since she’d had not one but two seizures in the past twelve hours, she had no will to argue. “Fine. They can look in the window if I’m not outside.”
Expression dark with a scowl and eyes leopard, Remi nonetheless rose to his feet. “One more thing—thanks for sending the indi-mech deal our way. That was you, wasn’t it?”
Her nod was jagged. “You were the best option. But the final decision will be based on your proposal.” The words flowed off her tongue, as if she’d been running business operations for years.
A chill wind over her skin.
Some of what she’d been doing of late might be explained by things she’d observed in her years of blurred awareness, but not this, how her mind had begun to make calculations without thought in terms of business, how the right words just bloomed in her brain and took shape in her mouth.
“We get that.” Remi glanced over at her cabin, then back at her. “Call me when you decide you’ve had enough aloneness, and we’ll talk. I’ll print you a bed in the interim.”
* * *
• • •
TWO hours later, Auden got into her jet-chopper and flew herself home. Once she’d calmed down, she’d realized she had no choice. If she’d had a seizure bad enough that it had nearly wiped out all memory of her flight to the cabin, then her piloting the craft again was a huge risk, but it wasn’t a deadly one.
She’d put on both biometers that Dr. Verhoeven had assigned her, then locked them into the onboard system. Any major fluctuation and she’d programmed the chopper to land at the heliport behind her family home—that heliport was equipped with emergency “homing beacons” that would guide the chopper safely down.
The same wasn’t possible at the cabin, which meant she’d be stuck at the house until she could figure out another way to reach the freedom of this place of mountain and trees, morning mist and creatures wild.
She kept her eyes trained on the trees as she flew, searching for glimpses of gold and black, but jungle cats were masters of the hunt. All she saw were waves of fall foliage, the canopy so verdant that she couldn’t even make a guess as to where RainFire made its home.
Her heart clenched when she cleared the final trees, their leaves a cascade of oranges and reds intermingled with lime green and the odd pop of a darker shade. It felt as if she was shutting the door behind herself, giving up on her quest of freedom for her baby. “No,” she vowed. “This is just a roadblock. Even if I am irreparably damaged, my baby isn’t. She’s going to make it out.”
Auden did everything in her power to keep that thought uppermost on her mind as she landed. Charisma was waiting for her, her organizer held at her side. “I thought you were planning to stay two days,” she said once Auden had made it inside the house.
“I wanted to see Dr. Verhoeven,” Auden said, and almost told Charisma about the seizures.
Usually, it wouldn’t have mattered, because the doctor reported to Charisma anyway, doctor/patient confidentiality no proof against the other woman’s power. But Auden was changing, becoming a woman far more able to manipulate and control. The idea made her a little sick—but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t use her new skills if those skills would keep her daughter safe. This time, the doctor wouldn’t be spilling his guts to Charisma.
Auden would make sure of it.