"Boy's got a point," Valentin rumbled. "It is fun to run around pantless--though I'd go the whole hog and take off the shirt, too."
Despite Valentin's light words, his lips weren't curved, his amber eyes aglow . . . and suddenly acute in their perception. "How can you possibly hear them?" he asked, muscles bunching beneath her. "I have far better hearing than any Psy should have, and I can't hear a word of their conversation."
"That's because it's taking place out in the forest where the two of them are going for a moonlit walk while their cub sleeps, watched over by his doting grandparents." She paused. "Your parents?"
He shook his head, a shadow passing across his face. "My father is dead. My mother prefers the wild." Short words that said so much and not enough. "Must be Chaos's parents--they just arrived this morning for a visit after spending time with his sister in the Rockies. She mated with a grizzly. Bad-tempered creatures, grizzlies."
Silver had so many questions, but tonight, she was the one telling secrets. "I can also hear one of your sentries sending in a report to Pavel."
"The miscreant is heading the watch tonight." Valentin kissed her slow and deep, as if savoring her, before flipping them so she was below the powerful bulk of his body. "Super hearing doesn't sound like a curse. It's considered a strength for changelings."
"I'd consider it a strength, too, if I could control it." She pressed both hands to her ears. "This is what I did as a child when my grandmother lowered the secondary shields she'd had around me. I had my telepathic shields already, didn't understand why she was pushing me to create military-grade shields so strong they were titanium." Silver had always had a strong will.
"Grandmother didn't want to do it," Silver said, because it was important Valentin know that, "but she had no choice. I had to know my greatest weakness so I could protect myself." She thought back to the child she'd been. "I screamed and screamed and screamed until I lost my voice."
Valentin's expression grew ominously dark. "Ena--"
"Hurt far more than I did, though she'd never admit it." Silver knew, was the one who'd woken cradled in her grandmother's lap, being rocked like a far younger child. "She had no choice. I had to understand the danger. Because, you see, unlike those with normal hearing, those of Designation Tp-A can't block out sound by plugging the ears."
Valentin's face was all craggy lines now, his voice so rough it was barely human. "A for audio?"
"Yes." She brushed back his uncontrollable hair. "The sound I 'hear' comes in via a psychic pathway. No one really knows how it translates into sound--audio telepaths are so rare that research on the sub-designation is nonexistent." What was the point when it had long been considered a death sentence?
"You're saying the noise will overwhelm you if you allow your shields to fall?"
"That's what happens to any pure telepath who lowers her shields." A roar of crushing noise. "The telepathic noise of the world is chaos--depending on a telepath's strength and the number of unshielded people in the vicinity, it could mean being overwhelmed by tens or hundreds or thousands of minds. Millions of random thoughts, no rhyme or reason to it."
Valentin kissed her again, his chest rumbling with the bear's agitation and his voice increasingly primal. "Like being in an extremely scent-rich environment for a bear changeling," he said. "Lock one of us in a perfumery, and we'd be in physical pain within a very short time."
"Exactly." Silver petted his shoulders, the muscles hard as rock with tension. "Too much input through channels that are meant to process that information--as a result it can be controlled through various methods. You could squeeze your nose closed; I could slam down telepathic shields."
Valentin nodded.
"It's also a matter of degrees." Silver had had a lifetime to think of this. "If I want to use my telepathy without being overwhelmed, I can. I simply have to adjust the strength of my shields."
"That doesn't work with audio telepathy." Not a question, because her alpha bear was too smart not to have worked out where she was going.
"It's either all or nothing." Silver pushed back his hair again for the simple pleasure of touching him. "I can block it, or I can have it open. That means when my audio channel is fully open, all I hear is noise. I could be alone in the middle of a national forest with not a single mind in the vicinity, and it wouldn't matter." Silver had done exactly that so she'd be certain of her hypothesis.
"In such a situation, I hear the rustle of the trees, the fall of the water, the crackle of the earth settling, magnified a thousand times over for every tree in the forest, every drop of water, every foot of earth." Nature turned into a brutal hammer. "If I didn't have my shields, it'd take a minute at most to crush my mind; cause of death would likely be an aneurysm or just pure shock."
Valentin's hand tightened in her hair. "Why are you hearing Nova and Chaos if you block the audio channel?"
No more time. No more hope.
"The shield is crumbling." Like a brick wall with parts eaten away. "Right now, my audio telepathy is at a point where I can use it. Though it's irregular, like a radio channel broken up by static, I can hear actual conversations, separate one voice from the other, one strand of sound from its neighbor." It was a painful glimpse of what her ability could've been if it weren't so impossible to control.
"It's astonishing," she said. "I'm so deeply aware of the world. The whisper of the wind through the trees, the way the leaves rustle, the scrabble of small creatures in the forest, the laughter of one of your clanmates as he runs from a chasing friend . . . Is that what it's like to be changeling?"
"The world is music around us," her bear told her.
Heat burned Silver's eyes until a droplet rolled down the side of her face. Valentin leaned down and licked it up. "Don't you cry, Silver Mercant." It was a rumbling order. "Don't you cry."
"I didn't know I could." She kissed his jaw, his cheek, her heart breaking for this man who would move mountains for her. "It's beautiful what you said, about the world being music around you." Nuzzling against him, drinking in the tactile contact as if she could take it with her into the darkness, she drew in his scent.
Valentin nuzzled back; the affectionate contact made more tears roll from her eyes. He kissed them away, growling once again at her to "stop it" and yet his touch was tender, his kisses so gentle they hurt. "Why?" he asked at last.
Silver needed no further words to know what he was asking. "It's emotion." She clamped her palm over his mouth when he would've spoken.
Scowling, Valentin licked her palm.
She wanted to smile, couldn't. "Because of the lack of research," she told him, "I don't know how or why, but audio telepathy has always been linked to emotion. Pre-Silence, audio telepaths were considered extinct. We simply didn't survive childhood."
"Not even the weaker ones," Valentin asked after she dropped her hand, "the ones who would hear less?"
It was a good question, a smart question. "As far as I've been able to determine, audio telepathy only appears as a secondary ability and only in high-Gradient telepaths." Which meant powerful telepathic channels. "The oldest surviving pre-Silence audio telepath who was identified as such was three years old. Chances are very high that others died before ever being identified as Tp-As."
"Then you go Silent," Valentin said, the words hard. "If it will keep you safe, keep you alive, you stop feeling and you go back to Silence."
Silver's throat was crushed glass. "I can't."
"Don't you argue with me on this." He gripped her jaw. "You go back." An alpha's command, wild storms in his eyes. "I'd rather have a frosty Silver alive and well than a feeling, loving Silver dead in a box. You shut it down. Be who you were before you decided to lower your shields."
She loved him so.
Silver had never truly understood love before this instant when she knew it, like a bowstring snapping tight inside her soul. With that one potent glimpse, she saw the other strands of love in her heart. For Arwen. For her grandmother. Even for her p
arents. All shining bright. All unbreakable.
"You go back to being ice-cold, Starlight." Valentin's words were unyielding, but the pain in his big body, it was a dark turbulence. "You go back."
She cupped his face in her hands, his bristly jaw a familiar sensation against her palms. "I'm not being stubborn, Mishka." She used the family nickname as a gentle tease, but there was no joy in her. "I've realized over the past hour that I can't." The knowledge seeping into her in a slow wave until it was unavoidable.
"Why?" A harsh demand. "You were fine before."
"Before?" She laughed, the sound fractured but holding a humor he'd taught her to feel. "Before, I was opening my door to an alpha bear and having conversations with him when I should've called security." Instead, part of her had waited for that heavy knock. "A truly Silent individual wouldn't have interacted with you as I did, wouldn't have thought about you when you didn't show up for a few weeks."
"I was trying to play hard to get," Valentin said, turning his head to bite at her fingers, as bad-tempered as the grizzlies he'd maligned. "You're telling me your Silence was breaking down before you made the conscious decision to try a life without Silence?"
She nodded. "The Honeycomb changed everything." The empaths had created the network to keep the PsyNet alive, keep Psy from going insane. But-- "It's a product of naked emotion."
"Can you cut yourself loose?"
"Yes." Silver had already considered how it could be done. "I'd risk madness, but that could be managed by short bursts of contact with the Honeycomb--only I think it's too late." The fractures in that brick wall could no longer be repaired.
She had tried already in an effort to disprove her dark theory, only to have all her attempts fail. "Taking into account all I know of audio telepathy," she told this bear who was a gift she'd never expected, "the disintegration of my audio shields appears to be a genetic inevitability."
"Your research could be wrong."
Silver had never wanted to be wrong so much in her life. "Even before Silence fell, my shields were starting to crack under the weight of the avalanche of sound my mind is built to hear."
To hear, not to survive.
"I just didn't see the cracks until the sound levels reached a critical point." There was no other explanation for the depth of the damage to her shields--it hadn't happened over weeks or even months. "The Honeycomb accelerated the effect, but only by a matter of weeks. My shields were always going to fail."
Valentin pushed off her, got off the bed. He strode around the room, proud in his nakedness. When he slammed his hands against the wall, it was with a cascade of curses that turned the air blue.
His fury was an untamed, beautiful thing. Like him.
Eyes wild, his hair whipping around his face, he strode to her, hauled her up onto her knees on the bed.
*
CLASPING Silver's head in his hands, the moonlight of her hair tumbling over his big rough hands, Valentin roared at her. She didn't flinch, not Silver Fucking Mercant. His mate. His tough, proud mate.
Who would die if they didn't figure out a way to shut off the increasing scream in her head.
"There must be a way."
Silver closed her hands over his wrists. "I've thought of everything."
Valentin wasn't used to thinking about the brain in such ways, but he wasn't stupid. He could learn new things. And maybe an outsider could see options Silver couldn't. She was brilliant, but she'd been raised in a certain way, taught certain things. "If you don't feel, if your brain literally can't feel, could you rebuild your shielding?"
Silver's eyes grew darker in thought. "If I actually didn't feel, there would be no need for the shielding. Audio telepathy is tightly linked to emotion, remember? That's why it continued to exist in Silence--we always had the capacity for emotion, even if we trained ourselves not to respond to it."
Valentin squeezed his eyes shut, his bear trying to make sense of a wholly unfamiliar world. Think, Valentin. He snapped open his eyes. "Is it possible to physically stop your brain from processing emotion?" He hated that he was talking about maiming her, but damn it, if it would keep her alive, he'd consider anything.
"If that were possible," Silver said with no hint of anger, her tone gentle in a way he'd never heard from her, "the Psy Council would've done it long ago."
The Psy Council.
A chip to force Silence on the biological level.
Valentin's heart thundered.
"The scientist who mated with a leopard in Lucas Hunter's pack." A woman with startling blue-gray eyes against skin of deepest brown, her hair a wild mass of near-black curls. "She did that public broadcast." An act of rebellion that had further pushed Silence closer to collapse. "She talked about the Council wanting to use a chip to make people Silent."
Silver sat up straighter on her knees, the sadness fading from her face to be replaced by acute concentration. "Ashaya Aleine?" Her tone was better now, more his smart, strong Starlichka.
"Yes, her. Have you ever talked to her about your audio telepathy?"
"No, but my grandmother was able to get access to data about the chip. It wasn't designed to fix an error in the brain--it was designed to suffocate normal emotion and create a hive mind."
Valentin could see her struggling to find a way to explain.
"It's . . . like a sphere designed to perfectly encompass a flower. A construction of exquisitely precise detail," she said at last. "But if the flower is shaped differently, if it has longer petals or is misshapen, the sphere will no longer be able to enclose it without damage. It might cut petals in half or crush a critical part."
"Tell me you didn't just call yourself misshapen." Fury had him glaring at her.
Silver raised an eyebrow, every inch the queen. "I am perfectly shaped, Alpha Nikolaev."
Grinning, he kissed the life out of her, tumbling her back into the bed so he was braced over her. "That's my Starlight."
Frost in her expression, but she touched him with possessive hands, pushing his hair back from his face in a way that made his bear smug. "I have no problem with who I am," she said. "I am made up of all parts of me, and they are all critical to Silver Fucking Mercant."
His bear adored her. The man loved her beyond bearing.
"I was simply attempting to explain why a chip designed for ninety-nine percent of minds may not function on the one percent who don't fit the mold of what is considered normal."
Valentin got what she was saying, but he also understood another critical factor. "Mercants are all about secrets, right?"
"That's a fair enough estimation." Her tone was slightly suspicious.
It made his grin widen--bear mates often got that tone in their voices. "So I know, moyo solnyshko, that you've never considered asking Dr. Aleine if she could modify her original chip to work on your brain." He saw from her face that he'd hit the bull's-eye. "Doing that would've exposed a Mercant vulnerability, and Mercants don't expose anything if they can help it."
"Again, for a bear alpha who disavows an interest in politics, you have an acute grasp of it."
He bit at her jaw. "Stop being mean."
She laughed. Starlight actually laughed. It was short and cut off almost at once, her hand at her mouth. But he'd heard, and it was the most beautiful sound in the universe. "Do that again," he whispered.
Eyes wide, she said, "Did I laugh?"
"You're a goddess when you laugh." Hell, she was stunning no matter what, but when she laughed he felt as if he could conquer the world.
Eyes still wide, she ran wondering fingers over her own lips. The lingering warmth in her face made her glow. "You're right. I've never really considered reaching out to Dr. Aleine or her twin."
"Her twin?"
"Identical in every way except that Amara is a psychopath. They've always done their most brilliant work together." The glow faded. "Rebels blew up the original lab. Ashaya destroyed her own files. All information on the chip is gone."
"Do you think it's go
ne from her brain?"
Chapter 33
Not long ago, an attack on my lab put the development of the implant back to square one. But it can be rebuilt. I'm not the only scientist with the capacity to do the work.
--Excerpted from transcript of Ashaya Aleine's broadcast (June 2080)
VALENTIN'S QUESTION CIRCLED in Silver's brain.
Ashaya and Amara had two of the most brilliant minds in the world. They would've forgotten nothing, even if they'd chosen not to pursue their research--or more correctly, Ashaya had made the choice and Amara had decided to accept her twin's decision.
"If I do this," she said to Valentin, "if I ask them and they can create a chip that deletes my emotions, I'll no longer be the Silver you know. I won't even be the Silver you knew before I decided to consciously drop my shields."
She had to make him understand the consequences. "My emotions were already beginning to make themselves felt on a subconscious level when I first met you. Otherwise, I would've never sparred with you as I did."
"Regret that?"
"Not for a second." She liked the person she was with emotion, liked the woman who loved her brother so very deeply and who knew her grandmother as far more than the matriarch of their family.
And this man, this wild changeling . . . "You make me more myself than I've ever been."
"You make me better," was his deep, rumbling response.
"Valyusha." He made her better, too. So much better. "I can't lose this."
Valentin's jaw set again. "If it'll keep you alive, we take the hit." Making no attempt to hide the anguish tearing at that huge heart of his, he said, "You're Arwen's beloved sister and Ena's hope and the linchpin of EmNet. Most of all, you're my Starlight. You have to survive."
"Will you?" She understood now what it would cost him to have her be cold toward him. Cut off from her emotions, she wouldn't feel the pain. He'd feel every terrible second.
"So long as you live and breathe," he said, his eyes a deep, glowing amber, "I can bear anything."