Total pages in book: 136
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 128413 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 642(@200wpm)___ 514(@250wpm)___ 428(@300wpm)
But for a few minutes, seated in this chair that he’d brought for her, she could pretend.
The second chair ready, Remi rose to grab the cooler and put it in front of them before he took a seat. “How are you feeling?”
Tears threatened again, a thick knot of them in her throat.
“Better,” she said when she could speak, then felt compelled to add, “You don’t have to babysit me. I’m sure you’re a busy man.”
“Not too busy for this.” He stretched out his legs, his gaze on the trees beyond. “You mind if I ask what it feels like when you pick up an imprint? I’ve never met a psychometric before.”
Auden’s first urge was to tell him everything. He sounded genuinely interested. But aware of her current muddled state, she considered his words, thought of how information could be used to cause harm not just to her but to others like her, and hesitated.
“I know you sense emotion.” Remi’s eyes glinted at her. “Cat’s out of the bag there.”
She exhaled, the decision easier now. “It’s why Ps-Psy kept their heads down during Silence,” she said. “And why there are so few of us. We were rare anyway, but while the Council didn’t bother to crush us as they did designation E—likely because we were too few in number to make a ripple in the Net—the quiet pressure to select for less ‘emotional’ abilities had an effect.”
“I did a bit of research after we first met,” Remi said, “and saw some pretty high salaries offered by universities and museums for psychometrics.”
“We’re prized in certain quarters now, but during the initial few decades of Silence we were considered one of the least desired of abilities. That generation took enough psychometric genes out of the pool that our numbers now are even smaller than they were prior to Silence. Small enough to command a premium at those facilities that need us.”
Remi stayed silent, a big jungle cat who looked outwardly lazy but who she was certain could move at lethal speed without warning.
“Our low numbers,” she added, “meant that even if we did breach Silence on a bad read, we didn’t have a big enough presence to contaminate the Net with emotion.” It had been a formless black back then, dotted with the cold and icy stars that were the minds of the Psy.
No empathic color, no desperate honeycomb to connect them to each other in an effort to stop the psychic network from crumbling. The latter terrified Auden, not for herself, but for her innocent baby, who would be born into a world with a PsyNet that was thick with holes and ragged with lost and broken pieces.
She felt sick when she stepped onto it these days, the thinness of the psychic fabric a stark warning.
“Makes sense,” Remi said in that easy way of speaking, as if he had all the time in the world. “Why waste energy on such a small percentage of the population, especially when I’m guessing most of you tried to stay away from emotional reads?”
Auden nodded, feeling an odd expansion in her chest. This was the first time she’d spoken openly about her ability to anyone in real life. To someone who knew her as Auden Scott and not just anonymous user A9.
It felt so good that she broke her private rules, told him more. “Back in the old world, before Silence, psychometrics worked regularly with search and rescue and even Enforcement. They used to help catch serial killers.
“In one famous case, the Ps-Psy found a live victim because the victim had thrown her driver’s license out the window of the car as it was traveling the highway, but she’d been reciting her abductor’s registration number in her head at the time. Over and over again. Until it imprinted on the license.”
Remi whistled. “Wow, that’s seriously good tracking.”
“It was also agonizing,” she whispered. “I’ve read a copy of the book the psychometric published.” It was passed around the forum like a holy relic, a forbidden thing from the time before Silence.
“The license was a clean item as imprints go, but Crispin Nicholas—the psychometric—later read the basement on the killer’s farm, the place where he tortured and murdered his victims. Crispin wrote that it felt like fingers shoving into his skull while other fingers forced his eyes open and made him watch, made him see everything that had gone on in that place.
“He couldn’t look away, couldn’t make the images stop, was frozen in place until a human colleague figured out something had gone horrifically wrong and punched him unconscious before physically carrying him out—with no access to a strong telepath who could go in and disrupt the read, it was the only way to break him out of the loop.”
Remi’s agreement was quiet, his voice deep and low. “Be like picking up the scents at a murder scene a couple of days old. The fetid scent of decay.”