Total pages in book: 149
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 138217 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 691(@200wpm)___ 553(@250wpm)___ 461(@300wpm)
Yakov grinned. “Ena’s heir in more ways than one.” Silver Mercant wasn’t the director of EmNet because she was anything less than ruthlessly organized and meticulous in her goals. “So, what do you need me for?”
Silver told him.
Making a face, he folded his arms across his chest. “Izvinite, Siva,” he said, though he wasn’t really sorry—his parents had just raised him to be a polite bear. “That’s a big nyet from me.”
Silver Mercant was well used to dealing with growly and uncooperative bears, didn’t bat an eyelash at his response. “Even if it gains you entry to a highly secure facility with the warrant to poke about at will?”
Yakov scowled. “You fight dirty.”
That was when she pushed across the box of fresh donuts he’d been smelling since he walked into this meeting that was really a cat-sneaky ambush designed to make him spend a lot of time with a person he most assuredly was not going to like.
“I hate you,” he muttered with zero weight behind his words as he picked up one of the glazed circles of fried goodness and finished it off in two bites. “So,” he said now that his stomach was happier, “you want me to babysit a Psy who might be a psycho?”
Silver rubbed her temples as she had a way of doing when dealing with recalcitrant bears. He might actually buy it along with the pinched expression in her eyes except—
“You like us.” He grinned and spread out his arms. “You are, in fact, enchanted by our beariness.”
Lips twitching in one of those still-rare expressions of emotion, Silver dropped the act. “I need help,” she said simply.
Chapter 5
Councilor Adelaja brings up an excellent point. While the pre-Silence generation of adults is beginning to thin out due to age and the cognitive dissonance created by our people’s new way of life, we do have a problem with young individuals who continue to fail to achieve satisfactory levels of Silence. It’s time to talk about a solution.
—Councilor Vey Gunasekara to fellow members of the Psy Council (circa 2012)
YAKOV GROANED ON the heels of Silver’s confession that she needed his help. “Grr, now I can’t say no.” He ate another donut in revenge, and reached across to steal the mug of hot coffee she’d just poured for herself. “So—how do the Americans say it?—lay it on me.”
Leaning back in her chair, every single blond hair contained in an elegant twist at the back of her head, and her upper body clad in a white shirt and a gray suit jacket, Silver said, “What do you know about the Centers?”
“Not much.” Yakov put down the misshapen coffee mug that looked to have been made by one of the cubs. “Nova told me once that the Psy sent people they considered ‘defective’ there to be brainwashed.” He made a face. “I mean, it sounded about right for what we knew of the Psy under Silence so I never questioned it.”
Silver made no effort to don the mask she wore around outsiders. Her anger was as cold as a Siberian winter. “Nova was close but she didn’t go far enough. Silence was all about conditioning emotion out of Psy—those who wouldn’t or couldn’t conform were sent to a Center for rehabilitation.” Her jaw was a hard line against the cool white of her skin. “Such a detached word.”
Yakov wished he hadn’t eaten those donuts now. “It wasn’t brainwashing, was it?”
Silver shook her head. “It was a brainwipe.” Her hand flexed, pressing down against the top of her desk. “They literally erased people. If they’d gotten their hands on Arwen, my brother would—” Silver bit off the words but Yakov didn’t need them to understand.
Arwen—sophisticated, snobby, and painfully kind Arwen—was an empath. A being whose entire world was made up of emotion. The very thing the Silence Protocol had made illegal for the Psy. “These victims,” he said, because fuck if he’d use the word “patients” for the horror she was describing, “did they die?”
“Some,” she said, “but that tended to be unintentional. The survivors were left as little more than vegetables who could move and do menial tasks at best. Their real job was to be a warning to the rest of us to toe the line—or else.”
Gut churning, Yakov shoved back his chair and got up to prowl around the room, his bear wanting to explode out of his skin. He was by no means one of the more impulsive bears in StoneWater. He couldn’t do his job as one of his alpha’s seconds if he were prone to flying off the handle, but neither was he a Psy trained to hide his emotions.
“How could anyone have agreed to Silence knowing that was one of the consequences?” he demanded.
“It didn’t begin that way.” Silver’s tone shivered with fury. “It was the first generation raised in Silence—the first Silent natives—who founded the Centers.”