Total pages in book: 131
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 121389 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 607(@200wpm)___ 486(@250wpm)___ 405(@300wpm)
When another attendant came to consult with Ivan’s partner, Ivan carried on. He could handle the smaller bodies on his own, and the attendant had paired his device with Ivan’s phone so Ivan could run the IDs.
Despite everything, he still wasn’t ready to see bodies so small he could carry two or three at once.
But of course, children had called this place home, too.
“They’re just as dead,” he told himself, keeping things chillingly pragmatic. That was how he functioned with anyone but Lei, was the reason he wasn’t insane: a wall of cold sophistication that separated him from the wider world.
He pulled that ice around himself now. He was no use to the dead if he couldn’t do what needed to be done, if he saw in these small bodies a whisper of what might’ve been for a small boy born into a pitiless life some three decades ago.
After ID’ing and logging the first child’s body, he got a small body bag from one of the boxes situated throughout the area of the massacre. It was a matter of two minutes to return, put the body gently in the bag, write the ID on the tag, and carry it with care to the refrigerated truck.
“Sleep well, little one,” he found himself saying though he knew it was foolish; this child’s ears would never again hear anything.
He still treated the body with utmost care, even climbing inside the truck so he could position the body on the top shelf.
Where nothing would crush that small, cold form.
Then he continued on. Body after body.
It was in the most churned-up part of the park area that he found her. She was buried under five other bodies, and invisible to his gaze. He’d been planning to ID the bodies he could see, then call over his partner to help get them in body bags, as the deceased were all adult males. Because while Ivan was far stronger than suggested by his lithe frame, the dead had a dark weight to them.
Then the background telepathic scan he ran at every moment, a low-level security tactic that was second nature, suddenly snagged, hitting a mind that was a wall. Not shielded. Naturally opaque. Only changeling minds felt like that.
Memory crashed into him, of the last time he’d hit a mind that closed.
Suffocating the wave of emotion that threatened to surge past the ice, he glanced toward the forest that bordered this settlement, assuming he had an ocelot watcher—but the line of trees was too far, not captured even on the far edge of his scan. He took in the area again. To his knowledge, every other worker here was Psy, and the civilian survivors had been evacuated for the duration of the cleanup.
That left only one possibility—a living changeling mind among the dead.
Chapter 7
We were once knights to a king, our loyalty unbreakable. We serve no kings now, but we continue to live with honor. Family, fidelity, integrity. That is what it means to be a Mercant.
—Ena Mercant to Ivan Mercant (circa 2061)
IMPOSSIBLE, SAID THE most logical part of Ivan’s brain, but—as proven by his attempt to bond with Lei—he was far more than simply that part. His mind had been blown wide open in childhood, the memories he held a kaleidoscope of sweet madness. And it was that part of him that had him in motion the instant he realized he was looking for a living mind.
It was possible the survivor had been frozen into a suspended state, as had occurred in the past with people who fell into ice-cold bodies of water … or they’d been insulated from the cold by the bodies on top of them. Just enough warmth to keep their heart pumping.
He began to slide aside the male bodies in the closest pile one by one, not being as gentle as he should’ve been. If he was wrong, so be it. If he was right …
Then there she was, a long-legged form crumpled inside an ankle-length dress of vibrant pink-red that had twisted around her, her denim jacket torn almost to shreds. She was covered in blood that had dried to a viscous thickness, her hair a tumbled black stuck to the side of her face with more dried blood.
At least one of her arms and her left leg were clearly shattered. Bruises and cuts swelled and broke her face, and the warm brown of her skin was now flat and edged with blue where it wasn’t bruised a sickly green.
None of it mattered.
He knew her.
“Lei,” he whispered, his voice sandpaper and his hand trembling as he forced himself to check her pulse.
Ice against his fingertips, a cold whisper that this place belonged to the dead. Except …
Thud … thud … thud …
The pauses between beats were dangerously long. Even as he processed the horror of finding his sparkling Lei so broken and hurt, he was scooping her up in his arms. He had to tug to release her from the earth. Jarring her broken bones didn’t matter, not when her life was at stake. She was barely clinging to the world, the dull speed of her pulse a countdown to death.