The smooth, blank wall inside his head taunted him.The wall had remained firm under the sodium pentothal mixed with Zed and the beatings.They hadn’t dared to use electroshock, which might destroy vital pieces of information.The telepaths had been unable to read him without excruciating pain and possible death, Del’s own talent extinguishing the mind that sought to probe it.
Every mind, except hers.
He felt along the wall again.He had locked something in the deepest recesses of his brain.Something precious.
The image of that half-remembered room—scarves tossed over the bed, plants growing lush in every corner, and sunlight spilling along shelves of books—returned.Familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, his only refuge while they tortured his body, the space held a faint, beautiful perfume.
He imagined himself there, standing on the mellow-glowing wood floor, the edge of his hand warmed with sun pouring through the French doors, and the aromas of paper and bindings and wet earth rising—she just watered the plants.
The thought was gone as soon as it appeared.
Nothing else but the faint, almost imperceptible odor of a woman’s skin, clean and fresh.
He was in three places at once—his body, lying on a cheap hotel bed in Lubbock, in that room full of sunlight and clean peace, and a third part crouched before the blank, smooth wall and scraping at it with fingers turned to bloody claws.
Let me in.Let me IN!
The answer, when it came, struck as hard as a fist to the gut.
Youpushedyourself to forget.Nowpushyourself to remember.Then you’ll know where she’s going, and who she is.
It was risky.He might end up a crippled, mind-shattered hulk if thepushricocheted.If Sigma caught him again, he doubted he could force anotherpushthrough in time.They wouldn’t just beat him up and fill him full of Zed.
No, they wouldn’t stop until he was dead.He’d outwitted them twice now, and was too dangerous for any profit his talent could bring.
So this time was for keeps.
Del gathered himself, feeling the need for Zed burning in the subtle traceries of his veins.If he took the hypo now, he wouldn’t have the concentration necessary for thepush, and he’d foul something up.No, this would be painful anyway, best to just get it over with.
He reexamined the wall, searching the smoothness for any weak spot.Looking at it like someone else’s mind, shielded and shut tight, but still vulnerable.Very few minds were completely impenetrable—only Zeke’s.That was why they called Zeke “the Tank,” because he was curiously inoculated against psychic attack.Even Del couldn’t crack him.
Delgado thought of the woman’s voice, her husky contralto.Justin!No!The flood of feeling from her, underlaid with something too pure to be described, a feeling like?—
Hepushed, gathering all his talent in one single, undeniable thrust.Battered the wall with the sound of her voice, agony curving into his brain’s map, black explosions against his eyelids as his back arched and his arms twisted uselessly, his heels drumming the mattress.
And the wall… broke.
But Delgado was finally, mercifully, unconscious.
He came to hours later, dried blood crusting his nose.His head throbbed, every nerve twisting excruciatingly.He fumbled for the hypo, pressed it against the inside of his elbow and heard more than felt the airpac discharge.Numb, blessed relief crawled upward, spilled past his shoulder.Spread through his chest and reached his legs, headed for his brain to short him out.
Oh, God,was his first thought.Oh, my God.No.
Echoes inside his head.A woman with long ash-blonde hair, green eyes dark with pain and her mouth clamped in a thin line.Memories flooding—running halfway across the country to escape Sigma, training her to be an operative, her voice crackling through a commlink as the rest of the world turned to gray fuzz because he’d been shot in a raid on a Sigma installation.She had literally pulled him back from death.
Her voice, the exact color of those eyes, the taste of her skin where the fragile pulse beat just above her collarbone.
Rowan.
He remembered now, remembered why he hadpushedhimself to forget.He’d sacrificed himself to get her out and away from the ruin of Headquarters, wiped his own head so he couldn’t be used against her, because she was the only thing he cared about.The only thing in the world that mattered.
Sigma was now frantically trying to find her while Delgado, mind almost shattered by agony, Zed, and his own talent, lay on a hotel bed and began to laugh aloud, a keening unhealthy sound.
He was going to find her first.
CHAPTER11
Vegas was shimmeringspikes bristling into desert night under small, flinty stars.Outside the window, an entire world thrummed with an electric bath of greed and light, but it was, for all its desperation, a relaxed town—probably due to the sheer amount of alcohol being consumed, fuzzing all the deadheads out.
