SAHARA FELL OUT of the memory to find her cheeks wet and her hands fisted to bloodless severity, anger a jagged blade in her chest. She had loved him. So much. Enough to defy her family. Enough to chance the psychic brainwipe of rehabilitation. Enough to fight for him even when he warned her off.

She had loved him until it was the defining fact of her existence.

Life, she thought, rubbing her hand over her heart, had come full circle. Because as the girl she'd been had loved him, so did the woman she'd become, her heart branded with his name. No matter what the future held, the terrible choice she might yet have to make, no one else would ever be to her what Kaleb- Another unraveling of memory, dragging her further back into the past.

"Please show Kaleb around the grounds, Sahara." Anthony nodded at the boy who sat straight backed and expressionless in a chair beside a man Sahara disliked on sight. She knew not to say that, however. She was only seven, her Silence brittle, so she wouldn't be in big trouble for blurting out her immediate and violent distaste, but she'd still be in trouble, probably have to do twice her normal quota of mental exercises.

Better to keep her mouth shut.

The man she didn't like shot her a glance out of cardinal eyes that weren't pretty like the boy's, but flat, dead. "That child," he said, dismissing her as if she were a piece of furniture, "is too young to provide conversation that will in any way interest Kaleb. He can remain."

"I don't conduct business with children present," Anthony responded in a calm tone that Sahara knew meant her uncle wasn't about to change his mind. "We can schedule another appointment next month to discuss the forecasting services required by your company."

Steepling his fingers, the not-nice man turned his head toward the boy whose name was Kaleb. "Go. Behave yourself."

To Sahara, the words sounded like a threat.

Walking with Kaleb around the grounds, Sahara pointed out the things her father had told her she must point out to a guest. "Such independent social interaction with nonfamily members is an important part of your education," he'd said. "If your backsight eventually leads you to a career in Justice, you'll need to interact with a wide range of personalities, both Psy and not. I've told Anthony you're ready to act as a guide for those of your age and slightly older."

Sahara was pretty sure the boy called Kaleb fell outside that age group, but Anthony probably didn't have any choice but to use her since the older children wouldn't get out of school for another hour.

She was telling Kaleb about the hydroponic garden when she glanced up and saw fine lines radiating out from his eyes, bracketing his mouth. "My father's an M," she said. "We can go see him."

Kaleb stared at her with eyes that had lost their stars. "Why?"

Sahara was sure he had a hurt somewhere, but she knew it wasn't polite to say things like that to someone she didn't know. So she said, "He has interesting scanners in his office."

"I've seen medical scanners before."

Figuring Kaleb wanted to see his own medic and not a stranger, Sahara said, "Okay," and kept going . . . only she didn't walk as fast, and she didn't take him up the slope to the recreation center the grown-ups used for exercise. If they went there, the manager would want Kaleb to try the new machines, and she didn't think he should while he was hurt.

"There's fish in the pond," she said, after they'd covered all the areas visitors were permitted to view. "Do you want to see?"

Kaleb followed her in silence, but he went down on one knee to watch the orange fish in the pond in the center of the park within the NightStar compound. "Why was this created?"

Sahara barely stopped her shrug in time. Someone of her age, she'd been told multiple times, should've already conquered the habit. "I heard Father say it was an 'approved meditation aid,'" she parroted without quite understanding the words. "The F-Psy who live here use it." Her cousin Faith didn't live in the compound. She had a separate house, like all the really strong foreseers.

"Are you an F?"

"Not really. I'm subdesignation B. That means I have backsight." It wasn't as interesting as being an F, but Sahara thought she might like catching bad people for Justice. "What are you?"

"A Tk."

Excited-though she tried not to let it show, in case he told on her-she said, "Can you do any tricks?" One of the telepaths in her cla.s.s had just a tiny bit of Tk and she could write on the electronic board without moving from her seat in the cla.s.s; the teachers made her do that so she'd practice her telekinesis.

Kaleb didn't say anything and it took Sahara a few seconds to realize she wasn't touching the ground anymore, her body floating several inches off the gra.s.s. Eyes wide, she stood up, her feet on nothing, then, checking to make sure no one was watching, jumped up and down without ever hitting the ground.

"That was wonderful," she whispered when he set her down, then felt bad she'd forgotten about his pain. "I'm sorry. Did it hurt you to do that?"

Shaking his head, Kaleb played a finger through the water of the pond, making the lazy fish pretend to move. "Your Silence is flawed for your age group."

Suddenly aware she'd forgotten to fake Silence because he was nice even if he didn't talk a lot, Sahara bit down on her lower lip. "Are you going to tell on me?"

"No."

And he never had, Sahara thought, sitting on a corner of her bed, her back braced against the wall and her arms wrapped around her knees as she thought of the boy with such haunting pain in his eyes. Instead, he'd taught her how to be more careful . . . and he'd visited her.

"h.e.l.lo."

Surprised, Sahara looked up from the wide stump where she sat. No one ever came this way, her home backing onto a stand of trees that ended at the perimeter fence. Pretty cardinal eyes in an expressionless face met her own.

"Hi!" Knowing her father was busy in his study on the other side of the house, she put down the datapad that held her despised math homework. "Is that man here again?" She hesitated, then said what was in her heart, since Kaleb had kept his word and not reported her terrible Silence. "I don't like him."

Kaleb shook his head. "I came to see you." A pause. "I don't know any other children who talk to me."

"That must be lonely." She broke off half her nutrition bar, held it out. "I know you probably think I'm a baby, but you can be my friend if you like." Shifting on the stump when he accepted the snack, she made a s.p.a.ce for him.

"I don't think you're a baby." He took a seat beside her. "I think you're smart and you see things other people don't." This time, the pause was longer, his gaze focused on something she couldn't see. "I don't like him, either."

Another thread pulling free of the vault almost before she'd a.s.similated the last, another memory, this one tinged with laughter.

Sahara poked out her tongue at the datapad on her lap. She might be eleven and much better at pretending to be Silent in public, but she still hated math. She'd tried to tell her teachers not to put her into accelerated lessons when it came to this one subject, but they kept pointing out the fact that her IQ scores placed her learning capacity in the gifted range. According to them, all she had to do was try harder. "Hah!"

When Kaleb appeared beside the stump where she always did her homework, she smiled in relief. "I have to finish this by Friday," she told him. "Or I'll be put into an after-school math tutorial." It wasn't the tutorial part that horrified her-it was the thought of doing even more math!

"Here." He took a seat beside her, a greenish bruise below the curve of his left cheekbone.

Sahara kicked her heel back into the stump to force herself not to ask about the bruise, the impact painful on her bare skin. She knew the answer to her question and she knew there was nothing she could do about it, the knowledge bubbling acid in her stomach. "What's this?" Putting aside her datapad and tightening her abdomen against the futile surge of anger, she took the hard-copy book he held out.

"You're a tactile learner," he said, as she opened the pages to see that it was a math textbook. "I thought this might help you remember the equations better." Reaching into a pocket, he put two ink pens between them.

"Why don't you just tell me the answers?" she asked brightly. "Then we can talk about much more interesting things."

Kaleb simply looked at her with those beautiful starlight eyes that were too often an empty black these days, holding a numbness that made her chest hurt.

Sighing, but happy because he hadn't gone away again, she picked up the blue pen and began to do the equations on the first page, making sure to write down her entire painstaking process. When she was done, Kaleb went over her work, showing her where she'd made errors of logic so she wouldn't make the same ones again.

"Can you write down the correct processes, too?" she asked him. "I can use them as study aids while I do my homework." No matter what the teachers tried, Sahara never learned as well at school as she did with Kaleb when it came to math. He knew exactly how to explain things to her.

Nodding, he went down the page with a black pen, his writing strong and neat. "Did you have a dance lesson today?"

She said, "Yes," then ran over to the side of the house to peek at the window to her father's study. He was still there, working on a paper for the Psy-Med Journal. Smiling, she ran back to Kaleb. "I learned a new step." Bubbles of happiness in her blood. "Want to see?"

Closing the math textbook, he set it on the stump and nodded. Then, as the birds flew home to their nests and the sky turned a dusky orange, she danced, the gra.s.s soft beneath her bare feet and Kaleb her quiet audience.

Sahara's heart warmed at the innocence of the memory, at her absolute trust in the boy-becoming-a-man who had understood that for her, dancing was like breathing, their friendship iron strong. It had only grown stronger as the years pa.s.sed, but Kaleb had had to be so careful-Enrique had him on a very tight psychic leash, but the older he grew, the better he became at slipping that leash for small periods of time.

Secret, everything had been secret.

Her stomach clenched without warning at the whispered thought, bile coating her throat.

Staggering out of bed, she made it to the bathroom before falling to her hands and knees to retch, her abdomen and throat hurting from the force of the convulsive shudders that tore through her body to leave her shivering on the floor. When she could move again, she cleaned up the mess, brushed her teeth, then showered under a red-hot spray before wrapping a towel around her body and walking to sit back down on the bed.

Droplets of water trickled over her neck and between her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, but she made no move to mop them up, her mind on her fragmented past. It didn't take a genius intellect to realize the bad thing that had happened to her was somehow connected to Kaleb, an event her mind continued to rebel against remembering, regardless of how hard she tried.

All it got her was the promise of another episode like the one she'd just suffered.

Frustrated but conscious she couldn't expect absolute recall all at once, she gave up the fruitless exercise after twenty minutes and got up. Pulling on underwear, a pair of jeans, and a V-necked cashmere pullover in an azure blue shade that Faith had gifted her, the texture exquisite against her skin, she dried and braided her hair.

Her next task was to check on her father. Hearing that he was in a natural, deep sleep had her smiling after she disconnected the comm link. She could've gone for a walk under the moonlight, but what she really needed was to be close to Kaleb, her heart chilled by the malevolence that hovered over her.

Is your meeting over? she asked over the extraordinarily pure connection that spoke of his telepathic strength.

Yes. I'm working from the house-what do you need?

Swallowing at the question that said so much about what he felt for her, she sent her answer. To come to you.

Kaleb appeared by her side an instant later, dressed in the same suit he'd been wearing earlier, minus the jacket, his collar open and sleeves rolled up. "Is something wrong?"

"No." Stepping into his arms, she held on tight. "Can we sit on the terrace?"

Skin hot through the fine fabric of his shirt, he took her home and sat down in the lounger with her between his legs, her body curled up against him under the early afternoon sunlight on this side of the world. It took time for the masculine heat of him to melt the ice, for her body to stretch out until she lay with her back to his chest, his arms around her and one of his legs bent slightly at the knee outside her own.

"You made me float beside the koi pond."

Tension infiltrated his muscles at her quiet words. "You remembered."

"Yes." She curled her hand around his biceps. "How we met, how you came to visit me."

"Do you," he said, the tension fading, "remember what you asked me to do on your fifteenth birthday?"

Sahara went to shake her head but the memory was suddenly there, as if it had simply been waiting for her to notice.

Chapter 33.

SAHARA'S LAUGH WAS sunlight in his veins. "I asked you to kiss me. And you said no!" Tipping up her head, she pretended to scowl at him. "I finally had to make the first move."

"In my defense, I was twenty-one to your fifteen. It would've been inappropriate." Stroking his hand around her throat, he angled her head so he could taste her lips. That she'd come to him after what he'd told her at the aerie, it was a miracle. The fact that her mind continued to withhold the b.l.o.o.d.y truth from her was another.

"It took me a year to build up the courage," she murmured against his mouth, lips curved and fingers laced behind his neck.

"Your determination," he said, pushing up the softness of her pullover to place his hands on the silken warmth of her abdomen, "has never been anything less than steely." She'd caught him as he bent over her wrist to affix the dancer charm to her bracelet. He'd been so startled at the shockingly intimate contact, he hadn't broken away, and the taste of Sahara had entered his bloodstream, a brand he'd wear for the rest of his life.

Color had painted her cheeks in the aftermath. "Sixteen and twenty-two isn't a significant gap." It had been a mutinous statement. "Five more years and I'll be twenty-one, and a legal adult with full rights. We can file a conception and fertilization contract, and once we have a child, we can agree to joint parenting and live-"

"Yes," he'd said, interrupting the rush of words because she had no need to convince him to accept a trust of which he would never be deserving, but that he intended to take and protect to his last breath.

A dawning smile. "We'll have a home," she'd whispered, "where I can kiss you as often as I like."

But that had been their first, their only kiss. Two days later, Sahara had screamed until her voice broke, her blood slick on her brutalized skin.

"I'm sorry," he said, the memory one he'd carry to his grave, "that I'm not the man you remember. Too many things happened while you were gone." If she'd been with him through that time, the bright light in the nightmare, he might have battled to retain some sliver of his "humanity." But they had stolen her from him, stolen the only being in the universe about whom he cared, and in so doing, they'd changed the course of the world.

Sahara's fingers tightened on his arm. "You're mine." Simple, quiet words that were a punch to the chest. "I will fight for you, today, tomorrow, and all the tomorrows to come."

In the intensity of the silence that followed as they simply held on to one another, as if to mitigate a separation that had scarred them both, he saw her eyes close, her breathing even. She'd fallen asleep in his arms. The first time she'd done that, she'd been eleven years old, their relationship a friendship that had become integral to his sanity.

Tired from her dance lessons, she'd leaned against him as they sat in front of the stump, and the next thing he knew, she was fast asleep. No one had ever shown him such trust. He hadn't dared move for the entire time he was able to spend with her, waking her with the gentlest of telepathic hails when it was time for him to go.

He could still remember the smudgy blue of her eyes when she'd wakened, the way she'd accepted his presence without surprise or fear. As if that was his place. With her. Rubbing at her eyes, she'd said, "Will you come tomorrow?"

"Yes."

He'd always said yes to her, to the girl who had given him a sense of belonging, a sense of home. As she'd grown and realized where he went when he left her, what was done to him, those eyes had turned bruised. But never had she turned away from him, no matter how broken he was when he came to her.

"I'll tell," she'd said at twelve, her face set. "He's hurting you even if you won't say how, and I won't be quiet about it anymore!"

"You can't. There's no evidence." Santano had made certain of that. And should a J-Psy be called in to check Kaleb's memories-"I'll have a fatal accident before he allows anyone close enough to examine me."

Tears of rage, face red. "I hate that monster! I hate him."

In the end, her loyalty and love for him had cost her everything. "I'm sorry," he said again, touching his fingers to the tiny scar on her cheekbone. "No one will ever again cause you harm." He'd already executed three of the guards who had helped to imprison and torture her.

All had hidden like the rats they were when they understood they were being hunted, but Kaleb was patient. He'd find each and every one. And he'd break their minds before he broke their necks.

THREE days later, Sahara waved good-bye to her father on the comm and watched him turn away to get to work. He'd been discharged a day earlier and was already in the clinic office, looking over patient files in direct violation of the orders given him by his own medic. There was no doubt where she'd inherited her will-a will Kaleb had teased to a shattering point the previous night.

After he'd sat distractingly shirtless beside her as she viewed one of his research videos. Every so often, he'd looked up from his datapad to point out a technical aspect of what the naked people on-screen were doing, his voice cool and expression clinical. She'd lasted exactly seventeen minutes before pouncing on him.

Blushing at how very unclinical he'd been with her, she turned off the comm and headed down the rope ladder to meet Faith and Mercy for a shopping trip to San Francisco. It was time for her to explore her new life, and the idea of doing it with friends was sweetly wonderful. Both her cousin and the witty, kind DarkRiver sentinel had become an important part of her life, and she intended to nurture that relationship, come what may.

"I need to think about what I'm going to do," she said to them in the SUV, turning slightly to involve Faith in the discussion. Her cousin had insisted Sahara take the front pa.s.senger seat when Mercy picked them up, since the scenery would be new to her. "With my life, I mean."

"You don't have to decide that right now." Faith frowned over her carry cup of coffee, the scent luscious enough to make Sahara question her own dislike of the bitter liquid. "If anyone's earned downtime, it's you."

"That's what I thought"-Sahara made a face-"but that's not my personality." It never had been. "Now that I'm healthier, my brain's going a hundred miles an hour." She'd already inhaled multiple textbooks on her favorite subjects.

Mercy grinned. "Leopards, as they say, don't change their spots."