Total pages in book: 140
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 131364 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 657(@200wpm)___ 525(@250wpm)___ 438(@300wpm)
Quatro remained secret for a far darker reason. All four of them had begun to work as active Js at the same time, give or take a month or two. And all four of them had crossed a final dividing line within weeks of each other, whether by chance or because of the cases they’d been assigned over the years—Bram, Eleri, Saffron, and Yúzé ranged from 8.9 to 9.5 on the Gradient; they’d never been given any nonviolent cases after they completed their apprenticeships.
Theirs had been the realm of serial and spree murderers.
The four of them weren’t going to make it on either the psychic or psychological level.
“No point hiding from it,” Bram had written four months ago after Yúzé turned Sensitive, the last one of the Cartel to do so. “All four of us now have shields so thin that we pick up thoughts through even minor touch—staving off Exposure is going to take a mammoth effort, if it’s even possible.”
Exposure would mean the total loss of their shields, the psychic noise of the world crushing them until they screamed and tore at themselves in a futile effort to make it stop. No J ever voluntarily reached Exposure—the members of the Corps knew to choose their own exit route instead of being at the mercy of others after they’d lost their ability to function.
Eleri could imagine no worse death than being a mindless creature who could neither defend herself nor understand the screaming voices inside her head that would never, ever stop.
“This,” Bram had added, “remains what it’s always been—our online home, but it’s also now a place to share data about our rates of disintegration. Whichever one of us falls last, your task will be to compile that data and put it into Sophia’s hands, in the hope it’ll assist her in saving more J lives. For now, it’ll help the four of us set our affairs in order—including ensuring any delayed justice.”
Delayed justice.
Bram had a way of couching murder by Js in language that sounded almost harmless, but they all knew what he’d meant. Because though none of them had reached thirty, with Eleri and Yúzé just past twenty-seven and Bram and Saffron twenty-eight, they were all senior Js who had completed their final assigned cases.
While they technically remained Js in the system, with all the official access to information, their badges yet valid, it was understood that what time they had was their own; the four of them planned to use that time to correct mistakes in that system for which they’d been culpable—or which they hadn’t been able to stop.
As part of their pact to share everything they could to help each other plan their unavoidable descent into the abyss, Eleri had posted her PsyMed results an hour after she’d received them: Predicted status change from Sensitive to Exposed now at six months.
“Fuck, Eleri.” Saffron was angry in a way Eleri simply couldn’t become any longer, their brains having reacted in diametrically opposing ways to repeated reconditionings.
Where Saffron screamed her rage, Eleri drowned in nothingness.
“Six months?” Saffron had picked up and thrown the object nearest to her—a water glass that had shattered into bright shards of sound. “Fuck!”
Because Eleri was the first of them to be given the Exposure diagnosis, she’d added further context: I retain full cognitive and physical function. However, I can’t sleep for more than three hours at a stretch, and memories from retrievals early in my career have begun to surface at increasing speed.
Eleri was the canary in the coal mine now, hers the descent the others would watch in order to prepare for their own. The part of her that understood she’d once felt emotion on a deep level was glad that she could offer this gift to the people who had been her friends since the day she’d walked into class as a six-year-old child who’d been told she’d never again be going home.
Later, that same information might help others born far after the end of her own childhood.
“If the PsyMed specialists and empaths know what to watch for,” Bram had said when talking about compiling the information on their descent into Sensitivity, then Exposure, to pass on to Sophia, “they might actually be able to head it off at the pass.”
It’d be their second contribution to saving the J Corps. Their first had been to ensure Sophie became their leader—between the four of them, their network was labyrinthine and they’d put all their power behind the woman who was now their director.
That Sophie had a direct link to the Ruling Coalition was important, but they’d have disregarded that if she hadn’t also had their trust. Sophie might work for Nikita Duncan, but she remained a J to her core, her determination to protect her fellow Js an elemental part of her nature.