Atonement Sky

Chapter 1

"Some of us didn't make it, Sophie. We've accepted that. Our final goal is to create a better world for the next generation of the children we once were."

"No, I won't let you do this."

"You have no choice-to be a good leader, you have to implement triage, focus your energy on the ones who are salvageable. Leave the rest of us to do what we do best. We've bathed in evil . . . there's no washing that off, so we might as well use it to lure monstrous prey."

-Heated discussion between Eleri Dias (J Corps) and Sophia Russo
(director of the J Corps) (5 January 2084)

The road to Raintree, Arizona, was composed of sprawling desert and rippling walls of red-orange rock. Eleri was no geologist, had no idea whether the rock was shale or limestone or something else altogether. All she saw were natural formations that looked as if they'd been created by an expert sculptor, each ripple and gradation of color put delicately in place.

Where the rocks fell away, the desert glinted, the only signs of life in any direction scraggly bushes of a sandy green hue and the majestic forms of saguaro cactus plants, their arms akimbo at ninety-degree angles.

The sky was a searing blue, the landscape as arid and dry as Eleri's heart and mind. It seemed fitting that it would all end here, in this place devoid of the lush greenery so prevalent in the place where she'd taken her first breath too many shadow memories ago.

LIAR!!

That echo was as vicious today as the day it had been born, his voice having haunted her through all the years in between. And the further she drove into Raintree, the higher the likelihood that she'd come face-to-face with him . . . with the one person to whom she could never atone. There was no way to bring back the dead, and he'd taken care of the justice at which she'd failed.

Eleri. That's pretty. My name is Adam.

Her fingers flexed on the steering wheel, the wall of numbness in her mind a gift against the past. How much worse would it be if she could truly experience it, instead of looking at it from beyond a vast gulf of nothingness?

She hadn't shared her latest PsyMed test results with Sophia. They would have distressed her, and she was already in a physically vulnerable state, her pregnancy now at seven and a half months.

Poor Sophie.

Trying so hard to save all of them when that was an impossibility. And a terrible irony, because it had been Sophia's refusal to give up on her fellow Js that had led to her forcible elevation to Director of the J Corps.

Sophia was Ruling Coalition member Nikita Duncan's senior aide, and had no time to head a group of damaged telepaths who had once been overseen by the J Corps Management Board. But when the Ruling Coalition wiped out that board-after Sophia brought its mismanagement of the Corps to the Coalition's attention-and asked all working Js in the world to get together to nominate their new leadership, they'd come back with a single name: Sophia "Sophie" Russo.

They'd dropped the mess of the J Corps into Sophia's lap and trusted her to build a better long-term structure for them. She could've said no, but of course she hadn't. Because Sophie wanted not just life for all of them, but a life filled with joy and hope.

"Sophia's as tough as fucking nails, except when it comes to Js."

It was Bram who'd said that in the conversation group of four he'd set up almost eighteen years ago: the Quatro Cartel. Bram's little joke because the biggest case in the news at the time-when the four of them had been between nine and ten-had involved a ruthless drug cartel that liked to remove organs from people who owed them money, for no reason except that it was horrific torture.

"Perhaps we should follow that cartel's example, Bram," Saffron had said two months ago in her whisper of a voice, her throat still healing from her altercation with a murderer on a rampage. "Remove organs one by one, make our targets suffer."

No one had told her that would take her into sociopath territory. Fact was, none of them had the patience for such games of torture, especially not Saffron, with her violent rages and extreme temper. Regardless, they agreed with her in principle-after what they'd seen in the minds they'd wandered, Eleri and the rest of the cartel of four had no doubts about evil and what it deserved.

Quatro had begun as a secret because they'd been children at a strict boarding school who'd wanted a private way to talk. It was Yúzé who'd taken Bram's initial idea and used his tech skills to move the chat into a secure online room-Eleri didn't understand how he'd done it, but then tech had always been Yúzé's specialty. As a J, he'd been pulled near exclusively into cases that involved high-tech elements of murder.

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.

A sense of movement in Eleri's peripheral vision.

Glancing out the window of her vehicle, she glimpsed a large bird wing lazily over the desert landscape, its upper feathers a deep gray with a bluish tone. On the underside were bands of white interspersed with black. Dark eyes, with feathers of a much darker hue under those eyes.

A peregrine falcon, an extraordinary aerial hunter with acute vision, and the majority type of falcon that made up the WindHaven clan. She'd researched them as much as she could before heading toward the town that had been linked to the predatory clan throughout known history-but the falcons were as reticent as most other changelings, and all she had was scraps.

This falcon kept easy pace with her as she passed the sign that marked the town boundary: Welcome to Raintree! Where the Canyons Are Vast and the Skies Endless. The background image was of a lush forested area nestled against a towering rock face painted in the colors of sunset.

The changeling winged away at that point-and she knew it had been a changeling from the size. Changeling birds were much larger than their natural counterparts-though not as much as they should have been given their size in human form. She'd found endless online threads talking about the mass differential in certain changeling species-many had theories, but none answers.

LIAR! It was no mistake!

Strokes of green began to color the landscape as she drove deeper into Raintree and into the echoes of the past. This far out, she saw only the odd sign of habitation. From her research, the town had natural access to a tributary of the Colorado River that caused it to be somewhat of an oasis in this arid region. She saw that firsthand when she came around the corner . . . and into a sudden explosion of dark green.

Raintree didn't quite fit in this landscape.

It was too fertile, too abundant. As if it had been plucked out of the Pacific Northwest and dropped into this landscape of desert browns and rust reds, an intruder that had decided to settle in for the long haul.

Shaking off the sense of wrongness but making note of it because it might be a sign of mental degradation, she lowered her speed. This seemed like the kind of place where children might run across roads while neighbors gossiped on corners.

Turned out she'd been a little too early in her caution; she didn't see any sign of true civilization until at least five minutes later. The houses that began to pop up at that point were small and neat, with well-maintained front yards, some of which had a number of desert rocks in them.

Greenery crawled over the rock, life defying the desert Eleri had just traversed.

But the green was no challenge to the soaring rock faces striated with orange and yellow, red and pink, that rose on either side of the town. They rippled like water, the rough surface appearing smooth as glass from this distance.

Raintree, she realized, was based inside a canyon that leaned in to shadow the town from both sides; the sunlight that reached Raintree would mostly be on either end of the day rather than in the blistering middle. Add in its proximity to water, and no wonder the town had such an unexpected microclimate.

Almost at a standstill on the road now, she looked up to the looming canyon wall to the left of the town and frowned. Either she was having vision issues or someone was standing high up on the side of the rock face.

A rock climber on a ledge?

Her vision wasn't sharp enough to make out details from so far out, but then she saw a pair of wings sweep out over the person on the ledge and sucked in a breath.

Falcons.

She understood now. They were linked to Raintree, but it wasn't their home. That sat high above the town. She should've realized that; why would winged changelings want to live on the ground when they could live in a nest in the sky?

Liar! You fucking liar!

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel, the renewed roar of the memory a thunderous force . . . as if it had gained strength from the sight of the lone falcon who stood so high above Raintree, his confidence apparent in his stance even from this distance.

Eleri. That's pretty. My name is Adam.

Chapter 2

Winged changelings, especially the raptors, are interesting in the most fascinating way. While their clans follow a similar internal structure to those of earthbound predatory packs like the wolves and bears, they have a unique culture built on the freedom extended by their wings.