“Still, the trainers figured they might as well pit me against him just in case. I was led into our first session in a bland beige room furnished with a heavy metal table and two metal chairs. Vasic should’ve been sitting on one chair already, but he was standing in a corner, staring at the door.
“When I came in, he continued to look at me with this unblinking stare he shouldn’t have been able to maintain as a child.” Aden angled his head to meet Ivy’s gaze. “He was trying to disconcert me, make me run. Later, he told me it had worked with several of the other children. He broke their nerve just with his eyes.”
Ivy’s emotions knotted in her veins—affection for the boys they’d been, fury for what they’d both suffered, pride at the men they’d become. “What did you do?”
“Took my seat like the well-behaved child I was, and waited for the trainer to leave the room. I knew, of course, that the evaluation team would be monitoring our interaction via the surveillance equipment, as well as on the PsyNet. Then I watched him watch me.”
Ivy found herself charmed by the thought of two small boys trying to win a battle of wills. “Who blinked?”
“That’s a matter of dispute. I say he did. He says I did.”
Laughing softly, Ivy leaned in a little closer. “And?”
“When he realized I wasn’t going to leave, he went to phase two. Taking the seat across from me, he started lobbing psychic strikes at me in an erratic scattering rather than the mandated training pattern.” Aden’s profile was clean, no smile, and yet Ivy had the sense the memory was a good one.
“Apparently, he’d driven off quite a few others with that tactic. At that age, we’re taught in rote patterns,” he explained. “It’s meant to make certain things instinct, and it does, but it also leaves most child Arrows without the capacity to deal with unexpected situations.”
“You handled it,” Ivy guessed.
“I think it’s better to say I held my own,” he said. “Session completed, I got up and left. We went through pretty much the same routine ten times, never speaking a word. Then late one night I was in my room studying when the ceiling panel slid aside and he looked down and asked me if I wanted to go outside.”
Ivy started to smile. “What did you do?”
“It was past curfew, with all violations to be strictly punished.” A pause. “So I said yes and stood on a chair, and he hauled me up.” A glance at her laughing eyes. “I was much shorter then, while Vasic had already started to gain his height. We snuck outside and just walked around.”
It was the freedom, Ivy understood, that had been important, the fact they’d made a choice. “Vasic told me you once painted a training room in zebra stripes.”
“That was later, after we’d been partners for four years. We planned the operation down to the second, were back in our rooms before anyone discovered the incident.”
“I’m glad you had each other,” she said, releasing his shoulder to lean forward in an echo of his own position. “Thank you for looking after him.”
Aden’s responding look was quiet. “You don’t understand, Ivy. I didn’t look after Vasic. He looked after me—he understood I was a scared boy whose parents were Arrows who were gone ninety-nine percent of the time on missions that could end their lives, and who knew his place in the squad was shaky at best.
“Vasic had the handicap of a heart that felt too much, but he was always the more emotionally strong of the two of us . . . until the past two years, when I think the weight of the guilt began to crush him.”
Ivy understood both men would say the same thing with the opposite meaning. To Vasic, Aden had helped him stay sane. To Aden, Vasic had helped him stay upright when he would’ve fallen. One lost boy helping another.
Reaching out, she closed her hand over his again, knowing she was breaking boundaries, but these Arrows needed to have certain boundaries broken. Who better to do it than an empath? The squad had become so ferally protective of the Es that an E had more latitude with an Arrow than pretty much anyone else in the Net.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “There’s no ledger. You were there for one another, and because of that, I have a man who lives in my heart and he has a friend he knows he can rely on no matter what.”
Aden’s fingers twined with hers. “He also has a woman willing to walk in his darkness and not judge him. You don’t know how much that means.”
Soul aching, she leaned her head against his shoulder, and that was how they stayed for a long time. Then he made her eat again, drink again. She didn’t argue this time, realizing that Aden was sublimating his own fear by looking after her—if he lost Vasic, he’d lose the one person who was his family. So she did what he told her, even walked up and down the corridor after he said her back would get stiff.
Fourteen hours after the doors had closed on the surgery, they opened again.
Chapter 60
IVY AND ADEN both stood as one, staring at Samuel Rain. His formerly pristine white operating smock was bloody, his eyes drained and tired, but there was a jubilant smile on his face—shaved clean prior to the operation—that gave Ivy her answer even before he walked straight to her and said, “Go. He’s put himself under. He asked that you give the signal that he should wake.”
“Thank you.” Ivy hugged him so hard she almost knocked him off his feet. “Thank you.” Tears poured down her face.
“Wait,” Samuel said when she drew back to run to Vasic. “We had to take his arm.” The brilliant man scratched his head, a wary confusion in his eyes. “He told me it was all right before the surgery began. Should I have asked you?”