Chapter 33

Subject V-1 is showing significant neural “burns.” We need to stop the alternating drug regimen before the subject begins to lose cognitive function.

—Message from Dr. Upashna Leslie to Councilor Marshall Hyde (5 May 2069)

AS HE AND Theo continued to search the facility, Yakov’s bear nudged at him to move closer to her, dazzle her with his prowess. The human part of him told the bear to rein it in. Theo might’ve allowed him to cuddle her in bed and petted him with wild pleasure, but she wasn’t yet ready to be dazzled as the bear wanted her dazzled.

Naked. The bear wanted naked. Lots of naked.

After all, it had spent years waiting for her to turn up. It figured now that Yakov knew Theo could be trusted, the courtship was done. Time to get naked. Naked skin privileges would also make her feel better, the bear argued. She was so sad and angry inside and what better cure for that than hard-core cuddling?

We have to be subtle, he reminded the bear. Valya had won Silver by being subtle, hadn’t he? Psy like subtle.

Valya climbed up Silver’s building and appeared outside her door, his bear pointed out helpfully.

Shaking his head to stop the argument going on inside his head, he lifted up the bed he’d already searched and stood it against the wall. And yes, he flexed a few muscles in the hope that Theo would notice, but he was subtle about it.

No ripping his clothes off, then strutting over to her and putting his hands on his hips to best display his assets as his bear suggested.

He didn’t glance over to see if she had in fact noticed, which was as well, because his eye caught on something. One of the legs of the bed didn’t look right. All the other beds he’d examined so far had featured a single continuous metal frame, but this one appeared to have legs that could be screwed on or off.

“Means a cavity inside,” he said to himself, thinking aloud. “Question is whether it’s deep enough to be a useful space, or just enough for the leg to be screwed in.”

Unscrewing it was child’s play—it hadn’t been built to withstand bear strength. He pulled and it was off.

A cascade of color bouncing off the polished but dusty floor.

“What’s that sound?” Theo ran over, her scent a welcome caress over his senses. “It sounded like pebbles.” That was when her eyes fell on the colorful array at his feet.

They crouched down in concert, each picking up a different pill. Hers was long and red, a capsule in which tiny particles tumbled when she turned the capsule this way and that. His was a small and hard tablet, half green and half pink.

“A patient hoarding or avoiding medication,” he murmured, picking up another jewel-like pill; this one was hexagonal in shape but a bland beige in color. “For a long time, too.”

Theo stared at the array of color. “No,” she said. “Look at the different varieties. If we say that the patient was given one of each every day, there are still only enough pills for four or five days. Ten days if we split the pills into alternate days.”

Yakov realized he’d made a critical mistake; he’d assumed that no one would give a patient so many pills in a single day. “You were more on the tech side of nursing, right? Developing medical items?”

“I was a drone,” she muttered. “I chose the nursing degree, thought I could use it to get out. But my grandfather punished me for rebelling against him by sticking me in a dead-end position that I couldn’t leave without abandoning Pax—because if I left, I knew I’d have to go under, beyond deep.

“Otherwise my grandfather would’ve hunted me down out of spite; and by then, he’d learned how much pain he could inflict on me without my subconscious reaching out to Pax. He would’ve taken great pleasure in keeping me as his whipping girl after I conveniently made myself disappear.”

Yakov went motionless, the bear’s playfulness replaced by predatory rage. “He physically abused you.”

A shrug. “I never cried.” Fierce pride. “And I was bored out of my skull in my job, so I made it my business to learn as much as I could about what it was my grandfather manufactured in that particular facility. Including all of these pills.”

It took teeth-gritted concentration for Yakov to focus on her words and not on the information she’d so casually shared.

“I’d built up quite the chemical arsenal simply by picking up detritus from the factory floor,” she told him, a gleam in her eye. “I was planning to poison Grandfather at our next meeting, but an assassin blew him up before I could. It was the one murder I would’ve never regretted.”

Yakov’s bear rumbled in his chest, proud of her ferociousness even as he wanted to go out there and bring Marshall Hyde back to life so he could rip him to shreds with his claws. The bear’s rumble yet in his tone, he said, “Any therapeutic reason a person would be given this many pills?”

Theo began to put the pills into groups. Seeing what she was doing, he helped her and they ended up with ten discrete piles. At which point, Theo leaned forward and put those piles into three groupings.

“None of these medications have been anonymized,” she told him, then picked up a pill and showed him the stamp in the middle that bore a letter of the Cyrillic alphabet. “There was no reason for them to be anonymized or used in a generic form. No one was ever going to come here and do a prescription audit.”

“You recognize them?”

Theo pointed to the first set of pills. “If I’m correct, those are basic sedatives. Relatively mild except for the dark pink capsules—one of those will hit a Psy hard. They’d be able to follow only the most basic commands at best.”

She pointed to the second pile. “Those relate to digestion, more specifically to nausea control. Not an unusual combination. Some patients don’t react well to sedation, and nausea can be a side effect.

“However”—she picked up one of the anti-nausea pills—“this specific drug is extremely heavy-duty. Furthermore, most of this class of medications have been phased out across the world.” She pointed at the third pile. “Even so, those are the most unusual. The black one is the most hated medication possible among Psy.”

Yakov thought of what side effect might elicit such a strong reaction. “Does it impact your mind? Your abilities?”

“That wasn’t its initial purpose,” she said. “In the time before Silence, it was a drug born of empathy—it was used to assist those who couldn’t control their strong psychic abilities and their attendant side effects. I’m not talking about people who simply needed to learn control. I’m talking about individuals who didn’t have the neurological capability to do so.

“The telepaths used to just scream and scream, their hands over their ears, because they couldn’t block out the telepathic roar of the world, while the Tks often teleported themselves into horrific or deadly situations because they’d caught a random glimpse of an accident site on the comm, or seen a photograph a relative had taken of their climb in an ice crevasse. Do you see?”

Yakov whistled. “Yeah. Like a bear who has all the strength of an adult but thinks he’s a cub so he doesn’t know to protect others from his actions. But in this case, the Psy were hurting themselves.”

“Not all of them,” Theo clarified. “A powerful Tp could liquefy their parents’ brains with a tantrum should those parents be less powerful. A Tk could kill a caregiver if they began to lift and throw things. A foreseer could grab hold of a child and spit out nightmarish prophecies.”

“Bozhe moi.” Yakov had never once considered this issue when it came to the Psy. “The medication was a way to offer the patients peace, while protecting those who cared for them.”

“Exactly so.” Theo picked up the black pill, stared at it. “The problem with it is the significant side effect: it blunts awareness. The world becomes a blur, seen through a haze. More so than any other drug I’ve ever researched. One patient described it as being a zombie incapable of moving from the spot in which he was ‘parked.’ ”

“Pretty significant side effect.”

Theo nodded. “Which was why, once stabilized after an initial course of the drug, the patients with the capacity to understand their options, even if that understanding was limited, were weaned off it little by little until their cognition became more acute. At which point they were asked if they wanted to be on the drug. Led by empaths, our medics were far more ethical then. Those empaths also facilitated conversation with the nonverbal patients.”

“How many said yes to continuing the medication?”

“Ninety-seven percent.”

Sensing Yakov’s surprise at her precise answer, she said, “I did a research project on this medication for extra credit—it was a course about Psy medicinal history. The drug has been out of use for over five decades.” Because instead of helping their people, come what may, the Psy had begun to “dispose of” those they considered “imperfect.”

Such clean words her people had learned to use to hide the weight of their evil.

From the way Yakov’s body went still beside her own, she knew he’d come to the same conclusion. But what he said aloud was “So, it was helpful when used as designed to be used.”

“Yes. For most of the patients on it, it was the first time in their life they’d been able to consciously experience the world in some capacity instead of being overwhelmed by their abilities, and that wasn’t something they were willing to give up. Most asked for a dosage calibrated to give maximum benefits with minimum side effects—a little psychic risk in return for agency and conscious awareness.”

Yakov nodded slowly.

“However,” Theo murmured, her mind making the connections spark by dark spark, “it strikes me that using this pill would be an effective way to achieve a reversible chemical rehabilitation.” She turned the innocuous-looking pill from one side to the other. “Unlike with traditional rehabilitation, this wouldn’t erase the structures in the brain that make us psychic. It would instead put those abilities in a holding pattern.”

Yakov whistled. “Pretty handy if you had a person whose abilities you wanted to use, but who it was too much of a risk to keep lucid and able the vast majority of the time.”

Theo placed the pill back on the ground, her fingers feeling soiled. “Pre-Silence research suggests that if a person were to go on this medication, the dosage would have to be gently shifted up or down—no abrupt increases, no sudden stops. The latter was said to cause irreversible brain damage.” So if a patient had been put on this and then taken off, over and over again, there was no knowing the current state of their brain.

She forced herself to pick up another pill, this one a capsule that was white on one side and yellow on the other. “I’m pretty sure this is a form of Jax.” Glancing at Yakov, she explained the drug that had been formulated to control the Arrows, the most lethal soldiers among the Psy.

These days, it was also a street drug.

“How do you know about Jax and the Arrows?” Yakov said. “I’d figure the Council kept that information close to the vest.”

She lifted one shoulder in a motion she would’ve never made had her grandfather been alive. It would’ve shown him too much of who she was behind the mask she wore in front of him. “Once you have a dog on the leash, there’s no reason to watch your mouth around said dog.” Because that was all Theo had ever been to her grandfather: a vicious dog trained to the leash.

Yakov’s hand on the back of her neck, the hold gentle but firm—and his voice rumbling thunder. “Thela, you talk about yourself that way ever again, and I won’t buy you any more of the donut holes you inhaled on the way here—and I’ll talk Gustav into banning you from the bakery, too, so you can’t buy them yourself.”

Theo, braced for an altogether different kind of a response, felt her mouth fall open. She hadn’t even realized he’d noticed how quickly she’d demolished the entire small box of the sugared treats; he’d seemed intent on his savory tarts the entire time.

Bears. Sneaky in a wholly bearish way.

She wanted to hug him for noticing her, even caring for her . . . and she was utterly bewildered by him. “Why does it matter to you?” she asked when she could speak. “What I say about myself?”

He leaned in so close that his nose brushed hers, the scent of him wrapping around her like a bear’s fur. “Because I think you’re mine, Theo Marshall. And I don’t let people hurt those who are mine. You can’t hurt yourself, either.” A slight squeeze of her nape, his hand so warm, his skin a little rough. “You might as well get used to it.”