Kiss of Snow

Chapter 30

ADEN LOOKED OVER at the Arrow who stood beside him on the sandy beach along the Amalfi Coast. Abbot was a telekinetic, 9.1 on the Gradient, incredibly powerful, incredibly skilled, incredibly cursed. It had come as no surprise to discover that the twenty-six-year-old was drawn to the idea of Purity.

“Have you come to stop me, Aden?” the other Arrow asked. “Ask me not to join Pure Psy?”

Aden shook his head. “I’m not Ming, to force you to follow my own political agenda. But you must know—you cannot be both an Arrow and a member of Pure Psy.”

“So you would exile me.”

“No, Abbot. That isn’t who we are.” The water held an edge of luminescence in the dark of the night that had fallen on this side of the world, and he made a note to do some research, find out what sea organism caused the effect. “But the squad works on unconditional trust.” On the knowledge that the Arrow at his back would never use the position to knife him. “Once you give your allegiance to Pure Psy, you must follow their goals.”

Abbot took his time replying, his ink black hair blowing back in the salt laced wind coming off the Gulf of Salerno. “You’re not a Tk.”

“No.”

“What does Vasic say?”

Aden thought of the Tk-V who could lift blood out of walls and bodies from within graves. “You should ask him.”

“No games, Aden. You know his mind—he speaks to you.”

Aden looked down at the glowing foam before the sea sucked it back in. “Vasic believes it doesn’t matter the Councilor at the helm, or whether the machinery is called Council or Purity—in the end, we’re nothing but warm bodies to bleed for them.” So many Arrows had died to protect Silence. Their only reward had been more death.

“Yet we give our allegiance to Kaleb Krychek.”

“There are reasons.”

Abbot looked out toward the lingering golden light in the windows of some of the homes that hugged the cliffs, and Aden saw bleak longing in those eyes as blue as the deepest part of the Aegean. A breach of Silence, but an Arrow never betrayed one of his own.

“We are Arrows for a reason,” the other man said at last. “We cannot survive without Silence.”

“Perhaps.” Aden thought of Vasic again, of the price the Tk-V had paid to retain his sanity. “But perhaps the price of survival has become too high.”