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hollow craa-aack of a rifle.
    ——
    D iana did have an almost uncanny sense of direction, a talent she had discovered only in the last year or so, but her physical conditioning and endurance, unlike that of most of the other team members, were still considerably under par.
    She hated that.
    No matter how many times Quentin or Miranda reminded her that she was playing serious catch-up after spending almost her entire adult life in a senses-dulling haze of various medications, she couldn’t escape the feeling that she should have been… further along by now. Physically stronger, at the very least.
    “You’re stronger than you know,” Bishop had said, only a couple of weeks before.
    Yeah, right .
    The truth was that she had drifted through her life, completely detached, uninvolved in… anything. Diana honestly wished she could believe that all the doctors who had tried one medicine or therapy or treatment after the other had done it only because they’d had her best interests at heart and sincerely thought she suffered from some unnamed mental illness. But what she believed was that her father was a wealthy, powerful man, and what Elliot Brisco wanted, he got.
    He’d wanted his only daughter’s life under his control. And though he still claimed his actions stemmed from love and concern, Diana had come to the conclusion that he had been driven as much by that need to control what was “his” as by a deeply rooted fear of anything he didn’t understand.
    Such as psychic abilities.
    Diana tried to shove the painful musing aside, wishing her father hadn’t intensified his efforts in the last couple of months to try to convince her one more time that she’d made a mistake in joining the FBI. And, especially, the SCU.
    It was no accident, she thought, that he had been applying more pressure just when she was becoming involved in her first field assignment.
    Consciously or not, he knew exactly how to undermine her confidence in herself.
    Never mind him. Concentrate on the job at hand, dammit .
    Leaning against a handy maple tree to catch her breath, she decided that the shortcut that had seemed such a good idea really wasn’t. The trade-off of avoiding the greater distance of twists and turns for a more direct route meant she was forced to do a hell of a lot of pretty rugged climbing to get over a ridge.
    “Suck it up,” she muttered to herself. “You’re surrounded by people who don’t even get the concept of quit.”
    That reminder did little for her self-confidence, but at least it caused her to push herself away from the support of the tree and press onward.
    And upward.
    No more than twenty or so yards farther, near the crest of the ridge, she stopped to lean against another tree, but this time not only because of her burning legs and thudding heart.
    Quentin was near.
    It was weird, that… sensation. More than knowledge or awareness, it was a tangible connection she couldn’t really explain—and had so far refused to examine closely. Even after all these months, she invariably caught herself resisting, pulling away from that powerful inner tugging, not allowing herself to be drawn toward Quentin as every other instinct insisted she must be.
    Bishop said it was because she had lived so much of her life under someone else’s control and that, once all the medications were out of her system and her father’s authority over her had been legally and practically severed, she was bound to instinctively fight for her independence—even against a connection that posed no threat to that independence.
    He had said this out of the blue one day while he was teaching her a few basic martial arts moves, and Diana had somewhat indignantly believed he did it only to distract her so he could maintain the upper hand in the match—until she thought about it later. First she recognized that he had hardly needed any sort of distraction, given his skills. And she recognized second that not only was he right in what he’d