The Psy-Changeling Collection (277 page)

“
Viability of the work without telekinetics?
”

“
There’s always a risk of detection with flying in—the op may attract unwanted attention
.”

A long silence. “Were all the staff members at Sunshine Psy?
”

“
Yes
.”

“
Have EarthTwo log that the encampment was abandoned after the outbreak of a lethal airborne virus. That should keep anyone else from wanting to go in for the time being
.”

“Katya!”
Dev shook the woman in his arms, having carried her outside to the cold when she refused to respond to him in the dormitory.

Her eyes fluttered. “Dev?”

“It’s me, baby. Come on, come back.”

“I remembered,” she whispered, her voice husky.

“Tell me in the car.” Only when he’d settled her in the back-seat and crawled in to take her into his arms did he breathe again. “Your eyes . . .” It was like she’d ceased to exist, or gone so deep that he couldn’t see her anymore. He’d thought no terror could come close to what he’d experienced as a child. He’d been wrong.

She hugged him, pressing kisses to his jaw. “I’m sorry—I think I must’ve slipped into some type of a trance state.”

He let her soothe him, needing the caresses, needing to know that she was alright. “Tell me.” Stroking his hand up her spine, he closed his hand over her nape.

Horror spread its fingers through his chest as she began to speak, the invasion hard and pitiless. “Over twenty people went insane at once?”

“More than that—some would’ve been killed when they first turned on each other.”

“How is that even possible?” He pulled her into his lap, needing to feel the living warmth of her weight. “I’ve heard that Psy are breaking in higher numbers, but we’re talking about a case of mass insanity.”

“I didn’t believe the rumors,” she said. “Not until I heard that.”

He waited.

“A number of our—mine and Ashaya’s—contacts reported that there were stories of certain parts of the Net going ‘dark,’ like something was collecting there, something that ate up or buried the fabric of the Net.”

“The influence of the DarkMind?”

“Yes, that’s a possibility. I just don’t know.” She shook her head. “No one could ever actually point to an example, so we didn’t pay it that much attention. We couldn’t—we had to focus on what we could actually see and change.”

“Go on.”

“You know what it means to be in a neural network—it’s like swimming in the sea. There’s no way to avoid coming into contact with any pollutants.”

Dev pulled off his knit cap with an impatient hand. “You think this ‘rot,’” he said, for want of a better word, “seeped into all those minds?”

“The Net isn’t locked to any one location,” she said, “but your location in the Net is determined partly by where you are in the world. This group would’ve been in Sunshine, and that means they would’ve occupied an isolated section of the Net. If they all arrived together, the rot would’ve started to work on them at the same time.”

“Some of the ones who were killed,” Dev said, barely able
to wrap his mind around the sheer magnitude of the slaughter, “chances are they would’ve broken, too—if they’d lived a little longer.”

“Yes.” Katya wrapped her arms around his neck. “If this has happened once, Dev . . .”

“We need to record this. We need proof.”

“The Council will deny it. No one is ready to believe.” A tight kind of anger filled every syllable. “I know—we tried so hard to tell people the truth, but it’s like they can only take so much at a time. They’ll say you’re simply trying to create political—”

“I know.” He broke off the flow of frustrated words with a kiss. “I need the records for my people.”

Understanding lit those pretty eyes from within. “Oh. I see. Did you bring a recording device?”

“My cell phone has a high-enough resolution and plenty of memory.”

Neither of them said anything for several minutes—though they both knew they had to get out of the car to document what they’d found. Katya listened to the steady beat of Dev’s heart and in that, somehow found courage. “We can do this.”

He dropped a kiss to the top of her head. “Do you know what I see when I look at the blood?”

“Tell me.”

“The possible future of the Forgotten.” He thrust a hand through his hair. “Why couldn’t we have left the madness behind when we left the Net? Why do our abilities always have to come bundled with darkness?”

Katya had spent many hours considering the same. “If they didn’t, the Psy truly would rule the world—that flaw, that built-in Achilles’ heel, is the only thing that makes us breakable, the only thing that stems our arrogance.”

His fingers threaded through her hair, pushing off her cap. “With power comes temptation.”

“Yes.” She thought of the people who’d worked in the labs
with her, so many of them gifted, so many of them unable to see that what they were doing was monstrous. “That much power, without any controls, changes a person from the inside out.” And what emerged wasn’t always anything human in the wider sense.

“Emotion is a control.” Dropping his hand from her hair, he picked up her cap. “But it’s not the complete answer.”

“If it was,” she murmured, letting him put the cap back on her head, drawing his tenderness around her like a shield, “Silence would have never come into force.”

“Circles.” He reached out to open the door. “Ready?”

“Yes.” But it was a lie. She’d never be ready to face the death that stained Sunshine a dark, nearly black red. It didn’t matter. This had to be done. Somebody had to bear witness to the loss of so many minds, so many dreams and hopes. “Yes. Let’s go.”

PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

Letter dated January 5, 1979

Dear Matthew
,

I almost can’t believe that we made it. The ShadowNet, as everyone’s calling this new network, is a vibrant, chaotic place. Given our numbers, it’s not as dense as the PsyNet, but it’s alive. And that’s all that matters
.

The ostrasizing has already begun. We called your uncle Greg to tell him we were safe. I could see the relief in his eyes, but all he said out loud was not to call him again. He’s afraid that if he shows any feelings toward us, the Council will take your cousins away
.

I cried afterward. You saw me, wiped my tears. And I knew with every beat of my heart that I’d made the right choice
.

I love you so
.

Mom

CHAPTER 41

Night fell with
predictable swiftness but they were done by then. Neither of them brought up the idea of staying on. Dev simply took the wheel and they headed out. They’d been driving an hour when Katya broke the silence. “I’m starting to remember things I wasn’t ready to before.”

“Anything like this?”

“No.” A long pause. “My memories of Noor’s and especially Jon’s time in the labs are almost complete.”

He didn’t try to talk her out of her guilt—that, he’d realized, would take time. The woman Katya had become would never be able to walk away from those darkest of memories. So he kept his tone matter-of-fact, his words the same. “She seems unaffected, and he’s a strong kid.”

“A gifted one.” Katya’s voice was quiet. “His ability—it’s one so open to misuse.”

“Not if he’s shown the right path.”

“When I was a child,” she said, “I used to try to use my telepathy to make others in my crèche group do what I wanted.”

“That’s a fairly normal developmental stage for telepathic children.” Dev, too, had done things as a kid that weren’t strictly right—he’d been learning his strengths, stretching his limbs. He wanted to tell Katya that, share the truth of his gift with metal, with machines. “It pisses me off that I can’t talk to you like I want.” His palms protested the strength with which he was gripping the steering wheel. Relaxing with effort, he blew out a breath between clenched teeth.

“I keep telling myself that things will change, that I’ll find an escape hatch.”

He remembered what she’d once said about the tentacles of Ming’s control. “You haven’t been able to work out a way to disengage the programming?”

“No” she said, wrapping her arms around herself in a hold so tight, he heard something tear in her jacket. “Not without damaging my brain. The talons of this
thing
he put in my head are sunk too deep.”

“Maybe the programming is too strong to break,” he said, pain shooting down his jaw, he’d clenched it so hard, “but it shouldn’t have a permanent physical effect. It’s a psychic construct.”

“Dev . . . it’s not the programming. The prison is anchored in my mind.”

His gut turned to ice. “How sure are you?” A long pause. “Tell me.”

“I’ve looked at it from every possible angle. I was hoping I’d made a mistake.” The tone of her voice told him she’d discovered different.

Dev was only just a telepath, but he knew everything there was to know about the abilities—both old and new—that might manifest among the Forgotten. So he understood damn well that something that was anchored in an individual’s mind, as opposed to the fabric of a neural net, would tear that mind to pieces if it was removed without the proper procedure. And
right now, the only person who had a key to Katya’s prison was Councilor Ming LeBon.

The decision was simple. “We need to find Ming.”

Katya’s head snapped toward him. “No, Dev.
No
.”

Having spent
the entire day with Cruz, Sascha expected to fall into an easy sleep that night, tired by the psychic energy she’d expended. But she found herself lying awake long after the forest had gone quiet around her. Cuddling into Lucas’s changeling heat, she spread her fingers over his heart and tried to match the rhythm of her breathing to his.

Her body began to relax, but her mind continued to spin. Giving up, she decided to read for a while . . . but Lucas’s arm tightened the instant she tried to pull away. She should have let him sleep—instead she stroked a hand down his neck. “Wake up.”

His eyes blinked open with feline laziness. “Hmm?” Nuzzling at her in sleepy interest, he squeezed his hand over her hip.

“I can’t sleep.”

He spread his hand over her abdomen. “Feeling okay?” A tender question, a protective touch.

“Yes.” She moved her hand over his biceps. “Just wide-awake.”

“Want me to make you tired?” A rumble against her ear, fingers playing over the dip of her navel.

The butterflies in her stomach were intimately, exquisitely familiar. “That’s a very tempting offer.”

“But you want to talk.”

Heart stretching with the force of what she felt for this man who knew her so completely, she kissed the side of his jaw, tangling her hand in the heavy silk of his hair. “Working with Cruz . . . he’s so vulnerable, Lucas, so open to any direction.”

“Then it’s a good thing you’d never hurt him.”

That was what worried her. “That book my mother sent me—it said E-Psy can turn bad.”

“No,” Lucas said, rising to look down at her. “It said E-Psy often care so much they start to think they know what’s best for everyone.”

“And then they do bad things,” she insisted. “What about that empath the writer profiled—the one who tried to emotionally manipulate everyone to be ‘good.’ He drove people insane by forcing them to go against their own will.”

“He was a loner—without family, without Pack. Do you really think I’d let you turn into a megalomaniac?” An amused gleam in those leopard eyes.

She made a face at him. “This is serious.” But he’d succeeded in loosening the knot of fear in her chest. “I never even knew I could feed emotion into someone, literally force them to feel what I wanted.”

Lucas played with strands of her hair as she lapsed into thought.

“I wonder why my mother sent the book,” she murmured. “Was it to destabilize me, or did she want to warn me of the danger?” With most mothers, it wouldn’t have been a question, but most mothers weren’t Councilor Nikita Duncan.

“Or maybe she’s finally realized what a powerful ally you’d make.”

She lifted her face in a wordless question.

“You know what the alpha in me found most interesting in that book?” he asked, bracing his elbows on either side of her head. “The fact that a cardinal empath who has total control of her gift can effectively stop a riot of thousands in its tracks. Imagine how useful that gift would be to a Councilor facing rebellion from within the ranks.”

Sascha wrapped her arms around Lucas’s neck. “According to Eldridge’s book, that empathic skill has saved countless lives over the generations.”

“Yes.”

“But you don’t think that’s why Nikita wants it?”

Lucas kissed her with utmost tenderness. “I’m not going to guess at your mother’s motives, Sascha. But I can’t bear to see you being hurt—be careful, kitten.”

His love swept around her, tight and protective and wonderful. “Don’t worry,” she said, nuzzling into him. “I’m not that vulnerable to her anymore. I just wish I understood why she did this now of all times.”

“Ask her,” Lucas said, to her surprise. “She might not tell you the truth—probably won’t—but you’re good at reading between the lines, at reading body language.”

“Yes, I think I will.” Pressing a kiss to his shoulder, she let her mind meander back to a subject she’d been mulling over earlier that day. “I think something is happening among the Forgotten.”

“I get that feeling, too.” He shifted so that more of his body tangled with hers. “Those guards on Cruz—I’m not sure Dev is only worried about the Psy. Word is, some of his own people are moving against him.”

“Do you think the Forgotten are starting to have the same problems that drove the Psy to Silence?”

“If they are . . . Dev has a hell of a problem on his hands.”

Katya felt as
if she’d been arguing until she was blue in the face. Dev didn’t argue back—he simply refused to change his mind. “Are you insane?” she was finally driven to yell, as they prepared to catch a few hours’ sleep at the same little bed-and-breakfast they’d stopped at before. They’d driven half the night, compelled to get away from the malignant violence that marked Sunshine. But from the instant Dev had mentioned going after Ming, she’d had only one thought in mind—stopping him. “That’s what he wants! It’ll make it so much easier for him to kill you.”