by Nalini Singh
The next person to arrive did so under his own steam: Arran Gabriel, with his black hair and brown skin, his body tightly coiled under his torn jeans and faded black T-shirt, was another telekinetic with teleport-capable abilities. As a result of the latter—and because his family hadn’t held the power of Payal’s—he’d been taken from his family unit at age four and thrown into a strict martial training program.
He’d initialized at age seven, but somehow, no one had realized what was happening, what he was. Arran was the only hub of whom Canto was aware who hadn’t immediately been tagged as an A upon initialization. His experiences had left him angry in a way Canto knew was dangerous. But at twenty-four years of age Arran had that violent anger under vicious control.
The man was now a mercenary with zero acknowledged alliances or connections.
Canto had fully expected Arran to tell him to fuck off. But while emotionally damaged on a deep level, Arran wasn’t a psychopath. His A core wouldn’t allow him to ignore the oncoming annihilation of their race.
Now he grunted in greeting, his gaze flat and starless.
Genara brought in the last of their number right then: Ager Lii. Bent slightly at the back, with one hand leaning heavily on a cane, they were androgynous in appearance and claimed no gender. Their eyes were unusually elongated and their hair a soft and snowy white that hit shoulders covered by the linen fabric of the cream-colored tunic they wore with slim brown pants, their skin papery white and spotted with age.
Most Psy got those spots removed, but Ager had moved beyond that.
They were all here. The general and her lieutenants.
Chapter 16
Silence is a gift we need to cherish.
—Unknown A (1981)
CANTO SAW THE others take in Ager as Genara teleported out. Payal, who was closest to the frail A, got to her feet and offered her seat in a silent show of respect; Suriana murmured a quiet greeting, while Bjorn raised a hand in hello.
Arran, who’d blinked when Ager appeared, now moved subtly closer.
To catch the elder should they fall.
Yes, Arran might be angry and dangerous, but he wasn’t evil. That had been Canto’s only qualification for the anchors he wanted on this advisory board. That they not be so damaged by life and by what was being fed into them through their bond with the Net that they’d become as twisted as the dark twin of the NetMind.
The twins were gone now, merged into one chaotic and mindless creature that made Canto want to break the world. To him, the DarkMind and NetMind had been the soul of the Net. Split in two, but still extant, a source of hope that life could come from the worst mistakes. But all that remained of the burgeoning twin neosentiences were faraway echoes of who they’d once been.
“Ager,” he said, “welcome.”
Five of them arranged themselves around a low table Canto had positioned prior to their arrival. On it he placed nutrient drinks and bars. Having surrendered her chair to Ager, Payal took the one next to the older A. Bjorn sat down on Canto’s other side, Suriana between Bjorn and Payal.
Arran didn’t sit, a barely leashed creature who prowled the open end of the shelter.
Canto made no comment on the younger male’s restlessness as he did a round of introductions. Afterward, Ager was the first to speak. “They’re all wondering what I’m doing here, young Mercant.” They coughed on the heels of their words. “That wolf child in Psy skin is expecting me to keel over at any moment.”
Arran—who did remind Canto of one of the changeling wolves—paused midstep but didn’t argue with the statement. And the question hung in the air. They all wanted to know why Canto had brought in an anchor so very old.
“Ager should have retired by now,” he began, because accepted common knowledge was that anchors began to decrease their zone of influence at around Bjorn’s age and had only a highly limited area of control by age ninety to ninety-five.
That meant three to four decades of life where an A could sleep without the constant huge pressure of a massive piece of the PsyNet at the back of their brain. Yet total retirement was an impossibility. They’d break at the absolute loss of that inexorable pressure, for they’d been born as anchors and would die as anchors.
“But,” he continued, “we don’t have enough As in the Net.” A manifest fact. “As a result, Ager continues to maintain a full zone of influence.” The other A had to constantly be on the verge of exhaustion.
Bjorn sucked in a breath. “If I may ask your age . . .”
“A hundred and ten” was the quick reply—because there was nothing wrong with Ager’s mind.
Bjorn leaned forward, his hands tight on the arms of his chair. “I want to disbelieve you. I’m already starting to feel the need to reduce the size of my zone, and I’m decades your junior.”
“You sure about your age?” Arran muttered, his eyes narrowed.
Ager took no offense. “Heh! Look older, don’t I?” Their words were clipped, their accent soft. “I’ll save the waste of a question. It’s because it turns out the reason we’re meant to retire around the ninety mark is because after that, our anchor pathways begin to degrade. I’m having to do constant repairs and it’s sucking me dry.”
“But if Ager decreases their zone of influence, people die,” Canto finished.
“So Ager is here as a living example of the stupidity of our forefathers?” Arms folded, feet apart, Arran was a storm barely contained.
Ager’s bones creaked as they angled their head toward Arran. “No, wolf child, I’m here because I was born at the start of the stupidity and have more knowledge in my old skull than your young brain can imagine.”
Suriana found her voice, her Australian twang impossible to miss despite the quietness of her voice. “Ager? Were we always forgotten?”
“Yes.” Ager coughed again and there was a painful rattle to it. “But the old As back when I first took over my zone, they told me they liked it. The politicians left them alone to get on with their job, and no one ever questioned how anchors managed the flows of the PsyNet—it was just accepted that they did. It meant our kind didn’t have to play politics or show our faces to the media.”
Payal spoke for the first time, her voice pushing against the bruise she’d put on Canto with her request that he sever the emotional ties between them, stop caring for her. “I’d agree with their stance were the situation the same—with all of us in a stable network.”
Suriana nodded, while Bjorn appeared thoughtful. “Do you know if the Council consulted Designation A when they first came up with the idea for Silence?”
Ager gestured to a bottle of nutrients. It was lifted, uncapped, and in the elder’s hands before Canto could see which Tk had done it. The look Arran shot Payal gave him the answer: she was faster and had more fine control than Arran, her ability cool and focused where Arran’s was hot and more erratic.
After taking their time to have a sip, Ager said, “As far as I know, As were never consulted. I don’t know if it would’ve made much difference if they had been.”
“Seriously?” Arran was pacing again. “Our forebears couldn’t figure out the mess Silence would make of the Net?”
“According to the old ones, the Substrate was in chaos prior to Silence. Massive turbulence, ‘emotional fires’ that burned out minds in their path, sudden and unpredictable flash floods of data that literally crushed biofeedback links and led to deaths termed ‘unexplained’ by the medics.”
“Why isn’t this in the records?” Bjorn asked with the intellectual skepticism of a man who worked in academia.
“Because no one talks to anchors,” Payal said, crisp and to the point.
“Exactly so.” Ager’s hand shook as they placed the bottle on the table. “The Psy Council of the time was made aware of the incidents, but they were absorbed by the problem of how to fix the insanity and violence affecting o
ur race. I suppose the information just became lost in the chaos.”
Ager rasped in a breath. “My mentors, the old anchors, they preferred Silence. They said they’d felt peace for the first time in the years after it was implemented—the waves calmed at last, the flash fires and floods coming to a halt.”
“Does that mean there’s no hope for the PsyNet?” Suriana whispered, her hand rising to her mouth; on the back of it was what appeared to be a burn scar. “We bring it back to equilibrium, and it just fails again in a different way? An endless loop? Is that how it’s always been?”
“Not according to all the history I know,” Ager responded before wetting their throat with the nutrient liquid once more. “We’ve always been the most unstable of the three races, but prior to the first crash, we were never on the edge of chaos. Something went critically wrong at least a generation before Silence came into effect—a wound of which we have no comprehension.”
This was why Canto had asked Ager to join them, despite the other anchor’s precarious health. So much information had been lost because anchors lived isolated lives, knowing only their sub-anchors and perhaps the anchors in the next zone over. No longer were they close enough to mentor each other, the zones too stretched out. Their “pack” had been decimated.
Canto was determined to change that, pull them back together.
“This, what we’re going to attempt, it’s critical for the future of our race,” he said. “You’re either in or out. Make the choice. If you’re in, loyalty is a prerequisite. Both to the As in this group and As as a whole—Payal is to be our face, but we stand as equals within.”
“I agree to the terms,” Payal said. “Unless the anchor is psychopathic and has turned to murder. Then I’ll take them down.”
Arran stared at Payal. “I like you. You say things without bullshit.” A glance at Canto. “What she said.”
“Yes.” Suriana’s whisper.
“I’m also in agreement,” Bjorn said, “though I do think you’re being naive to take our words for it, child. You should have us sign legal documentation.”
“Would you betray us, Professor?” Ager asked after signaling their acquiescence with the terms.
“No, but we’re all different individuals.”
“We’re anchors,” Canto said, a sense of stretching deep inside him. “No one but another A will ever understand who we are and what we do. No one else even considers the board on which the game is played. We must be our champions.”
Payal would be their champion. Intelligent, calculating, ruthless—and capable of a far fiercer allegiance than she would ever acknowledge—the woman the world knew as the hard-nosed Rao CEO was going to stand for Designation A.
Chapter 17
If you control the anchors, you control the Net.
—Bjorn Thorsen (2081)
PAYAL FOUGHT HER need to look at Canto; the gravitational pull of him acted as a tide on her senses. To feel such a visceral compulsion toward anyone, it was a new thing, a craving unknown. She never took her attention off Lalit or her father, but that wasn’t the same. She didn’t want to look at them. She had to look at them. With Canto Mercant, want was very much a component of her response.
Want. Desire. Hunger.
All words for a single potent emotion. For Payal, such violence of need equaled a chaos of the mind that could leave her vulnerable to her father’s or brother’s machinations. Even knowing this, every part of her wanted to reach out to Canto, a painful ache deep within her that only he could assuage.
Her eyes wanted to go to the gift he’d given her.
Food.
Again.
Not just food, a thing she’d asked for as a child.
He hadn’t forgotten.
All these years and he hadn’t forgotten.
That awareness had threatened to break all the restraints on that screaming, obsessive girl in her mind. Panic had set in. It still fluttered in the back of her throat, a small trapped creature that wanted to show itself in fluctuations in her breath, splotches of blood on her face.
Payal kept it in check with teeth-gritted will—and by refusing to make eye contact with Canto. Those galaxies made her want too much, made her dream. She wasn’t in a position to dream, would never be in a position to dream even if her father and Lalit were both gone.
Because the meds only stabilized the imbalance in her brain—and what was wrong with her wasn’t only organic. She was quite certain a strong component of it came from the PsyNet.
And the neosentience of the Net was now quite fragmented and mad.
“Tell us about the Ruling Coalition plan you mentioned.” Ager’s voice broke the silence, shattering the ice that crawled over her inner landscape as she tried to reinitialize the defenses that kept her robotic and uninvolved with the world.
“It’s called Project Sentinel.” The black strands of Canto’s hair glinted in the sun now just angling into the shelter, catching her eye despite her every attempt to maintain visual detachment. “The Ruling Coalition wants to break off a test section of the PsyNet. It’s an experiment to see if the smaller section will be more stable and less prone to fractures.”
Payal thought of another deal she’d just made. “Did they get the idea from the Forgotten?” When Arran and Suriana looked blank, she said, “Not all our ancestors agreed with Silence. The ones that didn’t left the PsyNet, and as their descendants are still alive, they must have their own network.” Psy brains needed the biofeedback generated by a psychic network. Cut that off and those brains died—an established biological fact.
“I’ve never heard of them,” Suriana said softly.
Ager coughed. “The Council liked to pretend they didn’t exist. But back when I was a young’un, a few of the old-timers used to keep in sporadic contact with Forgotten relatives. Wasn’t allowed, but people are people.”
Canto’s constellation eyes met hers, and those dreams, they threatened to awaken all over again. “How do you know about them?”
“I’ve done a number of deals with Devraj Santos.” The leader of the Forgotten and a man whose gold- and bronze-flecked brown eyes appeared to be undergoing a transformation that made her wonder if enough Psy genes had coalesced in him to create a cardinal. “Rao also keeps excellent histories.”
It had turned out that she and Santos were—very—distant cousins, linking up at an ancestor who’d left the PsyNet with the defectors. “The Forgotten also don’t hide their heritage as they once did,” she added. “I’ve heard that the Council used to hunt them.” Likely because anyone with psychic power outside the Net was a threat.
“Now the Council’s defunct and we have bigger problems.” Canto leaned forward, his forearms braced on his thighs and his gaze direct. “I think you’re right that the Ruling Coalition looked to the Forgotten, but it won’t have been the only factor.”
He paused to take a drink before continuing. “Per Sentinel, Kaleb Krychek would shift his mind into the initial experimental section and go with the broken piece—the island, so to speak. We all know he’s powerful enough to hold the piece together if it’s about to go into cataclysmic failure—but he’s not an anchor. He can only hold back a collapse, not create a foundation.”
“They taking an anchor with the island?” Arms folded, Arran leaned against one side of the open end of the shelter.
“That’s the plan, but there’s a problem that seems to have escaped everyone’s notice, probably because anchors just keep on with the job.”
He showed the others the graphic representation of Designation A in the Substrate that he’d already shown Payal—the lack of overlaps between anchor zones, the sheer thinness of the coverage. As Suriana, Arran, Ager, and Bjorn asked their questions, Payal sat back and distracted herself from obsessing over Canto by processing what she thought of the others.
Each had an element to them tha
t could be dangerous if used against the group, but it was inescapable that the most dangerous person in the group was Canto, who held all their attention even now. He had that unknown quality that turned people into followers. It was a rare thing, but she’d seen it in both Devraj Santos and Ivy Jane Zen, the high-Gradient empath who was the president of the Empathic Collective.
She’d also seen it in a local human guru who used his charisma to leech money from his followers.
The difference between a user and a leader was what they did with the adulation.
Mercants had never had a reputation for selflessness.
Yes, Silver Mercant was head of EmNet, the largest humanitarian network in the world, but Silver Mercant was also mated to a changeling bear. She couldn’t be taken as an exemplar of the proto-Mercant.
He’d given her food. He’d remembered her.
Her fingers curled into her palms, her nails digging into her flesh.
“That isolated hub will crash and burn in weeks if not days.” Hands shoved into his pockets, Arran glared at no one and everyone. “How can they not know that we zone shift? It’s been getting harder and harder, but we can still do it.”
Payal had realized the latter, too. While the zones no longer overlapped in the vast majority of the world, one A could extend while another shrank back for a few days, and vice versa. Taking the pressure off in turns, to give all of them a chance to rest and recharge.
Canto’s scowl was dark enough that Arran focused all his attention on him, belatedly realizing what Payal already had: that Canto Mercant was the apex predator in this space. “They don’t know because there’s no A on the Ruling Coalition—and nobody on the Coalition is old enough to remember how As worked before Silence.”
“Probably didn’t even know back then,” Ager croaked out, waving a hand. “I don’t know if any political leadership has ever understood the mechanics of the A network, probably because our predecessors were less than generous with the information. A bit of mystery intended to protect us—no one can chain us if they don’t know how we work.”