by Nalini Singh
—From Disasters of the Ancient World by Antonio Flavia (1957)
EIGHT HOURS AFTER the meeting, Payal lay awake in bed, staring up at the ceiling. In her fist was a small white stone she’d stolen from the oasis when Canto wasn’t looking. A stone he’d touched, held. Her larceny had been an impulsive emotional act that had nothing of reason in it, another sign of the deleterious effects of her response to him.
She squeezed the stone hard . . . and teleported herself back to the desert, barefoot, and wearing only a sleep tee and pajama pants. Moonlight kissed the oasis, so she was in the same hemisphere—and from the position of the moon, not so very far from Delhi. Padding down the path, the sand gritty under her soles, she checked the areas she’d altered while he’d watched with interest. None of them had been changed back.
Sitting down on a fractionally misaligned paving so she wouldn’t have to look at it, Payal soaked in the peace and quiet. No wind stirred the trees or made the sands whisper closer. No other voices split the air. If she’d tripped a silent alarm, no one came to kick her out.
In front of her lay a small area she’d fixed so it was harmonious to her mind.
“It’s compulsive, your need for mathematical perfection.” Her father’s voice when he’d discovered her arranging her childhood belongings exactly so on her shelves. “Coloring between the lines will never get you anywhere. Our race likes rules, but the people who gain power are the ones who understand that the rules need to be bent and broken.”
Pranath Rao had never seemed to understand that though his daughter far preferred to color inside the lines, she saw all the options, the decision-making system in her mind a multilayered and multidimensional matrix. Her preference for order over chaos wasn’t heavily weighted in that matrix.
Rising, she went to the next little garden area. It had been planted with care but remained out of alignment. She knew Canto wouldn’t mind the small alterations she wanted to make to bring it back to harmony. This place was his, but . . . it felt a little bit hers, too. It was a terrible thing, this emotional response, another strike at the walls that protected her sanity, but she couldn’t make herself teleport home.
She began to work.
Sitting back with a satisfied sigh some time afterward, she looked at her sand- and dirt-covered hands, then up at the night sky. The galaxies of Canto Mercant’s eyes dazzled her inner vision. The part of her that had learned to survive in Vara hissed at her to remember that he was a Mercant.
Don’t trust him, it whispered.
It was silenced by the furious echo of the wild-eyed girl she’d once been. He’d bleed for you! she yelled over the warning whisper. The intensity of Canto’s loyalty was a kind of subvocal hum that disturbed the tiny hairs on her arms and caused her ears to attune themselves to the deep timbre of his voice.
“You’re imagining it,” she told herself. “You’ve never been great at reading emotional cues.”
The girl inside her remained stubborn, mutinous. That girl had no doubts.
Canto Mercant would not betray Payal Rao.
The knowledge kept on causing breaks in the wall of her mind, kept on making her want to retreat from her own request to him. She’d made that request in a blind panic, stunned by how fast her walls were crumbling. Now, as she sat in the cold night air, hugging her knees to her chest, she was afraid, so afraid that she’d given up the only thing in her life that had ever made her feel . . . good. Just good.
The insane girl inside her smashed her fisted hands against the iron bars of the cage Payal had built to keep her contained, wanting out, wanting freedom. Wanting Canto. Bending her head toward her knees, her eyes hot and her throat thick, Payal rocked back and forth.
A telepathic knock had her jolting. She recognized the mental signature as that of Arran Gabriel. Prior to ending their first meeting, the six of them—in what they’d decided to name the Anchor Representative Association or ARA for short—had exchanged telepathic conversation in order to make such contact more seamless.
Arran, she said, guard raised. How may I assist you?
I’ve been thinking, he said in a mental voice far colder than the angry heat of his physical presence, and I still can’t work out if Canto is for real. So I reckoned I’d ask the most rational person in the room. You figure this for a con?
Payal wondered if she should disclose her conflict of interest. No, the past was between her and Canto, a private thing. She could answer Arran’s question using pure robotic reason, her own terrifying sense of trust no part of the equation.
Mercants always plan multiple moves ahead in multiple dimensions, she said, but right now, Canto is planning for Designation A. The foundation of the PsyNet is in trouble. There’s no faking that. Anchors must be part of the solution—Canto and the Mercants gain nothing from this gambit that we all also do not gain.
Huh, Arran said. Guess so.
He ended the communication as abruptly as he’d begun it.
But the interaction had been enough to break her out of her cycling thoughts. After taking one last look around the oasis, she returned home to sleep and prepare for what was to come, the small white stone clutched safely in her hand.
She slept with the heaviness of exhaustion and woke to the feel of a massive pressure wave at the back of her brain. The gravity of it was familiar, the conclusion inexorable: the PsyNet in her region was buckling under bombardment from multiple sources.
Leaving Krychek and other powerful minds to deal with the assault on the main level of the PsyNet, she dived into the Substrate. The grid with which she made sense of this space wasn’t broken. It was warped.
Severely.
Net failure imminent.
She shifted into anchor mode, her entire attention zeroing in on that warped section that was no longer a healthy glowing blue, but a dull and muddy green.
As if the warping had cut off the blood flow to critical arteries.
Weaving through it all were the strange and thick fibers of dull brown that had begun to grow a couple of decades earlier. As far as Payal knew, none of the As had ever been able to get rid of the fibers, and the stuff was clogging up the flow of the Substrate.
But that was a problem for another day.
The rest of her zone would be fine with nothing but a ghost anchor for a short period. But no matter how much energy she fed into the matrix, she couldn’t correct the warp. It hadn’t, she belatedly realized, been caused only by the newest attack—this was a mutation in the Substrate, part of the rot in the Net.
When she rose up out of the Substrate, it was to see a huge mind working on the breach—a mind that wasn’t Kaleb’s obsidian, but darker, more cloaked in shadow. Aden Kai, leader of the Arrow Squad. Only recognizable because he wasn’t in stealth mode.
She could see what he was trying to do, knew it wouldn’t work, not given the extent of the damage in the Substrate.
Payal didn’t like touching unknown minds, but this was an extenuating circumstance; she made the effort to send a message to the man working with such merciless concentration in front of her: You need Krychek, too. The Substrate is badly damaged, and I require a bigger window of time to fix it.
In truth, she wasn’t certain she had the raw psychic energy to do such a massive repair on her own—but she couldn’t pull in her sub-anchors. With her focused on the repair, her subs were bearing the bulk of the zone’s load.
The mental voice that replied to hers was black ice. Who are you, and how did you telepath me through blackout shields?
I’m the hub-anchor for this region, and I sent the message through your biofeedback link. It was a clunky way to talk even for anchors, so this second message she sent through the telepathic pathway he’d opened. I have to fix the Substrate or your repair will collapse. Get Krychek.
She returned to the foundations of the Net without waiting for an answer. As she did so,
she thought of Canto . . . and was reaching for him before she’d processed the need that was a bruise inside her. Once again, he was too far away for her to touch. But she did hit another familiar mind.
She could’ve stopped then, returned to rationality, but she spoke to that familiar mind: Suriana, can you bounce a message to Canto?
Suriana’s telepathic voice was sweet and clear. I just tried, but I’m too far. I can message him on the number he gave us.
Do it. Tell Canto I need him.
A crystalline mind brushed against Payal’s mere seconds later. I’m here. Absolute attention. Is this about the attack on the Net in your area? I can see the turbulence in the Substrate.
Aware that he was listening for her now, his telepathic “ear” far stronger than her voice, she said, I can’t do it alone. Not enough energy. It was a mathematical truth, yet she kept on working. Anchors did not give up. Anchors went down with the Net if necessary, but until then, they fought.
I can give you ten minutes, he said. My anchor point will hold for that duration even without me.
Never did she ask for help for anything, but this was Canto. Her 7J. Come.
* * *
• • •
ADEN was an Arrow, privy to secrets dark and dangerous, but he had no experience with a communication such as the one that had just taken place. The initial contact hadn’t been telepathic, had come from inside him. Ostensibly through his biofeedback link. Which was an impossibility, unless he was losing his mind. As he knew he was sane, he decided to do as the eerie and clipped voice had commanded, and contacted Kaleb.
The dual cardinal arrived within a short period, and they began to work with a rhythm they’d long since perfected. It felt akin to gluing the holes in a leaking bucket that was so eggshell-thin and brittle it kept cracking and breaking.
I was contacted by the hub-anchor for this region through my biofeedback link.
Anchors don’t talk to anyone. Not directly.
This one ordered me to get you because what she termed the Substrate is damaged, and I wouldn’t be able to do the repair on my own. She also stated that the repair would fail unless she fixed the Substrate.
She?
Yes. Her telepathic voice had fallen into a register rarely found in males. Who’s the hub for this region?
I don’t have the information at hand. But whoever she is, she was right. Krychek indicated a patch that was already unraveling even with both of them using every ounce of their abilities to keep it in place. As if the Net was crumbing so fast that their stitches couldn’t hold. Let’s hope she can fix this mysterious Substrate.
The Architect
While most patients with Scarab Syndrome show signs of confusion and memory loss, a small segment remain fully cognizant—and deeply damaged as a result. They are aware of their decline and unable to stop it.
The most dangerous group, however, are those with delusions of omnipotence—this pool is limited, but the delusion, when it takes hold, is all-consuming. Such patients want no assistance, refuse to believe that their brain is degrading, and consider health professionals enemies envious of their power.
—Report to the Psy Ruling Coalition from Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo
THE ARCHITECT “WOKE” to the realization that her memory was an ominous blank.
Unalarmed, she accessed her telepathic recorder and played back the time.
Nothing of note. It appeared she’d simply been sitting at her desk, staring into nothingness. A dangerous sign, but not one that she couldn’t find a way to mitigate. Her deeper concern was what her children had done during her time of “sleep.”
She glanced at the chains that bound her children to her.
Three had snapped their leashes and gone rogue, and from the waves rolling through the PsyNet, they’d done what might be irreparable damage. Her children might be the next evolution of Psy, brilliant and too big for the current world, but nonetheless, she couldn’t permit such rebellion.
It would only foment more at a time when that could collapse all her plans for the future. Regrettable as it was, she had to do what she so rarely did and end their existence. The three believed they’d attained freedom by snapping the leash, but the Architect had been a power for many years. She understood never to rely only on a single factor.
Which was why she’d put ticking time bombs in their minds.
It took a single telepathic command to detonate those bombs: Sleep, my child. Your work is done.
Three huge minds fell under the weight of devastating aneurysms.
The Architect sighed and ran her hands down the front of her pristine black dress. An undesirable choice, but a necessary one. She’d made it clear to her children that they were to do no more damage to the PsyNet. Not until things had stabilized to the point that the threat of further damage could be used as a bargaining chip.
The Psy would give her anything once they understood she held the foundation of their lives in her hand. She intended to get to the point where her children could collapse specific parts of the Net, executing hundreds or thousands at a whim and as a reminder of her power.
Once she had the Psy, she would take the humans, and last, the changelings. They were the most dangerous, but they would not be able to stand against the combined power she intended to wield.
The world would belong to her, with her children her successors.
Chapter 20
The stars are moving. Leaving . . . migrating.
—Faith NightStar, Cardinal Foreseer, PsyClan NightStar/DarkRiver leopard pack
PAYAL WRESTLED WITH the warping, trying to pull the lines of the grid back into shape.
The system did not move back into alignment.
Then a pair of arms formed of starlight joined hers, the hands closing over her fists. Warm, masculine, a hint of roughness. Canto. He made no attempt to take the lead, just fed his energy into her actions. It was the most intimate she’d ever been with any being, yet she felt no shock, nothing but a sense of rightness so pure it hurt.
Together, they wrenched the first line into alignment.
Muddy green morphed into glowing blue along that line.
How bad is it? His voice was music in her mind.
Catastrophic. Payal could sense all the lives being impacted by the carnage, each and every one a flickering pinpoint of light in her awareness. We’re going to have casualties. The people at the very center of the wound in the Net would’ve died before Payal could respond, their minds crushed by a roaring wave of data as pieces of the Net impacted one on top of the other.
But we can save those who remain if we fix this. A repair below impacted the space above and vice versa. That was why anchors had quietly mirrored every upper-level repair.
Just part of their job. Nothing to mention or make a fuss over.
Arran will replace me when I have to return, Canto told her. Then Suriana, followed by Bjorn. Ager last, because they are the oldest with the least energy to spare. I’ll work on increasing the network for future incidents.
Payal fought the visceral urge to reject such potent psychic contact with anyone but him. She needed every bit of help she could get. Held in Canto’s starlight arms, she worked with a focus that burned blue fire.
She knew the instant he fell away, the vastness of his power sucked back to his anchor point. Arran arrived on his heels, his power angry in a way that made it turbulent. But he didn’t try to take over and that was all that mattered. There was also no sense of an embrace with him; he simply stood with her and fed power where she needed it.
Relieved at the lack of intimacy, she worked on. Canto had helped her with the most difficult part, the twisted center. Arran assisted her to smooth out the surrounding section. Then he was gone, Suriana slipping into the void left behind.
Her energy was as gentle and as soft as her voice.
Weaving her power with Payal’s, she helped until the matrix was back in place. Battered and heavily patched, with the odd remaining kink, but good enough to keep people alive. Tell Bjorn and Ager to stand down. She threw the thought out to Canto, certain he was still listening for her.
Canto would always now listen for her. It was an illogical but confident belief.
Done, he responded at once. We’ll talk after you’ve recovered.
After managing to thank Suriana for her assistance, Payal dropped out of the Substrate and straight into her physical body. It ached, as if all her muscles had cramped. Stabs of pain shot down her jaw at her first breath, her tendons pulled taut for far too long as she unknowingly gritted her teeth.
The last thought she had was that she was glad she turned her room into a walled castle every night before she went to bed. No one would violate her sanctuary while she was unconscious.
Because her mind was fried, her power close to flatlining.
Her anchor point would hold, but barely.
The veil fell.
* * *
• • •
CANTO had gotten to work as soon as his anchor point hauled him back to his zone. If he couldn’t help Payal one way, he’d find another. His first act had been to touch base with ten other anchors who had the mental strength and capability to assist should it be required—Bjorn had agreed to watch the situation and send in those anchors as needed.
That set up, Canto hacked into Vara.
His family didn’t advertise his ability to hack into various databases and locations, preferring to keep that particular trick up their sleeves for exigent circumstances. The Mercant information network was fed by living informants—data hacking had too many pitfalls to be useful as part of normal operations.