The reminder of her pet’s loyalty leavened some of her guilt, but it could do nothing for her grief.
A rough-skinned hand brushed her own.
Not taking. Asking.
Breath a knot in her lungs, she didn’t look at Alexei as she slid her fingers into his, let his bigger hand engulf hers. Skin privileges. Hers for a short while longer . . . before the true Es discovered that she was an abomination.
Chapter 17
All historical records retrieved1 to date support the Ruling Coalition’s hypothesis that the PsyNet was never meant to contain only Psy minds. In the pre-Silence period, humans—via relationships with Psy—made up at least twenty-five percent2 of the Net population. As all indications are that human minds cannot access the PsyNet and Psy cannot access Net-connected human minds, the humans were a passive element of the pre-Silence PsyNet.
1 Majority of retrieved documents are partials, resurrected then organized into coherent order.
2 Conservative estimate.
—Research Group Alpha-Z, PsyNet Health
NIGHT CLOAKED MOSCOW. Kaleb stood on the edge of the terrace, his body clad only in the lightweight black pants he wore while exercising and his mind on the new damage in the PsyNet. The disintegration was increasing at multiple critical junctures, the Honeycomb strained.
“There are a lot of us Es,” Ivy Jane Zen had told the other members of the Ruling Coalition an hour earlier, “but it’s clear we were never meant to hold the entire PsyNet together on our own.”
No, the Es were meant to connect the PsyNet, much like the nervous system of a living entity, so that it could live and breathe. Below that was meant to be a solid foundation, thick with muscle and bone, not a ragged and thin skeleton with an increasing number of repaired fractures.
Slender arms slid around his waist, the charm bracelet on Sahara’s wrist falling down her forearm a little as she pressed the side of her face into his back. Closing a hand over one of hers, he lifted her palm to his mouth for a kiss. “Any solutions?” She’d been on a comm conference with the Empathic Collective when he walked out here forty minutes ago.
A shake of her head. “We just don’t know enough—the post-Silence Councils did a stellar job of destroying data that didn’t fit the Silence worldview.” Moving around to face him, she let him wrap his arm around her waist, her hair tumbling down her back. “Is Bo willing to work with us?”
“Yes.” While Kaleb was the one who’d approached Bowen Knight, he’d never truly expected the security chief and effective leader of the Human Alliance to agree to offer any aid.
Humans, with their weak mental shields, had no reason or motive to help the Psy race survive—Knight himself had made it clear that he’d seen too many examples of mental rape and telepathic theft firsthand to look at Kaleb’s race with anything but suspicion. But he was also a man with a soul. He wasn’t willing to stand by and watch millions of innocent Psy perish in a PsyNet collapse.
Kaleb had never been certain he had a soul, but he’d never once taken a human mind. So perhaps he did have some semblance of one. Perhaps. “Knight’s sent out a missive asking for volunteers willing to interact with Psy.”
“It would take incredible trust.” Sahara leaned into him.
“The Psy are to be empaths. Es are the only Psy that humans trust even a fraction.”
Strands of Sahara’s hair danced on the quiet wind. “The other thing?” she asked, the dark blue of her irises awash in hope.
“Signs of limited success.” Bowen Knight had asked Kaleb to find a solution to the problem of human shields; Kaleb had responded by assembling a team of the PsyNet’s brightest minds to work on the task. “Ashaya and Amara Aleine have the deepest knowledge on the topic, but they’ve deliberately sequestered themselves from the wider research group. Data in but not out.”
“To stop unconscious bias?”
Kaleb nodded. The Aleines had created a prototype implant that had come tantalizingly close to success before failing; the twin scientists had no desire to accidentally stifle new lines of inquiry by presenting the PsyNet team with their already discovered pathway. “The Aleines have also managed to convince Samuel Rain to put his mind to the problem.” Another brilliant scientist, albeit one who thought in strange patterns.
It might be exactly what they needed.
Sahara was quiet for a long moment before she spoke. “Do we have time, Kaleb?” A solemn question. “Bo’s decision to ask for volunteers when we haven’t been able to uphold our end of the bargain is an act of enormous compassion . . . but bonds take time to form.”
And bonds strong enough to pull a human into the PsyNet would take even longer. “No,” he said, because lying to Sahara wasn’t something he did. “The PsyNet is failing at a catastrophic rate. Unless thousands of humans fall in love with thousands of Psy within the next twelve months, it will collapse.”
Chapter 18
My daughter is a failed cardinal with delusions of grandeur. There is no such designation as E.
—Nikita Duncan to news media at the time of Sascha Duncan’s defection from the PsyNet (2079)
TWO HOURS AFTER arriving at the empathic compound, and ten minutes after eating lunch, Memory sat at a small table inside a neat little cabin. Outside, the rain had returned and become a downpour, and across from her sat a woman with eyes of cardinal starlight that tilted up a little at the corners, and skin of a dark honey brown, her black hair in a single braid.
Memory thanked the skies all over again that the rain had begun coming down hard right before she and Alexei walked into the compound. It meant no one but the Arrow guards had seen her as they ran across to the cabin Alexei said had been assigned to her. The small period of dampness while her clothes dried off in the warmth of the cabin had been worth it. She didn’t want to meet the others here while dressed in ill-fitting sweats, with her badly snarled and uncared-for hair in two frizzy knots on either side of her head.
It was bad enough that Sascha was seeing her this way.
Warmth emanated from the other woman, the sense of her as deeply kind and unthreatening as Lucy, but Memory was glad Alexei was leaning up against the wall next to her all the same. He was far deadlier than Sascha, a provoking wolf on top of it . . . yet she couldn’t help but remember how he’d held her hand, lent her his strength as she walked into an unknown situation.
“Did you really hurt people who came after your cub?” The question burst out of her.
Sascha’s facial muscles tightened. “Yes,” she said. “I’d do it again in the same circumstances, but it’s difficult to know that about myself—that I have the capacity for such violence.”
That was the fundamental difference between the two of them. Memory took great pleasure in imagining tearing Renault limb from limb. All at once, she knew she was being foolish in attempting to delay the inevitable—there was no way she could ever dupe Sascha. The cardinal’s power was a hum in the air, an electric sensation against her skin.
Her shoulders slumped. “I’m not an empath,” she whispered, speaking as much to the golden wolf who’d rescued her as to Sascha. “I’m sorry.”
“Sure, lioness,” drawled the aggravating wolf. “I must’ve imagined the ferocity of your roar.”
Memory gripped the edge of the table. “Four,” she said very precisely.
And the wolf laughed, filling the air with a wild humor that made her want to turn, watch him. Alexei was beautiful when he laughed, his eyes bright with light and his entire body a thing of passionate life.
Lips curving, Sascha tilted her head to the side. “My friends in the PsyNet tell me your mind expresses itself in a unique way, but there is no doubt you’re one of us.”
Memory shook her head. “I’m not.” It came out hard and rough, she wanted so desperately for what Sascha said to be true. “Empaths heal. I . . . I can’t do that.” Her gut churned. “I’m
not like you.”
Not responding in words, Sascha held out her hand, palm up. Another invitation. Except that making contact with an empath was a dangerous risk—catastrophically so when the empath was Sascha Duncan. The cardinal would no doubt discover the heavy darkness that lived at the core of Memory’s nature, the abyss she could never escape.
But what was her other choice? Memory couldn’t go after Renault with her mind wide open. She needed to learn how to shield, how to re-create the protective shell he’d systematically destroyed. Perhaps, if she cooperated, Sascha would teach her the basics before the Empathic Collective kicked her out of this compound.
“It’s all right.” Alexei’s hand brushing her nape. “Sascha doesn’t bite.”
Wishing he’d maintain the contact but not knowing how to ask, Memory placed her palm over Sascha’s. She was braced for a psychic intrusion, but Sascha simply closed her fingers over Memory’s and said, “Who told you that you weren’t an E?” Lines flared out from the corners of her eyes, her voice firm.
“Renault.” Memory tried to quiet her racing heart, failed. “But I learned long ago to never take anything he said at face value. He lies so smoothly it’s like breathing to him.” Her captor also felt nothing as he did it; the only time he came close to experiencing emotion was when he killed, and even that emotion was twisted and wrong and made her feel dirty.
“Yet you believe he was right to deny you the label of empath.”
“On the comm,” Memory said, her throat dry, “the professors and Psy experts talk about empaths being psychic healers. I don’t do that.” Her belief was backed up by the rare opportunities she’d had to test her psychic muscles—mostly when Renault had allowed her to be “free,” his psychic grip a hovering warning.
Each time, she’d seen a person in distress and reacted without thought, reaching out to try to help them. Each time, she’d failed. As she had with Alexei yesterday, when she’d caught the raw depth of the pain he carried in his powerful body. All she’d succeeded in doing was having him accuse her of trying to pet him.
“Not every E is suitable to be a healer.” Sascha’s voice was soothing in a way Memory couldn’t explain. “Some of our kind work in large corporations, help read the other side in a negotiation.” A faint smile. “We have an ongoing ethical discussion about the topic and it can get heated.”
Memory wanted to grip on to the lifeline, to lie, discovered that she couldn’t. Alexei, Sascha, even the lethal alpha wolf, had made the decision to help her. For no reason but that they were good people. If she kept on lying to them, what did that make her?
A shadow of Renault.
Her neck stiffened, her gut tensing. Never would she be Renault’s reflection. “I—” She bit her lower lip, trying and failing to find the words to explain what she did. Everything felt too much, her head too full, the scream building again.
Shoving back her chair, she strode to the cabin door and wrenched it open. The wind whistled in, but not the rain, the overhang over the porch a protective barrier. Alexei had told her this cabin was hers for the duration of her training, that she could decorate it how she liked.
The wonder of having a door that she controlled, a place where others had to ask for entry, it was the most incredible gift she could imagine. But even as she basked in the joy of it, she’d known she’d be stealing it.
When a large, warm hand closed gently over her nape from behind, she shivered inwardly at the sweep of . . . something that wasn’t simply a lack of pain. Her heart, it beat faster, her breath caught, and her skin, it grew hot. Her hand clenched on the edge of the doorjamb. “I should go,” she said, suddenly afraid of what she might bring to this beautiful green place full of wild creatures. “Renault won’t give up, will come here.”
Alexei brushed his thumb over her skin, the caress turning her breath shallow. “Don’t know if you’ve noticed, lioness, but we’re predators with claws of our own.” Words spoken against her ear, his breath hot, intimate. “Stop insulting us by worrying about that coward.”
She felt his claws release, brush her skin—but though the hard tips lay against her carotid and jugular, Memory didn’t run, didn’t panic. Because deadly predator or not, this was the golden wolf who protected her as much as he infuriated her. “I don’t want to bring evil here, to this bright, green, clean place.”
Another brush of Alexei’s thumb over her skin before he retracted his claws. “Sascha darling probably has a story or two to tell you about that.”
“I’m going to smack you in a second.” Despite the dark threat, Sascha’s tone was exasperated rather than angry. “Or maybe I’ll just call you Sexy Lexie.”
Alexei’s growl made every tiny hair on Memory’s body quiver in attention. Turning without dislodging his hold on her nape, she saw that he was scowling at a grinning Sascha, and she wondered why he called the cardinal “darling.” Sascha was mated to another man, mother to a cub she adored enough to do violence.
Maybe she’d ask him . . . but first she had to make them understand. “I don’t know how to tell you what I do,” she said in a voice that broke at the end. “I have to show you.” It was hard to breathe, her chest painful. “I need a monster, a murderer who kills for the thrill of it.”
Alexei’s jaw was a brutal line, his thumb stroking her skin again. “You’re free now, Memory. You don’t have to consort with bastards like Renault.”
“Yes, I do,” she whispered, her chest so tight she wondered if it would crack. The ugly darkness was where she walked, nightmares her home ground. “I’m not meant to heal. I’m a monster, too.”
Sascha got to her feet and took Memory’s hand, as if she hadn’t heard anything Memory had just said, the warning she’d tried to give. “Most Es refuse to work with true psychopaths.” She made a face. “I feel awful about it, but I can’t even get myself to work with Amara and she’s not a serial killer. It’s just . . .”
The cardinal shivered. “She’s better than she was before, has developed a stunted kind of emotional intelligence, but there’s such emptiness at her core where emotion should be, an endless nothing that drags me under.”
“Nothing,” Memory whispered, astonished that Sascha had felt it, too. “That’s what’s inside Renault, too. Nothing.” She didn’t realize she’d moved closer to Alexei until she raised her free hand and fisted it in the back of his T-shirt. He didn’t object, his thumb continuing to stroke the side of her neck in rhythmic motions that made her toes curl.
Sascha dropped Memory’s hand—but only so she could cup the side of Memory’s face. “You’re an empath, Memory.” No room for discussion in the cardinal’s tone, Sascha’s lips soft when she pressed them to Memory’s forehead. “You appear to be a unique kind of empath, but you are one of us. I know—I see you as only another E can.”
Memory’s lower lip threatened to tremble at the kiss. It reminded her of her mother’s gentle hands on her as Diana Aven-Rose helped her put on her coat, or did her hair. “I have to show you,” she repeated; the fear of being repudiated would otherwise eat her up from the inside out. “The psychopath has to volunteer. I won’t force anyone, not even a monster.”
Sascha blew out a breath, her hand still on Memory’s cheek. “You’re certain you want to do this now?”
“Yes.” Her hip and shoulder brushed Alexei’s side, his body a furnace.
“Amara’s a scientist. She’ll probably volunteer out of curiosity—or does it have to be a murderer?” Sascha’s brow furrowed, care in the hand she ran over Memory’s hair. “I really don’t like this, but at least Amara is safe enough if handled correctly.”
Memory forced herself to think. “If she has the nothingness inside her, then yes, it should work.” The howling abyss was the key. “I’ve only ever done it with a murderer, so I don’t know for sure.”
Alexei’s chest rumbled. “Sascha, I’m not sure this is a good idea. Memo
ry’s—”
“—right here!” Spinning out and away so she could face him, she folded her arms across her chest and glared; for some reason, while Sascha’s protectiveness made her feel warm and safe, Alexei’s made her feral. “Don’t talk about me as if I’m a dog you rescued!”
God, she was magnificent. “A dog would have more sense,” Alexei said in a snarl. “You want to go party with psychopaths when you’re so thin I could pick you up with my little finger.” Her neck had felt scarily delicate under his touch, the unruliness of her curls the biggest thing about her.
“I’m doing this,” she bit out. “Then I’m going to hunt Renault.”
The wolf in Alexei approved of her single-minded need for vengeance. Hell, so did the man. The same wolf was torn by an overwhelming sense of protectiveness toward this survivor who’d refused to allow a monster to destroy her. “With what?” he snarled. “You have claws smaller than a kitten’s.”
Narrowing her eyes, Memory looked as if she wanted to show him her claws right then and there—probably across his face—but Sascha said, “Both of you. Behave.” Stepping forward, she frowned. “We have to figure out logistics—bringing Amara to a compound full of baby empaths isn’t a good idea. She’ll panic them.”
The genuine worry in her tone had Alexei breaking his eye-contact standoff with Memory. “That bad?”
“It’s this sense of being sucked into a howling emptiness that gives nothing back.” Goose bumps broke out over the cardinal’s arms. “I can handle it by gritting my teeth and ignoring my nausea, but untrained Es won’t have a chance.” She touched the side of Memory’s face again, her smile holding the warm affection of an older sister. “Our Memory is far tougher than she looks if she can deal with the sensation without breaking.”
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