Blaze of Memory

by Singh, Nalini

  Glen shook his head. “No way she had the coordination to get through security then—she’d have lost her fine motor skills well beforehand.”

  Fighting the rush of anger provoked by the thought of how helpless she must’ve felt, what might’ve been done to her in that time, Dev glanced back into the room. The bright white overhead light glinted off her matted blonde hair, highlighting the scratches on the face, the sharp bones slicing her skin. “She looks half-starved.”

  Glen’s usually smiling face was a grim mask. “We haven’t had the opportunity to do a full checkup but there are bruises on her arms, her legs.”

  “You telling me she was beaten?” Raw fury pulsed through Dev’s body, hot and violent.

  “Tortured would be the word I’d use. There are old bruises beneath the new ones.”

  Dev swore under his breath. “How long before she’s functional?”

  “It’ll probably take forty-eight hours to flush the drugs out completely. I think it was a one-time hit. If she’d been on them longer, she’d have been even more messed up.”

  “Keep me updated.”

  “Are you going to call Enforcement?”

  “No.” Dev had no intention of letting her out of his sight. “She was dumped in front of my door for a reason. She stays with us until we figure out what the hell is going on.”

  “Dev . . .” Glen blew out a breath. “Her reaction to the drugs says she has to be Psy.”

  “I know.” His own psychic senses had picked up an “echo” from the woman. Muted but there. “She’s not a threat at this stage. We’ll reassess the situation after she’s up and around.”

  Something beeped inside the room, making Glen glance at his chart. “It’s nothing. Don’t you have a meeting with Talin this morning?”

  Taking the hint, Dev drove home to shower and change. It was just ticking over six thirty when he walked back into the building that housed the headquarters of the Shine Foundation. Though the top four floors were sectioned into a number of guest apartments, the middle ten were taken up with various administration offices, while the floors below the basement housed the testing and medical facilities. And today—a Psy. A woman who might turn out to be the latest move in the Council’s attempts to destroy the Forgotten.

  But, he reminded himself, right now she was asleep and he had work to do. “Activate. Voice code—Devraj Santos.” The clear screen of his computer slid up and out of his desk, showing a number of unread messages. His secretary, Maggie, was good at weeding out the “can-waits” from the “must-responds” and all ten on-screen fell into the latter category—and today hadn’t yet begun. Leaning back in his chair, he glanced at his watch.

  Too early to return the calls—even in New York, most people weren’t at their desks by six forty-five. Then again, most people didn’t run the Shine Foundation, much less act as the head of a “family” of thousands scattered across the country, and in many cases, the world.

  It was inevitable he’d think of Marty at that moment.

  “This job,” his predecessor had said the night Dev accepted the directorship, “will eat up your life, suck the marrow from your bones for good measure, and spit you out on the other end, a dry husk.”

  “You stuck to it.” Marty had run Shine for over forty years.

  “I was lucky,” the older man had said in that blunt, no-nonsense way of his. “I was married when I took the job, and to my eternal gratitude, my wife stayed with me through all the shit. You go in alone, you’ll end up staying that way.”

  Dev could still remember how he’d laughed. “What, you have a very low opinion of my charm?”

  “Charm all you like,” Marty had said with a snort, “but women have a way of wanting time. The director of the Shine Foundation doesn’t have time. All he has is the weight of thousands of dreams and hopes and fears resting on his shoulders.” A glance filled with shadows. “It’ll change you, Dev, turn you cruel if you’re not careful.”

  “We’re a stable unit now,” Dev had argued. “The past is past.”

  “Dear boy, the past will never be past. We’re in a war, and as director, you’re the general.”

  It had taken Dev three years into the job before he’d truly understood Marty’s warning. When his ancestors had defected from the PsyNet, they’d hoped to make a life outside the cold rigidity of Silence. They’d chosen chaos over control, the dangers of emotion over the certain sanity of a life lived without hope, without love, without joy. But with those choices had come consequences.

  The Psy Council had never stopped hunting the Forgotten.

  To fight back, to keep his people safe, Dev had had to make some brutal choices of his own.

  His fingers curled around the pen in his grip, threatening to crush it. “Enough,” he muttered, glancing at his watch again. Still too early to call.

  Pushing back his chair, he got up, intending to grab some coffee. Instead, he found himself taking the elevator down to the subbasement level. The corridors were quiet, but he knew the labs would already be humming with activity—the workload was simply too big to allow for much downtime.

  Because while the Forgotten had once been as Psy as those who looked to the Council for leadership, time and intermarriage with the other races had changed things in their genetic structure. Strange new abilities had begun to appear ... but so had strange new diseases.

  But that wasn’t the threat he had to assess today.

  If they were right, the unknown woman in the hospital bed in front of him was linked to the PsyNet itself. That made her beyond dangerous—a Trojan horse, her mind used as a conduit through which to siphon data or implement deadly strategies.

  The last spy stupid enough to try to infiltrate Shine had discovered the lethal truth far too late—that Devraj Santos had never left his military background behind. Now, as he looked down into the woman’s bruised, scratched, and emaciated face, he considered whether he’d be able to snap her neck with cold-blooded precision should the time come.

  He was afraid the answer might just be an icily practical yes.

  Chilled, he was about to leave the room when he noticed her eyes moving rapidly beneath her lids. “Psy,” he murmured, “aren’t supposed to dream.”

  “Tell me.”

  She swallowed the blood on her tongue. “I’ve told you everything. You’ve taken everything.”

  Eyes as black as night with a bare few flecks of white stared down at her as mental fingers spread in her mind, thrusting, clawing, destroying. She swallowed a scream, bit another line in her tongue.

  “Yes,” her torturer said. “It does seem as if I’ve stripped you of all your secrets.”

  She didn’t respond, didn’t relax. He’d done this before. So many times. But the next minute, the questions would begin again. She didn’t know what he wanted, didn’t know what he searched for. All she knew was that she’d broken. There was nothing left in her now. She was cracked, shattered, gone.

  “Now,” he said, in that same, always-patient voice. “Tell me about the experiments.”

  She opened her mouth and repeated what she’d already confessed over and over again. “We doctored the results.” He’d known that from the start; that was no betrayal. “We never gave you the actual data.”

  “Tell me the truth. Tell me what you found.”

  Those fingers gouged mercilessly at her brain, shooting red fire that threatened to obliterate her very self. She couldn’t hold on, couldn’t protect them, couldn’t even protect herself—because through it all he sat, a large black spider within her mind, watching, learning, knowing. In the end, he took her secrets, her honor, her loyalty, and when he was done, the only thing she remembered was the rich copper scent of blood.

  She came awake with a jagged scream stuck in her throat. “He knows.”

  Brown eyes looking down into hers again. “Who knows?” The name formed on her tongue and then was lost in the miasma of her ravaged mind. “He knows,” she repeated, desperate that someone unders
tand what she’d done. “He knows.” Her fingers gripped his.

  “What does he know?” Electricity arced like an inferno beneath his skin.

  “About the children,” she whispered, as her head grew heavy again, as her eyes grew dark again. “About the boy.”

  Gold turned to bronze and she wanted to watch, but it was too late.

  PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

  Letter dated January 17, 1969

  Dear Matthew,

  At today’s meeting of government heads, the Council proposed a radical new approach to the problems we’ve been facing. I knew it was coming, but still, I can’t quite imagine how it will work.

  The aim of this new program would be to condition all negative emotion out of the coming generation of Psy. If we could cure rage, what a boon that would be—so much of the violence could be stopped, so many lives saved. But the theorists have gone even further. They say that once we have a handle on rage, we may be able to control other damaging emotional events—things that cause the fractures that lead to mental illness.

  I’m cautiously optimistic. God knows, this family has paid the price for its gifts one too many times.

  With all my love,

  Mom

  CHAPTER 2

  He knows ... About the children. About the boy.

  Having forced himself to wait till nine, Dev coded in a call to Talin with impatient hands, his shoulders tight with strain. The blonde woman had fallen straight back into unconsciousness after uttering those words, but Dev hadn’t needed anything more—his gut told him there could be only one answer.

  “Dev?” Talin’s sleep-rumpled face appeared on the transparent screen of his computer, her yawn unsurprising given it was just hitting six in her part of the country. “I thought our meeting was at ten thirty Eastern.”

  “Change of plans.” He considered his next words with care. Talin was pragmatic, but she was also very attached to her charges. “I need to ask Jon something.”

  She made a face. “He’s not going to change his mind about entering a Shine school. But I make sure he reads everything Glen sends him, and the Psy in the pack are helping him train his abilities.”

  “He’s settled in DarkRiver.” Dev had come to that conclusion after a personal visit to the leopard pack’s home base in San Francisco. “I think that’s the best place for him.”

  “Then . . . ?”

  “How many people knew about Jon in the Psy labs—after he was kidnapped?” The boy was—genetically speaking—over forty-five percent Psy and had been born with a unique kind of vocal ability. Jonquil Duchslaya could literally talk people into doing whatever he wanted. It was a gift many would shed blood to control.

  Tiny lines fanned out from the corners of Talin’s eyes as her gaze sharpened. “Ashaya, of course. She was the head scientist.”

  Ashaya Aleine was also now mated to a DarkRiver leopard, and would do nothing to put either Jon or other Forgotten kids in danger. “Who else?”

  “No one alive.” Talin’s voice vibrated with the echo of purest rage. “Clay took care of Larsen, the bastard who was experimenting on the children. And you know the Council destroyed Ashaya’s lab after she defected, killing all her research assistants.”

  Ice speared through his chest, cold, rigid, deadly. “How certain are you of that?”

  “DarkRiver has contacts in the Net. So do the wolves,” she added, referring to DarkRiver’s closest ally, the Snow-Dancers. “There wasn’t even a hint of a survivor.”

  But the Psy, Dev knew, were adept at keeping secrets. Especially Psy like Ming LeBon, the Councilor rumored to have been behind the destruction of the lab. “If I send you a photo, can you see if Jon recognizes the person in it from his kidnapping?”

  “No.” An absolute answer, her expression as fierce as that of the leopards in her pack. “He’s finally starting to act like a normal kid—I don’t want to remind him of what he went through in that place.”

  Dev had known Talin long enough to understand that she wouldn’t budge. “Then I need Ashaya’s number.”

  “She was pretty broken up about losing her people.” A pause. “Just be careful with her.”

  Dev heard what she wasn’t saying. “You afraid I’ll beat the answer out of her?”

  “You’ve changed, Dev.” A quiet response. “Become harder.”

  It was an accusation he’d faced many times in the past few months.

  You heartless bastard! You put him in the hospital! How can you live with yourself?

  Shelving the knife-edged memory, he shrugged. “Part of the job.” That was true as far as it went, but even if he stopped being the director of Shine tomorrow, his ability would ensure the spreading cold in his soul. Paradoxically, that very ice made him the best person to run Shine—he knew how the Psy thought.

  “Here.”

  He noted the number Talin flashed on the screen. “Can we postpone our meeting?”

  A nod. “Let me know what you find out.”

  Ending the call, Dev coded in Ashaya’s number. It was answered on her end by a gray-eyed child with silky straight black hair. “Hello. May I help you?”

  Dev hadn’t thought anything could make him smile today, but he felt his lips curve at the solemn greeting. “Is your mom around?”

  “Yes.” The boy’s eyes sparkled, suddenly more blue than gray. “She’s making me cookies for kindergarten.”

  Dev couldn’t quite reconcile the idea of Psy scientist Ashaya Aleine as a mother who made her little boy cookies at six fifteen in the morning. “Shouldn’t you still be asleep?”

  Before the boy could reply, a frowning female face filled the screen. “Who are you talking—” Her gaze fell on him. “Yes?”

  “My name is Devraj Santos.”

  Picking up her son, Ashaya hitched him over her hip. The boy immediately snuggled his head onto her shoulder, one little hand spread on the pale blue of her shirt. Intelligent eyes watched Dev with undisguised interest.

  “The Shine Foundation,” Ashaya said, adjusting the collar of her son’s pajama top with the absent movements of a mother used to doing such things.

  “Yes.”

  “Talin’s spoken about you.” She tucked back a strand of curly black hair that had escaped her braid. “What can I do for you?”

  Dev’s eyes flicked to her son. Taking the hint, Ashaya kissed the boy on the cheek and smiled. “Keenan, you want to cut out some cookies while I talk to Mr. Santos?”

  An enthusiastic nod. Mother and child disappeared from the screen for a minute, and as he waited, Dev found himself wondering if he’d ever hold a child of his own in his arms. The likelihood was very low—even had he trusted his genetic inheritance, he’d done too much, seen too much. There was no softness left in him.

  Ashaya’s face returned to the screen, her eyes filled with the remnants of laughter. “We’ll have to be quick—Keenan’s very good, but he’s still a four-year-old alone with cookie dough.”

  Knowing he was about to wipe that shimmering joy from her eyes, he didn’t try to soften the blow, didn’t try to sugar-coat the implications. “I need you to see if you can identify someone.” Then he told her about the woman he’d found dumped outside his apartment door.

  Ashaya’s face went pale under that dusky skin. “Do you think—”

  “It could be nothing,” he interrupted. “But it’s a possibility I have to check out.”

  “Of course.” Her throat moved as she swallowed. “If the Council knows about the unique abilities being manifested in the children of the Forgotten, there’s a chance they’ll begin to try to experiment on those children once again.” A pause. “I think Ming would kill them if he couldn’t use them.”

  Dev’s jaw tightened. That was exactly what worried him—the Council would never countenance the idea of another group with access to psychic powers—much less the increasingly strong ones being manifested in some of his people. “Is this line secure?”

  “Yes.”

  He sent thro
ugh a photograph. “She may not look like she used to.”

  Nodding, Ashaya took a deep breath and opened the attachment. He knew the instant she recognized the woman in the photo. Crushing relief, anger, and pain—it all swept over her face in a violent wave. “Dear God.” Her fingers covered her mouth. “Ekaterina. It’s Ekaterina.”

  CHAPTER 3

  The Psy Council met in their usual location—a mental vault deep within the PsyNet, the psychic network that connected every Psy on the planet but for the renegades. An endless vista of black, each Psy mind represented by a single white star, the Net had a stark kind of beauty. But of course, those within the Net no longer understood beauty.

  Like their Council, they understood only logic, practicality, economics.

  Shut inside the solid black walls of the vault, Nikita looked to Ming. “You had something to discuss?”

  “Yes.” The other Councilor’s mind was a blade, precise, ice-cold. “I’ve been able to retrieve some of the data Ashaya Aleine obfuscated before her defection.”

  “Excellent.” Shoshanna Scott’s mental voice was as coolly elegant as she was in person. That was why she was one of the two public faces of the Council. Her “husband,” Henry, their relationship a front to pacify the human and changeling media, was the other half. Though, Nikita thought, the two hadn’t been working as a cohesive unit these past months.

  “Anything we can use?” Shoshanna again.

  “Possibly.” Ming paused. “I’m uploading it now.”

  Streams of data scrolled down the black walls, a silver waterfall comprehensible to only the most powerful Psy minds. Nikita absorbed the information, scanned through the salient

  points. “This concerns the Forgotten.”

  “It appears,” Ming said, “that their most recent descendants are being born with abilities unseen in the Net.”