by K. M. Ruiz
Lucas exited Kerr’s mind, leaving behind a gaping hole in Kerr’s thoughts that was filled with a myriad of minds from Nathan’s merge. Kerr held on to the Stryker merge for a few moments longer, holding up the façade, until everyone else let go and all he could feel were two last people lingering in his mind.
Jason and Threnody.
For a second—Kerr lived a lifetime.
Jason’s shield disappeared. Kerr cut the psi link between them. Merged Warhound telekinesis, once held at bay, now slammed into Kerr. He was thrown back by the force, the punch a harder hit than anything he’d ever before experienced. He crashed to the floor, felt his bones shatter from the inside out, felt the deep ache of organs tearing apart. All he tasted now was blood.
Merged telepathy curled deeper into his mind, stripping his shields down to their last layer, down to where his Class IX empathy mingled with his Class II telepathy. It wasn’t enough to save him. Not this time.
Kerr blinked, struggling to breathe. Emptiness clawed at the edge of his mind and brightness interfered with his vision. He could see sunlight glinting off the space shuttles through the plasglass observation windows of the command room, everything shining with false halos.
He felt Nathan digging through his mind and Kerr couldn’t stop him, didn’t even try as the Warhound merge got lost in the maze of his psyche. He let all those minds find anchor points in his own thoughts, tying them down. Blood and clear fluid slid out of his nose and ears, pouring out of his mouth, choking him. He sensed Threnody’s determination through the tenuous psi link that still ran between them. Kerr closed his eyes, feeling some distant sort of satisfaction as Nathan found, too late, what was hiding in his mind.
No, Nathan said, his telepathy a ragged, bright line of thought knotted deep in Kerr’s mind. You Strykers would never do this. It goes against everything you are.
That’s why you never saw it coming, Kerr said, thinking of Lucas.
With the last of his strength and every mental trick Lucas had taught him, Kerr held tight to the faded imprint of the merge, trapping Nathan and the merged telepaths and telekinetics there with him on the ground. The Warhounds struggled to get free of the deep holes in Kerr’s mind, and maybe some did, but Kerr didn’t know how many of them survived. All he knew was the shock that colored everyone’s thoughts, their shared horrified, frantic disbelief. In that last hectic instant, Kerr heard them, heard them all as they died screaming.
[FORTY-FIVE]
SEPTEMBER 2379
PARIS, FRANCE
Threnody felt, distantly, when the last motherboard burned out, the spark of exploding circuits cascading through her brain. Or maybe it was something else, something more immediate. Threnody didn’t know, couldn’t care, as she collapsed to the floor, struggling to stay conscious.
Everything seemed distant until Kerr’s voice whispered through her mind. Threnody could barely understand his words, but it didn’t matter. All he needed were her eyes, so she focused on the generator room, everything blurry to her sight. Then it sharpened, brought into perfect clarity not by her, but by someone else. The connection overwhelmed her traumatized system and she passed out for a few seconds. She came back to herself slowly, hearing someone calling her name.
“Thren, please. Wake up,” Quinton said, his voice a ragged, painful plea in her ear.
It took effort to open her eyes. She was barely aware of her surroundings, of the person holding her up so she could breathe. She coughed, her lungs burning. She tried to move, but the agony in her body made her choke out a cry.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” Quinton said, sounding desperate. He shifted her in his arms, one hand resting above the bullet wound in her thigh. “I know it hurts, but we’ll fix you up in no time. I promise.”
Only one emergency light was still working, whatever power source it ran on spared from the damage she’d caused. It cast an eerie glow over the two men gathered around her. Threnody opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out.
Quinton’s shaking hand touched her face. “Jason, get us out of here.”
Threnody blinked, the room changing shape with a crack of displaced air as Jason teleported them not to safety, but to the storage room she had left behind for the generator room. A single emergency light burned over by the door. The Command Center must have had a separate emergency backup system that she hadn’t been connected to. There still wasn’t enough light to see by.
“Flashlight,” Threnody rasped out. “Near the case.”
“Jason, we don’t have time for this shit,” Quinton snarled. He still grabbed the flashlight and turned it on. The bright light hurt Threnody’s eyes.
Threnody coughed and looked down at herself. Her arms were black husks streaked through with scorched red, her uniform and the skinsuit burned off. Pieces still remained, melted into muscle, mixing with plasma. She could move her fingers, barely, but she couldn’t feel a damn thing. Her head felt strangely weighted down.
“The case?” she managed to ask.
“Bomb’s still active. The insulation in the carrying case protected it,” Jason said in a hollow voice. “The shelves were metal. Receiver is nothing but slag. I can’t find the remote detonator.”
Threnody let out a choked little laugh. “Had it with me. Left it on the lower level.”
She could hear Jason swallow. “Then it’s probably slagged as well.”
Something wet hit her face; tears, maybe. Or blood. She couldn’t smell the difference, couldn’t smell anything. Threnody focused on hands that she couldn’t feel anymore, muscle memory ingrained in a way the brain couldn’t forget. Quinton always said that even after he’d lost his arms or hands to his power, somehow he always thought his limbs were still there. Phantom sensations that his nerves remembered, would always remember.
Hers remembered.
“How much time?” she said.
Quinton’s arms tightened around her. The pressure nearly sent Threnody spiraling back into unconsciousness, and she let out a pained noise. Quinton loosened his grip. She squeezed her eyes shut.
“Kerr and Lucas can’t hold Nathan back for much longer,” Jason said. “Three, maybe four minutes. Everyone else has teleported out. It’s just us.”
Threnody opened her eyes. The darkness seemed strangely bright to her. “Leave me.”
“No.”
Quinton ground out the word. Threnody felt his entire body jerk in protest at what she was telling him to do. She struggled to lift an arm, bumping a ruined hand against the line of his jaw, refusing to let the pain pull her under. A roaring sound filled her ears, but she didn’t know what it was and couldn’t care.
“No choice.” She smiled, struggling to form it. “Bomb needs to go off.”
“I’ll do it,” Quinton said, burying his face against the top of her head, his teeth catching on her hair. “Jason can teleport you to London, then come back for me.”
She caught sight of Jason’s face and the bitter regret in his eyes. “I’ve only got enough strength left for one more teleport,” Jason said. “I can’t—”
Save you. The same way he couldn’t save Kerr. She didn’t need to be a telepath to hear those unspoken words.
Threnody drew in a short breath, finding it hard to breathe. She felt cold. “The world needs Jason. He needs you, Quinton. There’s no one left to do this. Just me.”
Quinton clutched wordlessly at her uniform, pulling at it.
Threnody felt Jason’s hand on her shoulder, his grip shaky. His voice wasn’t much better. “We’re running out of time.”
Quinton picked her up with arms that shook, but his hands were gentle as he cradled her close for the last time. He sat her up against the back wall of the storage room, Jason dragging the black case within easy reach. The glow from the flashlight showed Threnody everything around her, everything that mattered.
Quinton framed her face with his hands, fingers warm against her skin as he looked at her, his eyes searching hers out in the dark as they’d
done countless times before.
“Hi,” Quinton said, voice breaking.
“Hi.” Threnody leaned forward, pressing her forehead against his. “I wanted to see it.”
“I know.”
“Live it for me. As long as you can.” He tried to say her name, but nothing came out, just the shape of it on his lips. Threnody smiled, refusing to look away. “It’s okay, Quin. Don’t be afraid.”
Jason teleported them out in a crack of displaced air and Threnody was left alone, the ghost of Quinton’s touch on her face. The flashlight was angled to spotlight the open black case and the shape of the nuclear bomb that rested inside.
Threnody reached out with a shaking hand, ignoring the pain that came with movement, until her ruined fingers hovered over the arming switch near the base of the warhead. The tattered psi link between her and Kerr was held together by mental whispers, and then not even that.
She sobbed out a breath, biting down hard on her torn bottom lip until blood flowed over her tongue. She still couldn’t taste it, but she remembered the metallic flavor, and her life, and all the decisions that had brought her to this moment.
Threnody flipped the switch.
The world burned hot and white for an instant. The mental grid dipped. Pulsed. Flattened.
In her mind and Kerr’s, everything was quiet.
[FORTY-SIX]
SEPTEMBER 2379
LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM
Telepaths were dying beneath her hands, beneath her power, and Jael could only let them slide away as the merge ate through their minds. Nothing she could do would keep them alive long enough for her to stabilize their minds. She couldn’t save most of them, so Jael settled for a few, two of them being Lucas’s sisters. She kept a careful mental touch on Samantha and Kristen as she worked on the Strykers she could help. Jael judged the state of the fight by the state of those two Sercas and how damaged their minds were becoming.
Only when telekinetics started teleporting into the street in droves did Jael realize how many Strykers they were going to lose. She was inundated by the spiraling death throes of too many minds, and they threatened to take her down with them. Even her shields weren’t enough, the mental shrieks of the dying clawing at her mind. For the first time since she’d dipped into a person’s mind for psi surgery, Jael closed herself off to their thoughts and pain, trying to find her balance again.
The telepaths who were purposefully held back from the merge to be available for the fallout couldn’t have known what was coming. They couldn’t have foreseen that Strykers would be dying in the streets, slumped over one another, bleeding in the gutter, minds tangled together in a knot that no one could undo.
Then the cause of the whole damn mess teleported into the street, legs crumpling beneath him as he appeared. Someone screamed for Jael, but she was already running, stumbling over bodies to reach Lucas. The Stryker merge that had hung over the mental grid for so long finally broke down completely, the Serca siblings losing the viselike grip they had on everyone’s minds. Lucas, for all his immense power, was so far gone, wrapped so tight and stretched so thin, that he never even felt it when his mind broke.
Samantha did, but she could do nothing, had nothing left to reach for him with that could help. Her telepathy was as shattered as the merge, and Kristen was no longer present to help pull Lucas out of the mental abyss that threatened his sanity. Kristen was already gone, mind broken beyond repair and shutting down, one dying spark in a wave of many. Try as she might, Samantha couldn’t find Lucas in the mess that was the mental grid, and Jael felt the girl slip away somewhere deep inside herself.
Jael crashed to her knees beside Lucas’s body, yanking at the lock of his skinsuit helmet and prying it off. She cushioned his head with one hand, letting her fingers catch the weight of it rather than the street. At the touch of her mind to his, Lucas’s eyes snapped open, pupils tiny black pinpricks in a sea of dark blue, blood leaking out of the corners like tears.
“Lucas,” Jael said, heart pounding in her chest. Stay with me.
He focused on her, or seemed to. Recognition was there, but Jael knew, somehow, that it wasn’t of her. She would never know what he saw in that moment.
He opened his mouth and choked on words. “I—”
Breath stuttered in his chest. Jael felt his mind fall through the mental grid.
She couldn’t catch him.
Jael felt the massive, gaping hole in Lucas’s ravaged mind—all that was left of him after the merge—swallow everything in the wake of the trauma he’d inflicted on himself. Jael was effectively shut out, clawing at his mind and not even touching shields, just empty space.
“Lucas,” she whispered, staring blankly down at his unconscious form and the slow rise and fall of his chest. Jael needed to transport him to the Strykers Syndicate immediately, but she wasn’t sure if any telekinetics were left who had the strength to teleport.
A shadow drifted over her and Jael looked up, staring at Jason and Quinton. Jason had his arm slung over Quinton’s shoulder, letting the other man take most of his weight. An ugly rip was torn through his uniform and skinsuit, blood having saturated the area, but his chest seemed whole. The grief they exhibited rubbed against the raw places in her own mind. Quinton was staring down the street with a dead look in his eyes, seemingly unaware of his surroundings.
“It’s over,” Jason said, eyes bloodshot, voice raw and wounded. “Threnody detonated the bomb. Kerr made sure Nathan and his Warhounds couldn’t leave the explosion radius before everyone else teleported out of range.”
Jael closed her eyes, her mind still searching for Lucas’s. “And the people already in space?”
Quinton spoke, but he didn’t sound like the man Jael knew. “Let them die out there.”
PART NINE
TABULA RASA
SESSION DATE: 2128.09.28
LOCATION: Institute of Psionics Research
CLEARANCE ID: Dr. Amy Bennett
SUBJECT: 2581
FILE NUMBER: 881
The doctor kneels before the girl, one hand gripping the cascade of wires that hangs from bruised skin. Those bleached-out violet eyes seem sunken and they no longer look at the camera. They look elsewhere.
“Aisling,” the doctor pleads. “We can’t survive like this.”
The girl is still and quiet, one hand clutching a white card. After a long moment, she unclenches her hand and lets the card fall to the floor. “Thank you,” she whispers.
The doctor picks the card up, turns it around to see the shape on the underside. “We don’t want your thanks.”
“I know.” The girl smiles and leans forward, the effort making her gasp. She presses a kiss to the woman’s forehead, like a benediction when it isn’t, not in her prison cell. “I wasn’t thanking you.”
The doctor drops the card to the floor and reaches out to help the child lean back in her seat. Behind them, the machines click and hum and whine, a nonstop sound that has been a constant companion to them both.
“What do we do?” the doctor whispers. “What do we do next?”
“Anything you want, Lucas.” Aisling smiles, eyes wide and glazed and looking at things no one else can see. “Anything at all.”
[FORTY-SEVEN]
OCTOBER 2379
TORONTO, CANADA
It never changed.
Jael wondered about that, the first time she went down into the static of Lucas’s mind to try to anchor a psi link. She gave up analyzing it on the tenth try. The vibrancy was gone, the brightness normally there on the mental grid missing. Nothing remained but an echo, a negative imprint that she couldn’t hold on to.
Not a memory, exactly. Not really a dream. Just the seam of his mind and the spaces in between that he’d fallen through. Just that last, drawn-out moment before the permanent end he hovered over, unable to let go, because psions were incapable of forgetting. Dying quick was always preferable to dying slow. Bleeding out in the mind happened like this, in increments. Searching f
or Lucas was like trying to find one clean drop of water in an ocean of toxic mistakes. Impossible without belief, without help.
Jael stared across the medical bed where Lucas lay, at a hollow-eyed Samantha, who swayed on weak legs, Marguerite standing worriedly behind her.
You won’t find him, you know, Samantha said, the psi link between them quivering on her end as she struggled to hold on to something that only Jael was generating. Not how he was. I don’t know why you brought me in here.
I’m not expecting to find sanity in his thoughts, Jael said as she curled a hand around Lucas’s lax one. I’m only interested in what’s left behind. We need your brother.
Samantha hunched her shoulders, the rigid line of her body bending into a brittle curve. Do you, Jael? You need something he no longer is.
Samantha could feel him, here in his mind, damaged as they both were, when all the times that Jael had tried before she only felt that vast, echoing emptiness; only seen a flatline on the EEG and supporting machines, despite the heart beating in his chest. Jael had been in and out of both their minds for weeks on end, struggling to find the pieces of two shattered personalities and coming up achingly, bitterly short.
Jael was a Class III telepath. She would never be able to reach far enough to find Lucas, but Samantha could. She could find him, when no one else had the ability to, because Lucas always led her to him. It took nearly a month for Jael to realize why, of days spent holding Samantha’s thoughts together while the telepath screamed her throat bloody and raw beneath makeshift mental shields that wouldn’t hold. Permanent shields weren’t an option, not yet, not until they found Lucas.
Samantha was as whole as Jael could make her, something far less than what the girl had been born to be. Jael could see the fragility in the blonde, in the tiny mental threads that held her together. All Jael’s work and all for nothing, the Stryker thought tiredly.
Jael pressed her telepathy against the edge of Samantha’s mind and the old scar of the mindwipe that had Lucas’s touch all over it. All over his sister. Samantha’s mind had never been her own. It had horrified Jael when she’d figured out what the scars pressed into Samantha’s thoughts meant, yet it also relieved her. Here was the shape of Lucas, in Samantha’s mind, the mold he needed to fill. Here was their salvation, as fractured as it was.