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  She went motionless, then was gone. But the imprint of her lingered on his palm, the ferocious strength of her grip a silent testament to trust. Canto curled his fingers inward, trying to hold on to the fragile promise in that grip.

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL slept deep and well that night, though she’d expected to toss and turn. When she woke, it was to a stabbing moment of shock at all she’d shared with Canto, but that passed in a cascade of memory. Of galaxies and tools and the freedom to just be. Whatever was happening between the two of them, it had nothing to do with the outside world—and that included anchor business.

  Those night hours had been theirs, private and alone.

  She almost contacted him and made a request to repeat the experience, but hesitated at the last second. The previous night had been an interaction out of time, lit by starlight and apart from reality; she had no idea what Canto might think of it now. What he might think of her and her chemically imbalanced brain.

  Yes, baby, just tools.

  Her hand tightened into a fist, holding on to the rough tenderness of his words as she got up to ready herself for the day. Part of that preparation included finishing the protein bar he’d given her—she’d retrieved it before she left.

  Foolish, it was foolish to be so affected by his way of giving her food.

  She still ate it down to the last bite.

  Then it was time to walk out into the battlefield of Vara. She managed to make it through to early afternoon without running into Lalit or being summoned by her father. Surprised by the latter, she glanced at her message stream and saw that Ruhi had responded to a call request from Pranath.

  Sir, before I disturb Ms. Rao, I thought you’d like to know that she is deep into planning the upcoming Jervois bid.

  Her father had replied that he’d speak to Payal tomorrow.

  That had been clever of Ruhi, to gain Payal time without offending Pranath. Payal sent a note to her assistant praising her for the act. Ruhi seemed to be in Payal’s corner—if only because she knew Lalit never would have promoted her to her current high-level position. Payal’s brother preferred male assistants.

  Whether Ruhi was actually “hers” remained an open question. The assistant could have been told to take actions for her boss’s benefit exactly so Payal would begin to trust her. Just as well Payal trusted no one.

  Except Canto.

  A buzz in her blood, she took a moment to compose herself before going to speak to Ruhi. “I’m heading to a meeting. If Father asks, mention it’s the Mercant matter. Tell Lalit to speak to my father if he pushes for information.” She glanced at her watch. “Actually, have an early day. I’ll let my father know.”

  Ruhi didn’t argue—she didn’t like dealing with Lalit when Payal was away. “I have some work to finish, but I can log in from home.”

  Leaving the other woman to gather her things, Payal made her way to her apartment. She didn’t intend to change—her wide-legged black pants and simple sleeveless red top with a vee-neck would be fine for the meeting. She’d come down for only one reason—to open up the book of tax law and touch her fingers to the wrapper she’d pressed within.

  It wasn’t about the wrapper. It was about the care it indicated.

  Obsession, whispered the part of her on which hung her sanity, this is the start of an unhealthy obsession.

  Her hand clenched on the book. Closing it and returning it to the shelf before her mind could spiral, she checked her makeup and hair in the mirror—checked her armor—then teleported to the meeting spot.

  Canto was already there, waiting for her in the shelter. He’d parked his chair within a circular arrangement of five other seats. So she’d be meeting with four others today.

  “There you are,” he said, the galaxies in his eyes warming as if there were a candle within. “Look, I got you this.” He held up a small brown box.

  Though she had choices, and even though the scent of him disturbed her on a primal level, even though he could look at her and know too much, she took the chair right next to him. Because it was Canto. “What is it? Something for the meeting?”

  “No.” A faint tug of his lips that tore open places inside her that had long scarred over. “A gift.”

  She should’ve treated it as a possible threat, but it took all her control not to grab the box with feral glee. After accepting it with conscious care, she lifted the lid. Inside sat a small artwork of a cake, such as she’d seen in the windows of human and changeling bakeries. It was coated in pink with sparkles of silver, and cascading over one side were tiny flowers made of edible material.

  She couldn’t breathe.

  “You want to try a piece now?” Canto was turning to look over his shoulder. “I have a plate and a knife back there.”

  “No.” It came out a rasp. Coughing, she managed to find her voice again. “No. I’ll take it with me.” Where she could be alone with the chaos he’d incited inside her, the raw wave of emotion that threatened to swamp all that she was, all that she’d built herself to be.

  Getting to her feet in a jerky movement, she closed the box and put it in one of the small cubby-style shelves built into the side wall of the shelter. Every movement felt jagged and hard, her body an automaton pulled by strings out of her grasp.

  Unable to inhale past the shards in her lungs, she strode out of the shelter.

  Before

  “Well?”

  “She’s responding positively to the drug regime. In fact, the results of her cognition and comprehension tests put her in the ninety-ninth percentile of her age group.”

  —Report on Payal Rao (age 7) to Pranath Rao

  THE SMALL GIRL sat in the room where they’d locked her up and stared at her hands. They bore no scabs or cuts, the scars from her previous marks having faded away. She was too young to think in terms of metaphors, but she felt as if the scabs and cuts on her mind were fading, too.

  The fuzzy edges had become sharp, the broken thoughts whole.

  Putting her hands on the soft stretchy cotton of her black tights, she looked at the wall in front of her, and she made herself think. The doctor had said she could soon have her own proper room, where no one would lock her inside.

  She wanted that—but she’d seen Lalit spying on her from around the corner. He was waiting for the doctors to stop watching her; he’d hurt her again if she let him. So she had to make sure he never caught her alone—and she had to make her mind stronger and stronger, so he couldn’t make her lose her thoughts again.

  Don’t give the monsters the satisfaction of seeing you give up.

  “I won’t,” she whispered to the memory of the boy who’d said such nice things to her, and who’d looked at her like she was strong and brave and not wrong in the head. “I won’t, 7J. I promise.”

  Chapter 15

  Project Sentinel is authorized to proceed.

  —Unanimous decision of the Ruling Coalition

  CANTO WAS USED to waiting. A man couldn’t work in surveillance and not build a tolerance for patience. He was also good at absorbing a lot of information and processing it down to the most critical factor.

  But Payal screwed with his calm, turned his patience to dust.

  His eyes went to the box that held the cake.

  He’d done something wrong, but he couldn’t figure out what and it was messing him up. He’d held on to her dreams for an eternity, waiting for the day when he would see her again; to be able to give her this small piece of what she’d wanted, it had made his fucking heart jump like an excited cub’s.

  “Shit.” He shoved a hand through his hair. “Get it together, Canto.”

  Checking on the time, he saw that several minutes remained until the others would begin to arrive. He moved out of the shelter and down to where Payal crouched by a bed of succulents, quietly rearranging the st
ones. Last night, after she’d left, he’d looked at what she’d done and hadn’t been able to see anything of substance.

  Yet he’d known she hadn’t simply been moving stones around without reason, so he’d taken an image and had his computer analyze it. It had linked her design back to a precise mathematical model.

  Patterns and grids were the baseline of Payal’s mind.

  “I screwed up, didn’t I?” he asked roughly, because this mattered. She mattered.

  Payal moved three stones before responding. “I can’t—” She broke off, started again. “I function in this world because I work inside a defined set of parameters, within a framework of rules that keep me from becoming erratic and without reason.”

  Canto waited, unable to see where she was going.

  “You . . .” A quick obsidian glance, the stars erased. “When we’re together, it speaks too much to the child I once was.” Another stone placed before she rose to her feet. “She wants to break out, wants to take control.”

  Canto bit back his knee-jerk reaction and stared out at the water. He wanted to tell her that was bullshit, that she didn’t need all those rules and fences around her mind. She was dazzling in her brilliance, a bright star that had been constrained into an unnatural shape.

  But Canto wasn’t only the boy who’d almost died because his father considered him a mistake. Canto was also the man who’d spent years harboring a child empath inside his shields. Arwen had altered the core of his nature, taught him things without ever once giving instruction. One thing Canto knew was how to listen.

  Yesterday and today, what had Payal told him?

  That she had a chemical imbalance in her brain that made her feel out of control, obsessive, and without reason. The medications she took helped equalize her brain chemistry to standard levels—and her focus and concentration, the rules she’d made for herself, took her the rest of the way to being the kind of person she wanted to be.

  “I’m a risk to your stability,” he ground out, the words grating against his insides like sandpaper.

  Payal released a shaky breath. “I thought I could handle it, that I could separate our time together from the rest of me . . . but I can’t. Being with you, it weakens the walls I keep between myself and the unstable part of my psyche. I need distance.”

  Canto felt as if she’d stabbed him in the heart, the hilt thudding home against his skin to leave a bruise black and blue. Sucking in the pain, he said, “The anchor work?”

  “I won’t back away from that.” A solemn promise. “But us . . .” A long breath, an exhale. “Whatever this is, it threatens to fracture my foundations. Please help me maintain those foundations.”

  The last sentence broke him.

  He’d promised to stand by her side no matter what, but this was the hardest possible thing she could’ve asked of him—to help her maintain shields that would keep her distant and separate from him. No more would she reach out a hand and hold on tight to his. Instead, she’d pull back behind the shield of robotic coldness with which she faced the rest of the world.

  “Canto?” It was the softest he’d ever heard her voice, and when he looked up, her face was stark in a way he’d never seen.

  He jerked his head in a yes. What the fuck else could he do? She needed this. He would not let her down. Not even if watching her reinitiate her shields felt like losing her all over again.

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL wanted to reach out and grab onto the thread she’d just cut, stop it from falling away into the darkness. It took everything she had to remain still and allow the thread to become lost in nothingness.

  Loss clawed at her. Inside her screamed the manic, broken girl.

  She forced out words of logic, focusing on the one tie to Canto she hadn’t brutally destroyed. “In our last meeting, you were adamant that we need to connect with the Ruling Coalition. Why?”

  His shoulders were still rigid, white lines around his mouth, but he didn’t punish her by withholding himself. His response was immediate. “Because they’re talking about breaking the Net into pieces.”

  The words slammed a fist through the echoes of emotion, snapping her fully into anchor mode. “With all the collapses of late,” she said after absorbing the data, “all the fractures, the PsyNet is going to tear apart regardless.” She saw it now, why the Ruling Coalition had made a choice of such violence. “Better to do it in a controlled fashion.”

  “I don’t disagree with the idea of breaking the Net into smaller pieces—the problem is that it can’t work as posited.”

  “Show me.” Payal heard how she sounded, added, “I’m sorry. That sounded like an order.”

  Canto was already turning to head back up. “No, it was just you being blunt and honest.” He glanced at her, the galaxies missing from his gaze. “Don’t change that part of how we interact, Payal. Don’t add niceties and politeness to make yourself palatable to me. Speak without filters.”

  That, she could do. That was her natural state. It was the politeness and the not accidentally offending people that took work. “All right,” she said, and shoved her hand into her pocket to stop from reaching out to him.

  Never had she reached out to anyone as an adult. That was why Canto was so dangerous to her, why she’d decided to push him away. A choice between a precious and rare connection, and her sanity and reason.

  Not fair. But the world had never been fair to them.

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO had managed to get his raw emotions under unyielding control by the time he reached the shelter. He’d rage when he was alone. Right now, Payal had asked him to help her maintain her foundations—to help her live as Payal Rao and not a wild and out-of-control falling star—and he would not let her down.

  “Here.” Sliding out the large-format organizer he’d put in the case built into the side of his chair, he brought up the plan his grandmother had received from Kaleb. Canto had read the signs in the slipstreams of the PsyNet, knew the Ruling Coalition had to be considering this dangerous solution, and asked his grandmother to feel things out.

  She’d just gone ahead and asked the most powerful man in the Net.

  It was a measure of Kaleb’s respect for Ena that he’d passed on the classified plan titled “Sentinel”—though he had asked why she wanted to know. When informed that the request had come from a Mercant hub-anchor, Kaleb had apparently become very interested in return.

  “He doesn’t know the whole family yet,” Ena had told Canto when she sent him the Sentinel papers. “Had no idea we had a hub in the mix—he wants to meet with you.”

  Canto wasn’t ready to talk to the cardinal Tk. Not yet. He had to figure this out with Payal and the other anchors first. This was an A problem, the subject so specific and esoteric that it had been forgotten by the rest of the world. “I think all of us should talk about Sentinel,” he said. “You, me, and the four As who’ve agreed to be part of the advisory panel.”

  Payal—who’d once more taken the seat next to him—didn’t look up from her intense focus on the severance plan, her skin no longer pale as it had been when she’d looked at him with such open vulnerability. She was once more Payal Rao, CEO, and her skin held a honeyed glow under the filtered sunlight. Canto had set the walls of the shelter to medium clarity—a setting that allowed in light but muted it to a more comfortable softness.

  “The members of the advisory board,” she murmured. “They agree with the decision to face off against the Ruling Coalition?”

  “More or less.”

  She raised her head.

  He rubbed his face rather than give in to the compulsion to touch the curve of her chin. “None of us are used to working as a team—or being so visible—but they’re all intelligent people. I don’t think we’ll have too much trouble.” He’d made sure not to choose anyone so insular and
isolated that they’d panic at the idea of being exposed to the world.

  “We’ll allay their concerns by making it clear I’ll be the face.” Payal zoomed in on part of the plan. “You’re willing to be my lieutenant? To step in if I can’t?”

  “According to my grandmother, Mercants were knights to a king at the beginning of our history and rode into battle at his side,” Canto said. “Only one of us was left standing by the end.” He looked into a face he’d never be permitted to touch. “We’re good at standing by our generals.”

  “Such language makes us sound like an army going into war.”

  “That’s exactly what we are.” There was no getting around that. “We’re battling for the survival of the entire PsyNet. We are the last guard against a total system failure.” And Payal—strong, determined, unbending against pressure—would go into battle at the forefront, the anchor flag held high.

  He’d fight to the death to protect her as she fought for Designation A.

  A flicker at the corner of his eye, the first of the advisory board members being teleported in. It was the only non-cardinal in the group: Bjorn Thorsen.

  Almost eighty-seven years old with gray hair and gray eyes, his skin white with a tinge of pink, the senior anchor took a look around the oasis, then glanced inside the shelter and did a double take. “You’re an A?”

  Payal crossed one leg over the other, while holding the organizer on her thighs. “Yes.”

  “Payal Rao, meet Bjorn Thorsen,” Canto said, “professor of mathematics and hub in California.”

  Next to come in was Suriana Wirra, a twenty-seven-year-old woman of medium height with skin of darkest brown, softly rounded cheeks, and thick hair she’d pulled back into a single braid. Her teleport was thanks to the second Mercant teleporter, since Genara would’ve flamed out if asked to make all the ’ports.

  Shy and quiet, Suriana just nodded as she settled in.