Last Guard Read online

  So she gave him a different truth. “I didn’t fit my father’s idea of perfection. I’m neurodivergent in ways he couldn’t accept. My emotional range has been stunted since childhood.” That no anchor was truly Silent was an accepted fact between them that didn’t need to be articulated.

  “B.S.,” he muttered, his features dark. “Even if that were true, why would Pranath care? It’d just make you better at Silence.”

  “I was also prone to flying into uncontrollable rages.”

  Canto’s words were hard when he spoke. “You were never violent at the school unless they pushed you to it. Was your brother Lalit doing something to set you off?”

  Payal blinked slowly, her hands fisting inside her pants pockets. “What do you know about Lalit?”

  “Rumors of psychopathic behavior.”

  Deciding that was too much trust even between 3K and 7J, she said, “Cardinal what?”

  “Telepath.” A scowl. “Imagine the fucking chaos we could’ve caused if we’d been free.”

  “Could’ve-beens are a waste of energy.” She’d learned that lesson young; once in that place, half-crazed by all the small tortures her brother had inflicted on her, she hadn’t been able to think with any kind of clarity for a long time.

  When she had finally found a path to sanity, she’d castigated herself for allowing Lalit to get what he wanted. He’d been too young to influence or attack Varun, but Payal had been easy prey. Soon, however, she’d seen that such thoughts couldn’t help her; she’d been stuck in that prison, alone and without help.

  Her eyes went to Canto again.

  Did he remember giving her food? The teachers had put them on strict diets meant to keep them weak. She’d been hungry all the time. But every time they passed in the corridor, Canto’s—then—halting walk familiar to her, he’d slipped her food he’d saved from his meal.

  A nutrient biscuit.

  A slice of dried fruit.

  A nut bar that was the biggest-energy item on that day’s menu.

  Payal remembered every single gift.

  Her chest began to tighten up, her skin to heat. She felt as she hadn’t since she’d been that small, helpless child. She couldn’t go back there. Not now. Not when she’d made it out. Taking a deep breath, she stared out straight in front, the world a blur.

  Her next comment was rote, words to buy her time. “An interesting location. How did you discover it?”

  “I’m a Mercant.” It seemed an answer as flat as her question had been. Then his shoulders locked and he shifted his chair to face her. “Payal, we are not doing this.”

  “You asked me to come here.”

  “No, we’re not going to pretend to be two strangers having a conversation about the fucking desert or the weather.”

  Chapter 6

  “Our histories tell us that anger can be either a weapon or a weakness, Canto. Decide what it will be for you.”

  “No, Grandmother. Sometimes, I just want to be angry. I don’t want to pretend to be civilized—because I’m not, and never will be. And I’ll never wear masks.”

  —Conversation between Canto Mercant and Ena Mercant (2063)

  PAYAL COULD FEEL the heat blazing off Canto—but that had to be her imagination, for they stood in a sunlit desert. Yet the urge to go closer to his flame was a tug. It had always been there, since she was that feral little girl. The boy who’d given her food and who’d stealthily passed over a folded-up piece of paper bearing answers to a test she was meant to fail, he’d meant something to her.

  Some part of her insisted on seeing that same boy in this man. But he wasn’t. He was a Mercant. A man whose job it was to gather information—so it could be used against his targets. “We’re strangers now,” she said as coldly as she could, and took a step to the left, putting more distance between them. “The girl I was, she’s dead. She had to die so I could survive.” A simple, inexorable fact.

  Canto’s eyes shifted to pure black, the galaxies eclipsed by emotion. “What did they do to you?” Rage thrummed in every syllable.

  “It’s all in the past.” She glanced at her timepiece, steeling herself so her arm didn’t tremble. “Why don’t we talk about why we’re here today? I don’t have endless time.”

  “You mean the extinction of Designation A?” It was a near-growl. “Yeah, why don’t we?”

  “Using the word ‘extinction’ is a touch hyperbolic.” She had to keep this rigidly practical. “The PsyNet has its issues, but much of it has to do with the damage done by Silence, and by the rise of the Scarabs.” Deadly, unstable Psy who were unleashing their abilities on the Net in a fury of violence.

  When he didn’t respond, she couldn’t help herself from glancing at him.

  It was as big a shock as the first time she’d laid eyes on him, her stomach muscles clenching reflexively. She couldn’t understand it, why he had this impact on her when they’d both grown and changed so much in the years between what had been and what was now. His cheekbones were striking, his cardinal eyes extraordinary—it was as if he held the universe in his eyes.

  Even had she forgotten everything else about him, never would she mistake those eyes for those of any other cardinal. The eyes and the cheekbones weren’t the whole of it, however. His skin held a glow that said he often spent time out under the sun, and his eyes were subtly tilted, his jaw square. His short hair was silky black, but the unshaven bristles on his face held a dusting of gray.

  Binh Fernandez had been of mainly Filipino and Turkish descent, with a smattering of other genetic factors. The Mercants, meanwhile, had multiple lines of descent through their family tree, but the primary one through Ena was Caucasian—however, that split again in the Mercant matriarch’s offspring.

  It was the rare Psy who was full-blooded in any genetic sense. Not when their race was about psychic power above all else. Matches were on the basis of increasing the chances of powerful offspring.

  Payal didn’t know much about the Mercant—Magdalene—who’d carried Canto in her womb. She needed more data on Magdalene. More data on him. Data made sense of the world. Data would help her understand why she felt the impact of him like a kick to the stomach.

  Data would stop the feral girl inside her from screaming for freedom.

  It had to be a remnant of their childhood interaction, especially those final minutes when she’d locked her hand around his and held on, just held on. She’d known that pain lay on the horizon for both of them, but for those murderously stolen minutes, they’d been free of punishment, free of being watched.

  Just free.

  But that had been in a different lifetime. Canto’s impact on her would fade as soon as she learned more about him and his motives. People were never what they appeared on the surface; while Canto Mercant was beautiful in the structure of his features and in his musculature, physical beauty had nothing to do with personality and ethics.

  Payal’s brother was considered handsome and sophisticated, one of Delhi’s most eligible bachelors. Yet Lalit’s version of recreation was to cut bloody lines into the skin of crying men and women who couldn’t fight his telekinetic strength.

  What she needed to know was the core of Canto Mercant.

  Monster or manipulator? Messiah or deluded?

  Ally or threat to be eliminated?

  Her power crawled under her skin, ready to strike out at the first sign of aggression.

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO couldn’t read her, this enigma of a woman who’d once killed to protect him. She gave every appearance of being distant and cold, yet there were moments when he could swear emotion licked the air, a wild dark wave viciously constrained.

  His muscles knotted with a sense of wrongness.

  He’d been older, he reminded himself, more likely to hold on to his sense of self. But the girl he’d known . . .
even so young, her will had been titanium. He wouldn’t have thought anything could force her into a shape she didn’t choose.

  He hated the idea of her being coerced and smothered into a form acceptable to her father. “Thank you,” he said, his voice rough.

  “For what?” She didn’t look at him as she asked the question, her eyes on the palm fronds that waved in the slight breeze.

  “For stopping that teacher from murdering me.”

  Payal’s dark eyes—no stars now, nothing but endless black—landed on him. “Would he have gone that far, do you think? We were, after all, the children of important people. Certainly they must’ve needed to get authorization before terminal action.”

  “They had so much power—were bloated with it.” A deep psychic corruption. “My father also hadn’t come to see me since abandoning me in that place. To him, I was a genetic mistake he wished would vanish without a trace.”

  “My father had me tested for psychotic and psychopathic tendencies after the school reported what I’d done.” Payal’s tone was dangerously even. “He’d already decided to take me back, see if I could be brought up to an acceptable standard.”

  “Wrong fucking child to test.” It came out harsh as crushed stone. “Is he truly so blind that he doesn’t see which one of his children is the problem?”

  “The fact that I’m CEO and Lalit isn’t is the answer to your question” was the cool response, before she shifted the direction of the conversation. “The PsyNet has begun to heal since the re-emergence of the empaths.”

  Canto forced himself away from their private history, away from the compulsion of Payal Rao, and toward the heartbreaking clarity of the water that fed the oasis. “I thought I was imagining that.”

  “You’re not.” Payal’s voice, so flat, so without tone, so wrong. “The problem is that as soon as it heals, it fractures again. The fractures have now begun to cascade one after the other, which gives the impression that the empaths aren’t helping at all.”

  A rustle of fabric. A soft waft of air that brought with it a subtle scent. It was . . . nice, he supposed with an inward grimace. But it held none of the passion and intensity of the girl who’d sharpened a toothbrush into a knife because she intended to escape, or the wonder of the girl who’d told him about walking under blossom trees with a dreamy light in her eyes.

  “The truth,” Payal continued in that toneless voice, “is that half the Net would already be dead and desiccated without the empathic network—their Honeycomb, as I believe they prefer for it to be called.”

  Her mind, the acute sharpness of her intelligence, hadn’t changed. “You’ve studied it.”

  “I’m an anchor.” A faint rebuke.

  He’d take it. He’d take any emotion he could get from her. Because he had the sickening feeling that while she’d saved him . . . no one had saved her. Payal had had to fight for survival every day of her existence, and she’d done so by withdrawing so deep within her core of steel that the girl she’d once been had no voice.

  She turned to face him. “Haven’t you kept an eye on the grid that underlies the Substrate?”

  “I can’t,” he admitted with a grimace. “Turns out not all anchor minds work the same. When I look into the Substrate, I see the wider picture, and what I see reveals extreme stress, buckled sections, others that are stretched thin.”

  Payal paused, seeming to chew that over. But her question had nothing to do with the foundation of the PsyNet. “How did you know I was an A?”

  Most of the other As had assumed he had the knowledge because he was a Mercant. But that wasn’t Payal Rao: cool, contained, and ruthlessly intelligent. “I can link A minds in the Substrate back to their PsyNet presence.” This wasn’t about lies. Especially between them. “After that, I used my usual skills to put a name to the target mind.”

  The stars had returned to her eyes and those stars bored into him. “No one has ever claimed to be able to identify anchor minds on the PsyNet.”

  “I’m not delusional,” he grumbled with a scowl. “And I didn’t say I could ID anchor minds on the PsyNet—I said I can ID them in the Substrate.” A place accessible only to Designation A. “Think about it—when was the last time anyone asked anchors anything about how our minds work?”

  She continued to regard him with a vague air of suspicion. He wanted to growl at her—his grandmother was right; he’d been hanging around the bears too much. But he felt more at home with the rowdy changelings than he did with all Psy outside of his family.

  Payal was the sole exception.

  What they had here, now, it was awkward and it made his guts twist with a sense of frustrated fury, but he still didn’t want to pull away. He wanted to get closer, see inside her. Figure out if that wild girl was just buried . . . or had been erased out of existence.

  “Let’s head to the shelter,” he muttered when she didn’t respond. “I want to show you a set of specs.”

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL turned to walk up with Canto. “Were you ever Silent?” This level of emotional depth hadn’t grown in the time since the fall of Silence. It appeared too ingrained an aspect of his personality.

  “No.” A grim smile, his eyes glittering. “That was one of the many issues that got me thrown into that place—my Silence was erratic as hell.”

  As Payal considered that, she couldn’t help noticing that he wasn’t using either the hover capacity or the drive built into his chair to ease his way up the incline. His muscles were defined against the olive brown of his skin as he maneuvered the chair along the path, and a tracery of strong veins ran under that skin, his jaw set in concentration.

  Another data point: this was a man unused to taking no for an answer from himself or from others.

  He might prefer jeans to suits and speak with a confronting frankness that eschewed any attempt at sophistication or manipulation, but that was because Canto Mercant fed his determination and energy into other areas.

  He was dangerous.

  Her fingers curled into her palm, holding on to the sensory memory of a piece of dried apple being pressed into her hand behind the backs of the teachers. A part of her—a quite insane part she’d kept caged for decades—wondered if any element of that protective, kind boy existed in the no-doubt sophisticated surveillance operative he’d become.

  Not that it mattered.

  Childhood’s end had come for both of them long ago.

  Upon reaching the shelter—the roof of which held multiple solar power panels—he went to the refrigerated cooler in the corner and removed two bottles of water. A fine layer of ice had formed on the outside of each.

  She accepted one, the cold welcome against her palms. Had she been alone, she’d have put the bottle against her neck or cheek, but a robot didn’t do that. A robot displayed no weakness. A robot was never vulnerable.

  Payal had spent too long building her public persona to allow it to fracture now.

  He already knows.

  It was a whisper from the maddened heart of her.

  He’s seen you at your absolute worst, with the blood of another living being on your face and hands.

  Chapter 7

  A: The designation from which it all begins. I, fortunate to be privy to the writings of a seer of legend, do find it my sad duty to share that this is the designation with which it will all end one day.

  —Iram’s Almanac of Designations, Annotated with Thoughts of the Author (1787)

  PAYAL HAD PRETENDED to be sorry for her actions during the psychiatric evals ordered by her father. Only six years old and she’d already learned that her natural tendency to tell the truth was a handicap. But she’d never actually been sorry. The man she’d killed had been a torturer who’d been brutally hurting a boy worth a thousand of his cruel mind.

  Payal had never permitted her mask to drop during chi
ldhood. Had she done so, however, she’d have spit at the name of that so-called teacher. As a child, she’d have danced on his dead body and not cared.

  Yes, that caged part of her was quite, quite mad.

  Taking a seat in a chair across from Canto, she checked the seal of the water bottle, then unscrewed the lid and drank straight from the bottle. He put away the glass he’d been about to offer her, before unscrewing his own bottle and drinking down half of it in gulps that made his throat muscles move in a way that caught her attention, held it.

  His neck was strong, his skin touched with a hint of perspiration, the color appearing darker where—

  Going motionless as she realized her small obsession, Payal shored up her shields.

  She couldn’t give way to such primal impulses. They came from the murderous girl who crooned in her head in the quietest hour of night, wanting freedom. Wanting to live.

  Capping the water with hands that wanted to tremble, she put it on a small table to the side. Canto had already placed his own bottle on the same table. Uncapped.

  Payal resisted the temptation to use her telekinesis to lift the cap from where he’d forgotten it on top of the cooler and screw it on. It’d be a good use of the micro-Tk skills she’d had to learn to pass her training modules, but it would also be giving in to her compulsion for order. Order was how she stayed sane, but she refused to permit it to become another kind of madness.

  Having reached into a side panel of his chair to pull out a paper-thin large-format organizer, Canto brought up a file on the screen. “Look.”

  She took the organizer. On the screen was an image of the PsyNet as it had been pre-Honeycomb. “Where are the empaths?”

  “Several levels up.” He moved his chair so he was right next to her, the warmth of him a quiet assault against her senses. “This is the basic structure of the Net—the bones, so to speak.”