Last Guard Page 6

  Payal tried not to breathe in his scent. It made her skin prickle, her pulse want to kick. “I see.” She used every trick in her arsenal to narrow her focus to the organizer. What he’d sketched out was the Net without all the surface chatter—a sea of black with only the finest faded pinpricks to show the minds that existed on the layer above . . . except . . . “Why are there fluctuations in the fabric?”

  Reaching out with a hand partially covered by a glove, Canto tapped one of the fluctuations, a point where it appeared that the fabric of the Net was being sucked inward. Like a whirlpool frozen midmovement. “This is you.”

  Payal went motionless.

  “I always thought we could all see each other,” he said in that deep voice that held a gravelly edge. “I only recently realized I’m not normal there. But that’s not the point. Do you see the pattern?”

  Payal’s mind saw patterns as others saw the sky or grass. “Your modeling is incorrect,” she said with the same bluntness that had led to the robot moniker. Such honesty had been part of the insane girl, too, and it frustrated her that to interact with the world, she had to so often stifle her natural tendency.

  “Why?”

  “There are no overlaps between anchor zones. There should be overlaps.”

  “Yes, there should.”

  She was so involved in examining the model that it took a moment for his quiet agreement to penetrate. Looking up, she met those extraordinary eyes that held the universe, and once again she was nearly lost, falling into them as she had when they were children.

  “We’ll go walking under the blossoms.” A rasp of air through his abused throat. “Or maybe I won’t be able to walk. But I’ll be there.”

  “Can we eat cakes as well? The small pretty ones they have in the windows of the bake shops?”

  “Payal?” A rough softness to Canto’s question.

  Hauling herself back from the brink, she broke the searing intimacy of the eye contact while fighting off the keening need from the part of her forever impacted by those fleeting minutes so long ago. “I know there’s no overlap in my region due to a recent death.” An older anchor had passed away three weeks earlier. “Are you telling me there are zero overlaps across the Net?”

  “Seventy-five percent lack of overlaps between anchor zones.”

  “Impossible.” Payal snapped her head to face him. “That would mean a single anchor death could plummet the Net into a fatal spiral.”

  The Architect

  The occurrence of Scarab Syndrome in the general population continues to climb.

  Patient Zero is maintaining coherence, and Memory Aven-Rose, now permanent primary empath on this team, has significantly increased her success rate in stabilizing new cases, but she can only attempt to stabilize those we find.

  I have grave concerns that the graph charting patients, though upward-trending, isn’t as steep as it should be—despite our efforts, a number of those with Scarab Syndrome are falling through the cracks.

  While my job is medicine, not politics, I do believe that a large percentage of those lost patients are being scooped up by the bad actor known as the Architect, their aim being to use the patients’ growing psychic powers with no thought to the mental decline and death that is the inevitable result of untreated Scarab Syndrome.

  —Report to the Psy Ruling Coalition from Dr. Maia Ndiaye, PsyMed SF Echo

  THE ARCHITECT HAD plenty of contacts inside the PsyNet, including many who agreed with the old way of things. After all, what had happened since the fall of Silence but the disintegration of their race?

  The Ruling Coalition might be trying to sell the idea that the problems had begun in Silence and that what they were now experiencing was the destructive aftermath, but the intelligent saw through that smokescreen. It was in the Coalition’s interest to say such things, part of their grand plan to keep the populace weak and cowed.

  The Architect didn’t much care for the masses, not when the Psy were so much lesser than she and those of her kind.

  Scarabs.

  The new power.

  The new people.

  The Psy would be nothing but slaves for her to rule once she achieved her benevolent dictatorship. She’d inducted so many more soldiers into her network over the past weeks, had spread infinite tendrils through the PsyNet. She was also getting better at persuading her newborn children as they came to their true consciousness.

  No longer would her kind be imprisoned and poisoned by so-called medics. No longer would her kind be made lesser so that the Psy could feel strong. No longer would she and her children be anything but world-annihilating powers.

  Now the weak ones in power were saying that the PsyNet needed to be broken into pieces in order to be saved. She could not permit that. How could she rule over the entire race if the PsyNet was no longer whole?

  No, that course of action had to be stopped.

  At the same time, she could see why the Ruling Coalition had come to their foolish decision. Perhaps she’d been hasty in ordering attacks that so significantly weakened critical PsyNet structures. But to fragment the PsyNet? No. Never.

  She sat, thought. She wasn’t like her children, many of whom were so out of control that she was the only leash on their violence. Not only was she rational, she had telepathic backups of her personality in place should the awesome Scarab power within overwhelm her at any point. A small price to pay for untrammeled power tempered by reason.

  Today, she used that sense of reason to make the decision to ask her children to stand down. The Silence of the Scarabs would lull the Psy into a sense of complacency and security, leaving them all the more vulnerable for the strike to come.

  The Architect began to make detailed plans, giving no consideration to the fact that the PsyNet was now so damaged that it was beyond being able to heal itself.

  In her mind, the Net sprawled endlessly, a black sky unalterable and unbreakable.

  Chapter 8

  As we walk into a world with emotion, we must accept that for some of our people, it is too late. They were born in Silence, raised in Silence, scarred by Silence. To expect them to forget or “get over” a lifetime of conditioning and interact at the emotional level that may become the norm is cruel—and the Psy have too much cruelty in our past already.

  —PsyNet Beacon editorial by Jaya Laila Storm (Medical Empath and Social Interaction Columnist)

  CANTO COULDN’T STOP himself from watching Payal. It was no longer about the shock of coming face-to-face with the phantom he’d been hunting for so many years; it was her. The line of her profile, the way she’d allowed her spine to soften in her concentration—but most of all, the intensity with which she looked at the data.

  As if absorbing it into her brain for later recall.

  Telekinetic memory.

  This wasn’t only that. This was Payal Rao, the woman who’d become the CEO of a family where loyalty meant nothing and betrayal was to be expected. She’d had to be smarter, tougher, more ruthless.

  And alone. Always.

  His hand fisted—at the same instant that she said, “How accurate is this model?”

  “Margin of error of a percent at most,” he replied, the numbers burned into his brain after all the times he’d checked and rechecked his data. “I did the survey twice to confirm.”

  Payal didn’t respond, her attention on the model.

  It gave him time to study her.

  She appeared as absorbed as she’d been as a child when she’d drawn precise grids on the screen of her bulky old organizer, the act appearing almost meditative. And once, when they’d been permitted outside for exercise, he’d watched her pick up leaves that had fallen to the ground, begin ordering them by size and color.

  “Everything fits together, like a puzzle,” she’d said when he joined her. “But the pieces have to be in the right places.”
Deep frown lines between her eyebrows, the tangle of her hair half falling over one eye. “I like to put the pieces in order.”

  He’d have thought it a desperate attempt to find control in a situation where they had no control, but she’d always looked so content when she worked with her grids and organized those leaves.

  She’d clearly noted a pattern about adult Canto—because, his anger about it aside, she treated him with suspicion due to a dangerous and skilled cardinal who was a stranger. As a threat. Full stop.

  His mobility level didn’t factor into her equations as a negative when it came to her assessment of his strength. It wasn’t that she didn’t see the chair. Her comment about his successful surgeries had made that clear. But Payal hadn’t fixated on it like so many Psy. To her, it was just one element of the whole pattern that was Canto.

  His chest expanded on a rush of air.

  He hadn’t realized until that moment that he’d been holding his breath on a psychological level, waiting for her to hurt him. Because she could.

  Fuck.

  Canto had stopped being concerned about the opinions of others long ago. The PsyMed psychology specialist his grandmother had made him see had told him that his “distancing behavior” was a coping mechanism for the “unusual circumstances of his life to date.”

  In other words, Canto didn’t give a fuck because his father had slated him for death when he proved imperfect. The Mercants had brought him back from that enraged and broken edge, but he still cared for the opinions of very few.

  Payal Rao would always be one of those people.

  Foolish and illogical and goddamn stupid when he hadn’t seen her for decades, but it was what it was; he’d been forever altered by her courage and refusal to surrender. The only way his emotions toward her would change for the worse was if she proved to have become a monster.

  Head of the Rao empire, Canto. That doesn’t happen by being kind and generous.

  His grandmother’s voice, what he imagined Ena might say were she able to hear the direction of his thoughts. But the thing was, Canto knew Payal could be dangerous. He was alive because she was dangerous.

  When she raised her head at last, her eyes were obsidian. Heavy processing power, psychic and/or mental. “That’s why I’m tiring quicker,” she said, as if they were midconversation, her voice clipped. “Because there’s almost no overlap in my entire country. The secondary anchors can’t take the weight a hub-anchor is built to handle, so the hubs are under unrelenting pressure.”

  The same pressure was a heavy weight on Canto’s mind—and his region wasn’t as bad as Payal’s. Anchor zones were meant to overlap by at least a quarter, so that when one A tired, the As around them took the load. It was done so instinctively that neither party was ever aware of it—or that was how it was meant to work.

  “There’s no longer any downtime built into the system,” Payal continued. “If anchors were machines, we’d be overheating.” She leaned back in her seat, her obsidian gaze unblinking.

  It should’ve been eerie, but Canto had often seen the same inky black in the mirror. Usually when he’d pushed his telepathy too far, or if his emotions were running high.

  “Is this a recent problem?” Payal asked, her gaze still distant as that beautiful mind worked at a speed far faster than the vast majority of the population.

  “No.” Careful not to accidentally brush against her even though he wanted to steal that contact, he touched the screen of the organizer to bring up a chart. “Occurrence of As in the population.”

  Payal went silent as she examined the bleak downward curve.

  He could almost hear her thinking. And there he went, being a quasi bear again by feeling smug that she was already comfortable enough with him to retreat that way—on the other hand, she was a cardinal Tk who could snap his bones in half with a thought. He had to stop thinking of her as 3K, stop searching for hints of that wild girl.

  Her next question was abrupt. “When did you become aware of the problem?”

  “I initialized late,” he said to her. “Not until age nine. Probably why I began hearing the NetMind—things were leaking through because of the delayed initialization.”

  Obsidian eyes on him, her attention a laser. “As far as I know, anchor initialization starts at age five, with the top edge being age seven.”

  “Yeah, I was an outlier.” Unaware of the A ability slumbering inside him, waiting to wake. No one had ever worked out a way to test children at birth to see if they were or weren’t anchors. Initialization just happened at a certain age, the Substrate opening up to them as their minds became the weights that kept the fabric of the Net in place.

  “Might be because I came into it so late, but I was curious.” It had also given him a focus that took him away from the hospital rooms that had so often been his home. “The more I researched anchors—and there wasn’t much, even with the weight of my family’s resources behind me—the more it didn’t make sense.”

  Magdalene had sat quietly with him, teaching him how to run the searches—because Ena had decreed that he was to do the legwork himself. She hadn’t been born yesterday, his grandmother. She’d known he needed a mental distraction—and time to come to terms with the mother who’d contracted him away.

  Payal leaned toward him. “How so?”

  His skin grew tight, his muscles tense in readiness, not for an attack but for contact. A small part of him still couldn’t believe she was real. He wanted to break every rule in the book and touch her, make certain she was here.

  Shoving aside the irrational need, he said, “I’ve never accepted the known wisdom that anchors are rare and always have been. That doesn’t make sense in any self-supporting system.”

  He continued when she didn’t interrupt. “But I had nowhere to go from there—until two years ago, when the weeds in the Substrate began to multiply at a suffocating pace.” The layer of the Net in which anchors did their work was meant to be a pristine blue ocean aglow with an inner light. It shouldn’t be dull and infested with fibrous brown material dotted with hooks that constantly caught onto anchor minds. The things were a bitch to shake loose.

  “I assumed the fibers were an extension of the rot in the Net.”

  “Yeah, probably.” Canto scowled. “Doesn’t change that it’s a screwed-up situation.”

  Payal stared at him. “Afterward—did you ever try to return to Silence?”

  “Nope. Was too pissed off.” A broken boy rejected by the only family he’d ever known, his body betraying him more and more with each day that passed.

  Then had come Arwen, and it was all over. No one in the family had ever figured out the mechanics of it, but Canto had enclosed Arwen in his shields seconds after Arwen’s birth. His shields were anchor tough—perfect to protect a baby empath. But having an untrained E inside his shields had nixed any attempt at Silence. Those same shields, however, had protected him from exposure.

  He waited to see if Payal would take the opening, venture deeper into the past, but she shifted her attention to the organizer once more. “If your figures are correct, the shortage of As didn’t begin with the implementation of the Protocol—but it did speed it up. Was it because of our unstable Silence, our mental instability?”

  “No.” It was accepted fact in the corridors of power that anchors were more susceptible to murderous insanity than the rest of the population, but when he’d crunched the numbers in detail, they hadn’t borne that out.

  “Anchors do have higher levels of mental instability,” he told her, “but in the vast majority of cases the only negative impact is on the A in question. Designation A produces murderers at the same rate as most designations.” He showed her that data file.

  “The Net needs anchors,” he said as she examined the information, “and will always need us regardless of emotion.” Canto leaned back in his chair. “Silent anchors are just as
good as non-Silent anchors—the Council never cared to discipline us, especially since anchor shields mean that nothing leaks out, even if we do feel emotion.” Had Canto initialized prior to banishment to the death chamber disguised as a school, no one could’ve stifled his telepathy, no one could’ve chained his mind.

  He could’ve helped Payal, helped the other children.

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL glanced up from the organizer . . . and her control broke. He was so close, close enough that she could touch him, this man who was the last person she’d ever truly touched. “What happened to your jaw?” His skin was dark with bristles there, and she had the irrelevant thought that it would feel rough against her fingertips.

  “The scar?” He rubbed his fingers over the lower right side of his jaw. “Accident when I was trying out a robotic suit.” A heavy scowl. “Why?”

  “You didn’t have it when we last met.”

  “You didn’t have that dot on your left cheekbone.”

  “Lalit stabbed me with a pencil,” she said without any change in her tone, the incident one she’d long put behind herself. “I broke his fingers in self-defense—he wasn’t expecting such a fast response.”

  Canto’s muscles went rigid, the line of his jaw brutal. “No one ever teach him that the strong are meant to protect the younger or weaker?” A sudden glitter in his eyes that made her breath catch and spawned an odd sensation in her abdomen. “Or the ferocious are meant to protect whoever the hell they damn well want.”

  Her, he was calling her ferocious. Perhaps she had been. Once. “I’m a cardinal Tk. My father expected me to take care of myself. The weak don’t thrive.”

  “You’re also five years younger than your asshole brother,” Canto said in a voice so deep and rough it was a growl that brushed over her like fur. “How in the fuck was that a fair fight? It’s not like he’s psychically weak. A better-trained Gradient 9.1 Tk against a much younger cardinal? Your father should’ve kicked his ass for laying a finger on you.”