Last Guard Read online

  A rising scream in the back of her mind, a vicious torrent of forbidden emotion.

  Chapter 9

  It is our duty to further the aims of our fathers and mothers. Some of them have faltered in their path, but that is to be expected. They are not Silent natives. We understand this world as they will never have the capacity to do; this is their twilight, and our dawn.

  —Council Member Neiza Adelaja Defoe (2016)

  SHUTTING DOWN THE incipient emotional storm with harsh abruptness because to listen to that broken part of herself was to lose everything, Payal tapped at the screen. Graphs and numbers and data, she could process those. What she couldn’t process was a man who seemed to see her as a person worth protecting.

  “What happened seventy years ago?” That was when the decimation of Designation A gained steam.

  “The first generation born in Silence began to take control of the power structures of the PsyNet. Before that, the majority were holdovers from the time before Silence—an old guard, so to speak.”

  Payal looked out at the desert so she wouldn’t stare at him, at those eyes full of galaxies, at that jawline bristled with stubble. “People whose decisions would’ve been informed by the emotions—and the ethics—of the time before Silence.”

  “Look here.” Tapping the screen, he brought up images of the people who he told her had sat on the Psy Council just before the beginning of the end for Designation A. “Three of them had science backgrounds, three business, and the last came from a family previously known for great works of art—but he was a curator and seller of that art, not a creator.”

  “Effectively another business brain.” Cut away the fat, get down to the core, and this man had been about numbers and money. “Business and science can work well in concert, but they can also form a dangerous confluence when devoid of the balance provided by empathy.” Even Payal understood that art came from emotion—good and bad. That was why Psy had stopped being poets and painters, sculptors and composers post-Silence.

  “Exactly.” His attention was aggressive, threatening to see too much—right down into the heart of her stifled screams.

  She fought by going on the offensive. “I may be a robot in my social interactions, but I factor all elements into my decision-making matrix.” It was a testament to her years of self-training that her tone didn’t alter, her breath didn’t hasten.

  “Recent events have made it clear that empaths exist for the same reason as anchors: they are crucial to the effective and safe functioning of our society. A Council devoid of their input would have been perilously unbalanced.”

  The way he looked at her . . . “Your brain is a thing of beauty, Payal Rao.”

  Her stomach grew tight, hot. “What did this unbalanced Council decree?”

  He shifted in his chair to lean toward her, the action drawing her gaze to the muscles of his shoulders as the scent of him—warm, oddly rough—wafted over her. “It was less a decree than a subtle change in culture born at the top. The aim of Silence altered from mental survival to perfection.”

  “I see.” Returning the organizer to him, she said, “You exhibited physical defects as a young child—as judged by the PsyNet. I had mental defects on that same judgment. I know that at least one A in my region suffers from a degenerative condition.”

  Canto nodded, his scent wrapping around her until she inhaled it with every breath. She should’ve pulled back, but she didn’t. A test, she told herself, to see if she could maintain control even when pushed to the extreme.

  Nothing to do with the need to be closer to the only person in this world who had ever seen her.

  “My census is nine-tenths complete,” he said in that voice deep and gritty, “and it looks like roughly sixty percent of current anchors have some level of what Silent Psy would consider a defect.”

  Sixty percent?

  The number smashed through her compulsion with Canto, snapping her to icy attention. “Have As always displayed a high incidence of physical and/or psychic defects?”

  A hard shake of his head. “The statistics I’ve unearthed say we were at about the same rate as the general population. It was only after Silence that anchor young began to be born either sick or with hidden genetic defects. Not all, but a slowly growing majority.”

  The grim darkness of his expression echoed the violent rage in her mad heart.

  Anchors were considered so critical that their initialization signs were part of the mandatory post-birth briefing . . . but such signs didn’t show until approximately one month prior to initialization. Up to that point, a nascent A appeared no different than any other young child.

  “A lot of children have accidents by age five,” Payal mused with a determined clinical coldness; anything else would lead to the escape of the manic thing that lived in the back of her head.

  The medications the M-Psy had put her on after her father removed her from the school had helped, but she’d been too feral by then to make it out had she not initialized soon afterward. Gritting her teeth and digging in her feet, she’d grabbed hold of the lifeline that was the strong, stable permanence of the Substrate.

  Seeing you fight gives me the courage to fight. Quiet, solemn words. Don’t give the monsters the satisfaction of seeing you give up. You’re better than all of them, 3K.

  Did Canto remember saying that to her one rainy day when he found her huddled sobbing in a corner, her spirit whimpering in pain? No one else had ever seen her as anything good, anything worthy.

  His words had forever changed her.

  His faith in her was why she’d survived—and why she’d fought to pretend to be sane—but she’d been a small child with only so much willpower. Without the Substrate, she’d have flown apart into a million tiny pieces.

  “Had.” The hardness of Canto’s voice as he spoke that single word was a hammer. “A lot of children had a way of having accidents by age five. The fall of Silence broke the chain of death.”

  “You’re being perplexingly optimistic for a man who is part of a family rumored to know all of the Net’s most terrible secrets.” Payal couldn’t understand him. “Perhaps you have a surfeit of empaths in your zone. They tend to shoot out rainbows and flowers even to those of us who prefer cold reason. I suppose they can’t help it.”

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO almost choked on the water he’d just drunk. Coughing, he wondered what Arwen would make of being described as shooting out rainbows and flowers. A second later he scowled at the realization—not for the first time—of how much his cousin had shaped him. Softened him.

  Because Payal was right; his statement had been one colored by hope.

  Anger was a metallic taste on his tongue as he thought of all the children who’d been eliminated from the population for so-called imperfections. All the children who hadn’t had Ena Mercant in their corner. “Did anyone fight for you?” he found himself asking, needing her not to have been so painfully alone.

  “In my family, only the strong survive.”

  Canto’s hand spasmed on his water bottle.

  Needing to do something—anything—for her, he went to the temperature-controlled storage cabinet and, putting aside the water, pulled out a couple of nutrient bars. He handed one to Payal after returning to his spot by her side. “The teleport would’ve burned a chunk of your energy. You should refuel. Especially since your anchor zone is also sucking you dry.”

  She stared at the bar in her hand as if it were a strange, unknown object.

  “It’s sealed,” he said without scowling—he understood that her issues with trust went to the core. They weren’t children anymore, and she’d been relying only on herself for a very long time.

  He had to get it through his thick skull that she might never fucking trust him.

  A hard swallow before she curled her fingers around the bar. “Why d
o sick As keep being born?” she asked, her voice tight. “Pre-agreement genetic testing of procreation partners should make such matches impossible.”

  Canto had seen the testing record for his mother and Binh Fernandez. It had been a thing of art in its detail. Yet it had forecast none of Canto’s future physical issues. “I have a theory that we only start to sicken after birth—when the first trickle of the PsyNet begins to run through our minds.” A slow, relentless drip into pathways built to one day mainline the Net. “It’s filthy with rot and we’re caught in the stream. No other Psy engage with the Net to the same depth as As.”

  “I had a tumor, too,” Payal told him without warning, almost as if the words had shoved themselves past her rigid control. “In my brain. Medics discovered it a month after my removal from the school.”

  That was powerful information to have about the Rao CEO. Canto grabbed hold of the small indication of trust—and secreted away the data in a private file about 3K that he would never ever share with anyone else. This? Him and Payal? Theirs was a private bond.

  Years of lost time between them, a heavy weight of the unknown, he took the organizer and brought up a profile labeled Hub-3. “This anchor suffers from recurring skin cancers, while this one”—a profile labeled Hub-4—“has a disorder that causes severe breathing issues that can’t be linked to any particular diagnosis.”

  “You think the PsyNet is doing this to us. That as it sickens and dies, so do we—and because of that, past anchors were murdered as infants and toddlers.”

  Such a short, concise summation of horrific ugliness. “Prior to initialization,” Canto said, “anchors are just ordinary children with medical issues.”

  “Your theory also explains the high incidence of mental instability in our designation. As the NetMind began to lose coherence, so did we.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I think.”

  * * *

  • • •

  PAYAL knew she had to keep her distance from the relentless force that was Canto Mercant for her own safety. But she opened her mouth and said, “I will assist you.” The anchor problem was too critical to the future of their race for her to allow personal concerns to hold her back.

  But Canto wasn’t done. “Will you be the face of our organization, the one who speaks to the Ruling Coalition?” Galaxies that threatened to suck her under. “Majority of As are ready to join the organization—I don’t foresee problems with the more hesitant, either. They just need a little hand-holding.”

  “I’m considered robotic,” she pointed out. “I have no charisma.”

  “You’re wrong.” Implacable. Absolute. “When you talk, people listen. You also have a spine of steel—and Designation A needs that steel, because what we’re going to say and demand is going to come as a shock.”

  “Why not do it yourself? Your own will isn’t in question.” For one, he’d tracked down the loner members of a secretive designation and talked them into becoming part of a group.

  “I have zero patience for politicking of any kind.” Thunder on his face. “I’d yell. A lot.”

  Payal blinked. No, Canto Mercant was not predictable. “Why do you believe I can be a politician?”

  “You can’t. But according to all my sneaky spying—”

  Fascination had her interrupting. “Sneaky spying?”

  He grimaced. “Damn bears.” Not explaining that response, he returned to his previous subject. “You’re no politico, but I have plenty of evidence that you never lose your temper. You just keep going until people listen. There’s a silent, inexorable grit to you.”

  “The last time I was in negotiations with Gia Khan, she said I might as well be made out of cold iron, I was so inhuman.”

  “Gia Khan is full of shit—and a sore loser.” Canto shrugged away the insult, as if it was so ridiculous it didn’t bear scrutiny. “You’re exactly who we need as our general, Payal—generals don’t care about hurting feelings or about charisma; they’re there for the battle—you didn’t break as a child and you won’t break as an adult.”

  No one had ever framed her bullish and often ice-hearted tendencies in such a positive light. It . . . meant something to be valued. Especially by him, by the boy who’d seen her at the very worst, before the medications, before the therapies, before she’d thrown herself into mental and psychic training.

  “Fine. I can be the face of Designation A.” The screams rising at the back of her mind, she rose to her feet. “I have a business meeting I can’t miss. Are we to have an A advisory board? We can’t speak for all As without their mandate.”

  “I have a list of candidates—most of the other As just want us to deal with the situation and don’t care how we do it.”

  Payal gave a curt nod, then teleported out.

  Running from Canto. Running from the past. Running from the keening madness of who she’d once been . . . and could one day again become.

  Chapter 10

  Honor born

  Knight to a king

  My blood my coin

  —“Loyal” by Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)

  PAYAL STARED AT the nutrient bar in her hand as she stood in her private apartment in Vara. Her throat was dry and her heart, it beat too fast.

  7J had given her food again.

  “Not 7J,” she rasped. “Canto.”

  But this bar she held, warm from her body heat, it told her that 7J remained alive inside the stranger who was Canto Mercant. The boy who’d cared to hear her opinions had grown into a man who thought who she was—rigid, robotic, uncharismatic—had value.

  He’d compared her to a general.

  He’d be disappointed when he discovered 3K was dead, buried so effectively that she’d never again be the girl he’d known. 3K couldn’t exist if Payal was to live a life of sanity. But he hadn’t yet learned the bitter truth, so perhaps she could continue to interact with him in this strange way. With a kind of raw honesty that stripped away the barriers people put between themselves and the world. In Payal’s case, those walls were so high that no one else had ever been invited in.

  Her sister, Kari, was too young for them to have that kind of a relationship. And though Payal knew there were people in the Rao empire who were loyal to her, those people were all also beholden to that empire for jobs and security. The power imbalance was an ever-present part of their interactions.

  Canto, however, needed her for nothing on a personal level.

  Even the anchor work—had she said no, he would’ve been able to find another suitable individual, she was sure. She’d been his first choice, but not his only one. Still, to be anyone’s first choice . . .

  All her life she’d had to fight and fight. Every role, every position, she’d won it through white-knuckled combat of a kind that left no physical bruises. Canto had just offered her the position of head of the anchor union. He’d also done so before he knew she was 3K, so it had nothing to do with the bonds of the past.

  Payal allowed herself a quiet exhale, then unwrapped the bar with extreme care before taking a bite. Only after she’d finished the whole thing did she get a sealed bottle of water from her tamperproof cooler and drink. Then she did a foolish thing. She smoothed out the wrapper and placed it within the pages of one of the hard-copy books she had on the shelves in her bedroom.

  The book held artwork created by Karishma. Payal only dared display one piece—a large painting of Vara on canvas that her sister had done for her final grade the previous year. Unsigned and with an aged look to it, it could pass as décor that had been in the mansion prior to Payal’s usage. Everyone in Vara was used to the amount of art—hidden and out in the open—that lay in its history.

  So Karishma’s painting could hang openly in Payal’s office without anyone noticing it as anything but an appropriate type of decoration for the office of a CEO. Psy might have given up creating art under S
ilence, but her race had always understood that even the Silent reacted subconsciously to certain elements of their environment.

  The book, on the other hand, held pen-and-ink sketches that were nothing if not modern. Payal’d had them bound in a decoy cover that made it appear to be a dusty tome on tax law. Should Lalit ever manage to invade her inner sanctum, he wouldn’t bother to look inside those books, would simply dismiss them as another sign that his sister had no life beyond the Rao business.

  Good.

  Payal didn’t want him to look deeper. Didn’t want him to remember Karishma, or the others Payal had secreted away to safety. And she never wanted him to find a way to taint the haunting and honest relationship she had with a man who held galaxies in his eyes.

  * * *

  • • •

  CANTO couldn’t settle after returning home, so he went out onto his deck and brooded while staring out at a landscape of lush, thriving green. Though it might seem like he was in the middle of nowhere, he was actually on the public edge of StoneWater land, near the road that led into their wild territory.

  His move to Moscow had been unexpected. He’d been based in a small town in Germany for the past decade. But then, while doing his unofficial census, he’d seen that the aging anchor in the Moscow region had started to show signs of a troubling kind of exhaustion. Worried, Canto had reached out to see if he could assist.

  Balance of it was that Canto’s anchor region had proved “smaller” in terms of energy output. He’d offered to swap regions and the other anchor had gratefully accepted. All of this had happened soon after Silver ended up mated to an alpha bear.

  Which explained why Canto had been permitted to set up his base in StoneWater territory. He hadn’t asked for it—that would’ve been an asshole move with Silver so newly mated. Instead, he’d moved into a place on the outskirts of Moscow, taking it over from one of his other cousins—Ivan. A security operative who worked under Canto, Ivan had shifted his home base to San Francisco just prior to Canto’s arrival.