Chapter 2

The restricted rider to Coda 27 of the Silence Protocol applies here. Pax and Theo can be—and must be—separated the instant they hit seven years of age. I’d recommend doing it sooner but the risk of psychic collapse is high. To chance that with a Gradient 9 would be reckless in the extreme.

—Report by PsyMed specialist Dr. Kye Li to Councilor Marshall Hyde (1 January 2061)

THEODORA MARSHALL BUTTONED up the crisp white of her shirt, erasing the view of the strip of smooth and pale skin in between the two panels. That skin was so inoffensive, so normal. Look at that and you’d never know what crawled over her back—and twisted inside her mind.

She could live with the physical marks of what had been done to her, but the only way to live with the mental marks was to enforce a rigid aloneness.

Except that was impossible.

Pax needed her. Her twin, the golden child, the one who was supposed to survive, to make it, had ended up kicked by their genes. Scarab Syndrome they called it. A disease that was the greatest irony of their race. Psy who were born so powerful that their minds effectively ate them up; prior to the advent of Silence, such Psy had imploded and died as children.

Then had come a protocol that put chains around all that chaotic power. Silence might have crushed and murdered millions, but it had worked for those like Pax who would’ve otherwise burned up in the conflagration of their abilities. Then Silence had fallen . . . and there was no putting the genie back in the bottle, no way to reinitiate Silence once Scarab Syndrome took hold.

Doctor Maia Ndiaye, one of the lead medics on the Scarab team, had framed it thus: “Once a susceptible Psy enters the Scarab state, it is a permanent shift. Literal alterations to pathways in the brain that mean the subject is no longer capable of initiating Silence on any level.”

In short, her brother’s vast power had become a voracious monster lurking in the back of his brain.

Theo’s stomach lurched at the idea of Pax vanishing from her mind. Because that was what no one in their family had ever understood: their grandfather might have separated Pax and Theo on the physical level, but even Councilor Marshall Hyde had never quite managed a clean break on the psychic.

Pax had saved her life time after time.

Theo would do anything to save his. With that in mind, she picked up the bracelet she’d manufactured using knowledge gained in her prior job as a medical-device technician who moved tiny components using her very limited telekinetic abilities.

Made of two pieces of dull metal polished to an unexceptional smoothness except for the intricate pattern she’d hand-carved in the center, the bracelet was designed to clip over her wrist. She’d been careful to ensure that it mimicked a popular low-price comm device, complete with a tiny screen.

Snapping it shut on her wrist, she checked that it was fully charged.

One hundred percent.

Good. The shock it was designed to send into her system would hurt.

Satisfied, she finished dressing in preparation for meeting Pax. Her brother needed her to handle something for him. No matter how much she’d prefer to vanish into the murkiest of shadows, she couldn’t.

She had debts to pay.

Blood debts.

It still took all her willpower to drive through the imposing metal gates of the Marshall estate just outside Toronto. The blades of grass on the lawns on either side of the driveway were clipped to a precise length, the asphalt itself clean of anything as mundane as moss or dirt.

The two-hundred-year-old marble fountain in front of the house lay silent, but it, too, was pristine. As were the box hedges by the wide front steps. As if the gardener in charge walked around with a ruler in his back pocket.

There were no flowers.

Parking her small vehicle in the circular area at the top of the drive, she ignored the imposing bulk of the estate house of traditional red brick and walked around one of the wings to the green area beyond. If she’d ever experienced true freedom in this place, it had been in the small wilderness beyond the back lawns.

For a moment, as she stood in the silence behind the house, staring out at the green, she could almost hear the sound of her and Pax’s mingled laughter as they chased each other into the trees.

“Theo.”

Unsurprised that her brother had found her so fast, she touched the deep and glossy green leaf of the decorative plant that bordered the path that now cut the lawn in two. “It’s changed a lot.” She hadn’t been back to the family residence for . . . a long time.

“Yes, I suppose so.” A glance over the manicured green with eyes as blue and as cold as her own—neither one of them understood warmth. “I try not to spend much time here.”

She didn’t need to ask why; she knew. The grand old place full of antiques and an endless warren of rooms at their backs wasn’t a home. It held too much poison and dripped too much treachery. “Why did you bring me here?”

“Because you own half of it.”

Theo snorted; she didn’t pretend to be Silent around Pax. He had an excellent idea of exactly how “good” she was at the protocol that had conditioned emotion out of Psy for over a century. “Pax, I know full well that Grandfather left everything to you.” After Theo’s place on the Gradient of Psy power was confirmed, Marshall Hyde had never even publicly acknowledged that he had a granddaughter.

Privately . . . in the darkest shadows, it had been another matter.

He’d had quite the use for Theo there.

“And,” she added before Pax could speak, “I hope to hell you’re not about to saddle me with any of it. You know the entire vicious lot of our ‘beloved’ family would be out for me with knives sharpened.” They had no idea what Theo could do, no reason to believe that she was the more deadly twin—but that didn’t mean she wanted to spend her life looking over her shoulder.

She already had too many ghosts chasing her.

“I wouldn’t do that to you.” Pax slipped his hands into the pockets of his black cargo pants. His black boots were scuffed and his simple sweater of dark green wool hugged a well-muscled body devoid of any ounce of fat.

Some would call the latter a result of discipline. Theo knew Pax had plenty of that. She also knew that Pax had never been permitted to fail, not even by the minutest fraction. He’d never been given any room to grow out of the brutally defined box into which their grandfather had put him.

Her twin didn’t know how to be anything but unflinchingly perfect.

As it was, the world rarely even saw her brother dressed as casually as he was today; Pax was known for his bespoke suits and razor-sharp elegance, his “utter precision of form”—words she’d actually seen in a magazine article.

Why had she been reading an article about her brother?

Because he was the only person in the entire world who mattered to Theo, and—even though he’d never expect it—it was her turn to protect him. Even from outwardly harmless journalists who seemed to be paying a little too much attention to a Psy who kept his focus on the business world. It could be a hapless individual caught by his magnetic charisma—or it could be a stalker.

“What I’ve done,” he said now, “is set aside a hidden trust. The details on how to access it are in our PsyNet vault.”

“Our” meant the vault that Theo and Pax alone could access. Created of building blocks of pure psychic energy and embedded in the vast psychic network that connected all Psy on the planet but for the rare rebels, the vault was locked to their mental signatures. To the psychic echo that ran through both their brains. Because those brains had developed together in the womb and never fully lost their entwined nature.

Their invisible bond was the only thing that had saved her all those years when her grandfather would’ve rather disposed of this “defective” member of the extolled Marshall family. Too bad for him that to erase Theo would’ve been to fatally damage Pax.

Some Psy twins were like that.

“You’ve already given me enough money to last me multiple lifetimes. And I earn an income from my work.” Theo didn’t need much, didn’t deserve much after what she’d done. “I have no use for more. Especially after you gave me a position at your side, with the commensurate pay.”

Theo would’ve preferred to remain occluded, hidden by the shield of their grandfather’s machinations and her and Pax’s apparent personal estrangement. It had been far easier to help Pax as a lowly tech no one was watching, but her twin needed someone he could trust without question at his right hand—so here she was, a monster walking out in the open.

Poor Pax. Tied to a twin with no power, and death her only gift.

“We need to prepare you to go under if I die.” Flat, hard words, a reminder that her outwardly healthy brother’s life hung in precarious balance.

Theo looked away, her stomach clenching so hard it hurt.

“Theo.”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.” Not yet. Not when they’d had but a heartbeat of time together after the cold and lonely desert of their childhoods. “I don’t like this place. Let’s get out.”

“Wait, I did have another reason to bring you here. I wanted to talk where we had no chance of being overheard—and no one ever comes out into the grounds.” Halting on the far end of the path, where the land merged into a small stand of trees and other foliage that blunted the impact of the high walls beyond, he pulled a slimline organizer about the size of a phone out of his pocket.

“I’ve been researching Grandfather’s interest in the Centers.” His eyes were ice chips now. “We own significantly more of them than I realized.”

A chill deep inside Theo’s chest, a shiver of awareness over her spine. “I’m not surprised. That’s exactly the type of business Grandfather would’ve considered a good investment.” The truly sickening thing was that until recently, Marshall Hyde would’ve been correct.

Psy families had paid good money to have their “malfunctioning” members “rehabilitated.” Such a clean word for the destruction of all a person was and all that they might’ve become, nothing but shuffling blanks left in the aftermath.

“The records are complex and I’m still digging my way through them,” Pax said, “but I found a fragmented file with your name on it.”

“What?” Theo blinked, frowned. “Why would my name be on anything to do with the Centers?”

“I don’t know.” Pax brought up a document on the organizer. “This is all I could pull up—looks like the file was deleted but the system glitched and so it was only partially erased.”

Taking the thin datapad, Theo stared at the jumble of black letters on white. Most of it was so fragmented as to be gibberish, but she could clearly see what Pax already had: Theodora M—

There were no other Theodoras in the current line, but—“Wasn’t I named after a great-great-grand someone?” Theo had zero interest in her family’s history; aside from Pax, they were nothing to her. “Maybe she was the one who made the original investment in the Centers.” A second later, she corrected herself. “No, it can’t be that. Her death would’ve predated the Centers.”

“Yes, but look here.” He pointed out a fragment she’d missed in her initial scan.

A date: November 2, 2055.

Her and Pax’s shared birthdate. Theo was exactly two minutes his elder.

She checked the entire document again, this time with intense care, but found nothing else legible. “You’ve already run a program to see if you can work out the rest of the scrambled words.” Not a question because that was exactly what she would’ve done, and in things like this, they thought the same way.

A short nod. “From what I can tell, multiple files were deleted at the same time and hit the same glitch, so what we’re seeing is a scramble.”

Just when she’d begun to breathe again, sure that her name had nothing to do with any Center, he said, “The only thing that I am certain of is that all the documents in that particular file dump had to do with the family’s interest in a specific Center.”

Theo’s hand clenched on the organizer, her bones pushing up against her skin. Rage simmered just beneath the surface of the person she’d patched together from the ruins left by her grandfather.

It took conscious effort to force herself to breathe and relax her hand, return the organizer to Pax. “There’s no reason I should be in those files. Grandfather never took me to any of his business enterprises.”

She looked away from her brother’s incisive gaze, not wanting him to see, not wanting him to know. Pax had always believed she was angry with him for being the favored son, the family’s shining scion.

His guilt was enormous.

How much worse would it be if she told him what Marshall had forced her to become?

Better that he believe her to be holding a grudge than realize that the reason she refused to permit him any closer was that she couldn’t bear for him to see the ugliness of her. Because Pax had a heart far less warped than her own; he’d protected her even when he was so small he shouldn’t have been able to protect her.

She’d die for her brother. More importantly, she’d kill for him.

“What do we know about this particular Center?” she asked when she could speak again.

Pax hadn’t interrupted. He knew about this part of her, this splintered chaos that boiled deep within and exploded as rage.

Uncontrollable. Deadly to anyone in the vicinity not as powerful as Theo.

Not a problem since she was a 2.7.

Unfortunately, she had an instinctive and inseverable connection to a Gradient 9. And in her rage, she could access some of Pax’s power.

They’d both tried to shut off the valve. It didn’t work.

When under the influence of a rage attack, she became a violent and murderous 9. And there were very, very few people stronger than a 9 on the Gradient.

“That’s just it,” Pax said, making no comment on her tense frame or rigid features. He had no idea of the root of her rage, but he knew the price she paid to keep it contained, keep up the meek and mild avatar she’d perfected so she could hide in plain sight. “We know nothing. The Center isn’t even a ghost in the main system. It’s nonexistent.

“What I did unearth,” he added, “I found in one of his private archives that he must’ve been in the process of decommissioning when he was assassinated—the job was half-done, a door left partially open.”

Nausea, inexplicable and bitter. “Grandfather hid it even from you?”

“Maybe he was planning to tell me. But then he got killed.” Pax said the latter in the same way he might mention a business acquisition.

Where others would see a ruthless predator with no emotions and no heart, Theo saw only the twin who’d had to survive a different kind of abuse. Being Marshall Hyde’s favorite grandchild and heir had been no gift. At least Theo had been able to spend the vast majority of her time out of her grandfather’s sight.

Now, her twin, the boy who’d refused to let go of her no matter what, held her gaze. “What’s your status? Are you able to take on the task of checking out this Center? I can’t be away from HQ with our dear cousin attempting a leadership coup, so it has to be you. Grandfather hid this because it’s important.”

“I’m in control.” The last rage storm had hit three months ago, and she usually had six between strikes. “I need to know why I’m in those files.” There was no reason, no reason at all for Theo’s name to be anywhere near that of a Center.

She had full mental capacity.

She hadn’t ever had a brainwipe.

Hadn’t ever been rehabilitated.

Cold in her veins. Ice that crackled as it spread.

Are you sure, Theo? asked the cruel phantom of her dead grandfather.