Chapter 3

Gradient 1: Baseline—no one below a full level 1 has ever been able to link to the PsyNet.

Gradient 2: Minor useful ability but 2s do not work in fields that require psychic ability, unless the power requirement is negligible.

Gradient 3: Beginning of beneficial levels of power, though 3 remains in the low range.

—From the introduction to Overview of Gradient Levels (24th Edition) by Professor J. Paul Emory and K. V. Dutta, assigned textbook for PsyMed Foundation Courses 1 & 2

Twenty Years Ago

THEO STOOD OUTSIDE the door to her grandfather’s study in the large family home that they were all supposed to live in before they turned eighteen and moved to their own places in either a high-rise owned by the family or, if they’d “achieved positions elsewhere,” in “suitable” local apartments.

Theo knew that word for word because all children in the Marshall family knew that. Just like they all knew that while Grandfather’s last name was Hyde, he was the Marshall. It was complicated and she didn’t quite understand, but her mother had once said that Grandfather’s surname was Hyde because he’d been meant to be raised in the Hyde family.

“The agreement didn’t work as intended,” her mother had added absently while she finished up a piece of work, “and Father returned to our family. He was old enough at the time that he didn’t want to change his name, and because he’d won various accolades as a teenager under that name and was already building an excellent profile, he was permitted to retain it.”

Theo still didn’t know what “accolades” meant. She kept forgetting to ask the computer. What she did know was that her grandfather had grown up to be the head of the Marshall family.

He was the boss of everyone in this house.

Theo had watched her older cousins leave at eighteen, known that those cousins would no longer have to follow the rules of the family home. She and Pax had whispered about it, deciding what they’d do if they could do anything. They’d thought they had years and years to make their plans.

Then Grandfather had made Theo leave only days after her and Pax’s seventh birthday.

Theo hadn’t understood why. She’d cried. She’d tried not to, knowing that Silence said she shouldn’t cry, but she wasn’t very good at Silence then, and so she’d cried and asked her mother why she was being made to go away from Pax.

They hadn’t even let her say good-bye to her twin.

Her mother had given her a firm look out of eyes the same color as hers and Pax’s. “It’s for the best, Theodora. Now stop embarrassing yourself and go wash your face.”

Theo knew to obey her mother when she spoke like that, so she’d gone and washed her face. She’d tried to telepath Pax, but just like all the other times she’d tried to ’path him since the time they’d last seen each other, the pathway was blocked.

It had panicked her.

Pax had always been there. They were always in each other’s heads. He was stronger so he could reach her from farther away, but she’d never had trouble reaching him either because Pax did the work of bridging any gap between them. Only now he was gone, and she couldn’t find him, and no one would tell her anything.

Theo didn’t panic anymore. She didn’t cry these days, either. And she knew why she’d been moved from this house and into the apartment of a foster “parent” who was paid to look after her. The place she lived in wasn’t a Marshall high-rise. It was also nothing like this big house with its many rooms, antique carpets, and large green spaces.

Theo’s apartment had two bedrooms, the smaller one of which was hers.

She stayed inside her room nearly all of the time.

Her hands wanted to fist. She kept them flexed straight. Someone might be watching. She remembered that about this house. People were always watching and reporting back.

That was the only good thing about where she lived now.

No one watched her.

Colette, Theo’s foster parent, spent her time in her room or in the living area, doing administrative tasks for the family, because that was her real job, her fostering of Theo an “addition to her duties for which she was paid a substantial sum”—that was how Colette had put it once, when Theo had screamed and cried and accused Colette of kidnapping her.

That had been right at the start, when Theo had still thought it all a mistake.

She hadn’t thought that for a long time, and she behaved herself with Colette. Because after so many months, she understood that if she made Colette’s job easy, then Colette would leave her alone.

That was better than being watched, being punished.

Now that Theo had learned how to feed herself the right amounts of nutrients for her age, Colette didn’t even interrupt her work to make sure Theo was fed.

The only time they interacted was the daily one-hour walk that they took outside the apartment. Colette had told her it was a mandated health walk, the second part of Theo’s exercise regimen. Theo was very careful to behave on those walks, the air freedom in her lungs. She couldn’t risk losing the walks. Otherwise the screaming inside her head might come out.

Except for those scheduled walks, as long as she behaved and did her schoolwork on the computronic system in her room, no one cared what Theodora Marshall was doing.

That was how she’d managed to hack into the family’s systems.

She knew she was too young to do it. That was probably why no one had thought to firewall her school system from the main system. But Theo had a lot of time. She didn’t have Pax to talk to or play with anymore, and she made sure to finish her schoolwork right on time or just after. Before, she’d used to finish early.

And learned that the school program would give her more work in return.

So now she dragged things out while using a walled-off part of the system to hack into the family’s files. It had taken her a whole month to set up those walls. She’d learned how to do it by going on the human and changeling Internet.

Her gut got a gnawing feeling. Like a small animal inside was biting at her.

She’d stolen the tablet she used to go on the Internet. It had been on one of the walks; Colette had been distracted by a colleague who’d stopped to chat with her. That was when Theo had seen the tablet abandoned on a park bench.

She’d had it in her coat pocket before she could think about it.

Her heart had thump-thumped all the way home. She’d been so scared of being found out that she’d waited until Colette was asleep before she took the tablet out of the hiding place where she’d shoved it after getting home.

Even though it was an old and cheap model, she’d known she shouldn’t have taken it. She should’ve handed it in somewhere. She’d felt a little better when she’d powered it up and seen that it wasn’t registered to anyone and had no password. It was too basic to even have a fingerprint lock, but it wasn’t so old that she couldn’t charge it using the charging table she used for her school tablet.

It looked like someone had used it to read the news sites and play games.

Theo had told herself they wouldn’t miss it if they had a tablet just for that stuff, but she still felt bad. She wasn’t a thief. She’d never been a thief. But Colette had blocked the Internet from her devices except for authorized educational sites. Theo had known that if she tried to break through that block, it would set off an alarm, get her in trouble.

At first, she’d planned to use the Internet to connect to her brother. She missed Pax so much. They’d never been apart from each other for this long and it hurt her. She’d thought she could set up an email and get him the address and then he could set up an email, and they could talk that way.

Only . . . she didn’t know how to get her email address to him.

Colette never took her to the family house. And all of Theo’s psychic pathways were muffled, as if someone had thrown a big blanket over her. She wouldn’t even have any idea if Pax was alive if she didn’t have the knowing inside her. That, nobody could block. She knew her brother was alive the same way she knew she had two arms and two legs. It was just a knowing.

That was when she’d decided to hack the family’s systems.

It had taken her a long time.

And what she’d found was so confusing. She wasn’t listed as Pax’s twin anymore. They had her down as a younger sister. She’d also seen a note about someone of whom she had no memory: Keja, a sixteen-year-old sister of their mother’s who’d died when Theo and Pax were about two years old.

Like Theo, Keja had been a Gradient 2, though she’d been 2.3 to Theo’s 2.7.

It had taken another month for Theo to realize what she’d found. She’d been cut from the family because she was weak. Maybe that had happened to Keja, too. Only Keja hadn’t survived. She’d died. And no one had cared. No one ever talked about her.

Her heart had been thudding so hard then. She’d wondered if she’d die, too.

Now, only two weeks after she’d broken into the system, she stood outside her grandfather’s door and she tried not to run through these rooms screaming for Pax. He wasn’t here. She’d always been able to tell when her brother was close by, and so she knew he wasn’t here.

A lump grew in her throat, threatening to make her eyes burn. She’d been so good about not showing emotions; she’d been hoping that her family would forgive her for being so weak, that they’d take her back.

But Pax wasn’t here. And Colette hadn’t told her to pack her things.

She blinked really fast in an effort to fight her tears.

That was when her grandfather’s aide, a short woman with gray hair who’d been his aide as long as Theo could remember, came out from his room. “You can go inside now,” she said to Theo, and for a moment, Theo thought she saw a softness in her expression, and she wondered if she could tell the aide her email address and she’d give it to Pax.

Then the woman’s face turned all hard again, and Theo knew that whatever had made her face go soft had nothing to do with Theo. The woman belonged to her grandfather, would tell him anything she said. And Theo would lose even the small possibility of meeting up with her brother.

“Thank you.” Her voice came out quiet, but calm.

She checked that her knee-length black coat was neatly buttoned, her socks pulled up and her black shoes shiny, then turned and walked into her grandfather’s study.

The door clicked shut behind her.