Chapter 66

“We are the foundation.”

—Payal Rao, representative of Designation A on the Ruling Coalition in the PsyNet Beacon (29 June 2083)

KALEB FINISHED TRANSPORTING all parties but two to the StoneWater den infirmary. “I left Pax Marshall and his teleport assist at the site.” Pax didn’t need to have internal images of the StoneWater den, the home of the clan’s most vulnerable.

Valentin rubbed his face. “Chert, what a complication. Trust Yasha to fall for a woman with Pax Marshall for a twin.” Harsh words, but worry pumped off the alpha. “I’ll deal with him. Spasibo for coming so quickly.”

“I try to be a good neighbor.” StoneWater was also not in the habit of asking for his help—which was why he’d cut short a critical meeting to respond to Valentin’s SOS. “I apologize for not answering my phone. I had it on silent during a meeting.” In the end, it was Silver who’d contacted him via the PsyNet.

Valentin waved off his apology. “You came. That’s all that matters. We owe you one.”

“Yes, you do,” Kaleb responded, because being a good neighbor didn’t mean being foolishly noble. A favor from StoneWater was valuable coin. “Good luck with the wounded.”

Teleporting back to his home on the remote periphery of Moscow, he glanced outside and saw that the rain had stopped for the time being, so he stepped out onto the rain-washed deck before returning to his meeting on the PsyNet. “Apologies,” he said to Payal, whose mind was laser bright next to his. “Emergency teleport request from an ally.”

“I understand,” said his fellow member of the Ruling Coalition, and a woman who also happened to be a cardinal telekinetic. “Everything all right?”

“I left them in an infirmary.” Marshall’s sister had lost so much blood that Kaleb had his doubts about her chances of survival. But he’d done all he could, and now he had to return to a problem where millions of lives hung in the balance.

He looked once more at the island on the other side of the chasm in front of him and Payal. That island was no longer an opaque blank. Rather, it sparked with energy, the connections within flickering in and out of visibility in sharp flashes—but that was because the man at the center of the island was still learning how to manage the energy that poured through his brain, then back out into the system.

“So?” he said to Payal.

“The Substrate flow is clear. Anchor energy from the main network is feeding into the island and vice versa.”

“Stable?”

“Stable.”

Kaleb continued to watch what was, at present, Ivan Mercant’s personal fiefdom. Sahara had laughed when he’d put it that way. “He’s mated to a healer, my gorgeous Mr. Krychek. He couldn’t turn into a dictator if he tried.”

She was right, of course, but that didn’t obliterate the fact that, as of now, one man held two thousand and twenty-three lives in stable orbit around him. Which wasn’t necessarily a bad thing—it was the reason why he and Payal were standing here, deep in the shadows of the Net.

“When we first brought up breaking the PsyNet into smaller units,” he said, “you were adamant it wouldn’t work because of the dearth of anchors.” Anchors maintained and upheld the foundation of the PsyNet, the Substrate. Invisible to all but designation A, it was nonetheless the most critical structure in the Net. Should it collapse, so would the PsyNet—leading to the effective extinction of the Psy race.

Payal, ruthless CEO of the Rao Conglomerate, was the anchor representative on the Ruling Coalition.

“If any designation has the leverage to set themselves up as dictators, it’s A,” Sahara had added during that same conversation, while in the process of knotting his tie while she stood barefoot on their bedroom carpet dressed only in one of his shirts. “Lucky for us that they just want to be left alone.”

While it was tempting to think about how he’d pulled off the tie soon afterward and asked for his shirt back only to throw it on the bed and haul her laughing, naked body against his, it would have to wait. Right now, his focus had to be on the continued disintegration of the psychic fabric on which he stood—because Sahara had asked him to walk in the light, to save the PsyNet rather than burning it down to the ground.

“What’s your current view of the situation?” he asked Payal.

“Complex. We’ve assigned a team of As to study the input and output of anchor energy from the island. At this point, the island is drawing more energy per capita than the rest of the PsyNet.”

Kaleb stared out at the gorge beyond his home on the physical plane, the drop sheer. Terrifying for most. But not a teleport-capable telekinetic. He’d added a safety railing nonetheless. Because this was Sahara’s home, a place of utmost safety. “The Scarabs?”

“Yes. In terms of percentages, the island houses significantly more Scarabs than the rest of the PsyNet. That volume of chaotic Scarab energy would equal an inherently unstable network without conscious remediation by my As.”

“Even with Ivan Mercant’s containment fields?”

“He can contain them on the Net level, but the Scarabs are jacked directly into the Substrate, just like you are. No way to stop their energy from feeding into the rivers of the Substrate. My As must clean it up before it takes deeper hold and frays another part of the network. It’s an exhausting process.”

Kaleb considered the gleaming perfection of a drop of water that hung from the railing . . . before falling to the deck to vanish into the thin film of water already present on the boards.

Gravity was a law of nature.

As was a Psy’s internal link to the psychic space that sustained the members of their race. To cut it would be to pass a sentence of death.

And the Scarabs are still us, Kaleb, said the echo of Sahara’s voice, the words ones she’d spoken to him as they lay in bed one night, her head on his bare shoulder and his hand fisted in the softness of her hair. We can’t just eject our broken. That would make us no better than the Council we replaced. Monsters on a quest for genetic perfection.

Kaleb had few scruples, his psyche damaged and brutalized too young. But Sahara was his world—and she had conscience enough for both of them. So he didn’t postulate a solution that would mean the hunting and erasure of all adult Scarabs in the network. It would take time, but it could be done. A silent and sweeping genocide. But it wasn’t going to be done, not under Kaleb’s watch.

Not under Sahara’s sky.

“Ivan Mercant is also unusual,” Payal added. “His psychic ability functions in a way none of us have ever before seen.”

“Most of us haven’t seen it now, either,” Kaleb muttered, bracing his hands on the wet railing on the physical plane.

“Ah, the man who knows everything doesn’t know this. It must be most aggravating.”

Had anyone told him a year ago that he’d one day be a source of amusement for the Rao Conglomerate’s grim-faced and robotic CEO, Kaleb would’ve ordered that individual to have a drug test. “Do the anchors see it then? Ivan’s power?”

“Not in the sense you mean. We are, however, aware of it in a visceral way impossible to explain to anyone but another anchor. He is exactly how his mate puts it: the heart of a system.”

Kaleb didn’t bother to ask for more personal information about Ivan that she might know as a result of her marriage into the Mercant family. One, Payal wouldn’t tell him. And two, he could speak to Ivan himself. Kaleb would never be one of Ena’s flock, but she’d accepted him into the inner circle of the family.

“What happens if the heart dies?” he asked, even as part of him grew dark at the thought of the devastation that would cause in Ena’s family. The Mercants weren’t like so many other families twisted by Silence. The Mercants would cut the throat of anyone who dared harm their own.

Their grief would be infinite.

“We don’t know,” Payal answered, “and Ivan is in the prime of his life. Let’s not borrow trouble when we already have so much.”

Kaleb saw the wisdom in that. “I haven’t found a way to cross to the island, and now that Ivan is anchored there, he can only cross back for short periods. His network reach is effectively limited to the island.”

“Yet, despite its overload of Scarabs, Ivan’s island is more stable than any other section of the PsyNet.”

“Yes.”

“Power versus stable ground,” murmured the woman who’d been raised by a man who valued power and had wielded it with an iron hand. “We need to do further research on the effect on Psy brains of a limited psychic ecosystem versus a wider one.”

“A sensible precaution, but we’re running out of time.” The Net was unraveling around them, an increasing number of sections too threadbare to navigate. “I do know of a very tight network—less than ten individuals—that survived for a solid period.” A familial network of defectors that happened to include one of Kaleb’s few friends in the world. “Even if all we gain is a year, it’ll be more time than we have now.”

“Sadly, I have to agree.” Payal’s tone was solemn. “The Substrate is healthier than it’s been for a long time, but we’re stretched so thin, Kaleb.” A more personal tone to her voice now, a hint of the exhaustion felt by every A in the system.

“The problem is Ivan Mercant—or the lack of more like him.” Kaleb had sent out countless psychic bots into the PsyNet, searching for any hint of another person with the same subset of abilities. “I’ve hit zero. So has Aden. The empaths, too. Anchors?”

“Nothing. Yet to know that two members of a line were confirmed to have it, with a third a viable possibility, it’s difficult to say it’s not genetic. And it’s rare for Psy abilities to be limited to a single line.”

That was when Kaleb remembered when Payal had entered the Ruling Coalition. “I’m not sure it is genetic. After we seized his aunt’s records, I looked for data to either confirm or negate a rumor I heard during the start of my term on the Council.

“I uncovered evidence that, at one stage, Scott and her former husband both chose to have experimental bioneural implants.” The arrogant stupidity of it stunned him. “The aim of the implant was to control others via a forced neural link.”

“Intriguing. But that doesn’t explain her sister or Ivan.”

“The sister was a Jax addict, and Ivan was exposed in vitro.” All information Ivan had shared with the Ruling Coalition in an effort to assist their search for others with his ability. “Jax opens pathways of the mind. What if it isn’t the power itself that’s genetic, but rather the predisposition to such a specific type of expansion?”

Payal was quiet for a long time before saying, “Even if you’re right, you can’t use it. Jax is a psychological poison pill now.”

Kaleb walked back and forth across his deck. Logic stated that such a thought was ridiculous. A medication was a medication. Used in a way not meant to cause harm, it could be a gift of life. And yet . . . how would they know it wouldn’t cause harm? How could they control the exposure?

Since Kaleb would—with zero remorse and no guilt—end the life of anyone who suggested child subjects, it would have to be adult volunteers with the right brain structure. And then what? Ivan had survived because he’d been exposed in vitro, then again at a very young age. His mother, the adult user, had died.

No autopsy had ever been done, so they had no idea of the state of her brain at the time of her overdose.

“We might have to go back to the original plan,” he said to Payal. “Have a powerful Gradient hold an island.” A difficult—and perhaps unfeasible—task for a mind not built for it like Ivan’s, but there was a chance it would work as a stopgap measure.

“I’ll agree to the experiment on the understanding that if such an attempt breaks the connection to the Substrate, we call it off at once. Nothing has changed when it comes to the critical shortage of designation A—my people are spread thin, held up by each other, load sharing an integral aspect of the new system we’ve put in place. They’ll burn out and die within days if cut off from the main streams of the Substrate.”

“Agreed.” Kaleb had no desire to agitate the fragile balance the As had created, one that permitted them to rest rather than working until they dropped. Healthier As meant a healthier Net; it was as simple as that.

An exhale into the psychic space. “I don’t want this.” Payal’s voice was taut. “Every single one of our objections continues to apply. But the decision matrix has altered with the continued rise of the Scarabs and the attendant rise in chaotic energy in the Net—we have to attempt a controlled separation before an uncontainable collapse makes the decision for us.”

Unspoken was that they’d have to get the agreement of all those on the Ruling Coalition, as well as the residents of the area where the experiment was to take place. But those were minor hurdles in the grand scheme of things. It was the anchors who held the veto power and they weren’t going to use it.

It was time to purposefully splinter the PsyNet.