Last Guard

by Nalini Singh

  Pranath Rao had smiled the same cold smile Lalit so often mimicked. “Well done, daughter. I didn’t think you had it in you.” A cool murmur. “You do realize I know every location you could’ve possibly utilized.”

  Payal had held his eyes without fear, her ability to wall off the rage of her emotions the best trick she’d ever taught herself. “I’ve run my own small business since I was fifteen. Did you actually believe I showed you all my profits?” Payal had learned by watching her family, and what she’d learned was never trust anyone. “Try to find the girl or the recording. You’ll fail.”

  After a long, tense minute, while Payal stood unflinching, Pranath Rao had brought his hands together in a slow clap. “Brilliant. You are my true heir after all—Lalit never saw you waiting to strike at his back.”

  Now Payal took the elevator to the basement level of Vara, a windowless and highly secure area that could be accessed only by a limited number of people. All were Psy, and all but Payal and Lalit were fanatically loyal to Pranath Rao.

  Which was why their father had other ways of controlling his children.

  After exiting the elevator, she keyed in her private entry code on the doors to the main suite, then stood still for the retinal scan. She should’ve been able to teleport in, but her father had a group of staff on duty whose sole task was to alter elements of his work space in ways that stopped a teleport lock.

  The team did this every single time after a visit from Lalit or Payal.

  What some might call paranoia, their father called good security, and Payal couldn’t fault him for it. Lalit, at least, was fully capable of teleporting in while Pranath was at work and slitting his throat.

  The doors slid open in front of her. Beyond them moved an M-Psy in blue scrubs, her brown skin dull as a result of all the time she spent underground. The other woman gave her a nod.

  “Is my father awake?”

  “Yes. He’ll see you.”

  Of course he knew of her arrival. The entire area was monitored. “Thank you.”

  Turning right, she walked down a wide hallway decorated with artefacts of gold against a black background. Historical treasures captured by their ancestors that should’ve been verboten under Silence—but the Rao family was never going to give up their history. They’d simply moved the prized possessions to places where no outsider would ever see them.

  Her father had added to the artefacts: the two golden swords at the end of the hallway were his. Mounted beside them was a small knife Lalit had sourced earlier that year. Her brother had never given up on his ambitions; he’d also managed to keep his hands outwardly clean for years.

  Payal was well aware she was on borrowed time.

  “Payal, come in.” Her father sat propped up in the computronic bed he used when working, papers and datapads spread out on the specially built desk that arched over the bed.

  The overhead lights were on against the windowless enclosure that was the public part of his suite. Not that the room was clinical—a thick Persian carpet covered the floor, and delicate historical paintings of long-dead royal courts decorated two of the walls.

  At the center of it all was Pranath Rao.

  Chapter 12

  “7J?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you remember me? After I’m not here anymore?”

  —3K to 7J (August 2053)

  PAYAL KEPT HER face expressionless as she stood in what was her father’s version of an office. Pranath Rao had lost all feeling below the waist after a riding accident. Horses were one of the few recreational animals that had survived Silence when it came to the Psy. It was considered good exercise to ride.

  Pranath had also suffered other injuries, because he’d fallen onto rocks. His facial scarring was significant enough that multiple cosmetic surgeries hadn’t been able to soften the pink and patchy places or erase the thick ridges. It turned out his body didn’t like healing from surgery and tended to form keloid scars that resisted treatment.

  Payal was certain it was the facial scarring rather than the paralysis that had led to his retreat from public life. He hadn’t retreated from anything else. She’d had to fight over every major move she wanted to make when she first took on the role of CEO. He’d only begun to release the business leash when it became obvious that she thought five steps ahead and could make them more powerful as a family group.

  Despite his partial capitulation, she never forgot that the majority of the people around her belonged to Pranath Rao. Some because that was part of their identity, others out of fear. Payal had turned a number of the latter, but she knew she couldn’t fully trust them as long as he lived—fear was a hard taskmaster.

  Payal had been afraid once, as a child at the mercy of a monstrous sibling.

  “Father.” After closing the door behind herself, she locked it.

  “Excellent work on the Tiang-Jiao negotiation,” he said, his eyes on his organizer. “I had my doubts you’d pull it off with how stubborn they were being, but I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

  Payal said nothing in response, because no response was required. She was always careful to follow the accepted format for Psy interactions when it came to her father. He might consider her more stable than Lalit, but he also never lost sight of the fact that she was an anchor and thus inherently unhinged in a different way.

  He made her wait two more minutes before looking up. She knew it for a power play, but such things had no impact on her. She saw them as petty wastes of time. Even more so now because if Canto was right, none of these games would have any relevance soon unless they found a way to fix the dearth of anchors in the Net.

  She used the free two minutes to go over data he’d sent her telepathically after their meeting.

  Yet even as she did so, she found herself thinking of the wrapper she’d hidden in the book, the food he’d given her. Her fingers wanted to curl into her palm, her pulse suddenly an echoing drum.

  Her father finally deigned to look at her, his eyes that pale amber-brown. “Are you here for your medication?”

  Years of training meant her tone was even when she said, “Yes, Father.” He made her go through this routine every single time—every seven days since he’d made her CEO, when, prior to that, the dosage had been calibrated to last three months. A constant reminder that she could never act against him without putting her life at critical risk.

  “It’s over there.”

  She moved to the small table set up against the dark red-brown of the far wall; the color made the room even more claustrophobic for Payal. The familiar injector lay on a sterile tray along with an alcohol swab and the vial of vivid green medication.

  Slotting the vial into the injector, she then swabbed the side of her neck, though that step wasn’t strictly necessary. It took but a second to punch the medication into her system. The pain was minor at most; she didn’t even notice it after so many years.

  As a teleporter, she could switch out vials with ease and had done so more than once. But the scientists she’d hired had never been able to reverse engineer the drug her father had sourced from a now-dead chemist. She was ninety-nine percent certain he’d killed the chemist to ensure that Payal could never break free.

  Lalit came by his psychopathy honestly; Pranath was just better at playing the role demanded by society.

  “Better?” he said as she placed the injector back on the table.

  “Yes.” The headache that had been building behind her eyes would soon calm, the medicine’s effects rapid; and for seven more days, the tumors in her brain would grow no bigger. “Did you want to discuss any other matters?”

  He’d returned his attention to his organizer, but he said, “You were away from your office for a long period today.”

  A sinuous reminder of just how many loyal spies he had in the Rao organization.

  “Meeting with
one of the Mercants.” Payal had always been a bad liar, but at times, the truth was a better mask than anyone expected—especially when used with surgical precision.

  Pranath was suddenly not in the least interested in whatever was on his organizer. “The Mercants haven’t worked with our family for five generations.”

  Payal knew that. After being knocked back on a proposed venture that would’ve brought profit to both parties, she’d made it a point to find out why. It was because a Rao ancestor had betrayed the Mercants after they’d come to an agreement. Canto’s family did not forgive.

  Yet he expected her to trust him.

  Because it was anchor business.

  Because it was between 3K and 7J, not Rao and Mercant.

  Her stomach squeezed into a tight ball.

  “I don’t know if they will now, either.” Slipping her hands into her pockets, she kept her body relaxed even as her pulse drummed. “It was a preliminary meeting with nothing of relevance on the agenda.” All true as far as it came to Pranath’s interests.

  But her father was no longer looking at her, his attention caught by the idea of an alliance with the Mercant clan. On the face of it, Rao was bigger and held more power, but everyone knew the Mercants preferred to stay out of the limelight—and had more tentacles than any of the mythical beasts created by various cultures.

  “All we need is an entry point,” Pranath mused. “Word is what one Mercant knows, they all do. So we just need one person and we can crack their hermetic seal of useless loyalty.”

  So quickly, his thoughts went to betrayal.

  “I’ve kept the door open.” Payal always had difficulty breathing in this room, but she’d long ago learned to hide what she knew was a psychosomatic reaction. “I’d suggest you not attempt to track me while I’m with my contact. Mercants are . . . touchy.” Her father couldn’t actually follow her the vast majority of the time, since she could ’port wherever she wished, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t attempt other methods of surveillance.

  “Understood.” It sounded sincere. “Keep me informed. I want to know the instant this looks like it might go somewhere.”

  “I will.” She began to head to the door.

  “Payal.”

  “Sir?” She made sure to meet his gaze.

  “Your brother has brokered several major deals of late, and he’s increasingly building connections that will assist the family in the future. A Mercant link would be advantageous for you.”

  After inclining her head in a silent response, Payal exited. She didn’t permit herself to think about what he’d said until she was behind the locked doors to her apartment, a place she swept every morning and night for spyware and that had a number of electronic tripwires designed to alert her to unauthorized access.

  Her father wasn’t a stupid man. She couldn’t risk him figuring out that his final arrow had hit home. She had even less time than she’d thought if he was beginning to threaten her with Lalit.

  “You might have killed once, but you don’t have your brother’s ruthless instincts,” he’d said to her the year before. “You expect people to act with logic, to be rational in their behavior.”

  He was wrong. She used to expect that, but her childhood had shown it to be a false data point—so she’d adapted. In time, she’d gathered enough information to realize that Psy under Silence made decisions for all kinds of reasons, many of them incomprehensible if you took only the rules of the Protocol into account.

  Payal, too, didn’t always act in a way that fulfilled the tenets of pure rationality. Such as right then, when she reached out to Canto with her mind. He’d given her his telepathic “imprint,” for lack of a better word, when he’d sent her the expanded data. She couldn’t find that imprint in the telepathic space, which meant he was farther away than her Gradient 4.3 telepathy could reach.

  It should’ve stopped her impulsive act, but she picked up her encrypted organizer and sent him a message: Initiate telepathic contact.

  The connection snapped into place within seconds: Payal? Is there a problem? His voice was crystalline, so pure a sound that it was almost—but not quite—painful to her psychic ear.

  Payal didn’t understand music, but at that moment, she came as close to that understanding as she ever had. No problem, just information. To cover our meetings, I’ve told my father we’re considering a business collaboration. I need you and your family to back me up should mine send out feelers.

  It’ll be done. A minor pause. You’re the financial head of the Rao family.

  This was why she didn’t act on impulse. Impulse led to mistakes. In the end, all she said was There are other factors in play.

  It’s your brother, isn’t it? Watch your back, Payal. Lalit is a predator. Another small pause before he added, If you want him gone, just give the word.

  Payal sat down on the closest surface. It happened to be a seat built into a large curved window that overlooked the city. She could’ve had an apartment lower down, where the property’s opaque fences blocked out the view of Delhi, but she’d never considered that an option. Are you making an offer?

  Why don’t you come over and we’ll talk.

  She stared at the falling darkness of Delhi, lit up by the yellow lights that lined its streets in tandem with the tiny fairy lights so many of the small businesses still preferred to hang over their awnings or on their rooftops. Now was the time to meet Canto if she wished to do so in absolute privacy. Not even her father could see through walls and into her rooms.

  And . . . she wanted to talk to Canto.

  Such a foolish, dangerous need, but she couldn’t fight it. Same location?

  It’ll be cold now. Come prepared.

  First, she took a couple of minutes to touch base with Karishma using an encrypted messaging app, to ensure that Pranath hadn’t made any moves that put her sister in jeopardy.

  I’m safe, Karishma replied. Father and Lalit haven’t tried to contact me. I think they’ve forgotten I exist. Visha is fine, too.

  You both remember the exit plan?

  Karishma repeated it back to her. I won’t let them kill us, she promised. That would leave you all alone.

  Payal never knew what to say to her gentle, artistic sister when she made such statements. Just worry about yourself and let Visha protect you. The teenager turned young woman whom Payal had rescued from Lalit’s torture was ten years Kari’s senior and fiercely loyal to her younger charge. I’m the elder. I’ll take care of myself.

  Yes, Didi. An honorific for “older sister,” but not one used among Psy. It held too much emotion, too much affection. Payal didn’t chastise her—Kari was growing up in the post-Silent world, and Payal intended for her to grow up in a kinder one, too.

  Payal’s one experience of kindness as a child had been a boy who’d asked her for her thoughts and slipped food into her small palm. The profound impact of Canto’s actions rippled through time in how Payal interacted with Karishma. Are you still happy with the school?

  Yes. Miss Almeida is my favorite.

  Payal responded with interest, and the two of them messaged for several more minutes before she said, Good night. Keep up your guard. Though showing emotion was difficult in the extreme for her, she made the effort for Kari—she didn’t want her sister to end up like her, damaged in a way nothing could ever fix. You are very important to me. I won’t allow anyone to hurt you.

  I know, Didi. I love you.

  Kari’s statement clawed into Payal’s psyche, the rising emotion a threat that could overwhelm. When she went to reinitiate her shields, the manic, half-mad girl she’d once been fought her with savage fury. Her jaw ached, her neck tight by the time she got things under control.

  That was why she didn’t crack open the door. It inevitably led to a deluge.

  Despite her conversation with Kari and though she took the time to chan
ge into fitted black jeans, a sweater in dark green, and work boots she used on site visits, she still beat Canto to the desert.

  Lights came on the instant she moved. Small twinkling sparkles wove their way through the trees of the oasis, while the walls of the shelter began to warm with a soft glow that made it welcoming rather than harsh.

  Having walked down to the water, she felt Canto arrive, her telepathy strong enough to run patrol scans in this limited area. The mind that appeared with his soon disappeared, the teleporter fast enough that Payal didn’t bother to try to catch a glimpse of them. It was hardly a surprise that the Mercant family had access to such services.

  As she walked back up to join Canto, she saw that he’d brought nutrient drinks, fruit, and simple food packs in a small box and was setting them out on the table. “Figured you’d need fuel after another distance teleport at the end of a full day,” he said gruffly.

  Her chest hurt, that ache in her throat threatening to take over her whole body. “Why do you keep feeding me?” she blurted out, angered by him for some incomprehensible reason. “That’s not your job.”

  Chapter 13

  I am concerned about the levels of certain hormones in her system.

  —Medical report on Payal Rao (age 6)

  A CHALLENGING LOOK out of those eyes so hauntingly beautiful—and implacable in their stubbornness. “Yes,” he said, no give in him, “it is.”

  “Why? Because I’m to be your anchor representative?”

  His jaw worked. “Don’t give me that bullshit, Payal. You and I, we bonded in blood as children. You saved my life. Yours is now mine to protect.”

  “That’s not how it works.”