Blaze of Memory

by Singh, Nalini

  “I know things,” she blurted out.

  He didn’t pause. “What things?”

  She found herself leaning back toward him, so hungry for contact that her skin felt as if it was parched, dying of thirst. “I know about the world. I know I’m Psy. I know I shouldn’t be able to feel emotions.” But she did. Need, fear, confusion, so many things that twisted and tore at her, demanding attention, wanting to surface.

  And beneath it all was terror. Endless. Wordless. Always.

  Dev’s fingers touched her nape, vivid warmth and silent demand. “How much do you know about the world? Politics?”

  “Enough. Pieces.” She breathed deep, found that the scent of him, rich and dark below the crispness of the aftershave, was in her lungs. It made her heart race, her palms go damp. “When people speak, when I watch the news channel, I understand. And I know other things...I know who—what—you are. I know what Shine is. It’s only me I don’t know. Nothing comes.”

  “That’s not true.” Firm strokes, little tugs on her scalp. “You dream.”

  A pulse of dread, bile in her throat. “I don’t want to.”

  “It’s a way for your brain to process things.”

  Her arms hurt, and she realized she was holding herself so stiffly, her muscles were beginning to burn. Forcing herself to let go of the chair, she focused on the repetitive strokes through her hair, the feel of the bristles, the aggressive male heat of the man behind her. “I’m a threat.”

  “Yes.”

  That he hadn’t lied almost made her feel better. “What will you do with me?”

  “For now? Keep you close.”

  “Don’t.” It came out without thought. “There’s something wrong with me.” That wrongness was an alien silhouette in the back of her skull, a wave of whispers she couldn’t quite hear.

  “I know.” He didn’t sound too worried, but then, she thought, he was a man who’d likely never known fear. She knew it too well, until the acid of it stained her very cells. But she still had her mind, fractured though it might be.

  “You want something from me.” Why else would he keep her alive, keep her close?

  “Do you remember the research you were doing with Ashaya?”

  Pale blue-gray eyes, dark hair in wildfire curls, coffee-colored skin. Ashaya. “She was here?” Her skin stretched as lines formed on her brow. “She was here.”

  “Yes.” Long, easy strokes through hair that no longer needed to be smoothed out. “She wants you to go stay with her.”

  Katya was shaking her head before he finished speaking. “No.” Fear closed around her throat, brutal hands that choked her until she couldn’t breathe. Pinpricks of light in front of her eyes, agony in her chest.

  The tugs on her scalp ceased and a split second later, Dev was crouching in front of her, his hands over hers. “Breathe.” A ruthless order, given in the voice of a man who would not countenance disobedience.

  Staring into those not-brown eyes, she tried to find some sense of balance, of self. “Breathe,” she repeated in a thin whisper that was barely sound. “Breathe.” Air whistled into her lungs, heady with the exotic taste of a man who’d never see her as anything but an enemy.

  At that moment, she didn’t care.

  All she wanted was to drown in the scent of him, until the fear inside her was nothing but a vague memory, a forgotten dream. She drew in another deep breath, luxuriating in the wild sweep of her senses, in the unforgiving male beauty of Devraj Santos. He smelled of power and an unexpected stroke of wildness, rich cinnamon and Orient winds—things she somehow knew, words her mind supplied. Almost without deciding to do it, she raised her hand to the thick silk of his hair. It was soft, softer than should’ve been possible on this man. “Will you promise me something?”

  For the first time in years, Dev found himself facing an opponent so opaque, he couldn’t get a handle on her. He’d come down here in order to make up his mind about whether or not she was nothing more than a truly clever actress. Instead, he’d found his Achilles’ heel given human form—a woman who appeared utterly without barriers, without protections.

  Then she’d touched him, and he hadn’t pushed her away . . . though he was a man who’d never been easy with touch, with the casual intimacies so many took for granted. Dev preferred to keep his distance. Except her hand was still in his hair, her skin soft under his rougher grip.

  Even now, he had to fight the primitive need to protect, to shelter, to save. What some called his stone-cold heart apparently had some warmth left in it. But that warmth wasn’t enough to blind him to the cynical truth—she might be the best move the Psy Council had ever made, a weapon tailor-made to provoke instincts so basic, Dev had little to no control over them. “What do you want me to promise?” he asked, hardening himself against a plea for mercy.

  Instead, she stroked her hand through his hair, as if fascinated by the texture, and said, “Will you kill me?”

  He froze.

  “If I prove too broken,” she continued, “too used up to fix, will you kill me?”

  There was, he thought, nothing lost about her at that instant. Her intent burned off her, a bright, decisive fire. “Katya—”

  “He did something inside me,” she whispered with a restrained violence that was all the more powerful for being contained. “He changed me. I don’t want to live if that’s who I am. His . . . creation.”

  The horror in her face, in the inescapable ugliness of what she was saying, curled around the iron shields that caged his soul, threatening to erode everything he thought he knew about himself. “If,” he said, unable to look away from those eyes streaked with gold and green, “you were going to give up, you’d have done it by now.”

  Her hand fell from his hair, but she held his gaze, unflinching in her naked honesty. “How do you know I didn’t?”

  EARTHTWO COMMAND LOG: SUNSHINE STATION

  21 February 2080: The new staff rotation arrived at 0900. All personnel are in good physical and mental condition. Work will begin in one day’s time, after the team members have had time to acclimate to the conditions.

  Councilor Ming LeBon has requested a report on the continued viability of this site, to be delivered at the end of this rotation. According to current calculations, the site should yield valuable compounds for the foreseeable future, but all data will be confirmed prior to the completion of the report.

  CHAPTER 6

  An hour after Katya asked him for a promise of death, Dev pushed a plate across the break-room table. “Eat.”

  Not touching the food, she pinned him with eyes more gold than green at that moment, streaks of brown bursting from the pupils. “Will you keep your promise?”

  He knew when he was being played. But most people wanted favors of a far less final kind. “I’ll kill you if it proves necessary.”

  She paused, as if considering his words, then picked up the fork. “Thank you.” While she ate in small, birdlike bites, he wondered what the hell he was going to do with her. Dev knew full well what he was becoming, but he wasn’t—not yet—so much the monster that he’d throw her back to the wolves. But neither could he permit her to become intimate with Shine.

  Katya might look fragile, might appeal to instincts born in the darkness of a childhood that had ravaged his soul, but she was Psy—and Psy cared for their physical appearance only to the extent that it got the job done. It was her mind that he had to consider—she couldn’t be allowed near any computers, any sources of data, certainly none of their most vulnerable.

  Pushing away the still mostly full plate, the woman at the center of his thoughts shook her head. “My stomach can’t take any more.”

  “Another meal, in an hour.”

  Her expression remained unchanged, but he saw her fingertips press down hard against the edge of the tabletop. “You’re used to giving orders.”

  “And having them obeyed.” He made no effort to hide his nature, his will. It was what had gotten him this far, and it was what wou
ld protect the Forgotten from the Council’s murderous attempts to stamp them out forever. “Can you handle some questions?”

  “Would you stop if I couldn’t?”

  “No.” He had to assess the level of threat—outwardly, she was as fragile as glass, but then again, most poison didn’t look like much either.

  In contrast to the majority of people when faced with him in this grim mood, she didn’t break eye contact. “At least you’re honest.”

  “Compared to?”

  A shake of the head, one answer she wouldn’t give him. “Ask your questions.”

  “Are you in the Net?”

  She blinked. “Of course.” But her tone was unsure, her forehead furrowing.

  He waited as her lashes came down, as her eyes moved rapidly behind the delicate lids. An instant later, they flew up. “I’m trapped.” Her fingers curled into the table, nails digging into the wood veneer. “He’s buried me in my mind.”

  “No. If he had, you’d be dead.”

  The harsh words acted as a slap. Katya jerked up her head, saw the cold distance in the eyes looking into hers, and knew there’d be no gentleness from him. He was no longer the Dev who’d brushed her hair and let her touch him. This man wouldn’t hesitate to fulfill her promise. But she hadn’t asked this man.

  Paradoxically, the ruthlessness of him made her spine straighten, a new kind of resolve rising up out of her battered soul. Where she would’ve softened for Dev, she didn’t want to surrender and give the director of the Shine Foundation the satisfaction. “Yes,” she said, forcing herself to still the panic. “The biofeedback has to be coming through.” The logic of it was irrefutable—she wouldn’t have lasted more than a few minutes without that feedback from the neural network that every Psy linked to instinctively at birth. “But I don’t think I can enter the Net itself.”

  “Doesn’t mean someone can’t find a way inside you.”

  Her stomach revolted. It took everything she had to keep down what she’d eaten. “You think he already has,” she whispered, looking into that pitiless face. “You think I’m nothing but a puppet.”

  Heading back up to his office after Katya—and yes, he found himself thinking, that name suited her far better than Ekaterina—began to slump from exhaustion, Dev considered who might know the answer to the mystery that was Katya Haas. He had a network of spies and informants that was as byzantine as the PsyNet. However, a direct channel to that net was the one thing he hadn’t been able to achieve. But, he thought, DarkRiver counted more than one full-blooded Psy among its numbers—chances were very high that an open line of communication existed somewhere.

  Looking down at the frenetic energy of New York, he weighed his next move. If Katya had been dumped at his home as a warning, then the powers in the PsyNet already knew she was alive and were—as she herself had said—controlling her. However, he had to consider the converse possibility—that she’d been rescued and left at his home because her rescuer knew the Forgotten would never cooperate with the Council. If so, any ripple in the pond could put her life in danger.

  “Dev?”

  He turned to find Maggie, in the doorway. “What is it?”

  “Jack’s on his way up.” Her eyes were sympathetic.

  Dev’s gut twisted, his mind filling with images of William, Jack’s son. The last time Dev had seen him, Will had still been a laughing, energetic little boy. Now . . . “Show him in when he arrives.”

  Sleet began to fleck the window as Maggie withdrew, every blow more cold and brittle than the last. Moving away from the sudden darkness, Dev returned to his desk. To his responsibilities. There was only one decision he could make when it came to seeking information about Katya—she wasn’t as important as the thousands of Forgotten he’d pledged to protect. A ruthless line, but one he could not cross.

  Several floors below, her eyes closed in sleep, Katya found herself back in the spider’s web.

  “What is your secondary purpose?”

  “To gather information on the Forgotten, to discover their secrets.”

  “And if you fail to find any useful data in the designated time frame?”

  Fear rose, but it was dull, a feeling she’d endured so long, it had become a bruise that never faded. “I must shift all my focus to the primary task.”

  “What is that task?”

  “To kill the director of the Shine Foundation, Devraj Santos.”

  “How?”

  “In a way that makes it clear he was assassinated. In a way that leaves no room for doubt about who did the task.”

  “Why?”

  That threw her. “You didn’t tell me why.”

  “Good.” A single, ice-cold word. “Your job isn’t to understand, simply to do. Now repeat what you are to do.”

  “Kill Devraj Santos.”

  “And then?”

  “Kill myself.”

  A pause, a rustle of fabric as he crossed his legs, his face as expressionless as when he’d shut her in the dark again though she’d begged and pleaded on her hands and knees.

  “Please,” she’d said, scrabbling to hold on to his legs. “Please, don’t. Please, please!”

  But he’d kicked her away, locked the door. And now he sat—a god on his throne while she huddled on the floor—speaking to her in that cool voice that never changed, no matter how much she screamed.

  “That task is the sole reason I’m leaving you alive.”

  “Why me?”

  “You’re already dead. Easily expendable.”

  “If I fail?” She was so weak, her bones seeming to melt from the inside out. How could she possibly kill any man, much less one reputed to be as lethal as the director of the Shine Foundation?

  There was no immediate answer, no movement from the spider who’d become the only living being in the endless pain that was her universe. He was a true Psy. He didn’t make gestures or movements without purpose. Once, she’d been like that. Before he’d torn into her mind and snapped the threads of her conditioning, wiping out all the things that had made her who she was.

  Before he’d killed her.

  “If you fail,” he finally said, “Devraj Santos will eliminate you from the equation. The end, for you, will be the same.”

  Katya gasped awake, her clothing sticking to her skin, her head pounding. Fear and horror clawed at her chest until she kicked off the blankets, certain something was sitting on her ribs, crushing her bones.

  Nothing.

  Nothing but madness.

  Shoving a fist into her mouth, she curled onto her side, wrestling with the jagged fragments of a dream that had drenched her body in the sick chill of fear-sweat. But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t connect the pieces, couldn’t figure out what it was the shadow-man had wanted her to do.

  She just knew that when the time came . . . she’d do it. Because the shadow-man never left anything to chance. Most especially his weapons.

  PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

  Letter dated December 3, 1970

  My dear Matthew,

  It’s as I thought—the attempt to condition rage out of our young is failing. But that isn’t the most disturbing news. Today, I read a confidential report that says the Council has begun to consider the effective elimination of all our emotions.

  My hand shakes as I write this. Can’t they see what they’re asking? What they’re destroying?

  Mom

  CHAPTER 7

  Three days later, Dev had the answer to his question.

  “We’ve rechecked with our source,” Dorian told him over the communications panel. “She’s officially listed as deceased.”

  “Ming had to have taken her out beforehand. Unless your intel says otherwise?”

  “No. With Ekaterina—”

  “Katya,” Dev corrected automatically.

  “Right.” The sentinel gave a single sharp nod. “Well, with Katya, he really cleaned up his tracks—apparently, there’s not even a whisper that she survived the explosion. Asha
ya’s starting to think the amnesia could be the side effect of a psychic block of some sort, something that stops her from betraying herself on the Net.”

  “We’re working on that.” The Forgotten had changed over the years, but they still had telepaths in their midst, still had those who could work with minds wrapped in a mental prison. Dev knew the painful certainty of that far too well.

  “You need any of us, all you have to do is say the word. Sascha, Faith, Shaya,” Dorian said, naming three of the powerful Psy in his pack, “they’re ready to drop everything to help Katya.”

  “Until we know how dangerous she is, I can’t chance that,” Dev answered. “Shine might be the main target, but if I know the Council, they’ll use the opportunity to hurt anyone they can. DarkRiver is a real thorn in their side.” All true. But there was another truth—in asking him to end her life, Katya had put that life in his hands—he’d allow no one else to interfere. “I’ll let you know if we find anything more.”

  Dev had just hung up when Glen paged him down to the medical floor. “She’s ready to be discharged,” the doctor told Dev as soon as he arrived. “I’ve given her several bottles of supplements—combine those with a steady diet and she should bounce back fairly quickly.”

  Dev’s shoulders tensed as he was reminded of exactly how badly she’d been treated, but he made himself focus on the issue at hand. “Any indications of her abilities?”

  “According to the tests we’ve run, she’s midlevel in terms of strength. Can’t yet tell you what type of ability she has, but what I can tell you is that she doesn’t appear to be accessing it at present.”

  That lowered the level of threat, but—“We need to keep her close until we figure out why she was sent in.”

  “I can’t justify holding her down here.” Glen’s boyish face set in stubborn lines that might’ve surprised many. “It’s a nice-enough clinic, but she needs sunlight, fresh air.”