Blaze of Memory

by Singh, Nalini

  18 May 2080: The medical team is reporting a higher than average number of minor illnesses, with headaches being the main complaint. Tests to date have revealed that a small number of staff are suffering from recurring pinprick hemorrhages in the cerebral cortex.

  Those affected are being regularly monitored, while a biomed team has been instructed to scan the area for any toxins that may be causing the problem.

  However, no one has been disabled or seriously compromised as a result of these illnesses, and productivity remains high. There is no need for replacement personnel.

  CHAPTER 10

  Dev’s words—the impact of his touch—circled endlessly in Katya’s head as he showed her upstairs and to her bedroom. That room proved lovely and airy, the sheets on the double bed a rich cream shot with rose. “It’s perfect, thank you.”

  “Unfortunately, they don’t open.” He nodded at the two wide windows on the opposite side of the room. “The wood swelled last winter, and I haven’t gotten around to replacing it. But you’ll get plenty of fresh air if you leave your door open during the day.”

  Katya looked at that handsome face and saw a merciless conqueror, a warrior king whose sense of honor would never allow her to be mistreated. And yet ... “It’s a very comfortable prison.” A low curl of anger unfurled in her stomach.

  He didn’t flinch, didn’t pretend surprise. “What I said about why the windows don’t work? Truth. But yeah, that’s why you’re getting this room and not one of the others.”

  “What do you expect me to do?” She waved at the endless spread of green and white beyond the glass. “We’re in the middle of nowhere—I doubt I could find my way out if you gave me a map and a compass.”

  “But the car has a nav system,” he said with quiet implacability. “It also has security features that tell me when someone’s tried to start it without authorization.”

  Ice trickled down her spine, extinguishing the anger. “I’m a captive. It’s my duty to escape.”

  “And go where?” A harsh question from the warrior, all traces of civilization stripped away. “You were dumped on my doorstep like trash.”

  She was the one who flinched. “That doesn’t mean I’m not wanted by someone. My father, for one.”

  “Never lose an investment?” The razor of his words sliced over her flesh, slitting her open.

  “Yes,” she whispered, wanting to believe that the cold man who’d raised her, with a woman as cold, cared whether she lived or died. “He’ll help me.”

  “Against the Council?”

  No, she thought. Her father was no rebel. He’d brought her up to be a good Council soldier. But she’d chosen her own path—and in that truth, she had found her strength. “I’ll help myself.”

  Dev shook his head, sunlight gleaming off the black of his hair, highlighting the hidden strands of bronze. “You can’t even stand for ten minutes without your legs getting shaky.”

  It angered her, his sheer disregard for her abilities. She was—a blank. No one. She was no one. But she would become someone, she vowed, looking into that arrogant face. Devraj Santos was going to eat his words.

  Walking over on the legs he’d mocked, she pushed him in the chest.

  He didn’t shift so much as an inch, but his eyes narrowed. “What was that for?”

  Her palms tingled where she’d touched him, her skin tight with painful craving. “I want you to leave.” Fighting the need for tactile contact, she folded her arms and tilted her head toward the door. “Right now.”

  “And if I don’t?” He stepped closer, until they were toe to toe, those impossibly beautiful eyes of his staring down at her.

  He was good at intimidation.

  But she was through with being intimidated. “Then you’d better eat carefully,” she said sweetly. “I am a scientist, after all.”

  “Poison?” His lips curved. “Bring it on.”

  “I just threatened you and you smiled. I tried to escape and you got angry?” She didn’t understand him.

  “The threat,” he said, touching his fingers to her cheek in a slow caress, “is permissible. After all, I’m keeping you prisoner, and it’s hardly as if you can overpower me. But the escape attempt? That, I won’t allow—you belong to the Forgotten, and until I figure out what you’re meant to do, you’re staying right where I can see you.”

  She understood the distinction. When she dealt with Dev, the man, she might get away with a great deal. But when it came to Devraj Santos, director of the Shine Foundation, rebellion could cost her everything. The heat that had reignited within her during the argument, the sudden spurt of fire, chilled under the ice of understanding.

  She didn’t know what she would have said, didn’t know how he would have responded, because his cell phone beeped at that moment. Except... he made no move to retrieve it from his pocket. The sustained eye contact stole her breath, threatened to pull her under. “Aren’t you going to answer that?” Her voice sounded strained to her own ears.

  “No.”

  The sheer iron of the answer made her heart crash against her ribs. “Has anyone ever talked you out of anything?”

  “If I’m in the mood.”

  His answers kept confounding her. He didn’t behave according to how her brain, how her knowledge of the world said he should behave. “What do you want?”

  The phone stopped beeping.

  Dev blinked, a slow, lazy thing at odds with the wild energy that she’d felt under her palms. “That’s the problem, isn’t it?”

  PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

  Letter dated November 30, 1971

  Dearest Matthew,

  Today you fell off a swing and bloodied your knee rather spectacularly. But you know what? You never cried. Instead, you stood there, your face all scrunched up and tears glittering in your eyes as I cleaned and bandaged the wound. It wasn’t until I kissed it better that you threw your arms around me and told me it “hurt.” Oh, my baby, you make my life a joy. And soon, you’ll have someone else to play with—your father has charmed me into giving him another son or daughter, you a little brother or sister.

  I love him, your father, exasperating man that he is at times. But I wonder at bringing a child into this world. The tide is changing, Matty. Today, Mrs. Ennis told me that maybe the Council is right, that maybe we should embrace Silence. I wanted to argue with her, but what could I say in the face of her loss? She’s still grieving for her husband. As soon as Enforcement catches one serial killer, another takes his place. Mr. Ennis was simply one victim among many—and that horrifies me.

  And yet, I can’t accept a protocol that would steal your smiles, your tears, your very heart. You’re more precious to me than all the peace in the world.

  Love,

  Mom

  CHAPTER 11

  Changing into sweatpants and a sleeveless tee, Dev continued to ignore his cell phone in favor of a hard workout in the gym set up at the back of the house. Pounding his fists into the punching bag worked off some of his frustration, but left him with no new answers.

  Katya drew him. Simple as that. And it was about time he admitted it.

  She was the enemy, had even warned him that she was a grenade waiting to blow up in his face, but still, she drew him. Part of him wanted to protect her, take care of her, while the other part, the hard-nosed pragmatist, warned him that doing so would just come back to bite him on the ass.

  He’d almost kissed her upstairs, his entire body humming with the raw excitement that came only from arguing with a woman who aroused a much more intimate passion. She shouldn’t have been able to get through the metal of his shields, shouldn’t have been able to affect him on such a visceral level, not without a conscious decision on his part.

  And yet she had. She did. Every fucking time.

  Slamming his foot into the punching bag, he spun and came down feet flat on the exercise mat.

  “You’re good.”

  He didn’t turn, focusing on his next round of punches. “
Been doing it since I was a teenager.” Since the day he’d realized he carried within him the seeds of the very violence that had shattered his life as a child. “Good stress relief.”

  Katya stayed in the doorway, and he was blindingly aware of her gaze as she watched him. It took all his concentration to maintain his focus. “We’ll get you into doing some easy stretches, strengthen those muscles.”

  “Are you sure I have any?”

  It was a kick to the gut, that hint of humor. He glanced at her, pushing damp hair off his face, conscious of the fact that his tee was sticking to his body, his arms shimmering with sweat. “I’m sure there’re one or two hidden away in that scrawny body of yours.”

  Hazel eyes darkened. “Do you always insult the women you kidnap?”

  A temper. Interesting. “Depends on the woman.”

  “How many have you brought here?”

  None. Dev didn’t share his personal spaces well. “That’s for me to know.” Wiping off his face with a towel he’d thrown in the corner, he strode to the door. “I’ll make you that smoothie after I shower.”

  She shifted away as he walked past. It was a very Psy thing to do. They hated any kind of physical contact. But Katya had seemed to crave it. Irritated at the change, he took the steps with angry confidence. And when the shower came on ice-cold, he left it that way.

  Katya bent over, bracing her hands on her knees as all the breath simply rushed out of her. Dear God, she’d known he was in shape, but ...

  She swallowed, tried to relearn to breathe. She’d once seen a tiger in a wildlife reserve in India. Her job had been with a multinational lobbying for permission to mine in the region, but it was the image of the tiger that had always stuck with her. The lethal grace, the beauty of it—even her Psy mind had understood that it was something extraordinary.

  Dev’s muscles slick with sweat, his biceps defined as he punched the bag—he’d been as wildly beautiful as that tiger, as far from the man in the dark suit and formal shirt as she was from the Ekaterina who’d once worked for the Council. It had taken every ounce of control she had not to reach out and stroke him.

  He’d probably have snapped off her hand if she’d dared.

  Drawing in another shaky breath, she walked across the exercise mat to put her palm on the punching bag. It was heavy. And he’d been sending it back and forth like it weighed nothing. Her memories of the details might be scattershot, but she knew that all her life, she’d valued psychic strength over physical. But after seeing Dev move, she was revising her opinion.

  The physical plane was just as powerful as the psychic.

  Especially between male and female.

  And for the first time, she felt very much female.

  She drew in a deep breath, trying to find her balance... and catching an echo of Dev’s distinctive scent instead, harsh, sensual, unforgivingly masculine.

  Something low in her body tightened, a sensation for which she had no name, no comparison. It was hot and tight and... needy. And it craved Devraj Santos.

  CHAPTER 12

  Dressed again after the welcome chill of the shower, Dev picked up his phone to see three missed calls. One from Maggie, two from Glen. Maggie had left a message saying she’d rescheduled his meetings, but Glen had hung up both times.

  Running his fingers through his damp hair in lieu of a comb, he coded through a call to the doctor as he headed downstairs. The house’s security was undisturbed, which meant Katya was inside somewhere. Deciding to finish the call before he tracked her down, he walked into the kitchen and pulled out the blender.

  “Dev?” Glen’s voice came on the line. “Where were you?”

  “Busy.” He put the milk on the counter. “What is it?”

  “One of the Shine Guardians picked up a kid in Des Moines. Looks like a true telepath.”

  Dev froze. “They sure?” True telepaths were extremely rare outside the PsyNet—after their exodus, the Forgotten had intermarried with humans and changelings, had mixed-race children. Their abilities had changed in remarkable ways, but they’d lost things, too. The first to go had been the purity of certain Psy abilities—some Psy in the Net could telepath around the world without blinking an eye. None of the Forgotten had been able to do that since the rebel generation.

  “Very,” Glen said. “You know the Guardian—Aryan—he has some low-level telepathy himself, and he did a phone consult with Tag and Tiara. All of them agree the kid’s showing clear signs of strong telepathic abilities.”

  Tag and Tiara were the strongest telepaths in the ShadowNet—the neural network created by the original rebels when they dropped from the PsyNet—but even their range was limited to a distance comparable to the length and breadth of the United States. Of course, that was impressive on its own. “Is he salvageable?” Dev had to ask that question, though the weight of it was a rock on his chest. He hated losing any of his people, hated it with a vengeance that had turned him merciless.

  “Kid was in a state home.” Glen’s voice was tight. “Parents died in a car crash, leaving him an orphan. The grandparents apparently never passed on the fact that the father was descended from the Forgotten, so the poor kid’s been doped up on meds most of his life for his apparent schizophrenia.”

  Anger roiled in Dev’s gut. That knowledge should never have been lost. All the Forgotten who’d scattered after the Council began hunting them had been told to keep precise records for the very reason that latent genes could awaken with devastating results in their children. “Mother had to be one of us, too, if the kid’s a true telepath.”

  “Aryan tracked her records down. Her great-great-grandmother was part of the original rebel group.” Glen muttered something blue under his breath. “The boy’s fragile, Dev. He’s going to need you—you’ve got a way of getting through to these kids. If I didn’t know better, I’d say you had some kind of empathic ability.”

  Dev knew it was the opposite the children sensed in him—that he was a pit bull, one who’d let no one and nothing get to them. “I’ll be there.”

  “What about Katya? You want one of the others to keep an eye on her?”

  “No. She comes with me.” It was an instinctive response, threaded with an almost brutal possessiveness. Something in him flinched at that description, at the realization that he was losing the cold faster and faster.

  But Glen didn’t argue. “With the meds currently in his system, the boy isn’t going to be coherent for at least two days, so we don’t need you until then.”

  Hanging up after getting a few more details, Dev set his senses to searching. This aspect of his abilities, while very minor in the scheme of things, was an interesting offshoot of telepathy. He could literally scan a discrete area, correctly identify the individuals in each room, and if he was emotionally linked to someone, accurately guess at his or her mood.

  Katya was sitting in the sunroom out front.

  Her mood was opaque to him, her secrets hidden.

  Slamming a glass on the counter, he poured the milk into the blender and scooped in some vitamin-laced protein mix. “Katya!”

  She appeared in the kitchen doorway a minute later. “Yes?”

  “What fruit?”

  For an instant, he thought she’d tell him she wasn’t hungry, in which case, this would’ve gotten ugly—his need to take care of her was a fucking fist in his gut, a violent protectiveness that demanded release. But she stepped closer and picked up a mango.

  He gave her a knife. “Peel and chop.”

  Taking a second mango, he quickly did the same. He was done before she got halfway . . . because she kept licking at her fingers. His entire body became one giant pulse as he watched her close her lips around a finger and stroke it through. “Katya.”

  She colored, misreading that single strained word. “It tastes so good.”

  He couldn’t help it. Raising a piece of the juicy yellow flesh to her lips, he said, “Open.”

  Eyes locked with his, she obeyed. Her lips—soft, lush
, wet—brushed his fingertips as he fed her the fruit and it was the most erotic thing he’d ever felt. “Good?” he asked, his voice husky.

  A nod, blonde hair catching the light. “Where’s the ice cream?” An ordinary question, but the way she was looking at him said something else altogether.

  Reminding himself that, everything else aside, she’d been unconscious not that long ago, he shut the door on a desire that threatened to undermine his every vow, his every promise. “I’ll get it.” Adding it to the mix, he finished blending everything and poured her a glass. “You’re eating a sandwich, too.”

  “I’m not really hungry.”

  “Tough.”

  The glass she’d picked up met the counter with a bang. “What will you do if I don’t eat?”

  “Tie you to a chair and wait until you decide to cooperate. Then I’d feed you every bite.” Shoving bread across the counter, he began to take out the fixings. “Start making your own, or I’ll do the choosing.”

  This time, the look she shot him was pure female fury. “Just because you’re bigger doesn’t mean you have to be a bully.”

  “Just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean I’m going to let you get away with bullshit.”

  She slapped butter on her bread, then reached not for the ham or cheese, but for the raspberry jelly. “Quiet,” she said when he opened his mouth.

  Raising an eyebrow, he went to the pantry and brought back a jar of crunchy peanut butter. “Goes well together.”

  She shot him a suspicious look but took the jar. Not saying anything, he quickly put together his own sandwich, then took it and her smoothie to the table. Katya followed him a minute later, after putting away the jam and peanut butter with slow deliberation—as if hoping he’d be gone by the time she was done.

  When she did sit, she kept her eyes resolutely on her meal.

  He was, he realized, being ignored. Grinning, he sprawled back in his chair, his legs encroaching on her space.