Blaze of Memory

by Singh, Nalini

  Katya had spent her life in science. She might not remember much of it, but she knew she’d been cool, calm, collected, even beneath the Silence. But today, with Dev, she’d come startlingly close to losing her temper. And right now, she wanted to kick his feet away from her chair, aware he was deliberately pushing into her personal space.

  Big shoulders, long legs, muscled power, and contained arrogance. No wonder he made her mad. But—She put down her sandwich, her mouth suddenly bone-dry. “Why isn’t my emotional state leaking out into the Net?” Betraying her, warning the others that she was a traitor to Silence.

  “You said you were trapped.” The hairs on her arms rose in response to the ice in every word. “It makes sense that the shield isn’t only meant to serve as a cage. It has to hide you, too—the fewer people who know about a Trojan horse, the more damage it can do.”

  “Why do you sound so calm about that?” She leaned forward, searching for answers. “For all you know, my task might be to kill you.” A chill snaked up her spine, and she found herself whispering, “There’s a good chance it is that.”

  One shoulder lifted in a negligent shrug. “I’m not easy to kill.”

  “Don’t be so overconfident. I’m a telepath, after all.”

  A silence.

  She blinked. Shook her head. “Yes, I’m a midlevel telepath... and M-Psy. Dual abilities, with both my telepathy and my medical talent measuring at around the same level. Below 5 on the Gradient.”

  Dev knew the Gradient was the scale the Psy used to measure power, with 10 being the highest level. Apparently, cardinals were unmeasurable beyond that point. “Send to me.”

  “Dev! If they find me—”

  “Council already knows we’ve got some remnant abilities—and I don’t intend to let you go.” Soft words, lethal as blades. “I’ve only got a touch of telepathy. I want to know if it’s enough to ‘hear’ a Psy.”

  She sent the first thing that came to mind. Don’t you consider yourself Psy?

  Dev tipped his head slightly to the side, a furrow between his eyebrows. “I almost caught it. Like a too-soft murmur. What did you say?”

  She repeated her question aloud.

  “No.” His mouth firmed. “The Psy cut off my ancestors without a thought—then they tried to annihilate them. Far as I’m concerned, that removes any family connection.” He reached forward with a speed she had no hope of avoiding and gripped her chin, his hold gentle but firm. “Do you? Consider yourself Psy?”

  “It’s what I am.” But his question raised ones in her own mind, stabbed phantom pain into her heart. “They threw me away.”

  Dev rubbed his thumb over her chin, a slow, intent stroke. “Or you could see it another way.” Golden brown eyes watching her with the same absolute focus she’d seen in that tiger’s gaze.

  “What other way?” she whispered, realizing she was leaning toward him.

  But she couldn’t pull back, couldn’t be the Psy her fractured memories told her she was. Every atom of her being was focused on the roughness of Dev’s skin against hers, the angles and planes of his face in the sunlight, the shape of his mouth as he said, “That they gave you to me.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Nikita stared out at the patch of the Net that was simply “dead.” “How long has this been here?” she asked the mind at her side.

  Councilor Kaleb Krychek sent her a psychic image. “Threads have been running through the Net for some time now, but nothing like this.”

  “What’s caused it?”

  Kaleb paused, as if considering how much to reveal. As a cardinal telekinetic, perhaps the most powerful Tk in the Net, he wielded considerable control over the NetMind, the neo-sentient entity that was the Net given form. It provided Kaleb with a conduit of data no other Councilor could match. But all he said was “You have your own suspicions.”

  She decided there was nothing to be lost in sharing them. “The surge of violence in the past months—the compulsion killings—they left a mark. I think this is a psychic scar.”

  “Possible.”

  “But you don’t agree?”

  “I think the echo of that violence will ripple through the Net for some time, but this speaks of a deeper malaise.”

  “You think the Net itself is . . . sick,” she said, for lack of a better word. “If that’s true, it’s going to start affecting the populace.” All Psy were linked to the Net on the most basic level—there would be no way to avoid the insidious effect if these “dead” areas continued to grow.

  “Maybe it already has—perhaps cause and effect are now locked in a feedback loop.” Kaleb touched a psychic tendril to the edges of the darkness.

  Nikita kept back. “You could become infected with whatever it is that’s caused this.”

  “No,” he murmured, almost absently. “I’m shielded.”

  She knew it was more than that. Could it be that Kaleb had some affinity to the spreading stain? “Where else is it this bad?” This patch was small and isolated—as if the disease was hiding. Nikita would’ve considered the anthropomor phization absurd in any other context, but in spawning the NetMind, the Net had clearly proven it was an organism of some kind.

  “This is the worst,” Kaleb responded, drawing back the psychic tendril he’d used to explore the darkness. “It’s as if all the dead threads have been migrating here, collecting in a pool.”

  “That means it’s going to keep growing.”

  “Unless we can find a way to negate those threads of darkness.”

  She felt a flicker of warning. “Why are you showing this to me rather than to the Council as a whole?” They were allies of a kind, but there had been something else in that statement.

  “I thought it’d be obvious,” he said. “Your daughter is a cardinal E-Psy.”

  “I see.” And she did. The last time the Net had threatened to self-destruct, it had been because the E-Psy had been systematically eliminated. But the situation was completely different now. “There are millions of E-Psy present in the Net.” The Council had stopped the deletion orders on all E-designation conceptions once it became apparent that their simple presence—no matter if their empathic powers were kept ruthlessly contained—helped keep the mental fragmentation at bay. “This is something else.” The problem was, she had no idea what.

  CHAPTER 14

  It was dark. So dark. Darker than the night, than the midnight sun. No, that didn’t make sense. There was no such thing as a midnight sun. No . . . Alaska had a midnight sun. But that meant there was light all day long. Here there was no daylight, no sunlight, no hope.

  She tried to curl her fingers and toes but couldn’t feel them. It was as if they’d been eaten up by the darkness. It was tempting to scream, to hear sound even if she couldn’t see, couldn’t feel, but she held it inside, locked within the walls of her mind. The monster had taken everything else she had.

  She wouldn’t give him her screams.

  But minutes, hours, days later, she lost the battle and her anguish poured out of her in a wave of sound.

  Except ... she heard only silence. The darkness absorbed even her scream.

  And that was when she knew.

  She truly was dead.

  Heat.

  Touch.

  Life, electric in its fury...a kiss that demanded her participation.

  Shuddering in surrender, she drowned in the scent of him. Wild and exotic. Dark and male.

  A man who’d snarled at her, caged her... fed her.

  “Dev.” Spoken against his lips, she was so loath to break contact.

  His mouth took hers again before she could say anything more, his teeth sinking into her lower lip. She jerked, dug her fingers into solid masculine shoulders. Never, she knew, had she experienced anything even remotely similar. He was so hot, she wanted to crawl into him. His skin burned her fingertips, and she wanted more, wanted to be naked, to have him crush her to the sheets, his weight a heavy, immovable blanket.

  Gasping in a breath whe
n he released her, she stared into his eyes, wondering if he could read the clawing depths of her need.

  “You back?” His voice was harsh, his eyes glittering fever bright.

  Her breasts brushed against his chest with every breath, the tips so tight with need, it was almost pain. “Where did I go?”

  “You were screaming your lungs out.” He continued to hold her in an embrace she knew she’d never be able to break. “Wouldn’t wake up no matter how much I shook you.”

  “So you kissed me.” It had been, she was forced to admit, a highly practical decision. Even a broken Psy would react to something so completely against her conditioning. “Thank you.” It would’ve been prudent to pull back, but she’d never felt more alive, more real. “I think . . . that was my first kiss.”

  A low, rough word. “Hell, I’m sorry.”

  “Do it again.”

  His lashes came down. Once. Twice. She expected refusal. Instead, he tugged back her head and brushed his lips over hers, a single hot caress. When she tried to get closer, he refused to let her. “Dev.”

  “Don’t rush.” And then he touched his mouth to hers again, but this time, he lingered.

  Acting on instinct, she sipped at the fullness of his lower lip, felt the rough warmth of his body tense against the palms she’d pressed flat on his chest. For a second, she was afraid he’d stop. But he deepened the kiss with slow, sweet strokes that made her fingers dig into the firm muscle under her hands as her body filled with a liquid kind of heat. Hips twisting in a hunger she barely understood, she tried to pull him closer.

  “Enough.” Harsh, spoken against her lips.

  “A little more.” Every hot breath, every stroke, every lick, it anchored her in the most sensual, most earthy of ways. “Touch me.”

  His fingers tightened in her hair instead, his jaw setting in a way that was already becoming familiar. “Why were you screaming?”

  Somehow, the softness of the question, the strength of his hold, made it easier to return to the nightmare. “I dreamed I was in the hole, the nothing-place, again.”

  Something flashed across his face, something so razor sharp in its fury, it should’ve made her run. But all she wanted to do was strip him to the skin, feel his body hard and unashamedly male over hers. “Dev—”

  “You’re scared,” he said, fingers on her jaw. “I’m not going to take advantage.”

  Her eyes dipped to the straining bulge of his arousal. “You want to.”

  “What we want”—a voice as unbending as stone—“isn’t always good for us.”

  Hearing the finality in that, she swallowed the need that urged her to keep pushing. “Thank you for coming to me.”

  “Are you going to be alright now?”

  The truth came out before she could censor herself. “No.” Without the erotic shield of Dev’s kiss, fear was already crawling up her legs, creeping into her lungs.

  He didn’t say a word, simply got up and nudged her over on the bed. She shifted with alacrity, feeling the mattress dip to his side as he lay down beside her seated form. He was, she noticed, wearing only a pair of sweatpants, his chest a lithely muscled plane sprinkled with dark hair. Fingers curling into her palms, she found her gaze dropping, following the trail that—

  “Come here.” He held up an arm.

  Jerking up her head, she felt her cheeks burn.

  “I don’t bite.”

  She wasn’t so certain. This man, he confused her. As hard as he was beautiful, and yet capable of a gentleness that left her floundering. Now, he just watched her, let her make up her own mind. There was only one choice, only one place she wanted to be.

  The erotically charged taste of him still in her mouth, she scooted over and laid her head down on his arm. It curled around her shoulders, curving her into his body. And the contact—hot, real, Dev—shoved the fear aside. When he pulled a sheet over them, she didn’t protest, tucking her head against his chest, her fingers curling into the crisp hairs on his chest. The last thing she was aware of was his heartbeat.

  Dev brushed Katya’s hair off her cheek and studied her sleeping face, his eyes lingering on the lush sweetness of her mouth. Hunger and innocence, it was one hell of a potent combination. His body surged at the memory, defying his efforts to keep it under control. Gritting his teeth, he sought out all the metal in the house.

  The cool kiss of iron and steel brushed his mind, invaded his limbs. It wouldn’t last long, not with Katya’s slight form resting trustingly against him—but he’d use the calm while he had it, see if he could find answers to some of his questions in the ShadowNet. He’d heard stories of the PsyNet, that it was an endless field of black littered with millions of white stars, each star representing a mind, but it was a concept he had trouble understanding.

  How could minds remain completely separate?

  Closing his physical eyes, he opened a psychic gateway and stepped out into the organized chaos of the ShadowNet. Given their comparatively small numbers, the “skies” of this psychic network were stretched thin in comparison to the endless breadth of the PsyNet, but it was a riot of color, of connections.

  From where he stood, he could see the solid threads that tied him to both sets of grandparents—his bond with his maternal grandmother was the strongest, but he was linked indelibly to all four, and the two couples were also connected to each other, though those links were much weaker. More threads linked him to uncles, aunts, cousins, friends, some thin, some strong, some on the verge of breaking.

  And then, there was the strange, almost invisible dark thread that tied him to his father.

  All the crisscrossing bonds made the ShadowNet a busy place to navigate. Most people tended to follow the lines of connection until they found the person they wanted—sometimes even then, the lines were so tangled that it took a few tries to locate the right thread. But the one that Dev wanted stood out like a beacon—bright silver and tough as titanium.

  His maternal grandmother took no shit from anyone.

  Smiling inside at the thought of the woman he’d loved since the day he’d first opened his eyes and seen her watching over him, he shot along the silver thread and “knocked” on the door to her mind. She responded a moment later. Conversation in the ShadowNet itself was difficult because of the amount of psychic “noise,” so they both hooked into the emotional line that connected them, creating a direct conduit for speech—and affording unbreachable privacy.

  “Devraj.” His grandmother’s energy was strong, beautiful, carrying within it the echoes of incense and spice, silica and molten heat. “A little late to come calling, beta.”

  Only his grandmother ever called him “beloved child” in the language of his mother. “I figured you’d be up working on your designs.”

  “The glass is becoming more and more stubborn with age. Today, I meant to finish a stained glass window except the red refused to cooperate. It turned orange instead.”

  He was used to the way she spoke of her precious glass as if it were a sentient being. “You still haven’t sent me my birthday present.”

  “Cheeky boy.” A psychic brush against his mind, an affectionate kiss on his forehead. “You’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  He laughed, and it was perhaps the only time he ever truly did that anymore—with her, the woman who’d loved him even when he’d hated himself. “Nani,” he said, using the Hindi word for maternal grandmother, “I need some advice.”

  “You’ve been walking a lonely path these past few years.”

  “Yes.” He’d never lied to his grandmother. Perhaps he’d withheld his darkest secrets, but he’d never lied.

  “The metal—I know it kept you sane at a time when another child might’ve broken,” she said, the warmth of her love a gentle wind across his senses, “but you must see what it’s doing to you.”

  It was, Dev knew, becoming fused into his very cells. Sometimes his mind was so cool, so flawlessly quiet that he wondered if it was blood that ran in his veins, o
r something far less human. “I can no more stop reaching for metal than you can stop shaping glass.” Steel and iron, copper and gold, it all called to him, resonating on a psychic frequency he alone could sense. “It helps me do what I need to do.”

  “Understand the Psy?”

  “Yes. And make decisions that need making.”

  A sigh. “Metal melts, too, beta. It is not always hard, not always cold.”

  “That’s the problem. Something’s penetrating my shields.”

  “Without your conscious control?”

  “Yes.” He told her about Katya. “I’m the director—I can’t afford that kind of a chink in my shields.”

  “No.”

  “I should remove the threat.”

  “Kill her, you mean.”

  “Yes.”

  There was no shock from his grandmother. In her youth, she’d been one of the foot soldiers for the Forgotten. “This woman, this Katya,” she now said, “she plays on your weaknesses.”

  Katya’s screams echoed inside him, full of so much terror, he didn’t know how she’d survived. “I don’t think it’s deliberate.”

  “Perhaps.” A pause. “If she is a sleeper assassin, it may be that she was chosen...no, that she was made to disarm you. Your history isn’t public knowledge, but neither is it completely hidden—you may believe you’re refusing her entry, but your subconscious has clearly opened a door for her.”

  Something twisted inside him, shooting barbs into his heart. “If she was designed to get under my skin, they did a good job.” She’d slipped inside him with such stealth, the perfect stiletto in the dark.

  “Ah, Devraj, don’t sound as if you’ve been played for a fool.” A pulse of loving energy that was as familiar as the melting silica of her precious glass. “I’m happy for you.”

  “Why?”

  “It shows you still have heart, that you didn’t immediately move to strike. And I’d rather you have that than be a cold-blooded general who thinks of nothing but power.”