Blaze of Memory

by Singh, Nalini

  Dev, having finally gotten rid of his jeans, sprawled down over her, burying his face in her neck. She managed to find enough energy to thread her fingers through his hair and hold him to her as his chest rose up and down in long, deep breaths. “You’ve killed me,” he muttered.

  “I plan to do it again as soon as I recover.” Which would be in about a week.

  “Insatiable.”

  “Only for you.”

  A silence unbroken but for their jagged breaths. “So honest.” He pressed a kiss to her damp skin. “Don’t ever change that about yourself.”

  Her free hand curled into the sheet. Was a lie of omission still a lie? Yes, she thought, honest with herself, even if she couldn’t be with him. “I’m hungry.”

  “Give me a minute to find the strength to hunt and gather.”

  Her lips quirked. “Devraj Santos, brought down by a woman half his size.”

  “With a mouth like heaven.” Another kiss. “You can do that again anytime you want. I insist.”

  A laugh burst out of her. “Ouch, my stomach muscles hurt.” But she’d take this kind of pain any day. “Tell me about the eyes.” Surely that knowledge was nothing that would hurt the Forgotten even if Ming found her before she could end this?

  “Hmm.” His lashes moved against her in an incongruously delicate caress. “We had cardinals drop out with us. The eyes disappeared within a generation.”

  “Because of the dilution in your abilities,” she murmured. “No cardinals, no night-sky eyes.” Cardinal eyes were eerily beautiful. Even Psy in the Net rarely met those at the extreme end of Psy power—white stars on black, their eyes seemed to reflect the Net itself.

  “But some of us are starting to be born with these eyes.”

  “Brown and gold?”

  “The color doesn’t matter.” He rose up on his elbow, damp strands of hair on his forehead. She liked him this way—sexy and disheveled. “I don’t think you’re listening to me.” He mock-scowled when she reached up to lave kisses over the muscled curve of one shoulder.

  She smiled. “Sorry.”

  “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted”—she laughed at his severe tone—“there’s some kind of psychic feedback in times of either great emotional stress or arousal.” A gleam in those beautiful eyes. “I think you gave me both today.”

  “That’s what I like to hear,” she said, in deliberate echo. “Jonquil,” she whispered. “I thought his eyes were simply an extraordinary blue, but I think he exhibits the phenomenon.”

  Dev cupped her face in his hands. “It’s not connected to the level of power,” he told her. “It seems to be a random mutation that’s occurred in a certain percentage of the population.”

  “Maybe you’re in the process of developing your own version of cardinal eyes,” she murmured. “Even if it’s not connected to power now, it might one day end up being so.”

  “I hope to hell not,” Dev said, jaw firming. “It’d make the strong ones easier to identify and target.”

  “I thought this was a safe question.” Chest tight, she closed her hand over his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Dev. I won’t let anyone take the knowledge from my mind.” Not this time. Not ever again.

  “Why do you think I told you?” A tone that left no room for doubt. And then he said the words she’d waited what felt like a lifetime to hear. “You won’t betray us, Katya, no matter what the cost.”

  “Dev.”

  “You beat him. You survived,” he said quietly. “Ming has no claim on you anymore.”

  PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES

  Letter dated July 17, 1982

  Dearest Matthew,

  You’re growing so big and strong, my boy. Your talent shines ever brighter. I wish we didn’t have to uproot you at such a critical time, but I’d rather be safe than sorry. Several of the defectors have recently disappeared without a trace. They were all at the powerful end of the spectrum. There’s speculation the Council is eradicating us.

  Your father... he had a vision yesterday. He’s so rarely truly with us these days that I wanted only to talk to him, but he used the minutes that he was awake and lucid to warn me. They’re going to come after you, Matthew. You’re too powerful a telepath. So we have to run. And we have to keep running until they can no longer find even a trace of the Petrokovs.

  Your father won’t come with us. He calls himself a liability. And he won’t listen to me when I say different. Before Silence, I used to tease him by quoting the Manual of Psy Designations. It says that F-Psy are considered some of the strongest individuals among our race because of what their ability demands. But today, he proved the definition true to the last word, my strong, courageous David.

  He made me promise to go tomorrow. I don’t know if I can. I don’t know if I can leave the only man I’ve ever loved.

  Mom

  CHAPTER 43

  You won’t betray us, Katya, no matter what the cost.

  He was more right than he knew, Katya thought two hours later, pain beating at her temples. Reaching out, she whispered her fingers over Dev’s cheekbones, conscious he’d wake to anything but the most butterfly of touches. Even then, he shifted.

  “It’s just me,” she whispered, as the exquisite ache in her heart threatened to tear her wide open. This, she thought, was love. She’d never felt it before but she knew. This feeling, it went soul deep, and it ravaged even as it healed. Devraj Santos had become an integral part of her. She couldn’t let him go after Ming—she had every faith in his abilities, but she refused to lose him to a fool’s errand.

  There was no way to save her.

  She’d realized that the instant after Dev had said she could live out her whole life without anyone being the wiser. True. Except that her whole life might only equal another month . . . if she was lucky. The thing with being in a prison was that after a while, your skin got pasty, your body got weak, and your mind began to beat itself against the walls in a vain effort to escape.

  She was Psy.

  She couldn’t survive being permanently cut off from the Net.

  The biofeedback alone wasn’t enough. She had to be some part of the fabric of a neural network. Psychic isolation . . . It would drive her mad, increment by slow increment.

  Her fingers lifted to her nose. Dev hadn’t seen it. She’d hidden it. But there, in Sunshine, her nose had bled again. Just a little. But more than on the plane. It had been easy to shrug off the incident as being a consequence of the bitter cold—yet even then, part of her had begun to wonder. And now, tonight, as her skull threatened to implode from the agony of a sudden spiking headache, she accepted the truth—her brain was already starting to lose the battle. Her mind had begun its slow, steady beat against the walls of its prison.

  Even if she somehow managed to hang on to her sanity, Ming had assured her end. She’d told Dev she was remembering more and more. She hadn’t told him she’d remembered the final session.

  Talons sinking into her mind, deep, so deep she knew she’d never get them out. “It hurts,” she said tonelessly. It wasn’t a complaint. He’d ordered her to tell him her reactions. She didn’t understand why, when he could simply read her mind, but she wasn’t going to rebel without reason. That brought pain so excruciating, one more episode might snap the final, fragile threads of her very self.

  “Good.” A “snick” that she heard with her psychic ear. “It’s done.”

  She waited.

  “Open your psychic eye.”

  It took her almost a minute, she’d been forced to keep herself contained for so long. All she saw was blackness. Then, as her eye adjusted, she began to make out the spiderweb linked to every part of her mind. Those thin threads fed back to thicker, darker, obscenely jagged roots.

  Chilled, she moved around those talons... and slammed into an impenetrable black wall. Panic gripped her throat but she didn’t make a sound. Instead, she padded around the walls until she was back at her starting point. “I’m locked inside my mind.” It
was the worst kind of nightmare. Even the rehabilitated, those Psy who’d had their minds destroyed by a psychic brainwipe, had access to the Net. Ming might as well have buried her alive.

  “We wouldn’t want your aberrant mental state affecting the Net.” A small pause as he took a seat. “Your personal shields are under your control—you’d be useless otherwise. Telepathy appears to be your only offensive capability.”

  So, she thought, ignoring his deliberately belittling words, she could still do that much at least. But it wasn’t the same—she’d never been so alone, her mind surgically excised from the herd.

  “Why does it hurt?”

  “An incentive to complete your mission within a particular time frame. The longer it takes, the less chance you have of actually obtaining any useful information before the Forgotten realize what you are.”

  “Incentive?”

  “If you complete your primary task and return to me by the date imprinted in your mind, I’ll consider removing the controls that are effectively starving parts of your brain into cell death.”

  “Those parts won’t regenerate, no matter what. That’s no incentive.”

  “On the contrary—all the parts that’ll fail before the deadline are nonessential. After that point, your motor skills and ability to reason will go, followed quickly by the involuntary controls.”

  “Like breathing?”

  “What else?”

  She sucked in air, savoring something that was going to be lost to her soon enough. “If I come back, if I complete the primary task, you’ll allow me to access the Net again?”

  “I might even decide to retain you as one of my operatives.” Coal black eyes with the rarest specks of white stared into hers. “You’d be a most effective assassin—after all, you don’t exist.”

  Katya spread her fingers over the steady pulse of Dev’s heartbeat as the pain of the headache dissipated, leaving only a dull bruise. More pain would come soon, but it didn’t matter. She’d never complete the primary task. Not consciously. But she knew damn well that Ming wouldn’t have left that to chance. How could she guard against a threat she couldn’t see, couldn’t even guess at?

  If she were truly selfless, she’d slit her own throat.

  Dev’s eyes snapped open, startling her into a little gasp. “Dev?”

  “What were you thinking?” Gold glittered in the depths of the rich brown that had come to mean everything to her.

  “A nightmare,” she said, and it wasn’t a lie. “That’s all.”

  He tugged her until she was almost under him. “I’ve got you. Sleep.”

  Heart thudding in reaction, she put her hand on his shoulder, let him tuck her close, and tried to find sleep. The thoughts that had somehow awakened him, she shoved to the back of her mind. Suicide, she realized belatedly, would destroy Dev. He’d blame himself. That was simply the man he was—protective to the core. She’d have to find some other way to save him from the loaded gun that was her mind.

  Because killing Devraj Santos was simply not on the agenda.

  CHAPTER 44

  Judd Lauren walked into the church that Father Xavier Perez called home and took a seat in the last pew, beside the guerrilla fighter turned man of God. After a moment of silence, the other man sent him a slow glance. “No questions today, my friend?”

  “I thought I might give you a break.”

  “And yet I see a question in your eyes.”

  “The Psy won,” Judd said quietly. “In your corner of the world, the Psy won.”

  They’d first met in a bar in a no-name town in Paraguay. Judd had been there to liaise with a contact who never showed. Xavier had been sitting on the bar stool next to his and, tongue loosened by tequila, had begun to talk. Back before he became a no-good drunk, the priest had said, he’d been a man with simple needs—but one who believed in fairness. And there had been nothing fair in the way the Psy had effectively shut out the humans in his region from any kind of trade with the neighboring sectors.

  First, it had been a political protest. But things had quickly escalated... until the Psy had crushed the human rebellion so thoroughly that not even an echo remained.

  Xavier gave a slow nod, his skin gleaming ebony beneath the soft church lights. “Yes.”

  “And yet you believe in God.”

  Xavier took several minutes to answer. “There was a girl in my village,” he said, his tone a caress. “Her name was Nina. She was . . . a bright light.”

  Before, Judd wouldn’t have understood. Now he’d held Brenna, now he knew what it would do to him to lose her. “Did she die in the fight against the Psy?” The assassins had whispered into the village in the depths of the night, death their only agenda.

  “We thought they might come,” Xavier told him. “We never imagined they’d be as brutal as they were, but we got our vulnerable out.”

  Judd waited, knowing the story wasn’t over.

  “Nina wouldn’t go. She was a nurse—she knew she’d be needed. She, like all of us, thought they’d rough us up some, leave us to lick our wounds.”

  “That must’ve put you in one hell of a mood.”

  Xavier’s lips curved. “I threatened to tie her up and throw her on the back of a donkey if that was what it took.”

  “She stayed.”

  “Of course. Nina was pure steel beneath that sweet surface—I figured that out when we were six.” The smile faded. “Then the Psy came, and I saw man after man fall, blood pouring out of their ears, their noses, their eyes.”

  A huge burst of psychic power, Judd knew, could do that. “If they’d had a full Squad, they could’ve done the whole village at once.”

  “Yes. But I suppose our little rebellion only merited two or three men. The ones who did come were powerful—ten men died in the first three minutes.” Soft words, Xavier’s hands remaining flat on his knees. “I managed to run Nina out through the jungle... and then I told her to jump in the river.”

  Judd had seen that river, seen the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving village. “It was the only way out.”

  “It was a four-story fall—and Nina was never the strongest of swimmers.” Xavier’s hands curled, crushing the fabric of his white pants, part of the simple clothing of a Second Reformation priest. “But I promised her God would look after her, and then I kissed her good-bye. As she jumped, I prayed to God to keep her safe, to watch over her.”

  Judd knew without asking that Nina had never been found. “Why didn’t you jump with her?”

  “You’re a soldier—you wouldn’t have left either.” Xavier took a deep breath. “Turns out my head is harder than anyone knew. The Psy blast knocked me out, but I regained consciousness hours later.”

  “A natural shield,” Judd said. “Pure chance that you had it, that it was tough enough to deflect the hit.” It was likely, he thought, that the Psy team had been using as little power as possible, because not even a natural shield could protect against a full telepathic blow. “You should be dead.”

  “The assassins obviously didn’t bother to check to make sure I was—though I guess I was dead for the six months I spent drunk.” He spread his hands again. “You’re quiet, my friend.”

  From behind them, the Ghost finally spoke. “I’m waiting to hear the answer to Judd’s question.”

  Judd had heard the other man come in, heard him lock the door, but hadn’t turned. It was part of their unspoken code, one that kept faith with the Psy rebel who was both ruthless and—in his own way—utterly loyal.

  “The answer,” Judd said, “is that so long as Xavier believes in God, he can believe that Nina lives, that she somehow survived.”

  “That logic is inherently flawed,” the Ghost pointed out, but there was something in his voice that Judd couldn’t quite catch.

  Xavier shook his head. “There is no logic to it, my friend. It has everything to do with the heart and nothing to do with the head.”

  The Ghost said nothing. Judd hadn’t expected him to.
A man didn’t survive the high-stakes game the other rebel was playing by being anything less than pure ice.

  “So,” Judd said, “why did you want to meet?”

  The Ghost passed a data crystal over Judd’s shoulder. “There have been some changes in the Arrow Squad.”

  Catching the crystal, Judd slid it into a pocket. “Deaths?”

  “Seven men are currently being held in a facility deep in the Dinarides, a remote mountain range along the Adriatic. There’s a possibility they’ve all been taken off Jax.”

  Judd took several minutes to think of the implications of such a radical shift. “Either it’s as a result of a medical reaction—”

  “—or the Arrows have decided Ming is no longer the leader they want to follow,” the Ghost completed.

  “Would it be that easy?” Xavier asked. “Won’t the M-Psy be monitoring their reactions?”

  “The medic in charge of monitoring Jax reactions is always another Arrow,” Judd said quietly. “If that Arrow is no longer loyal to Ming . . .”

  “What will they do if it’s the latter?” the Ghost asked. “If they intend to take the leadership from Ming?”

  “I won’t betray my fellow Arrows.” Each and every Arrow had been shaped by his or her ability, all of them lethal, all of them destroying their chances of a normal life. The fact that Judd was now on the other side of the war did nothing to sever that bond.

  “The PsyNet can’t handle rogue Arrows,” the Ghost argued. “They could destabilize the entire system.”

  “No,” Judd said. “An Arrow’s first task is to maintain Silence. They’ll do nothing to undermine the stability of the Net.”

  The Ghost didn’t say anything further. Theirs was an alliance of equals, and the rebel knew Judd would not bend on this, as the Ghost wouldn’t when it came to protecting the Net. It was Xavier who next spoke. “And you, my friend, what is your first loyalty?”