by Nalini Singh
This time, it was Kaleb who said, “I know,” devastated at being so wanted. “You are just a little possessive.”
Sahara laughed, her eyes wet as, inside him, the candle flame continued to burn, the light a warm, enduring gold. But there was more. On the psychic plane outside their minds, a fine thread of midnight, distinguishable from the black of the Net only by the glittering obsidian facets of it, had woven intimately with one of golden light, the tie going from his mind to Sahara’s. “We’ve bonded.” Look.
Sahara’s eyes turned inward, her smile luminous. “Kaleb.” Laughing in open delight, she pressed kisses along his jaw, halting only when the fingers of one of her hands brushed the scar on his forearm. “Are you determined to erase this?”
“I won’t risk you.” He telepathed her the reasons why as the rain turned slowly to a misty haze, the connection between their minds so clear it was beyond even his telepathic strength. “And whatever you see in it, I’ll never see the same.” For him, it would always be a reminder of the day he’d lost her.
“All right.” Shimmering droplets on her eyelashes, stars caught in transition. “But will you replace it with something for me?”
“Anything.” His body was hers.
Brushing her fingers over his lips, she said, “You gave me an eagle. I want to give you one, too.” A tender kiss pressed to the scar. “I want us to fly together.”
“You saw me, all of me,” he said, dragging her up to his mouth. “You know I’m never going to be good.” After seizing control of the Net, he’d do whatever it took to maintain it. No one and nothing was ever again going to imprison either one of them.
“A good man,” she said, her lips against his, “wouldn’t have survived what you did, wouldn’t have been able to find me. To fight evil, you have to understand the dark. We both do.”
“You’ll have to be my conscience.” He knew his flaws, and he knew the parts of him that were irrevocably broken. “Mine isn’t going to grow back.”
Pushing off wet strands of hair from his forehead, Sahara held his gaze. “Have I ever let anything slide? That won’t change.” A slow smile. “I intend to have a thousand fights with you.”
He thought of a lifetime of having Sahara’s stubborn will in his life and knew that she was his reward for surviving.
“Kaleb?” When he met her gaze, she touched one of the fine silvery scars on her own body, and his anger ignited anew, rage swirling in his veins. “No,” she whispered with a shake of her head. “You don’t think of him when you see these. You think of me. A fighter, a survivor, your lover.” It was an order . . . and one he realized he would have no hesitation in following, the marks her badges of honor.
Leaning up, he kissed one on her shoulder as she’d kissed the scar on his arm. “Only you,” he said, the vow a final one. “My fierce, intelligent, lovely Sahara who spit in a monster’s eye.”
“Kaleb.”
They were lost in one another in the minutes that followed, touching and caressing and simply being together.
“Our bond,” he said afterward, “it’ll be visible in the Net if I drop the shield I placed over it.” It had been an instinctive act from his mind, the feral response to protect something indescribably precious. “Twenty-four hours—that’s how long I plan to keep the shield in place.”
Worry shadowed Sahara’s smile and he knew she understood what he intended to do. “Are the people ready?”
“Some will never be ready, but it’s time.” The disease rotting the fabric of the Net was growing stronger, more virulent with every passing hour. “The only other option is a slow death.”
Sahara thought of the dark places Kaleb had shown her, the dead places, and knew he was right. “You need the time to speak to the Arrows, don’t you?”
“Yes. I have to find out if they’ll fight me or support me when I announce the fall of Silence. I don’t want to execute men and women who are more like me than any others in the Net, but I will if necessary.”
If the squad fought him, Sahara thought, the resulting conflict would be far more devastating than anything Pure Psy had done. “The Arrows are intelligent; they must see Silence is rotten at the core.”
“It’s difficult to fight over a century of unyielding tradition.”
Kaleb’s words had Sahara thinking of the teleporter with the cold gray eyes. Could a man like Vasic exist in a world without Silence? It might be an impossible demand. Her heart hurt for him, for the choices he had never had, and she wished there was an easy answer, some way to give him a path out of the darkness.
Then the midnight star pulsed inside her, and it was a silent reminder that life wasn’t easy. Sometimes, it demanded heart’s blood and gave back only unbearable pain. Sometimes, it broke you. “When you’re broken,” she whispered to the man who would save the world for her, “you can’t see hope. We must be their hope.”
Kaleb held her close as she tucked her head under his chin. “You want me to drop the shielding around our bond when I talk to them.”
“It’ll be a risk, I know. They could immediately turn on us, but, Kaleb, that could’ve been us in another life.” The idea of never meeting Kaleb, never loving him, made her heart thud in a panicked rhythm. “You’re as lethal as any Arrow, but you made it out. Let them see that life isn’t only pain and survival.”
“Even if they join us, we won’t save all of them.” It was a grim truth.
“Then,” Sahara said, the fingers of one hand locking tightly with Kaleb’s, “we save the ones we can. Together.”
“Always.”
Chapter 46
ADEN WAS STANDING under a heavy desert moon, the dunes desolate waves of silver and shadow, when Kaleb appeared beside him. He’d realized long ago that, like Vasic, the cardinal could go to people as well as places, but the other man had never before been so confrontational about his ability. He had, Aden thought, been courting the Arrows.
Clearly, the courtship was over.
“Vasic is practicing the weapons capability of his gauntlet?” Krychek asked, his eyes on the churned-up sand around Aden’s partner, Vasic having chosen a position midway down the dune that was Aden’s watchtower.
“Yes,” he said, and refused Vasic’s telepathic offer of assistance at the same time. If Krychek had come with hostile intent, he’d have struck already. “It’s meant to integrate with his base telekinetic strength, but there are glitches.”
Vasic teleported in and shot a small, personal laser missile at a target they’d set up on another dune a hundred meters away. It not only went haywire, it doubled back toward the teleporter. Not showing any indication of being concerned, Vasic pressed something on the gauntlet and the missile exploded in midair.
“I’d say the glitches are significant,” was Kaleb’s cool appraisal. “He shouldn’t have been implanted with the device if it’s at this level of development. Its usefulness doesn’t balance the risk.”
Aden found himself in the unusual position of being caught unprepared. Because Kaleb had just repeated Aden’s own argument when he’d tried to talk Vasic out of volunteering for the risky procedure. “There was no way,” he said after a slight pause, “for the scientists to progress further without implanting it onto a live subject.”
“Can it be removed?”
“No, it’s fused too deeply to his body.” Aden watched as Vasic launched another missile. “You didn’t track us down to watch Vasic target practice,” he said as this missile did exactly what it was meant to do, sand exploding in a silver geyser.
“Why are you here?” Kaleb asked instead of answering the implied question. “There’s nothing you can do to stop an accident.”
Aden had no intention of answering with the truth. “I’m here to monitor the tests, provide a backup account of the results.”
Kaleb was quiet for a long time, the two of them watching the arcing blue flare of weapons fire as Vasic tested another setting on the gauntlet. When he spoke, Kaleb again said the unexpected. “You
’re here so that if something goes wrong, Vasic doesn’t die alone. He’s so close to the edge, you aren’t certain he won’t engineer a fatal accident.”
There were very few people in the world who knew Vasic that well. Kaleb Krychek was not one of them, and yet he’d come to the right conclusion. Turning toward the man who was dressed in black combat pants and a black T-shirt, a large thin-skin bandage on the inside of his left forearm and scuffed boots on his feet, Aden said, “What do you want?”
Kaleb shifted to face him. “To know if I’m going to have to leave you dead on the desert sands.”
“What makes you so certain you could?”
The white stars in the cardinal Tk’s eyes gleamed as hard as diamonds. “You could incapacitate or kill me if you had the element of surprise, but in brute strength, I have no equal.”
“Vasic has a lock on your position.” His partner had taken that action the instant Kaleb first appeared. “He can have a gun to your head in the space between one breath and the next. And I am no medic.” The only reason he told Kaleb that was because he was certain the other man already knew the true nature of his abilities.
Unlike Ming, Kaleb took nothing at face value, especially not a field medic who held the loyalty of the entire squad. “To be complacent in the presence of a cardinal Tk of opaque objectives and fluid allegiance,” Aden added, “would be stupid in the extreme.”
“That’s why I’d rather not kill you,” was Kaleb’s response. “It’s easy enough to find a trained assassin—an intelligent fighter capable of foresight, and flexible enough to alter his plans given the circumstances, is a far more rare thing.” Shifting on his heel, the cardinal began to walk down the dune. “There’s something your partner needs to see.”
Aden followed in silence, unable to predict what Kaleb would do next. When the cardinal asked both Aden and Vasic to meet him on the PsyNet, they did so without argument. Once there, the other man said, “I need you to step inside the first layer of my shields.”
Again, neither one of them hesitated; Krychek’s shields were byzantine, but Aden and Vasic were more than capable of breaking out of this layer without problems. Aden had actually broken into it when the squad had first begun to consider shifting their loyalty to Kaleb—in a strictly limited sense that made it clear the Arrows were no one’s lapdogs.
Then, he’d seen nothing, the outermost layer of Kaleb’s shielding nothing but a redundancy that acted as an alarm bell in case of incursion. Today, he saw a psychic bond that went from Kaleb’s mind to another one he didn’t recognize, the colors of the bond faceted obsidian and a radiant light gold.
Force, coercion, manipulation, indications of psychic fraud, he searched for any hint of that in the connection that broke every rule of Silence, and found nothing. It was an organic construct, growing from two minds that had reached out for one another across the void, the light embracing the dark, the dark protective around the light.
Almost before Aden understood what it was he was seeing, he and Vasic were shoved out by a wave of naked power, shields of impenetrable obsidian slamming down over Kaleb’s mind and that of the unidentified other.
“You’re emotionally linked to someone,” Aden said back in the desert, thrown enough by what he’d seen that the words spilled out past his normally airtight guards.
Was it real? Vasic asked at the same time, as if distrustful of his own perception.
Yes.
“My true allegiance,” Kaleb said on the heels of Aden’s telepathic answer, “has never been fluid.”
It was Vasic who next spoke, the desert wind so quiet around them that it disturbed not a single grain of sand. “That bond cannot exist in a Silent world.”
“No.”
At last, Aden understood why Kaleb had come tonight, why the cardinal needed to know if he would have to drench the sands with their blood. “The Arrows,” Aden began, “were created at the dawn of Silence, our mandate to protect the Protocol at all costs.”
Kaleb said nothing, his face so remote, it was impossible to believe he had the capacity to bond with anyone.
“The first Arrow,” Aden continued, “was told that Silence was the Psy race’s only hope, that without it, we would fall into madness and insanity until our people were nothing but a terrible memory. Zaid believed. We all believed.”
“It wasn’t a total lie.” Kaleb’s gaze met Vasic’s. “Not all of us would have survived to adulthood, or maintained a kind of sanity at least, without some level of conditioning.”
“No,” Vasic said, “it wasn’t—isn’t—a total lie, but the core is rotten.”
“That’s why it must be excised.” A ruthless proclamation from a man who had always seemed the embodiment of the Protocol: cold, powerful, without ties of any kind. “Silence must fall. Will the Arrows fall with it?”
“The Arrow Squad,” Aden said, “must always exist.” For those like Vasic and Judd—and Kaleb. The ones who were too dangerous to live in the ordinary world; the ones the rest of their people would fear if the outliers were not first trained to hide their lethal nature; the ones who would always be needed to protect their people. “It cannot fall.”
Kaleb’s answer was blunt. “Then it must adapt.”
It would be the most difficult journey any Arrow had ever taken, and Aden knew some would splinter before this was all over. But, his men and women were ready. The squad had known it might one day have to break from Silence, from the Net itself—though that Net was their lifeblood, a psychic home they had fought to protect for over a hundred years . . . even as it killed them.
Arrow after Arrow had been lost as a result of decisions made by those who saw them as disposable, perfect soldiers who were thrown out the instant they became too fractured to be of use. The squad didn’t wish to abandon their people, but they had been willing to do so, to defect, to protect those of their number who weren’t yet fatally damaged.
Having seen the life Judd had made for himself, Aden had cautiously expected that, given the chance, the younger Arrows—the ones still on the right side of the abyss—might be able to build the same: a life that didn’t involve only death and isolation and an existence forever in the shadows. Yet if Kaleb Krychek had been able to bond with another living being . . . Perhaps Aden had sold his Arrows short. Perhaps salvation could come for even the most broken among them.
“We’ll adapt,” Aden said, the heavy moon standing sentinel above, “but one thing will never change—we’ll follow only those orders with which we agree.” The time for blind obedience, for faith in a leader who was not one of their own, had passed. “And should you ever become a threat to the squad, we’ll turn on you without hesitation.”
“I would expect nothing less.” Kaleb slid his hands into the pockets of his combat pants. “You understand if the latter ever happens,” he added, “I’ll show no mercy.”
Vasic said the words on Aden’s tongue. “The Arrows expect mercy from no one.”
There was no further discussion, the bargain made, the future irrevocably altered.
Looking at the streak of light that marked the passage of an airjet in the star-studded night sky, Aden thought of the cold at that altitude. Icy, inimical to life. But it was in that same hostile environment that snowflakes formed on the windows of slower craft, creations of delicate filigree . . . beauty born in the bitterest cold.
* * *
IN the hours that followed Kaleb’s meeting with the Arrows, a very select number of people received a visit from Kaleb Krychek—and two men received one from the Ghost, their meeting place the last two pews of a small Second Reformation church, the lights turned off in this one section. Neither Judd nor Xavier was surprised at the news of the upcoming revolution in the Net.
“The wave,” Judd said, “has crested. To swim or to drown, those are the only two options.”
Xavier’s words were quieter, held more worry. “So, we’ve achieved our aim—the Council is no more, and Silence is about to fall. And yet I think t
he task is just beginning.” Looking up as a parishioner entered, Xavier rose to speak to the frail, elderly man, while Kaleb turned his face deeper into the shadows.
“It’s not safe for Xavier to be connected to Kaleb Krychek,” Judd said once the priest was far enough away that he wouldn’t overhear the words, “but no one will blink an eye at the fact that Judd Lauren knows another Tk. If you need me, I’ll be there.”
“The same applies.” Kaleb didn’t quite understand how he had come to have the loyalty of these two men, but he knew he’d guard their trust with his own. “I’ll make sure Xavier remains safe.” He paused. “I paid a quiet visit”—unknown, unseen—“to the mountain village where his Nina is meant to be.” It was an act that would gain Kaleb nothing, but he thought he had done it out of friendship, to save Xavier pain should it be a false trail.
Judd’s laugh was soft. “So did I.”
“Shall we tell Xavier?”
“No, he leaves for the mountains tomorrow. I think some things a man must experience to believe.”
Kaleb thought of the candle flame in the void, of a bond beautiful and unbreakable, and knew Judd spoke the truth.
* * *
WHEN he returned home at last, all the pieces in place, it was to find Sahara standing in front of the house, her eyes on grasslands kissed by the pearl gray light of the time before true daylight, the mist still licking the ground. Wearing a pretty white top and a flowing ankle-length skirt of summer yellow flecked with tiny flowers in myriad shades, the skirt embellished with two layers of ruffles created of the fabric, she looked like a piece of sunshine racing ahead of the dawn.
“Kaleb.” She ran into his arms.
“What are you doing out here?” He didn’t speak of the meetings he’d attended; she’d been with him everywhere but the church—terming that a discussion with friends. It was Sahara who had known Vasic was close to broken; as for Aden, she’d agreed with Kaleb that the telepath was a man who could become a powerful ally if they could earn his trust.
