by Nalini Singh
Silver had turned to gold.
The next day, gold had become platinum, a solid, unbreakable rope.
His nani found him in the ShadowNet. “Look at that, beta. Beautiful.”
“It’s stronger than any other thread.” He kept running his psychic fingers along the length of it, amazed and delighted in equal measures.
Nani laughed. “Of course it is.” A wave of affection surrounded him. “It’s love.”
“Yes.” He felt his heart expand. “It’s also because she can’t access the biofeedback by herself. She has access to the ShadowNet because her mind is close enough to ours to allow it, but she’s linked to me, not jacked into the network itself. I have to draw in the biofeedback for both of us.”
“Does that bother you?”
“No—there’s more than enough to go around.” His heart swelled. “I wish I’d known it would work like this before.”
“Love is unpredictable, Devraj. Those bonds, we can’t control.”
“Never liked surprises,” Dev said. “But I think I’ve changed my mind.”
As his nani laughed, he felt Katya awaken, their link to each other so deep and true, the knowledge was instinct. Dropping from the net, he strode into the bedroom just as her eyes lifted. “Hey, sleepy.” It took incredible control to keep his tone light, his face calm.
Dev? A confused look. But—
“Shh.” Kissing her gently on the temple, he helped her sit up, his heart thudding double time. She’d spoken telepathically and he’d heard. It was another piece sliding into place, another joy. “I’ll explain everything.”
And he did. No one interrupted them—knowing his grandmother, she’d played sentinel and barred the doorway.
“Those two are miracles,” Katya whispered. “Dear God, Dev, if the Council ever—”
“They’ll never find out,” he promised her. “All of us, Shine, the cats, we’ll all protect them.”
Her face twisted. “And to think,” she said, “that Larsen would’ve destroyed Noor had he had the chance. He’d never have understood the gift of what she is.”
“You did.” He ran his hand over her hair. “Lucas plans to apologize to you for chasing you in panther form.”
That made her smile. “I thought I was done for that night.”
“No,” he said, closing his arms around her. “You had to live to meet me.”
Her hand spread over his chest. “How am I hooked into your ShadowNet?”
“Through me,” he said. “My grandmother agrees—your connection is only through me. It’s our ‘mating bond,’ as the changelings put it, that’s keeping you in the ShadowNet.”
“A mating bond.” She smiled. “I like that.”
“Katya—that means if I die,” he told her, “so will you.”
A shining look up at him. “That’s what happens to changelings, you know. One dies, the other doesn’t last long.”
“How do you know?”
“I did some research once. I was curious.” Fingertips stroking over his cheek.
Dev understood. “It’s not only changelings. Humans pine away, too.”
“But,” she said with a smile, “I’d like to have a long lifetime with you, so stay safe.”
“You, too.” He reached up to cover her hand with his own, holding it against his cheek. “Because if you die, so will I.”
A smile that held a spark of mischief, a bright new thing. “Will you pine away?”
“It’s no laughing matter.” But he was smiling, too.
“Dev, my Dev.” She rose to straddle him, her face glowing with happiness.
Placing one hand on her hip, the other on her lower back, he bent his head and let her press kisses all over his face, fleeting touches of love, of affection, of promise. “You saved me, you know,” he said between kisses.
A curious look.
“Everyone’s been worrying the metal would take me over.” He drew in the scent at the curve of her neck. “But how can it when you have a line straight into my heart?”
“Dev.” More kisses, gentle touches. Then a whisper against his ear. “I’m afraid to look at your ShadowNet.”
He found himself whispering back, playing with her. “You? Afraid?” He slid his hand under the sheets to close over her thigh. “Not my Katya.”
“Will you hold my hand?”
“Always.”
Dev was waiting for Katya on the psychic plane when she opened the mental doorway of her mind and took the first step out into the shimmering chaos of a network of thousands of minds, millions of emotional connections. He felt her shock, but she held on to their bond and stayed in place, looking, learning.
“It’s . . .” He felt her wonder, her terror.
“You get used to it.”
“You do?” A laughing question. “Dear God, Dev. How do you navigate this?”
“Follow the threads.”
“But I only have one to you.”
“You can bounce off the threads of others,” he explained. “As long as you don’t actually try to hook into an emotional line without permission, no one minds if you use the threads as navigation points.”
“And this,” she said with a deep breath, “is definitely a place that requires navigation.”
“You’re wrong, you know,” Dev said, nudging her attention sideways. “You have got other threads.”
“But I don’t know anyone else in here.” She touched the thread. “It’s your grandmother!”
He felt her follow the thread, knew when she’d reached the end. “I see her, but I also see . . . your grandfather?”
“Yes, you have a link to him through her. As you have a link to thousands through me.”
He could see her thinking that over. “When I form more connections, you’ll be able to access them, too?”
“On a certain level,” he said. “It depends on my own emotional bond with the individual. Look.”
She followed his finger to a sparkling silver-blue thread that glittered diamond bright. “Who is that and why am I linked to her?” Curious as a child, she touched her psychic hand to the silver-blue thread. “Tiara.” He saw her smile on the physical plane. “She likes me enough that this link’s formed.”
“She’s always been a lunatic.”
“I think she has excellent taste.” She played her fingers over the thread. “It’s very fine.”
“You’ve just begun a friendship. If you grow apart instead of together, the thread will fade, too.”
“I guess,” she murmured, “lovers in the ShadowNet always know where they stand.”
“If both are psychic,” he pointed out. “If a Forgotten forms an intimate bond with a human, that human is pulled nominally into the net. We can see the mind, but it’s automatically shielded—we think the ShadowNet does that because otherwise humans would be too vulnerable. But it has the side effect of blocking their access to the network.” A sound of frustration. “We never even considered that it would be otherwise with Psy, that the ShadowNet would recognize you as different.”
“You had no reason to think that,” she said, calming him. “The ShadowNet’s acceptance of me is a gift—but it’s only an answer to those who love.”
“Those who dare to love.”
“Yes.” Another pause as she scanned the multitude of intertwined and entangled threads around them. “This network is very, very complex.”
He smiled. “That’s my Psy.”
A playful mental slap came down the line as she began to figure out how things functioned. “It’s open, that’s what the difference is. Your ShadowNet is open to outside connections and influences—even shielded, those human minds bring something to the network.”
He took time to consider it. “Yes, I think you’re right.”
“But that also means,” she pointed out, “this network can’t retain information with the same efficiency as the PsyNet. Or can you still find data in this chaos?”
“Not without searching a whole heck of a
lot. Easier to use computers.” He laughed at her expression on the physical plane. “It can be useful in that way sometimes, but mostly, the ShadowNet is about feeding our psychic need for connection, for family.”
“What about the biofeedback?” she asked, worry a jagged thread in her emotional signature. “I’m taking so much. If your network leaks energy—”
“It doesn’t matter. Look around. We’re overloading with it.”
“You are, aren’t you?” she murmured. “It’s because you feed things back to each other, somehow increasing the output. Love goes out, love comes back, and the energy grows with each exchange . . .” Another pause. “Dev, the psychic pathways are different. It’s as if my mind is slightly out of sync.”
He knew that, had hoped she’d be able to navigate them. “Can you move along them?”
“Not easily or instinctively, but yes.” Almost a minute of silence. “Actually, I think I’ll enjoy the intellectual challenge. There’s so much to explore.”
In spite of her intrigued comments, he could feel her beginning to overload with the intensity of the emotions in the ShadowNet. Making a command decision, he bullied her back down to the physical plane.
“I wasn’t finished,” she almost growled at him.
He held her close. “You’re exhausted.”
“It was just so much input.” She snuggled into him, tugging up his shirt to touch skin that tightened at the first brush of her fingertips. “The PsyNet is full of pure data—there are uncountable pieces flowing past every split second.”
The Shine director in Dev could see the appeal. “You’d be able to know what was happening every minute of every day.” That, he had to admit, would be highly useful.
“Yes. But it’s cold. Data is always cold—it just exists. But the ShadowNet—each thread tells a story and each carries a different emotional flavor. I want to touch every one, know every one!”
“That, my beautiful Psy rebel,” he said, speaking against the lush fullness of her lips, “will take at least a million years.”
Husky feminine laughter, playful fingers dancing along the waistband of his jeans. “I guess I’ll have to take it one kiss at a time.”
PETROKOV FAMILY ARCHIVES
Letter dated May 5, 1995
Dearest Matthew,
Today, as I watched you promise to honor and cherish the woman you love, I saw the beginning of a dawn so bright, nothing will dare stand in its way. Our hope, our courage, our very heart carries on in your willingness to love, to be vulnerable, to hurt.
Those in the Net call us weak, but they’re wrong. It’s easy to ignore emotion, to bar the pathways of the soul. If I hadn’t loved your father, his death wouldn’t have forever broken a part of me. But if I hadn’t loved your father, I’d never have known what it is to be human.
As the years pass, I hope you’ll remember that, that your children’s children will remember that. And when the shadows return, as they eventually will, remember this, too—we survived once. And we’ll keep on surviving.
Nothing is stronger than the will of the human heart.
With all my love,
Mom
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