The older Psy had given him a look that betrayed nothing . . . but that wasn’t as closed as her expression had been at the start of their meeting. “I’m well aware we’re welcoming a predator into our midst, Kaleb. But never forget that even predators can be taken down by a single poison dart.”
He’d smiled. “So, we understand each other.” Two predators who had decided to cooperate and to watch one another’s backs.
“Yes.” Ena had raised the delicate bone-china teacup in her hand, full of a pale green liquid that wasn’t part of the ordinary Psy nutrition list. “Welcome to the family.”
Having teleported back to his office rather than to Sahara because she’d had to go into a meeting herself twenty minutes earlier, Kaleb kept the door shut and considered the implications of the day. Mercant help was not to be taken lightly and Kaleb had no intention of abusing their trust. He was a man who knew how to value his assets and the Mercant intelligence network alone held the power to topple countless individuals.
Ping.
The psychic alert was faint and part of the myriad pieces of data flowing into his mind at any one instant, but he took a second to glance at it. Interesting. His search had picked up a mention of the DarkRiver alpha’s child.
Stepping out into the PsyNet with his mind cloaked so well that he was a ghost, he shot himself to the exact location of the ping. Around him, the PsyNet was a vast blackness populated with millions of stars that represented the minds of the Psy in the Net. But where there had been only black and white, there was now a delicate golden framework underlying everything.
The Honeycomb, created by the empaths, the fragile golden structure that kept the Net from crumbling. Brilliant in the once pure-black spaces in between the bonds of the Honeycomb were the sparks of color that denoted a psychic network awash in empaths. Research suggested the reason those sparks were so prevalent was because the PsyNet was sick, needed a lot of healing.
Today, however, his attention was not on those sparks or on the fine golden lines that connected people to the Es and the Es to one another. It was on the data that flowed constantly through the empty spaces between minds, endless streams of it.
He was only interested in a particular piece of it.
. . . Psy with shifting powers?
Catching the first hint of the conversation that had prompted the alert, he came to a halt, listened.
Such an individual would have enviable abilities.
Do you truly believe so? Don’t forget, the child will be hampered by her animalistic instincts.
The changelings have proven intelligent.
Yes, but Psy are more intelligent. Nadiya Hunter is unlikely to have the same brainpower.
Kaleb didn’t need to listen any longer. It took less than a minute to identify the minds as belonging to would-be-intellectuals from a university. Like many academics, their shields were all but useless. Inserting a complex “reporter” bug in each mind, one that would awaken if and only should the mind involved begin thinking about the child in a way that indicated danger to her, he left them to their pontificating.
He returned to his own mind with the awareness that a large cross-section of the Psy race still couldn’t see outside their bubble of perceived superiority. Fools. Those who thrived post-Silence would be the ones who knew the truth, knew that their competitors had the same hard-nosed intelligence and capacity to innovate. In the case of humans, they often had more because of the way they had so long been sidelined or abused.
Mention of the child, he messaged Judd. No threat. “Intellectual” curiosity. More like speaking simply to hear their own voices.
The reply was prompt. Let’s hope they keep it to that.
Yes, Kaleb thought, highly conscious of what Nadiya “Naya” Hunter represented. Considering the bloodshed that would erupt should she be harmed, he decided to use the NetMind and DarkMind to heighten the watch. The NetMind was the librarian and guardian of the Net, its task to create order out of a chaos of data and minds. The DarkMind was far different, a twisted and homicidal creature.
Kaleb could speak to both. Understand both.
Yin and yang. Dark and light. Innocence and horror.
When the twin sentience came to him, however, they were disturbed. Or, the NetMind was disturbed and the DarkMind was ambivalent. Following them back into the Net, Kaleb found himself being taken to a section that was dark. Dead. No empathic sparks. No minds within the dead section. No Honeycomb strands. That wasn’t unusual. Parts of the Net had suffered catastrophic damage before the empaths woke and began to sew it back together.
At the current rate of improvement, it would take years, an entire generation, maybe two, for those sections to recover. No minds could anchor there until then. Nothing would survive—or if it did, it would be a creature of raving insanity.
?!!
Following the NetMind’s wordless urgings, he shifted his point of view . . . and saw the problem. The rot, the disease, was spreading. Not, however, in a way most people would be able to detect. No, the fine threads of the Net were literally coming apart strand by strand below the surface. Kaleb only saw it because the NetMind had imposed its vision over his. “Did you show the empaths?”
A sense of the negative, of an awareness the Es were already close to exhaustion.
Kaleb couldn’t disagree. Sahara worked closely with the Empathic Collective, and she’d been sharing her worry with him that Designation E was being asked to take on too much too soon. “No one designation can shoulder that much responsibility,” she’d said, eyes of darkest blue passionate. “It’s getting impossible to juggle the workload. I’m terrified that despite our best efforts not to repeat the mistakes of the past, they’ll begin to crumple under the pressure.”