Storm echo, p.22
Storm Echo, page 22
Communication had proved impossible, though hospital empaths had reported erratic bursts of fear and confusion from their patients. That last piece of data wasn’t public knowledge, but of course Grandmother knew of it without having put any of her children, her grandchildren, or their partners in a compromising situation.
The latter had never before been an issue, with their entire family below the radar. But now Silver was the director of the biggest emergency response organization in the world, Canto was bonded to a member of the Psy Ruling Coalition, and Arwen was an official member of the Empathic Collective and had taken the Collective’s oath to protect the privacy of those he treated.
“Really, Ivan,” Ena had murmured on a recent call, “soon, we shall be far too visible to run an information network.”
“Maybe, Grandmother,” Ivan had replied, “it’s time to return to our roots. Back when Mercants were the knights to a king, walking right in the open rather than being the shadows behind the crown.”
Onscreen, Ena had raised both eyebrows, the sky a turbulent gray behind her and her upper body clad in a shift of delicate bronze silk. “Once again, you surprise me. Perhaps you’re right. Perhaps we come to a moment of change—after all, the world is in flux.”
Her words had played in Ivan’s mind as he wandered closer to the island. As he did so, he became aware that, in the aftermath of the incident, he’d forgotten to sever the fine threads that connected him to the people he’d saved. Links that had formed at the moment he grabbed hold of them and threw them to safety. Those threads had become stronger in the interim, turned silver with the barest touch of flame.
His abdomen went rigid in the physical world, but he was unable to sense any power flowing his way. He hadn’t turned them into a spider’s prey. For now, at least. Because the fact the threads had gained in strength was a warning that the spider wasn’t only stirring, it was wide awake and looking to feed.
A moment of sheer panic before he remembered that his bond with Soleil was a changeling thing. Nothing he could even see. No way for the spider to devour her. Not that he could trust it would remain that way as the spider gained in strength, the psychic mutation of Ivan stretching out its limbs in endless greed.
He went to sever his connections to the survivors from yesterday, hesitated … because some of those threads led to the island. He’d thrown people to the closest safe area. For many, that had meant the island. Which also meant they were probably now in a coma or locked inside their minds.
In trying to save them, he might have doomed them.
Jaw set, he used the threads to try to tug himself onto the island. Per the family-wide alert he’d received before he left the apartment yesterday evening, no one had been able to access the island to date. Psy minds literally could not cross empty psychic space.
It was akin to asking someone to walk over to the next neighborhood by crossing an expanse of outer space. It was neurologically and physically impossible. Psy minds couldn’t survive in that dead space.
Except … Ivan was now standing on the island, his hands glinting with the flame-kissed silver of the threads he’d used to travel here. As if they’d acted like a spacesuit, keeping him alive for the journey. Which meant he was taking energy that wasn’t his to take; he might not feel bloated with it, but that he was alive was an answer in itself.
Ivan had become the monster he’d spent a lifetime fighting.
He turned to look back the way he’d come, his gorge rising … and saw nothing but a wall of obsidian. His mind was anchored on the other side, this part of him a roaming echo—but he could no longer see his mind, far less the silvery bonds he’d used to reach this strange place. Neither could he make telepathic contact with any of his family.
A definite problem.
A roaming mind couldn’t survive separated from the main part of the mind, and vice versa. At a certain point in time, the two parts would both begin to fragment, with the roaming part absorbed into the PsyNet. Giving him, in effect, a psychic lobotomy. At which point, his physical body would die.
Great.
However, since he’d learned young that to rail against that which couldn’t be altered was a waste of time, he didn’t try to throw himself against that infinite wall of black. Rather, he focused on the psychic structure of the barrier. The ones behind this island had been clever. Instead of trying to control each individual mind on the island, they’d simply isolated the entire island.
That had to be burning massive amounts of power.
Power such as that generated by Scarabs before they imploded.
Because Scarabs were inherently unstable. That was the problem, had always been the problem. Silence had been designed as a solution partially to deal with this exact scenario: to assist Psy who burned so hot, so out of control that they went insane or died in childhood, their brains unable to cope with the psychic overload.
That amount of power required very specific neural machinery. Machinery such as that in a dual cardinal’s brain. And dual cardinals were the rarest of the rare, genetic anomalies so unusual that there was no statistical model for their occurrence in the PsyNet.
Had the Scarabs not been unstable—both psychically and mentally—no one would’ve worried about them. Rather, they’d have been studied for the potential for untrammeled psychic power. Because while not every Psy wanted to be a brutal power, it was a safe bet that most at the lower end of the Gradient wouldn’t turn down an opportunity to safely supercharge their psychic abilities.
But, as with Ivan’s own ability, it turned out that becoming a Scarab wasn’t a choice—and it wasn’t safe. Thanks to Grandmother’s standing in the PsyNet, a standing that meant she’d been briefed fully on the entire situation, Ivan knew that Scarabs had been studied once—a generation into Silence.
Project Scarab had initially been lauded a great success. Removing the psychic rules mandated by Silence had removed the “dimmer switch” on the abilities of affected Psy.
It had also destroyed them.
“They all died,” Grandmother had told him, her tone solemn as she stared out at the roiling waves of the ocean. “Either by their own hand, or at the hands of Council executioners. They were too unstable, fractured at the very core—and that instability, that psychic chaos, threatened to destabilize the Net.”
Yet the separation of this island from the Net hadn’t been chaotic.
No, it had been very well planned, and it had succeeded in its goal. Which meant that the Scarab power was being somehow stabilized. A task so difficult that, per information supplied by Grandmother’s byzantine maze of personal contacts, only a rare few empaths had succeeded in doing it, and even then, the stability of their subjects was precarious at best.
He added it to the list of questions for which he needed to unearth answers. The priority was to find out the reason for the comas, catatonia, and disordered states. Especially as it appeared that, as of now, he was the only person outside the island who could access it.
With that in mind, he began to move away from the edge of the broken-off segment. It might be that the solution to his problem of being stuck here, cut off from his mind, might also lie deeper within the island.
If it didn’t …
Death had never worried Ivan. He’d been up close and personal with it at too young an age. He’d always figured that when it was his time, it was his time. But to die because he hadn’t set up a fail-safe—a stupid basic error?
He’d have to haunt his own dead body.
That this was an unknown situation that had thrown everyone wasn’t an excuse. He was a security specialist, his job to consider how things could go pear-shaped. Yet he’d assumed he could get himself out of this—because he’d been getting himself out of various situations all his life.
“You, Ivan, take independence a touch too far at times,” Grandmother had once said to him. “You don’t always have to rely only on yourself. Such violent independence can become a weakness.”
He’d been sixteen then, had politely listened to her words—then ignored them. Canto, Silver, Arwen, they’d worn off some of his edges with their unrelenting support, so that these days he did, at times, reach out to them for an assist.
At the core of it, however, he hadn’t changed. And he’d proved Grandmother right. “You can say ‘I told you so’ if I make it out of here,” he muttered in the strange psychic space he now inhabited.
Since he couldn’t extricate himself, he’d have to hope that one of his family would give in to their nosy instincts and come looking for him before it was too late. Even then, they were unlikely to be able to wake him since he’d separated his mind into two parts. What they could do was ensure that his body stayed alive, while he fought to find a way out before it was too late and his mind simply stopped.
Because Ivan wasn’t done with life. Not yet. Not while he was still himself enough to watch over Soleil, ensure that her new pack would treat her well, and that she’d live a life of happiness.
A small cat prowled inside him, swiping at him with an annoyed paw for what he’d done, the mess he’d gotten himself into. Mad, he had to be going mad to believe that their wild bond had followed him here, but he carried that annoyed cat with him as he walked in this psychic space unlike any he’d ever explored.
It was nothing akin to the PsyNet, with minds neatly grouped or laid out in various patterns, each with a small section of the Net to themselves. Here the minds sat jumbled up against each other, or hung twisted in streams of violent psychic energy that crackled with random bolts of lightning.
Driven by instinct, he’d avoided the bolts but now deliberately took a glancing hit—he needed the data. It felt like being sucked into a cyclonic vortex that didn’t know whether it was twisting clockwise or anti-clockwise, creating brutal opposing forces that threatened to rip him apart.
Shaking it off with effort, he looked once again at all the minds being buffeted, felt a cold chill run through his veins. If the lightning continued … People were going to start dying. Soon. Those bolts held far too much unrestrained power, enough to crash and crush.
This explained the comas, the catatonia, the mental chaos.
He was no expert in psychic mechanics, but it was obvious that there were no safe zones. The power was too erratic. The only way for those caught in this zone to protect themselves would be to hunker down behind shields so heavy they could no longer interact in the physical world—but those would only last so long, and anyone not in on the plan for separation would’ve been taken by surprise, with no time to realize what was happening before they were hit by a bolt.
These people were in a critical countdown.
A tug on the part of him that held all those silver threads.
It led to a mind under considerable pressure from the bolts. He recognized that mind, though that should’ve been impossible. It was of a person he’d thrown onto the island, away from the abyss. In the same way he recognized this mind, he knew that it was on the brink of total catastrophic failure, far too weak to survive much more.
The cat nudged at him, told him to remember.
The memory came in a rush: Of the healer with big brown eyes who owned Ivan, and an alpha changeling with claw marks on one side of his face. A primal bond sealed in blood. A bond that would permit a transfer of power.
Ivan was no alpha. He was a monster, a spider that sucked others dry. He could kill this person if he opened up that part of his mind, the very part that had shoved a tendril outside a once-solid cage and formed the link between them. Yet if he didn’t, they’d die regardless.
Thoughts grim, he consciously opened the door of the psychic prison for the first time in nearly two decades, releasing the spider but using all his adult knowledge in an attempt to reverse the polarity—his aim to pulse energy from himself down that silvery thread. Giving rather than devouring.
The mind flared with light, became stronger.
It had worked.
Shocked, he stood there for a second, staring. Why had he never considered this before? It was a good skill. He received his answer a heartbeat later. Because now that the spider was free, it was bunching in readiness to shoot out more lines of its web, hook in others, begin to feed.
Ivan slammed it back into its prison, feeling the pushback as it fought him. He’d have to be extremely careful with any future assists, act at rapid speed. To allow the spider to linger was to expose everyone in the vicinity to the mutation in him that just wanted to feed and feed and feed.
As if his mother’s craving for the crystalline petals had burned itself into the cells of her son, creating a monstrous creature that was never satisfied, no matter how much power it had at its disposal. He’d always seen his mutated ability as a spider because of the web, the connections, but it could as well be termed a locust.
One that fed and fed, leaving nothing but a lifeless desert in its wake.
Moving on, searching for others to whom he was connected and could help, he saw that some minds in the ChaosNet were different. They glowed not with the dull starlight of the minds under assault, but with a dazzling kaleidoscopic energy that reminded him of the crystalline flowers … and they absorbed the lightning strikes rather than being damaged by them.
“Scarabs,” he said, realizing he was seeing them in their purest form.
Not stable, not with the way those minds twisted and turned, the energies coming off them chaotic fuel for the lightning. Full of an enraged power. There were also a hell of a lot of Scarab minds. Nothing that could be explained by random chance. This, he understood at last, was the Island of the Scarabs, with the other minds caught in the slipstream, nothing but helpless fodder.
Yet, chaotic energy or not, the island held steady.
There had to be a controller behind it all, a mastermind … an architect.
Another tug on his mind, another desperate person struggling to survive. He offered an assist, even though it was dangerous. He still did it. Over and over again, until he couldn’t avoid a lightning strike.
It blanked his mind, shot pain down his psychic pathways.
He barely held on to consciousness—he was critically low on psychic energy and he almost hadn’t won against the spider. A lethal combination. Because the spider’s goal was survival above all else. Set free, it would take and take and take, until there was nothing left on this island but empty husks.
Chapter 34
Power
Corrupts
So say they
I say
Power
Is a tool innocent
The corruption
An inner rot
—“Power” by Adina Mercant, poet (b. 1832, d. 1901)
A SHIVER IN her web, an unexpected shift … and an odd resonance.
Almost a sense of recognition.
She perceived it through all the points of contact in her new network, all the points of power.
Pausing in her current structural stabilization of the island network, she attempted to pinpoint the reason for the blip and found no evidence of an anomaly. After a moment, she shook it off. It was nothing, could be nothing. She knew everything that happened on the island.
It was her domain and hers alone.
“Soon, my children,” she murmured. “Soon we will reign, for we are evolution.” Stronger, faster, powerful enough to tear the PsyNet itself into pieces.
This was but the first piece.
A piece full of beauty, so much power arcing through it that the network burned. And if it burned out a few weak minds, so be it. Only the strong deserved to survive, could survive.
The Scarab Queen leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, the better to see the new world she’d seeded into creation.
Chapter 35
Leilei, something’s happened. You need to come home.
—Farah Khan to Soleil Bijoux Garcia, 13 February 2082
SOLEIL DIDN’T HESITATE when she reached the top of the stairs. She turned straight into the room on the left. Where Ivan lay silent and still on the bed, dressed in nothing but a pair of thin black sweatpants.
Her eyes went to the extremely shallow rise and fall of his chest, his breaths coming too far apart for it to be healthy for a Psy male of his size and age. The fine black tattoos that marked his skin were a shock—Psy just didn’t go for body ink. Except for her Psy, it seemed.
What she caught of the imagery that played over his chest was beautiful but haunting, glimpses of ghosts seen out of the corner of the eye and visions of worlds unknown, but she had other priorities at that moment, her heart racing as she took stock of his physical situation.
She’d learned basic Psy biology and health indicators in the paramedic course but upgraded her knowledge through self-study when things first began to go wrong with the Psy population next to SkyElm. She’d wanted to be ready to render first aid.
So she reacted quickly to take Ivan’s vitals.
His pulse was too slow, his skin cooling further by the second. “Ivan,” she said, using a sharp tone she’d found very effective on patients.
No reaction.
She put her hands on his shoulders, shook. “Ivan!”
The barest flutter of his lashes.
Her mind made the connection at once: it was the increased physical contact that had gotten through to him. Tactile contact was often a strong part of changeling healing, so it made sense to her. And Psy did have a primal core to their nature; she’d seen the dark side of that on the bloody field of the massacre. This, too, was a matter of life or death, albeit one devoid of violence.
She made the call. She didn’t have any more time. Already, he was missing a breath for each one he took. Stripping off her sweater to reveal the simple white bra she wore underneath, she lay down beside him with her head on his shoulder and wrapped her arms around him, making as much skin-to-skin contact as possible.
She also kept saying his name, calling him back to her as she would a traumatized or emotionally wounded changeling. Inside her, her cat swiped out with its paw and she swore she saw streams of shattered starlight.
