Storm echo, p.31
Storm Echo, page 31
“Do you believe she’d wish to take over the general planning?” Payal asked with a gentleness not many people ever saw in the tough CEO. “Canto and I would remain involved, but it’d take the heavy administration off our shoulders.”
“I think she would find it an honor to be asked,” Ena said to this woman with a capacity for empathy so strong that it had survived the evil toxicity of her childhood.
“I will reach out to her.” Payal glanced at her timepiece. “It’s time.”
When Ena indicated she was ready for the teleport, Payal put a hand on her shoulder. A moment of spatial disorientation before Ena found herself standing under the spreading branches of a huge tree, the sky streaked with the golds and oranges of early evening in this part of the world, and the ground littered with leaf debris.
More trees surrounded them on every side, though there was plenty of space between their aged trunks, the entire area warm with the diffuse light that rained down through the canopy.
Ivan had told her the provided teleport lock would bring her to a spot on the very edge of DarkRiver’s forested territory—it was a complicated emblem that hung from the branch of the nearest tree that created the teleport point. Take that away and this was just another patch of forest indistinguishable from thousands of others.
Ena took no insult in not being invited into the inner sanctum. This was a new mating, Ivan’s welcome in the pack currently an unknown to Ena. The bears had “stolen” Silver with joyful glee, then opened their entire pack to the Mercants, calling them family.
Leopards were not bears, however, Lucas Hunter a very different alpha from Valentin Nikolaev. The leopard alpha reminded her an unusual amount of members of her own family. It was the glint in the eye, the sense of things prowling beneath the surface.
A stir in the trees, Ivan striding out hand in hand with a tall woman with dark hair that was pulled off her face by two simple combs, her lovely oval face marked by a scar on one side. She carried the scar with comfort, the warmth of her eyes and the depth of her smile the most striking things about her.
Ena was struck by a perplexing moment of familiarity.
“Grandmother, thank you for coming,” Ivan said. “Payal, it’s good to see you again.”
“I look forward to many such meetings,” Payal said, then nodded a greeting to the woman at Ivan’s side. “With both of you. I’ll leave you now so you can converse privately with Grandmother.” She teleported out, having already telepathed Ena that she’d return as soon as Ena wished to go back home.
Ivan met Ena’s gaze with the impenetrable paleness of his own before turning to his mate. “Soleil, this is my grandmother.”
“I’ve been waiting for this moment since Ivan first told me about you,” Soleil said. “I’m so happy to meet you, Grandmother.” Open admiration and warmth in her expression, not a single shield or self-protective instinct in sight.
Ena sighed internally. “I, too, am pleased to meet you, Soleil,” she said to the healer whom Ivan had mated.
You do realize, she telepathed her grandson, she and Arwen will become firm friends and hound us all to take better care of ourselves?
A quiet joy in Ivan’s eyes, a subtle gentling of the soul that she hoped would bring him the peace she’d never been able to foster in him.
“You’re a healer?” she said to Soleil, to confirm her guess.
Soleil’s laughter was sunshine, wrapping around Ena the same way Arwen wrapped her up in his arms from behind when he thought he could get away with it. Her empath grandson had altered Ena, altered all of them, and she had the thought that Soleil would do the same. Healers had a way of loving until it became a fact of life, a simple acceptance that settled on the skin and the soul.
“Is it that obvious?” Soleil said with a look up at Ivan that held the same primal possessiveness Ena had seen when Valentin looked at Silver.
Healer she might be, but she was also a predatory changeling with her mate.
When she turned back to Ena, her eyes were no longer human. “Ivan is beyond lucky to have you in his life, Grandmother. Thank you for loving him as a boy so he had the heart to love me as a man.”
Only a healer would say such a thing to Ena Mercant, a ruthless matriarch whose Silence was meant to be flawless. Truly. How did her grandchildren keep doing this to her?
“Come,” she said, “let us walk and get to know one another.”
Ivan stayed quiet as the two of them spoke, and the more Ena learned of Soleil, the more she began to realize that this woman had a spine of steel. Of course she did; no weak-willed creature would’ve broken through Ivan’s refusal to admit that he was worth more than a life in the shadows.
And it was those shadows about which Ivan told her when they began to talk of his ability. He’d already mentioned to her that his shields were fragmenting, but she hadn’t realized the situation was this bad. “Excuse me?” she said, her tone frigid, when he told her his plans for the psychic cage.
“Don’t worry, Grandmother,” Soleil muttered, her arms folded and feline eyes narrowed. “I already told him that’s not an option.”
If Ena had not already approved of Soleil, she’d have passed the mark at that instant. The thin woman across from her was not playing when it came to Ivan’s safety. “Show me the shields,” Ena said.
They spent the next twenty minutes going over every technical detail. The problem was that Ivan appeared to have thought of all possible options, tested them, and confirmed that they wouldn’t work.
Ena’s heart thudded in her mouth, her mind filled with the memory of his small and cold hand in hers as she walked him out of the sterile room where he’d been taken after his mother’s death. That too-quiet, damaged boy had become a man of courage and loyalty who’d found happiness at long last.
Ena refused to let him down now.
But even Ena Mercant, she realized in the darkest part of night, many hours after she’d left Ivan and Soleil in the forest, couldn’t magic an answer where none existed. No one in the world had a brain like Ivan’s, and the problem wasn’t in the structure of his shields or their complexity. It was in the fact that his ability was morphing at a rate far beyond the capacity of any shield to contain.
It was as if the power he’d named the spider had been designed to penetrate shields—Ivan’s and everyone else’s. But such a neural design made no sense in the Psy world. It might have if Ivan could control it from his end, the power a dark one but a power nonetheless. But Ivan had never been able to control it … so when it broke free, it would enmesh him as much as any one of his targets.
The sea crashed below her home, smashing at the rocks, while Ena ran headlong into the realization that this time, she might not be able to solve the problem, might not be able to save a member of her family.
Chapter 47
There’s a minute possibility that the DNA trace is failing because the DNA involved is classified. I would put the chances of this at under 0.1%—because we’d be talking about such highly classified DNA files that it’s getting into the Council superstructure.
Those individuals keep a steely grip on their familial connections. No one vanishes unless the family wants them to vanish—and in those cases, the vanishing is final. I’m not giving up, but even we don’t have the connections to get to a small number of those classified files, so let us hope that 0.1% chance is so unlikely as to be negligible.
—Rufus Mercant (2071)
IVAN WOKE WITH the birds, while the world outside was yet dark. Soleil was curled into him, her hand on his heart and her body warm with life. But inside him spread a growing chill.
A secret part of him had hoped his grandmother would have an answer he hadn’t considered, but he’d seen the truth in her gaze before she left yesterday. He knew she’d have stayed up through the night, would’ve tapped all her contacts in the hunt for a solution, but even his grandmother couldn’t fix the unfixable.
A stirring beside him, Soleil yawning and rubbing her face against his chest. “It’s early.” It was a very feline complaint, the cat that lived inside his mind grumpy with it.
He massaged the back of her neck, her hair silky and thick under his fingers. “It’s time, my Lei.” His psychic reservoir had reached full charge. “I need to return to the ChaosNet.”
Soleil went motionless for a long moment before she rose up onto her elbow to look down at him. “Eat first,” she murmured, her eyes dark with the knowledge of what he risked today. “Go in as strong as possible.”
He nodded, tugged her down for a kiss. They’d loved again with their bodies in the night, and he hoped that there would come another dawn where he could lie with her in their home and kiss and caress and pet her. But today, they both rose after that kiss, to ready him for the task to come.
They ate breakfast on the verandah, by the light that poured out from their living room. Because while the birds were awake, the sun was far from rising. Afterward, Soleil laid her head on his shoulder, her hand locked in his, and said, “Remember, I’ll be here to pull you out at any stage. Just call me through the mating bond. I’ll hear now that our bond is complete, I’m certain of it.”
Ivan had thought to go inside their aerie, lie on their bed, but now made a different choice. “I’ll go in from here, surrounded by the trees and the birds.” He turned to look at her. “You like it here.”
She shifted to meet his gaze, her own fierce and wild. “I love you, Ivan Mercant. You’ll kick those Scarabs’ butts.” A hard kiss. “I’ll get you a cushion for your back, and if I feel anything going wrong, I’m going to haul you out.”
“I know.” He felt her love for him, her fear for him, in every cell of his being. She didn’t seem the least afraid for herself, even though whatever happened, it would impact them both. “Te amo, ma chérie, today and tomorrow and always.”
She swallowed hard at his use of the lovingly mixed-up language of her childhood. “Come back, Ivan. But if you can’t, I’ll walk with you wherever you go.”
He carried her words with him into the ChaosNet. She was a tug inside him that was invisible, but that he knew led the way home. So it was that he stepped into the chaotic lightning-shot island with one goal in mind: to find some way to collapse it so that the minds within would reintegrate into the PsyNet.
Already, he could see the difference from the last time he’d visited: a number of minds had gone dull, and he knew that those were the people who were declining, not just comatose but in a critical state where their brains flickered between life and death.
It was, he found, difficult to ignore pain in front of him—he was pragmatic, had long ago learned to see death as an inevitability—but these people hadn’t chosen to play on this field, had been hauled onto it without permission. They’d been made pawns in someone else’s game, their choices ripped from them as Soleil’s had been ripped from her.
Regardless of his response, however, he couldn’t divert his attention to help them; such an action would deplete his psychic reserves, put him back right where he’d been after his first visit. He’d do far more good if he could complete his assigned mission and bring down the island.
He’d told Krychek before he went in, so the other man could put all the various hospitals on alert, as their patients might go into cardiac arrest or show other signs of catastrophic failure at the moment of disconnection. The medics needed to be warned not to interfere with lifegiving measures unless the patient didn’t stabilize within five seconds.
A healthy Psy mind should only need half that long to reconnect to the massive sprawl of the PsyNet. Any interference in between could cause neural disruption that critically disturbed the process.
Krychek had confirmed that the hospitals were already on standby for such instructions, and that he’d blasted out a telepathic alert that it was happening today. Now all Ivan had to do was deliberately splinter the ChaosNet.
He’d have attempted to collapse the foundation by somehow taking out the anchors without killing them, but there was no way to identify an anchor on the PsyNet. Canto had confirmed that for him last night when he’d called and spoken to his cousin.
Ivan always had plans for an operation, but today, there could be no plan. This place was too chaotic, too much an unknown. He’d have to act in the heat of the moment the instant he found a fatal vulnerability in the system.
That in mind, he began to move quickly through the psychic space, gathering as much data as possible. He couldn’t avoid all the lightning strikes—not when the psychic space was full of them—but he didn’t take any major hits. Around him, the landscape was warped and sluggish, the data in the network so fragmented that it was of no use.
Which was why it took him a long time to pick up the echo that ran through every inch of the ChaosNet: Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.
Over and over and over in an endless loop. Obsessive and compulsive and not rational. Even if they managed to pass themselves off as rational on the physical plane, their minds were lost in a fog of compulsion.
Compulsion toward their Queen.
Despite his earlier suspicions, Ivan had no proof that this was the Architect. To date, the Architect’s actions had all been very rational—they had played the long game. And they’d played it well enough that even his family hadn’t managed to unmask them.
A mind up ahead that had been shooting out lightning bolts suddenly burst outward in a supernova of light and energy that buffeted Ivan’s mind with brutal force. He was only able to survive because his shields were titanium. But when the dust cleared, nothing remained of the Scarab who had once existed.
That echo again: Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen. Scarab. Queen.
That was who’d done this, broken the PsyNet by using the Scarabs. Because the world wasn’t an even playing field. Some people had more power, more charisma. If Grandmother, for example, had wished to turn Ivan evil, she could have: he’d been a badly damaged child when he came into the family, Ena his savior. She could’ve molded him into nothing but her obedient shadow with very little effort.
These Scarabs, too, would’ve been damaged when the Queen captured them in her web. But it couldn’t only be charisma and timing. Scarabs were too powerful when their brains broke the chain that Silence had imposed on them—they would’ve long ago subjugated anyone less powerful.
Ivan hissed out a breath on the physical plane: a Scarab powerful enough to control other Scarabs would be a nightmare. This individual might be even more powerful than Kaleb Krychek—and that could lead to hell on Earth.
He took a significant blow from a black lightning bolt right then, shuddered, but shrugged it off. His internal power meter, however, dipped once again. The longer he stayed here, the more hits he’d take, and the less power he’d have if he did work out how to collapse the island.
The only mercy was that the spider inside him sat silent, unmoving. He’d have hoped the mating bond had made it go quiescent, but he knew better. His power could coil and strike at any moment. As Soleil’s cat could pounce; that cat, too, sat unmoving, watchful.
Making a call on gut instinct, he began to arrow in toward the center. This island was a new construct, with nothing akin to the PsyNet’s psychic weight to it. Whatever stability it had, it had to come from the core, else it’d be folding in on itself, the weight on one end more than the other.
The PsyNet, in contrast, was so big that it had no true center. It was different depending on each individual’s location. The island was minuscule in comparison. It made sense that it would have a central point from where everything else flowed.
He expected to find a mind brighter than the others, the Queen to whom they paid homage, but when he reached the place that he was certain had to be the center, his internal compass telling him that he was now equidistant from most of the coast on any side, he saw nothing.
There was literally nothing there.
Not a single mind, only endless darkness. Since Ivan took nothing at face value, he went closer, still closer. That was when he realized that no lightning bolts passed through this area, either, the region as eerily still as the eye of a hurricane.
A shield?
But he had zero issues moving through the dead zone … and that was when he felt it—a subtle draw that tried to suck him downward. In truth, there was no up or down in the psychic space, but that was how his brain made sense of it: that something was pulling at him, trying to siphon his energy.
It wasn’t a sinkhole. No, it was something much more subtle. He knew all at once that the dead psychic zone around it was formed of all the minds it had already sucked dry of energy.
A cold realization in the center of his brain, a creeping sense of the familiar. Had he been a cat like his mate, he’d have put it in scent terms: it was as if he’d scented something he knew, a psychic presence that was no stranger, was rather so akin to him that it … felt like family.
His stomach roiled.
Sensing the spider inside him beginning to stir, he pulsed the psychic space with his own brand of energy. It was a silvery wave brushed with flame, glittering and powerful to his gaze but invisible to everyone else.
The cat inside his mind pawed at the threads of shimmering silver.
A reminder from his mate that this power wasn’t invisible to everyone.
It lit up the entire area before it was sucked down by the darkness—but he’d taken a snapshot right before the moment when everything went black. And what he saw was a sprawling black spiderweb, at the center of which sat a bloated monster.
A hard tug on the bond inside him. A literal bite that he felt through the psychic space—just as a cold black spidery hand scraped over his mind. He snapped his eyes open to find Soleil looking down at him with eyes gone ocelot.
“Did you bite me?”
“You wouldn’t wake up,” she said, her fingers on the side of his neck. “And your pulse was starting to weaken. It was just a nip—didn’t break the skin.”
