Storm echo, p.8
Storm Echo, page 8
Not that the sobbing, scared woman seemed to care.
“I’m going to remove your underwear,” Soleil said, thankful Zoula was wearing a loose dress. “I’ll be gentle.”
“Please save her,” Zoula begged. “Please. I love her. I’m allowed to now. Silence has fallen. I’m allowed to love my baby.” Desperation in every word.
Soleil used a pair of disposable surgical scissors to delicately cut off the woman’s underwear but left them below her. Then she turned to a shell-shocked man sitting on the nearby curb. “I need your jacket.”
Pale and shaking, he nonetheless immediately peeled it off and handed it over. Folding it, she tucked it around the pregnant woman’s bottom. She had no intention of allowing the baby to touch the asphalt, but this would also help protect her gloves and hands from scrapes.
She couldn’t risk wasting even an ounce of healing energy.
A gush against her hands, too much blood coming out of Zoula. Shit. “You,” she said to the man again, making sure her voice stayed steady. “Call emergency services, tell them it’s a priority. Pregnant woman in distress. Baby coming.” That way, the paramedics would know what they’d be facing with this patient.
The man pulled out his phone with a trembling hand.
Trusting him to complete his task, Soleil returned to her own. “You can do it,” she soothed Zoula, who’d gone too quiet. Too much blood loss. Too much trauma. “I have you, and I have your little one.”
Five minutes later, with Zoula’s eyes fluttering and struggling to stay open, Soleil held a tiny baby covered in the fluids of birth. She’d emerged with startling quickness, as if her mother’s body was ejecting her because she had a better chance of survival outside than inside a body that might seize again.
Her cry was thin and angry and welcome.
Cat making a happy rumbling sound in her chest, Soleil placed the baby immediately into Zoula’s hands, knowing the contact would be good for them both, then used another pair of sterile scissors from the emergency kit to sever the umbilical cord.
A DarkRiver cat—a white-blond male—who’d run over with a blanket gave Soleil a nod that said he saw her, knew her, and would deal with her later. He covered mother and baby in the warmth of the blanket, while Soleil took care of the afterbirth. She placed it in a large biohazard bag from the kit in lieu of anything else, never taking her attention off her patients.
Zoula was rocking her baby, a new light in her face. “She’s alive.” A shaken whisper. “Thank you. Oh, thank you.”
“You did all the work, Mama,” Soleil said, exhaling in quiet relief when an ambulance screamed into the street. It stopped right next to them—thanks to the waving arms of the man who’d given up his jacket.
Soleil waited only until Zoula and her baby were both in the ambulance before she moved on to assist other injured.
Whatever had happened, it was still going on.
And the stranger with the obsidian eyes continued to kneel there, his muscles locked but his eyes scanning the area. Gasps of life followed his attention. That black gaze locked with Soleil’s for a fleeting instant, a shock of blazing power and cold control … and from her cat, a possessive swipe.
Then he was gone, leaving her cat bad-tempered and the human side of her shockingly aware of him in a way she hadn’t been aware of anything since her waking. Her breath stuck in her throat, her cat grumpy at not being able to touch him.
Mine, it snarled. Mine.
Glaring at her own cat—who stuck up its tail and its nose in haughty defiance—she ran toward a changeling couple who were attempting to assist an elderly Psy. All the while, no matter where she was on the street, no matter if she was facing him or had her back to him, she could pinpoint the location of the stranger.
As if inside her was a homing beacon attuned only and perfectly to him.
To a Psy with eyes as black as night.
Chapter 12
With all the collapses of late, all the fractures, the PsyNet is going to tear apart regardless. Better to do it in a controlled fashion.
—Payal Rao, Anchor Representative on the Psy Ruling Coalition & CEO of the Rao Conglomerate (16 June 2083)
KALEB HAD BECOME used to dealing with Net ruptures.
The tears had increased in frequency and destructiveness ever since the rise of the Scarabs—powerful, out-of-control Psy who were a byproduct of the fall of Silence. Because the Silence protocol had worked for a minority of the Psy race, the rules and attendant shielding mandated by it creating a wall around their minds that had helped contain their chaotic power.
Prior to Silence, these same Psy would’ve imploded as children, burning up in the inferno of their abilities. But Silence had allowed them to grow to adulthood. And these adult Scarabs were viciously powerful—and on the road to death. The vast majority of Psy minds weren’t built to process that much psychic energy, would crash and burn under the weight of it.
But the Scarabs could cause—and were causing—massive damage on the way to self-destruction.
Now this.
“This isn’t a rupture,” he said to the cloaked mind that stood next to him on the starlit black of the PsyNet. Aden Kai, leader of the Arrow Squad, had responded at the same time as Kaleb—because this break was nothing normal.
“Agreed.” Aden’s presence was a calm ocean in the chaos. “We can’t seal this.”
“No.” It would be the first time the two of them made no attempt to fix a breach. “We save those who we can, reduce the Net lesion where possible.” He’d already been doing so even as they spoke, as had Aden.
Now, decision made, they split off in different directions. He could see multiple other strong minds in his vicinity, could tell the untrained ones from the trained. It didn’t matter. Power was power and as the untrained were set on assisting minds to hold on to the Net, they could do no harm.
He targeted his own energy—the brutal energy of a dual cardinal—into sealing the “frayed” edge of the PsyNet. He didn’t know how the system would work with that massive black space beyond. The PsyNet had always been a single contiguous network, one that spanned the globe. Today, an entire piece had torn off into an island.
And the moat around that island was growing.
A moat.
That was when he realized the PsyNet remained a contiguous entity—it was already redirecting itself to flow around the island. The PsyNet would surround that island, but the two parts were no longer connected. The blackness that separated them was full of nothing—and it was growing.
That was when he saw it.
A mind flashing bright on the other side—on the edge of the island—before it vanished.
A Scarab burning up in their own power.
Coincidence or cause? He’d find out, and he’d deal with it. At this moment, he had to stop the hemorrhaging of the Net, halt the river of death.
Once, he would’ve sacrificed these strangers without a thought, but that was before Sahara asked him to save them instead. And for her, even the twisted darkness inside Kaleb would seek the light.
Payal, he said as he worked. Has the island separated from the main body of the PsyNet on every level?
The woman who represented Designation A—the very foundation of the network—took several seconds to answer. Unclear, she said at last. Massive surges in the Substrate, tears all over the place. We’ll have to assess once things calm. What I can tell you is that we’ve lost multiple anchors to that island.
The cold and calculating part of Kaleb—a permanent aspect of his psyche that Sahara saw and somehow accepted—weighed up the potential of what had just happened. An island, complete with anchors.
It was the perfect test on whether such a separation could work.
They hadn’t done it when the idea was first broached because of a dearth of anchors—and this event would only magnify the shortage—but if it did work, then the long-term plan could be to hold on until they had enough new-generation anchors to action the plan in its entirety.
Update. Payal’s crisp psychic voice. Four anchors lost from the main network. Massive structural damage. Cascade collapse imminent.
Jaw clenched on the physical plane, Kaleb threw his vast psychic power into holding back the ripple effect. But he still saw a mind hanging in the dead space between the PsyNet and the island.
Pausing only for a split second, he checked his senses.
No mistake. There was a mind there, a mind cloaked in stealth that was blowing its cover in bursts of faint silver-shot light as it appeared to assist other minds. Its presence defied every psychic law in existence. Psy minds could only exist in a psychic space—and the moat was pure nothing. No psychic threads. No biofeedback. A perfect blackness akin to the emptiness of space.
But someone was hanging in the middle of the chasm; and since that someone appeared to be an ally, Kaleb shoved the oddity aside to deal with later.
Right now, he had to keep the PsyNet from falling.
Chapter 13
Ready for gentle physiotherapy. Prognosis is good but it will take time, especially her leg.
—Medical notes on Patient: Lei, 5:01 p.m., 9 October 2082
SOLEIL COLLAPSED AGAINST a sidewalk tree hours after the nightmare first began. Her hands trembled, the adrenaline crash hitting hard. She’d used up every ounce of energy in her body at least an hour ago. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t had to utilize her healing ability—that only worked with those who were pack, and Soleil was a changeling alone, her heart broken.
The pull on her resources had been unremitting regardless, patient after critical patient. It hadn’t let up even after help arrived in the form of more paramedics as well as changelings with medical knowledge.
Lucy, a blond SnowDancer wolf who’d introduced herself as a trained nurse, had happened to be close to Chinatown at the time of the incident, and she’d worked side by side with Soleil in the aftermath. Soleil had very much appreciated her calm competence.
Now the two of them sat against this tree that had pushed its roots up through the sidewalk. At any other time, the sight would’ve made her smile.
“You’re like this tree,” Farah said from her other side. “Stubborn, beautiful, cracking through all the walls people try to put up.” Laughter that hurt Soleil’s heart. “I was such a little grump as a cub, and still you became my heart’s friend.”
“Drink.” Lucy’s voice, the other woman indicating the bottle of electrolyte-laden water a shopkeeper had thrust into Soleil’s hand. “I’ve almost emptied mine.”
Soleil looked down at the bottle, her mind sluggish. And her mind was all she had in her quest for vengeance against a goliath. The realization, fuzzy though it was, was enough to have her lifting the bottle, opening the lid, and pouring the liquid down her throat. As a healer, it was her duty to ensure that she was ready to respond to an emergency. She’d failed once, failed to save any of them. Never again.
Unable to watch the dead now being put into body bags, she looked down at her lap instead, her cat too exhausted to argue with her retreat. Would autopsies be done on these dead when their cause of death was as clear as the cloudless blue of the late-afternoon sky?
The entire planet knew that when groups of Psy collapsed without warning, it had to do with a failure in their worldwide psychic network. Soleil often wondered why the PsyNet had ever been such a big secret to begin with—it wasn’t as if humans or changelings could enter that psychic space and do damage. Only Psy minds had the ability to access it.
“Leilei, what are you doing here?” Lucy asked with the ease of a friendship forged in fire. “You know you’re breaching our laws.”
Soleil picked at the label on her bottle, tiny pieces of confetti to match the ruins of her grief-induced plan of revenge. “Will DarkRiver execute me?”
Brow furrowed below the strands of hair that had escaped her ponytail to stick to her sweat-damp skin, and brownish-hazel eyes holding a wolfish edge, Lucy shot her a mystified look. “You’re a healer,” she said, as if that was an answer.
Soleil didn’t understand, but she suddenly had another priority, her head rising and eyes going directly to the Psy male that her cat was obsessed with—it was as if he’d activated an emitter that lit up the baffling homing beacon in her feline brain.
Her cat prowled to the forefront of her consciousness.
She scowled at its attempts to take over but was glad to see that the stranger had finally eased his at-attention stance. As she watched, he shifted to sit against a wall, his hand braced on the raised knee of one leg and his head pressed back against the wall. He’d taken off his jacket at some point, now wore only the blue jeans and white tee, his feet clad in laced-up black boots.
As if he’d felt her scrutiny, his eyes opened without warning, locked on her. They weren’t black any longer but that searing blend of blues that shot ice into her blood—and made her cat rub against her skin, urging her to go closer, sniff at him.
Sniff at him?
Soleil was appalled. Yariela had not raised her to go around sniffing random men. Even Soleil’s free-spirited parents would’ve been taken aback by the idea. But driven by her—insane—cat, she inhaled deeply, as if she might catch his scent on the air, figure out the reason behind her primal response.
What she sensed was fresh blood—and though they were surrounded by carnage, she knew it was his.
Her cat growled. How dare he be hurt?
Struggling to her feet, she said, “It’s okay,” to Lucy when the other woman began to stand. “Quick job.”
Since she’d be shriveling away in a DarkRiver prison soon enough, maybe she’d go and sniff at the pretty and dangerous stranger to satisfy her cat. A small piece of feline wildness in the midst of all this horror, a reminder that her cat had always walked to the beat of its own drummer—though never before had it fixated on a stranger.
First, she opened up the much-better-stocked first-aid kit that a paramedic had provided for her. It was all but empty at this point, but she managed to find a couple of gauze pads. Grabbing them, she made her way across a street filled with the sound of zippers closing over people’s faces.
Her stomach lurched. Her cat flinched.
Don’t look. Don’t think. Don’t remember.
The orders a mantra inside her head, she made it all the way to the stranger who hadn’t taken his eyes off her. It struck her again, how good-looking he was—ridiculously good-looking. The kind of good-looking that made fools of women.
Her cat snarled, swiped again. Mine, it growled.
Too tired to fight the feral beast that was the most primal part of her nature, or to keep her feet, she came down onto her knees in front of the stranger in a barely controlled descent.
Snapping out a hand in a motion almost as fast as a cat, he clasped her upper arm to stabilize her. Soleil saw stars. Actual stars. Pinpricks of dazzling light against a vast blackness. Her cat meanwhile was preening. Any longer and it’d be batting its eyelashes.
The stranger released her when she made a slight pulling-away motion. Her cat was not pleased. She was meant to sniff him, not reject him. A few strokes of his hand through her fur would also be acceptable.
Mad, she was going mad.
But she stayed. And held up the gauze. “Your nose.”
A blink—as if he hadn’t noticed the bleed that had barely begun—before he accepted the offer and used the gauze to stanch the blood flow. “Thank you.” His eyes were even more striking up close, electric in their attention.
Her own eyes threatened to semi-shift under the force of the cat’s will. “It’s medicated,” she said, a slight roughness to her tone that came from that same cat. “Should help heal any minor trauma.”
From what she’d picked up from having lived next to Psy for much of her life, and due to the more open channels of information of late, such nosebleeds in Psy often augured an overuse of power, but that didn’t mean the bleed itself wasn’t a result of broken blood vessels and the like. In the worst-case scenario, it might be a sign of major brain trauma.
She held up two fingers. “How many?” He was cognizant of his surroundings and had sustained no obvious injuries, the reason why he’d been passed over by the paramedics, but that could be a false impression, his brain bleeding out on the inside.
“Two,” he said, continuing to watch her with an unrelenting focus that—in a changeling—would’ve been a challenge. “I don’t have a brain injury.”
Soleil’s cat wanted to hold the eye contact, wanted to show him that it wasn’t a submissive—but the healer in her took priority. Ignoring his self-diagnosis, she continued to run through the procedure for checking his mental acuity and reflexes.
He cooperated with no emotion on his face. Silence, the eerie protocol that had conditioned emotion out of the Psy as children, had fallen—at least according to the Ruling Coalition of the Psy. But compared to the hundred years for which it had held, it had been but a bare heartbeat since the fall.
Many, many Psy remained cold and shut off.
Soleil didn’t blame them. Feelings were tough even if you’d felt them all your life. How much harder must it be for people who’d been taught to stifle all emotion from childhood?
Soleil had learned to suffocate her sadness and fear as a child. Without Yariela, she’d have grown up to be a brittle creature inside a stony shell. She wondered if this Psy had ever had a Yariela in his life.
“Seven hundred and four,” he answered in that same cool tone he’d used throughout, this time in response to a complicated math question.
She fought back a shiver, certain all at once that his voice could soften in ways unexpected that would make her toes curl. Those firm lips, too, could feel warm and— She cut off the hallucinatory direction of her thoughts with a curt shake of her head. It’s just the impact of his face, she told herself. Pretty enough to make her lose all sense.
