Big shoulders, long legs, muscled power, and contained arrogance. No wonder he made her mad. But—She put down her sandwich, her mouth suddenly bone-dry. “Why isn’t my emotional state leaking out into the Net?” Betraying her, warning the others that she was a traitor to Silence.
“You said you were trapped.” The hairs on her arms rose in response to the ice in every word. “It makes sense that the shield isn’t only meant to serve as a cage. It has to hide you, too—the fewer people who know about a Trojan horse, the more damage it can do.”
“Why do you sound so calm about that?” She leaned forward, searching for answers. “For all you know, my task might be to kill you.” A chill snaked up her spine, and she found herself whispering, “There’s a good chance it is that.”
One shoulder lifted in a negligent shrug. “I’m not easy to kill.”
“Don’t be so overconfident. I’m a telepath, after all.”
A silence.
She blinked. Shook her head. “Yes, I’m a midlevel telepath . . . and M-Psy. Dual abilities, with both my telepathy and my medical talent measuring at around the same level. Below 5 on the Gradient.”
Dev knew the Gradient was the scale the Psy used to measure power, with 10 being the highest level. Apparently, cardinals were unmeasurable beyond that point. “Send to me.”
“Dev! If they find me—”
“Council already knows we’ve got some remnant abilities—and I don’t intend to let you go.” Soft words, lethal as blades. “I’ve only got a touch of telepathy. I want to know if it’s enough to ‘hear’ a Psy.”
She sent the first thing that came to mind. Don’t you consider yourself Psy?
Dev tipped his head slightly to the side, a furrow between his eyebrows. “I almost caught it. Like a too-soft murmur. What did you say?”
She repeated her question aloud.
“No.” His mouth firmed. “The Psy cut off my ancestors without a thought—then they tried to annihilate them. Far as I’m concerned, that removes any family connection.” He reached forward with a speed she had no hope of avoiding and gripped her chin, his hold gentle but firm. “Do you? Consider yourself Psy?”
“It’s what I am.” But his question raised ones in her own mind, stabbed phantom pain into her heart. “They threw me away.”
Dev rubbed his thumb over her chin, a slow, intent stroke. “Or you could see it another way.” Golden brown eyes watching her with the same absolute focus she’d seen in that tiger’s gaze.
“What other way?” she whispered, realizing she was leaning toward him.
But she couldn’t pull back, couldn’t be the Psy her fractured memories told her she was. Every atom of her being was focused on the roughness of Dev’s skin against hers, the angles and planes of his face in the sunlight, the shape of his mouth as he said, “That they gave you to me.”
CHAPTER 13
Nikita stared out at the patch of the Net that was simply “dead.” “How long has this been here?” she asked the mind at her side.
Councilor Kaleb Krychek sent her a psychic image. “Threads have been running through the Net for some time now, but nothing like this.”
“What’s caused it?”
Kaleb paused, as if considering how much to reveal. As a cardinal telekinetic, perhaps the most powerful Tk in the Net, he wielded considerable control over the NetMind, the neosentient entity that was the Net given form. It provided Kaleb with a conduit of data no other Councilor could match. But all he said was “You have your own suspicions.”
She decided there was nothing to be lost in sharing them. “The surge of violence in the past months—the compulsion killings—they left a mark. I think this is a psychic scar.”
“Possible.”
“But you don’t agree?”
“I think the echo of that violence will ripple through the Net for some time, but this speaks of a deeper malaise.”
“You think the Net itself is . . . sick,” she said, for lack of a better word. “If that’s true, it’s going to start affecting the populace.” All Psy were linked to the Net on the most basic level—there would be no way to avoid the insidious effect if these “dead” areas continued to grow.
“Maybe it already has—perhaps cause and effect are now locked in a feedback loop.” Kaleb touched a psychic tendril to the edges of the darkness.
Nikita kept back. “You could become infected with whatever it is that’s caused this.”
“No,” he murmured, almost absently. “I’m shielded.”
She knew it was more than that. Could it be that Kaleb had some affinity to the spreading stain? “Where else is it this bad?” This patch was small and isolated—as if the disease was hiding. Nikita would’ve considered the anthropomor phization absurd in any other context, but in spawning the NetMind, the Net had clearly proven it was an organism of some kind.
“This is the worst,” Kaleb responded, drawing back the psychic tendril he’d used to explore the darkness. “It’s as if all the dead threads have been migrating here, collecting in a pool.”
“That means it’s going to keep growing.”